Bollettino
I wrote yesterday’s post after a fatiguing day sawing down and piling up cedar trees on a ranch – have to earn money any way I can. In any case, the fatigue showed.
Today, I read a quote from some interview with Mel Gibson, who was, indirectly, the subject of my last post. In the interview, Gibson took issue with those people who “blame the Church for the Holocaust.” He had a name for these people: secular Jews.
Unfortunately, in the effort to be evenhanded, and in the even greater effort to be non-controversial, the American media discusses the issue of the Catholic church’s rich Anti-Jewish history with caution. To give you a taste of what “radical” Catholic opinion was like back in the day, go to this site about the Croatian Ustashi. The Ustashi was the Croatian equivalent of the Nazi party. Its roots were clerical, its intellectuals taught at Catholic Universities, and when it came time to build the concentration camps, its priests were right there, blessing the mass slaughter of the Jews and the Serbs.
Here’s a typical excerpt from the Catholic press at that time:
"Up to the birth of Christ, Jewish atavism proved its sinful inclinations toward knavery, its lack of gratitude to God, its ruthless selfishness, its disobedience toward the heads of the state, its anarchism, its love of profit-making through the accumulation of worldly goods by means of corruption, bloodthirstiness, despotism, lasciviousness and homosexuality, incorrigible stubbornness and haughtiness ... Having realized all this, we dare to conclude that the Jews have always been destructive regardless of whether they governed themselves or were governed by others. The Jews will never change, because according to the laws of psychology their national soul cannot change for the better as long as the human race continues to exist."
I didn’t see the interview with Gibson, but it would have been nice if the interviewer was educated enough to ask revealing questions. My guess is that there was no mention, in the interview, of the Jasenovac Concentration Camp. It was here that the dirty spirit of one hundred fifty years of Catholic invective against the Jews finally came to fruition. A Franciscan, Miroslav Filipovic, was put in charge of the camp. The rules were a bit different than what one would expect from a follower of St. Francis of Assisi. Filopivic later claimed, in a probable understatement, that he’d ordered the killing of about 40,000 people at the camp. If you are in the mood for it, here’s the testimony of one of the survivors of the camp. Much has been made of the fifteen minutes of whipping time in Gibson’s film. Compare it to the tender mercies of Father Devil, as he was known:
Fra Filipovic's] voice had an almost feminine quality which was in contrast with his physical stature and the coarseness of his face... I was hardly seated, and as I sank into my sad thoughts, I heard the orders "Fall in - Fall in!"
...Old Ilija, an Ustasha, appeared in the threshold of the hut, a revolver in one hand and in the other, a lash... Before us passed six men, their hands tied before their backs with chains. The Ustashi had their revolvers loaded and aimed. Fra Sotona walked over and approached our group.
"Where is our new doctor?" I knew he meant me.
"He is here," someone replied. He came a little nearer, looking at me with an insolent, ironic, bizarre manner.
"Come here, doctor," he said, "to the front row, so that you will be able to see our surgery being performed without anesthetic. All our patients are quite satisfied. No sighs, nor groans can be heard. Over there are the head and neck specialists, and we have need of no more than two instruments for our operations."
And Fra Sotona caressed his revolver with one hand and his knife with the other ... Looking at these victims who, in a few moments would be in another world, fear written on each face, no one could penetrate the depth of their moral abyss. They silently watched the gathering crowd of more pitiful people, more condemned people like themselves.
Fra Filipovic approached a group of them. Two shots rang out, two victims collapsed, who began to twitch with pain, blood surging from their heads intermingling with the brain of one or the eyes of the other.
'Finish off the rest!' cried Filipovic to the executioner as he put his revolver away. “
Secular Jews make such fusses about such things, being, well, secular, and Jews, and all. Unsightly.
Perhaps, you will say, this is just some peculiarity of Croat Catholicism. Surely the Vatican eventually responded. This is true. They responded after the war. At the highest levels, they systematically smuggled Catholic war criminals out of Europe, so they could escape imprisonment by the Allies. Many of them went to Argentina. The effect was delayed, but the years of the Dirty War showed that packing these people off on the rat lines did make a difference.
Looking elsewhere, we find another state run by a Clerical Nazi Party – the Slovak Republic. Here, a Father Tiso became head of state, supported of course directly by the Nazi party. Catholic historians, who look around for evidence that the Vatican opposed the mass killing of the Jews, often cite the letters sent from the Vatican to Tiso about the deportation of Slovak Jews to the death camps. Indeed, this happened in 1944, and there is a nice, comprehensive account at the Catholic Information Network site . The Holy See protested the deportation of Slovak Jews from a labor camp at Sered to Bergen Belsen. This protest was seconded by Father Tiso.
But before we bestow the ADL man of the year award to Father Tiso, it is necessary to see what other action was taken by his government in relation to Slovak Jews.
- in 1939, on the accession of Father Tiso’s party to power in Slovakia, Jews were forbidden from certain professions.
- In 1940, with the cooperation of Eichman, who advised the Tiso administration, Jews were singled out for the yellow star. They were also committed to labor camps. Expropriation of the wealth of the Jewish Slovak community commenced.
You will not find the Holy See intervening to protest these measures.
The truth is, the Holy See never embraced and actively opposed, most of the time, the exterminationist agenda. The pre World War II Church was, indeed, anti-Jew (a word I prefer to the milky anti-Semitic), but wanted that prejudice embodied in certain cultural and legal restrictions on Jews, not in such things as labor camps or yellow stars. Given that the church’s agenda was to hold onto this prejudice, but to fight the de-humanization and murder of Jews, the Vatican did battle, by its own lights, with the Nazis. The fascisms of Tiso and the Ustashi were of a virulence that was not mainstream. The more decorous notions of order promoted by Catholic thinkers like Eliot are probably closer to the Catholic norm, with their complaint about the modernizing, atheistical strain in society that can be laid at the feet of the Jew.
There. If I was going to place Mel Gibson on the anti-Jew meter, he isn’t even close to Father Tiso. He is, however, typical of the American form of bigotry, which is more about blackballing from clubs, and jokes about Jews with the right listeners. And of course there’s his Dad, who is further in the direction of Father Tiso. These bigots can be recognized by the bristly defensiveness that emerges when they are called about their bigotry. There isn’t, really, any mystery here.
Oh, but before I finish this post with my oh so sophisticated dismissal of Gibson’s anti-Jewism, let me link to this account of a more disgusting and dangerous variant. It isn’t as if Father Tiso’s spirit is dead.
We especially liked the response of the current Slovak charge d’affairs regarding the laws restricting Jews in the professions. This is ur-Gibsonism:
“While he acknowledges that there was anti-Semitism in Slovakia during the wartime period, he argues that some of the first laws targeting Jews, specifically the ones restricting the number of Jewish lawyers and doctors, were not altogether anti-Semitic.
"I'm saying that particular one was not solely anti-Semitic," he says. "I think that one was based on the social justice of trying to get other people into those professions over and above the one minority.’”
Friday, February 27, 2004
Thursday, February 26, 2004
Bollettino
I was out drinking with some friends the other day when the topic of Mel Gibson’s Jesus film came up. Now, I had experienced for myself Gibson’s dim religious wattage in the forgettable Signs, and from what I’d read about the Gibson movie, beyond the anti-jewish bits, it looked to me like the clunkiest Hollywood realism – which consists of an almost fetishistic appreciation of the artifacts peculiar to a historical epoch or situation, vitiated by the emplacement of the most physically unlikely specimen of California health -- the blond, dazzlingly toothed actor or actress -- in the midst of it. There was an article in the NYT about what Jesus looked like, a little froth on the Gibson publicity circuit, and the man who wrote it, who was mounting his own meticulously detailed Jesus bio-pic, was adamant that he must be a wiry peasant, about 5’3” – no Hollywood charmer.
Well, we wonder about the 5’3” – although we do concede the point that a man who wanders on foot the length and breadth of Judea is probably going to be wiry. It is hard to think of a man as fat as, say, Nero, as a messiah. For one thing, he was no pedestrian. Jesus was a pedestrian – how is that for a bumper sticker?
Anyway, my drinking friends were all going out to see the movie. One of them was interested to hear that I did not consider Jesus to be the son of God, and she remarked that she couldn’t imagine living without God. To which I made some conciliatory remarks about how I consider God to be what we are made of, and what everything else is made of. A goofy enough theology to get by when you don’t want to be pressed on the point. Another of my friends told about seeing a special about the movie – everybody seems to have seen a special about the movie – that showed how they manufactured a crucifixion, complete with a nail entering a hand. Hmm. My impulse was to say, how awful – the crucifixion as F/X shocks even me. But then I thought that this was par for the course as far as my reactions are concerned – only someone for whom religion is a matter of beautiful pictures and poetry would be discomforted by such tackiness. Tackiness, as Flannery O’Connor knew, was no bar to religious ecstasy.
For those interested in the portrayal of Christ, there’s an essay on the birth of the paradigmatic connection between image, power, and religion in this season’s American Journal of Philology, written by a Francis James. It is entitled Living Icons: Tracing a motif in verbal and visual representation from the second to the fourth centuries C.E. It is James’ contention that images – as in portraits, descriptions of persons with an emphasis on their visual aspect, instead of a stereotypical reference to the fact that they had a visual aspect – comes into textual play in these centuries. Not coincidentally, they come into play in terms of lives of holy men and Byzantine emperors. And they not only come into play, but they refer to their own quality of visualizing by making reference to painted or sculpted images. So an emperor, like Constantius, can be described entering into a town in triumph by referring to the way he looks like a painted image, and the way he looks like a painted image is referred to, consciously, by the way he is stiff, the way he glances with dignity at the crowds, etc., etc.
