“…nay, is not the Universe itself, at bottom, properly an Intrigue?” – Thomas Carlyle

In the late nineties, Norma Baig was in trouble. She had, for instance, the FBI on her tail. They were interested in whether she had tried to defraud her mother, Asma Bagain, by claiming that her mother’s house was her own in order to borrow money against it. Then there was the court complaint that she had beat her mother in law and threatened to kill her, which was part of the general mess, apparently, of being married to John Toliopoulos. During one of her separations from Toliopoulos, she stayed with a woman named Brandy Murphy. According to the Australian paper The Age, Brandy only learned that she was living with a genius when Norma left:

"Norma left Chicago on the Labour Day weekend in August 1999. I had been her best friend for five years. We were inseparable. I thought I knew everything about Norma, so when she left I was really upset. I used to sit in her room and cry."
…

"She once told me that she was writing a book," Ms Murphy said, "but that it was too private and personal to show me. After she left, I found some things she had written which were pure fantasy about her father, and how she wanted to die and thought she was evil. It was really heartbreaking stuff."

One likes to hear stories like this. It is like an anecdote in Vasari – one of those about a famous artist who was discovered, all naïve and shepherding and shit, drawing some perspective laden scene by another artist, and taken up and educated in a studio. For Norma’s little sketch pointed to the larger life ahead of her as a Fake. Not a minor fake, not an everyday seller of promises that never pan out, not a down on her high heels confidance man – no, that wasn’t Norma. The sketch about being, to use Alice Walker’s disgusting verb, incested, was all about an instinct. Yes, in the early nineties, if you were going to make it big in the confession game, incest was what it was all about. Daddy peeping in on you, Daddy and you in the shower, the return of all your repressed memories via the wonders of modern therapy, with its rediscovery of an innocence within children of all sexual knowledge that a psychoanalyst could only gape at. Roll over Sigmund Freud and tell Mrs. Grundy the news. This was when we were living in a nation that believed, in its tiny little heart, that day care centers could double as Satanic cult drive-ins; this was a nation willing to arrest, in one case, almost a whole police force (in Olympia, Washington), on the charge that they had been making with the big cloven hoofed guy and forking babies and such. This, as we now know, was the acme of progress and Western Civilization.

But I am getting ahead of myself. Norma left that sketch behind because, I believe, she knew, with the instinct of a great artist, that the time for mere tales of sodomizing were past. The fake’s art consists of finding just the right combination for the historical moment. Norma, fleeing the US with her husband in 1999, arrives in Australia. And then – another Norma appears. Norma Khouri. This Norma has a heartfelt tale to tell, a tale to make you cry. It is an especially heartwarming and shocking tale in the age of the new Crusade, the Post 9/11 era when the West discovered how civilized it was, after all, especially compared to the Middle East. In the era of the New Crusade, the right, which formerly gave its considered opinion about feminism by coining the term femi-nazi, was suddenly very, very upset at the condition of women in Moslem countries. In the Clinton years, Wendy Shalit could write a feeble anti-feminist book that ends on a note of respect for the Taliban’s enforcement of the laws of chador, and that book would be praised by no less than George Will; but in the era of the New Crusade, it turns out that feminism is one of the things that make us Good – as compared to the Bad, which was, in general, anything Middle Eastern (save Israel). Whether from instinct or from sheer brilliance, Norma Baig dropped the memoir about being ‘incested’ and wrote a book that conformed perfectly to the new victim vogue. How much better to show how much better we were than our enemies -- who, it turns out, weren't even Christian! So was born a seering memoir of Norma’s adventures in Lebanon, and the death of her best buddy Dalia. Dalia, the ravishing daughter of a Moslem brute, falls in love with a Christian. Secret, chaste meetings ensue, but Daddy (borrowing the murderous patriarch theme from Norma’s previous sketch) lurks, dagger in hand, in the shadows. With twelve blows of the dagger he dispatches his fair daughter, with only Norma left to tell the tale.

And so Norma’s memoir appears, and Norma is everywhere – Norma Khouri, the woman who fled from Lebanon. Tears spring to her eyes, a fund is mounted for the victims of honor killing, there are readings in high schools and art festivals, and appearances on American tv to promote Honor Lost – the title of the book for the American market – and everything is going swimmingly. In the background, it is true, there is the nattering of Arab women – Jordanian women, actually. According to the Christian Science Herald:

“The National Commission for Women in Jordan had independently discovered more than 70 errors in her book and sent this information earlier to Random House and to Simon & Schuster. Random House replied at the time that they stood by their author after being satisfied that she had changed names and places to protect people in Jordan.”

Alas, as the spirit of the New Crusade has dwindled, we have discovered a lot of, uh, intelligence errors. That first fine bloom of Western Civ triumphalism – that period after 9/11 when some of our greatest intellectuals, like Italian prime minister Berlusconi, proclaimed the unadulterated superiority of the West, or that portion of it with white faces, over the East, a sneaky and retrograde part of the Earth that needs a good invasion to set it straight – has rather wilted.

And so too has Norma’s story. The Sydney Herald investigated Norma Khouri and found Norma Baig. They found a married woman, not a single one; they found a refugee from Chicago and debt, rather than Lebanon and honor killing. And they published the story.

