Remora

LI finds discussions of "saving" the Democratic party repellent and boring. Who cares? The DC press is, of course, in hyperdrive about the elections, but that is because politics is their industry. Still, we've been following the discussion between Robert Reich and Joe Klein at Slate, partly because these two are typical DC-kabuki types. The ritual entrances. The stereotypical phrases. The rigid decorum, the predictable plot. Without, we should say, plumbing any of the deep sources of kabuki's beauty -- the body's presence to itself as a drama of obstruction and annihilation, passion as a disruption on the surface of expression, etc.

Klein, in particular, illustrates the convention of hypocrisy that makes political discourse, as it is practiced by the op ed set, so off-putting.

This is how Klein starts out:

"Some say move left. Some say move right. Both are right and both are wrong. If we're to have a vaguely interesting national debate, the Democrats have to move forward�away from the boring, tiny, and tactical issues, and language, and interest groups that the party has championed in recent years. This will mean a change in style as well as content. Above all, it will mean an extremely risky change in focus from the beloved and reliable geezers to the edgy, cynical, apathetic young people. The electorate has to be expanded. But the most valuable cache of votes isn't to be had in the poor neighborhoods�as admirable as such efforts may be�it is to be found on the college campuses, where the next generation of activists lives. We can discuss the policy details over the next few days."

So, what is the premise here? That Klein is going to give us the technique by which the Democrats can win elections. But what he is actually doing? He is trying to influence the party to represent his point of view. In DC talk, when that point of view comes from, say, a teacher's union rep, it is known as special interest. As if there were some disinterested point of view. And as if, hey, the political pundit set represents that disinterestedness. When Robert Reich replies to Klein with his prescription for the Democratic Party -- which is, basically, to represent Robert Reich's lefty point of view vigorously -- this is how Klein replies:

"You mock moderates, call them Republicans-Lite. But, to my mind --and I'm a flaming moderate - the best new ideas have come from the middle of the spectrum in recent years. In domestic policy, it was the idea that centralized, industrial-era bureaucratic systems are too rigid and too expensive (urban school districts, for example); it's better to give individuals money -�tax credits, vouchers, whatever you want to call it -and allow them to make their own choices on health care, housing, prescription drugs, day care, schooling, and so forth. You were a pioneer in the field, Bob, with your voucherized job training and retraining program at the Labor Department. The reactionary left opposes this idea (the AFL-CIO wasn't too hot for your program, if I recall). The Republicans pay lip service to "empowerment" but don't want to actually pay money for it. The progressive middle says: Fund it amply, monitor it, regulate it - but do it. (By the way, tax disincentives are a good idea, too: I'd favor a cigarette-level tax on bullets, for example; I would tax corporations on their "externalities" - the social and environmental disruptions they cause -- not their profits.)

In foreign policy, the basic idea is global citizenship: American leadership -- with lots and lots of quiet diplomacy and consultation -- in organizing collective action against terrorists and rogue governments, against environmental depredation, against the transnational efforts of corporations to escape taxation and of criminal combines to escape the law, and the free flow of goods, services, information, and, to the greatest possible extent, people."

Now, what is this discussion really about? It isn't about how Democrats can rebuild their party, it is about molding a party to one's own beliefs. LI thinks that is honorable. LI thinks the dishonor comes in the pretense that one is simply trying to "save" the Democratic party. It is this third way bull crap. LI doesn't vote for a faction just because it is a faction. Nobody does. The technicians who "analyze" politics -- the Broders, the Kleins, the Barneses, etc. -- are really just importing their ideas into politics, under the pretense that their ideas represent the 'center' -- represent the average American voter.

Well, LI is unrepresentative of the average. Our motto is: screw the average. If you look at this country and you say, hey, we are rich enough to shed six trillion dollars worth of wealth in the stock market and still buy record numbers of cars, so we are rich enough to design a national health care system, then you work for that through a number of modalities. A faction exists as one in a set of mechanisms of suasion. And who cares if you run this goal through the Republicans or the Democrats? The point is the goal.

