a letter from an LI reader

Peter Beinart
Nude Model

Dear LI

As you probably know, the most exciting story of the upcoming 2008 presidential campaign is the extraordinary synergy between science and muscular liberalism that has actually cloned a candidate from one of Joseph Lieberman’s cells crossed with one of Harry Truman’s. The candidate, Harry Truberman, will, I think, be challenging voters with his exciting new policies any day now, as soon as our assistants teach him English.

But with the upside comes the downside. Yes, the Truberman campaign did hire me to create an exciting blog for a truly spectacular candidate (also, they are programming some math and geography into his, at present, prone and unconscious bio-structure). This was great news, until the minions of reaction got ahold of it, as in this ABC story, ‘Truberman stumbles on the Net’. The money shot graf, as it were, is this one:

“The drama began when it became known that the Truberman campaign had hired Peter Beinart, former editor of the New Republic and now the employee of a group calling itself Scruggs+LimitedInc+Gulf and Western. Reaction from the right side of the blogosphere was swift and critical, as Beinart’s work in such films as Bend Over Muscular Liberals and My Missile, Your Place were reviewed for lack of, shall we say, child friendly viewing (although this commentator did like the exciting Command and Control scene in the latter film). Beinart, they claimed, made caustic, profanity-laced remarks in these films, besides showing his privates. Beinart supporters, on the other hand, claim that the remarks were only made by the co-stars, with Beinart’s own dialogue amounting to “feel that, baby” and “oh yeah, oh God, oh yeah”. Beinart’s spokeswoman claims that the later is a quote from one of the Psalms, although as of the date of this report, she has still refused to specify which Psalm.”


Once again, a muscular liberal like myself is being martyred by McCarthyism. So let us get this story straight, shall we?

My nude modeling career is out there for all to see. I have nothing to hide on that front. My discussions about this with the Truberman campaign people was nothing if not candid. Most of them, I was pleased to discover, are big fans of my film oeuvre. These attacks, however, do present a test of will for us (and, by the way, our bio-form candidate has passed several tests with flying colors this morning, including identifying all of the primary colors by name), since we can bow to the demagoguery of the dishonorable right – in which I do not include such names as Rich Lowrey or, say, Charles Krauthammer, brilliant writers who have come out and said that the Bend Over films were like a fifth division, aimed at the treacherous heart of Islamofascism - or we can fight for what we believe in. These red herrings do us no good in a time when we need to be radically increasing our defense budget to meet the challenges of World War IV, and defending a reformed Social Security system that integrates Wall Street and Main Street – the best of American productivity meeting the best of America’s financial wizardry. Tearing down middle class entitlements is part of the third way that is revolutionizing the government, and making us ever more relevant in an ever more competitive world.

So, ignore the stories you are reading about the Truberman campaign disavowing this one lone, and – even if I say it myself – heroic nude model, standing up against those in the Democratic party who, inadvertently, help the cause of terrorism. Standing up for aching minutes in other areas too, standing, throbbing, heated, passionate, oh yeah, oh God, oh yeah – such are the talents I am proud of.

Yours,
Peter Beinart
Nude Model

philosopher buffoon 2

- Do you know how to twist?

Well it goes like this…

The buffoon and the ass keep turning up together, as though the deck of achetypes that lies, face down, under my electric prestidigitator’s fingers were a crooked pack.

According to Frances Yates’ Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradion, Apuleius, the author of the Golden Ass (that book of transmutations through which the transcendentally ludicrous is finally given shape and form by Psyche’s quest for Cupid) was, by the fourth century A.D., credited with the translation of the corpus of Hermes Trismegistus. These were the books that were supposedly written before Moses was a pup, and they were wildly popular in the Renaissance. Cosimo de Medici hired Ficino to translate the Greek Corpus Hermeticum in 1462, as the manuscript containing it had turned up by way of a traveling monk, Leonardo da Pistoia - instructing him to interrupt the Plato translation project, as the Corpus Hermeticum was urgent. Cosimo wanted to read the thing before he died. Such was its prestige, such is the greed for ‘secret’ knowledge. By the time of Bruno, a century later, the C.H. had lost something of its allure, vis a vis the regular scholarly world, but had continued to be central to the system of Renaissance magic, which operated in the hidey holes, intersecting, as secret knowledge always seems to, with intelligence agencies and diplomacy.

Bruno, of course, was interested in magic, as were members of Raleigh’s School of Night that he made the acquaintance of in his London sojourn. In the group picture of the founding fathers of the modern era, all lined up like Dutch masters, we usually have Bacon, Galileo and Descartes – Bruno is left out. And the reason that he is left out is that he was just too damned interested in that f-fuckin magic. Yet in reality – that promiscuous bitch, my darling - Bruno can’t be left out. He interests us in this post because, unlike that grave company, Bruno was a buffoon – a necessary joker, the philosopher-buffoon who keeps returning, in some dark orbit according to some dark cycle of its own, to put into disarray the white magic of Bacon, Galileo and Descartes. To throw a few boomerangs around, liven the joint up, and raise, if possible, everybody’s level of anxiety and hope, the two intricately counter-weighted against each other.

Dorothy Waley Singer’s life of Bruno has been put up in its entirety by the good folks at positive atheism – and let’s end this post with an anecdote about Bruno’s childhood from Singer:

Bruno gives in his greatest Latin work, the De immenso, [4] a description of an episode in childhood, which made a deep impression on him. His home was in a hamlet just outside Nola, on the lower slopes of Cicada, a foot-hill of the Appenines some twenty miles east of Naples. [5] He tells with affectionate detail of the beauty and fertility of the land around, overlooked from afar by the seemingly stern bare steeps of Vesuvius. One day a suspicion of the deceptiveness of appearances dawned on the boy. Mount Cicada, he tells us, assured him that "brother Vesuvius" was no less beautiful and fertile. So, girding his loins, he climbed the opposite mountain. "Look now," said Brother Vesuvius, "look at Brother Cicada, dark and drear against the sky." The boy assured Vesuvius that such also was his appearance viewed from Cicada. "Thus did his parents [the two mountains] first teach the lad to doubt, and revealed to him how distance changes the face of things." So in after-life he interprets the experience and continues: "In whatever region of the globe I may be, I shall realize that both time and place are similarly distant from me."

Pity the poor fascist

Back in the day, fascists were loud and proud. They formed parties that called themselves fascist. They enthused about Mussolini, and Hitler. They enthused about their own leaders, who they usually called “leader” – in Italian, Romanian, Hungarian, Latvian, upper class English or what have you. They had a trade mark, of sorts, on a brand – fascism.

Now, of course, fascism has become an open source kind of thing. Sure, there is a party that calls itself fascist in Italy, but that is the little toe of fascism nowadays. Fascism has become an honorific bestowed by others. You have Islamofascism (or the new variety, Sunni fascism, coined by that facisto-brander extraordinaire, Chris Hitchens), you have Christian fascism, you have Bush as a fascist and Osama as a fascist and my Uncle Dick as a fascist and Donald Duck as one too.

Oddly, as the brand has exploded, it has also become a secret vice, like eating clay is in certain counties in the Southern U.S.A. Nobody wants to be a loud and proud fascist, and usually the response to being called a fascist is to call the person calling one a fascist a fascist. As Machiavelli once put it (talking to Leo Strauss), “I’m rubber and your glue/whatever you say bounces off me/ and sticks to you” – a principle exhaustively analyzed in Schmitt’s Grundlegung des Gummi-Prinzip, an indispensable guide to political philosophy, as all us fascist anti-fascists well know.

Not that I’m a fascist, mind you. Say that again to me and I’ll hit you with my police baton.

This pullulation of fascism is a little unexpected, especially as its principle architects – those many, many fascists of today – can be said, like Christ's executioners, to know not what they do. Osama, looking at what Mussolini wrought in Libya, for instance, might not recognize that as just what he is aiming at – but don’t we know better? And Bush, a man who operates, it has become pretty clear, in the traditional mode of the Southern politician – a species that has been known to seize a capital or two (vide Herman Talmadge) to cap a corrupt victory “gained’ at the polls, turns out to be a fascist too. Well, shit, seems there is a perfect fit between today’s brand fascism and today’s mock heroic ethos – we are in the post Third Way age, the age of the long long long long war on terrorism itself, or World War IV as its fans like to call it. Genocide, it turns out, doesn’t consist of people butchering people in heaps (when that happens, we immediately look for errors in random samples, happily dispute about them, and are able, presto-chango, not to think about stinky dead bodies and such) -- but of the President of Iran holding a holocaust denier conference. Who knew that, in order to save the honor of the holocaust victims, we would have to systematically lower the standards of genocide to a verbal act? Soon bumping your funny bone in the shower will just be a pinprick away from being sent to the oven in Auschwitz. Such are the speeded up delights of insta-history.

Bruno tells the story of two blind beggars at the door of the archbishopric of Naples who started beating each other with sticks, the one claiming to be a Guelph, the other a Ghibelline, although when they were separated neither could say what they meant by those terms.

