Our dreams in Iraq come true!

The victory of Sadr's coalition in Iraq reminds me of, well, countless blogposts I writ with my own hand here during the reign of dumb and dumber that was Bush (now we have the re-run, evil and eviler, but it is on the same IQ level).

So I thought I'd just reprint a post from February 23, 2007. Cause it contains a bit of that old prophecy.

good news (again) in Iraq

As LI has said before, there is something curiously hollow about the Bush administration’s policy stated aim of victory in Iraq. On the one hand, we already won – you will remember the Saddam Hussein hanging. On the other hand, we are still there, fighting for something. Often, that something is simply conflated with “defeating Al Qaeda.” It is an interesting policy – one perhaps stemming from Jesus’ Good Samaritan parable - that seeks to protect the Iraqis from Al Qaeda while allowing Al Qaeda to regroup and party in Pakistan. Is this due to the saintliness of our president? Bravely trying to wrestle the control of the White House plane away from the pilot on 9/11/2001 so he could go mano a mano with the terrorist fiends, did Bush’s thoughts drift to the potential danger to the Iraqis – in Kirkuk, Mosul, Basra, Baghdad and all of those cities he had difficulty finding on a map – from an Al Qaeda that didn’t exactly exist in Iraq, but could, if America didn’t challenge them by inviting them in and then fighting them interminably.

Well, that’s our president. Even when he was knee high to a grasshopper, he was always in a sweat about Iraqis. Were they happy? Was their burning yearning for liberty being satisfied? Were there enough of them happily vacationing (in that funny way Iraqis vacation – they bring all their money, as many possessions as they can, and their families) in Jordan and Syria? Even then, he knew that when he grew up, he would protect them against the terrorists that he invited into their country and win a big victory and go down in history as one of our great presidents, like George Washington – except with better teeth.

Now that the British have started to withdraw from Basra, our Vice President has remarked that this is good news. This is all about success in Iraq. So now, at least, we can catch a glimpse of what victory means – what the Iraq of our dreams is going to look like. That’s why readers should go to Patrick Cockburn’s report in the Independent. It is a heady thing, victory, and this is what we are fighting for:

The British forces had a lesson in the dangers of provoking the heavily armed local population when six British military police were killed in Majar al-Kabir on 24 June 2003. During the uprising of Mehdi Army militia of Muqtada al-Sadr in 2004, British units were victorious in several bloody clashes in Amara, the capital of Maysan province.

But in the elections in January 2005, lauded by Mr Blair this week, Sciri became the largest party in Basra followed by Fadhila, followers of the Mohammed Sadiq al-Sadr, the father of Muqtada al-Sadr. The lat-ter’s supporters became the largest party in Maysan.
Mr Cordesman says the British suffered political defeat in the provincial elections of 2005, and lost at the military level in autumn of the same year when increased attacks meant they they could operate only through armoured patrols. Much-lauded military operations, such as “Corrode” in May 2006, did not alter the balance of forces.

Mr Cordesman’s gloomy conclusions about British defeat are confirmed by a study called “The Calm before the Storm: The British Experience in Southern Iraq” by Michael Knights and Ed Williams, published by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
Comparing the original British ambitions with present reality the paper concludes that “instead of a stable, united, law-abiding region with a representative government and police primacy, the deep south is unstable, factionalised, lawless, ruled as a kleptocracy and subject to militia primacy”.

Local militias are often not only out of control of the Iraqi government, but of their supposed leaders in Baghdad. The big money earner for local factions is the diversion of oil and oil products, with the profits a continual source of rivalry and a cause of armed clashes. Mr Knights and Mr Williams say that control in the south is with a “well-armed political-criminal Mafiosi [who] have locked both the central government and the people out of power”.

The war’s supporters, of course, have reason to feel smug. Our long nightmare is over. As a people, Americans – rich and poor, black and white – have, for over a decade, been clamoring for an Iraq ruled by Sciri and Sadr. It is all that we talk about. Sometimes we entertain ourselves with a few celebrity deaths or haircuts, but here in the States – I’m writing this down so that readers overseas get a feel for the American reality – conversations about money, sex, jobs invariably drift to that dreamy moment when your average American says, I don’t care how much money it takes or how much blood, I want to see an Shi’a fundamentalism take control in Mesopotamia – it is a long held childhood dream, actually! Then Americans get all misty eyed, thinking about how they can die happy if only things go the right way in Kirkuk.

