Remora
Limited Inc remembers with fondness Halloweens of yore - the costuming, the secret hurling of rotten eggs at the neighbor's prize Oldsmobile, the decorative touch with dog turds flambee and the ringing of the doorbell, giggles in the dark as we ran to the bushes -- such, such were the joys. But this Halloween we want to give our readers a special fright, some horror they can treasure up for the golden years. That is why we recommend this article by Kenichi Ohmae in New Perspectives Quarterly. The undead, monsters reassembled out of corpse parts, mad knifethrowers, phantoms of the opera, they might give one the ephemeral tingle, but there's nothing like sober economic statistics to bring on a dead faint and heart palpitations. The article is a scathing survey of the financial sleight of hand by which the Clinton administration contained infection from the Japanese slump. Old Doctor Bush, our cornpone POTUS, has poo-pooed the old Clintonomics, and, according to the article, he's about to get a big surprise. His advice amounts to the standard boilerplate about letting the marketplace sort out the dead from the living, the bankrupt from the solvent. The gov, in this view, should stand back and let unemployment do what it will, in order to have a healthier tomorrow. Well, Ohmae points out, lets say the Japanese government actually pays more than lip service to this insane advice. The zombies among Japanese banks and corporations might not just roll over, but but Doc! they might actually struggle to survive. Eek! Then Daddy Warbucks might have to put on his thinkin' cap. You can't smoke capital out of the holes, unlike terrorists, and since he has a complete moron for a Treasury secretary (did Limited Inc say that? Apologies all around. Not a COMPLETE moron. Really, what were we thinking?), we shouldn't expect common sense from that quarter. Well, in that potential struggle, these moribund investors will need resources, which means pulling massive amounts of capital out of investment positions here in the States. Here are two grafs with some striking claims:
"I believe that the Dow will decrease by one-third from its peak. When the Dow was 12,000, it would have been 8,000 without the influx of foreign capital.
Who will suffer the most?
The capital flight back into Japan will be close to $550 billion, of which $320 billion is in Treasury bonds. The Japanese hold approximately 10 percent of all outstanding US government securities-more than any other single country."
It is a little noted facet of economic theory that sometimes, it pays to be crooked. In the early 90s, American regulators and the Fed knew that technically big banks, like Citicorp, had suffered enough of a loss in the bursting of both the stock and real estate bubbles in the Heimat and the double whammy of the real estate bubble in Tokyo and its collateral effect in emerging markets that they were in default of the rules regulating banks. That is, they had to start monetizing assets in order to maintain balances against debt. But the Fed looked the other way, and eventually the situation solved itself. James Grant has written a nice and disgusted book on this, but it isn't that disgusting. Here we are facing another situation in which the better part of financial valor is to cook the books. We'll see what happens.
Do the numbers, and have a happy and safe Halloween, y'all.
Tuesday, October 30, 2001
Monday, October 29, 2001
Remora
Another magazine is roadkill - not exactly eyecatching news as the Stock market finds the center cannot hold, and the ceremony of innocence is lost among postal workers nationwide. This magazine, too, it isn't exactly Lingua Franca. It's Famous Monsters of Filmland. Apparently the articles in this magazine exerted a formative influence on a lot of very bad directors in Hollywood, among them John Landis. So why don't these bad directors, who can eat off silver plate, could fill their swimming pools with 20 dollar bills, have spent tons, no doubt, to promote trade with Colombia (heh heh), why don't they shunt some ready in the direction of their childhood formative influence? Not a question that Caitlin Liu asks in her acticle:
Auction Could Kill 'Monsters'
Here are two grafs that plug into a very California feud:
"Last year, after a trial during which Landis and author Ray Bradbury testified for Ackerman [former editor/publisher of the magazine], a Van Nuys jury found Ferry [current publisher/editor of the magazine] liable for breach of contract, libel and trademark infringement. Ackerman won a judgment of about $500,000 and rights to the pen name "Dr. Acula." Ferry has appealed.
Shortly after the verdict, Ferry transferred his assets to his housemate, declared himself broke and filed for bankruptcy protection, court documents show. The judge found the asset transfers to be fraudulent because Ferry was trying to keep them out of the hands of creditors such as Ackerman, Avery said."
Why can't Limited Inc use these telltale bits to make a fortune, you know, in the screenplay trade? We confess, the color by number scenario could be put together by the merest hypnotized piker and surely sold to some narcissistic someone out there in Beverly Hills. Of course, in the process, avoiding use of the term "Dr. Acula," which would be wrong, just wrong.
Another magazine is roadkill - not exactly eyecatching news as the Stock market finds the center cannot hold, and the ceremony of innocence is lost among postal workers nationwide. This magazine, too, it isn't exactly Lingua Franca. It's Famous Monsters of Filmland. Apparently the articles in this magazine exerted a formative influence on a lot of very bad directors in Hollywood, among them John Landis. So why don't these bad directors, who can eat off silver plate, could fill their swimming pools with 20 dollar bills, have spent tons, no doubt, to promote trade with Colombia (heh heh), why don't they shunt some ready in the direction of their childhood formative influence? Not a question that Caitlin Liu asks in her acticle:
Auction Could Kill 'Monsters'
Here are two grafs that plug into a very California feud:
"Last year, after a trial during which Landis and author Ray Bradbury testified for Ackerman [former editor/publisher of the magazine], a Van Nuys jury found Ferry [current publisher/editor of the magazine] liable for breach of contract, libel and trademark infringement. Ackerman won a judgment of about $500,000 and rights to the pen name "Dr. Acula." Ferry has appealed.
Shortly after the verdict, Ferry transferred his assets to his housemate, declared himself broke and filed for bankruptcy protection, court documents show. The judge found the asset transfers to be fraudulent because Ferry was trying to keep them out of the hands of creditors such as Ackerman, Avery said."
Why can't Limited Inc use these telltale bits to make a fortune, you know, in the screenplay trade? We confess, the color by number scenario could be put together by the merest hypnotized piker and surely sold to some narcissistic someone out there in Beverly Hills. Of course, in the process, avoiding use of the term "Dr. Acula," which would be wrong, just wrong.
Sunday, October 28, 2001
Remora.
Sadness. Yesterday Limited Inc went to the rally gainst the death penalty. We saw a poster advertising it, and made a note to go. Limited Inc is not an inveterate rally-goer, but these days, these grim days, needed some poetic counter-thrust. And what better protest than to protest against the cruel, extensive intention to murder, taken by the state and its officers?
All rallies in Austin are as obsessed with the capital building as Moslem pilgrims are with Mecca, although for opposite reasons: instead of worshipping, we come to metaphorically destroy. Routine for this rally, like the anti-WTO rally, was: forces gather in that park on 5th street across from the post office, forces get pumped by a few speeches, forces shuffle down the sidewalk out third street, past the groovers who wave at us from the coffee shop and past Fado's and then left turn up Congress and after various and sundry chants have been tried out and the cops have motorcycled past so we know that they have motorcycles (I suppose this impresses upon us that if we suddenly get the urge to hurl bricks through windows, we WILL be run down by flashing blue lights), we all pool around the Capital steps and listen to more feisty oratory.
When we got to the park, there was a desultory group with some tables set up, and we mistakenly thought for a second that the march had already occured, because the scene looked so evidently like backwash. B-b-but no, the backwash was the group -- a pitiful collection of middle aged freaks like us, with a few tatted youths, and (best part of the whole thing) at least twenty African Americans-- usually the rallies we've been to are as pale as the chalky shores of Albion, and that always bugs us no end. There couldn't have been more than two hundred there. Instead of expressing a strong minority opinion, our march seemed to express an arcane eccentricity. It was pathetic. And when we got to the Capital, the feisty oratory was off-key. There was an address from a woman whose daughter had been murdered that was painful to listen to, partly because we felt she was being exploited, somehow.
Here's the rub: to my mind, it is alright to be for the death penalty if a member of your family has been murdered. We would be for it, then, like a shot. We're a revengeful little prick, all in all, but even if we weren't, we'd still feel we owed it to the victim to want to kill the killer.
I talked about this with my friend MB last night. Opposition to the death penalty, for both of us, doesn't depend on an act of forgiveness, but is rooted in a separate conviction, that the state shouldn't add another murder to one (or more, oftentimes) that has already been committed.
In that conversation, I learned that MB and Limited Inc have different notions of what forgiveness is. Forgiveness takes up remarkably little space in ethical theory. When Jesus, dying on the cross said, forgive them, they know not what they do, what was he talking about? Could they not be forgiven if they knew what they were doing? For MB, Jesus didn't rise to the occassion, which would have required that they knew what they were doing in order for the act of forgiveness to be perfect. As you can tell, MB has high standards. So is forgiveness an insight into some intellectual lapse? Well, that doesn't seem to fit the way I think of forgiveness. There's an article in the New Republic this week (but not online) that reviews Andre Comte-Sponville's "A Small Treatise on the Great Virtues," and the reviewer does a little conceptual analysis of forgiveness.
But to get back to my original topic. Perhaps we should have lobbed some bricks through windows. Or simply not marched. I know, of course, that the death penalty is as popular in Texas as football. I know the death penalty is wrong. I know that fact must, sooner or later, yield to conviction, if conviction is tireless enough. But this is a dreadful time to come out against death. So many people are eager to see it.
Which brings me to the odd article by Phillip Weiss in the NY Observer. Weiss puzzles me -- second graf of the article will tell you why.
Vietnam ended marriages. The husband was for the war and the wife was quietly against it. Maybe they were Republicans, and the wife turned slowly Democratic. She didn�t talk about it openly. The husband�s change of view came years later, and was reluctant.
That was before feminism, but it seems as if the same divide is occurring over the war against terrorism. I left the country in mid-October, but before going I was at several gatherings where the women ran down the jingoistic rhetoric of the Bush administration, and then the men drifted off and discussed the war in somewhat gonzo terms. "What do you think we should do?" I said to one friend. "Go over there and ice �em," he said. We shook hands. At a birthday party, a biker told me about off-the-books assassination squads that roam free in mountains in the Far East. We both grunted with approval. A third friend and I drank red wine before his stone fireplace and talked about how some action was required. An artist, but he seemed to be saying "Love it or leave it," and I found myself agreeing."
Is Weiss serious? The article goes on to quote dissenting e-mails from his wife, who must wonder at that lede. And what to make of that "shaking hands" scene. Is the frat boy in Weiss coming out, or what?
Sadness. Yesterday Limited Inc went to the rally gainst the death penalty. We saw a poster advertising it, and made a note to go. Limited Inc is not an inveterate rally-goer, but these days, these grim days, needed some poetic counter-thrust. And what better protest than to protest against the cruel, extensive intention to murder, taken by the state and its officers?
All rallies in Austin are as obsessed with the capital building as Moslem pilgrims are with Mecca, although for opposite reasons: instead of worshipping, we come to metaphorically destroy. Routine for this rally, like the anti-WTO rally, was: forces gather in that park on 5th street across from the post office, forces get pumped by a few speeches, forces shuffle down the sidewalk out third street, past the groovers who wave at us from the coffee shop and past Fado's and then left turn up Congress and after various and sundry chants have been tried out and the cops have motorcycled past so we know that they have motorcycles (I suppose this impresses upon us that if we suddenly get the urge to hurl bricks through windows, we WILL be run down by flashing blue lights), we all pool around the Capital steps and listen to more feisty oratory.
When we got to the park, there was a desultory group with some tables set up, and we mistakenly thought for a second that the march had already occured, because the scene looked so evidently like backwash. B-b-but no, the backwash was the group -- a pitiful collection of middle aged freaks like us, with a few tatted youths, and (best part of the whole thing) at least twenty African Americans-- usually the rallies we've been to are as pale as the chalky shores of Albion, and that always bugs us no end. There couldn't have been more than two hundred there. Instead of expressing a strong minority opinion, our march seemed to express an arcane eccentricity. It was pathetic. And when we got to the Capital, the feisty oratory was off-key. There was an address from a woman whose daughter had been murdered that was painful to listen to, partly because we felt she was being exploited, somehow.
Here's the rub: to my mind, it is alright to be for the death penalty if a member of your family has been murdered. We would be for it, then, like a shot. We're a revengeful little prick, all in all, but even if we weren't, we'd still feel we owed it to the victim to want to kill the killer.
I talked about this with my friend MB last night. Opposition to the death penalty, for both of us, doesn't depend on an act of forgiveness, but is rooted in a separate conviction, that the state shouldn't add another murder to one (or more, oftentimes) that has already been committed.
In that conversation, I learned that MB and Limited Inc have different notions of what forgiveness is. Forgiveness takes up remarkably little space in ethical theory. When Jesus, dying on the cross said, forgive them, they know not what they do, what was he talking about? Could they not be forgiven if they knew what they were doing? For MB, Jesus didn't rise to the occassion, which would have required that they knew what they were doing in order for the act of forgiveness to be perfect. As you can tell, MB has high standards. So is forgiveness an insight into some intellectual lapse? Well, that doesn't seem to fit the way I think of forgiveness. There's an article in the New Republic this week (but not online) that reviews Andre Comte-Sponville's "A Small Treatise on the Great Virtues," and the reviewer does a little conceptual analysis of forgiveness.
But to get back to my original topic. Perhaps we should have lobbed some bricks through windows. Or simply not marched. I know, of course, that the death penalty is as popular in Texas as football. I know the death penalty is wrong. I know that fact must, sooner or later, yield to conviction, if conviction is tireless enough. But this is a dreadful time to come out against death. So many people are eager to see it.
Which brings me to the odd article by Phillip Weiss in the NY Observer. Weiss puzzles me -- second graf of the article will tell you why.
Vietnam ended marriages. The husband was for the war and the wife was quietly against it. Maybe they were Republicans, and the wife turned slowly Democratic. She didn�t talk about it openly. The husband�s change of view came years later, and was reluctant.
That was before feminism, but it seems as if the same divide is occurring over the war against terrorism. I left the country in mid-October, but before going I was at several gatherings where the women ran down the jingoistic rhetoric of the Bush administration, and then the men drifted off and discussed the war in somewhat gonzo terms. "What do you think we should do?" I said to one friend. "Go over there and ice �em," he said. We shook hands. At a birthday party, a biker told me about off-the-books assassination squads that roam free in mountains in the Far East. We both grunted with approval. A third friend and I drank red wine before his stone fireplace and talked about how some action was required. An artist, but he seemed to be saying "Love it or leave it," and I found myself agreeing."
Is Weiss serious? The article goes on to quote dissenting e-mails from his wife, who must wonder at that lede. And what to make of that "shaking hands" scene. Is the frat boy in Weiss coming out, or what?
Saturday, October 27, 2001
Remora
The great images of prostitution in the 19th century - the century of Nana -- feed by unconscious and subterranian streams into the Storyville photographs of EJ Bellocq. Walter Benjamin would have recognized the spirit of the Passagen in the itchy copulations implicit in the professional smiles of girls reclining in desolate, straw cushioned cribs, or the sentimental decorations which cluttered the rooms of the higher class tarts, and the lost allusions to a debased and by this time comic myth of Oriental sensuality that runs right into the chinese motifs decorating the ceramic chamber pots under the often used beds in the quality houses as well as the porcelein bric a brac behind glass and lock and key in the overstuffed steamboat mansions along St. Charles from which the better, regular clients came. Ornament is crime, the Viennese Modernists said. Ornament is where the dream of Lustmord, sex killing, begins. Limited Inc saw Bellocq's work in Al Rose's book on Storyville. I was living in New Orleans then myself, and vaguely knew that Pretty Baby, the Louis Malle film, was based on this book. But when I looked at those prints, I knew I was seeing something mad -- something that Manet's Olympia hinted at. It was the madness of a man who can't get over what is between a woman's legs. He can't get over the sight, smell, touch of the thing, he can't get over how the vagina is the body becoming the body. Bellocq, of course, might never have read Nana, certainly didn't know Rimbaud, but this is what gives his work its power: he had to make it all up. The most startling photos were, of course, the ones with the heads of the women erased. The erasures are concentrated, jagged scribbles; they look as though they were done in some fury, figurative damage to a figure, the transfer of rancorous passion that still looks criminal. The story was that Bellocq's brother, a priest, must have worked over these photographs. Even then I wondered why a priest would be destroying the faces instead of the bodies -- what was the point? Now Lee Friedlander, who restored Bellocq's photos, is saying that he believes Bellocq himself did it. One of the Roses has a great article on the subject at Exquisite Corpse.