In so doing, they have elevated Norma Khouri. As a victim, Khouri was minor. As a Fake, however, she’s become a Rorschach test for the Zeitgeist. The crossing over of a particularly malignant strand of liberal decay – therapeutic liberalism, with its blind identity of victimhood with goodness – with conservative resentment finds its great artistic achievement in Norma. Her book could be praised not only by Ms. magazine, but by the National Review. A particularly heartfelt review of the book appeared in the American Outlook, penned by a NR contributor, Katherine Lopez. It begins with the standard Rightwing windup:

“To most Americans, and Westerners generally, it is inconceivable. A father kills his daughter because she fell for the wrong guy. But move East, and in some cultures that is just what is done. A reality no one speaks of.
Norma Khouri can’t stand the silence. She’s written Honor Lost: Love and Death in Modern-Day Jordan in honor of her best friend, Dalia. Dalia and Khouri met when they were three, and, as Khouri tells it, were nearly inseparable for the next twenty-two years. They were always challenging their culture, Dalia’s religion, and her father. They managed to convince him to allow them to open a hair salon in Amman. It was in the salon where she found the happiness that would ultimately lead to her death penalty.

Dalia, twenty-six years old, was killed—stabbed twelve times with a kitchen knife—for the sake of her family’s honor. Her scandalous behavior? She was seen in public with a Catholic man.”

You will not see such an outpouring of sympathy from the NRO about, say, the statesponsored kidnapping of the children of lesbians in this country, or the stabbing to death of some prostitute and the malign neglect of the ensuing police investigation. But for one brief shining moment, the party of Phyllis Schlafley was on the barricades with Gloria Steinem.
This was not simply an accident. Norma’s book, like all great Cons, is designed to confirm the beliefs of its marks. There is a delicacy in these things that shouldn’t be underestimated. There are two parts of Norma’s work that are particularly beautiful and must be saluted.

One was the creation of Dalia. As the daughter of a Moslem, of course she longs for fairer, Christian men. The opera must go on! But if Norma’s drama were set in, say, America, Dalia would have probably been, shall we say, physically intimate with her Christian knight. But no – Dalia, in her twenties, was entirely chaste! For a crowd that advocates the teaching of abstinence with truly Taliban like fervor, this was a dream come true. However much the New Crusaders vaunted the freedom of women, briefly, in that small post 9/11 moment, they were still the standard anti-abortion, anti-sex, and pro-family crowd we’ve all come to know and love. The same people who consider the showing of Janet Jackson’s nipple a major cause for legal reform. Norma’s infallible instinct here is truly dialectical. It elevates her, to my mind, from mere con artist to artist, period.

An artist, as opposed to a con artist, longs for a signature. And this is the second brilliant thing about Norma. In that wicked Eastern land where, unlike the U.S. or Australia, men are brutes to women, a certain dream logic takes hold. Just as Shakespeare set one of his romances in a Bohemia with a seacoast, so, too, Norma’s individuality revolts in her very text and discretely devises a signal that says: I am the maker of this thing. This supposed refugee from Lebanon gives her country a border with Kuwait.

The New York times ran an op ed piece by an Australian writer who asked the question: how did she get away with it? For Norma was more than a writer – she was a personality. She loved the spotlight. One is reminded of Carlyle’s essay on the Affair of the Necklaces. That affair was recently a movie, starring Hilary Swank – which is how we get our history out here in the sticks. Jean de la Motte, aka Valois, tricked the Cardinal de Rohan into buying a diamond necklace, ostensively for Marie Antoinette. Jean found some strumpet to play Marie, pocketed Rohan’s money, and sold the diamonds before she was caught. Ever afterwards people have wondered how Rohan could fall for such an obvious dupe, and how Jean could have hoped to get away with it. Carlyle writes:

“Cheerfully admitting these statements to be all lies; we ask, How any
mortal could, or should, so lie?

The Psychologists, however, commit one sore mistake: that of
searching, in every character named human, for something like a
Conscience. Being mere contemplative recluses, for most part, and
feeling that Morality is the Heart of Life, they judge that with all the
world it is so. Nevertheless, as practical men are aware, Life can go
on in excellent vigour, without crotchet of that kind. What is the
essence of Life? Volition? Go deeper down, you find a much more
universal root and characteristic: Digestion. While Digestion lasts,
Life cannot, in philosophical language, be said to be extinct: and
Digestion will give rise to Volitions enough; at any rate, to Desires
and attempts, which may pass for such. He who looks neither before
nor after, any farther than the Larder and State-room, which latter is
properly the finest compartment of the Larder, will need no Worldtheory,
Creed as it is called, or Scheme of Duties: lightly leaving the
world to wag as it likes with any theory or none, his grand object is
a theory and practice of ways and means. Not goodness or badness
is the type of him; only shiftiness or shiftlessness.”