Now, if Klein doesn't like national health insurance, fine. But there is no reason that the Democratic party should abandon national health insurance. Certainly the reason can't be that it is "unpopular" -- the whole point is to make it popular. And, contra Klein, that happens all the time, as it should. Our two big factions exist to make ideas that the guy selling cigs at the Tenneco isn't entertainng at the moment entertain-able. Look how the abolition of inheritance taxes was made popular. Or how invading Iraq was made popular. This is what factions are for. It is about struggle. So the first task of the Reichs in the Democratic party, it seems to me, is to unmask the language of consensus for what it is: the language of position taking. And deal with it as such.

Remora

LI, having liberally annointed our back molars with a codeine, or benzocodeine, salve, would like to do a piece on today's big news story. Sorry, the consideration of time as a component of picturing will have to be postponed -- we aren't Boethius, nor were meant to be...

Onto the big story, which as my readers will know by now, is the on-going collapse of National Century Financial Services. Oh, you thought it was the bread and circuses, or rather war games, thing going on in D.C.?

No, today we have an excellent example of why the press can calmly talk about how the "wave of corporate scandals" has broken. That's because nobody wants to talk about it. Plus, no star is involved in this scandal.

The story is in the biz section of the Times.

"The rapid collapse of National Century Financial Enterprises Inc., a large provider of cash flow financing, is sending hundreds of health care companies and their affiliates scrambling to avoid big financial trouble."

Cash flow financing means this. The thirty thousand dollars that X is paying to have his prostate operated on is out there in segments. The insurance is paying for it, but the deductible means that X has to pay for it on credit. Here comes NCF, then, offering to aggregate such debts and securitize them, much as mortgages are securitized. Beautiful, right?

"Two of National Century's largest clients have sought Chapter 11 protection from their creditors, while the dubious status of two of the company's bond deals worth $3.3 billion has set off a spate of threatened legal action against National Century, J. P. Morgan Chase, Bank One and other firms involved in the asset-backed securities. Amid the meltdown, National Century's chairman and chief executive, Lance K. Poulsen, quit both posts on Friday and left the company, which is based in Dublin, Ohio."

Ah, there's a little backstory with this Lance Poulson. And with National Century. But first, here's the fishiness in this creature from the depth. This will tell you pretty much all you need to know about the state of corporate creative financing in this "reform" period:

"This complex brew [of bonds based on hospital receivables] began to boil over in May when the Fitch rating agency warned that it might downgrade National Century bonds, which it did in July. It cited "increasing levels of defaulted and rejected receivables" and a lack of information from the company. This made it harder for National Century to issue new bonds, and the company soon ran into trouble finding the money to pay its clients.

In response, National Century began taking money from the reserve funds of two bond trusts � NPF VI and NPF XII. When J. P. Morgan, as trustee for NPF VI, asked for documentation as to how this was acceptable, National Century stopped taking money from NPF VI and eventually replaced it.

But the trustee of NPF XII, Bank One, is said to have made no such demand, so the company took about $300 million from that reserve fund, draining it to almost zero. At first, bondholders assumed the money went to buy new receivables. But in their motion filed in the Franklin County Court of Pleas in Columbus, Ohio, they say Mr. Poulsen admitted using it for other purposes."

Well, well. It turns out that junior, who flunked eighth grade mass, could have done better than bought the mortgage theory. He could have pointed out that hospital receivables are much more volatile, subject to a much higher percentage of defaults and restructurings. And traditionally, such volatility attracts, well, the loan shark -- because sharks are the type to be able to cover their bets with high interest and the threat of immediate violence following non-payment. Mr. Poulson isn't exactly a loan shark, but according to this account by Doug Noland (who writes the Credit Bubble report for Safehaven, a website for contrarian investors), the history of National Century is spotted with shady characters -- or should we say fly specked?

First, the sentence about the use of NPFXII funds in the Times story is confusing. It implies that the bondholders would be fine with the draining of the reserve fund to invest in further receivables. But of course, that is not what a reserve fund is for -- it is to serve as a barrier against the risk of defaults.