Here’s a graf from the article:
Thus it appears that it was the writers of the Second Sophistic who
specifically developed ekphrasis as a description of works of art, and in
so doing they explored and exploited the relation between word and
image for their own literary purposes. The author of the Philostratean
Imagines, arguably the most powerful work of ekphrasis in antiquity,
presents a tour of an entire gallery—possibly real, possibly imaginary12—
signaling a new departure in which viewer and object enter into a complex
reciprocally assimilating relationship. In Imagines the reader becomes
the viewer in the gallery. Preoccupied with “looking” at the pictures
and the learned interpretations of the docent character, the reader is
absorbed into the text and forgets that he or she is a reader. The acts of
reading and viewing are compounded, their boundaries blurred.13 Similarly,
and also from the late second or early third century C.E., Longus’s
novel Daphnis and Chloe purports to be an immense ekphrasis.14 The
distinction and conotation of verbal and visual representation was being
deliberately and artistically pursued at the very cutting edge of Roman
imperial high culture.
Indeed, the face is, as Deleuze puts it in Mille Plateaux, a social machine.
In an odd way, living without TV has cut me off from this machinery in its most frenzied historical phase. I am dying outside history, getting my images filtered through the constraints on the bandwidth of my computer. They are all, essentially, fuzzy. This is probably a good thing.
I was out drinking with some friends the other day when the topic of Mel Gibson’s Jesus film came up. Now, I had experienced for myself Gibson’s dim religious wattage in the forgettable Signs, and from what I’d read about the Gibson movie, beyond the anti-jewish bits, it looked to me like the clunkiest Hollywood realism – which consists of an almost fetishistic appreciation of the artifacts peculiar to a historical epoch or situation, vitiated by the emplacement of the most physically unlikely specimen of California health -- the blond, dazzlingly toothed actor or actress -- in the midst of it. There was an article in the NYT about what Jesus looked like, a little froth on the Gibson publicity circuit, and the man who wrote it, who was mounting his own meticulously detailed Jesus bio-pic, was adamant that he must be a wiry peasant, about 5’3” – no Hollywood charmer.
Well, we wonder about the 5’3” – although we do concede the point that a man who wanders on foot the length and breadth of Judea is probably going to be wiry. It is hard to think of a man as fat as, say, Nero, as a messiah. For one thing, he was no pedestrian. Jesus was a pedestrian – how is that for a bumper sticker?
Anyway, my drinking friends were all going out to see the movie. One of them was interested to hear that I did not consider Jesus to be the son of God, and she remarked that she couldn’t imagine living without God. To which I made some conciliatory remarks about how I consider God to be what we are made of, and what everything else is made of. A goofy enough theology to get by when you don’t want to be pressed on the point. Another of my friends told about seeing a special about the movie – everybody seems to have seen a special about the movie – that showed how they manufactured a crucifixion, complete with a nail entering a hand. Hmm. My impulse was to say, how awful – the crucifixion as F/X shocks even me. But then I thought that this was par for the course as far as my reactions are concerned – only someone for whom religion is a matter of beautiful pictures and poetry would be discomforted by such tackiness. Tackiness, as Flannery O’Connor knew, was no bar to religious ecstasy.
For those interested in the portrayal of Christ, there’s an essay on the birth of the paradigmatic connection between image, power, and religion in this season’s American Journal of Philology, written by a Francis James. It is entitled Living Icons: Tracing a motif in verbal and visual representation from the second to the fourth centuries C.E. It is James’ contention that images – as in portraits, descriptions of persons with an emphasis on their visual aspect, instead of a stereotypical reference to the fact that they had a visual aspect – comes into textual play in these centuries. Not coincidentally, they come into play in terms of lives of holy men and Byzantine emperors. And they not only come into play, but they refer to their own quality of visualizing by making reference to painted or sculpted images. So an emperor, like Constantius, can be described entering into a town in triumph by referring to the way he looks like a painted image, and the way he looks like a painted image is referred to, consciously, by the way he is stiff, the way he glances with dignity at the crowds, etc., etc.
Here’s a graf from the article:
Thus it appears that it was the writers of the Second Sophistic who
specifically developed ekphrasis as a description of works of art, and in
so doing they explored and exploited the relation between word and
image for their own literary purposes. The author of the Philostratean
Imagines, arguably the most powerful work of ekphrasis in antiquity,
presents a tour of an entire gallery—possibly real, possibly imaginary12—
signaling a new departure in which viewer and object enter into a complex
reciprocally assimilating relationship. In Imagines the reader becomes
the viewer in the gallery. Preoccupied with “looking” at the pictures
and the learned interpretations of the docent character, the reader is
absorbed into the text and forgets that he or she is a reader. The acts of
reading and viewing are compounded, their boundaries blurred.13 Similarly,
and also from the late second or early third century C.E., Longus’s
novel Daphnis and Chloe purports to be an immense ekphrasis.14 The
distinction and conotation of verbal and visual representation was being
deliberately and artistically pursued at the very cutting edge of Roman
imperial high culture.
Indeed, the face is, as Deleuze puts it in Mille Plateaux, a social machine.
In an odd way, living without TV has cut me off from this machinery in its most frenzied historical phase. I am dying outside history, getting my images filtered through the constraints on the bandwidth of my computer. They are all, essentially, fuzzy. This is probably a good thing.
Saturday, February 21, 2004
Bollettino
PS – we urge readers to peruse this James Surowiecki article about Big Pharma, and then compare it to the LI criticism of a former Surowiecki piece on big pharma. We reproduce our piece, all the way back from 2001, here. Has Surowiecki been sneaking glances at our humble blog? The suggestion that he makes – that smaller R&D firms represent the coming wave of research, while the Pharma dinosaurs should either learn to market efficiently or die in their own stupors, is exactly the point we were making about the way monopoly has practically driven efficiency out of the big Pharma culture. Here’s our humble little piece:
In the November 5th New Yorker there is a column by the astute but limited James Surowiecki, who makes the standard case against breaking the Bayer patent on Cipro. The case goes like this: to come up with an antibiotic takes years of R & D, and R & D costs beaucoup millions; so if in the end, the anti-biotic isn't a moneymaker, then R & D into other anti-biotics will be inhibited. Thus it is socially advantageous not to bust Bayer's balls, so to speak.
Unfortunately, as Surowiecki sleepwalks through his econ 101 lecture, he adds a number of facts that contradict his larger point, and support the idea that monopoly actually has an inhibiting effect on medically important R & D. He averts to the slowdown in antibiotic research after 1967, a generally agreed upon high point in the war against infectious diseases. That slowdown, he contends, was market driven:
"Besides, given the choice between making an anti-biotic that a person might take for two weeks once in a lifetime or developing an anti-depressant that a person would take every day for the rest of his life, drug companies naturally opted for the latter." If S. could be shaken out of his dogmatic slumbers for a bit and made to read back his own sentence, he might notice that monopoly, here, does the opposite of what he claims it does. It levels the field so that it makes it more profitable to de-emphasize exploring anti-biotic pharmaceuticals as compared to the more lucrative anti-depressives. In other words, bad research drives out good. And the penalty for that is minimal, given that anti-biotics are being held in a sixteen year bondage according to federal law, and the patent time frame is easily extendable. S. even is hip to the result of this: "that's why in the past twenty-five years they {big Pharma] have developed just one new class of anti-biotic." Well, let's look at correlations. We have an increasingly sophisticated sphere of intellectual property laws, and we have an increasingly debauched drug research system, more interested in those nifty sex-drive-n'-hair enhancers than in coming up with cures for multiple drug resistant tb. Now if the state were sensitive to this, it would not hand out monopoly power like candy. If there was a smaller time frame, the sex-drive-n-hair enhancers would have to be marketed more efficiently, as generic drug companies can come up with amazing copies quickly. In this atmosphere, the profitability of anti-biotic drugs as compared to others would go up, since there is less likely to be a major profit in copying them, and there is more reason to emphasize them for their developers. They would be mid-list drugs, steady sellers. Moreover, breaking up the monopoly power of big Pharma would recognize the R & D real world - which is networked through a university system largely subsidized by the good old Gov. Perhaps smaller companies can't compete with giant companies that dragoon, or tempt, researchers into more frivolous but lucrative research. But if there were more starters, there might just be more incentive to do that major research. In other words, more competition, lower entry costs, is what we should be aiming at.
Of course, Surowiecki's idea that tech comes when you lay out money as automatically as an old pooch trots to the dogfood bowl when you put out the Gainesburgers is pretty naive. It shows zero feeling for the history of the golden age of medicine, which was driven, pre-1967, much more by an ethos of public healthcare than by the numbers pharmaceutical giants are used to now. And another hint: the fons et origo of that era is clearly the biggest of all state endeavors of the 20th century -- as with most of our technology, the modern medical era can be tracked back to WWII. War is the mother of invention.
6:54 PM
PS – we urge readers to peruse this James Surowiecki article about Big Pharma, and then compare it to the LI criticism of a former Surowiecki piece on big pharma. We reproduce our piece, all the way back from 2001, here. Has Surowiecki been sneaking glances at our humble blog? The suggestion that he makes – that smaller R&D firms represent the coming wave of research, while the Pharma dinosaurs should either learn to market efficiently or die in their own stupors, is exactly the point we were making about the way monopoly has practically driven efficiency out of the big Pharma culture. Here’s our humble little piece:
In the November 5th New Yorker there is a column by the astute but limited James Surowiecki, who makes the standard case against breaking the Bayer patent on Cipro. The case goes like this: to come up with an antibiotic takes years of R & D, and R & D costs beaucoup millions; so if in the end, the anti-biotic isn't a moneymaker, then R & D into other anti-biotics will be inhibited. Thus it is socially advantageous not to bust Bayer's balls, so to speak.