Here's a graf:
Recently, Lee Friedlander has re-examined the plates and tried to duplicate the scratching with a sample area, but the emulsion flaked off instead of scratching. The emulsion around the original defacement in some areas is folded over gently, and could only have done so when wet. Therefore, E.J. Bellocq probably defaced the negatives shortly after he developed them in the early 1900s.
In one photograph, however, a woman wears a carnival mask that has been incongruously positioned to hide her eyes, possibly echoing some ambivalence that made Bellocq scratch the faces from so many of the negatives. Yet the approach to the women's faces is not the only curious aspect of Bellocq's Storyville work. In one pair of photographs, a woman stands clothed in the first image in front of heavy wooden doors, but in the second image, she is nude, her face has been scratched from the negative, and a heavy couch has been pushed in front of the door. A locket, another repeating motif in Bellocq's Storyville work, also becomes visible in the second image. One of Bellocq's defaced nudes is actually shown examining her locket. But the pair of images mentioned above is not the only example of couches in front of doors in Bellocq's Storyville nudes. One such image shows clearly that there is already a lock on the door, and a cord from an electric light has further been wrapped around the lock in what looks like a final obsessive attempt at privacy. Why would Bellocq feel the need to use a couch, a lock, and a wire to keep the door shut in an expensive brothel? Rugs used as hasty partial backdrops and, in one case, sawhorses also suggest that Bellocq may have intended to drop the backgrounds from his images, vignette, or otherwise alter the images to imitate the saccharine romantic photographs and paintings he hung on his walls. In fact, one of Bellocq's portraits is clearly shown vignetted and framed in one of the two studies of his desk.
The great images of prostitution in the 19th century - the century of Nana -- feed by unconscious and subterranian streams into the Storyville photographs of EJ Bellocq. Walter Benjamin would have recognized the spirit of the Passagen in the itchy copulations implicit in the professional smiles of girls reclining in desolate, straw cushioned cribs, or the sentimental decorations which cluttered the rooms of the higher class tarts, and the lost allusions to a debased and by this time comic myth of Oriental sensuality that runs right into the chinese motifs decorating the ceramic chamber pots under the often used beds in the quality houses as well as the porcelein bric a brac behind glass and lock and key in the overstuffed steamboat mansions along St. Charles from which the better, regular clients came. Ornament is crime, the Viennese Modernists said. Ornament is where the dream of Lustmord, sex killing, begins. Limited Inc saw Bellocq's work in Al Rose's book on Storyville. I was living in New Orleans then myself, and vaguely knew that Pretty Baby, the Louis Malle film, was based on this book. But when I looked at those prints, I knew I was seeing something mad -- something that Manet's Olympia hinted at. It was the madness of a man who can't get over what is between a woman's legs. He can't get over the sight, smell, touch of the thing, he can't get over how the vagina is the body becoming the body. Bellocq, of course, might never have read Nana, certainly didn't know Rimbaud, but this is what gives his work its power: he had to make it all up. The most startling photos were, of course, the ones with the heads of the women erased. The erasures are concentrated, jagged scribbles; they look as though they were done in some fury, figurative damage to a figure, the transfer of rancorous passion that still looks criminal. The story was that Bellocq's brother, a priest, must have worked over these photographs. Even then I wondered why a priest would be destroying the faces instead of the bodies -- what was the point? Now Lee Friedlander, who restored Bellocq's photos, is saying that he believes Bellocq himself did it. One of the Roses has a great article on the subject at Exquisite Corpse.
Here's a graf:
Recently, Lee Friedlander has re-examined the plates and tried to duplicate the scratching with a sample area, but the emulsion flaked off instead of scratching. The emulsion around the original defacement in some areas is folded over gently, and could only have done so when wet. Therefore, E.J. Bellocq probably defaced the negatives shortly after he developed them in the early 1900s.
In one photograph, however, a woman wears a carnival mask that has been incongruously positioned to hide her eyes, possibly echoing some ambivalence that made Bellocq scratch the faces from so many of the negatives. Yet the approach to the women's faces is not the only curious aspect of Bellocq's Storyville work. In one pair of photographs, a woman stands clothed in the first image in front of heavy wooden doors, but in the second image, she is nude, her face has been scratched from the negative, and a heavy couch has been pushed in front of the door. A locket, another repeating motif in Bellocq's Storyville work, also becomes visible in the second image. One of Bellocq's defaced nudes is actually shown examining her locket. But the pair of images mentioned above is not the only example of couches in front of doors in Bellocq's Storyville nudes. One such image shows clearly that there is already a lock on the door, and a cord from an electric light has further been wrapped around the lock in what looks like a final obsessive attempt at privacy. Why would Bellocq feel the need to use a couch, a lock, and a wire to keep the door shut in an expensive brothel? Rugs used as hasty partial backdrops and, in one case, sawhorses also suggest that Bellocq may have intended to drop the backgrounds from his images, vignette, or otherwise alter the images to imitate the saccharine romantic photographs and paintings he hung on his walls. In fact, one of Bellocq's portraits is clearly shown vignetted and framed in one of the two studies of his desk.
Friday, October 26, 2001
Remora
If you sup with the devil, use a big spoon, as Tolstoy, or my grandmother, said. Limited inc is always confusing our grandmother with Tolstoy -- difference is, our grandmother sold Avon, Tolstoy didnt. In any case, the saying means, if you dabble in evil, evil will get ya. And so it goes with this military campaign. Bombing Afghanistan, or Kabul and other targets, had a certain military logic. Just as prelimary bombardments in any war target military hardware, vulnerable personnel, and sites which are strategically key, such as communications systems, so I suppose -- we all suppose, here at Limited Inc, having only the filtered information that our patriotic media has so wonderfully denuded of any content shocking to the naive American citizen -- that was the point of the first wave of bombing.
Now, however, the bombing is serving another, and less justifiable purpose. In fact, unjustifiable, I'd say -- nasty, illegitimate, criminal, these are other terms that come to mind, but I'm a bit saturated with invective right now -- and that is to remind the Heimat that the commander in chief is still ferocious and on point. We have to consider the neandrathal element in the populace. In fact, they find ululation, here and there, never so clearly as in this posting from Scott Moore at Slate.
"But regardless of the source [of the anthrax], if you believe, as I do, that the poison is being spread by al-Qaida operatives in the United States, you have to ask: What the hell are we waiting for in terms of killing the Taliban and al-Qaida in Afghanistan? From what I read in news reports, we�re taking our sweet time about bombing their front-line positions. There have even been reports that senior Taliban leaders were fleeing Kabul and other cities to go to the front lines because they thought they would be safer there. Wouldn�t round-the-clock B-52 raids reduce the front lines of the Taliban to something resembling the pile at 1 WTC in a matter of days? But we aren�t doing that because we hope �moderate� elements of the Taliban will defect and form a coalition with the Northern Alliance after the war. Let me offer a suggestion: Let�s worry about post-Taliban Afghanistan post-Taliban."
Notice the clever/unclever phrase, "reduce the front lines of the Taliban to something resembling the pile at 1 WTC in a matter of days?" As if there were anything in Afghanistan that, standing or ruined, was going to resemble the tallest skyscrapers in New York City. It is the American conceit that all wars are winnable if you use enough ferocity. It stands in troublesome disjunction with another American conceit: that we fight for moral reasons only. If, for instance, Scott Moore had said that he desired, like Charles Manson, or Jeffrey Dahmer, to play in the slimy viscera of dead Afghanis, he probably wouldn't have had his forum -- but of course, he keeps his bloodlust technologically condomed, so we think, sure, let's use our vast explosive capacities to spread jihad warrior gore over the mudhuts of Afghani villages. Something in me, however, thinks this isn't a good idea.
It seems that all involved confess that the military gain to begin with was small. Now it is miniscule. And there is this thing about bombs -- explosions pick out bodies randomly. So with each new bombing, we increase the amount of collateral casualties. We in fact move from warfare slowly but surely to organized terrorism, in the classic sense of spreading terror among an unarmed population. The Times headline story today has definitely turned Limited Inc against continuing this phase of the war. Here's the banal first graf:
"Huge explosions shook Kabul today on the Muslim day of prayer as United States jets kept up their bombing raids on targets in and around the capital, witnesses said."
Tickets go to the first caller who names how many NYT headlines stories begin with "explosions shook Kabul today"...
If the UN does intervene here, it might save us from ourselves.
Guardian Unlimited Observer | Observer site | UN set to appeal for halt in the bombing
If you sup with the devil, use a big spoon, as Tolstoy, or my grandmother, said. Limited inc is always confusing our grandmother with Tolstoy -- difference is, our grandmother sold Avon, Tolstoy didnt. In any case, the saying means, if you dabble in evil, evil will get ya. And so it goes with this military campaign. Bombing Afghanistan, or Kabul and other targets, had a certain military logic. Just as prelimary bombardments in any war target military hardware, vulnerable personnel, and sites which are strategically key, such as communications systems, so I suppose -- we all suppose, here at Limited Inc, having only the filtered information that our patriotic media has so wonderfully denuded of any content shocking to the naive American citizen -- that was the point of the first wave of bombing.
Now, however, the bombing is serving another, and less justifiable purpose. In fact, unjustifiable, I'd say -- nasty, illegitimate, criminal, these are other terms that come to mind, but I'm a bit saturated with invective right now -- and that is to remind the Heimat that the commander in chief is still ferocious and on point. We have to consider the neandrathal element in the populace. In fact, they find ululation, here and there, never so clearly as in this posting from Scott Moore at Slate.
"But regardless of the source [of the anthrax], if you believe, as I do, that the poison is being spread by al-Qaida operatives in the United States, you have to ask: What the hell are we waiting for in terms of killing the Taliban and al-Qaida in Afghanistan? From what I read in news reports, we�re taking our sweet time about bombing their front-line positions. There have even been reports that senior Taliban leaders were fleeing Kabul and other cities to go to the front lines because they thought they would be safer there. Wouldn�t round-the-clock B-52 raids reduce the front lines of the Taliban to something resembling the pile at 1 WTC in a matter of days? But we aren�t doing that because we hope �moderate� elements of the Taliban will defect and form a coalition with the Northern Alliance after the war. Let me offer a suggestion: Let�s worry about post-Taliban Afghanistan post-Taliban."
Notice the clever/unclever phrase, "reduce the front lines of the Taliban to something resembling the pile at 1 WTC in a matter of days?" As if there were anything in Afghanistan that, standing or ruined, was going to resemble the tallest skyscrapers in New York City. It is the American conceit that all wars are winnable if you use enough ferocity. It stands in troublesome disjunction with another American conceit: that we fight for moral reasons only. If, for instance, Scott Moore had said that he desired, like Charles Manson, or Jeffrey Dahmer, to play in the slimy viscera of dead Afghanis, he probably wouldn't have had his forum -- but of course, he keeps his bloodlust technologically condomed, so we think, sure, let's use our vast explosive capacities to spread jihad warrior gore over the mudhuts of Afghani villages. Something in me, however, thinks this isn't a good idea.
It seems that all involved confess that the military gain to begin with was small. Now it is miniscule. And there is this thing about bombs -- explosions pick out bodies randomly. So with each new bombing, we increase the amount of collateral casualties. We in fact move from warfare slowly but surely to organized terrorism, in the classic sense of spreading terror among an unarmed population. The Times headline story today has definitely turned Limited Inc against continuing this phase of the war. Here's the banal first graf:
"Huge explosions shook Kabul today on the Muslim day of prayer as United States jets kept up their bombing raids on targets in and around the capital, witnesses said."
Tickets go to the first caller who names how many NYT headlines stories begin with "explosions shook Kabul today"...
If the UN does intervene here, it might save us from ourselves.
Guardian Unlimited Observer | Observer site | UN set to appeal for halt in the bombing
Wednesday, October 24, 2001
Remora
One Vincent Browne for the Irish Times has written a scathing newspaper column revealing a scandal of major proportions -- people on the Net were mean to him! In his first graf, he describes the response to an article he'd written, entitled Afghans victims of US terrorism:
"A Mr Nelson ... wrote: "I read your article and all I have to say is: go f**k you f***ing queer butt f***ing . . . I hope the US bombs Assolastan until every rag has been killed . . . Hope you get AIDS f***er".
There were tens of other such responses, in all 339 e-mails, almost entirely from the United States from people who had read the column on the Yahoo.com website, where it was posted. The response was overwhelming vituperation offering an insight into part of the mind of America at this time. Of the 339 responses only about 30 were supportive of the views expressed."
Mr. Browne goes on in the tone of shock I associate with schoolteachers asking, who threw that paperwad. He has either never written anything for the Internet, or has only transacted with the most high minded sites, say, the Wilfred Sellars Philosophy Portal. His last sentence is a good gauge of his mindset: we have either the unruly students over there, or the ones that did their homework over here. I especially like the "insight into the mind of America." Hmm, I wonder if Mr. Browne has ever been tempted to go to an Irish pub, and if he has, I wonder if he's ever strolled to the the Gents with a belly full. Now just Imagine him, dear reader, shaking off the excessive Harp, and surveying, with increasing consternation, the racism, the unwarranted, impossible and sometimes drawn suggestions re the female anatomy and its uses, and other scribbles indicative of the "mind of Ireland" at this time. Mr. Browne would no doubt tuck in and fly in the horror Christian shows in Pilgrims Progress for one of Satan's typical lures. Browne doesn't apparently know that between the ages of 12 to 21, there are a lot of boys out there, and they like nothing better than to say, "you f**cking c*cksucker", or use Assolastan (which just doesn't have the ring of the well beloved Assotollah of the hostage years). The prim, shocked tone, and the idea that the only correct response, indicative no doubt of the better sort, would be 'supportive of the views expressed" is the clincher -- I mean, this is the school teacher in a nutshell, this is the one it was so much fun, when I was in high school, to discombobulate -- the fart sounds coming from the back row, the stray spit ball, the furious threats to make all the class stay after school. It comes back to me in a rush, darling Clarkston High, which has proudly produced more than its share of illiterates and crack addicts. Join me now in a rousing hymn of the Pink Floyd favorite, 'We don't need no Education." Or no, don't. Just join with me in sending Mr. Browne a message.
Turning to the right, we have Andrew Sullivan, who seems to be thrown at me from all directions. Why is he famous and I'm not is the question many in my household ask. But let's not get into that. Two friends have recently sent me columns of his, and one of them was rather astonished at the flood she produced -- she said that my inexhaustibility on a subject where I was not being remunerated might have something to do with my lack of remuneration in general. This friend goes for the jugular, sometimes. Anyway, Sullivan, in a benign mood, turns his eye to the "loony left,' the knee jerk anti-Americans, the traitorous pink, and his eye alights, at last, on Christopher Hitchens, who Sullivan thinks shows some glimmering sanity, as he so manfully did about that outrage on the Constitution, Clinton's infamous bj, so that maybe, as these lefty cohorts fade away into the sunset, conservatives can grapple with respectable people on the left who agree with them at all times. The usual tripe, in other words. What I do think is interesting is the graf about Hitchens:
"One immediate response is to argue that the U.S. itself created Osama bin Laden in its war against Soviet communism. This isn't true--but even if it were, doesn't this fact, as Mr. Hitchens has argued, actually increase the West's responsibility to retaliate against him?"