That is what it was like back in those primitive times. Now, of course, those blind beggars toss aside their sticks to become political pundits, and we all join in the melee, in which every bruise turns out to be a word.

PS - LI is no Schmitt, admittedly, but we do think the sweet clarity and distinctness of political discoursing would be immeasurably elevated if, instead of using the term, fascist, one simply used the more comprehensive and all purpose term, motherfucker.

Mistah Scruggs ties the knot

Congratulations to Mistah Scruggs, who is to the squirrels of this era what Davy Crockett was to the bears of his, on the announcement of his upcoming marriage.

I am a little worried about the impact of this marriage on the Scruggs+Limitedinc+Gulf and Western high end adult entertainment business. I hope the bride to be understands that we are only in the business of creating quality cinema for muscular liberals (with your favorite stars, like Peter Beinart, Nude Model) because, well, because WE CARE.

beating some horses

This blog does try to take our far flung correspondent T.’s advice about leaving dead horses unpummeled – but sometimes, Christopher Hitchens provides such an irresistible target that we can’t, we just can’t. Forgive me, Mr. T!

Anyway, this is just to note that the pluminess, pomposity and egotism with which the man’s mind is furnished is busy producing a form of prose that sounds exactly like the parody of the English celeb journalist in this video by IT’s friend, Jeremy Mcclintock


This comes from his latest article in Slate, entitled, Don’t Blame me, blame the evil Islamofascists against which I struggle like a veritable Hercules:

“The only way of preventing this triumph of the democratic heresy, wrote Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, was to make life so unbearable for the heretical Shiites that they would respond in kind. The ensuing conflict would ruin all the plans of the Crusader-Zionist alliance. I can still remember the chill that went through me when I read this document and realized that it combined extreme radical evil with a high degree of intelligence.”

“I can still remember the chill…” This is the kind of writing you do when you never quite got over those G.A. Henty adventure stories you read as a boy.

Hitchens, however, is too much of a joke to be a lot of fun bitching about anymore.

On the other hand, John Burns, the Iraqi correspondent for the NYT who was one of the little warriors in 2003, is now all about explaining the woe and American innocence in an interview highlighted on The Corner and pointed to (which is how we came by it) by Matt Yglesias. Yglesias has an inexplicable affection for Burns. We don’t.

This exchange is all about the blind praising the blind for their mutually satisfying depth perception:

“Russert: John, was it possible for our policy makers to truly understand the way Iraqis would have reacted? The judgments made here were that when we went in we would be greeted as quote, "liberators," to quote Dick, Vice President's Cheney's phrase, that they were prepared, in effect, to take governing into their own hands, that they were so upset and had been so downtrodden by Saddam Hussein that they would embrace democracy and rise up, almost immediately.

Burns: Well first of all, I think, again, to be fair, the American troops were greeted as liberators. We saw it. It lasted very briefly, it was exhausted quickly by the looting and the astonishment and puzzlement and finally anger of Iraqis that nothing, or very little was done to stop that. I think that to be fair to the United States, when I speak as a citizen of the United Kingdom, I think that the instincts that led to much that went wrong were good American instincts: the desire not to have too heavy of a footprint, the desire to empower Iraqis.”

On Matt’s site, I commented at some length of the absurdity of the ‘desire not to have too heavy a footprint”, otherwise known as trying to run a war and cut taxes for the wealthy at the same time. The light footprint effect was seen in New Orleans during and after Katerina too – those idealistic Americans, just empowering the weak like nobody’s business! And – of course – down memory hole is the fact that there has never been an occupation anywhere without looting, and the American response – darling idealists, those Americans – was to guard the Oil Ministry. There are other synonyms for America’s good instincts: blind smugness, criminal greed, incompetence, featherbedding, neo-imperial warmongering – oh, give me a thesaurus and I’ll be here for a week.

But - I suppose I should just say – I still remember the chill that went through me when I read Burns’s malefic words.

the philosopher buffoon

Lately, LI has contracted the bad habit of picking up and dropping threads. Like Roger Rabbit blithely hopping down the path of Needles, this kind of thing can lead to no good end. Although it might not seem like it to the reader, LI likes to think of this blog as our own, our.. our Fors Clavigera, our Cantos, our Maximus poems, our Collected Looney Tunes, vol. 2, 1941-1948. We are in hot pursuit of a central but always somehow eluded pattern here, fellas. Our threads – the Giants, Asinine philosophy, the Infinite Earth, Anima Mundi, and especially, via Michelet, the Witch’s path of negation (or is it a train of powder, already lit? the path you can’t go back down, honey) – actually and obscurely point to each other, with the political posts crudely breaking in upon the flow, a Robert Wilson-like chorus of pyromaniacs and junkies equipped with a barbaric yawp lined with newspaper.

Ah, and you thought you were simply reading the heebee jeebees of a logomaniac, eh?

Well, lets set out another little tub. This thread is gonna be about the philosophic buffoon – or the buffoon philosopher.

It all goes back to a moment of absentmindedness – it all goes back, for me, to the eighties, when I used to talk to my friend and prof, Kathleen Higgins, who was writing her first book, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. K.H. had become fascinated by ass fests, one of which is featured in the big Z, and was seeing large echoes in the text from Apuleius’ Golden Ass.

At the time, I didn’t grasp the import of this. Only lately have I begun to connect what she was telling me with my sense of the-muse like power of the ludicrous – which has always operated like the Air Loom gang on the broken winged crow who speaks to you here.

However, I have forgotten (and can’t find the book this morning) whether K.H. mentions Bruno. Nuccio Ordine’s book, Giordano Bruno and the Philosophy of the Ass, was published after K.H.’s book – I do know that.

At the time that I was talking to her about Nietzsche, I was especially drawn – like Krazy Kat to Ignatz’s brick – to one particular moment in Nietzsche’s corpse-us – the beginning number of the Gay Science, in which he says this:

“To laugh at oneself, as one must laugh, in order to laugh out and out of the whole truth – up until now, even the best did not have enough probity, and the most talented had much too little genius! there is, perhaps, a future even for laughter! at that moment when the principle, “the type is everything, one is always none – gets assimilated into mankind and everybody then will always have access to this last liberation and irresponsibility. Perhaps then, laughter will have bonded with wisdom, perhaps then there will only be a “gay science.”

From what we know about Nietzsche, in his private life, he did have a peculiar sense of humor. The first time Franz Overbeck saw Nietzsche after the breakdown, he wrote that “I have seen Nietzsche in certain conditions where it seemed to me – a terrible thought! – that he was faking madness, as if he were glad that it had ended thus.” This, to me, implies that Nietzsche had, in his sane years, a very large appreciation of the practical joke and the dead pan – and would probably have liked Buster Keaton, if he had lived long enough to see the twenties films. In my private list of all stars, many similar jokers crop up – Kurt Tucholsky, Franz Kafka, Georg Grosz, etc. They all appreciated the cruel laughter at the cripple, sliced and diced into the cripple’s laughter at the ludicrous unconsciousness of the sound.

a shameful post

LI shouldn’t post on Rev. Ted Haggard, the ideal no sex man. LI should have some shame. On the other hand, the American knock-em-up spares no man, never has, puts six bullets in its six shooter and uses em all, breaks broncos and banks and babes, busted prairie ground for suckers, moves with a sublime unsense of its own ridiculousness to ever greener pastures through ever more trivial valleys of the shadow of death, recycles himself for the second, third, and 1+n acts, and is that meaty breadwinner, Rabbit and Proteus, Elmer Gantry and Coyote, met in one.

This is from the Denver Post:

Haggard, 50, resigned as president of the National Association of Evangelicals and was fired from the church he built from nothing into a 14,000-member congregation after a former male prostitute in Denver alleged a three-year cash-for-sex relationship.
Haggard admitted to "sexual immorality" and a long battle against feelings contrary to his beliefs. He admitted buying methamphetamine but said he never used it. Haggard did not respond to interview requests.

Among other things, the overseers urged Haggard to enter a 12-step program for sexual addiction, Ware [Rev. Mike Ware of Westminster, spokesman for the four minister board overseeing Haggard’s rebirth] said.

Ralph [another preacher overseer] said three weeks of counseling at an undisclosed Arizona treatment center helped Haggard immensely and left Haggard sure of one thing.

"He is completely heterosexual," Ralph said. "That is something he discovered. It was the acting- out situations where things took place. It wasn't a constant thing."