"From Dow Jones� David Feldheim: �No ratings Rx appears in sight for National Century Financial Enterprises (NCFE) amid concerns about revenue streams backing some of its securitizations. In the 11-plus years since its inception, NCFE has become the largest financier of healthcare receivables, according to its spokesman Jim Nickell. Over this period NCFE has securitized in excess of $6 billion of healthcare receivables, and it has bought substantially more than that from providers. It has also drawn recent scrutiny from the ratings agencies who rate those securitizations. Fitch Ratings said over the weekend that it has been informed by interested parties that NCFE directed the trustee to reroute certain funds intended for the NPF XII reserve accounts in order to fund the purchase of new receivables. �The company's apparent willingness to disregard the documents and commit such a serious breach, causes Fitch to question NCFE�s viability.��

Second, how did this company get so big, and why has nobody heard of it? One of the results of "restructuring" investment regulations in the eighties and nineties is that everybody gets to play investment bank. Without any pesky regulators looking at what you are doing. So anywhere cash is being transferred, somebody, somewhere, is trying to get a piece of that. Securitizing, slicing and dicing issues -- it is a wondrous way to make money, as long as you aren't on the other end when the stuff starts coming apart.

According to Noland, the company, founded in 91, has ties to a group of other companies, many of them connected to one Steven Scott. Scott ran a company called PhyAmerica Physician Group, which was delisted by the NYSE when its stock plummeted to pennies. PhyAmerica seems to be running on money loaned to it by NCF. In 2000, this became an issue, as stockholders sued Scott and Poulson for, as they put it, draining the company: "They alleged that Scott and Lance K. Poulsen, National Century�s president, had an agreement: Poulsen would fund Scott�s spending while Scott �looks the other way while Poulsen improperly diverts the company�s cash into NCFE�s coffers.� Even as the company�s finances deteriorated, PhyAmerica bought one corporate jet for $6.6 million and leased another for $848,000 -- expenses that benefited Scott because he owned the aviation company that provided the jets, shareholders said.� Also from the article: �There was a report on �60 Minutes� accusing�Dr. Steven Scott, of hiring doctors who had been disciplined or sued for malpractice.�

Forbes profiled the 'bearded" Poulson, and found him to be sanguine about NCFE -- at least in October. From Risky Business, on Friday October 11, By Seth Lubove:

"In between the court appearances Poulsen has thrived in his niche, making himself and his partners comfortably wealthy, though in ways that might raise eyebrows among traditional lenders. Poulsen, his wife and other company executives, for instance, have occasionally taken personal stakes in NCFE's borrowers. In addition to lending $107 million to something called Med Diversified as of the end of last year, NCFE also owns 6% of the company, or 5 million shares, while Poulsen personally controls another 109,000 shares of preferred stock. Med Diversified also acquired a company that was 22% owned by Donald Ayers, an NCFE cofounder and Med Diversified director. Med Diversified is dependent on NCFE in more ways than one. It derived $4 million in revenues in its 2001 fiscal year from NCFE for various "consulting services," in addition to being owed another $4.3 million in unpaid invoices from NCFE. Another $2 million in revenues during the same period came from an outfit called Millennium Healthcare, a company owned "indirectly" at the time by NCFE. Med Diversified fared badly anyway. It was delisted from the American Stock Exchange in July after losing $605 million in the past two fiscal years on sales of $296 million."

Medicine, attracting only the most sterling kind of entrepreneur! Noland's Safe Haven articule digs up some other intricate connections between NCF, Poulson, and various schemes, in twisted deals that have the involute structure of Jacobean drama, without the pretty poetry. This comes on the heels of two other medical scandals: one at Health South, and one at Tenet. Well, if hospitals start going bankrupt due to this Ohio case, the newspapers might even have to pay attention to it. We'll see.