Someone once said that in foreign affairs, as in love affairs, you always forget your next to last partner (okay, someone didn't say that, I said it, I just thought it sounded more sophisticated if I put in the someone said part). In the Gulf war, we turned on a dime from watching Saddam decimate Iranian troops with billions pumped into him from the Kuwaitis and the Saudis, and with our connivence in keeping his chain of material supplies alive, to Saddam as Hitler. Of course, the US didn't create bin Laden, they merely created the fundamentalist muhadjeen of the 80s, and then pronounced the ruins of a Soviet free Afghanistan a stunning success. What the left said at that time is that encouraging people to battle against communism is one thing, encouraging them to battle, as was done in the 80s, against atheism and civil rights for women in the name of Islam --- and if Sullivan was interested, he could find plenty of material that showed the US Intelligence people were not only doing this, but were quite proud of doing this ---- did infinite damage to the country. And that damage would be multiplied as the battle against godless Communism became the battle against the Infidel. Back in 1982, the latter phrase had a stirring ring, with CIA men fancying themselves little Lawrences of Arabia. Now, of course, we know what that means. To pretend this didn't happen is, well, did someone say the loonie right?
One Vincent Browne for the Irish Times has written a scathing newspaper column revealing a scandal of major proportions -- people on the Net were mean to him! In his first graf, he describes the response to an article he'd written, entitled Afghans victims of US terrorism:
"A Mr Nelson ... wrote: "I read your article and all I have to say is: go f**k you f***ing queer butt f***ing . . . I hope the US bombs Assolastan until every rag has been killed . . . Hope you get AIDS f***er".
There were tens of other such responses, in all 339 e-mails, almost entirely from the United States from people who had read the column on the Yahoo.com website, where it was posted. The response was overwhelming vituperation offering an insight into part of the mind of America at this time. Of the 339 responses only about 30 were supportive of the views expressed."
Mr. Browne goes on in the tone of shock I associate with schoolteachers asking, who threw that paperwad. He has either never written anything for the Internet, or has only transacted with the most high minded sites, say, the Wilfred Sellars Philosophy Portal. His last sentence is a good gauge of his mindset: we have either the unruly students over there, or the ones that did their homework over here. I especially like the "insight into the mind of America." Hmm, I wonder if Mr. Browne has ever been tempted to go to an Irish pub, and if he has, I wonder if he's ever strolled to the the Gents with a belly full. Now just Imagine him, dear reader, shaking off the excessive Harp, and surveying, with increasing consternation, the racism, the unwarranted, impossible and sometimes drawn suggestions re the female anatomy and its uses, and other scribbles indicative of the "mind of Ireland" at this time. Mr. Browne would no doubt tuck in and fly in the horror Christian shows in Pilgrims Progress for one of Satan's typical lures. Browne doesn't apparently know that between the ages of 12 to 21, there are a lot of boys out there, and they like nothing better than to say, "you f**cking c*cksucker", or use Assolastan (which just doesn't have the ring of the well beloved Assotollah of the hostage years). The prim, shocked tone, and the idea that the only correct response, indicative no doubt of the better sort, would be 'supportive of the views expressed" is the clincher -- I mean, this is the school teacher in a nutshell, this is the one it was so much fun, when I was in high school, to discombobulate -- the fart sounds coming from the back row, the stray spit ball, the furious threats to make all the class stay after school. It comes back to me in a rush, darling Clarkston High, which has proudly produced more than its share of illiterates and crack addicts. Join me now in a rousing hymn of the Pink Floyd favorite, 'We don't need no Education." Or no, don't. Just join with me in sending Mr. Browne a message.
Turning to the right, we have Andrew Sullivan, who seems to be thrown at me from all directions. Why is he famous and I'm not is the question many in my household ask. But let's not get into that. Two friends have recently sent me columns of his, and one of them was rather astonished at the flood she produced -- she said that my inexhaustibility on a subject where I was not being remunerated might have something to do with my lack of remuneration in general. This friend goes for the jugular, sometimes. Anyway, Sullivan, in a benign mood, turns his eye to the "loony left,' the knee jerk anti-Americans, the traitorous pink, and his eye alights, at last, on Christopher Hitchens, who Sullivan thinks shows some glimmering sanity, as he so manfully did about that outrage on the Constitution, Clinton's infamous bj, so that maybe, as these lefty cohorts fade away into the sunset, conservatives can grapple with respectable people on the left who agree with them at all times. The usual tripe, in other words. What I do think is interesting is the graf about Hitchens:
"One immediate response is to argue that the U.S. itself created Osama bin Laden in its war against Soviet communism. This isn't true--but even if it were, doesn't this fact, as Mr. Hitchens has argued, actually increase the West's responsibility to retaliate against him?"
Someone once said that in foreign affairs, as in love affairs, you always forget your next to last partner (okay, someone didn't say that, I said it, I just thought it sounded more sophisticated if I put in the someone said part). In the Gulf war, we turned on a dime from watching Saddam decimate Iranian troops with billions pumped into him from the Kuwaitis and the Saudis, and with our connivence in keeping his chain of material supplies alive, to Saddam as Hitler. Of course, the US didn't create bin Laden, they merely created the fundamentalist muhadjeen of the 80s, and then pronounced the ruins of a Soviet free Afghanistan a stunning success. What the left said at that time is that encouraging people to battle against communism is one thing, encouraging them to battle, as was done in the 80s, against atheism and civil rights for women in the name of Islam --- and if Sullivan was interested, he could find plenty of material that showed the US Intelligence people were not only doing this, but were quite proud of doing this ---- did infinite damage to the country. And that damage would be multiplied as the battle against godless Communism became the battle against the Infidel. Back in 1982, the latter phrase had a stirring ring, with CIA men fancying themselves little Lawrences of Arabia. Now, of course, we know what that means. To pretend this didn't happen is, well, did someone say the loonie right?
Dope
We at Limitedinc, in a vain attempt to become the Yuppie we used to despise (ah, and now we think, if only I had that much disposable income! And the insurance! And the SUV!), run � we run around Town Lake. This has become a necessary adjunct of thinking � we have an article to write, or a totally unremunerative post to post here, and we think it out while running.
So perhaps our mind is a little too vigilant, a little too quick to catch hints, but for the last five months, ever since the pedestrian bridge was thrown across the lake, we have been bugged by an architectural faux pas. The bridge is really a pretty structure, with scoriated cement arches footing it in the lake. It loads onto the South shore footpath from the North Shore. The north shore has a spiral entrance, which carries the pedestrian or bicycler about two stories up to the bridge proper. Or you can take the stairs, which also goes up to the bridge. There�s are two arms for the two entrances, which then come together to form the main bridge thru-way.
What is bugging Limited inc in this arrangement, which shows a maximum appreciation for us athletic Austin citizens? The entrances on the North Shore, as I said, go up about two stories, so the last supporting pair of arches on the shore face the spiral entrance. These arches have capstones. And --- here it is � the capstones are at different angles. In other words, the capstone front sides, which are marked by the symbol of Texas, the Lone Star, are wall eyed to each other. It looks disgraceful.
Now you are saying, perhaps the architect intended that asymmetry, and the angle between the capstones, which is some jagged number, 153 degrees or something, is subtly multiplied by some feature of the South shore landing. Well, short answer is no. We�ve gone over and over this bridge, and it turns out that Gaudi isn�t working for the department of highways and bridges of Texas. The capstone angle is a mistake.
How did this happen? Here�s what we speculate. Originally, the capstones were supposed to front the north shore in traditional alignment, one with the other. Then the entrances were added, or changed, in some way. And when the entrances were changed, they were speced according to some formula for bearing a load, and they discovered that the last supporting arches were somehow misplaced. So they moved the arches, and then they made room, in the more cramped space between the arches and the spiral entrance, by wall-eyeing the capstones.
Taking that scenario as true, for a moment, I imagine a further mistake was made. I imagine they specced the bridge with a weight per unit figure reflecting cars and trucks, not pedestrians. And if that is true, and here Limited Inc has become the paranoid he so dreaded becoming, perhaps THIS ISN�T A MISTAKE. In other words, the bridge was built so it could be converted to cars and trucks. And how would this happen? It would happen if the city, in its infinite wisdom, decided that the Lamar Boulevard bridge wasn�t big enough. In other words, they would decide they needed yet one more road to carry traffic through the city, north to south and vice versa. Now I think they wouldn�t dare do that right now, but it is easy to imagine a scenario. There�s a five car pile up on Lamar, for instance, and talk of how crowded it is, and how expensive to expand. And then covetous eyes are cast upon our pedestrian bridge.
So I say: change the capstones! The people, united, want symmetry or will fight, yeah! � we want them chanting that in the streets.
We at Limitedinc, in a vain attempt to become the Yuppie we used to despise (ah, and now we think, if only I had that much disposable income! And the insurance! And the SUV!), run � we run around Town Lake. This has become a necessary adjunct of thinking � we have an article to write, or a totally unremunerative post to post here, and we think it out while running.
So perhaps our mind is a little too vigilant, a little too quick to catch hints, but for the last five months, ever since the pedestrian bridge was thrown across the lake, we have been bugged by an architectural faux pas. The bridge is really a pretty structure, with scoriated cement arches footing it in the lake. It loads onto the South shore footpath from the North Shore. The north shore has a spiral entrance, which carries the pedestrian or bicycler about two stories up to the bridge proper. Or you can take the stairs, which also goes up to the bridge. There�s are two arms for the two entrances, which then come together to form the main bridge thru-way.
What is bugging Limited inc in this arrangement, which shows a maximum appreciation for us athletic Austin citizens? The entrances on the North Shore, as I said, go up about two stories, so the last supporting pair of arches on the shore face the spiral entrance. These arches have capstones. And --- here it is � the capstones are at different angles. In other words, the capstone front sides, which are marked by the symbol of Texas, the Lone Star, are wall eyed to each other. It looks disgraceful.
Now you are saying, perhaps the architect intended that asymmetry, and the angle between the capstones, which is some jagged number, 153 degrees or something, is subtly multiplied by some feature of the South shore landing. Well, short answer is no. We�ve gone over and over this bridge, and it turns out that Gaudi isn�t working for the department of highways and bridges of Texas. The capstone angle is a mistake.
How did this happen? Here�s what we speculate. Originally, the capstones were supposed to front the north shore in traditional alignment, one with the other. Then the entrances were added, or changed, in some way. And when the entrances were changed, they were speced according to some formula for bearing a load, and they discovered that the last supporting arches were somehow misplaced. So they moved the arches, and then they made room, in the more cramped space between the arches and the spiral entrance, by wall-eyeing the capstones.
Taking that scenario as true, for a moment, I imagine a further mistake was made. I imagine they specced the bridge with a weight per unit figure reflecting cars and trucks, not pedestrians. And if that is true, and here Limited Inc has become the paranoid he so dreaded becoming, perhaps THIS ISN�T A MISTAKE. In other words, the bridge was built so it could be converted to cars and trucks. And how would this happen? It would happen if the city, in its infinite wisdom, decided that the Lamar Boulevard bridge wasn�t big enough. In other words, they would decide they needed yet one more road to carry traffic through the city, north to south and vice versa. Now I think they wouldn�t dare do that right now, but it is easy to imagine a scenario. There�s a five car pile up on Lamar, for instance, and talk of how crowded it is, and how expensive to expand. And then covetous eyes are cast upon our pedestrian bridge.
So I say: change the capstones! The people, united, want symmetry or will fight, yeah! � we want them chanting that in the streets.
Tuesday, October 23, 2001
Remora
We love stories like this one. We love them because the people who accord them respect are the same kind of people who scoff at wild Kennedy assassination conspiracies; yes, people, like George Will, who accused Delillo of being treasonous for having written a novel, Libra, that implies the CIA bumped old JFK; or the people from the commentariat of the nyt who decry (oh, decry me a river, as Tallulah Bankhead once said) Oliver Stone's JFK for its fictions and hyperbole. But even Oliver Stone at least tried to make a convincing link. Here's the first two grafs of an AP story:
"Former CIA Director James Woolsey says Iraq likely was involved in the attacks of Sept. 11 and that the United States will probably confront President Saddam Hussein as part of its ongoing campaign against terrorism.
``There are too many things, too many examples of stolen identities, of cleverly-crafted documentation, of coordination across continents and between states ... to stray very far from the conclusion that a state, and a very well-run intelligence service is involved here,'' he told the national convention of the American Jewish Congress on Monday."
Here's Georgie Will on Libra:
"DeLillo says he is just filling in "some of the blank spaces in the known record." But there is no blank space large enough to accommodate, and not a particle of evidence for, DeLillo's lunatic conspiracy theory. In the book's weaselly afterword, he says he has made "no attempt to furnish factual answers."
Weaselly, huh? It's weaselly to say, I wrote a novel, not a history book? Hmm, well, wonder what George thinks of the phrase, "...stray very far from the conclusion that a state, and a very well-run intelligence service is involved here." Let's see, stolen identities, check for Oswald; cleverly crafted documentation, ditto; coordinated between continents, well, that is what you call petitio principii, begging the question, no? Still, I would like Woolsey to tell us who he thinks was at the crossroads in Dallas, 1963. But we know his answer: Saddam Hussein!
We love stories like this one. We love them because the people who accord them respect are the same kind of people who scoff at wild Kennedy assassination conspiracies; yes, people, like George Will, who accused Delillo of being treasonous for having written a novel, Libra, that implies the CIA bumped old JFK; or the people from the commentariat of the nyt who decry (oh, decry me a river, as Tallulah Bankhead once said) Oliver Stone's JFK for its fictions and hyperbole. But even Oliver Stone at least tried to make a convincing link. Here's the first two grafs of an AP story:
"Former CIA Director James Woolsey says Iraq likely was involved in the attacks of Sept. 11 and that the United States will probably confront President Saddam Hussein as part of its ongoing campaign against terrorism.
``There are too many things, too many examples of stolen identities, of cleverly-crafted documentation, of coordination across continents and between states ... to stray very far from the conclusion that a state, and a very well-run intelligence service is involved here,'' he told the national convention of the American Jewish Congress on Monday."
Here's Georgie Will on Libra:
"DeLillo says he is just filling in "some of the blank spaces in the known record." But there is no blank space large enough to accommodate, and not a particle of evidence for, DeLillo's lunatic conspiracy theory. In the book's weaselly afterword, he says he has made "no attempt to furnish factual answers."
Weaselly, huh? It's weaselly to say, I wrote a novel, not a history book? Hmm, well, wonder what George thinks of the phrase, "...stray very far from the conclusion that a state, and a very well-run intelligence service is involved here." Let's see, stolen identities, check for Oswald; cleverly crafted documentation, ditto; coordinated between continents, well, that is what you call petitio principii, begging the question, no? Still, I would like Woolsey to tell us who he thinks was at the crossroads in Dallas, 1963. But we know his answer: Saddam Hussein!
Dope
Limited Inc tossed and turned last night. In fact, we sleep so poorly lately that Insomnia has become our least favorite devil, and we are at a loss as to how to make terms with it. Benadryll doesn't help any more. Warm milk, not a chance; walking to and fro, exhaustion, lying still, lying under the sheet, pretending to be dead, turning on the light and deciding to read, turning off the light and trying to think of nothing, then trying to think of one thing, then trying not to let the mind get carried away by the thing that has to be done tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. All those nice, luscious stories about incubi and succubi are nothing compared to Beelzebub, Lord not only of the flies but of all buzzing night thoughts. The thought that we could open our eyes at any point last night was itself enough to drive us crazy.