And so it came to pass that the good reverend Haggard emerged from his desert sojourn. Unlike the Lord, who was merely tempted by Satan, Haggard was beset by the urge to buy drugs that he was never going to use and hire male prostitutes for the purpose of having no sex with them. Haggard, in short, had fallen prey to a temptation not listed in the Lord's prayer - the love of paradox. He is a peeping tom who keeps his eyes closed, an exhibitionist who exposes himself to himself in a dark closet in which he can't see himself. But LI is happy to see that all is not lost. For lo and behold, like the Gadarene swine doing the 12 step program, Haggard is coming out of Kristian Kamp with straight As in the straight department, leavin his devils behind him, and getting into online psychology! Let’s give him a big round of applause, and hope that he can find a cure for those woodies that may inflict themselves upon him and lure him, by their malefic throbbings, into non-sex, non-drug situations – they are so obviously symptoms of some rare tropical disease, as spots are to measles.

bremer and some media history

This lead graf to the story reporting on Proconsul Bremer’s upcoming testimony before a House committee contains some good material:

“The last time L. Paul Bremer testified before Congress, he was lauded as an American hero. Rep. Ander Crenshaw (R-Fla.) congratulated Bremer, who was leading the U.S. occupation authority in Iraq, for a "tremendous success." Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.) commended his "energy and focus." Sen. Pete V. Domenici (R-N.M.) praised his "brilliant analysis."”

Interesting what you can find going through the old quotes. This is from a Washington Post editorial (probably a Fred Hiatt editorial) from August 17, 2003, about Iraq:

The reality is more mixed. Certainly the U.S. effort is greater than some critics suggest, and the results are less gloomy than you might imagine from the inevitable daily attention to the latest problem. Some of the worst scenarios, widely foretold before the war, have not played out; there have been few revenge killings between Iraqis and little of the kind of communitarian violence that would threaten Iraq's unity. The majority Shiite community, though resentful of America's abandonment in 1991 and suspicious of the occupiers' motives, seems willing at least for the moment to tolerate a U.S. presence. Nor is the absence of negatives the only good news. As the fear of one of the 20th century's most vengeful rulers lifts, many Iraqis are reveling in new freedoms. There has been an explosion of political activity, of debate on campuses, of political parties and newspapers. In many cities, U.S. authorities have helped create local governing bodies that are ethnically mixed and broadly representative; an interim national council is also in place. U.S. service men and women are working heroically, tolerating stifling heat and difficult living conditions and often accomplishing with great patience and sensitivity tasks of municipal administration for which in many cases they had little training.
But that can-do spirit raises questions: Why are combat troops receiving so little help in these jobs? Why are there not more military police and civilian police trainers, more civil administrators, more democracy trainers? Why do the opportunities for communication between Iraqis and American authorities remain so limited? Why are troops stretched so thin in areas where they remain under threat? After an inexcusably hapless beginning, the occupation has gained some traction under the firmer guidance of L. Paul Bremer III. But is he really being given all the resources he could use? Could the United States really not be doing more to get Iraqis back to work, to turn the electricity and the air conditioners back on, to convince ordinary Iraqis that ordinary life will improve?”

Here’s WAPO’s opedist and conduit to Chalabi, Hoagland, September 21,2003 – months after the decision to disband the Iraqi army – giving Bremer the manly pat on the back:

“A man with $20 billion to spend is certain to accumulate a lot of things, including new troubles and determined rivals for control of that fortune. The hot seat that L. Paul Bremer occupies as America's proconsul in Iraq is about to get even hotter.
Bremer of Baghdad has exercised uncontested authority with a toughness and dogmatism needed to surmount the chaotic conditions he found when he arrived in Baghdad in May.
Those qualities won him support even from Iraqis and Americans he had to rebuff; in today's rapidly changing diplomatic and political environment, similar stubbornness could easily undermine Bremer's early successes.”

Those early successes – who can forget them? or, actually – who can remember them? What were they again? Ah, yes, they were all about dispelling the absurd idea that we were in for “revenge killings”, “communitarian violence” and all the other claptrap mouthed by the blame America first crowd.
Here is Krauthammer – a Churchill among columnists, a man whose eloquence has prodded us on in this long long long long war against the forces of evil and Mordred and all the grimy little hobbit killers out there who are out to get President Backbone before he puts Barney in the volcano… uh, I think. Isn’t that how this epic goes? Anyway, here he is, October 3, 2003:

“Garner was the right guy in the wrong place. There were other jobs to do, and Garner could not do them well. This error cost us a month, a crucial month.
His successor, L. Paul Bremer, has done remarkably well. Consider the task he faces. He has had to rule on privatization, the nature of the currency, the establishment of a central bank, the structure of the oil industry. And these are just the economic questions. Daily, he has had to make political, infrastructure, security, religious and ethnic decisions that will profoundly affect Iraq's future. In the United States, any one of these decisions would take months of deliberation, hearings and arguments. Bremer has to make them within hours or days. The re-emergence of life and structure in a country that six months ago had no civil society at all is testimony to his success.
His major mistake was disbanding the army. And even this judgment should be rendered with a bit of humility. At the time, it seemed the right thing to do. In the Middle East, a major obstacle to democracy has always been the military: military power, military autonomy, military coups. Keeping Hussein's army risked the worst possible outcome: a future return to power of a Baathist army. For the long-run health of the new Iraq, it made eminent sense to abolish the army and start over.”

Life was good back then. The privatizations were particularly dear to the Iraqi heart – for decades, the toiling, moiling masses had cried out in their hearts, if only we had deregulation in the agricultural sector! and as for the flat tax, make it at 15 percent, so that liberty and justice will be like dust in the desert wind!
What happened since we all know. The MSM made up a bunch of stories to disguise the outstanding successes that have made Iraq the envy of nations. We look forward to the Hiatt editorial explaining this at some later date.

the universe as the infinity of my inattention

In Jean Claude Beaune’s Philosophy of technique: matter, instrument, automat, he has an interesting passage on a conference talk given by Gaston Bachelard in 1939. The talk was called Universe and reality, and was sprinkled with odd remarks. For instance, Bachelard said” L’univers est l’infini de mon inattention… L’univers est mon repos, l’univers est ma paresse. Ce n’est jamais ma pensee.” “Bachelard posed as someone so naïve as to press on the limits of frivolity: “I have never reflected on the idea of the universe” (before the occasion furnished by the Lyon society of philosophy) and related cosmological preoccupations solely to the trivial inquietudes of a graduate student. He defined himself as a tetrological specimen – without any doubt, a unique one – “of a philosopher who has lost his world.” As Beaune says, we are a long way here from the Pascalian trembling before the infinite. Again, Bachelard says that “the idea of the universe presents itself as the antithesis of the object.” And: “to universalize is to hypnotize – oneself”.

Here’s a translation of the whole text. (I should say, I translated the quotes in the above paragraph myself). It is a remarkable piece – and short, too. It is pretty cool that it is up on the web for those who don’t read French.

Although Bachelard is a long way from Bruno, I don’t think my insertion of him in the chain of figures I'm going to use to talk about misfortunes of the infinite world does him any damage. On the contrary, although Bachelard doesn’t use the anima mundi terminology here, he never hesitated to reach for what some might consider scientifically ‘soft’ terms. His text does reference both older cosmologies and the relativistic image of the universe in physics.

So why do we hear the faint echoes here of Bruno’s anima mundi earth, which is not simply a compound, as Bruno said, of our trash? We’d identify the anima mundi world with that - and here we are making an unjustified leap – world the philosopher has lost. When Bachelard compares the universe of general relativity with the five year plan – a pretty witty comparison – we hear the faint overtones of the infinite world concept. The world whose loss is commoditized, whose atmosphere, oceans and soils have been made totally human over the last two hundred years. The totally human world, a goal shared by capitalist and communist alike, has turned out to be an incredibly successful project. The only non-human factor left in that world – the one factor not subject to the calculation of human use and value – is God. Animal, plant, element – they have all gone into the factory. As for God of the Gods, well, the non-humanity of God doesn’t really provide much of a stumbling block. Every effort is made to process God into the human, to create your nice adorable personal God. Otherwise, fuck him/her/them. The human God is tastier, with 90% less fat.

This weekend, LI liked two posts, one by Smokewriting and one by the friend and foil of this site, Paul Craddick, at Fragmenta Philosophica, that both had to do with the planetary question posed by the IPCC report – although Smokewriting’s post came before the official release of the report. Smokewriting's post welds together two different themes: one, the “risk society” thesis of Ulrich Becker (taken over by Anthony Giddens) that grounded the "third way" rhetoric of the nineties; and two, Hans Jonas’ thesis about the temporal dimension of the capitalist exploitation of nature, where natural resources stand for the future - human future. LI particularly liked this passage:

“Implicit in Beck’s thesis is the idea that the emptying and wholesale exploitation of the future is a structural feature of capital. It is this that generates the sense of having participated in an apocalypse which one failed to notice. Capital does not just extract surplus value from the ongoing present by subjecting it to the repetitive cycles of production, but also extracts it from the living futures of potential embodied in nature. Capitalist production pulls futures into the present and uses them up, but in order to do this it vampirises the past becomings from out of which the world has congealed.”

"The apocalype which one failed to notice" - we tend to see this as the universe that is the infinity of our inattention. It is the 'too big' of all the changes wrought on the biosphere during the twentieth century, the fertilizer dumped, the exhaust from each car, the oddity that transportation became both a major killer in the twentieth century and that the killings were absorbed into the background (while everybody is searching for a cure for malaria and aids, who is searching for a cure for the car accident?), etc.