Notice

I am not going to be as regular in posting this week, due to a toothache. Actually, three of my back teeth are in death star mode, causing me to suffer the pangs of hell in regular cycles. Like after I eat. Alas, having no money, what is LI to do? Well, this morning we called up the Texas Dental Examiners, who referred us to Texans for Healthy Smiles, who referred us to a clinic that will supposedly process us through the dread labyrinth of paperwork so that we can actually get these teeth extracted. Whether this will work or not is hard to say. If it doesn't, we'll rob a store and give ourselves up, and enjoy the amenities of prison dentistry. Anything to get rid of these molesting molars.

In the meantime, here's a thought from our friend, Tom. He sent us a little Moby Dick like medley of quotes, except not about the great fish. Here's the joke on the board above his office desk.

"The physicist Carl Friedrich von Weizacker told Heideggar the story of a man who spent all his day in a tavern. Asked why, the man replied that it was because of his wife: 'She talks and talks and talks and talks." He was asked, "What does she talk about?" He replied, "Ah, that she doesn't say." Heideggar is supposed to have said, "Yes, that is how it is."

Dope


We know for certain that sight is one of the most rapid actions we can perform. In an instant we see an infinite number of forms, still we only take in thoroughly one object at a time. Supposing that you, Reader, were to glance rapidly at the whole of this written page, you would instantly perceive that it was covered with various letters; but you could not, in the time, recognise what the letters were, nor what they were meant to tell. Hence you would need to see them word by word, line by line to be able to understand the letters. -Leonardo da Vinci

Seeking some calm from the excitements of this week � the injustice meted out to Winona! the latest report on the distribution of stock options during the 90s! und so weiter -- LI has been reading Leo Steinberg�s marvelous essay, Leonardo�s Incessant Last Supper. Steinberg is, as he calls it, a Leonardista. Among the splendors of the book are the photos he has taken, over the years, of the Last Supper. These photos record the changes made to that painting as its slow, inexorable restoration moved glacially forward. Frankly, if the restoration does look like the end page fold-out � and we have no doubt it does � LI suspects that, in another twenty years, we are going to be talking about the Last Supper Disaster. One has only to compare James Major, the second figure to Christ�s left, as he has been �restored� to earlier pictures. The restoration seems to have sentimentalized the painting, and to have created a muddiness where, before, there was a decay. I agree with Jacques Franck:"Ninety per cent of the work has disappeared, and the fact that you repaint 90 per cent is to me something that has not much sense."

This is not, I think, Steinberg�s opinion.

But what interested us, among other things, about Steinberg�s essay was the comparison of readings of the Last Supper. As Steinberg demonstrates, from the eighteenth century to quite recently, a secular interpretation prevailed. The �moment� portrayed in the painting, on this interpretation, was Jesus� revelation that he was going to be betrayed. Goethe was one of the great institutors of this interpretation � although, as a dissident pointed out, in 1903, Goethe depended on a reproduction of The Last Supper by Raphael Morghen that left the wine out of the painting � the wine in the glass before Jesus� upraised right hand. This is crucial to the counter-secular reading. This is how the scene is reported in Matthew, 26:

�19: And the disciples did as Jesus had appointed them; and they made ready the passover.
20: Now when the even was come, he sat down with the twelve.
21: And as they did eat, he said, Verily I say unto you, that one of you shall betray me.
22: And they were exceeding sorrowful, and began every one of them to say unto him, Lord, is it I?
23: And he answered and said, He that dippeth his hand with me in the dish, the same shall betray me.
24: The Son of man goeth as it is written of him: but woe unto that man by whom the Son of man is betrayed! it had been good for that man if he had not been born.
25: Then Judas, which betrayed him, answered and said, Master, is it I? He said unto him, Thou hast said.
26: And as they were eating, Jesus took bread, and blessed it, and brake it, and gave it to the disciples, and said, Take, eat; this is my body.
27: And he took the cup, and gave thanks, and gave it to them, saying, Drink ye all of it;
28: For this is my blood of the new testament, which is shed for many for the remission of sins.
29: But I say unto you, I will not drink henceforth of this fruit of the vine, until that day when I drink it new with you in my Father's kingdom.�
which was that the consternation at the table was provoked by Jesus�s pronouncement, this is my body, take eat, this is my blood.�

Steinberg traces the rise of the secular interpretation, buoyed by the spirit of Goethe, until the early sixties. But then the second, eucharistic interpretation began to emerge and contest the secularists. The salient fact about the Last Supper is that, at both ends of the table, the disciples register some kind of shock, while, at the very center, Jesus looks preternaturally mild. So what is this contrast? The secularists think that Leonardo has painted a Shakespearian tableau. Jesus� pronouncement, which could be uttered with cunning, or with anger, is uttered, by the son of man, with a sort of shame for the traitor � while the disciples, human all too human, have fallen to debating, among themselves, the crucial question of cultic loyalty. The eucharistics, according to the secularists, can�t account for the appearance of shock among the disciples. But this is because the secularists are thinking of the eucharist as it has been normalized for the last two thousand years. The eucharistics, however, think Leonardo has transported us back to the initial, shocking moment in which a man who these twelve men regarded as the son of God said to them, in effect, this bread, here, and this wine, over here, represent my body and my blood. And I want you to eat these things in order to remember me.

This is a shocking thing to hear. It is so very sexual, so very intimate, it releases a train of wild images in the mind that are normally repressed. It goes way back, saying something like that. There are stone floors of caves, there is firelight, there are night sweats, there is struggle. It forces the person who hears it to really look at the flesh saying it , and know that flesh is the world � that we live in a fully carnal world. The cannibal�s speech is that the mouth that speaks eats other mouths that speak. Words turn flesh, and flesh turns into words, feverishly. This is the effect caught in John 6, where Jesus says:

51: I am the living bread which came down from heaven: if any man eat of this bread, he shall live for ever: and the bread that I will give is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world.
52: The Jews therefore strove among themselves, saying, How can this man give us his flesh to eat?
53: Then Jesus said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, ye have no life in you.
54: Whoso eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, hath eternal life; and I will raise him up at the last day.

The effect of this speech on the disciples is remarked on in verset 60:
60: Many therefore of his disciples, when they had heard this, said, This is an hard saying; who can hear it?

So, this is the eucharistic case. But, as the saying is, sometimes Hegel happens. That is, sometimes the thesis and antithesis really do form a synthesis. Steinberg claims that the current consensus has moved to the conjunction of the secularist and eucharistic versions � that in this instance, as the hands go out for bread and wine, as the disciples cluster, as Thomas raises a finger and James Major spreads his arms in amazement, what is happening is a dream condensation, in the classical Freudian sense, of these two events � a Verdichtung. Steinberg does not make the Freudian detour, tempting as it might appear. LI is going to avoid it too � merely referring readers to the Chapter on Dreamwork in the Interpretation of Dreams. http://www.psywww.com/books/interp/chap06a.htm

We are after a different subject, which is: how exactly do we analyze the temporal element in the pictorial? In other words, how is time constituted in the picture?

Well, more on that tomorrow.

Remora

LI was walking up near the University yesterday when we heard our name. It was an old friend. We said, conventionally, how are you doing, and our friend said well, what did you think?
The news had depressed her utterly, she said.
We said, yeah, it sucked.
What are we going to do, she said? I want to move out of the country!
Well, we said, we don't feel that strongly about it. But we are pretty blue all the same. Damn blue.
How about the arctic wildlife refuge, she said.
Uh, we said, just because they are putting Winona in jail shouldn't effect Alaska in particular.
I'm talking about the elections! she said.
Oh, we said.

Yes, LI, with our inverted sense of historical events, was much more impressed by the railroading of Winona Ryder on a trumped up shoplifting charge than by changes in that other factory town, DC.

LI has never found Winona Ryder a fascinating femme de film. But her singling out for this ludicrous circus trial because she looked like she was going to steal items from Sachs Fifth Avenue -- this strikes us as an intolerable injustice. Or rather, it is justice with klieg lights, the justice that comes from lynching a name victim for political effect. And now she faces three years. What did Millikan serve, five? What is Ken Lay going to serve? What is Buddy Ebbers going to serve? Winona's mistake was not to have plundered systematically, with Sachs Fifth stock, rather than purloining a dress and a scarf.