Unfortunately, as Surowiecki sleepwalks through his econ 101 lecture, he adds a number of facts that contradict his larger point, and support the idea that monopoly actually has an inhibiting effect on medically important R & D. He averts to the slowdown in antibiotic research after 1967, a generally agreed upon high point in the war against infectious diseases. That slowdown, he contends, was market driven:
"Besides, given the choice between making an anti-biotic that a person might take for two weeks once in a lifetime or developing an anti-depressant that a person would take every day for the rest of his life, drug companies naturally opted for the latter." If S. could be shaken out of his dogmatic slumbers for a bit and made to read back his own sentence, he might notice that monopoly, here, does the opposite of what he claims it does. It levels the field so that it makes it more profitable to de-emphasize exploring anti-biotic pharmaceuticals as compared to the more lucrative anti-depressives. In other words, bad research drives out good. And the penalty for that is minimal, given that anti-biotics are being held in a sixteen year bondage according to federal law, and the patent time frame is easily extendable. S. even is hip to the result of this: "that's why in the past twenty-five years they {big Pharma] have developed just one new class of anti-biotic." Well, let's look at correlations. We have an increasingly sophisticated sphere of intellectual property laws, and we have an increasingly debauched drug research system, more interested in those nifty sex-drive-n'-hair enhancers than in coming up with cures for multiple drug resistant tb. Now if the state were sensitive to this, it would not hand out monopoly power like candy. If there was a smaller time frame, the sex-drive-n-hair enhancers would have to be marketed more efficiently, as generic drug companies can come up with amazing copies quickly. In this atmosphere, the profitability of anti-biotic drugs as compared to others would go up, since there is less likely to be a major profit in copying them, and there is more reason to emphasize them for their developers. They would be mid-list drugs, steady sellers. Moreover, breaking up the monopoly power of big Pharma would recognize the R & D real world - which is networked through a university system largely subsidized by the good old Gov. Perhaps smaller companies can't compete with giant companies that dragoon, or tempt, researchers into more frivolous but lucrative research. But if there were more starters, there might just be more incentive to do that major research. In other words, more competition, lower entry costs, is what we should be aiming at.
Of course, Surowiecki's idea that tech comes when you lay out money as automatically as an old pooch trots to the dogfood bowl when you put out the Gainesburgers is pretty naive. It shows zero feeling for the history of the golden age of medicine, which was driven, pre-1967, much more by an ethos of public healthcare than by the numbers pharmaceutical giants are used to now. And another hint: the fons et origo of that era is clearly the biggest of all state endeavors of the 20th century -- as with most of our technology, the modern medical era can be tracked back to WWII. War is the mother of invention.
6:54 PM
Bollettino
LI is finishing up the 13th chapter of our novel – hurray! And so, at such a solemn moment, we’ve been contemplating the spirit of comedy. Yes, we know there are giants’ footsteps, here, and we tread, comparatively, with a munchkin’s size 7. Still, when you are working on a fictional, comic account of an attempted rape, you think, why am I trying to make this funny, as well as, why is this, or not, funny?
When in need of help, I always go to an expert. Or so I’ve been instructed by the Reader’s Digest and the Poison warning label on insecticide cans. So I decided to look up the current research on comedy. This took me, bien sûr, to recent issues of Humor: the international journal of research in humor. I am just catching up with the 2002 issues. As the readers of HIJRH are well aware, literary comedy is not where your average humor researcher majorly focuses, especially when there are all those holes in the correspondence between threatening facial expressions of chimpanzees (barring teeth) and ritualistic smiling ceremonies of the Ainu. Or the like. I reluctantly scrolled through articles that would instruct me, with statistics, about the compatibility or incompatibility of husbands and wives reflected in a humor metric, and an article about the function of jokes in a medical context, to give my undivided attention to Salvatore Attardo’s reading of Wilde’s texts in Humorous Texts: a Semantic and Pragmatic Analysis. Or, at least, the cheat sheet, Christie Davies’ fine review. Any man who is willing to go mano a mano with Oscar, as Jr. Bush said to his Dad one humid Georgetown night, is all right with us. Davies begins his review by summing up Attardo’s achievement:
Perhaps the most significant innovation to be found in Attardo’s work
is the introduction of the idea of the ‘jab line’, and his use of it to discuss
texts in terms of particular con.gurations of jab and punch lines. In a
joke, an entity that must end with an uproarious punch line in which
the unexpected is suddenly revealed, the humorous jab lines thrown out
en route to the punch line are of secondary interest but in a longer
narrative it is essential to consider both the nature of each jab and the
pattern and sequence of jabs that make up the humorous text. Attardo
applies his method to a number of well-known humorous texts including
Voltaire’s Candide, Thomas Love Peacock’s Nightmare Abbey and Lord
Arthur Saville’s Crime by Oscar Wilde in an innovative and illuminating
way.
It turns out that he not only applies his method, but uses it to quantify. Quantifying the density of the jab lines in Oscar Wilde is a perversity that even Wilde never dreamed of – but seriously, ladies and germs, we are interested io the ways and wherefores of this mapping of laughs. As we had already learned from the sociobi articles in the HIJSH, the evolutionary theory of laughter right now couples it to tickling. And tickling is something like jabbing. So we had a vague sense that we were being carried smoothly down the currents of the finest scholarship. Here is Davies to elucidate:
“Let us take for example a line from Wilde’s description
of the people attending Lady Windermere’s reception in which ‘‘a perfect
bevy of bishops kept following a stout prima donna from room to room’’.
Attardo notes the humorous script oppositions of bishops/prima donna,
normal/abnormal, shows that they are in proximity and that the bishops
are being targeted and wonders whether there are further jabs here based
on alliteration and whether in addition stout is opposed to beautiful. Yet
to this reviewer the humorous thrust of the passage appears quite different
with the key opposition being between spiritual and carnal. The
bishops are in a bevy a collective term more usually applied to birds or
animals than to clergymen (who are not beauties either) and are in keen
sexual pursuit of the prima donna whom they follow eagerly from room
to room presumably in the hope that there will be an episcopal score.
The stout prima donna far from being a stereotypically fat and repulsive
opera singer is for them buxom and zaftig, a Junoesque beauty with all
the allure of the stage. What did the bishops say to the actress? Yet if
Salvatore Attardo and I see different jabs in different places and interpret
the jabs differently, how is the problem of the observer to be resolved?”
Indeed, Davies’s question does intrude, rather, the bothersome subjective. The image of these bishops, with their Episcopal skirts, one presumes, flying about, following a prima donna of a certain rotund and orotund quality – dare one dare the sexual proclivities on display, here? -- seems, to us, indicative of some dysfunction at the heart of the world. Nietzsche asked if there were any scientific truths that could only be apprehended through laughter – a profound question. Perhaps the whole evolution of sex is one. In Darwinian terms, could there be a more severe failure in the signals of sexual ornamentation that, presumably, play in the background of every animal pursuit?
Attardo, at least, is happy with his own analysis; not least because, given the distribution of jab lines, he can then plot their density. There’s a small glitch here – as Davies points out, the thinning of jab lines in the text corresponds to his sense of where the text is funniest, when one might expect a thickening of jab lines. Surely there is a Zen koan lurking here about clapping at a jab line with one hand or something. Like someone who thinks the funniest jokes are those that nobody laughs at, Davies is obviously a party pooper.
But I share Davies sense of humor, which is why I am such an unsuccessful player on the world stage.
Anyway, this got me thinking that I’d like to share one of Thurber’s letters to E.B. White. It concerns E.M Foster’s Abinger Harvest. Thurber particularly liked the essay on Howard Overing Sturges, a minor belle-lettrist now best known for being Henry James’ friend. Thurber writes:
Writes Foster, in all seriousness: Stugis… wrote to please his friends, and deterred by his failure to do so he gave up the practice of literature and devoted himself instead to embroidery, of which he had always been fond.’ It’s a way out, all right.
Then, further on: “I once went to Sturgis’ house myself – years ago… My host led me up to the fireplace, to show me a finished specimen of his embroidery. Unluckily there were two fabrics near the fireplace, and my eye hesitated for an instant between them. There was a demi-semi-quaver of a pause. Then graciously did he indicate which his embroidery was, and then did I see that the rival fabric was a cloth kettle-holder, which could only have been mistaken for embroidery by a lout. Simultaneously I received the impression that my novels contained me rather than I them. He was very kind and courteous, but we did not meet again.’”
Now, in my opinion, Thurber underestimates Foster, whose whole oeuvre is devoted to undermining seriousness and the deathly pall it casts on life. On the other hand, notice how Thurber reading Foster creates the Thurber in Foster -- the embroidery surely would fit not only fit into a Thurber story, but existed, perhaps, only to be put, later, into a Thurber story. At least, that is what Mallarme would have said, if he'd been born in Columbus Ohio, too. But we have to ask, how would our inestimable Professor Attardo explain Foster’s letter? Who let the jab lines in?
LI is finishing up the 13th chapter of our novel – hurray! And so, at such a solemn moment, we’ve been contemplating the spirit of comedy. Yes, we know there are giants’ footsteps, here, and we tread, comparatively, with a munchkin’s size 7. Still, when you are working on a fictional, comic account of an attempted rape, you think, why am I trying to make this funny, as well as, why is this, or not, funny?
When in need of help, I always go to an expert. Or so I’ve been instructed by the Reader’s Digest and the Poison warning label on insecticide cans. So I decided to look up the current research on comedy. This took me, bien sûr, to recent issues of Humor: the international journal of research in humor. I am just catching up with the 2002 issues. As the readers of HIJRH are well aware, literary comedy is not where your average humor researcher majorly focuses, especially when there are all those holes in the correspondence between threatening facial expressions of chimpanzees (barring teeth) and ritualistic smiling ceremonies of the Ainu. Or the like. I reluctantly scrolled through articles that would instruct me, with statistics, about the compatibility or incompatibility of husbands and wives reflected in a humor metric, and an article about the function of jokes in a medical context, to give my undivided attention to Salvatore Attardo’s reading of Wilde’s texts in Humorous Texts: a Semantic and Pragmatic Analysis. Or, at least, the cheat sheet, Christie Davies’ fine review. Any man who is willing to go mano a mano with Oscar, as Jr. Bush said to his Dad one humid Georgetown night, is all right with us. Davies begins his review by summing up Attardo’s achievement:
Perhaps the most significant innovation to be found in Attardo’s work
is the introduction of the idea of the ‘jab line’, and his use of it to discuss
texts in terms of particular con.gurations of jab and punch lines. In a
joke, an entity that must end with an uproarious punch line in which
the unexpected is suddenly revealed, the humorous jab lines thrown out
en route to the punch line are of secondary interest but in a longer
narrative it is essential to consider both the nature of each jab and the
pattern and sequence of jabs that make up the humorous text. Attardo
applies his method to a number of well-known humorous texts including
Voltaire’s Candide, Thomas Love Peacock’s Nightmare Abbey and Lord
Arthur Saville’s Crime by Oscar Wilde in an innovative and illuminating
way.