Paul’s post is less about Capital than about Cost – and the framework in which to measure costs:

[C]onfronted with the reality of climate change and a human role therein, the central question for deliberation - What is to be done? - is an ethical-political one, not primarily a scientific one (not "primarily" because, while sober scientific judgment undoubtedly must inform deliberation, the answer eludes science's competence). In other words, to suppose that science simply "tells" us how to address [climate change] is a blatant category mistake."

Put another way ... even assuming that we could believe, to a reasonable level of certainty, that a certain course of action would ameliorate climate change significantly, it still doesn't follow that it ought to be undertaken. The costs of so doing may be unjustifiable.

I’ll have more to say about this – until you, gentle reader, are sick to death of it – in later posts.

on the fight

I’ve only been in one real barfight. That was back in New Orleans days, and it wasn’t as fun as the fight in Hedwig and the Angry Inch. Unfortunately, it was faster, windows broke, my buddy made like a rabbit for the hills, which left me rather alone, and the cops came. The fight in HAI was started by the cry, ‘faggot’, which is the only similarity to that far off Plum Street brawl – apparently the bar I was in had strict rules on the display of male affection. Who knew?

Well, this week some blogs I go to and bloggers I like have been piling onto each other. It started with a thread at the Weblog, and ended, as usual, in tears, bannings, and complaints about personal threats. To me, the fun here is puzzling. It is sorta like a mosh pit without any music. Now, myself, when I am gray and crooked, I intend to bore grandnieces and nephews with the story of how old LI leaped into that mosh pit at the Nirvana concert (and, I should interject here before my friend D. leaps in here to make a comment, I did NOT break your nose, honey). So, I understand the mosh thrill. But not weblog shitstorms.

Maybe the problem is simply that blogs, so far, lack genius. The surrealists were always banning each other, but out of their fights came “The Use Value of D.A.F. De Sade” – and so far, blogorama has not produced a Bataille.

For me, recriminatory circle jerks don’t have any real attraction. It smacks too much of grad student days. There were many reasons I flunked outta grad school (I was becoming an asshole and a b.s. artist, and realized that, yikes! I didn’t want to be an asshole and a b.s. artist – I wanted to be a sage), but one of them was the odd sense that always, on the horizon, was a recriminatory circle jerk. Perhaps this was just my resistance to full American adulthood in an institution. In any case, it drove me emotionally crazy. I should say, though, that I am not offering this comment in that viscerally anti-academic way that comes to people who have flunked out of academia. Some of my best buds, people I love, are profs now, and I am happy for them and wish them much joy and tenure. I am not going to pretend my sour grapes are a mark of moral superiority. It is just an aftereffect of failure. But…

But, something should be done about the debased state of the academic weblog shitfight. Point a, if the Weblog, the Valve, Long Sunday and the rest of them want to host a brawl, cue the proper music. I’d recommend The Queen Bee’s romantic ballad, Suck my Dick (ah, one of the truly time wasting things about getting DSL - which I just did - is that I can watch Li’l Kim’s videos!) Thus transforming the mosh pit without music into one with, a big improvement. And point b is, please, don’t be a pussy about personal threats. Personal threats are lagniappe! It brightens the day. You venture out of your apartment, you scan the street for the big black pickup with the guy holding the two by four. Hollywood magic, man! Plus, how can one bitch about someone who cares enough about you to want to come over and sink a claw hammer into your skull? O...o....or am I just lookin for love in all the wrong places? … Naah. Take it from me: the early twentieth century figure who knew most about love was not Sigmund Freud, but Ignaz the Mouse. Throw the brick, honey! Suck my dick! – the immemorial song that goes all the way back to Eden.

Other points I will make up later, on some rainy day.

infinite earth vs anima mundi, round one

Robert Babe coined a phrase that LI is going to steal: infinite earth. My plan for this year’s posts is to sorta weave a pattern around the idea of anima mundi. The anima mundi idea emerges, in the early modern era, as the twin of infinity. Not of course that the anima mundi idea is new, since of course it occurs in one form or another as far back as we care to go. But something happens in the modern era, or rather a whole bunch of seemingly disconnected things happen. To quote again from Bruno’s Ash Wednesday’s colloquy:

“And he [Bruno] opened their eyes to see this deity this mother of ours, [earth]which on her back feeds them and nourishes them after she has produced them from her bosom into which she always gathers them again -- who is not to be considered a body without soul and life, let alone the trash of all bodily substances. In this way we know that, if we were on the moon or on other stars, we would not be in a place much unlike this, and perhaps on an even worse [place], just as there may be other bodies as good and even better for their own sakes and for the happiness of their own animals [inhabitants]. Thus we know as many planets, as many stars, as many deities, which are those hundreds of thousands that assist in the service and contemplation of the first, universal and eternal efficient [cause]. … We know that there is but one heaven, an eternal, immense region, where these magnificent lights keep their proper distances for a commodious sharing in a perpetual life. These blazing bodies are those ambassadors that announce the excellence of God's glory and majesty. Thus we shall advance to the discovery of the infinite effect of the infinite cause, the true and living evidence of the infinite vigor.”

Babe’s infinite earth phrase is found in his book, Culture of Ecology, and makes references to the usual arguments of the ecological economists, like Robert Goodland, whose The Case that the World has Reached Limits in 1991 is a little touchstone in the ecological economics movement. The usual arguments that are made back, by orthodox economists, are rather sweet. Poor people, who are basically flushed down the toilet by orthodox economists and certainly aren’t mingled with in their circles, unlike, say, bankers and CFOs, are suddenly hauled out of the toilet and marched front and center – economics, it turns out, is all for the poor. This critique of ecologism by Jay Mandle in the Boston Review is pretty much standard. When the ecological economist claims that economic activity unfairly enriches a grossly wealthy upper class, the Mandle’s of the world ignore pesky statistics about the distribution of wealth and go towards wealth effects, like the increase in life span, among the population as a whole. That is a useful statistic, but it is, of course, not a knock down argument: one can glance into any old folks’ home in these States and see increasing life span without an increase in the joy in life, so to speak. It certainly doesn’t address the issue, which is that transfers of wealth from the wealthiest would not decrease the wealth effect on the majority of the population, while at the same time taking out one of the drivers of growth that does the most ecological damage.

But this post – and in general the battle royale I am planning on staging between the Infinite Earth and Anima Mundi – is just going to graze these issues. I am more interested – in fact, passionately interested – in fact, head over pores immersed in, emotionally wired to, suicidally fixated on – the culture itself that is part and parcel of the infinite earth.

how do I love fertilizer? Let me count the ways

Were I an absolute legislator, I would therefore make it death for a man to be convicted of flying, the moment he could be caught; and to bring him down from his altitude by a bullet sent through his head or his carriage should be no murder. Philosophers would call me a Vandal; the scholar would say that, had it not been for me, the fable of Daedalus would have been realized; and historians would load my memory with reproaches of phlegmn, and stupidity, and oppression; but in the mean time the world would go on quietly, and, if it enjoyed less liberty, would at least be more secure. – William Cowper, letter upon hearing of Montgolfier’s ascent in a balloon.


The main reason that human population could quadruple while cropland only doubled in the twentieth century is that farming became more productive. Several elements combined in this, most notably chemical fertilizers and pesticides, irrigation, agricultural machinery and plant breeding. – William McNeil, Something New Under the Sun

To abbreviate horribly, Polanyi’s Great Transformation thesis states that the coming of capitalism to Europe was about reversing the relationship between the economic and the social, with the economic becoming the dominant, that into which the social is embedded. LI’s thesis, pursued with ardor and lunacy on this site, is that the twentieth century saw the meshing together of the treadmill of production and the war culture on a planetary scale. A couple of posts ago, we promised to say something more about Michael Pollan’s article in the NYTM, because we kept barking our shins, as we went through it, on brilliant hints of larger vistas. We have another excuse to say something about the planet today – the government equivalent of St. John on Patmos announced that it is the end of the world as we know it, and it does look like Exxon will be handing out its 10000 checks to Discovery Institute/Tech Station scientists in vain. Although, really, any changes that will be wrought in the near future will be purely rhetorical. We are the lemmings of the system, man.

Well, the atmosphere has been, in one way, the real last frontier: it is an airgrap, a stratograb, perhaps the logical conclusion of 1492. But LI has been collecting the flotsam and jetsam about the other biosphere transformation this week. The twentieth century saw the biochemical properties of the air, water and earth transformed by Man, that disconnected giant. However, a century has no eyes. There have been no eyes to see, and hence no memory to enshrine, the vast and sweeping changes we simply live in.

One of the greatest of those changes is one of the simplest.

Back in the days of the millennium – you remember the millennium, don’t you? – LI remarked to our friend, S., apropos of the Time Magazine article listing the hundred most influential people or scientists or whatever the fuck, that undoubtedly the most influential person who roamed the earth in the 20th century was Fritz Haber. S. thought this was wildly hilarious in a typical LI way. And in one way it is – Haber is one of those scientists who did something that seems, in retrospect, to have inevitably lain in the path of science. The spellbinding thing about science is how much of it seems systematically pre-ordained. Still, Fritz Haber was the first man – the first organism – to figure out a new way to synthesize nitrogen, and that was huge. Much huger than the invention of the atom bomb, or the invention of our minor knickknacks, like the computer.