Well, so we go to the National Sleep Foundation, my fave charity, and see what is up. We are greated with one of the great headlines of our time:
NATIONAL SLEEP FOUNDATION WELCOMES NEW FINDINGS SHOWING MINNEAPOLIS TEENS SLEEPING MORE DUE TO LATER SCHOOL START TIMES.
Where were these people when I was a punk?
Here's the kind of graf that makes teenage wasteland seem not so bad.
"Sleep studies indicate adolescents need between 8.5 and 9.25 hours of sleep each night. NSF surveys show that during the school week, only 15 percent sleep 8.5 hours or more, and more than one-quarter sleep less than seven hours. Because of their physiological changes, adolescents tend to fall asleep and awaken later, which can find their body clocks in conflict with school clocks if classes begin at a time when teens want to be sleeping. The result is that too many teens come to school too sleepy to learn. "
Well, the greatest non-sleeper in history is Macbeth. But Freud points out that Macbeth was not exactly the sleepless one:
"One is so unwilling to dismiss a problem like that of Macbeth as insoluble that I will venture to bring up a fresh point, which may offer another way out of the difficulty. Ludwig Jekels, in a recent Shakespearean study, thinks [Endnote 5] he has discovered a particular technique of the poet's, and this might apply to Macbeth. He believes that Shakespeare often splits a character up into two personages, which, taken separately, are not completely understandable and do not become so until they are brought together once more into a unity. This might be so with Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. In that case it would of course be pointless to regard her as an independent character and seek to discover the motives for her change, without considering the Macbeth who completes her. I shall not follow this clue any further, but I should, nevertheless, like to point out something which strikingly confirms this view: the germs of fear which break out in Macbeth on the night of the murder do not develop further in him but in her. It is he who has the hallucination of the dagger before the crime; but it is she who afterwards falls ill of a mental disorder. It is he who after the murder hears the cry in the house: "Sleep no more! Macbeth does murder sleep ..." and so "Macbeth shall sleep no more"; but we never hear that he slept no more, while the Queen, as we see, rises from her bed and, talking in her sleep, betrays her guilt. It is he who stands helpless with bloody hands, lamenting that "all great Neptune's ocean" will not wash them clean, while she comforts him: "A little water clears us of this deed"; but later it is she who washes her hands for a quarter of an hour and cannot get rid of the bloodstains: "All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand." Thus what he feared in his pangs of conscience is fulfilled in her; she becomes all remorse and he all defiance. Together they exhaust the possibilities of reaction to the crime, like two disunited parts of a single psychical individuality, and it may be that they are both copied from the same prototype."
Distributed insomnia. Well, whoever lost his insomnia, I found it. Call immediately. It answers to the name of Warmed Over Death.
Limited Inc tossed and turned last night. In fact, we sleep so poorly lately that Insomnia has become our least favorite devil, and we are at a loss as to how to make terms with it. Benadryll doesn't help any more. Warm milk, not a chance; walking to and fro, exhaustion, lying still, lying under the sheet, pretending to be dead, turning on the light and deciding to read, turning off the light and trying to think of nothing, then trying to think of one thing, then trying not to let the mind get carried away by the thing that has to be done tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. All those nice, luscious stories about incubi and succubi are nothing compared to Beelzebub, Lord not only of the flies but of all buzzing night thoughts. The thought that we could open our eyes at any point last night was itself enough to drive us crazy.
Well, so we go to the National Sleep Foundation, my fave charity, and see what is up. We are greated with one of the great headlines of our time:
NATIONAL SLEEP FOUNDATION WELCOMES NEW FINDINGS SHOWING MINNEAPOLIS TEENS SLEEPING MORE DUE TO LATER SCHOOL START TIMES.
Where were these people when I was a punk?
Here's the kind of graf that makes teenage wasteland seem not so bad.
"Sleep studies indicate adolescents need between 8.5 and 9.25 hours of sleep each night. NSF surveys show that during the school week, only 15 percent sleep 8.5 hours or more, and more than one-quarter sleep less than seven hours. Because of their physiological changes, adolescents tend to fall asleep and awaken later, which can find their body clocks in conflict with school clocks if classes begin at a time when teens want to be sleeping. The result is that too many teens come to school too sleepy to learn. "
Well, the greatest non-sleeper in history is Macbeth. But Freud points out that Macbeth was not exactly the sleepless one:
"One is so unwilling to dismiss a problem like that of Macbeth as insoluble that I will venture to bring up a fresh point, which may offer another way out of the difficulty. Ludwig Jekels, in a recent Shakespearean study, thinks [Endnote 5] he has discovered a particular technique of the poet's, and this might apply to Macbeth. He believes that Shakespeare often splits a character up into two personages, which, taken separately, are not completely understandable and do not become so until they are brought together once more into a unity. This might be so with Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. In that case it would of course be pointless to regard her as an independent character and seek to discover the motives for her change, without considering the Macbeth who completes her. I shall not follow this clue any further, but I should, nevertheless, like to point out something which strikingly confirms this view: the germs of fear which break out in Macbeth on the night of the murder do not develop further in him but in her. It is he who has the hallucination of the dagger before the crime; but it is she who afterwards falls ill of a mental disorder. It is he who after the murder hears the cry in the house: "Sleep no more! Macbeth does murder sleep ..." and so "Macbeth shall sleep no more"; but we never hear that he slept no more, while the Queen, as we see, rises from her bed and, talking in her sleep, betrays her guilt. It is he who stands helpless with bloody hands, lamenting that "all great Neptune's ocean" will not wash them clean, while she comforts him: "A little water clears us of this deed"; but later it is she who washes her hands for a quarter of an hour and cannot get rid of the bloodstains: "All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand." Thus what he feared in his pangs of conscience is fulfilled in her; she becomes all remorse and he all defiance. Together they exhaust the possibilities of reaction to the crime, like two disunited parts of a single psychical individuality, and it may be that they are both copied from the same prototype."
Distributed insomnia. Well, whoever lost his insomnia, I found it. Call immediately. It answers to the name of Warmed Over Death.
Monday, October 22, 2001
Sunday, October 21, 2001
Remora
We at Limited Inc are a little nostalgic for the blood sports of yesteryear -- the homicides that use to fill our tv time before the 9/11 6,000. Remember when all of America was obsessed with whether an aging ex-football player slaughtered his ex-wife and her boyfriend? Remember how this was considered (God knows why) some kind of naked encounter between black and white skin (Limited Inc must confess that we were less than enthralled by the OJ Simpson case and its ultimate meaning. That millionaires commonly get off of homicide raps was not news to people who have lived in Texas for more than a couple of months -- surely you could throw a good sized party with just the unconvicted Sugar Daddies of Fort Worth, not to mention Dallas. The revelation, to us, was not racial, but the house guest situation in Brentwood. That it was possible to roll in the lap of luxury, swilling liquor and eating hors d'oeuvres, without paying rent - and that the only job requirements were good grooming and availability for any late night hints from your host that his hands and teeth were dripping blood and gore for a secret reason -- that this job actually existed was was a crushing blow. We wanted to be Kato Kaelin! If you out there, reading us, are a homicidally inclined rich person in need of a house guest, please, we'd be more than happy. Just keep the fridge stocked, and we will bear infinite witness for you.)
Luckily, there will always be a Texas. The Washington Post has an amazing story this Sunday by Paul Duggan. It profiles the only full time pseudo hitman in the nation. And of course he works for the Houston police. The story begins with a typical day in his life -- there he is, sitting in a hotel room, listening to a wife's emotional plea that he take her money and eliminate her husband, so that she can find true love in the arms of another -- paid for, of course, by her husband's estate.
These two grafs are for those of you out there who don't believe me:
"Playing the part of the hit man was a 54-year-old undercover cop named Gary Johnson. Investigating murder solicitation plots and posing as a killer for hire is his full-time job, a busy specialty in Harris County, population 3.4 million. His beat is rife with big-money schemers and low-rent dreamers, many of whom, to their regret, have made the hit man's acquaintance.
In the last dozen years, working for the Harris County district attorney's office, Johnson has posed as a contract killer in about 100 meetings like the one with Lynn Kilroy. About 55 of those meetings led to murder solicitation charges against more than 60 people -- housewives, barflies, business owners, burger flippers, pencil pushers, an Elvis impersonator, even a church pianist who wanted the choir director dead."
And, okay, I can't resist one ghoulish note, though I usually try not to quote this much of an article. Here's my fave:
"Once he was offered a $22,000 speedboat, but normally his fees run in the low four figures. In 1993, a high school computer whiz named Shawn Quinn told Johnson he wanted a romantic rival slain, and he gave the hit man three $1 bills and seven Atari video games for the job.
"You want a $3 killing?" said the hit man, nonplused.
Quinn handed him a fistful of coins, making it a $5.30 killing, and said to look at the bright side.
"If you drive back on the toll road, you won't need to get change."
Apparently the neighborhood hit man is as much in demand as a good dentist. You see, you never know when your going to get tired of your loved ones in Houston.
We at Limited Inc are a little nostalgic for the blood sports of yesteryear -- the homicides that use to fill our tv time before the 9/11 6,000. Remember when all of America was obsessed with whether an aging ex-football player slaughtered his ex-wife and her boyfriend? Remember how this was considered (God knows why) some kind of naked encounter between black and white skin (Limited Inc must confess that we were less than enthralled by the OJ Simpson case and its ultimate meaning. That millionaires commonly get off of homicide raps was not news to people who have lived in Texas for more than a couple of months -- surely you could throw a good sized party with just the unconvicted Sugar Daddies of Fort Worth, not to mention Dallas. The revelation, to us, was not racial, but the house guest situation in Brentwood. That it was possible to roll in the lap of luxury, swilling liquor and eating hors d'oeuvres, without paying rent - and that the only job requirements were good grooming and availability for any late night hints from your host that his hands and teeth were dripping blood and gore for a secret reason -- that this job actually existed was was a crushing blow. We wanted to be Kato Kaelin! If you out there, reading us, are a homicidally inclined rich person in need of a house guest, please, we'd be more than happy. Just keep the fridge stocked, and we will bear infinite witness for you.)
Luckily, there will always be a Texas. The Washington Post has an amazing story this Sunday by Paul Duggan. It profiles the only full time pseudo hitman in the nation. And of course he works for the Houston police. The story begins with a typical day in his life -- there he is, sitting in a hotel room, listening to a wife's emotional plea that he take her money and eliminate her husband, so that she can find true love in the arms of another -- paid for, of course, by her husband's estate.
These two grafs are for those of you out there who don't believe me:
"Playing the part of the hit man was a 54-year-old undercover cop named Gary Johnson. Investigating murder solicitation plots and posing as a killer for hire is his full-time job, a busy specialty in Harris County, population 3.4 million. His beat is rife with big-money schemers and low-rent dreamers, many of whom, to their regret, have made the hit man's acquaintance.
In the last dozen years, working for the Harris County district attorney's office, Johnson has posed as a contract killer in about 100 meetings like the one with Lynn Kilroy. About 55 of those meetings led to murder solicitation charges against more than 60 people -- housewives, barflies, business owners, burger flippers, pencil pushers, an Elvis impersonator, even a church pianist who wanted the choir director dead."
And, okay, I can't resist one ghoulish note, though I usually try not to quote this much of an article. Here's my fave:
"Once he was offered a $22,000 speedboat, but normally his fees run in the low four figures. In 1993, a high school computer whiz named Shawn Quinn told Johnson he wanted a romantic rival slain, and he gave the hit man three $1 bills and seven Atari video games for the job.
"You want a $3 killing?" said the hit man, nonplused.
Quinn handed him a fistful of coins, making it a $5.30 killing, and said to look at the bright side.
"If you drive back on the toll road, you won't need to get change."
Apparently the neighborhood hit man is as much in demand as a good dentist. You see, you never know when your going to get tired of your loved ones in Houston.
Remora
Having an ancien regime taste for irony here at Limited Inc, we found this story somehow, well --- ticklish.
Vietnam Calls O.C. Group Terrorists
It appears that President Thieu's successors are alive and well and living in LA. Where else? An organization named Free Vietnam, which claims to be the true government of Vietnam (an obvious falsehood, since Limited Inc is the true and duly elected government of Vietnam), has been tending to its cred -- by which it earns "loans" from nostalgic Vietnamese businessmen -- by supplying available young and unemployed men with machine guns or bombs and turning them loose in Thailand. The Thais aren't amused. Two grafs:
"Vietnam has asked the United States to bring terrorism charges against the group's leader, former civil engineer Chanh Huu Nguyen, 52.
"Many times [group members] have organized bombings in Vietnam and against its agencies abroad," said Thuy Thanh Phan, spokeswoman for the Vietnamese Department of Foreign Affairs. "Vietnam has asked the U.S. to stop harboring, tolerating or supporting that group. It should punish those who commit terrorist acts on Vietnam . . . like Nguyen and his group."
Having an ancien regime taste for irony here at Limited Inc, we found this story somehow, well --- ticklish.
Vietnam Calls O.C. Group Terrorists
It appears that President Thieu's successors are alive and well and living in LA. Where else? An organization named Free Vietnam, which claims to be the true government of Vietnam (an obvious falsehood, since Limited Inc is the true and duly elected government of Vietnam), has been tending to its cred -- by which it earns "loans" from nostalgic Vietnamese businessmen -- by supplying available young and unemployed men with machine guns or bombs and turning them loose in Thailand. The Thais aren't amused. Two grafs:
"Vietnam has asked the United States to bring terrorism charges against the group's leader, former civil engineer Chanh Huu Nguyen, 52.
"Many times [group members] have organized bombings in Vietnam and against its agencies abroad," said Thuy Thanh Phan, spokeswoman for the Vietnamese Department of Foreign Affairs. "Vietnam has asked the U.S. to stop harboring, tolerating or supporting that group. It should punish those who commit terrorist acts on Vietnam . . . like Nguyen and his group."
Saturday, October 20, 2001
Remora
Well, news isn't good on the free speech front. The latest assault on our collective intelligence (we collected it from the clothes-line last night -- you can find it in your sock drawer) is the Labor bill which unctuously defines religious 'hate speech' and bans it, visiting its practitioners with a maximum penalty of seven years in stir. That will show them that God's in his heaven, damn them all.
The Observer's editorialist approaches this issue in a gingerly fashion:
"A couple of months ago Nick Griffin, the leader of the BNP, was on on television commenting on the riots in Bradford and Oldham. He said that these towns did not have an 'Asian problem' but a 'Muslim problem'. He demonstrated clearly how racists now use religion as a proxy for race in cultivating hatred for those they despise. The attack on the World Trade Centre, and the wave of Islamophobia it has generated, has only increased the vulnerability of many British citizens to this kind of racist attack.
In his speech to the Labour Party conference, David Blunkett announced the government's response.
He promised 'to toughen up our incitement laws to ensure that attention-seekers and extremists cannot abuse our rights of free speech to stir up tensions in our cities...' Laws against incitement to racial hatred are to be complemented by laws against incitement to religious hatred.
It is not clear exactly what is being proposed here. Few civil libertarians have a problem with a law that restricts speech that, given its immediate context, is likely to result directly in violence. John Stuart Mill gives the example of someone distributing leaflets which say 'Corn dealers are starvers of the poor' to an excited mob gathering outside a corn dealer's house. But it is not clear why we need a law that specifically targets religiously oriented speech that has this effect, rather than a general law against incitement."
A more vigorous defense of free speech is being made by comedian Rowan Atkinson, who pointed out, in a letter to the Times, that the Labor proposal could be used to ban satiric portrayals of religion. The government's purring reply was (get the claws back in the sheathes) that OF COURSE, you can trust us to do what is best.