Which is all there is to say about Norma, probably. One so hopes she doesn’t spoil everything by reverting to plan A (Daddy abused me). An artist should not go back on her work. At the moment, she is in seclusion, compiling evidence that she really has been living on the coast of Bohemia. A parallel news story caught our eye, however, as we were relishing Norma. Among the complaints about Norma is that the money that has supposedly been collected, through her agency, to help the suffering victims of honor killings in Jordan has seemingly disappeared en route. In keeping with Norma’s perfect sense of the Zeitgeist, the WP, similarly, reported that the U.S., tenderly stewarding the oil wealth of Iraq for the Iraqis, has inezplicably spent that money (who’d have thought it!) on big American defense contractors:

“For the first 14 months of the occupation, officials of the Coalition Provisional Authority provided little detailed information about the Iraqi money, from oil sales and other sources, that it spent on reconstruction contracts. They have said that it was used for the benefit of the Iraqi people and that most of the contracts paid from Iraqi money went to Iraqi companies. But the CPA never released information about specific contracts and the identities of companies that won them, citing security concerns, so it has been impossible to know whether these promises were kept.
The CPA has said it has awarded about 2,000 contracts with Iraqi money. Its inspector general compiled records for the major contracts, which it defined as those worth $5 million or more each. Analysis of those and other records shows that 19 of 37 major contracts funded by Iraqi money went to U.S. companies and at least 85 percent of the total $2.26 billion was obligated to U.S. companies. The contracts that went to U.S. firms may be worth several hundred million more once the work is completed.”
Surely, if Norma is utterly shamed in Australia, she should have a job waiting for her at the Pentagon.

Bollettino

LI can’t pretend to understand the atrocity unfolding in Sudan – the latest atrocity. The “government” of Sudan is a criminal organization that happens to run a state – or at least fulfill the one state function of directed violence. The direction had been towards fighting the South – with the division between Arab Moslem and African Christian being the rubric by which bystanders tried to make sense of the thing.

It was obvious, however – and we noted this in our posts on Libya in December – that the next problem in Sudan was going to be in the West. What is happening there is a more traditional mass murder, on ethnic lines. We recommend the article by John Ryle in this week’s NYRB on “the harrowing of Darfur.”

“In the case of the south, where the victims were non-Muslims, the official rhetoric justifying the attacks used the vocabulary of holy war, of jihad. Murahaliin were transformed into Mujahideen. But the unofficial rhetoric of the conflict was racial, employing the terms abid (slave) and zurga (literally "blue," meaning black, i.e., not Arab, in Sudanese language), words that bear the weight of a history of discrimination and exploitation in Sudan, where ethnic groups claiming Arab descent assume a superiority over others. In the case of Darfur, the inhabitants are all Muslim, with the exception of some displaced southerners, but the province is a patchwork of Arab and non-Arab groups, of which the Fur are one of many. In the present conflict, in the absence of religious difference, it is racial rhetoric that has come to the fore. Adherents of the two rebel movements, the SLA and the JEM, are drawn, in varying proportions, from the three major non-Arab or "African" groups in the province, the eponymous Fur, the Massaleit, and the Zaghawa, while the Janjawiid are drawn from a number of pastoral Arab tribes who move in the same territory and compete for natural resources and political power.”

What we are seeing in Darfur is actually a window into the forces that have made world history – if we take away the helicopters and the automatic weapons, this is how the conquistadors came into the New World, how the slavers populated that new world with an enchained labor force, and how the loss of the population that made up that labor force, wrenched by the millions from an Africa in which the traditional forms of bondage and warfare were refunctioned to “fit” an international machine, made the various kingdoms and tribes of Africa vulnerable to further conquest by the Europeans. The same thing happened in the North, in Morrocco, for instance, and on the East Coast, with Arab slavers. Of course, once Europeans had accumulated enough capital, through genocide and theft, to move on to the next ‘stage” of civilization, they reversed themselves on the question of slavery, and used it as an excuse to conquer, colonize, and further exploit Africa – a neat trick.

Interestingly, according to Ryle, the scrim by which we on the outside understand what is happening in Darfur – another atrocity underwritten by radical Islamicists – distorts the actuality of Darfur. Both the Darfur rebels and the Khartoum government are animated by some Islamicist ideology:

“The current military regime of General Omar al-Bashir, which is known as the Ingaz (Salvation) government, came to power in a military coup in 1989, after overthrowing the elected government of Sadiq al-Mahdi, grandson of the Mahdi. The power behind the throne in the Salvation government, until a split in 2001, was the Islamist thinker Hassan al-Turabi, who is Sadiq's brother-in-law. Turabi was the architect of a new Islamist program that reached beyond the Arab elites to include Muslim African peoples in Darfur and elsewhere. But Turabi now languishes in Kober prison in Khartoum, accused of links to one of the rebel groups in Darfur, the Justice and Equality Movement. The Salvation government, like its civilian predecessor, seems to have reverted to an Arabist agenda, attempting to control the west of the country, as it attempted to control the south, by divide and rule.”