The LA times gives an in-depth, and very industry perspective on the Ryder dust up:

"Actress Winona Ryder may be in for a white-knuckle ride over the next few months, but experts across Hollywood said Wednesday morning's conviction for grand theft and vandalism will not have a long-lasting impact on her career."

Here's the meat of the story:

"Alan Meyer of Sitrick & Co., one of the biggest crisis management firms in the country, said the "injury day" was emblematic of how poorly Ryder's ordeal has been handled from the beginning.

"She was only charged with shoplifting, not felony hit-and-run or child molestation. It should have been a 48-hour story, not a six-month story. Why this wasn't resolved very quickly, I don't understand," Meyer said, adding that the pair of convictions were "a real blow."

"The easiest way out of something like this is to acknowledge you did it and throw yourself on the public's mercy. Show remorse. Be contrite. People love that," he said."

People do love that. The contrition. The talk shows. Barbara. Jay. The recollection, in tranquility, of one's motives in that vague moment. The moment the cops caught one being sucked off in a car. The moment one was found with some crack rock. The moment one drove, drunkenly, in the wrong lane on the Sunset freeway for eleven miles. Those breakdowns, so helpfully glossed by the talk show host, the p.r. guy, the studio head, the compliant Vanity Fair interviewer. The return to grace.

But there are other people -- LI is one of them -- who want our Winona to be defiant. Remember Robert Mitchum. He did his time and implied, at every turn, screw the bastards. So screw Sachs! But W.R. 's Free Winona campaign, and her obvious disdain for the charges, is not going down well in the Industry. The honchos are speaking. The honchos want contrition. They want the image to be, depression, she was out of her mind, the transition between this wierd Beetlejuice girl, this vulnerable punk, the black clothes, and the woman, we've watched her grow up. That is the image. We've watched her, she's part of the family. And so she gets the kleptomania out when she is seventeen. Not thirty one. The honchos want the therapeutic talk ladled on. and this is what they are saying:

"Her publicist, Mara Buxbaum, insists business is booming, but the claim that Ryder was approached this year to star in at least one film could not be independently confirmed.

Buxbaum said Ryder will "definitely not be doing the talk show circuit" after the trial, although the actress probably will sit down at some point for the obligatory tell-all interview."

We were reminded of Zola's Au bonheur des dames, his novel about a Paris department store. If someone is smart -- if LI was smarter -- someone would do the op ed piece, or the column piece, this Sunday in the LA Times, with the potted story of kleptomania. Its origins in the 19th century, the discovery that this, like breast cancer, was a disease of upper class women, and the inference that it must be related to some vice, some decay. All the anger of which upper class women are the recipients from the great mass -- from me, from you -- and the way it forms a warp of unconscious energy, and like all energy sooner or later finds a form. In art, in the novel, in a D.A.'s brief, in a psychologist's treatise.

Au bonheur des dames -- which we can translate, approximately, as What the Ladies Like -- is Zola's novel about a department store. The manager of the store, the insufferable Mouret, has already featured as the boarding house stud in Pot-Bouille -- which outgrosses even contemporary novels. Zola saw that between matter and woman there was a suspicious relationship -- something like love. This has already been castigated in our good old Western tradition -- the horror that accrues to matter as matter was once called idolatry. The idea that a thing possesses a divinity -- the psychological roots of this anxiety aren't explored enough. We are palmed off with stories of human sacrifice, or demons, or whatever -- but didn't Jehovah himself appear in a flame? Actually, a flame, through its de-materializing power, is a brilliant vehicle for a God as schizophrenic about matter as the one in Genesis -- the world is good, but evidently, the genitals of two of his creatures, revealed in all their interesting possibilities by munching on a fruit, are another matter. There's a little pussy and dick in every thing we buy, you know.