Vaclav Smil, the geographer, gives some fascinating statistics in his book on Fritz Haber and the effects of the production of nitrogen fertilizer, Enriching the Earth, from which I take this:

-the reactive nitrogen in synthetic fertilizers is now perhaps equal to half of the total fixed by all bacteria in all natural terrestrial ecosystems.

-the twentieth century saw a roughly 125-fold increase in the average global rate of inorganic nitrogen applications per hectare of cropland. Half of all nitrogen fixed by the Haber-Bosch process between 1913 and 2000 was consumed only during the last two decades of the twentieth century.

- over forty percent of the human population depends on food fertilized by nitrogen fertilizers.

We are talking about a soil change that we can’t even begin to understand. Interestingly, that explosion in fertilizer use (and all the consequences – a monoculture that adapted to the fertilizers, an abundance of food that fed the exploding human population, etc.) came in tandem with the war system. This isn’t just a matter of poetic correspondences, such as Haber being one of the scientists to develop mustard gas. This is more a matter of policy patterns, common to both the east and the west, that resulted in massive population drains from the rural areas and the subjection of agriculture to efficiency – i.e., giant concentrated agricultural power, a process that was full integrated into the war culture as it played itself out in third world countries during the golden days of the green revolution.

That is enough about this for the moment. But I should end with one of Lorenz Oken’s golden sentences.

“The fourth science is the Art of War, the art of motion, histironism, music, poetic art of science, the light. As in the art of poetry all arts have been blended, so in the art of war have all sciences and all arts. The art of War is the hightest most exalted art; the art of freedom and of right, of the blessed condition of Man and humanity – the Principle of Peace.”

Hommage a Ayanna Khadijah

Ayanna Khadijah is not a celebrity face, is not running for president, and – having the system of surveillance on her neck for years – is not going to make as much money in her life as the CEO of Exxon makes in one day.

However, unlike the fucking celebrities, the fucking presidential candidates, and the fucking CEO of Exxon, Khadijah is a real human being. She was the victim of a ridiculous police raid to enforce the wholly monstrous laws against illicit substances in Norwalk, Connecticut. The police illegally entered her apartment and found drugs which, she contends, they actually planted – well, from the article Khadijah, an extraordinarily decent person, doesn’t say planted, but LI will, being an extraordinary son of a bitch. She won her case, but was still given a suspended 3 year felony conviction. Why?

…Ayanna Khadijah, 34, …. was convicted of the felony version of failure to appear after she failed to wake up from a nap and arrived 45 minutes late to court one day in August 2003. Her case is extraordinary because she fought back.
It was the only court date Ms. Khadijah missed among 45 sessions over three years defending herself against a set of drug charges that were eventually dismissed, in 2005. Ms. Khadijah, a single mother with a criminal history, received a suspended three-year sentence on the failure-to-appear charge.
She had spent the day before she was late for court at her job as a community organizer and then delivered newspapers from 1 to 8 a.m. Prosecutors argued that she should have known better than to work all night before a court appearance.

Khadijah had enough.

Connecticut’s appellate court overturned her conviction last fall after concluding that the inadvertent doze was not a willful shirking of responsibility. But the state is appealing to the State Supreme Court for fear the widely used tool could become harder to wield.
“We thought it set a bad example,” said John A. East III, a senior assistant state’s attorney, who argued in court papers that rather than rely on her boyfriend to rouse her, Ms. Khadijah should have set an alarm or perhaps brewed herself a strong cup of coffee.
But Gerald B. Lefcourt, a past president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, said the case “is really right out of Catch-22.” “There’s no way to win when you have a system that is so inflexible and so lacking in understanding,” he said.

There’s no way to win is the whole point of the system. It is a rule like, you can't beat the house. The system is all about mistreating people until they become laboring and docile cattle – although hopeful cattle, because who knows if the products they see advertised on tv might not bring them happiness. And that is the name of the system, otherwise known as pandaemonium, or L'infame. The people who change it for the better aren’t, God help us, named Hilary Clinton or Joe Biden or Barak Obama, and they certainly don’t bear the names of media personalities that I’m just not going to pollute this post with. They are named Ayanna Khadijah. In this world of the drowned and the saved, she decided not to drown.

goodbye molly ivins

Well, this year is starting out with a lot of deaths.
Molly Ivins just died.

I wasn’t going to put up any comment. I looked around and found plenty of comments on plenty of blogs already. But then a friend emailed me and reminded me of Ivins stand against the first Gulf War, retrospective support for which has become a sort of Rush ritual – the warmongers love the idea that anybody who is ‘serious’ in D.C. has to ritually praise the wonderful First Gulf War.

Molly Ivins was always part of the “war sucks” club. God bless her. The first time I saw her was, as my friend reminded me, in a chapel at U.T. in 1991. Apparently my friend and I even got on television at that event – but this had gone down the memory hole for yours truly. Ivins gave not only a rousing speech, but the right kind of speech against the upcoming Kuwait War. It was the kind of speech that you hardly hear anymore – it got to the point – fuck that war – it was inclusive – whether you are a Rotarian or a Young Socialist, this war is not for you - and it called on people to do something to show disgust when the war broke out. At least a thousand did, as I remember. We marched on the Capital and lay down in the rotunda. Unimaginable now, as we would be swept up as so many terrorists. Well, the nation that was back then has died, as we know, and out of it has hatched this monstrous product of fats and aggression that I can no longer recognize.

She was right about that war. Often, I didn’t like the Texas act, and often, I thought she was carried away by one of the subsidiary madnesses of this time, thinking that any political party – in Ivins’ case, the Dems - is going to embody anything but its own greed to survive. But her instinct, which was to push outside of the party structure, and not build your political life around voting, any more than you would build your economic life around buying a lottery ticket – was eminently sound. I always liked Molly Ivins. Last time I saw her was, what three years ago? It was at a party for Robert Bryce at Schultz’s, which has been the Texas Observer bar since forever – see Bill Brammer’s The Gay Place for details.

Oh fuck. Ivins fought well, carried a flame for existential liberty as the culture in this country got darker and sicker, and she died well. There is nothing more to say.

Michael Pollan, again

Being the sort of guy who plunges, headfirst, into the latest fashion, LI pondered two options, this week. We could start an exploratory committee to see about running for president (with the secret aim, of course, of being picked as VP by the candidate whose inevitability, at the moment, is crushing, Senator Dodd); or we could start reading Independent People by Halldor Laxness.

We crossed off the first option, because we are not going to give up shooting heroin just to pass that nasty drug test they give you to become the Libertarians for War candidate. Fuck that. And it is so sad, since the libertarians for war wanted to combine a muscular liberal approach to foreign policy with small government at home that would concentrate on destroying the scourge of drugs and cutting taxes for the most productive. So we opted for the second. Happily, Independent People is not just recommended by Jonathan Franzen and flaunted around by Columbia U. creative writing students, but is absolutely worth reading…

Which is connected, believe it or not, to our last post, about the excellent essay by Michael Pollan on the replacement of food by nutrition, the laboratory spawn of the agribusiness-chemical business, and its numerous malign side effects.

In Independent People, a homesteader, Bjartur, who has finally acquired land and had built a turf house and looks forward to becoming a debt free sheepowner, marries a woman named Rosa from the village of Utirauthsmyri and takes her to the little piece of independence he’s carved out of the world, much to her dawning horror. The first night is ill omened – Rosa finds out that Bjartur is a doubter, and refuses to even placate the local demon, whereas Bjartur finds out that Rosa has slept with other men (which, in all probability, is false – but she has had her crushes on other men). But Rosa’s ordeal of joylessness seems to increase day by day as, day by day, Bjartur seems content for them to subsist on dried catfish, oatmeal, and coffee. Plenty of sugar, though.

Then one day this dialogue ensues:
“Bjatur,” she said after a short silence, “I’d love some meat.”
“Meat?” he asked, astonished. “Meat in the height of summer?”
“My mouth waters every time I look at a sheep.”
“Waters?” he repeated. “Why, it must be water-brash.”
“That salt catfish of yours isn’t fit to offer to a dog.”

Rosa proceeds to truly astonish Bjatur by saying that she wants milk too. She dreams of milk. And tops it off here:

“Can we possibly buy a cow, Bjatur?”
“A cow?” he repeated in gaping astonishment. “A cow?”