So, for guidance on the religious issue, we at Limited Inc turned, of course, to Milton's Areopagitica. Milton, when he gets wound up, sounds like a giant chewing rocks. I imagine a murkish, Goya like figure. It's daunting, Milton's prose. After reviewing the history of censorship, with particular reference to the part played by various councils of the Whore of Babylon, ie The Church of Rome, he gives us this wonderful passage:
"And thus ye have the Inventors and the originall of Book-licencing ript up and drawn as lineally as any pedigree. We have it not, that can be heard of, from any ancient State, or politie, or Church, nor by any Statute left us by our Ancestors elder or later; nor from the moderne custom of any reformed Citty, or Church abroad; but from the most Antichristian Councel and the most tyrannous Inquisition that ever inquir'd. Till then Books were ever as freely admitted into the World as any other birth; the issue of the brain was no then the issue of the womb: no envious Juno sate cros-leg'd over the nativity of any man's intellectuall off spring; but if it prov'd a Monster, who denies, but that it was justly burnt, or sunk into the Sea. But that a Book in wors condition then a peccant soul, should be to stand before a Jury ere it be borne to the World, and undergo yet in darknesse the judgment of Radamanth and his Collegues, ere it can pass the ferry backward into light, was never heard before, till that mysterious iniquity, provokt and troubl'd at the first entrance of Reformation, sought out new limbo's and new hells wherein they might include our Books also within the number of their damned."
Among the new limbos, of course, is being fired for your views, which happened to Ann Coulter at the National Review. No need to mince words -- Ann Coulter is a bigot. But really, firing her from the National Review as if she'd just revealed her scarlet letter is unworthy of William Buckley's mag. Anyway, here's the start of a perfectly delicious column which, fortunately, we can read due to the lack, so far, of any hate speech legislation protecting liberals.
"LIBERALS ARE up to their old tricks again. Twenty years of treason haven't slowed them down.
Earlier prescient advice from the anti-American crowd has included: dismantling government intelligence agencies "brick by brick"; toppling the Shah of Iran and giving Islamic fundamentalism its first real foothold in the Mideast; turning the U.S. armed forces into a feminist consciousness-raising session; demanding continued dependence on Arab oil in order to preserve mud flats in Alaska; indignantly opposing a missile defense shield; promoting endless due process rights for aliens who are illegal, diseased or criminal; disarming the public; and purging the nation of insidious references to God."
This stuff is too good to be unbottled. It makes me a little giddy to think that I, a mere peon of the left, have secretly connived at such wonderful treasons. But I do wonder how she tracked us down -- I thought we removed those bricks at night? I was assured nobody was around. But you just can't trust the good people of Reston, VA, can ya? They must have figured something was up the next morning, when we had that huge brick sale to pay for the treasonous opposition to the missile defense plan. Treasonous opposition nowadays costs a packet. For one thing, there are all the black capes you have to buy for the meetings. But Coulter was on the spot. Drat!
Well, news isn't good on the free speech front. The latest assault on our collective intelligence (we collected it from the clothes-line last night -- you can find it in your sock drawer) is the Labor bill which unctuously defines religious 'hate speech' and bans it, visiting its practitioners with a maximum penalty of seven years in stir. That will show them that God's in his heaven, damn them all.
The Observer's editorialist approaches this issue in a gingerly fashion:
"A couple of months ago Nick Griffin, the leader of the BNP, was on on television commenting on the riots in Bradford and Oldham. He said that these towns did not have an 'Asian problem' but a 'Muslim problem'. He demonstrated clearly how racists now use religion as a proxy for race in cultivating hatred for those they despise. The attack on the World Trade Centre, and the wave of Islamophobia it has generated, has only increased the vulnerability of many British citizens to this kind of racist attack.
In his speech to the Labour Party conference, David Blunkett announced the government's response.
He promised 'to toughen up our incitement laws to ensure that attention-seekers and extremists cannot abuse our rights of free speech to stir up tensions in our cities...' Laws against incitement to racial hatred are to be complemented by laws against incitement to religious hatred.
It is not clear exactly what is being proposed here. Few civil libertarians have a problem with a law that restricts speech that, given its immediate context, is likely to result directly in violence. John Stuart Mill gives the example of someone distributing leaflets which say 'Corn dealers are starvers of the poor' to an excited mob gathering outside a corn dealer's house. But it is not clear why we need a law that specifically targets religiously oriented speech that has this effect, rather than a general law against incitement."
A more vigorous defense of free speech is being made by comedian Rowan Atkinson, who pointed out, in a letter to the Times, that the Labor proposal could be used to ban satiric portrayals of religion. The government's purring reply was (get the claws back in the sheathes) that OF COURSE, you can trust us to do what is best.
So, for guidance on the religious issue, we at Limited Inc turned, of course, to Milton's Areopagitica. Milton, when he gets wound up, sounds like a giant chewing rocks. I imagine a murkish, Goya like figure. It's daunting, Milton's prose. After reviewing the history of censorship, with particular reference to the part played by various councils of the Whore of Babylon, ie The Church of Rome, he gives us this wonderful passage:
"And thus ye have the Inventors and the originall of Book-licencing ript up and drawn as lineally as any pedigree. We have it not, that can be heard of, from any ancient State, or politie, or Church, nor by any Statute left us by our Ancestors elder or later; nor from the moderne custom of any reformed Citty, or Church abroad; but from the most Antichristian Councel and the most tyrannous Inquisition that ever inquir'd. Till then Books were ever as freely admitted into the World as any other birth; the issue of the brain was no then the issue of the womb: no envious Juno sate cros-leg'd over the nativity of any man's intellectuall off spring; but if it prov'd a Monster, who denies, but that it was justly burnt, or sunk into the Sea. But that a Book in wors condition then a peccant soul, should be to stand before a Jury ere it be borne to the World, and undergo yet in darknesse the judgment of Radamanth and his Collegues, ere it can pass the ferry backward into light, was never heard before, till that mysterious iniquity, provokt and troubl'd at the first entrance of Reformation, sought out new limbo's and new hells wherein they might include our Books also within the number of their damned."
Among the new limbos, of course, is being fired for your views, which happened to Ann Coulter at the National Review. No need to mince words -- Ann Coulter is a bigot. But really, firing her from the National Review as if she'd just revealed her scarlet letter is unworthy of William Buckley's mag. Anyway, here's the start of a perfectly delicious column which, fortunately, we can read due to the lack, so far, of any hate speech legislation protecting liberals.
"LIBERALS ARE up to their old tricks again. Twenty years of treason haven't slowed them down.
Earlier prescient advice from the anti-American crowd has included: dismantling government intelligence agencies "brick by brick"; toppling the Shah of Iran and giving Islamic fundamentalism its first real foothold in the Mideast; turning the U.S. armed forces into a feminist consciousness-raising session; demanding continued dependence on Arab oil in order to preserve mud flats in Alaska; indignantly opposing a missile defense shield; promoting endless due process rights for aliens who are illegal, diseased or criminal; disarming the public; and purging the nation of insidious references to God."
This stuff is too good to be unbottled. It makes me a little giddy to think that I, a mere peon of the left, have secretly connived at such wonderful treasons. But I do wonder how she tracked us down -- I thought we removed those bricks at night? I was assured nobody was around. But you just can't trust the good people of Reston, VA, can ya? They must have figured something was up the next morning, when we had that huge brick sale to pay for the treasonous opposition to the missile defense plan. Treasonous opposition nowadays costs a packet. For one thing, there are all the black capes you have to buy for the meetings. But Coulter was on the spot. Drat!
Remora
We at Limited Inc are not vindicative people. Some readers have asked us why we have never given a whole spot to Berlusconi, especially since we derided his comment about the superiority of Western Civilization to Islam. But at the moment, it is very hard to take umbrage at a man who finds himself playing a bit part, a swab, an Igor, to world historic events. There's a story about him in today's NYT, and these two grafs say it all.
"After Mr. Berlusconi, who is Italy's richest man, was not invited to a meeting of French, British and German leaders just before today's summit meeting, he showed how much he minded. At a news conference, he said he could not have fit the meeting into his schedule anyway, because he had a previous engagement with center-right leaders from Spain, Austria, and Luxembourg.
Of that group, he boasted that he was "the leader of the most important country."
More important than Austria? More important than Luxemborg? The heart swells. As for what Spain thought about Berlusconi claiming that to be king of the tree house, Lord only knows.
One of the odder characteristics of Braggart B. is how much he operates like a throwback to an earlier era. Weber, in Politics as a Vocation, an essay I am drawn to, lately, makes the point that politicians, just like artists, were invented in the Enlightenment, although of course they have their roots in the humanists of the Renaissance. And, like artists, politicians became autonomous as they separated themselves from patronage. That is, as they learned to live on the fruits of office, rather than having the office bought for them, or using it as a lookout from which to spy venues of pillage. A slow process, of course, which hasn't yet made its appearance here in Texas, but I trust in Weber -- modernity is a-comin'. Berlusconi, from all accounts, has made use of his own fortune and properties in order to run the prime ministers office -- in everything from holding meetings at his own villa in Rome to reimbursing certain of his deputies out of his own pocket. He operates, in other words, like a Medici. And that is very unusual.
Perhaps those who say the nation is disappearing are right, however. In which case all kinds of primitive political formations should start to appear.
We at Limited Inc are not vindicative people. Some readers have asked us why we have never given a whole spot to Berlusconi, especially since we derided his comment about the superiority of Western Civilization to Islam. But at the moment, it is very hard to take umbrage at a man who finds himself playing a bit part, a swab, an Igor, to world historic events. There's a story about him in today's NYT, and these two grafs say it all.
"After Mr. Berlusconi, who is Italy's richest man, was not invited to a meeting of French, British and German leaders just before today's summit meeting, he showed how much he minded. At a news conference, he said he could not have fit the meeting into his schedule anyway, because he had a previous engagement with center-right leaders from Spain, Austria, and Luxembourg.
Of that group, he boasted that he was "the leader of the most important country."
More important than Austria? More important than Luxemborg? The heart swells. As for what Spain thought about Berlusconi claiming that to be king of the tree house, Lord only knows.
One of the odder characteristics of Braggart B. is how much he operates like a throwback to an earlier era. Weber, in Politics as a Vocation, an essay I am drawn to, lately, makes the point that politicians, just like artists, were invented in the Enlightenment, although of course they have their roots in the humanists of the Renaissance. And, like artists, politicians became autonomous as they separated themselves from patronage. That is, as they learned to live on the fruits of office, rather than having the office bought for them, or using it as a lookout from which to spy venues of pillage. A slow process, of course, which hasn't yet made its appearance here in Texas, but I trust in Weber -- modernity is a-comin'. Berlusconi, from all accounts, has made use of his own fortune and properties in order to run the prime ministers office -- in everything from holding meetings at his own villa in Rome to reimbursing certain of his deputies out of his own pocket. He operates, in other words, like a Medici. And that is very unusual.
Perhaps those who say the nation is disappearing are right, however. In which case all kinds of primitive political formations should start to appear.
Friday, October 19, 2001
Dope
I had drinks with Alan a couple of nights ago. I was celebrating keeping this site going for threee months, and writing, almost every day, five hundred words on various topics. We talked a bit about what I was trying to do with this site: attract an audience? What kind of audience? In self-critical mode, I said I realized that sometimes I can't get off of a topic. For instance, the war, maybe I keep returning to it, maybe I am getting boring about it. And Alan said, oh, well, I don't usually read the posts that aren't about the war.
Whoah. Okay, Limited Inc. does go on an occasional esoteric bender, and maybe we should just keep doing war stuff. But screw it -- we never promised you a rose garden, reader. Sometimes the itch to talk about Plutarch or Ernst Junger gets to be too much. So yesterday I thought I'd push the envelope and post a complicated discussion of Gabriel Tarde.
Unfortunately, midway through the post, I looked at what I had written and thought -- this sounds like academic philosophy.
Do I want to do academic philosophy? No, clearly no.
So I decided to write about Bruno Latour instead.
The Connection is this: on his site, which is wonderfully stocked with essays, Latour has an essay, in English, entitled Gabriel Tarde and the End of the Social.
In this essay, Latour discusses Tarde's turn to Leibnitz. What interests me is what attracts Latour to Tarde. I think the answer is Deleuzian: for Tarde, what metaphysics does best, its function in the culture, is lay out the combinations in which reality will come this time. That is, it forges categories as a way of creating schematic space, and then populates that space with concepts. It isn't that these categories aren't founded in reality -- how could they not be? it isn't that the categories are subjective -- on the level of their creation, subjectivity hasn't, itself, been created, been conceptually molded, so to put the discourse in terms of subjectivity and objectivity is a form of philosophical anachronism; but what metaphysics does well is carve out schematic spaces. The hidden relationship of metaphysics and politics is found in the list -- that ur-text of state power.
That's my intro to this quote from Latour :
"Agency plus influence and imitation, is exactly what has been called... an actor-network. [limitedinc note - ANT, actor network theory, was a sociological school associated with Latour and John Law in the 90s.] The link of the two ideas is essential to understand his theory : it is because he is a reductionist �even of a strange sort� that he does not respect any border between nature and society, and because he does not stop at the border between physics, biology and sociology that he does not believe in explaining the lower levels by the higher levels. Such is the key difficulty : human societies are not specific in the sense that they would be symbolic, or made of individual, or due to the existence of a macro organisations. They seem specific to us for no other reasons that, first, we see them from the inside and, second, that they are composed of few elements compared to any of the other societies we grasp only from the outside.
Let�s get slowly here : to begin with, we have to understand that �society� is a word that can be attributed to any association :
" But this means that every thing is a society and that all things are societies. And it is quite remarkable that science, by a logical sequence of its earlier movements, tend to strangely generalise the notion of society. It speaks of cellular societies, why not of atomic societies ? not to mention societies of stars, solar systems. All of the sciences seem fated to become branches of sociology.��p.58.
Instead of saying, like Durkheim, that we ��should treat social facts as a thing��, Tarde says that ��all things are society��, and any phenomenon is a social fact."
Now that last sentence might set off warning flares for the group that thinks the humanists are pulling some fast and loose stuff with the sciences. This group, led by Paul Gross, is especially worried about the phrase 'social construction'. As in the slogan, social construction of reality. Is Latour a social constructionist, as Gross has accused him of being?
Lingua Franca, in 1994, published a profile of Latour BY David Berreby. It is still a handy guide to a sometimes infuriating thinker. I found these three paragraphs particularly enlightening:
"For instance, the Louis Pasteur who emerges in Latour's The Pasteurization of France (Harvard, 1988) -- a study of how Pasteur succeeded in winning over France to his germ theory of disease -- is a thinker-politician, a skilled manipulator of the g overnment and the press as well as a great researcher. All of his skills are important. "Pasteur went to blind wine tastings to demonstrate his theory of fermentation," Latour says. "That's not just showmanship. That's why he's such a good scientis t."
This egalitarianism is reflected in a favorite Latourian word: "symmetry." To understand symmetry, consider, again, The Pasteurization of France. To say that Pasteur succeeded because his discovery was true about nature, for instance, suggests that "nature," a realm neatly separated from society, can be used to explain the causes of activities within society -- that once some discovery about "nature" is shown to be true, society rearranges itself to conform to this truth. According to Latour, this is asymmetrical, because it suggests that an understanding of nature is somehow more powerful, more dispositive, more fundamental, than an understanding of society. On the other hand, one might discard the idea of truth entirely and argue that Pasteur's s uccess can be explained entirely through the lens of "society" -- that, say, the hygienic regulations that stemmed from Pasteur's work were in fact enacted in order to give those in power a new way to control the lower classes. This explanation, Latour ar gues, is a mirror image of the first. Instead of saying that the truth of nature determines social arrangements, it says that social arrangements determine what is construed as nature's truth.