It turns out that he not only applies his method, but uses it to quantify. Quantifying the density of the jab lines in Oscar Wilde is a perversity that even Wilde never dreamed of – but seriously, ladies and germs, we are interested io the ways and wherefores of this mapping of laughs. As we had already learned from the sociobi articles in the HIJSH, the evolutionary theory of laughter right now couples it to tickling. And tickling is something like jabbing. So we had a vague sense that we were being carried smoothly down the currents of the finest scholarship. Here is Davies to elucidate:
“Let us take for example a line from Wilde’s description
of the people attending Lady Windermere’s reception in which ‘‘a perfect
bevy of bishops kept following a stout prima donna from room to room’’.
Attardo notes the humorous script oppositions of bishops/prima donna,
normal/abnormal, shows that they are in proximity and that the bishops
are being targeted and wonders whether there are further jabs here based
on alliteration and whether in addition stout is opposed to beautiful. Yet
to this reviewer the humorous thrust of the passage appears quite different
with the key opposition being between spiritual and carnal. The
bishops are in a bevy a collective term more usually applied to birds or
animals than to clergymen (who are not beauties either) and are in keen
sexual pursuit of the prima donna whom they follow eagerly from room
to room presumably in the hope that there will be an episcopal score.
The stout prima donna far from being a stereotypically fat and repulsive
opera singer is for them buxom and zaftig, a Junoesque beauty with all
the allure of the stage. What did the bishops say to the actress? Yet if
Salvatore Attardo and I see different jabs in different places and interpret
the jabs differently, how is the problem of the observer to be resolved?”
Indeed, Davies’s question does intrude, rather, the bothersome subjective. The image of these bishops, with their Episcopal skirts, one presumes, flying about, following a prima donna of a certain rotund and orotund quality – dare one dare the sexual proclivities on display, here? -- seems, to us, indicative of some dysfunction at the heart of the world. Nietzsche asked if there were any scientific truths that could only be apprehended through laughter – a profound question. Perhaps the whole evolution of sex is one. In Darwinian terms, could there be a more severe failure in the signals of sexual ornamentation that, presumably, play in the background of every animal pursuit?
Attardo, at least, is happy with his own analysis; not least because, given the distribution of jab lines, he can then plot their density. There’s a small glitch here – as Davies points out, the thinning of jab lines in the text corresponds to his sense of where the text is funniest, when one might expect a thickening of jab lines. Surely there is a Zen koan lurking here about clapping at a jab line with one hand or something. Like someone who thinks the funniest jokes are those that nobody laughs at, Davies is obviously a party pooper.
But I share Davies sense of humor, which is why I am such an unsuccessful player on the world stage.
Anyway, this got me thinking that I’d like to share one of Thurber’s letters to E.B. White. It concerns E.M Foster’s Abinger Harvest. Thurber particularly liked the essay on Howard Overing Sturges, a minor belle-lettrist now best known for being Henry James’ friend. Thurber writes:
Writes Foster, in all seriousness: Stugis… wrote to please his friends, and deterred by his failure to do so he gave up the practice of literature and devoted himself instead to embroidery, of which he had always been fond.’ It’s a way out, all right.
Then, further on: “I once went to Sturgis’ house myself – years ago… My host led me up to the fireplace, to show me a finished specimen of his embroidery. Unluckily there were two fabrics near the fireplace, and my eye hesitated for an instant between them. There was a demi-semi-quaver of a pause. Then graciously did he indicate which his embroidery was, and then did I see that the rival fabric was a cloth kettle-holder, which could only have been mistaken for embroidery by a lout. Simultaneously I received the impression that my novels contained me rather than I them. He was very kind and courteous, but we did not meet again.’”
Now, in my opinion, Thurber underestimates Foster, whose whole oeuvre is devoted to undermining seriousness and the deathly pall it casts on life. On the other hand, notice how Thurber reading Foster creates the Thurber in Foster -- the embroidery surely would fit not only fit into a Thurber story, but existed, perhaps, only to be put, later, into a Thurber story. At least, that is what Mallarme would have said, if he'd been born in Columbus Ohio, too. But we have to ask, how would our inestimable Professor Attardo explain Foster’s letter? Who let the jab lines in?
Wednesday, February 18, 2004
Bollettino
After the first few months of WWI, according to Niall Ferguson’s The Pity of War, the German general staff knew that their one major hope (to knock out a stronger, more numerous enemy quickly) had been dashed. At this point, the Chief of Staff uttered the immortal words that sum up the incorrigible stupidity of the military mindset: “even if we are ruined by it, it was still beautiful.” One wonders if any Russian general feels the same this week, the fifteenth anniversary of the Russian evacuation of Afghanistan.
It is funny. I went through the eighties as a very active protestor. I talked every day with various leftist friends. We all talked about Nicaragua. None of us talked about Afghanistan. Even when the place was invaded, in 1979, the event was overshadowed, to the average American mind, by what was happening in Iran. Who knew that it was all about the leakage, the leakage? It never penetrated that there was some meaning in the fact that the largest CIA outpost in the world, after Langley, was located in Islamabad. About which we still know next to nothing.
Well, here was a small war (merely a million or so dead and wounded) with big consequences. It struck a fatal blow to one of the great empires of the post WWII world, and its aftermath kidneypunched the other. Just think: the demoralization of the Soviet army – in a country that devoted 15 percent of its GDP to the army, a country in which the army was, supposedly, the only thing that worked – materially deteriorated Soviet morale. Gorbachev, Chernobyl – yes, there were many small stages on the way to the final Soviet rust-out, but Afghanistan was definitely the music in the background, just as Vietnam was the music in the background in the seventies.
And then, the other empire, America the Good. America blindly and blithely arming happy Islamicists with Stinger missiles. Afghanistan was photo op number one for the up and coming right winger in the 80s. How could we not have known? When a group that has an unerring sixth sense for unlucky decisions, not to mention dirty, inhuman ones, was so involved in resisting the Russians in the mountains, we should have paid more attention. The allies are always dirty – Laotian generals neckdeep in opium money, Contra torturers, etc., etc. But since the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, it seemed like an easy call to support whoever opposed them. The whole tangle of that history is still tangled, and we doubt we are going to be handed the thread by the 9/11 commission. But we know it is there – just look at the first WTC bombing, look at who facilitated it and how they got here. For instance, look at this Atlantic article, written in 96, which traces the the Cia’s development of the radical Islamic network through the exemplary life of Sheikh Omar Abdul-Rahman, the man who was financed and nurtured by the CIA almost to the day he was arrested, in New Jersey, for planning the blowing up of the World Trade Center.
“WHEN Sheikh Omar entered the United States, in July of 1990, via Saudi Arabia, Peshawar, and Sudan on a much-disputed tourist visa issued by an undercover agent of the CIA, his primary purpose was to set up a U.S. infrastructure, a funding mechanism, and an organizational base for Egypt's militant Islamic groups -- an undertaking that he had largely accomplished by the time of his arrest in 1993.”
Those are the larger toxic spills. But I think, even more than the macro and visible events, what happened in Afghanistan set off a chain of small wars that are still going, and that will just get worse if the causes of them aren't made clear, and resistance to those causes doesn't coalesce around a progressive standard. Chechnya is the worst of them at the present time. The U.S., for its own reasons, abetted Yeltsin, one of the great thieves of our time, and – as is the case when you deal with the devil – was forced, by circumstances, to abet Putin. We’ve previously posted about the ‘terrorism of mirrors” that inflected Putin’s campaign for president – terrorist acts in 99 that were attributed to Chechens, even as all indications point to a dirty operation by Putin’s own national police department.
So what happens in the last two weeks? More of the collateral c. from Afghanistan, by way of Chechnya. One of Putin’s strident critics is Boris Berezovsky. We have no time for Boris’ moral character – he hasn’t got any. But that made him a perfect in between man to plan things between Moscow and Chechnya in 99, that oddest of years. When Yeltsin melted in his pilfered fats off the throne, leaving space for Putin, the former head of the secret police started operating like former heads of secret police operate: getting rid of his enemies, and wacking former associates. Boris Berezovsky was among the casualties. When Berezovsky fled to London, he started ratting out the whole dirty deal that had used the death of thousands of Chechnians as a prop to keep the electorate voting for Putin, and implicitly voting to protect Yeltsen’s family from jail time. Ivan Rybkin, the presidential candidate who disappeared, reappeared in a disoriented state, then hightailed it for London himself, was another loud critic of the Chechnyan policy. He was, supposedly, being funded by Berezovsky. Both of these are not harmless critics, in Putin’s view, since both know where the bodies were buried – and I don’t mean that figuratively.
A regime founded on a classic totalitarian big lie – the attack by the Chechens – exists only by means of small lies, the shattered fragments that reflect the original lie to the point of maximum distortion, renews its energies by periodical reinvigorating the causes of violence -- even if it has to counterfeit those causes, produce them in the secret police hq. So no one should be surprised that, as it is an election season, here comes the subway bombing. There are multiple levels in the terrorism that haunts Moscow at election time. Inexplicably, the system keeps failing in elementary ways, all the gates between Grozny and Moscow keep opening up, inexplicably the gross tolls of violence always seem to favor Putin’s ever more nationalistic stances. Yulia Latynina has a scathing column about that subway bombing. Here are few grafs:
“Terrorist acts will continue to happen in Russia for two reasons.