Bollettino

I’ve wanted to do a post about Joseph Glanvill for a while. Glanvill’s name has fascinated me ever since, as a kid, I encountered it in Poe’s story, Ligeia. That story is a typical Poe atmospheric, in which the matter seems to condense briefly out of a dense mental fog and proceed intermittently to some shocking horror that always just escapes the visceral. It is this flickering aspect of Poe that makes his stories seem like the way we remember our dreams – which is mostly what we mean by dream-like. Here’s how Poe begins the story:

“I CANNOT, for my soul, remember how, when, or even precisely where, I first became acquainted with the lady Ligeia. Long years have since elapsed, and my memory is feeble through much suffering. Or, perhaps, I cannot now bring these points to mind, because, in truth, the character of my beloved, her rare learning, her singular yet placid cast of beauty, and the thrilling and enthralling eloquence of her low musical language, made their way into my heart by paces so steadily and stealthily progressive that they have been unnoticed and unknown. Yet I believe that I met her first and most frequently in some large, old, decaying city near the Rhine.”

Notice the counterpoint between the tactile fact and the dreamlike doubt. The narrator starts out by not remembering something – an exceedingly odd way to begin a story. The confession of feebleness in the second sentence – which contests the pre-supposition of the narrator’s narrative competence that the reader brings to the reading of a story -- is in turn contested by the third sentence, which puts into doubt the epistemological grasp of narration itself – the Lady Ligiea “effect”, to use Barthes term, is produced at a level below that of the larger, grosser themes by which ‘story” grasps reality. And then the fourth sentence, a masterpiece of fogginess, descends to fact only to shirk before a proper name. The narrator ‘believes,” instead of remembers, that there were a series of meetings – where? In some large, old, decaying city near the Rhine. In other words, in one of a fifty or more places. The decay of the city is underlined by the absence of the proper name – for as we all know, the extreme point of a city’s decay is when the proper name is forgotten. And we all knew that even better in the Romantic era, with its vogue for ruins and digs.

One of Poe’s stylistic tricks is to always leave a discrepancy, a perceptible gap, between what the reader knows and what his sentences say. The sentences accumulate on the page, and properly one knows that these sentences should each be adding details to a picture beyond the text, should be making clearer some essential content, just as one knows about how to be awake without being taught -- waking being a natural state, rather than learned condition . Mysteriously, though, as the sentences pile up, the reader feels that he is being left behind, as in one of those dreams in which one walks and walks and, due to some unbearable, invisible weight, some supervenient heaviness, one never gets anywhere – one’s position in the road becomes an agonizing, incremental crawl, one’s attempt to climb the stairs becomes a sweaty effort to lift one gigantic foot up and forward, leveraging forward with paralyzed slowness.

This is the effect in Ligeia, just as it is in Pit and the Pendulum, or even the Fall of the House of Usher. In other stories, of course, the normal relationship between reader and information is maintained. In the Purloined Letter, for instance, Dupin will leap ahead of the reader with information about what happened and then (with the reader neatly eavesdropping somewhere outside the door the police commissioner has hastily closed as he rushes out to inform the Queen) lounge in his chair and tell us all about it. The logic of sequence is preserved.

Ligeia is a much sicker story – it is narrative infected with the sickness unto death. Given this kind of story, Glanvill’s name can’t but acquire a certain glamour for the reader. A phrase of Glanvill’s is placed as the epigraph for the story (and we all know how important his quotations were to Poe – his most analyzed story, The Purloined Letter, ends on one of those culled masterpieces of eccentric erudition), and as the story jerks into its start and stop motion, with Poe’s description of the “beauty’ of Lady Ligeia’s face one of his better jokes: his description shows us not a beauty, but a nightmarish monster, a face with long raven hair and distended eyes mounted upon a tall, emaciated figure. A haunt before her death, dying she utters Glanvill’s words: "Man doth not yield him to the angels, nor unto death utterly, save only through the weakness of his feeble will," which keys the entire fixation of the rest of the story.

Like the narrator of this story, my memory is feeble through much suffering, not to mention late payments for rent, and this splitting headache from the vodka cocktail last night. However, I believe I first read this story in a crumbling, suburban town, redolent every autumn of high school football fervors, near the banks of the Chattahoochee. I didn’t follow up that reading until years – and leaf driven years – and still more years – later. But in the decline of my mortal frame, I’ve sort of had a thing for reading 17^th century prose writers. And naturally I was lead, by this habit, to take down, in a figurative sense, or download, in a literal one, a volume or two of Joseph Glanvill’s.

Well, let’s get to that in the next post, shall we?

Bollettino

There is an aspect about the argument over the causes of the invasion of Iraq that bugs LI. The arguments, pro and con, over the Bush administrations justifications for the war systematically ignore the larger context of the war. In the rush to subject the minutia of justification to microscopic analysis, the connection of these minutia to the overall schema, as well as the outlines of that schema, are silently forgotten.

To my mind, the standard can’t just be: Iraq presented a gathering threat. It has to be closer to what Bush has said himself: in the post 9/11 world, we need to evaluate these threats differently. If we use that standard, then we have to ask: were all the claims to justify the invasion consistent with the larger context of winning the war against the particular network of terrorists that attacked us on 9/11? If, in fact, the time and circumstances of the war in Iraq were separate from, or even diversionary from, the larger context, than the growing threat justification is not only annulled, but we have grounds for thinking that the invasion was actually an invidious thing, the untimely intrusion of an ideological scam that has deteriorated the real and only reason the U.S. should be using its military power, and an ontological failure symptomatic of an ossified foreign policy world view that is disastrously out of synch with the reality that -- 9/11 happened. To put a Heideggerian spin on it, the Bush adminsitration has, in one and complete gesture, memorialized and forgotten 9/11.