One thing you have to say about this country – we are willing to sacrifice any amount of Iraqi blood to make our dreams come true. It is the way we are. Morally superior to the rest of the world. Which is why GOD has promised us victory, damn it, and we are going to reach for it!

on shock

“The intentional correlate of living experience has not remained the same. In the nineteenth century it as “the adventure”.In our days it appears as Fate. In fate is hidden the concept of the ‘total living experience’ that is completely mortal. War is its unsurpassed prefiguration. (That I was born German, then I must die for it – the trauma of birth contains already the shock that is mortal. This coincidence defines Fate.”

“That which is “always the same thing” is not the event, but what is new in it, the shock that pertains to it.”

“Empathy comes about through a declic, a kind of gear shift. With it, the interior life erects a pendent to the shock of sense perception. (Empathy is alignment in the intimate sense).” [My own translations]

I take these three comments about shock from Benjamin’s Arcades book. Like so many of Benjamin’s sentences and phrases, they carry a systematic hint, although the system into which they would fit was never constructed. To that extent, they also carry a certain glamour, the glamour of fragments that indicate some fuller but lost revelation. Like the fragments of the pre-Socratic philosophers, one wants to remove the eclipse, find the complete transcript, read the denser text out of which they were seemingly scooped. But in Benjamin’s case, the fragment reproves the desire that everything can be told, that there be some total confession that correlates to the total systems that were in play as he wrote, that the denser text is anything other than an excuse fit for conformists by which is lulled to sleep our sense of an ongoing emergency. As we know, one of those total systems drove him to suicide. Which is another way of eternalizing the fragment.

The Arcades work does not develop the notion of shock the way it develops other themes, such as fashion. Yet, in a sense, it was at the center of these themes, for at the center of the project was Baudelaire, who, Benjamin claimed, based his aesthetic practice on shock. Or based his modernity, his modernism, on shock, and in so doing incorporated it into the genetic structure of modernism. That shock comes up in different disciplines, and constitutes an image in different ways in modernity was to an extent oddly neglected in the Arcades work, which otherwise has a very shrewd dialectical-materialist take on lighting, clothing, urban planning, etc., all passages to the burrow, or rather, passages that make up the burrow of the poetry.

In as much as Benjamin’s view of shock encodes an inability to decide between mechanical movement and animal stimulus, it bears the impress of a certain pre-modern disposition. That is, it bears the element of the invasion of haptic space by the first mass medias. It reflects the Productivist regime of the first half of the 19th, when life crossed with electricity and the crowd was the physical infrastructure of industry and the revolution. But if we take our cue from Gabriel Tarde, the French sociologist of the late 19th century, shock, in the second half of the nineteenth century, is a second degree phenomenon. The crowd becomes merely one extension of the larger public (it is remembered as a sort of phantom limb), and that public receives its shock through the ever more penetrating environment of the visual and press medias. Shock emerges from mechanical collision into the regime of stimulus, which is the way it forms the modern moment, or present. Shock was not only a poetic tool, but a tabloid style. The speed graphic camera of the 1930s, the blinding flare of which became an icon for the sensational story, the shocking event, is an exteriorization of the kind of shock that joined together the animal crowd and the sensation ‘seeking’ public (which is actually sought out, rather than seeking – this is the trick of the media), haptic space and the wired in multitude:

“The flash does far more than merely aid in exposing the negative. Intruding into the cover provided by night or darkness, its scorching light transforms both the space and figures trapped in its glare. Subject matter is vignetted and figures and ground are flattened and abstracted. While flashed compositions have the stark look of a woodcut, it is the faces of the photographer’s subjects that are most affected by the bulb’s blaze. With skin flashed to white as if powdered, mouths locked into grimaces and eyes both black as troughs and glinting like glass, subjects suffer a loss of humanity: faces freeze into crystal masks and individuals metamorphose into freakish ghouls.” [Hauptman, 1998]

Weegee’s flashbulb is the equivalent of the rapid sketching, or caricature, in which Baudelaire saw the lineaments of heroism in modern life. Speed frozen – such is the temporal coordinate towards which the simultaneity of life under capitalism directed itself

Bad action stems from blinding the imagination: the case of American foreign policy

What would American history look like if the Republican party had been banned in the U.S. in the 1970s, its leaders jailed, or hunted down by the police? What would it look like if certain of them had been tortured or died?