First, because it is in the very nature of the system in place in Chechnya. Chechen field commanders produce terrorist acts, just as the Ostankino meat plant produces sausages. It's their business, just as is the case in Palestine. In both Chechnya and Palestine, there are people with power, influence and money who would not have power, influence and money if there were no terrorist acts.
It is not easy to fight terrorism even in a normal country, just as it is not easy to deal with gangrene even in a clean operating theater.
If, however, the operating theater is located in a pigsty, the nurses have pinched all the lightbulbs and the surgeon is not thinking about how to do the operation right, but about how he can cut off the patient's hand with his gold watch -- then it's a very different matter. And that is the second reason why terrorist acts will continue to occur.”
The problem with taking sides, in Russia, is that the sides are so filthy. It is like a fight in a locked toilet stall where the toilet has overflowed. Latynina properly attacks Putin’s populism, his war on the oligarchs – but this isn’t to defend the owners of Yukos, who basically stole the company from the state. This is a turf war in Shark land, and one’s challenge has to be promoting those sharks who, for their own sharkish reasons, are using the ultimate shock tactic of truth. The truth, at the moment, doesn’t matter – a situation bound to drive a writer mad. A parallel exists in this country, but let’s not go there right now. Barthes used the word “effect” to signify the aura, the premium, that surrounds certain writers, celebrities, objects. In Russia’s situation, the opposite is happening – call it effectlessness. Truth is ripped from its pragmatic coordinates – it is, contra William James, what doesn’t work.
Chechnya goes on. That's the saddest, sickest monument to what the cold war oligarchs, on both sides, did to us.
¶ 4:04 PM
After the first few months of WWI, according to Niall Ferguson’s The Pity of War, the German general staff knew that their one major hope (to knock out a stronger, more numerous enemy quickly) had been dashed. At this point, the Chief of Staff uttered the immortal words that sum up the incorrigible stupidity of the military mindset: “even if we are ruined by it, it was still beautiful.” One wonders if any Russian general feels the same this week, the fifteenth anniversary of the Russian evacuation of Afghanistan.
It is funny. I went through the eighties as a very active protestor. I talked every day with various leftist friends. We all talked about Nicaragua. None of us talked about Afghanistan. Even when the place was invaded, in 1979, the event was overshadowed, to the average American mind, by what was happening in Iran. Who knew that it was all about the leakage, the leakage? It never penetrated that there was some meaning in the fact that the largest CIA outpost in the world, after Langley, was located in Islamabad. About which we still know next to nothing.
Well, here was a small war (merely a million or so dead and wounded) with big consequences. It struck a fatal blow to one of the great empires of the post WWII world, and its aftermath kidneypunched the other. Just think: the demoralization of the Soviet army – in a country that devoted 15 percent of its GDP to the army, a country in which the army was, supposedly, the only thing that worked – materially deteriorated Soviet morale. Gorbachev, Chernobyl – yes, there were many small stages on the way to the final Soviet rust-out, but Afghanistan was definitely the music in the background, just as Vietnam was the music in the background in the seventies.
And then, the other empire, America the Good. America blindly and blithely arming happy Islamicists with Stinger missiles. Afghanistan was photo op number one for the up and coming right winger in the 80s. How could we not have known? When a group that has an unerring sixth sense for unlucky decisions, not to mention dirty, inhuman ones, was so involved in resisting the Russians in the mountains, we should have paid more attention. The allies are always dirty – Laotian generals neckdeep in opium money, Contra torturers, etc., etc. But since the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, it seemed like an easy call to support whoever opposed them. The whole tangle of that history is still tangled, and we doubt we are going to be handed the thread by the 9/11 commission. But we know it is there – just look at the first WTC bombing, look at who facilitated it and how they got here. For instance, look at this Atlantic article, written in 96, which traces the the Cia’s development of the radical Islamic network through the exemplary life of Sheikh Omar Abdul-Rahman, the man who was financed and nurtured by the CIA almost to the day he was arrested, in New Jersey, for planning the blowing up of the World Trade Center.
“WHEN Sheikh Omar entered the United States, in July of 1990, via Saudi Arabia, Peshawar, and Sudan on a much-disputed tourist visa issued by an undercover agent of the CIA, his primary purpose was to set up a U.S. infrastructure, a funding mechanism, and an organizational base for Egypt's militant Islamic groups -- an undertaking that he had largely accomplished by the time of his arrest in 1993.”
Those are the larger toxic spills. But I think, even more than the macro and visible events, what happened in Afghanistan set off a chain of small wars that are still going, and that will just get worse if the causes of them aren't made clear, and resistance to those causes doesn't coalesce around a progressive standard. Chechnya is the worst of them at the present time. The U.S., for its own reasons, abetted Yeltsin, one of the great thieves of our time, and – as is the case when you deal with the devil – was forced, by circumstances, to abet Putin. We’ve previously posted about the ‘terrorism of mirrors” that inflected Putin’s campaign for president – terrorist acts in 99 that were attributed to Chechens, even as all indications point to a dirty operation by Putin’s own national police department.
So what happens in the last two weeks? More of the collateral c. from Afghanistan, by way of Chechnya. One of Putin’s strident critics is Boris Berezovsky. We have no time for Boris’ moral character – he hasn’t got any. But that made him a perfect in between man to plan things between Moscow and Chechnya in 99, that oddest of years. When Yeltsin melted in his pilfered fats off the throne, leaving space for Putin, the former head of the secret police started operating like former heads of secret police operate: getting rid of his enemies, and wacking former associates. Boris Berezovsky was among the casualties. When Berezovsky fled to London, he started ratting out the whole dirty deal that had used the death of thousands of Chechnians as a prop to keep the electorate voting for Putin, and implicitly voting to protect Yeltsen’s family from jail time. Ivan Rybkin, the presidential candidate who disappeared, reappeared in a disoriented state, then hightailed it for London himself, was another loud critic of the Chechnyan policy. He was, supposedly, being funded by Berezovsky. Both of these are not harmless critics, in Putin’s view, since both know where the bodies were buried – and I don’t mean that figuratively.
A regime founded on a classic totalitarian big lie – the attack by the Chechens – exists only by means of small lies, the shattered fragments that reflect the original lie to the point of maximum distortion, renews its energies by periodical reinvigorating the causes of violence -- even if it has to counterfeit those causes, produce them in the secret police hq. So no one should be surprised that, as it is an election season, here comes the subway bombing. There are multiple levels in the terrorism that haunts Moscow at election time. Inexplicably, the system keeps failing in elementary ways, all the gates between Grozny and Moscow keep opening up, inexplicably the gross tolls of violence always seem to favor Putin’s ever more nationalistic stances. Yulia Latynina has a scathing column about that subway bombing. Here are few grafs:
“Terrorist acts will continue to happen in Russia for two reasons.
First, because it is in the very nature of the system in place in Chechnya. Chechen field commanders produce terrorist acts, just as the Ostankino meat plant produces sausages. It's their business, just as is the case in Palestine. In both Chechnya and Palestine, there are people with power, influence and money who would not have power, influence and money if there were no terrorist acts.
It is not easy to fight terrorism even in a normal country, just as it is not easy to deal with gangrene even in a clean operating theater.
If, however, the operating theater is located in a pigsty, the nurses have pinched all the lightbulbs and the surgeon is not thinking about how to do the operation right, but about how he can cut off the patient's hand with his gold watch -- then it's a very different matter. And that is the second reason why terrorist acts will continue to occur.”
The problem with taking sides, in Russia, is that the sides are so filthy. It is like a fight in a locked toilet stall where the toilet has overflowed. Latynina properly attacks Putin’s populism, his war on the oligarchs – but this isn’t to defend the owners of Yukos, who basically stole the company from the state. This is a turf war in Shark land, and one’s challenge has to be promoting those sharks who, for their own sharkish reasons, are using the ultimate shock tactic of truth. The truth, at the moment, doesn’t matter – a situation bound to drive a writer mad. A parallel exists in this country, but let’s not go there right now. Barthes used the word “effect” to signify the aura, the premium, that surrounds certain writers, celebrities, objects. In Russia’s situation, the opposite is happening – call it effectlessness. Truth is ripped from its pragmatic coordinates – it is, contra William James, what doesn’t work.
Chechnya goes on. That's the saddest, sickest monument to what the cold war oligarchs, on both sides, did to us.
¶ 4:04 PM
Sunday, February 15, 2004
Bollettino
Lately, all the news from Iraq has been gloomy. So why do I feel like Iraq’s situation is the best it has been in decades?
It comes, I suppose, from my screwy take on this war. I recently looked at two media forums. In Open Democracy, there is a report on the debate at the New School between Hitchens, Danner, Powers , and Frum. Hitchens and Frum represented the right wing pro-war side, Danner and Powers representing the responsible anti-war side. Hitchens was the only optimist in the bunch. Danner and Powers think Iraq is spinning out of control, and Frum, representing the muted panic of the Bushies, thinks we all have to work together, ie stop criticizing Bush.
Then, in the Guardian, there is an article, writers on the war, which polls prominent writers about their own pro or con-ness about the conflict. I was happy to see that the majority were anti-war, but unhappy to see that the instinct to distrust Bush had not extended to any very deep thought about Iraq at present.
Summarizing the LI position, it would go something like this: Bush’s argument for war disguised an all to familiar American imperial adventure. As in Latin America, the administration was trying to take out a hostile dictator and replace him with a compliant puppet, under whose benevolent gaze the U.S. could spread its fine mesh of corporate interest, engulfing the resources and wealth of a conquered protectorate.