This couple live, I would guess from internal references, late in the nineteenth century. So often the story of conjugal misery centers on money, or sex – and ignores food. Food, however, can be a powerful carrier of joylessness. The most irritating thing about second rate magical realism is the way food becomes empowerment – feminist empowerment, no less. That is a decorator magazine’s lie. Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, (I think – or was this in Shame?) contained a much more powerful truth in the person of an aunt in a household who curses the household with her food – every dish holds a curse. Although the conversations between Rosa and Bjatur are funny, we all know that domestic life for women in the nineteenth century, or the eighteenth, or the seventeenth – in China, in France, in England, in Iceland, in Kansas, etc., etc. – was often symbolized by an expertise in making food that the women personally despised. There’s an interesting story to be written about the relationship between male taste and female cooking, and it isn’t just the happy story of peasant bacchanals, that’s for damn sure. One has the impression from, say, Willa Cather novels that the joy of growing old for a woman among the sod huts of Kansas is being able to make, once in a while, food that she actually wants to eat – although one suspects that the joy of the taste has so long been extinguished by its omission from the signals sent each day from the tongue that the taste, in truth, disappoints.

I can sympathize with both Rosa and Bjatur. An ex lover of mine once accused me of being anorexic, and though, as a matter of fact, she was wrong, her exaggeration did hit on certain salient LI features. It is true that, more often than I care to admit, the whole notion of food disgusts me in the very pit of my stomach, and that visiting the standard grocery store often fills me with great, chainclanking boredom. A grocery store is my idea of karma – where else do we commune with the spirits of the dead as visually and viscerally as in a grocery store? I would be a much happier guy if I could eat like a sage – say three times a week, broth and French bread. But I am dragged by the habits of my mouth to hamburgers and fried chicken – and so, automatically defined as a denizen of my time.

Ezra Klein, in his post on Pollan, quotes a passage in the NYT Mag essay that ends like this:

“Medicine is learning how to keep alive the people whom the Western diet is making sick. It’s gotten good at extending the lives of people with heart disease, and now it’s working on obesity and diabetes. Capitalism is itself marvelously adaptive, able to turn the problems it creates into lucrative business opportunities: diet pills, heart-bypass operations, insulin pumps, bariatric surgery.”

Then Klein makes this transitions to a passage in the Omnivore’s Dilemma:

“The short version of this is that we've taken an animal accustomed to feeding on forage and forced it to digest grain. Corn, after all, is cheaper, more plentiful, more engineerable, less land-intensive, and more subsidized than grass. But cows haven't evolved to eat corn. And so we drug 'em.”

Here we have stumbled upon what looks like a disconnected giant – a whole system, if we want to look at it. But Klein’s conclusion is that we, as consumers, should buy more grass fed beef. That’s admirable, but there is a certain… inadequacy to it. The misfit liberal in me wants to go back to the whole corn/land-intensity issue and ask a few questions about the basic system – a system that, I should say, extends through capitalism and communism. A system of production. Not a malign system – one shouldn’t be nostalgic for Rosa’s dilemma, the way things were in the pre-industrial agricultural days, for her joylessness could be multiplied by millions of instances - but one that, having provided the Rosas and the Bjaltur’s with all the Big Macs they can stand, is slowly but surely drowning in its social costs.

Oh, dear. I’ll never cover this in one post. Shit. Well, Pollan’s article, which I haven’t even touched on, deserves another post.

Misfit liberalism

If LI is anything, we are that crash dummy that is continually being tossed around Lefty sites, the liberal. The sissified liberal, unable to put our shoulder to the wheel and overthrow the capitalist system in one giant revolutionary push. This is true. Our negative reason for this balky liberalism is that we don’t think the revolution would do anything but continue the treadmill of production in place. We don’t think it would take apart the war culture, but simply embody it again, another of the endless avatars. On the positive side, we think the liberal notion of encouraging a profit system, while at the same time putting two loaded pistols to its head at all time – militant labor, and a state that can exert some countervailing pressure to lessen the grosser features of the profit system in spite of its natural inclination to support capital – is the best of all methods to produce affluence. It is the Misfit method – named after the character in the Flannery O’Connor story – and if we were going to slap a little label on our politics, it would certainly be misfit liberalism.

Because it is a system of checks and balances, however, liberalism can’t really operate by the blind application of abstract principles. It can and should encourage that degree of equality, for instance, which forestalls and –hopefully – extinguishes the billionaire, while at the same time not aiming for an absolute equality that would abolish the profit motive.

Misfit liberalism, like all liberalisms, does suffer from a penchant to systems blindness. It is why Marx is still indispensable to the liberal – Marx did see systematically and whole. Unfortunately, in the Reagan era (which we still live in), liberalism went whoring after strange gods – an insane faith in the marketplace, for example, an inability to understand the crucial role of organized labor, and an inability to defend, on political grounds, common sense things, like – a really trivial point - encouraging the state to expropriate a lion’s share of the enormous surplus of wealth seized by the top one percent of the population. Alas, these common sense notions – known even to the well known, muscular liberal, girl scout cookie seller cannibal Harry Truman – are now heresies even among media liberals, a group who operate, generally, to pimp for the biases of the governing class. They are the too fit liberals.

But – to get to the nubby little point of this post – one of the root perversions of Reaganism is the infusion of methodological individualism into every good soul. The bias here is subtle. I thought about this reading a very good post written by Ezra Klein today about the brilliant NYT Magazine piece by Michael Pollan – and knowing my readers, they have already scarfed down the Pollan essay and gone, God fucking damn, I wish I had written that!

Klein draws on Pollan’s book to make several astute remarks. But we detect, here, a bit of that old systems blindness. About which we will comment in our next post.

the disconnected giant

In the chapter on the "metaphysics of the beautiful and aesthetics" in the second volume of the Parerga and Paralipomena, Schopenhauer discusses history. In 1851, when the essays came out, Schopenhauer's stance against the philosophical importance of history made him seem, pleasingly, like some archaic remnant of the eighteenth century. He was willing to suffer this reputation, and even enlarge on it. History at this time is, of course, associated with Hegel, and even if Hegel did not recognize, in Schopenhauer, his unmasker and foe, Schopenhauer definitely took Hegel as the touchstone of what Leon Daudet later labelled "the stupid 19th century" - the stupidity being, at its very beastly heart, the idea that there was a dynamic axis to history.

In the essay on history, Schopenhauer casts himself as a moralist, an intemporal observer, a user of classical exempla. And he comes up with this image:

He who, like myself, cannot help seeing in all history the same thing over and over again, just as every turn of a kaleidoscope continually reveals the same things, but in different combinations, will not be able to share all this passionate interest; nor, however, will he censure it.


According to the toy historian Paul Hidebrandt, the kaleidoscope, which was invented by the Scottish scientist David Brewster in 1817, aroused “such enthusiasm among all social circles that the victory of the kaleidoscope over the Chinese puzzle or tangram game was even celebrated in Paris with an engraving: the goddess Kaleidoskopia, with her emblems, a tube and a pattern sheet, stands on a Chinese person crawling on the earth, before whom lies his board game on the ground.” However, supposedly the Chinese became enamored of the ‘tube of ten thousand flowers” themselves, and began to manufacture them en masse.

Borges notes Schopenhauer’s kaleidoscope comparison in "the Wall and the Books" in Other Inquisitions, and writes of it: “For if the world is the dream of Someone, if there is Someone who is dreaming us now and who dreams the history of the universe (that is the doctrine of the idealists), then the annihilation of religions and the arts, the general burning of libraries, does not matter much more than does the destruction of the trappings of a dream. The Mind that dreamed them once will dream them again; as long as the Mind continues to dream, nothing will be lost…”

A quick search through a couple of Schopenhauer biographies has not brought me any information on when the great man collided with the kaleidoscope. But it would be easy to believe that he saw one early on, perhaps in 1817, because it was at that time that Schopenhauer was most closely involved with Goethe's optical work. Goethe was a friend of Schopenhauer’s always fearsome mother, Johanna, and Johanna wanted her son to get into Goethe’s good graces. Unfortunately, Schopenhauer deviated from the anti-Newtonian program on color laid down by Goethe – he rationalized it into a system having to do with the sensitivity of the retina. Goethe was particularly infuriated that Schopenhauer betrayed him on the issue of “white” – which, as Newton said, contained all colors, and which, according to Goethe, did no such thing.

A stronger metaphor using another children’s toy is employed by Lorenz Oken. I image Schopenhauer knew of it. Oken is writing in 1805, before the kaleidoscope. This is from his Physiophilosophy:

“All things are created in time; for time is the totality of Singulars. Time is no stationary quantity, which is always changing itself into something new during its progressive flux. It is not a continous stream, but a repetition of one and the same act, namely, the primary act, like as it were to a rolling ball, which constantly returns upon itself. There is no endless, still less an eternal thing; for things are only positions of time. Time itself is, however, only repetition…”

Two children’s toys, two similar points about time - except that Oken’s is a more radical stance. Schopenhauer was stuck, due to his system, with defending some version of Kant’s notion of the aprioris of experience. Myself, what I find interesting here is the connection between seriality and eternal repetition. The notion of a repetition that creates a difference connects Schopenhauer and Oken to a passage in De Quincey that you would not normally put in this association. It comes in the section of the Opium Eater entitled The Pains of Opium. The text wavers between a description of the hallucinatory pains of opium and a lingering repetition of them, arousing the suspicion that pain and pleasure melt into each other in ways that are going to elude classification.