Well, it would look a hell of a lot different.

This is why events like military seizures of power, or CIA supported coups, have had such a devastating effect on the histories of multititudinous countries. The suppression of a political party, or the banning of an ideology, can have major effects. Even after “democratic” procedures are re-applied, the swerve taken by a country, what is allowable, contains a limit, an internal place that can’t be trespassed.

I was catching up with the NYRBs lately – too much to read, the info just floods in! – and I came across a review of a Suzy Hansen’s Notes on a Foreign Country. Hansen expatriated to Turkey in the 00s, leaving Bush’s country behind. Gradually she began to see that American foreign policy had left a lot of damage around, for instance in Turkey. For the NYTR critic, a little of this was too much  - it was like “heavy-handed” Noam Chomsky – and he thinks he has a killer argument:

“A more pervasive problem concerns the way Hansen presents people living under American influence in countries such as Turkey. They are not as victimized as Hansen wants us to believe. In every free election held in Turkey since 1950, Turks have elected the party that offers an American-style modernizing agenda that combines capitalist and religious freedoms, even though they are well aware of American intervention during the cold war. Turkey’s Communists and Marxists (many of whom were jailed and killed in the 1970s and 1980s) may have the moral high ground in their critiques of American imperialism, but there is little popular support for them, at least at the ballot box.”

The pervasive problem with this paragraph is, of course, that you don’t hold a free election now and then and think, wow, we’ve really surveyed the popular will! If Ronald Reagan had been jailed and killed in the 1970s, to use my example above, he would certainly not have been the people’s choice in 1980. (I’m not going into whether the modernizing agenda chosen by Turkey was American-style or Kemalist – the description of what the ruling parties did in Turkey is at some variance with what we know about the pressure exerted on Turkey after the cold war to privatize and induce what Naomi Klein justly calls the “Shock Doctrine”).

This paragraph, to me, has a value that exceeds its place in a passing review: it really represents the blind spot of the foreign policy consensus in America, the contradiction between the imperialist enterprise and the democratic claim. It is one of the reasons that the #resistance to Trump has fallen back on the most absurd Cold War rhetoric: the “sides” in American foreign policy are all about how America should express its aggression, not whether it should express its aggression.

That can’t go on forever.

let's all piss on 'craft'

Back in the 1920s, the avant gardes, radicalized by the Russian revolution, explored the concept of the author as producer. This was a response to varied changes in the cultural industrial landscape, from the growth of newspapers and magazines to the coming of radio and film, in the light of a somewhat Marxist theory of economic development. Brecht, for instance, began to explore writing theater collectively. The surrealists briefly explored automatic writing. Skhlovsky and the Russian formalists became interested in skaz, or orality in the story.

And then there was England, and a guy named Percy Lubbock. Who was not at all interested in writing as a product manufactured  under the framework of capitalism. He was, in a gesture that referenced the 19^th century reaction to industrialism, interested in “craft”.  The writer as the proprietor of an atelier, not as a worker in the factory of language – that is the image.

Lubbock’s book, The Craft of Fiction, gifted us with that image and sign of this ye olde tweediness. Actually, I don’t want to be too hard on Lubbock – it isn’t a bad book. But it is a book that utterly skips modernism. All of which is encoded in that horrible word, “craft”.

We live in a vast world of bogus words – we train people up to create and distribute them, and we call them marketers. Marketers play a valuable Keynesian function, getting us all to purchase things we don’t need and might not even want, in a constant flow of purchase, work, and credit. The word craft applied to fiction, or to beer, or to cheese, etc., bears the marketer’s impress: it is a bogus descriptor from the topimus to the bottomus.  That writers take up the cross of that bogosity and actually write about the “craft” of fiction, or poetry, or whatever, always makes my heart sink, since we begin by stripping away the critical moment and retire into Hobbitland, from whence we make up “rules” and have ourselves a very good, ye olde time. Marketing, manufacture, production on different scales, all these are ways of getting to the social causes and effects of literature, or cheese, and lead us much more interestingly to the existential substructure.