Both views are equally na�ve, Latour says, because both proceed from the assumption that "nature" and "society" are somehow divisible. The symmetrical way to see Pasteur, Latour argues, is to see the split between nature and society as false. Thus, p art of Pasteur's success was his alliance, in the social world, with hygienists, for whom he provided a good explanation of the diseases they fought. But part of his success was also his alliance, in the natural world, with the microbes themselves, for wh om he became spokesman and interpreter. In other words, Latour rejects neither insight: not the insight into society nor the insight into nature. He simply claims that neither should be used to explain the other. It is a position of radical humility: poi nting out an asymmetry does not require the pointer to stand on some higher theoretical ground. It's a gesture not unlike pointing out that a painting in a hallway is hanging crooked."
In other words, Latour's point is not the social constructionist point, with their wierd intersubjective idealism. His point is that the era of the nature/culture divide is over. This is, indeed, the collapse of an enduring meta-narrative, but not one post-modernists envisioned sapping. What is happening in Latour, what connects his with the thinkers Deleuze first connected together, in a sort of geneology of disjunction, is that they see the exhaustion in the heart of dialectics since Hegel - that exhaustion of the subject and the object. Even at the time, it was a reactionary division, created as a sort of degenerate theology, an endrun around natural science in order to produce some secular version of redemption. Since then, it has become an impediment to thinking. And its last, ridiculous embodiment, in the naive realism of certain physicists, and the narcissism of social constructionists, signals the dialectics collapse. It is a ponzi scheme, now, and the concepts populating it are all greater fool ideas - they can have value only if you can sell them to greater fools, ie, students (for the academically entrenched social constructionists) and taxpayers (for the physicists, with their billion dollar plus laboratories).
I had drinks with Alan a couple of nights ago. I was celebrating keeping this site going for threee months, and writing, almost every day, five hundred words on various topics. We talked a bit about what I was trying to do with this site: attract an audience? What kind of audience? In self-critical mode, I said I realized that sometimes I can't get off of a topic. For instance, the war, maybe I keep returning to it, maybe I am getting boring about it. And Alan said, oh, well, I don't usually read the posts that aren't about the war.
Whoah. Okay, Limited Inc. does go on an occasional esoteric bender, and maybe we should just keep doing war stuff. But screw it -- we never promised you a rose garden, reader. Sometimes the itch to talk about Plutarch or Ernst Junger gets to be too much. So yesterday I thought I'd push the envelope and post a complicated discussion of Gabriel Tarde.
Unfortunately, midway through the post, I looked at what I had written and thought -- this sounds like academic philosophy.
Do I want to do academic philosophy? No, clearly no.
So I decided to write about Bruno Latour instead.
The Connection is this: on his site, which is wonderfully stocked with essays, Latour has an essay, in English, entitled Gabriel Tarde and the End of the Social.
In this essay, Latour discusses Tarde's turn to Leibnitz. What interests me is what attracts Latour to Tarde. I think the answer is Deleuzian: for Tarde, what metaphysics does best, its function in the culture, is lay out the combinations in which reality will come this time. That is, it forges categories as a way of creating schematic space, and then populates that space with concepts. It isn't that these categories aren't founded in reality -- how could they not be? it isn't that the categories are subjective -- on the level of their creation, subjectivity hasn't, itself, been created, been conceptually molded, so to put the discourse in terms of subjectivity and objectivity is a form of philosophical anachronism; but what metaphysics does well is carve out schematic spaces. The hidden relationship of metaphysics and politics is found in the list -- that ur-text of state power.
That's my intro to this quote from Latour :
"Agency plus influence and imitation, is exactly what has been called... an actor-network. [limitedinc note - ANT, actor network theory, was a sociological school associated with Latour and John Law in the 90s.] The link of the two ideas is essential to understand his theory : it is because he is a reductionist �even of a strange sort� that he does not respect any border between nature and society, and because he does not stop at the border between physics, biology and sociology that he does not believe in explaining the lower levels by the higher levels. Such is the key difficulty : human societies are not specific in the sense that they would be symbolic, or made of individual, or due to the existence of a macro organisations. They seem specific to us for no other reasons that, first, we see them from the inside and, second, that they are composed of few elements compared to any of the other societies we grasp only from the outside.
Let�s get slowly here : to begin with, we have to understand that �society� is a word that can be attributed to any association :
" But this means that every thing is a society and that all things are societies. And it is quite remarkable that science, by a logical sequence of its earlier movements, tend to strangely generalise the notion of society. It speaks of cellular societies, why not of atomic societies ? not to mention societies of stars, solar systems. All of the sciences seem fated to become branches of sociology.��p.58.
Instead of saying, like Durkheim, that we ��should treat social facts as a thing��, Tarde says that ��all things are society��, and any phenomenon is a social fact."
Now that last sentence might set off warning flares for the group that thinks the humanists are pulling some fast and loose stuff with the sciences. This group, led by Paul Gross, is especially worried about the phrase 'social construction'. As in the slogan, social construction of reality. Is Latour a social constructionist, as Gross has accused him of being?
Lingua Franca, in 1994, published a profile of Latour BY David Berreby. It is still a handy guide to a sometimes infuriating thinker. I found these three paragraphs particularly enlightening:
"For instance, the Louis Pasteur who emerges in Latour's The Pasteurization of France (Harvard, 1988) -- a study of how Pasteur succeeded in winning over France to his germ theory of disease -- is a thinker-politician, a skilled manipulator of the g overnment and the press as well as a great researcher. All of his skills are important. "Pasteur went to blind wine tastings to demonstrate his theory of fermentation," Latour says. "That's not just showmanship. That's why he's such a good scientis t."
This egalitarianism is reflected in a favorite Latourian word: "symmetry." To understand symmetry, consider, again, The Pasteurization of France. To say that Pasteur succeeded because his discovery was true about nature, for instance, suggests that "nature," a realm neatly separated from society, can be used to explain the causes of activities within society -- that once some discovery about "nature" is shown to be true, society rearranges itself to conform to this truth. According to Latour, this is asymmetrical, because it suggests that an understanding of nature is somehow more powerful, more dispositive, more fundamental, than an understanding of society. On the other hand, one might discard the idea of truth entirely and argue that Pasteur's s uccess can be explained entirely through the lens of "society" -- that, say, the hygienic regulations that stemmed from Pasteur's work were in fact enacted in order to give those in power a new way to control the lower classes. This explanation, Latour ar gues, is a mirror image of the first. Instead of saying that the truth of nature determines social arrangements, it says that social arrangements determine what is construed as nature's truth.
Both views are equally na�ve, Latour says, because both proceed from the assumption that "nature" and "society" are somehow divisible. The symmetrical way to see Pasteur, Latour argues, is to see the split between nature and society as false. Thus, p art of Pasteur's success was his alliance, in the social world, with hygienists, for whom he provided a good explanation of the diseases they fought. But part of his success was also his alliance, in the natural world, with the microbes themselves, for wh om he became spokesman and interpreter. In other words, Latour rejects neither insight: not the insight into society nor the insight into nature. He simply claims that neither should be used to explain the other. It is a position of radical humility: poi nting out an asymmetry does not require the pointer to stand on some higher theoretical ground. It's a gesture not unlike pointing out that a painting in a hallway is hanging crooked."
In other words, Latour's point is not the social constructionist point, with their wierd intersubjective idealism. His point is that the era of the nature/culture divide is over. This is, indeed, the collapse of an enduring meta-narrative, but not one post-modernists envisioned sapping. What is happening in Latour, what connects his with the thinkers Deleuze first connected together, in a sort of geneology of disjunction, is that they see the exhaustion in the heart of dialectics since Hegel - that exhaustion of the subject and the object. Even at the time, it was a reactionary division, created as a sort of degenerate theology, an endrun around natural science in order to produce some secular version of redemption. Since then, it has become an impediment to thinking. And its last, ridiculous embodiment, in the naive realism of certain physicists, and the narcissism of social constructionists, signals the dialectics collapse. It is a ponzi scheme, now, and the concepts populating it are all greater fool ideas - they can have value only if you can sell them to greater fools, ie, students (for the academically entrenched social constructionists) and taxpayers (for the physicists, with their billion dollar plus laboratories).
Remora
Our eyes have turned to the NYT Story in the biz section today
Canada Overrides Patent for Cipro to Treat Anthrax
by Amy Harmon and Robert Fear.
Lede graf:
"Canada, taking an unusual step that the United States has resisted, said yesterday that it had overridden Bayer's patent for Cipro, an antibiotic to treat anthrax, and ordered a million tablets of a generic version from a Canadian company."
This rings a bell. In August, Brazil decided to put the screws to Roche, the Swiss drug manufacturer. It declared a national emergency to break the patent on nelfinavir, an AIDS drug. The US reaction to Brazil's patent policies in general has been aggressive, as in this WP story:
"Last February, the United States filed a claim against Brazil with the World Trade Organization over Brazil's intention to produce generic versions of patented AIDS drugs. The United States later withdrew its complaint under heavy international criticism.
But Washington's complaint had mainly centered on a more controversial Brazilian law that allowed Brazil to to produce generic drugs -- including those not related to AIDS -- if companies did not begin producing the drugs in Brazil within three years of patent. Though that law remains on Brazil's books, the action announced today is being taken under different legislation that permits domestic production of internationally patented drugs during national emergencies."
The Financial Times, in Patent Nonsense, an editorial published at the time of the Brazil contratemps, spills the beans on what is at stake:
"In richer countries it is broadly accepted that the high cost of drugs includes the price of progress. But a general erosion of patent rights could jeopardise that consensus. "
Yes, what is at stake is monopoly power and the concept of "fair return," which has been turned into a cash cow by pharmaceutical companies, software companies, and any company that wants to fork over a satisfactory level of campaign contribution in order to get its patents "extended." Canada's action is probably not going to have the immediate repercussion of putting the patent monopoly system into question, but it is going to add to pressure in this country, surely.
One sign of that pressure. There's a public letter from Nader to Tommy Thompson that should take all the hair off Thompson's body, if he were pervious to shame. Of course, he isn't. Thompson claimed that he had no authority to have a generic version of Cipro made in the US. Nader reminds him that, in fact, he does have that authority. Here's a nice bite sized graf:
"In the absence of adequate government stockpiles, families who cannot afford the hundreds of dollars per month per family member for ciprofloxacin risk not having access to this product, should the need arise. This is an unethical and unnecessary form of rationing. Some government officials and those who can afford the high prices have secure supplies of ciprofloxacin. It is your duty to see that all taxpayers and especially those who are less affluent are protected, and are protected as soon as is possible, not as soon as it is possible for one firm, Bayer, to supply the market. And it would make sense to have redundant sources of supply, for all of the obvious reasons. "
Our eyes have turned to the NYT Story in the biz section today
Canada Overrides Patent for Cipro to Treat Anthrax
by Amy Harmon and Robert Fear.
Lede graf:
"Canada, taking an unusual step that the United States has resisted, said yesterday that it had overridden Bayer's patent for Cipro, an antibiotic to treat anthrax, and ordered a million tablets of a generic version from a Canadian company."
This rings a bell. In August, Brazil decided to put the screws to Roche, the Swiss drug manufacturer. It declared a national emergency to break the patent on nelfinavir, an AIDS drug. The US reaction to Brazil's patent policies in general has been aggressive, as in this WP story:
"Last February, the United States filed a claim against Brazil with the World Trade Organization over Brazil's intention to produce generic versions of patented AIDS drugs. The United States later withdrew its complaint under heavy international criticism.
But Washington's complaint had mainly centered on a more controversial Brazilian law that allowed Brazil to to produce generic drugs -- including those not related to AIDS -- if companies did not begin producing the drugs in Brazil within three years of patent. Though that law remains on Brazil's books, the action announced today is being taken under different legislation that permits domestic production of internationally patented drugs during national emergencies."
The Financial Times, in Patent Nonsense, an editorial published at the time of the Brazil contratemps, spills the beans on what is at stake:
"In richer countries it is broadly accepted that the high cost of drugs includes the price of progress. But a general erosion of patent rights could jeopardise that consensus. "
Yes, what is at stake is monopoly power and the concept of "fair return," which has been turned into a cash cow by pharmaceutical companies, software companies, and any company that wants to fork over a satisfactory level of campaign contribution in order to get its patents "extended." Canada's action is probably not going to have the immediate repercussion of putting the patent monopoly system into question, but it is going to add to pressure in this country, surely.
One sign of that pressure. There's a public letter from Nader to Tommy Thompson that should take all the hair off Thompson's body, if he were pervious to shame. Of course, he isn't. Thompson claimed that he had no authority to have a generic version of Cipro made in the US. Nader reminds him that, in fact, he does have that authority. Here's a nice bite sized graf:
"In the absence of adequate government stockpiles, families who cannot afford the hundreds of dollars per month per family member for ciprofloxacin risk not having access to this product, should the need arise. This is an unethical and unnecessary form of rationing. Some government officials and those who can afford the high prices have secure supplies of ciprofloxacin. It is your duty to see that all taxpayers and especially those who are less affluent are protected, and are protected as soon as is possible, not as soon as it is possible for one firm, Bayer, to supply the market. And it would make sense to have redundant sources of supply, for all of the obvious reasons. "
Thursday, October 18, 2001
Remora
Not to brag, but, uh... well, to brag. LimitedInc, if you go back to October 6th, was all about the terrorist-pirate analogy. It has since been picked up (probably, we suspect, because IMPORTANT MEDIA PEOPLE are secretly reading this weblog for pointers -- you know who you are!) all over the place. Latest is Chris Mooney's piece in the American Prospect, which is a little more specific about America's war with the Barbary pirates. Nobody has yet picked up on our point that piracy required sponsoring nations, at first, and actually contributed to nation-building. Somebody will inevitably get to that, though.
Not to brag, but, uh... well, to brag. LimitedInc, if you go back to October 6th, was all about the terrorist-pirate analogy. It has since been picked up (probably, we suspect, because IMPORTANT MEDIA PEOPLE are secretly reading this weblog for pointers -- you know who you are!) all over the place. Latest is Chris Mooney's piece in the American Prospect, which is a little more specific about America's war with the Barbary pirates. Nobody has yet picked up on our point that piracy required sponsoring nations, at first, and actually contributed to nation-building. Somebody will inevitably get to that, though.
Wednesday, October 17, 2001
Dope
Tomorrow, I am going to cut the throat of my popularity -- look, I've had as many as ten people visit this site in one day! -- and do a little foray into the philosophy of Gabriel Tarde. Since I mentioned Tarde in a review I wrote for Green Magazine last year - June, I believe it was -- of Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point, I'm going to paste the review here, for reference. Steve Johnson, the very handsome Steve Johnson whose Feed, alas, seems to be no more, interviewed Gladwell about that book at this link. .
As I said in some earlier post, right now I have a peculiar interest in the ruins and monuments of the 90s. Gladwell's work at the New Yorker wove a little filagree of old psychological experiments and new sounding science around the New Economy mantra. The first article of his I remember reading and going, wow, (and isn't that the quintessential, trend-driven, hyperinfantile response that people report as though it meant something? which I could have said bitchin, or I could have said, right on, or I could have said, great, and the way I packaged the awe would tell you where and when I am ) was the one on the Coolhunt. A lot of people picked up on that article. Luckily, it is in his archive.
I have to include Gladwell's intro graf, so that you get a feel for the man. If you haven't read him.