“Many years ago, when I was looking over Piranesi’s, Antiquities of Rome, Mr. Coleridge, who was standing by, described to me a set of plates by that artist, called his Dreams, and which record the scenery of his own visions during the delirium of a fever. Some of them (I describe only from memory of Mr. Coleridge’s account) represented vast Gothic halls, on the floor of which stood all sorts of engines and machinery, wheels, cables, pulleys, levers, catapults, &c. &c., expressive of enormous power put forth and resistance overcome. Creeping along the sides of the walls you perceived a staircase; and upon it, groping his way upwards, was Piranesi himself: follow the stairs a little further and you perceive it come to a sudden and abrupt termination without any balustrade, and allowing no step onwards to him who had reached the extremity except into the depths below. Whatever is to become of poor Piranesi, you suppose at least that his labours must in some way terminate here. But raise your eyes, and behold a second flight of stairs still higher, on which again Piranesi is perceived, but this time standing on the very brink of the abyss. Again elevate your eye, and a still more aërial flight of stairs is beheld, and again is poor Piranesi busy on his aspiring labours; and so on, until the unfinished stairs and Piranesi both are lost in the upper gloom of the hall. With the same power of endless growth and self-reproduction did my architecture proceed in dreams.”

When I started this thread, last week, I was trying to distinguish two types of giants. One type, as I said, was chased from Europe by a mode of thought not that different from the very different giantkilling promoted by the Daoists in China. This was the homogenous giant. There is a different type of giant, though – Don Quixote engages a premonition of him in the battle against the windmill, the romantics filled the city of the dreadful night with him, and he exists – if I, a total amateur, can rely on the construction of Indian myths in Roberto Calasso’s Ka - in depths in the Indian sacred books. This is the disconnected giant – he exists in the amniotic depths, precedes contradiction itself, and has that power of endless growth and self-reproduction that leads us, like our tutelary nightmare, through the money economy – for in my opinion, this is what the money economy is all about, its cosmological significance. for in my opinion, this is what the money economy is all about, its cosmological significance. And that, I'll grant you my lovelies, is not be the most obvious of connections. I should draw it out next - the relation of these passages to the nests within nests in Georg Simmel’s philosophy of money. Ooh, and then how this is like the ball, the kaleidoscope, the hallucinatory image of Piranesi multiplying, and the first man, Prajapati, who was made by the gods from seven men, impregnated the waters and was born out of the golden egg produced by the waters, and then created the Gods – for of course, in the first moment, the law of contradiction cannot apply, else the law would precede itself.

O, the amniotic tangle of it all, the amniotic tangle, and me at the bottom of the world doing a crossword puzzle.

A decent future

Brother see we are one in the same
And you left with your head filled with flames
And you watched as your brains fell out through your teeth
Push the pieces in place
Make your smile sweet to see
Don't you take this away - Neutral Milk Hotel

“I met Haifa and her husband, Hassan, both teachers, in a driveway in western Baghdad. They had just found the body of their 12-year-old son, who had been kidnapped and brutally killed, and were frantic with grief. They finally decided to leave Iraq, but its violence tormented them to the end. They paid a man to drive them to Jordan, but he was working with Sunni militants in western Iraq, and pointed out Hassan, a Shiite, to a Sunni gang that stopped the car. Over the next several hours, Haifa waved a tiny Koran at men in masks, pleading for her husband’s release, her two remaining children in tow.

Hassan, meanwhile, knelt in a small room, his hands behind his back. His captors shot a man next to him in the neck. Haifa, a Sunni, eventually prevailed on them to let him go. The family returned to Baghdad, then borrowed money to fly to Jordan.” –
It Has Unraveled So Quickly - NYT, January 28, 2007

“The auctioning off of Iraq began in the summer of 2003 in a packed conference room at the Grand Hyatt in Amman, Jordan. More than 300 executives had gathered from around the world to vie for a piece of one natural resource Saddam Hussein never managed to exploit—the nation's cellular phone frequencies. With less than 4 percent of Iraqis connected to a phone, the open spectrum could earn billions of dollars for the eager executives working the room. Conference organizers tried to keep everyone focused on the prize. "Iraq needs a mobile communications system and it needs it now," stressed Jim Davies, a British expert with the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) who was leading the effort. "We want quick results." – Mother Jones, September/October 2004, Crossing the Line

“In the bombings in Baghdad on Thursday, a roadside bomb that exploded about 7:30 a.m. near the mosque in the Cairo neighborhood killed three people and wounded 16 others, the Interior Ministry official said. About 9:30 a.m., a suicide car bomber detonated a bomb near police vehicles whose tanks were being filled at a gas station in the Karrada district, killing 10 people -- some of them police officers -- and wounding 17, the official said.

At 10:45 a.m., two more people were killed and 23 wounded when a second suicide car bomber exploded a bomb in the Bab al Sharji district, a mile north of the gas station, near the Interior Ministry's headquarters. At 3:30 p.m., a third suicide car bomber blew up his vehicle in the Kadisiya neighborhood near a police convoy, wounding seven police commandos, the Interior Ministry official said. At 7:15 p.m., a roadside bomb killed a woman and wounded 13 others in the Amil district. “– NYT, 8 Sept., 2006

“Even as the bombs fell over Baghdad, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), whose district includes many Qualcomm employees, had tried to wrap his favored company in the flag. He denounced the cellular system used by Iraq's neighbors as "an outdated French standard," and proposed a law that would effectively mandate Qualcomm on Iraq. "Hundreds of thousands of American jobs depend on the success of U.S.-developed wireless technologies like CDMA," Issa wrote in a March 26, 2003, letter to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. – Crossing the Line

“At the conference in Amman, CPA officials promised an apolitical selection process that would accept any workable technology. …. On October 6, Iraq's new minister of communications, Haider al-Abadi, announced the winners—two Kuwaiti firms and one Egyptian company. Not one of them used the Qualcomm standard.

If any officials in Baghdad or Washington thought such a decision would be the end of Qualcomm's quest, the next six months would prove them wrong. Like dozens of American corporations looking to influence U.S. policy—shaping everything from the banking and insurance markets to foreign-investment rules—Qualcomm, Lucent, Samsung, and their partners would only expand their efforts and broaden their reach into the CPA. With the guidance of a deputy undersecretary of Defense, John Shaw, this effort became one of the most brazen lobbying campaigns of the postwar reconstruction, one that has brought Shaw under investigation for potentially breaking federal ethics rules.” – Crossing the Line

“The morgue stank of bodies. Visitors burned paper and wood in the parking lot to mask the smell. The reception area was full with 40 Iraqis, mostly women, standing and sitting on the ground, waiting to look at bodies and photographs of bodies.

Around 11 a.m., three pickup trucks arrived with a total of at least eight bodies. Morgue workers and police officers put them in body bags and took them inside.

Officials in Baghdad receive 10 to 20 bodies a day, mostly victims of killings by Sunni and Shiite militias, American officials said.” – NYT, 5 July, 2006

“Deputy Undersecretary Shaw, an old Republican hand who had served in the Nixon, Ford, and Reagan White Houses, quickly became the point man for the initiative to bring CDMA to Iraq. Shaw and other officials in the Pentagon and Congress reasoned that establishing CDMA in the Middle East would be possible if they could find a way for Qualcomm and its partners to offer cellular service in Iraq under the rubric of the police and fire communications system that the CPA planned to purchase for the Iraqis. "The CDMA system could then morph into a commercial service with our having total control over it," Shaw wrote in a November email to a Coalition adviser in Baghdad.

To dodge contracting rules that prevent officials such as himself from cherry-picking favored companies, Shaw proposed using Nana Pacific, which is exempt from many contracting laws because it is an Alaska Native American-owned business. – Crossing the Line

“The new Iraqi president, Jalal Talabani, said Wednesday that more than 50 bodies had been discovered in the Tigris River and suggested that they were victims of a mass kidnapping south of Baghdad that other Iraqi officials had insisted was a hoax just three days before. – NYT, April 20, 2005

“... Deputy Undersecretary Shaw appeared to have reasons for pushing the plan that went beyond the interests of the Iraqi people … In fact, his intervention on behalf of the Qualcomm consortium, with whose lobbyists and investors he had close ties, has led the Defense Department's inspector general to begin an investigation into his activities.