So this is my plea to writers out there: let’s all piss on craft.

jordan peterson and other tinpot gurus of the Trump age

Wendy Kaminer’s 1993 book, I’m dysfunctional You’re dysfunctional, pointed to the way that the “personal development” movement was inherently political. She was not just following through on the feminist slogan, the personal is the political, but she was anchoring it in a long American tradition.

“(My first working subtitle was "Self-Help and the Selling of Authority.") While American mythology celebrates the common sense of Frank Capra's common man, the  American reality, reflected in the perversely named self-help industry is marked by a tendency to put our faith in experts. What sells self-help books, tapes, and workshops is the willingness to believe that there are experts who can help us achieve the good life, however it is defined at the moment; existential problems are reduced to merely technical ones, which can be solved by expert techniques.”

Shrewdly, she saw how this drew people – I would guess, mainly men – to Ross Perot in 1992. The persona he crafted was, in hindsight, something that was bound to find another figure eventually. This figure was, of course, Donald Trump. I actually don’t think Perot was disgusting, the way Trump is, but both Perot and Trump were fundamentally salesmen. Salesmen are not experts, but they use expertise as a gimmick. Hence, Trump’s famous relationship to “deals”, even though there is little evidence that he is actually very good at deals.

During the George Bush years, masculine self-help was monopolized by Straussians, who, whilst having a firm view of what men were (they were fighter pilots like George Bush!), didn’t really grasp the self-help market. Perhaps the most typical of the reactionary semi-self-help books from that decade was one that pretended to be a kind of philosophy – Harvey Mansfield’s ‘Manliness’ – and one that presented Bush as the John Wayne of our time – Fred Barnes’ ‘Rebel in Chief’.  Ten years on, a sort of synthesis has been manufactured by Jordan Peterson, the rather cracked guru of Alt-right lost boys. Strauss has lost his flair, or whatever flair he had, and the new flavour is Jung, with a dash of racism and mucho misogyny.

I ran into some of Peterson’s lost boys on twitter. One recommended that I listen to Peterson’s videos. I was a little dumbstruck by that – the man said Peterson had “turned his life around”, and what he meant is that he watched YouTube? I mean, read a book. But then I thought that this is something very much in what James C. Scott calls the little tradition – the resistance to literacy, and to the centralizing administrators of the big tradition, for whom literacy is power. The lost boys no doubt went to school, learned to read, and even learned to twitter, but in doing so they lost the anchor of the masculine voice – and it is the male voice as much as the penis that has psychoanalytical value here. The authority of that voice is crucial to the transference that is both sought and feared, since it seems to suddenly cast into recognizable form the random features of drifting lives in late capitalism.

Wendy Kaminer, by the way, has moved onward and rightward herself. In her critique of victimization she has forgotten that to say that there are no victims is as crazy as saying we are all victims. Her recent essay on why Monica Lewinsky is no victim, but is a prime case of #metoo overkill, works within the framework of methodological individualism to concentrate everything on whether Lewinsky gave her consent to sex or not. Once you’ve satisfied yourself that you can just bracket the institution, the rules of the organization, and the power those rules express, victims disappear. Once you re-introduce, say, common sense, you then have to deal with the consequences of an office in which the most powerful person – the president – likes quite visibly to ogle women, has an affair with an intern twenty some years older than him, and has people who want to make trouble about that – for instance, the fiendish Linda Tripp – transferred. In this office atmosphere, women are disadvantaged in all the classical ways. That means that, as a class, they are discriminated against. Which is why even consensual “hanky panky” can soon poison the office atmosphere. Kaminer’s failure to see this, or rather, her willingness to impose a framework in which this is rendered invisible, is why she ends up being quoted with approval by ginks like Jonathan Chait.

“Responsibility” quickly becomes an establishment copout. It is the way the establishment keeps itself going. It sucks.

Marx and the Amazon Hooligans

Everybody is writing about Marx, due to the 200thanniversary thing. All to the good! Here’s an al Jazeera article.