Of course, the gesture of memorializing and forgetting is central to the News. That is what News is. However, even if something is News, it doesn't necessarily exclude the fact that something happens. That is the problem with the news -- distinguishing true events from false ones. Which is why Being and Time should be on the syllabus for Journalism students... but I digress.

For this reason, it strikes me that the major reason for going into Iraq has to have been that Saddam Hussein had ties with Al Qaeda that were significant enough to pose a threat to the U.S. In other words, that the ties to Al Qaeda were major, supportive, and continuing.

That is the importance of the Bush claim, in his Cincinnatti speech in 2002, that "we've learned that Iraq has trained Al Qaeda members in bomb making and poisons and gases." And Powell’s reiteration of that claim before the UN in 2003.

The NYT has mapped, for the last couple of months, the rise and collapse of that claim. Their very informative little article, today, on the retracting of that claim by the one Al Qaeda operative who made it, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, shows both how weak the original claim was and how the press failed to press for details in their original coverage of the Bush case.

We draw, however, a larger moral from this story. The real question posed by the invasion of Iraq goes back to 9/11. To put it one way: how did 9/11 happen? For the Bush administration – especially the Pentagon crew – there is a fundamental, but unspoken assumption at work in everything they have done since: that 9/11, however much it serves as a pretext for policy, was an aberration. In other words, Al Qaeda and various networked terrorist groups aren’t important. Their withering will be a collateral effect of following a foreign policy that was devised without them in mind, and that will proceed in spite of them. For Wolfowitz, et al, terrorists aren’t even players. In other words, for these people, Bush’s contention – that the post 9/11 landscape is different – isn’t true. They are still where they were on 9/10. They still believe that a mature foreign policy should not be disturbed by the actions of subordinate, extra-state players. They still don’t get it.

We think that the pre 9/11 Bush adminsitration and the post 9/11 is, contrary to surface appearance, pretty consistent with itself. The way the Pentagon underestimated the resistance in Iraq was predictable from the way it underestimated terrorism in August, 2001. The same mechanism is at work. It is top down thinking. It is quintessentially bureaucratic thinking. I think we see, here, the difference between traditional conservatism, with its Burkean respect for social order, and the neo-conservatives, with their contempt for any social order except the ones upon which they have put their stamp of approval. With that contempt comes an under-estimation of the resistance that the social order in Iraq – and indeed, throughout the Arabic world – is able to mount. This has proven fatal to Bush’s Middle Eastern policy. It is why it has not only delivered a chaotic Iraq on the verge of becoming, once again, a Military Security State, but has, in addition, allowed the threat of terrorism throughout the Middle East to metastasize.

Bollettino

The man who isn’t there

There’s an article by Lawrence Wright in the New Yorker about the bombings in Madrid that dilates into an examination of the current state of play in the terrorist world. Here’s a clip from it:

“On April 15th, the voice of Osama bin Laden spoke again. “This is a message to our neighbors north of the Mediterranean, containing a reconciliation initiative as a response to their positive reactions,” bin Laden said on the Arab satellite channel Al Arabiya. Now it was the Al Qaeda leader who cast himself in the role of a rational political actor. “It is in both sides’ interest to curb the plans of those who shed the blood of peoples for their narrow personal interest and subservience to the White House gang.” He proposed a European committee to study “the justice” of the Islamic causes, especially Palestine.

…

The fact that bin Laden was addressing nations as an equal showed a new confidence in Al Qaeda’s ability to manipulate the political future. Exploiting this power will depend, in part, on convincing the West that Al Qaeda and bin Laden remain in control of the worldwide Islamist jihad. As long as Al Qaeda is seen as being an irrational, unyielding death cult, the only response is to destroy it. But if Al Qaeda—amorphous as that entity has become—has evolved into something like a virtual Islamist state that is trying to find a permanent place for itself in the actual world, then the prospect of future negotiations is not out of the question, however unlikely or repellent that may sound to Americans. After all, the Spanish government has brokered truces with ETA, which has killed four times as many people in Spain as Al Qaeda has, and the accelerated withdrawal of Spanish troops from Iraq following the train bombings has already set a precedent for accommodation, which was quickly followed by the Dominican Republic, Honduras, and Nicaragua. Last year, Germany paid a six-million-dollar ransom to Algerian terrorists, and the Philippines recently pulled its fifty troops out of Iraq in order to save a hostage from being beheaded.”