"Baysie Wightman met DeeDee Gordon, appropriately enough, on a coolhunt. It was 1992. Baysie was a big shot for Converse, and DeeDee, who was barely twenty-one, was running a very cool boutique called Placid Planet, on Newbury Street in Boston. Baysie came in with a camera crew-one she often used when she was coolhunting-and said, "I've been watching your store, I've seen you, I've heard you know what's up," because it was Baysie's job at Converse to find people who knew what was up and she thought DeeDee was one of those people. DeeDee says that she responded with reserve-that "I was like, 'Whatever' "-but Baysie said that if DeeDee ever wanted to come and work at Converse she should just call, and nine months later DeeDee called. This was about the time the cool kids had decided they didn't want the hundred-and-twenty- five-dollar basketball sneaker with seventeen different kinds of high-technology materials and colors and air-cushioned heels anymore. They wanted simplicity and authenticity, and Baysie picked up on that. She brought back the Converse One Star, which was a vulcanized, su�de, low-top classic old-school sneaker from the nineteen-seventies, and, sure enough, the One Star quickly became the signature shoe of the retro era. Remember what Kurt Cobain was wearing in the famous picture of him lying dead on the ground after committing suicide? Black Converse One Stars."
Okay, now for my review of his book.
The Tipping Point: how little things can make a big difference by Malcolm Gladwell Little Brown, $24.95
reviewed by Roger Gathman
At the end of the nineteenth century, an idiosyncratic Frenchman named Garbriel Tarde wrote a series of book in which he hypothesized that human history could be understood in terms of two principals: imitation and opposition. Writing in the wake of Pasteur�s discovery of the germ theory, Tarde envisioned "imitation waves" which propogated themselves limitlessly through human space until they met some countervailing force.
Tarde, by all accounts, was a contrarian fellow, and he died young. His work, ironically, did not spawn any great imitator. Instead, sociologists followed Durkheim, or Weber. Tarde�s weighty tomes were shuffled to the dustier regions of the library, where they sit today, mostly unread. But his insight into "imitation waves" has been revived, even if the current crop of pop philosophers are seemingly unfamiliar with Tarde�s name. The current fad for crossing the old idea of mimesis with information theory goes back to Richard Dawkins, the famed neo-Darwinist, who coined the term "meme" for a particle of content that leaps from mind to mind. The inevitable analogy with genes is invoked to give this idea a semi-scientific status. The term "meme" itself has leaped, at least, from the pages of one glossy magazine to another.
Malcolm Gladwell, the New Yorker writer, has gone back to the analogy with contagion that fascinated Tarde. In his new book, he offers a theory of collective human behavior defined as one vast, multi-tiered map of routes of exposure. The content of that exposure can be syphillis, or it can be the Hush Puppie, those brushed suede shoes that suddenly became fashionable in 1995. Gladwell wants to show us how, like germs, certain ideas, fads, or products can suddenly take off. The tipping point is the threshold between a linear increase in quantity and an epidemic increase. It is that moment when the purely numerical is lifted to a whole other order, transforming random incidences into a whole system.
A disease, according to Gladwell, needs three factors in order to become an epidemic.
First, it needs a core group of carriers. We think of disease as a linear process: I have a cold, I give it to x, who gives it to y, and so on. But an epidemic radiates these linear routes of infection off a small core group of intensely connected people. These are typhoid Mary figures, whose inclinations have lead them into professions or pursuits which involve numerous human relationships across a broad range of social clusters. Extrapolating from disease to any fashion, we have Gladwell�s "rule of the few:" a few people, who are connectors, expose a broad range of people to some contagious content, be it a message, a product, a style or an illness. These connectors alone aren�t sufficient, however. Among the few, we also have mavens, informal information collectors who are disposed to teach other people what they know, and pursuaders, or salesmen.
The second factor in epidemics is degree of contagiousness. Gladwell uses the marketer�s term, "stickiness." A sticky content can be explained by some intrinsic structure of the content, such as the highly infectious nature of the bug that carried the Spanish influenza, but it can also be designed. Gladwell spends a good part of the book talking about certain big features of human psychology to explain how we are peculiarly vulnerable to some contents, and how marketers, or persuaders of any kind, can use those vulnerabilities to produce "tipping points." Gladwell shows how the diffusion of a successful innovation shows a regular and predictable pattern: first it becomes popular among a core group of innovators, who spread it to a larger, but still relatively small, group of early adopters, who spread it out into a much larger group researchers have labeled the "late majority."
Even with the connectors in place and a "sticky" content, however, we also require favoring circumstances. Gladwell calls this the power of context. He uses the context of New York City in the eighties and nineties to highlight the difference between the spike in crimes which occurred in the eighties and the sudden, decisive drop which occurred in the nineties. The spike, Gladwells says, had to do with a general neglect of small features of the urban landscape. Here, Gladwell is picking up on the "broken windows" theory of crime, which predicts that the negligent enforcement of laws against quality of life crimes, like littering and vandalism, will nourish larger, more serious crimes, like robbery and murder.
Gladwell is one of those writers who can actually capture you in the very rhythm of his thought. When I finished The Tipping Point, I briefly became a Gladwell "maven," pressing the book upon my friends with missionary fervor.
But there also exists a cooler, critical spirit inside of me - otherwise I wouldn�t be a book reviewer, n�est-ce pas? That spirit spotted two flaws in Gladwell�s encompassing thesis.
One is that Gladwell sometimes willfully reduces conditions to causes. It is a condition of successfully lighting a kitchen match that it not be wet, but the effective cause of the flame that results when I scratch one across the side of the matchbox is bracketed within a much narrower band of factors. Although this might seem like metaphysical niggling, when Gladwell writes, for instance, summing up his New York crime example: "Clean up graffiti and all of a sudden people who would otherwise commit crimes suddenly don�t," he�s magnified my niggling into a valid objection. In this instance, we know that the crime drop wasn�t confined to New York City. It has happened, for instance, in Washington D.C., where nothing like the Broken Windows program was instituted. What we want is some means of filtering out those conditions which are necessary, but not sufficient, from those which are both. Gladwell is simply too sloppy about this.
The second objection is to Gladwell�s subtitle: "how little things can make a big difference." Basically, Gladwell often performs a sort of analytic hocus-pocus to make us think that there is one little thing which is the tipping point for his "epidemics." Take his example of the epidemic of STD�s in Baltimore in the nineties. He quotes three people with three different explanations of why it occurred, and he points out that, in all of the explanations, the precipitating factor was relatively minor. However, he soft pedals the fact that there are, after all, three different explanations. In almost all his examples, in fact, he relies on one dimension and the small changes within it to forward his thesis, when the important thing is that a complex order emerges from the interrelation of a number of small factors. This is why a person using Gladwell�s book to design, say, a marketing scheme is bound to be frustrated. Although minor changes in initial conditions can cause major systematic shifts, those conditions usually extend through temporal, causal, and physically specific dimensions - what the ecologists call an "adoptive landscape" - which limit the determinateness with which one can predict those shifts.
What do these objections add up to? Really, I am only reiterating the old saw that the devil�s in the details - and that Gladwell hasn�t quite caught that devil yet.
Tomorrow, I am going to cut the throat of my popularity -- look, I've had as many as ten people visit this site in one day! -- and do a little foray into the philosophy of Gabriel Tarde. Since I mentioned Tarde in a review I wrote for Green Magazine last year - June, I believe it was -- of Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point, I'm going to paste the review here, for reference. Steve Johnson, the very handsome Steve Johnson whose Feed, alas, seems to be no more, interviewed Gladwell about that book at this link. .
As I said in some earlier post, right now I have a peculiar interest in the ruins and monuments of the 90s. Gladwell's work at the New Yorker wove a little filagree of old psychological experiments and new sounding science around the New Economy mantra. The first article of his I remember reading and going, wow, (and isn't that the quintessential, trend-driven, hyperinfantile response that people report as though it meant something? which I could have said bitchin, or I could have said, right on, or I could have said, great, and the way I packaged the awe would tell you where and when I am ) was the one on the Coolhunt. A lot of people picked up on that article. Luckily, it is in his archive.
I have to include Gladwell's intro graf, so that you get a feel for the man. If you haven't read him.
"Baysie Wightman met DeeDee Gordon, appropriately enough, on a coolhunt. It was 1992. Baysie was a big shot for Converse, and DeeDee, who was barely twenty-one, was running a very cool boutique called Placid Planet, on Newbury Street in Boston. Baysie came in with a camera crew-one she often used when she was coolhunting-and said, "I've been watching your store, I've seen you, I've heard you know what's up," because it was Baysie's job at Converse to find people who knew what was up and she thought DeeDee was one of those people. DeeDee says that she responded with reserve-that "I was like, 'Whatever' "-but Baysie said that if DeeDee ever wanted to come and work at Converse she should just call, and nine months later DeeDee called. This was about the time the cool kids had decided they didn't want the hundred-and-twenty- five-dollar basketball sneaker with seventeen different kinds of high-technology materials and colors and air-cushioned heels anymore. They wanted simplicity and authenticity, and Baysie picked up on that. She brought back the Converse One Star, which was a vulcanized, su�de, low-top classic old-school sneaker from the nineteen-seventies, and, sure enough, the One Star quickly became the signature shoe of the retro era. Remember what Kurt Cobain was wearing in the famous picture of him lying dead on the ground after committing suicide? Black Converse One Stars."
Okay, now for my review of his book.
The Tipping Point: how little things can make a big difference by Malcolm Gladwell Little Brown, $24.95
reviewed by Roger Gathman
At the end of the nineteenth century, an idiosyncratic Frenchman named Garbriel Tarde wrote a series of book in which he hypothesized that human history could be understood in terms of two principals: imitation and opposition. Writing in the wake of Pasteur�s discovery of the germ theory, Tarde envisioned "imitation waves" which propogated themselves limitlessly through human space until they met some countervailing force.
Tarde, by all accounts, was a contrarian fellow, and he died young. His work, ironically, did not spawn any great imitator. Instead, sociologists followed Durkheim, or Weber. Tarde�s weighty tomes were shuffled to the dustier regions of the library, where they sit today, mostly unread. But his insight into "imitation waves" has been revived, even if the current crop of pop philosophers are seemingly unfamiliar with Tarde�s name. The current fad for crossing the old idea of mimesis with information theory goes back to Richard Dawkins, the famed neo-Darwinist, who coined the term "meme" for a particle of content that leaps from mind to mind. The inevitable analogy with genes is invoked to give this idea a semi-scientific status. The term "meme" itself has leaped, at least, from the pages of one glossy magazine to another.
Malcolm Gladwell, the New Yorker writer, has gone back to the analogy with contagion that fascinated Tarde. In his new book, he offers a theory of collective human behavior defined as one vast, multi-tiered map of routes of exposure. The content of that exposure can be syphillis, or it can be the Hush Puppie, those brushed suede shoes that suddenly became fashionable in 1995. Gladwell wants to show us how, like germs, certain ideas, fads, or products can suddenly take off. The tipping point is the threshold between a linear increase in quantity and an epidemic increase. It is that moment when the purely numerical is lifted to a whole other order, transforming random incidences into a whole system.
A disease, according to Gladwell, needs three factors in order to become an epidemic.
First, it needs a core group of carriers. We think of disease as a linear process: I have a cold, I give it to x, who gives it to y, and so on. But an epidemic radiates these linear routes of infection off a small core group of intensely connected people. These are typhoid Mary figures, whose inclinations have lead them into professions or pursuits which involve numerous human relationships across a broad range of social clusters. Extrapolating from disease to any fashion, we have Gladwell�s "rule of the few:" a few people, who are connectors, expose a broad range of people to some contagious content, be it a message, a product, a style or an illness. These connectors alone aren�t sufficient, however. Among the few, we also have mavens, informal information collectors who are disposed to teach other people what they know, and pursuaders, or salesmen.
The second factor in epidemics is degree of contagiousness. Gladwell uses the marketer�s term, "stickiness." A sticky content can be explained by some intrinsic structure of the content, such as the highly infectious nature of the bug that carried the Spanish influenza, but it can also be designed. Gladwell spends a good part of the book talking about certain big features of human psychology to explain how we are peculiarly vulnerable to some contents, and how marketers, or persuaders of any kind, can use those vulnerabilities to produce "tipping points." Gladwell shows how the diffusion of a successful innovation shows a regular and predictable pattern: first it becomes popular among a core group of innovators, who spread it to a larger, but still relatively small, group of early adopters, who spread it out into a much larger group researchers have labeled the "late majority."
Even with the connectors in place and a "sticky" content, however, we also require favoring circumstances. Gladwell calls this the power of context. He uses the context of New York City in the eighties and nineties to highlight the difference between the spike in crimes which occurred in the eighties and the sudden, decisive drop which occurred in the nineties. The spike, Gladwells says, had to do with a general neglect of small features of the urban landscape. Here, Gladwell is picking up on the "broken windows" theory of crime, which predicts that the negligent enforcement of laws against quality of life crimes, like littering and vandalism, will nourish larger, more serious crimes, like robbery and murder.
Gladwell is one of those writers who can actually capture you in the very rhythm of his thought. When I finished The Tipping Point, I briefly became a Gladwell "maven," pressing the book upon my friends with missionary fervor.
But there also exists a cooler, critical spirit inside of me - otherwise I wouldn�t be a book reviewer, n�est-ce pas? That spirit spotted two flaws in Gladwell�s encompassing thesis.
One is that Gladwell sometimes willfully reduces conditions to causes. It is a condition of successfully lighting a kitchen match that it not be wet, but the effective cause of the flame that results when I scratch one across the side of the matchbox is bracketed within a much narrower band of factors. Although this might seem like metaphysical niggling, when Gladwell writes, for instance, summing up his New York crime example: "Clean up graffiti and all of a sudden people who would otherwise commit crimes suddenly don�t," he�s magnified my niggling into a valid objection. In this instance, we know that the crime drop wasn�t confined to New York City. It has happened, for instance, in Washington D.C., where nothing like the Broken Windows program was instituted. What we want is some means of filtering out those conditions which are necessary, but not sufficient, from those which are both. Gladwell is simply too sloppy about this.
The second objection is to Gladwell�s subtitle: "how little things can make a big difference." Basically, Gladwell often performs a sort of analytic hocus-pocus to make us think that there is one little thing which is the tipping point for his "epidemics." Take his example of the epidemic of STD�s in Baltimore in the nineties. He quotes three people with three different explanations of why it occurred, and he points out that, in all of the explanations, the precipitating factor was relatively minor. However, he soft pedals the fact that there are, after all, three different explanations. In almost all his examples, in fact, he relies on one dimension and the small changes within it to forward his thesis, when the important thing is that a complex order emerges from the interrelation of a number of small factors. This is why a person using Gladwell�s book to design, say, a marketing scheme is bound to be frustrated. Although minor changes in initial conditions can cause major systematic shifts, those conditions usually extend through temporal, causal, and physically specific dimensions - what the ecologists call an "adoptive landscape" - which limit the determinateness with which one can predict those shifts.
What do these objections add up to? Really, I am only reiterating the old saw that the devil�s in the details - and that Gladwell hasn�t quite caught that devil yet.