Myself, I decided to read Marx’s lesser read journalism on the Paris commune. Although innumerable rightwing tweets have gone after Marx for Stalin, in reality, Stalin was born after Marx was dead. Marx made a very clear political record for himself. That record is a record of responses to the horrors of the 19^th century. Those are horrors that Cold War liberalism (of which conservatism is a variant) did not want to examine. Instead, the Cold Warriors approved a history in which native peoples “vanished”, and in which the pomp and panoply of the British Raj became the scene for many a BBC and PBS series – while the eleven million people who had starved to death in India, by 1911 (quoting the 10^th edition of the Encyclopedia Brittanica), were ushered off stage. Too bad! If you want to know what preceded Dachau, you should look in Mike Davis’s Victorian Holocaust. Imagine a famine in which hundreds of thousands are dying, and the government response is to send troops out to the countryside to collect their taxes. This happened. Imagine a labor camp where the daily release of food contained as many calories as … well, at Dachau. This happened. We know what Marx thought about labor camps, slavery, and the “vanishing” native people because he actually wrote about them. He was, let us say, against it.

In any case, on to the Commune, about which I am reading. Here’s another witness: Camille Mendés, a sensitive sort, a poet, who remained in Paris during the Commune and wrote a book about his experience there, entitled: Les 73 journées de la Commune. I can’t believe the echo of Sade is wholly absent from that book. 

Anyway, Camille was able to observe that thing which shocked the respectable in the 1870s, the amazons-voyous – amazon hoodlums. Women from the working class armed themselves and fought alongside another communard. Mendés compares them to the famouse tricoteuses – the women who knitted while the guillotines fell. Except these were cantinieres – cafeteria workers. Waitresses, you might say. Never underestimate the waitresses!

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

Marx of course supported the Amazon hooligans.

the myth of strong leadership

The ghosts of my tv watching youth drift through Youtube (downloaded by an ever nostalgic cohort of boomers) and are channeled through Adam’s video preferences. Thus, Charlie Brown tv specials have suddenly resurrected themselves in my life’s path, the catchy tune, the World War I flying ace, the security blanket, those voices – Lucy’s spectrum between cattily flirtatious to Charlie Brown’s clear as tapwater voice of reasoning and despair.

In one of these things, Charlie Brown goes to summer camp. He lists his hopes for summer camp, and they include “learning leadership skills”.

Ah, leadership! The ethos of my cub scout troop, the unexamined virtue we were all taught to revere: there was no merit badge for dissent, that’s for sure. Leadership skills were amply rewarded, or at least verbally praised.

In today’s Le Monde there is an interview with a political philosopher, who was asked to comment about a recent speech by Sarkozy in which he remarked that democracy destroys leadership. The response was along the lines of democracy is good! But – to quote a Flannery O’Connor character – that don’t satisfy me none. It is not that Sarkozy is making a deep point – he is a shallow man, and his points will always be shallow. This one just expresses that long longing for a strong tinpot dictator that has always moved the French right, whether for Boulanger in the 1880s or Poujade in the 1950s.

But the point can be deepened. The argument would go like this: when the foundations of democracy were laid, in the 18^th century, the model was the ancient Roman Republic. That Republic was a colonialist, warmongering and slaveholding polity, and its most characteristic leaders were military men. This model of Republican virtue was translated into the early democratic view of leadership. The leader was strong. He – always he – unified the nation in the way a general unifies an army. In this view, then, the voice of the governed was really about finding that strong leader, and following.

Yet the idea that the governed rule, in some way, does come into conflict with the idea of the strong leader. There is a tension there that has not been resolved; instead, it has been sublimated or wished away. Meanwhile, the cultural life of this proto-fascist vision of leadership is all around us, from cub scouts to business inspirational meetings. Division and dissent is bad. Bipartisanship, meaning conformity to some leadership policy, is a virtue.

If one discards this model, what is left? What would a real democratic form of leadership look like?

This is a good question to ask now, as the democratic moment – which I would define as that moment that gathered force with women’s suffrage, pulsed through the fifties and sixties with various civil rights movements and class based organizations, and started going into decline in the 80s – wanes. I suspect the demi-democracies before the mid-twentieth century and the plutocracies that have been thrust on us now relied on a notion of leadership that was, really, counter to the democratic impulse – that was connected, very much, with the subordination of women, class hierarchy, racism, and homophobia. And in spite of the achievements of dismantling these counter-democratic patterns, we still have a Pavlovian response to “strong leadership”.

I never got a merit badge in leadership. But I was always a smartass, anyway.

In other words: learn to dissent, Charlie Brown!