It has been almost three years, now, since Osama bin Laden successfully planned an attack on the U.S. and got away with it. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, his name was in the mouth of every politician in America. Contrast this to 2004. I’ve listened, off and on, to speeches at the Democratic Convention, which is an indulgence in an uncharacteristic masochism on my part.  So far, no mention of the man. And so we ape the CoC, who, since “winning” in Afghanistan in 2002, took the low and dirty route of  letting Osama bin Laden's escape go unresponded to, diverting money from the Afghanistan operation to Iraq in a maneuver of dubious legality and imbecilic strategy, and tacitly handing over the “problem” of Osama to Pakistan. In Bushworld, if it isn't spoken, it doesn't exist; if it is spoken, it hyper-exists. Thus the fight for democracy in Iraq consists of saying the fight is for democracy in Iraq, which satisfies the Federalist's requirements on the matter as far the administration is concerned. On the other side of the ledger, the victory over Al Qaeda is signalled by crossing out the name Osama whenever it occurs in the drafts of the prez's speechwriters. A terrorism that is so utterly vulnerable to liguistic fiat takes on the strange proportions of a kind of spirit, Bush's own Harvey; for this reason, he can make up stories about his imaginary friend and expect us to give them our complete belief -- as in the administration's contention that the  heart of the battle of terrorism is Iraq. Of course, that doesn't make sense. There were no Iraqis on those four flights. There was no connection between Saddam and Osama bin Laden. There is no reason to think that even if the U.S., by some miracle, "wins" against terrorism in Iraq, that this will have any effect on Al Qaeda whatsoever. In American politics, only Howard Dean has shown any encouraging skepticism about this claim, and even Howard Dean, last night, seemed more than willing to give a speech that was simply a feel good speech about voting – a rah rah speech that was all about the process and the ego, and not at all about the goal and the problem.

So let’s state the obvious, shall we? As I count the stats on the “war on terrorism”, I find them depressing: Osama bin Laden survived Tora Bora; his organization successfully regrouped in Pakistan; affiliates of his organization staged more attacks in 2003 than they did in the whole period between the embassy bombings and the attack on the Cole; the range of the attacks broadened, from the Moslem world all the way to Spain. Our own Homeland Security Department thinks that the organization or its affiliates could be planning something along the lines of 9/11 even now, with agents in the U.S.

The Dems are petrified that Bush will somehow ‘get’ Osama for an October surprise. Who knows, he might. The point is, the point that should be driven home with a sharpened wooden stake and a mallet, Bush doesn’t ‘get” terrorism at all – he seems, three years after the 9/11 attack, to be still as clueless as he was before the attack, a man perpetually reading a children's book to a class that, uncomfortably enough, has grown to include the country.  He is heading (astonishingly) the third administration that has mistaken moving Al Qaeda for destroying it.  This is why the Dems, rather than hoping Americans have forgotten Al Qaeda, should be shouting the name from the rooftops. There was a window of opportunity in 2002. There was the real possibility of taking the fight to Al Qaeda, of creating a symbolic defeat that could have been followed by real political defeats. That window closed. We now know just how ignominiously the players played their parts. We now know there is no "marshall plan" for Afghanistan, which has sunk into warlordism and opium traffic. We now know that there is no serious effort even to coordinate with our allies about terrorist suspects. We now know that Rumsfeld didn't like the war in Afghanistan because he couldn't find "targets" -- it is a mountainous country, after all, and our billion dollar toys work best in desert landscapes.

 Those who support the war in Iraq were the first to accuse Spain of retreating after the Madrid bombing – which means, logically, that those who support the war in Iraq have to explain the strategy of allowing a freerange terrorist group to make a flanking movement that knocks out an American ally. Since these are the same people who routinely suggested that Osama's continuing existence was no big deal, that he was a spent force, perhaps they should explain why they were terribly wrong, once again, to underestimate Al Qaeda. In fact, their underestimation is almost a compulsive repetition of the mindset pre 9/11, as we have had it detailed by the Commission. It is as if they are hardwired not to get it. This has to be laid at the foot of the arrogant and incompetent pumphouse Pentagon crew, urged on by an intellectual whose main previous accomplishment was to serve as an apologist for one of the great mass murderers of the 20th century, Suharto -- Paul Wolfowitz, come on down please! It has to be laid at the feet of exactly the kind of thing that Bush, in one of those moments of extreme disconnect that should disqualify him as a serious choice for president to anyone who pays attention, said he was opposed to: civilians second guessing the military in a war. Bush was referring, in his interview on Meet the Press, to Vietnam. It was one of those moments, frequent under this administration, when astonishment, indignation, and frustration mesh together in a perfect rush: never, never has there been a war in which the civilian command at the Pentagon so countered any serious input from the military high command as the war in Iraq. Never, never has there been a war that was so interrupted for political, rather than military reasons as the war against Al Qaeda. Never has there been a president who so joins together ignorance and unctuousness as Bush. He beats Warren Harding hands down.

 

The upshot is: the opportunity of spring, 2002, is gone. This president failed in the elementary duty of defending the U.S. against an enemy that was minor but vicious. His failure was not innocent – rather, it was part of a political strategy that year to capitalize on his “triumph” after Tora Bora to promote another war, one that had nothing to do with the immediate American interest in dispersing our real enemy. This president turned a blind eye to the metastasizing of that enemy. This president set us up to fail in the Middle East, with consequences that we can count in lives and explosives in Istanbul, Casablanca, Riyadh, and Madrid. This president has shifted the duty that should fall on the shoulders of the 400 billion dollar plus US military to the billion dollar minus Paki military. This president has shown no interest in the intersections between Kashmir jihadis, Al Qaeda, and various affiliates around the Mediterranean.