So Zola scoped out the buying scene. His klepto is a very proper bourgeois with a name that should remind us of Madame Bovary: Madame de Boves. She has a cowlike presence, and discovering Au bonheur des dames, she is ravished -- raped -- by the material on display -- the silks, the lace, the sheets, the textures, the textiles.

Here's how Zola describes her:

Mme de Boves venait de d�passer la quarantaine. C'�tait une femme superbe, � encolure de d�esse, avec une grande face r�guli�re et de larges yeux dormants, que son mari, inspecteur g�n�ral des haras, avait �pous�e pour sa beaut�.

(Madame de Bove had just passed forty. This was a superb woman, with the mane of a goddess, a large face with regular features, and large sleepy eyes, whose husband, a general inspector of horse stables, had married her for her beauty.)

Zola was nothing if not a gross painter of signs. Boves is close to bovine. Her husband is an inspector of haras -- the stables in which horses are kept. The large sleepy eyes -- the eyes of a cow -- seal the deal: this is one of Zola's animal-people.

She can be aroused, of course. But unlike Nana, she is not a woman of mouth and ass, a woman who, superbly, leaves an odor. Rather, to come out of her animal entrancement, she needs things. It is the store that excites her. It is the department store that eventually leads to her doom. At the end of the book, she is shopping with her daughter. As a clerk goes to take apart a packet of lace, Mme de Boves's daughter turns to speak to her:


Mme de Boves ne r�pondait pas. Alors, la fille, en tournant sa face molle, vit sa m�re, les mains au milieu des dentelles, en train de faire dispara�tre, dans la manche de son manteau, des volants de point d'Alen�on. Elle ne parut pas surprise, elle s'avan�ait pour la cacher d'un mouvement instinctif, lorsque Jouve, brusquement, se dressa entre elles. Il se penchait, il murmurait � l'oreille de la comtesse, d'une voix polie:
- Madame, veuillez me suivre.

(Madame de Boves didn't reply. It was thus that her daughter, in turning her soft face, saw her mother, her hands in the middle of the laces, engaged in making them disappear into the sleave of her coat, this Alencon pattern. She didn't appear surprised, she went forward, instinctively, to hide her mother, when Jouve, brusquely, stood before them. He leaned forward and whispered politely in the ear of the countess: 'Madame, if you could please follow me.")

Those Jouves! Just doing their jobs. But there's something dirty in the whole Sachs deal. We hope, when W.R. does the "obligatory tell all interview," that she doesn't grovel. She was the victim of a put up job, and she should imply that at every turn. And damn the honchos.

Remora

The Election.

LI, of course, hoped that the Republicans would not triumph at the polls. At the same time, LI did not much feel like voting himself. I did. I even voted for Democrats. But I did it with a rotten feeling inside, as though I�d compromised myself. In Texas, the two big dem candidates, Kirk and Sanchez, were nearly unbearable. Kirk ran at times to the right of his opponent, and spent much time attaching himself to Bush � a sort of disavowed, mutant twin to the Commander in Chief. I actually wanted to vote against Bush. I wanted, in other words, a second party to vote for.

Perhaps that is not going to happen in my life time. LI read, on the TAP Blog, a nasty little item about how the election might hinge on the guilty conscience of those who voted for Nader. This is just the kind of DC talk that makes one think of what Napoleon said of the monarchists: they have forgotten nothing, and learned nothing. Or was it Tallyrand? In any case, while Republicans do, indeed, stand for things, the very awful Democratic party got a deserved drubbing for standing for nothing.

To stand for something means that you lose for something. This, of course, seems to elude the thinking of the governing classes. The governing classes, in fact, are convinced, and have been since the seventies, that you have to slip civilization past the yahoos. That is Democratic political thought in a nutshell. The goal of a party should be to generate a set of principles of some sort, so that you can generally predict how the party will act. The goal of the Democratic party, however, has been the opposite, at least for the last twenty five years. Instead, they have pursued the image of the majority. In the pursuit, they have lost their minds. Or rather, among the Democrats, the head long ago seceded from the body. It is a party that expects its grassroots partisans to work ardently for it during election years, so it can betray those partisans the rest of the time. What grassroot Democrat wanted Tom Daschle to roll over for Bush about Iraq? To do that, and then to expect people like Limited Inc to vote for this kind of thing, is rather like inviting one into an abusive marriage, in which years of being beaten up are supposed to be compensated for by flowers on the birthdays. After a while, you drift away. You divorce.