What Iraq demonstrated is that intervention on this scale, and at this distance, is not going to happen. The Empire has limits. More, the unintended consequence of the intervention was the removal of a truly horrendous regime, and the opening to an at least tentatively democratic one. Good news.
This happened as the result of two happy accidents. The first accident was the sheer incompetence and unpreparedness of the Americans in advancing towards their goal. The idea of stuffing a swindler like Chalabi down the throat of the population was quickly abandoned as impractical. The ‘liberated’ population didn’t follow the script. The looting destroyed vital infrastructure, while the infrastructure itself, after eleven years of sanctions, was incredibly decayed. Misstep after misstep was made by the imperialists, who were most successful, apparently, at building concrete berms to keep out the dangerous wogs.
Meanwhile, happy accident number two was happening. The resistance turned out to be dogged and disruptive. Like the Bush administration, the resistors were guided by a bad intention – a pure power grab – and a much worse history, that of mass murderers. They squared off against the occupiers, and as they did so, they relieved the Iraqi population from the consequences that would have ensued from a successful Bush plan – puppet status, nationwide respectable looting to the advantage of corporations and exiles. This more subtle looting, it turns out, has been forced to prey only on the American taxpayer, who is pumping money on the grand scale into keeping Cheney's retirement benefits very, very real.
The tide turned, we think, with the capture of Saddam H. This capture, in one blow, operated against the Americans and the resistance. The utter bankruptcy of the resistance, and its futility, was finally and conclusively exposed, on the one hand. On the other hand, the last excuse not to resist the Americans was blown away. The Iraqi masses could now operate without fearing the return of Saddam. And their first action was to counter the occupation.
This is why we think the elections Sistani wants are so important. Both the Bushies and the liberals are opposed to them, because they both share a managerial ideology. They both talk about democracy, but they want it organized to the point where their side retains power.
Well, we’d love to see secular democratic socialists retain or return to power in Iraq, but we believe process can't be separated from content; that top down implementation of a secular state evolves top down governance, usually by the military. If you think that insulating a progressive group against real politics works, look around you in the world. It is a fatal and stupid thing to do. It creates a malignant alliance between progressives in the country and their sponsors out of the country. This, in turn, attenuates the rooting of the progressive wing within the country until it represents, to the people at large, one more aspect of a colonialist ethos.
The consequence of a direct election might well be a triumph for a reactionary, theocratic party. But we think that if that party is going to triumph, it is going to triumph no matter how much the NGOs think they can manage the country into their various versions of liberal democracy. Far better to strengthen the parties that oppose theocracy within the country from the beginning, far better to take up the election challenge, have them begin to understand the mechanism of electoral politics, than to try to manage a detour around "petty politics". Which is why we are rather disappointed that people who truly do want to see the triumph of a secular state that measures its surrenders to neo-liberalism against an ideal of social welfare are locked into the scared mode. Sure, Iraq teeters on a blood bath of factional struggle – but, as nobody seems to remember, the Kurds went through the same struggle in the 90s, and seem to have not only survived it, but become much more secular, democratic, etc., etc. Not that we think the two Kurdish warlord parties are the last word in secularism .. however, the opportunity exists, there. Given that the Americans are blindly working towards freeing Iraq of debt and repairing the infrastructure, whoever wins the elections will have a better position than Iraq has had since 1979.
This isn't to underestimate the body count. Actually, it is hard to even estimate the body count in this country -- nobody counts it. However, the alternative body count was worse -- the attrition from sanctions, the hopelessness of Saddam, the blighting of all promise.
Of course, we are probably wrong about much of this, re the real situation in Iraq. But we have a lively distrust the prejudices of Danner, Hitchens, Powers and Frum, who are also probably wrong about much of the real situation in Iraq. In neither forum, you’ll notice, is there … an Iraqi.
Lately, all the news from Iraq has been gloomy. So why do I feel like Iraq’s situation is the best it has been in decades?
It comes, I suppose, from my screwy take on this war. I recently looked at two media forums. In Open Democracy, there is a report on the debate at the New School between Hitchens, Danner, Powers , and Frum. Hitchens and Frum represented the right wing pro-war side, Danner and Powers representing the responsible anti-war side. Hitchens was the only optimist in the bunch. Danner and Powers think Iraq is spinning out of control, and Frum, representing the muted panic of the Bushies, thinks we all have to work together, ie stop criticizing Bush.
Then, in the Guardian, there is an article, writers on the war, which polls prominent writers about their own pro or con-ness about the conflict. I was happy to see that the majority were anti-war, but unhappy to see that the instinct to distrust Bush had not extended to any very deep thought about Iraq at present.
Summarizing the LI position, it would go something like this: Bush’s argument for war disguised an all to familiar American imperial adventure. As in Latin America, the administration was trying to take out a hostile dictator and replace him with a compliant puppet, under whose benevolent gaze the U.S. could spread its fine mesh of corporate interest, engulfing the resources and wealth of a conquered protectorate.
What Iraq demonstrated is that intervention on this scale, and at this distance, is not going to happen. The Empire has limits. More, the unintended consequence of the intervention was the removal of a truly horrendous regime, and the opening to an at least tentatively democratic one. Good news.
This happened as the result of two happy accidents. The first accident was the sheer incompetence and unpreparedness of the Americans in advancing towards their goal. The idea of stuffing a swindler like Chalabi down the throat of the population was quickly abandoned as impractical. The ‘liberated’ population didn’t follow the script. The looting destroyed vital infrastructure, while the infrastructure itself, after eleven years of sanctions, was incredibly decayed. Misstep after misstep was made by the imperialists, who were most successful, apparently, at building concrete berms to keep out the dangerous wogs.
Meanwhile, happy accident number two was happening. The resistance turned out to be dogged and disruptive. Like the Bush administration, the resistors were guided by a bad intention – a pure power grab – and a much worse history, that of mass murderers. They squared off against the occupiers, and as they did so, they relieved the Iraqi population from the consequences that would have ensued from a successful Bush plan – puppet status, nationwide respectable looting to the advantage of corporations and exiles. This more subtle looting, it turns out, has been forced to prey only on the American taxpayer, who is pumping money on the grand scale into keeping Cheney's retirement benefits very, very real.
The tide turned, we think, with the capture of Saddam H. This capture, in one blow, operated against the Americans and the resistance. The utter bankruptcy of the resistance, and its futility, was finally and conclusively exposed, on the one hand. On the other hand, the last excuse not to resist the Americans was blown away. The Iraqi masses could now operate without fearing the return of Saddam. And their first action was to counter the occupation.
This is why we think the elections Sistani wants are so important. Both the Bushies and the liberals are opposed to them, because they both share a managerial ideology. They both talk about democracy, but they want it organized to the point where their side retains power.
Well, we’d love to see secular democratic socialists retain or return to power in Iraq, but we believe process can't be separated from content; that top down implementation of a secular state evolves top down governance, usually by the military. If you think that insulating a progressive group against real politics works, look around you in the world. It is a fatal and stupid thing to do. It creates a malignant alliance between progressives in the country and their sponsors out of the country. This, in turn, attenuates the rooting of the progressive wing within the country until it represents, to the people at large, one more aspect of a colonialist ethos.
The consequence of a direct election might well be a triumph for a reactionary, theocratic party. But we think that if that party is going to triumph, it is going to triumph no matter how much the NGOs think they can manage the country into their various versions of liberal democracy. Far better to strengthen the parties that oppose theocracy within the country from the beginning, far better to take up the election challenge, have them begin to understand the mechanism of electoral politics, than to try to manage a detour around "petty politics". Which is why we are rather disappointed that people who truly do want to see the triumph of a secular state that measures its surrenders to neo-liberalism against an ideal of social welfare are locked into the scared mode. Sure, Iraq teeters on a blood bath of factional struggle – but, as nobody seems to remember, the Kurds went through the same struggle in the 90s, and seem to have not only survived it, but become much more secular, democratic, etc., etc. Not that we think the two Kurdish warlord parties are the last word in secularism .. however, the opportunity exists, there. Given that the Americans are blindly working towards freeing Iraq of debt and repairing the infrastructure, whoever wins the elections will have a better position than Iraq has had since 1979.
This isn't to underestimate the body count. Actually, it is hard to even estimate the body count in this country -- nobody counts it. However, the alternative body count was worse -- the attrition from sanctions, the hopelessness of Saddam, the blighting of all promise.
Of course, we are probably wrong about much of this, re the real situation in Iraq. But we have a lively distrust the prejudices of Danner, Hitchens, Powers and Frum, who are also probably wrong about much of the real situation in Iraq. In neither forum, you’ll notice, is there … an Iraqi.
Thursday, February 12, 2004
Bollettino
It was bound to happen eventually…
The George Bush who won the electoral college in 2000 had run as a rather wealthy, rather conservative suburban dad. While he wasn’t exactly approving of gays and feminists, he was tolerant. He had African-American buddies – not in the neighborhood, but at work. Sure, like any suburban dad, he harbored a few crackpot theories – his were about evolution and economics – but these seemed harmless. With his Texas accent and Crawford ranch, Bush seemed not so much like John Wayne as like a guy who had purchased the complete John Wayne video library and stacked them up on the video shelf, there to accumulate the dust of non-use.
9/11 changed that. Three years later, 9/11 doesn’t seem like the Battle of Hastings or Stalingrad – a historical turning point. It is a much referred to event, but that reference is a substitute for memory, since real memory is still too painful. Read Gail Sheehy’s remarkable report on the evidence that has accumulated for what happened that day, and the visceral panic pain comes back.
9/11 might not have changed everything, but it did change Bush, in two stages. Sheehy’s article reminds us of the first stage. For a crucial twelve hours, Bush pretty much lost control.