One of those lobbyists, Don De Marino, was a close friend and former deputy of Shaw from the Commerce Department during the early 1990s. Early this year, Shaw helped appoint De Marino to an official Defense Department assessment mission to Baghdad on behalf of Rumsfeld. Although De Marino had recently been a registered lobbyist of the Qualcomm consortium, he was given access to the CPA telecommunications office. "He spent hours in our office just being our buddy. Yucking it up," said a former adviser to the ministry, who added that no one there knew that De Marino, who works with the National U.S.-Arab Chamber of Commerce, was also a member of the board of directors of the Qualcomm consortium, and had helped the group to investigate the backgrounds of the winning cellular companies in Iraq.” – Crossing the Line

“In one of the most brazen kidnappings in recent memory in Iraq, about 60 masked gunmen wearing government-style camouflage uniforms stormed a meeting here of the country's top sports administrators on Saturday, abducting more than 30 people, including the president of the National Olympic Committee of Iraq, the authorities said. – July 16, 2006 NYT

“In a recent interview with the Los Angeles Times, Shaw dismissed claims that such mixing of friendship and business was improper. "Hey, we won the war," said Shaw, who, like De Marino and Qualcomm officials, declined to comment for this story. "Is it not in our interests to have the most advanced system that we possibly can, that can then become the dominant standard in the region?" – Crossing the Line

How Iraq Police Reform Became Casualty of War – headline, NYT, May 22, 2006

“In March, this dispute reached a critical turning point when Sudnick and other advisers in Baghdad discovered that Nana Pacific had added language to a contract for a pilot first-responder program that would allow such competition, opening the door for the consortium to establish a CDMA network. Sudnick and his colleagues promptly challenged Nana officials about the new provision. Within hours, they received a blistering phone call from Shaw, who shouted at Sudnick's deputy, Bonnie Carroll, that there would be "hell to pay" if they did not sign off on the additional language, according to Carroll.

Within days, Sudnick received an email from Shaw: "If you can't lead or follow get the hell out of the way." The first-responder system, Shaw wrote, was "the last opportunity to install a viable cellular network that is responsive to our needs and requirements." – Crossing the Line

“For more than a year, he has been collecting stories of atrocities committed by uniformed Iraqis. In a recent interview, he produced a book of case studies with color photographs showing gruesome evidence of torture and killings by men in uniform: a sheik with a power drill driven into his temple; 14 laborers abducted from a checkpoint in Baghdad and killed; dozens of men beaten, burned with acid and shot.”- 3 August, 2006 NYT

Interview: T. Christian Miller talks about his new book "Blood Money," about greed, waste and fraud undermining reconstruction of Iraq – Fresh Air, 12 September, 2006

“GROSS: So the way that Shaw from the Defense Department gets this backdoor deal for his friend through partnering with an Alaska Native corporation, it's all legal? It is all legal. So what's the problem?

Mr. MILLER: Well, yeah, it's all legal. It sounds comical, but it is all definitely legal. The problem was that--well, there was a couple of problems. One, it wasn't what anybody in Iraq wanted. Nobody needed another cellular phone contract.

Number two, the particular type of system that they wanted to install is a system widely unused in the US, but it's not used anywhere else in the world, so if you put the system in Iraq, nobody else would be able to use it, and it would basically force the Iraqis in the Middle East to go on the US standard of cell phone communications, which would basically reward very much companies like QualComm, but wouldn't do very much for telecommunications in the Middle East. So that was the second thing.

And the third thing was it was simply unseemly. It was a conflict of interest at the very least, and both the FBI and the inspector general for the Pentagon both looked into this matter, although ultimately the FBI filed no charges in the case.

GROSS: Now, you say that this scandal set back the telecommunications industry in Iraq. How?

Mr. MILLER: What happened with--well, the cellular phone system itself continued apace, and it has grown, and it's actually one of the very few success stories of the reconstruction of Iraq, is that the cell phone system has grown and expanded. So Iraqis today have cell phone communications. They're not great, but they have them.
On the other side, the particular contract that was involved in this deal between the Alaska Native corporation and the US company involved police communications. It was a contract to allow communications between police systems, essentially. That whole effort collapses when Dan Sudnick leaves. And it's only now, almost three years later, that there is a 911 system which is up, but there was a recent inspector general report which got almost no attention which, essentially, says that Iraqis today, three and a half years later, still can't call their local police station. They still can't report an insurgent attack or an insurgent--even tip off the Iraqi army or military, because they still don't have an effective system of communicating both with their emergency centers, their first responder centers and--nor do those centers have an effective way of communicating with each other.
So three and a half years later, it's an amazing thing, where we've put this focus on trying to tamp down the insurgency and yet we still can't create a system that allows an Iraqi to call 911.”

As Iraq Deteriorates, Iraqis Get More Blame; U.S. Officials, Lawmakers Change Tone Washington Post 29 November 2006

“Thomas Donnelly, a hawkish defense expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said he considers blame a legitimate issue. "Ultimately, just like success rests with the Iraqis, so does failure," he said. "We've made a lot of mistakes, but we've paid a huge price to give the Iraqis a chance at a decent future."

hide your devil

Thomas Bernhard’s biographer, Gitta Honegger, has noted that Bernhard was deeply influenced by his reading of Paul Valéry’s Monsieur Teste. She writes: “Valéry never recovered from his amazement about the spectacle of his own intellect,” mocks E.M. Cioran. If one replaced “amazement” with “laugher,” the statement could apply to Bernhard.” According to Honegger, the idea of Monsieur Teste – of an intelligence so high that it could only take as its highest object – itself – and in so doing erase itself, really impressed Bernhard.

Honegger quotes a passage from the Portrait of M. Teste section that describes the the characteristic trajectory of action performed by Bernhard’s early heros:

- Jealous of his best ideas, of those which he believed to be the best – sometimes so particular, so much his own that expressing them in the vulgar, instead of the intimate language gives us on the outside only the most feeble and false idea of them. – And who knows if the most important ones for directing a mind are not as singular to that mind, as strictly personal as a garment or an object adopted to one’s throws – who knows if the true philosophy of someone is… communicable?

- Jealous, then, of his diverse clarities – T. thought: what kind of idea is it to which one does not attach the value of a secret of state or of a secret of art? and thus one must have the shame as for a sin or a pain – hide your god – hide your devil.

LI brings this up because we found, while searching about, a pdf of the entire M. Teste text on the web, here. And we’ve been reading it. It has been a long time since we read this text – I call it a text rather than novella, because it is not like a novella. It is more like Valéry’s essay on Leonardo. It is as much a ‘text’ as a corn flake is purely a breakfast cereal. No fucking around.

At one time, in the twenties and thirties, Monsieur Teste had quite a reputation. But Cioran’s judgment on Valéry reflects the more contemporary view. And it is true, there is a coldness that run’s like the purest fish blood through Valery’s work. There’s a wonderful moment in Sartre’s essay on Nizan where he simply dismisses Gide and Valéry as the very archetypes of intellectual preciosity and futility.

But the thing is, M. Teste is, in spite of everything, rather beautiful.

I’ll have some more excerpts later.

The demonstration that the Washington Post is, of course, not mentioning

There was an actual article on the NYT front page – at least on the web – about war protestors! After we lay there on the floor a bit, we got back up and checked it out. It was about the protest today in D.C. – LI is sending all our spells and good wishes to this thing – and (thank God), the journalists didn’t dwell overmuch on the celebrities that are going to be there.

As we have made clear, we have definite ideas about demonstrations. A huge demonstration must, I suppose, have a few speeches, but let those speeches be … about the War. Entirely. Not about Global Warming, Venezuela, or fish farming.

A friend the other day sent me an email to show me that others than me are thinking about anti-war demonstration tactics. The email was a proposal to combine anti-war protest with online dating. Or dating period, or something. Apparently, using the chi energy that gets all fizzy when you are waving a sign denouncing our atrocious governing class and their War, you bond with some other likely anti-war protestor. At first I was confused, and thought you bonded right there at the protest – which I thought was, indeed, avant garde and heat, a “we chose fucking over being fucked up” gesture, like the sixties except with condoms, but apparently it is more like finding that certain someone to share a coffee with as you both rail about Bill O’Reilly.
I make fun.
I shouldn’t make fun. I’m down with anything that wakes people up.

Anway, we loved this bit in the NYT story:

''We see many things that we feel helpless about,'' said Barbara Struna, 59, of Brewster, Mass. ''But this is like a united force. This is something I can do.''
Struna, a mother of five who runs an art gallery, made a two-day bus trip with her 17-year-old daughter, Anna, to the nation's capital to represent what she said was middle America's opposition to President Bush's war policy.
Her daughter, a high school senior, said she has as many as 20 friends who have been to Iraq. ''My generation is the one that is going to have to pay for this,'' she said.
She held a sign that said, ''Heck of a job, Bushie,'' mocking Bush's words of encouragement to his disaster relief chief, Michael Brown, amid criticism of the government's immediate response to Hurricane Katrina in the summer of 2005.

When I get my head out of my ass – and it is easy to get your head up your ass when you are writing a blog, or just living, in fact most of the time I go around, embarrassingly enough, with my head up my ass – I remember how much, really, I love the plain old Americans.

The Washington Post, speaking of having your head up your ass so far that you can shed your whole readership while giving op ed space to the retarded children of war mongering think tankers because you are brave and bold and Fred Hiatt, has, of course, nothing on the front of its web page about the demo.

PS - finally, at noon, WAPO puts up a story about the demonstration. With much concentration on the counter-demonstration of pro-war types. Ah, fairness. WAPO is all about fairness.