So for us, here is the challenge to Kerry. If, following Bush, he takes the child’s way out – banishing Osama’s name from his speeches as a magical placebo for thwarting Al Qaeda – we think he will miss a golden opportunity himself. And it is that kind of thing which can really bring him down this election.  No -- scratch that. Bring on the thunder. It is more than the loss or gain of an election that is at stake. This is about shame, dignity, the dim knowledge that the culture is at risk, the ability to resist the sly insinuations of a class of pimps -- political consultants (who would serve the commonwealth better as real pimps, every blackhearted one of em) and to listen to the unpopular murmurs of his heart -- which has to be there somewhere, in the middle distance, even after the cheesy senatorial life. This is not some cutrate tv sitcom, this is fullblown shakesperian tragedy. Kerry's challenge is to recognize that.

 

Bollettino

When LI ruminated this joint into being, we decided that we were not going to spend our time exclusively referring people to other blogs. Our idea was that the Internet is so incredibly big that we could wander through it the way a Borges character might wander through the Library of Babel, randomly pulling out sites, spilling contents, going on eccentric and timewasting tangents. In this library, there is definitely a place for blogs (and for porno, and for pictures of cats, and for listservs, etc., etc.) and we try to sneak in links to those blogs we like or those that have caught our interest for some reason; but the blogosphere is so intensely inward looking that we felt that we couldn’t compete with those bloggers who do this much better.  For this reason, we’ve never constructed a permanent list of links, since the goal was, and is, to embed the shock of recognition contained by the link in the post.  LI has been re-thinking that of late. Should we surrender to the common format? Readers, tell us what you think.

Since the Dem and Republican conventions invited bunches of political bloggers to report on them, there has been another run of “what are blogs”” article in the press, and another run of blog triumphalism in the sphere. I’m rather sick of that. In the meantime, go to this link:  the Bureau of Public secrets  

BOPS is a website run by some old situationalist – or perhaps by some young fan of the situationalists. Lately, they have been doing something very very cool – they have been putting up Kenneth Rexroth’s poems and essays semi-officially, after contacting New Directions. We read Rexroth’s fascinating essay on D.H. Lawrence’s poetry last night,  and have been mulling over this paragraph. It comes after Rexroth makes the obvious comparison of Lawrence to Hardy, with particular reference to one of Lawrence’s early poems, ‘The Hymn to Priapus’:

“Hardy was a major poet. Lawrence was a minor prophet. Like Blake and Yeats, his is the greater tradition. If Hardy ever had a girl in the hay, tipsy on cider, on the night of Boxing Day, he kept quiet about it. He may have thought that it had something to do with “the stream of his life in the darkness deathward set,” but he never let on, except indirectly.”

This led me, following that Library of Babel riff, on a search for Lawrence’s poems. Go in particular to this crazy Danish site, which throws copyright law to the wind and publishes six collections of Lawrence’s poetry (including his worst – the Pansies collection).
Here’s one of the poems that torches a whole lyrical tradition. This is the kind of prophetic anger Rexroth is after, in which a vast, over-reaching cultural despair is poured into a situation so stylized by the love lyric as to have become numb. Lawrence's great idea is to pull out the pliers and work on the numb until he hits a shrieking nerve.  So he progresses from a poor first stanza, with its waxy flower/sunshine image, to heap up images of default, of natural and supernatural catastrophe, until one balked moment -- a moment of impotence -- becomes a blinding stroke of lightning in which the annihilating power of the system of enlightenment -- that butcher's power that systematically strips the animal from the man -- is revealed as a hideous commonplace -- as the implacably cruel intention behind the seeming kindness, the seeming morality, of the civilizing process.  

Last Words to Miriam

 

 

Yours is the sullen sorrow,

       The disgrace is also mine;

Your love was intense and thorough,

Mine was the love of a growing flower
5
       For the sunshine.

 

You had the power to explore me,

       Blossom me stalk by stalk;

You woke my spirit, you bore me

To consciousness, you gave me the dour
10
       Awareness — then I suffered a balk.

 

Body to body I could not

       Love you, although I would.

We kissed, we kissed though we should not.

You yielded, we threw the last cast,
15
       And it was no good.

 

You only endured, and it broke

       My craftsman's nerve.

No flesh responded to my stroke;

So I failed to give you the last
20
       Fine torture you did deserve.

 

You are shapely, you are adorned

       But opaque and null in the flesh;

Who, had I but pierced with the thorned

Full anguish, perhaps had been cast
25
       In a lovely illumined mesh

 

Like a painted window; the best

       Fire passed through your flesh,

Undrossed it, and left it blest

In clean new awareness. But now
30
       Who shall take you afresh?

 

Now who will burn you free

       From your body's deadness and dross?

Since the fire has failed in me,

What man will stoop in your flesh to plough
35
       The shrieking cross?

 

A mute, nearly beautiful thing

       Is your face, that fills me with shame

As I see it hardening;

I should have been cruel enough to bring
40
       You through the flame.

 

Bollettino

My God! Somebody gets it!