This isn’t to disparage him in particular. Karl Weick, a well known psychologist, has made a study of disasters. In a famous paper about a fire that killed several firefighters in Montana, he tracked the unfolding disarray that led to their deaths, and gave it a name: the collapse of sensemaking. Those routines by which we usually organize and manage events (the official procedures, the instruments, the tacit knowledge, the interpersonal trust) all seem to fall apart simultaneously. When Atta’s group took over the plane in the first twenty minutes out of Boston, the effect of that information seems to have produced a rapidly transmitted and magnified shock all along the system that connects the power establishment with the instruments of control. One has only to notice Bush’s response to the first crash, registered by Sheehy through one of her witnesses, the wife of one of the pilots: "I can’t get over what Bush said when he was called about the first plane hitting the tower: ‘That’s some bad pilot.’" Like any other mook that day, Bush didn't know what to make of the information.
The response to the infliction of such trauma on a system of power can move in several ways. It can produce surrender, resistance, regroupment, etc. etc. In Bush’s case, it became of crucial importance to overcome the initial evidence of panic. He did that, in the next week, by acting with a fortified coolness. The power system regrouped. The attack, while symbolically painful, actually changed nothing about the real balance of power. In order to overcome that moment of weakness we all saw on 9/11, Bush and his constituency – the whole nation, at the time – colluded in a little pretence that it hadn’t happened. We re-edited the past. Bush, in the meantime, reached some compact with his inner John Wayne to get himself – and us – over the hump.
This worked all too well to satisfy two desires – the public’s, for a narrative that included a hero to get us out of this horrible situation, and Bush’s, to measure up to the man he wanted to be. As Bush metamorphosed into John Wayne, he erased his earlier fumbles; as he erased those fumbles, he gained popularity; as he gained popularity, he armed himself against those – the press, the opposition – who might have a motive to point to those fumbles. And, as importantly, the D.C. court system began to exert its influence on him, stroking his vanity with the flattery he obviously craved -- that he actually was some avatar of the Duke.
In 2000, nobody, including Bush, would have bought that story. There has always been a vagueness in Bush’s background, and it has always been connected to the sometimes inappropriate fervor with which he publicly embraces Jesus. Sophisticates who think of that as political gesturing are not sophisticated enough – Bush’s need for salvation is palpably real. William James called it the Will to Believe. George Bush would certainly have gone down the road so shoddily essayed by his brother Neal, of Silverado S and L fame, if he hadn’t, as A.A. puts it, accepted a higher power. The need to do so wasn’t held against him by the electorate in 2000. Who among us, after all, hasn’t felt that need? And who can really make a virtue out of resisting it? Rather, the resistance turns on finding substitutes for it – higher powers, after all, can be history, can be art, can be all the Godheads in the pantheon. Atheistic monkeys haven’t yet evolved.
Unfortunately for Bush and his political advisors, they have forgotten this. They have sold themselves on the John Wayne persona. The Bush who once needed Jesus has reversed that formula : now Jesus needs him. Even discounting as exaggerated reports that Bush has talked about himself as some important figure in God’s plan for the world, something did click in his head after 9/11 that corresponds with that kind of arrogance. Why? Let me suggest that the weakness he showed on 9/11 was all too reminiscent, to Bush himself, of certain inglorious episodes in his past. His subsequent arrogance fills in the blanks that Bush has willed into his own biography.
I think we can date exactly when the John Wayne schtick started to fall apart: May 1, 2003. The famous, or infamous, Mission Accomplished speech marked, I think, a fatal moment for Bush, when image began to diverge too far from reality to be recuperable. To understand that, one has to understand how the John Wayne persona acted to legitimate the War against Iraq.
That Bush lied and hyped about the threat Saddam presented is, I think, undeniable. However, I think that Bush’s defenders are right to point out that we didn’t go to war to counter an imminent threat. Rather, we went to war because we trusted the John Wayne persona. We went to war on faith. And, I think, so did Bush. He was gulled by his advisors, who wanted this war, he used the build-up to it for political ends against the Dems. But, ultimately, there has always been something a little irrational about this war. It isn’t that there aren’t motives for it a-plenty – it is that none of those motives quite fit the reason we went to war – or even the reason that Bush wanted to go to war. That is because the reason was, in a way, the change in Bush wrought by 9/11. We went to war because Bush decided to trust his instincts. The irony is that those instincts are implants, Bush’s own psychological Botox. We saw the naked man on 9/11. We saw the instincts in action. Stripped down to fight or flight, Bush flew and flew until the fight came reassuringly back. His new instincts were virtual ones – the instincts of the movie Wayne. But the old instincts were still there – the old Bush was still lurking.
Reality has a way of undoing confidence men, even confidence men who trick themselves. When Bush announced Mission Accomplished on May 1, you could see his John Wayne persona being sucked back into the old Bush. This is always the way Bush did business – from Harkin to the tax cuts. Once you’ve won one or two small bets, bet everything.
And always, in these cases, Bush has misread the data. Always he has misplaced the Will to Believe from where it works – as a personal remedy for overcoming bad habits – to where it doesn’t – which is the dimension of reality itself, that big resistant Other that will always, sooner or later, undermine our fondest wish, which is that we not die. The wish that the iron laws of probability will, this one time, yield to our libido.
Think, for a moment, of the Mission that was accomplished:
The war wasn’t paid for;
The enemy we ostensibly fought (Saddam) was unaccounted for;
The territory we occupied was much bigger, and more populous, than the strength of the forces we had to occupy it could manage on anybody's account;
The man we had favored to head Iraq – Chalabi – had gained no traction since we injected him into the area;
The weapons with which to attack American forces were not even partially in our control;
In the John Wayne narrative, the fadeout comes before civilization arrives. The town might be cleansed of bad men, but then comes the work of paying for the police and building the jail. The best Wayne pictures don’t show him as a leader, but as an outlier – an unaccountable force, as in the Searchers. Wayne doesn’t play the Commander in Chief for good reasons – he has no talent for the patient building, dickering and dealing that goes with maintaining leadership.
Between the Mission Accomplished speech and the Bring It on speech, the persona that Bush had crafted in 2002 came unglued. Surely the last year must seem, to Bush, uncannily like other bad years in his life. Like the year that he and his Harkin friends tried to exploit the opportunities supposedly opened up after the Gulf War I. Or the year his father lost the presidency. All those times in which Bush, who is a terrible businessman, refused to hedge his bets – only to have to hedge them hastily and unprofitably at the last moment. This is always the moment when someone else has to help him out. Bush has a talent for not, immediately, being humiliated by this. Baker, for instance, getting him out of a jam in Florida must have, must have made Bush feel small. And there must have been some satisfaction to lending his ear, in the fall of 2002, to those people who talked his Dad’s men down. 2002 was the election W. won on his own. However, it couldn’t last. Bizarrely, the cowboy persona that Bush and his advisors have crafted out of sheer rhetoric is the one that his political operatives are banking on to get him re-elected. For this reason, we think the capture of Osama now looms as Bush’s great chance in this election. It is a chance to reconnect with his own Will to Believe – which has, on the evidence of the MTP interview, degenerated into longwinded, and exculpatory, clichés. This in itself must be a little humiliating. Bush is just not the Ahab type – he’d rather forget the Great White Whale. We don’t really believe that Bush took Saddam so personally that the war was a get even crusade – after all, the one person with whom the war really got even was Bush’s dad. And he has rubbed that in, with talk about lost opportunities and democracy, ever since. But now that Saddam is captured, he has to go out there and manage to get Osama, who he would just as soon forget. Bush hates to be reminded of the past like this, just hates it. The past is so hard to shape to the way he'd like it to be.
Wayne, of course, is always forced, at a certain moment in his movies, to pardon himself – usually to some woman. Bush differs from a lot of conservatives in being quite comfortable with women, just because (in the one trait he actually does share with Wayne) he trusts women to forgive him. This, by the way, is a little but real victory of Bush over his circumstances, if stories of Barbara Bush are true, since one would think that the upbringing by such a harridan would have exactly the opposite effect. But here there are no forgiving women, no Laura's, to bring him home. It is symbolic in more than one way that Bush, at the moment, is calling on his ex girlfriends to remember that he really did go to Guard training in Alabama. After all, he said so...
The public and private images that have been at play over the past three years have a dream logic. No psychoanalyst would be surprised that Bush is now being hit simultaneously with two things: the Kay report and the AWOL charges. Both operate as factors in one complex, one delusion. And both are dangerous to Bush because both are about who he really is. If we went to war on John Wayne’s sayso, Wayne can’t, as the going gets tough, dissolve into a wealthy suburban dad. The superhero’s agon must go on, and on, until we understand what we have always already understood -- there really aren’t any superheros. Caught in the toils of the image that he had to assume in order to go on, we are watching the mask come off, and the skin come with it. The Guard service is a trivial issue, but it resonates not so much because of Kerry’s medals – although those help – but because of the central weakness of trying to run a man on a character that has been fabricated out of an historical instance’s need. We’d still lay odds that Bush, the incumbent, will win this election, but the Democrats have a secret weapon that just might do the trick for them: the real George Bush. If the voters remember the man they didn’t elect in 2000, Bush will be the victim of an odd backlash, based on a deceit that he has talked himself and a great part of the nation into believing. While he richly deserves to fall there is something classically pitiful in the way he has, like a flawed hero in a Thomas Hardy novel, so amply and thoughtlessly contrived the means of his own downfall.
It was bound to happen eventually…
The George Bush who won the electoral college in 2000 had run as a rather wealthy, rather conservative suburban dad. While he wasn’t exactly approving of gays and feminists, he was tolerant. He had African-American buddies – not in the neighborhood, but at work. Sure, like any suburban dad, he harbored a few crackpot theories – his were about evolution and economics – but these seemed harmless. With his Texas accent and Crawford ranch, Bush seemed not so much like John Wayne as like a guy who had purchased the complete John Wayne video library and stacked them up on the video shelf, there to accumulate the dust of non-use.