LI thinks that the Democrats have addicted themselves to a delusion that there is a majority. There isn�t. To take positions on an array of existential topics -- and then to figure out how to persuade others to support those positions � that is all there really is to politics. In particular, if your positions are strongly inflected by your sense of justice, the pursuit of the image of the majority is fatal. The leftist party of the future should pursue, instead, its own singularity. When Paul Wellstone paraphrased Barry Goldwater�s campaign autobiography title (The Conscience of a Conservative) for his own campaign autobiography (The Conscience of a Liberal), he was acting on this insight. The whole history of the Democratic Party, however, works against the idea of singularity. The accidental identification of progressive politics and Democrats comes out of the melding together of lefty forces and the Democrats urban and rural patchwork politics under Wilson. As late as 1928, the black vote � or that bit of it allowed through the iron bars of American apartheid � was strongly Republican. The Democrats have always had the managerial, urban view � the view of compromised labor leaders and school teachers � that the important thing is to form a committee and make resolutions. The important thing, that is, is to act in a minor way. To create a little program here, to purvey pills to the elderly. To create a little program there. The incremental mindset is wholly unprepared for the charismatic act � the politics of the acte gratuit. That Bush is not a charismatic man doesn�t matter � he understands, instinctively, the charismatic nature of the times. To oppose him � for let�s be clear, the man is a disaster � requires understanding that landscape. Requires, that is, understanding how to lose. When you stand for nothing, you lose for nothing. Last night, The Democrats lost for nothing.

Remora

Mr. H. Pitt

Harvey Pitt just resigned. And LI would like to find the proper funereal words -- a send-off to this lost soul, whose last week was spent investigating himself, much like a Flann O'Brien character in one of the antsier novels.

Pitt should never have been the head of the SEC. He was not just sponsored by Bush, although the media, painting in black and white -- Whistler's colors -- has painted him as a stooge or crony of Bushism. Actually, he is a stooge or crony of the set of interlocking vested interests that briefly got a free ride in the 90s. The Wall Street brokerage houses, elevated bucket shops all; the banks, freed from the Glass Steagall act and acting, in consequence, like the suburban couples in some Updike novel that have just recieved news of the 'sexual revolution' -- i.e., fucking everyone; and the NY establishment, represented by the ever unbearable Democrat, Senator Schumer. Pitt started out as he was programmed to: the plan was to subvert regulation, as the plan had been since the glorious eighties. Alas, he ran into the brick wall of corporate malfeasance, and had to go against his character and present himself as an advocate for stricter regulation and concentrated enforcement. Pitt's conservative allies put up a fight for the man all through the summer. That Pitt's inclination was to go easy on the Street, to back the investment banks and the brokerages against their investors, was not a trait that could be changed in a political instant. LI is firmly on the side of greater transparency and more intervention in the banks vs. investors struggle -- but this is a hard issue to color, ideologically. After all, the investors are often what Marx called rentiers, not by and large a group with which LI has a lot of sympathy. In fact, the weird thing is that the Republicans have been complacently cutting the throats of their own constituency -- a tribal habit we thought more appropriate to Dems.

What counts, for us, is that the social composition of investor capital -- where it comes from -- has changed, significantly during the last twenty years. Investors include billionaires like Buffett and Pickens -- investors include all the old LBO guys, the Kerkorians and such. But investors also include the people with 401(k)s. If we have made a sullen and provisional peace with capitalism, it is always with the codicil that the mechanisms of enrichment common to large enterprises be fair. The SEC is a small part of making those mechanisms fair.
Pitt didn't see it that way.
So farewell. No doubt, we will see you again, being grilled by some greasy suit in Congress. Soon.