Last week, the NEA issued a report, "Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America." The report lamented the decline of the reading of novels and poetry and such in America. The reports about the report lamented the same thing. Party line about reading is that it is always a good thing in itself.

Carlin Romano’s column in the Chronicle of Higher C. examined the report, and found some of the statistics not so dire. That is interesting, but what rivets yours truly, a book reviewer who desperately wants out of the trade, is the end of Romano’s article. I could hardly believe it. They are almost word for word what I have been telling people forever – in fact, what I told the book editor at the Austin Chronicle just last week. 
  
"Almost nothing in our culture," the distinguished New York book editor Elisabeth Sifton memorably observed in a Harper's symposium years ago, "encourages the private moment of reading."I love that line. I also believe in its ironic, absurdist corollary: "Almost nothing in the modern American newspaper and magazine encourages the private moment of reading." Owners slash space for book reviews and coverage at the same time that they bemoan their own loss of readers. Then they order the remaining readers to do anything -- ANYTHING -- but read in their spare time. True, the three highest-circulation seven-day-a-week newspapers in America are also the three with the most powerful book coverage. But the NEA isn't worried in "Reading at Risk" about beneficiaries of the enlightened managers of The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post.So we're left with a general media environment in which the readerly commit a kind of cultural suicide in pursuit of the less readerly. In magazine and newspaper offices across the country, well-educated editors stuff their publications with pieces about trash movies, hip-hop hotties, reality-TV spinoffs, and ingénue profiles -- then go home and read a book. As print people drive their hordes toward nonprint media, TV folks -- supposedly a dimmer breed -- cleverly ignore the competition, rarely acknowledging what's in the local papers and almost never devoting a minute to a nonpresidential book.”

LI wrote something similar to the book editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer, where Romano works, a few years ago. That editor had written us a very depressing letter about the state of book reviewing – based on the cuts he had to make in the section’s size – and we wrote back:

“That is sad, X… The ice age is all around us, I'm afraid. I hope that after this terrible quarter is over and advertising resumes at some reasonable level, papers will resume running their cultural sections. I don't think that is just optimism -- I mean, books are not only a 20 billion dollar industry in themselves, but they generate movies, music, the public discourse -- they have incalculable benefits. Ironically, just as corporations are discovering intangible assets, i.e. the intricate web of know how among their employees -- newspapers are doing their best to pretend that books, which are the body and substance of that know-how, are a minor part of the whole, dispensable extras. They are cutting their own throats. Those people who don't read books will stop reading newspapers. That's a Q.E.D. To encourage a lively book page is to seed the newspaper readers of the future.”
  
Michael Dirda’s piece on the report in the WP today is less thought provoking.  
  
Dirda says some smart things in the piece, and some stupid things. The smart thing he says is that the literate person can’t just read today’s best sellers. Reading a book that was published this year, without having any knowledge of books that have been written over the centuries, is like examining an ice cube without any knowledge of water. The dumb thing he says is that the Internet is hogging reading time with its daily plethora of boring, trivial matter. Weblogs and such. He makes this charge in spite of the fact that he confesses to not using the Web much.

If he did use the web, then he would discover that, in fact, the Internet has reanimated literary life in ways the survey is designed not to show. When I lived in Gwinnett County Georgia a few years ago I discovered that if I went to the County’s main library and looked for, say, Mill on the Floss, I was shit out of luck – as my pap used to say. The books on display dealt with astrology, investing in real estate, the romances  of Princess Di, and how Jesus could save you from perversion, alcoholism, and bad teeth. The one thing that was systematically absent from the shelves were books (saving the Bible) that had been written earlier than say 1980.

So I went home and looked it up on the web. Sure enough, I found a copy of Mill on the Floss on a Princeton U. site. There is now a national library – in fact, there are several. There is Gutenberg. There is Black Mask. There is the Liberty Library. There is Constitution.org. There are Athena, ABU, Gallica, Les Classiques des sciences socials, etc. etc. Dirda instances his recent reading of Clarissa to show how important it is to read in depth – but where are you going to get a copy of Clarissa in Dothan, Alabama? in Niles, Michigan? In Nederland, Texas? You will get it here. 

The instrumental interpretations of the report are interesting, as far as they go. But LI has long been interested in the fate of reading literature in a modernity characterized by a systematic hostility to ritual. If one uses Victor Turner’s definition of ritual - "prescribed formal behavior for occasions not given over to technological routine, having reference to beliefs in mystical beings and powers" – it describes at least one aspect, a very important one, of reading novels and poems. And it also helps one get a grip upon the ambivalent triumph of the novel over the poem in the in the West – in France, Britain, and the U.S. –  that makes Americans, provincially, believe that poetry is some romantic remnant form. That isn’t true – if you ever talk to Russians, or Bulgarians, or Turks, or Arabs, you soon realize that cultures differ in their preferred literary form, with some cultures being poetry cultures (Turkey, for instance), some novel cultures (the U.S.) and some mixed (Russia). We think that the decline in reading has to be thought of in conjunction with what reading does. Romano points out that there is really a shift in the place of reading, with the survey’s exclusion of reading in the classroom and at work being, perhaps, an overlooked factor in the overt decline in non-leisure reading.  We will do another post about reading and ritual soon.