9/11 changed that. Three years later, 9/11 doesn’t seem like the Battle of Hastings or Stalingrad – a historical turning point. It is a much referred to event, but that reference is a substitute for memory, since real memory is still too painful. Read Gail Sheehy’s remarkable report on the evidence that has accumulated for what happened that day, and the visceral panic pain comes back.
9/11 might not have changed everything, but it did change Bush, in two stages. Sheehy’s article reminds us of the first stage. For a crucial twelve hours, Bush pretty much lost control.
This isn’t to disparage him in particular. Karl Weick, a well known psychologist, has made a study of disasters. In a famous paper about a fire that killed several firefighters in Montana, he tracked the unfolding disarray that led to their deaths, and gave it a name: the collapse of sensemaking. Those routines by which we usually organize and manage events (the official procedures, the instruments, the tacit knowledge, the interpersonal trust) all seem to fall apart simultaneously. When Atta’s group took over the plane in the first twenty minutes out of Boston, the effect of that information seems to have produced a rapidly transmitted and magnified shock all along the system that connects the power establishment with the instruments of control. One has only to notice Bush’s response to the first crash, registered by Sheehy through one of her witnesses, the wife of one of the pilots: "I can’t get over what Bush said when he was called about the first plane hitting the tower: ‘That’s some bad pilot.’" Like any other mook that day, Bush didn't know what to make of the information.
The response to the infliction of such trauma on a system of power can move in several ways. It can produce surrender, resistance, regroupment, etc. etc. In Bush’s case, it became of crucial importance to overcome the initial evidence of panic. He did that, in the next week, by acting with a fortified coolness. The power system regrouped. The attack, while symbolically painful, actually changed nothing about the real balance of power. In order to overcome that moment of weakness we all saw on 9/11, Bush and his constituency – the whole nation, at the time – colluded in a little pretence that it hadn’t happened. We re-edited the past. Bush, in the meantime, reached some compact with his inner John Wayne to get himself – and us – over the hump.
This worked all too well to satisfy two desires – the public’s, for a narrative that included a hero to get us out of this horrible situation, and Bush’s, to measure up to the man he wanted to be. As Bush metamorphosed into John Wayne, he erased his earlier fumbles; as he erased those fumbles, he gained popularity; as he gained popularity, he armed himself against those – the press, the opposition – who might have a motive to point to those fumbles. And, as importantly, the D.C. court system began to exert its influence on him, stroking his vanity with the flattery he obviously craved -- that he actually was some avatar of the Duke.
In 2000, nobody, including Bush, would have bought that story. There has always been a vagueness in Bush’s background, and it has always been connected to the sometimes inappropriate fervor with which he publicly embraces Jesus. Sophisticates who think of that as political gesturing are not sophisticated enough – Bush’s need for salvation is palpably real. William James called it the Will to Believe. George Bush would certainly have gone down the road so shoddily essayed by his brother Neal, of Silverado S and L fame, if he hadn’t, as A.A. puts it, accepted a higher power. The need to do so wasn’t held against him by the electorate in 2000. Who among us, after all, hasn’t felt that need? And who can really make a virtue out of resisting it? Rather, the resistance turns on finding substitutes for it – higher powers, after all, can be history, can be art, can be all the Godheads in the pantheon. Atheistic monkeys haven’t yet evolved.
Unfortunately for Bush and his political advisors, they have forgotten this. They have sold themselves on the John Wayne persona. The Bush who once needed Jesus has reversed that formula : now Jesus needs him. Even discounting as exaggerated reports that Bush has talked about himself as some important figure in God’s plan for the world, something did click in his head after 9/11 that corresponds with that kind of arrogance. Why? Let me suggest that the weakness he showed on 9/11 was all too reminiscent, to Bush himself, of certain inglorious episodes in his past. His subsequent arrogance fills in the blanks that Bush has willed into his own biography.
I think we can date exactly when the John Wayne schtick started to fall apart: May 1, 2003. The famous, or infamous, Mission Accomplished speech marked, I think, a fatal moment for Bush, when image began to diverge too far from reality to be recuperable. To understand that, one has to understand how the John Wayne persona acted to legitimate the War against Iraq.
That Bush lied and hyped about the threat Saddam presented is, I think, undeniable. However, I think that Bush’s defenders are right to point out that we didn’t go to war to counter an imminent threat. Rather, we went to war because we trusted the John Wayne persona. We went to war on faith. And, I think, so did Bush. He was gulled by his advisors, who wanted this war, he used the build-up to it for political ends against the Dems. But, ultimately, there has always been something a little irrational about this war. It isn’t that there aren’t motives for it a-plenty – it is that none of those motives quite fit the reason we went to war – or even the reason that Bush wanted to go to war. That is because the reason was, in a way, the change in Bush wrought by 9/11. We went to war because Bush decided to trust his instincts. The irony is that those instincts are implants, Bush’s own psychological Botox. We saw the naked man on 9/11. We saw the instincts in action. Stripped down to fight or flight, Bush flew and flew until the fight came reassuringly back. His new instincts were virtual ones – the instincts of the movie Wayne. But the old instincts were still there – the old Bush was still lurking.
Reality has a way of undoing confidence men, even confidence men who trick themselves. When Bush announced Mission Accomplished on May 1, you could see his John Wayne persona being sucked back into the old Bush. This is always the way Bush did business – from Harkin to the tax cuts. Once you’ve won one or two small bets, bet everything.
And always, in these cases, Bush has misread the data. Always he has misplaced the Will to Believe from where it works – as a personal remedy for overcoming bad habits – to where it doesn’t – which is the dimension of reality itself, that big resistant Other that will always, sooner or later, undermine our fondest wish, which is that we not die. The wish that the iron laws of probability will, this one time, yield to our libido.
Think, for a moment, of the Mission that was accomplished:
The war wasn’t paid for;
The enemy we ostensibly fought (Saddam) was unaccounted for;
The territory we occupied was much bigger, and more populous, than the strength of the forces we had to occupy it could manage on anybody's account;
The man we had favored to head Iraq – Chalabi – had gained no traction since we injected him into the area;
The weapons with which to attack American forces were not even partially in our control;
In the John Wayne narrative, the fadeout comes before civilization arrives. The town might be cleansed of bad men, but then comes the work of paying for the police and building the jail. The best Wayne pictures don’t show him as a leader, but as an outlier – an unaccountable force, as in the Searchers. Wayne doesn’t play the Commander in Chief for good reasons – he has no talent for the patient building, dickering and dealing that goes with maintaining leadership.
Between the Mission Accomplished speech and the Bring It on speech, the persona that Bush had crafted in 2002 came unglued. Surely the last year must seem, to Bush, uncannily like other bad years in his life. Like the year that he and his Harkin friends tried to exploit the opportunities supposedly opened up after the Gulf War I. Or the year his father lost the presidency. All those times in which Bush, who is a terrible businessman, refused to hedge his bets – only to have to hedge them hastily and unprofitably at the last moment. This is always the moment when someone else has to help him out. Bush has a talent for not, immediately, being humiliated by this. Baker, for instance, getting him out of a jam in Florida must have, must have made Bush feel small. And there must have been some satisfaction to lending his ear, in the fall of 2002, to those people who talked his Dad’s men down. 2002 was the election W. won on his own. However, it couldn’t last. Bizarrely, the cowboy persona that Bush and his advisors have crafted out of sheer rhetoric is the one that his political operatives are banking on to get him re-elected. For this reason, we think the capture of Osama now looms as Bush’s great chance in this election. It is a chance to reconnect with his own Will to Believe – which has, on the evidence of the MTP interview, degenerated into longwinded, and exculpatory, clichés. This in itself must be a little humiliating. Bush is just not the Ahab type – he’d rather forget the Great White Whale. We don’t really believe that Bush took Saddam so personally that the war was a get even crusade – after all, the one person with whom the war really got even was Bush’s dad. And he has rubbed that in, with talk about lost opportunities and democracy, ever since. But now that Saddam is captured, he has to go out there and manage to get Osama, who he would just as soon forget. Bush hates to be reminded of the past like this, just hates it. The past is so hard to shape to the way he'd like it to be.
Wayne, of course, is always forced, at a certain moment in his movies, to pardon himself – usually to some woman. Bush differs from a lot of conservatives in being quite comfortable with women, just because (in the one trait he actually does share with Wayne) he trusts women to forgive him. This, by the way, is a little but real victory of Bush over his circumstances, if stories of Barbara Bush are true, since one would think that the upbringing by such a harridan would have exactly the opposite effect. But here there are no forgiving women, no Laura's, to bring him home. It is symbolic in more than one way that Bush, at the moment, is calling on his ex girlfriends to remember that he really did go to Guard training in Alabama. After all, he said so...
The public and private images that have been at play over the past three years have a dream logic. No psychoanalyst would be surprised that Bush is now being hit simultaneously with two things: the Kay report and the AWOL charges. Both operate as factors in one complex, one delusion. And both are dangerous to Bush because both are about who he really is. If we went to war on John Wayne’s sayso, Wayne can’t, as the going gets tough, dissolve into a wealthy suburban dad. The superhero’s agon must go on, and on, until we understand what we have always already understood -- there really aren’t any superheros. Caught in the toils of the image that he had to assume in order to go on, we are watching the mask come off, and the skin come with it. The Guard service is a trivial issue, but it resonates not so much because of Kerry’s medals – although those help – but because of the central weakness of trying to run a man on a character that has been fabricated out of an historical instance’s need. We’d still lay odds that Bush, the incumbent, will win this election, but the Democrats have a secret weapon that just might do the trick for them: the real George Bush. If the voters remember the man they didn’t elect in 2000, Bush will be the victim of an odd backlash, based on a deceit that he has talked himself and a great part of the nation into believing. While he richly deserves to fall there is something classically pitiful in the way he has, like a flawed hero in a Thomas Hardy novel, so amply and thoughtlessly contrived the means of his own downfall.
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