Remora
Nick Cohen makes some very nice points in this Guardian article (which I went to by way of this weblog -- abrightcolddayinapril-- some nice bits on it, too)
First graf of Cohen's article:
"The bombing of Afghanistan must stop. To say so isn't to appease mass murderers by pretending they are misunderstood fighters against imperialism. You can think, as I do, that the sum of human happiness would inflate exponentially if the Taliban and their Arab allies were driven from power. You can believe that the atrocities of 11 September changed the world and made hitherto unthinkable expedients necessary. You can even fall in love with Tony Blair's mythical America which stood 'side by side with us' in the Blitz of 1940, rather than staying out of the Second World War until 1941, and was 'born out of the defeat of slavery', rather than a declaration of independence by, among others, slave owners. "
That's a bracing return to reality. I think the bombing must stop pretty soon, too, Cohen is right that there is a crisis looming here. It sounds all too much like Somalia redux. Warlords, famine, troops, terrorism. There is a book by David Halberstam out right now, re Clinton and the generals, War in a Time of Peace, which traces, in that inimitably smarmy Halberstam style, the rise of TAC - tactical air command -- over SAC in the nineties. Halberstam gets the insiders to tell about who conceived the convergence of smart tech and rapid response air power and how it changed the whole mindset in the Pentagon. (for a review of this book, see this Slate exchange.) But TAC has limitations, and we are going to see them, I think, in Afghanistan. The more the military tries to make this a replay of Kosovo, the less bang for the buck, or buck for the bang, we are going to get. Unless you can get the men in the training camps that we are really trying to stop to line up -- say, post some convincing announcement re Calisthenics and anthrax training at 0900 h -- air power is going to have to be subordinate, eventually, to more traditional military strikes. This is the nightmare that Bush, understandably, wants to avoid.
But I am putting Cohen's message in a narrow context. In the larger context of this war, in the way it is being turned, at least for now, in the Arab world into a war where American blood is precious, and our blood is water -- as some Egyptian housewife interviewed by the Times put it, I thought rather snappily -- the bombing has to cease pretty soon, and the attention to famine has to be put first.
Nick Cohen makes some very nice points in this Guardian article (which I went to by way of this weblog -- abrightcolddayinapril-- some nice bits on it, too)
First graf of Cohen's article:
"The bombing of Afghanistan must stop. To say so isn't to appease mass murderers by pretending they are misunderstood fighters against imperialism. You can think, as I do, that the sum of human happiness would inflate exponentially if the Taliban and their Arab allies were driven from power. You can believe that the atrocities of 11 September changed the world and made hitherto unthinkable expedients necessary. You can even fall in love with Tony Blair's mythical America which stood 'side by side with us' in the Blitz of 1940, rather than staying out of the Second World War until 1941, and was 'born out of the defeat of slavery', rather than a declaration of independence by, among others, slave owners. "
That's a bracing return to reality. I think the bombing must stop pretty soon, too, Cohen is right that there is a crisis looming here. It sounds all too much like Somalia redux. Warlords, famine, troops, terrorism. There is a book by David Halberstam out right now, re Clinton and the generals, War in a Time of Peace, which traces, in that inimitably smarmy Halberstam style, the rise of TAC - tactical air command -- over SAC in the nineties. Halberstam gets the insiders to tell about who conceived the convergence of smart tech and rapid response air power and how it changed the whole mindset in the Pentagon. (for a review of this book, see this Slate exchange.) But TAC has limitations, and we are going to see them, I think, in Afghanistan. The more the military tries to make this a replay of Kosovo, the less bang for the buck, or buck for the bang, we are going to get. Unless you can get the men in the training camps that we are really trying to stop to line up -- say, post some convincing announcement re Calisthenics and anthrax training at 0900 h -- air power is going to have to be subordinate, eventually, to more traditional military strikes. This is the nightmare that Bush, understandably, wants to avoid.
But I am putting Cohen's message in a narrow context. In the larger context of this war, in the way it is being turned, at least for now, in the Arab world into a war where American blood is precious, and our blood is water -- as some Egyptian housewife interviewed by the Times put it, I thought rather snappily -- the bombing has to cease pretty soon, and the attention to famine has to be put first.
Tuesday, October 16, 2001
Remora
Peter Hitchens is Christopher Hitchens brother. In England, he is a famous Thatcherite, waxing scornful at the leftist tide undermining civilization and stealing the family silver. To read a truly, truly bonkers article, you must take this link . The Spectator.co.uk It is hilarious. I particularly liked the line about the European Union being a smiley faced USSR. "Take me to your balaikas ringing out, Mr. Schroder," type of thing.
Of course, being a Tory of the old school -- I mean very old school, I mean I am pretty sure the guy is still pissed at the frogs for that Willian the Conquerer chap -- Hitchens doesn't content himself with knocking the usual left suspects -- no no no, the meat of the piece, rare and juicy, is dedicated to the proposition that Bush has gotten wobbly. In short, he's operating like the Manchurian candidate. Surely the smileyfaced KGB have been waving cards in front of his face. I'm not joking. An attack on Bush for being a lefty -- will wonders never cease! Here's a beautiful graf:
"This war is easy for the Left to like. By limiting his offensive to �terrorism with a global reach�, President Bush has specifically excluded the IRA from his wrath, robbing the campaign of its alleged founding principle and disillusioning those who fooled themselves into thinking that recent events in Colombia might have weakened American support for Sinn Fein."
Soft on the IRA, and next thing you know the commissars are boarding soldiers in your bedroom.
I can tell that Peter Hitchens is going to be my guiding star through this war. I've always had an unfortunate weakness for lunacy.
Remora
For Christmas in 1914, the Kaiser sent every German soldier on the Western front a box with 10 cigars. Facing them, the Tommies were being flooded with Christmas parcels containing plum cake -- apparently parents and wives at home were properly alarmed at what their boys would be eating over there in France -- all those sauces, you know. The soldiers on both sides declared an informal ceasefire, and traded cigars for plum cake, and sampled each others beers. On January 1, the Germans initiated a barrage, but the Tommies soon noticed they were firing in the air. The British replied, shooting high in the air. A good enough time was had by all. The high commands on both sides were furious, and sent strict orders down to the lower level officers that any fraternizing with the enemy in the future would be severely punished.
Four months later, in April, the Germans tried to break through the front at Ypres using a new weapon. Cannisters were exploded in a salient in front of an Indian-Pakistani battalian. A yellow cloud appeared, and was moved forward gently by the wind. It killed trees, birds, rats, and people. The gas was chlorine. The troops arrayed before it had no knowledge of gas, and no protection from it. Chlorine, breathed in, will either choke you to death immediately or have these effects: you spit up masses of bloody mucuous, your lungs expand to almost twice their normal size, they fill with water, you die. If in 1914, it seemed natural that the troops would fraternize at Christmas, the appearance of the gas -- which was used, by the end of the year, by the British - signalled that this was, indeed, another kind of war altogether. The old 19th century codes were gone.
I'm thinking about this because of an article in the WP Style section Sunday by
Joel Garreau.
Here's the intro grafs:
"Hinges in history -- 1914, 1929, 1945, 1963, 1981, and maybe the morning of Sept. 11, 2001.
These are pivots on which our lives move from one world to another.
After we swing past them, it's hard to remember what the previous world felt like, or what sense it made. (Why did '50s fraternity boys compete to see how many people they could stuff into a telephone booth? What was a telephone booth?)"
I am not sure 9/11 is in that company, but as it becomes obvious that the US is still vulnerable to a terrorist strike - that indeed, we can expect it, if the letter writing anthrax campaign isn't part of it - perhaps something has turned.
There's a lot of criticism of the way the Left has protested this war. Marc Cooper has an article in the LA Times which lays out the problem -- although I don't know what to make of Cooper's mild flag fixation. It isn't the alienation from American symbols that characterizes the Left's wierdness right now -- it is the alienation from reality. Reality is that we might have to look seriously at how we do the future - we might have to leap out of the practico-inert, to use Sartre's wonderful term -- and the left should have some idea of what that means.
Here is what I would like to see as a kind of left-sympathetic guy.
I would like to see some more serious response to the various policy disasters in the Middle East than the "why do they hate us" mantra. Which means making difficult decisions. If it is true that the US sanctions against Iraq and the bombing are immoral, it is also true that the regime of Saddam Hussein is a horror, perpetrated against a people who have never had a chance to decide their fate for themselves. They are locked in a prisonhouse created at the end of WWI and called Iraq. By quitting the bombing, we would accomplish one thing. We would stop pursuing an immoral and also an irrational policy. But what then? Simply leave SH free to continue killing and torturing on the usual scale?
The 'solution' to this, I feel instinctively, is democracy. US foreign policy, famously, is split between a realistic and a Wilsonian, or idealistic, school. The problem isn't really that the idealists are wrong -- it is that they continually underestimate the difficulty of pursuading the American public to follow through on the type of committments that would underwrite idealism, beginning with the failure to join the League of Nations and going all the way up to the ridiculous control Jesse Helms exerted over foreign policy in the Clinton years.
An idealist would have to say -- it is impossible to pursue foreign policy in a properly democratic way without building support for it domestically. Unfortunately, even when the US has promoted democracy, it has done so inconsistently, with wide leaway left for America's material interests. Jimmy Carter would lecture Argentine generals about human rights, but not Saudi sheiks. And when it got down to promoting democracy, the end result has been mere voting. Voting is the last part of democracy -- without separation of powers, without guarantees of rights, there is no democracy, period, whether the state's leadership has been elected or appointed itself over the barrel of a gun.
But given that stronger notion of democracy, can the left really credibly promote democracy? Only if it is willing to say that democracy might not be good, in the short run, for the West -- I imagine real democracy in Saudi Arabia and Egypt would be plenty bad for the Western oil interests, and let's face it, that is our interest. Our standard of living depends materially on the availability and cheapness of oil.
Which gets us to the second serious contribution the left can bring to the table (while tucking in its napkin and asking for a little more wine, garcon): power is a political issue. The refusal to recognize or go with the Kyoto accords isn't just a disaster for the environment, but it is a lost political opportunity. The Federal government underwrote our oil economy - from a foreign policy that was calibrated to keeping the price of a barrel of oil as low as it could go in the fifties and sixties to the socialization of the road system. The left has to make the case for the Federal government underwriting a new power economy -- that means everything from fuel cells which use natural gas to solar and wind power to conservation. This is the most powerful part of a lefty program, and it has been oddly muted since 9/11.
It shouldn't be.
The connection is pretty clear between the alienation of bin Laden's supporters, both active and passive, and the failing government in Saudi Arabia, which is authoritarian, corrupt, and unintelligent. America is so fixated on the Palestine-Israel drama that it doesn't even see what is evident in the Middle East -- that America's other great ally, Saudi Arabia, has squandered its wealth and inscribed itself in the global economic system to the extent that its oil simply doesn't count anymore. It can't afford gestures like the 1973 oil boycott. It can't afford the infrastructure it so stupidly built. It shouldn't have built it anyway. And who profited from it but American weapons manufacturers, American construction companies, and etc. When you think about the importance of SA to the Arabic world, this is the elephant in the room.
So - there are things the left, or at least a lefty leaning guy like me, can suggest about the future.
For Christmas in 1914, the Kaiser sent every German soldier on the Western front a box with 10 cigars. Facing them, the Tommies were being flooded with Christmas parcels containing plum cake -- apparently parents and wives at home were properly alarmed at what their boys would be eating over there in France -- all those sauces, you know. The soldiers on both sides declared an informal ceasefire, and traded cigars for plum cake, and sampled each others beers. On January 1, the Germans initiated a barrage, but the Tommies soon noticed they were firing in the air. The British replied, shooting high in the air. A good enough time was had by all. The high commands on both sides were furious, and sent strict orders down to the lower level officers that any fraternizing with the enemy in the future would be severely punished.
Four months later, in April, the Germans tried to break through the front at Ypres using a new weapon. Cannisters were exploded in a salient in front of an Indian-Pakistani battalian. A yellow cloud appeared, and was moved forward gently by the wind. It killed trees, birds, rats, and people. The gas was chlorine. The troops arrayed before it had no knowledge of gas, and no protection from it. Chlorine, breathed in, will either choke you to death immediately or have these effects: you spit up masses of bloody mucuous, your lungs expand to almost twice their normal size, they fill with water, you die. If in 1914, it seemed natural that the troops would fraternize at Christmas, the appearance of the gas -- which was used, by the end of the year, by the British - signalled that this was, indeed, another kind of war altogether. The old 19th century codes were gone.
I'm thinking about this because of an article in the WP Style section Sunday by
Joel Garreau.
Here's the intro grafs:
"Hinges in history -- 1914, 1929, 1945, 1963, 1981, and maybe the morning of Sept. 11, 2001.
These are pivots on which our lives move from one world to another.
After we swing past them, it's hard to remember what the previous world felt like, or what sense it made. (Why did '50s fraternity boys compete to see how many people they could stuff into a telephone booth? What was a telephone booth?)"
I am not sure 9/11 is in that company, but as it becomes obvious that the US is still vulnerable to a terrorist strike - that indeed, we can expect it, if the letter writing anthrax campaign isn't part of it - perhaps something has turned.
There's a lot of criticism of the way the Left has protested this war. Marc Cooper has an article in the LA Times which lays out the problem -- although I don't know what to make of Cooper's mild flag fixation. It isn't the alienation from American symbols that characterizes the Left's wierdness right now -- it is the alienation from reality. Reality is that we might have to look seriously at how we do the future - we might have to leap out of the practico-inert, to use Sartre's wonderful term -- and the left should have some idea of what that means.
Here is what I would like to see as a kind of left-sympathetic guy.
I would like to see some more serious response to the various policy disasters in the Middle East than the "why do they hate us" mantra. Which means making difficult decisions. If it is true that the US sanctions against Iraq and the bombing are immoral, it is also true that the regime of Saddam Hussein is a horror, perpetrated against a people who have never had a chance to decide their fate for themselves. They are locked in a prisonhouse created at the end of WWI and called Iraq. By quitting the bombing, we would accomplish one thing. We would stop pursuing an immoral and also an irrational policy. But what then? Simply leave SH free to continue killing and torturing on the usual scale?
The 'solution' to this, I feel instinctively, is democracy. US foreign policy, famously, is split between a realistic and a Wilsonian, or idealistic, school. The problem isn't really that the idealists are wrong -- it is that they continually underestimate the difficulty of pursuading the American public to follow through on the type of committments that would underwrite idealism, beginning with the failure to join the League of Nations and going all the way up to the ridiculous control Jesse Helms exerted over foreign policy in the Clinton years.
An idealist would have to say -- it is impossible to pursue foreign policy in a properly democratic way without building support for it domestically. Unfortunately, even when the US has promoted democracy, it has done so inconsistently, with wide leaway left for America's material interests. Jimmy Carter would lecture Argentine generals about human rights, but not Saudi sheiks. And when it got down to promoting democracy, the end result has been mere voting. Voting is the last part of democracy -- without separation of powers, without guarantees of rights, there is no democracy, period, whether the state's leadership has been elected or appointed itself over the barrel of a gun.
But given that stronger notion of democracy, can the left really credibly promote democracy? Only if it is willing to say that democracy might not be good, in the short run, for the West -- I imagine real democracy in Saudi Arabia and Egypt would be plenty bad for the Western oil interests, and let's face it, that is our interest. Our standard of living depends materially on the availability and cheapness of oil.
Which gets us to the second serious contribution the left can bring to the table (while tucking in its napkin and asking for a little more wine, garcon): power is a political issue. The refusal to recognize or go with the Kyoto accords isn't just a disaster for the environment, but it is a lost political opportunity. The Federal government underwrote our oil economy - from a foreign policy that was calibrated to keeping the price of a barrel of oil as low as it could go in the fifties and sixties to the socialization of the road system. The left has to make the case for the Federal government underwriting a new power economy -- that means everything from fuel cells which use natural gas to solar and wind power to conservation. This is the most powerful part of a lefty program, and it has been oddly muted since 9/11.
It shouldn't be.
The connection is pretty clear between the alienation of bin Laden's supporters, both active and passive, and the failing government in Saudi Arabia, which is authoritarian, corrupt, and unintelligent. America is so fixated on the Palestine-Israel drama that it doesn't even see what is evident in the Middle East -- that America's other great ally, Saudi Arabia, has squandered its wealth and inscribed itself in the global economic system to the extent that its oil simply doesn't count anymore. It can't afford gestures like the 1973 oil boycott. It can't afford the infrastructure it so stupidly built. It shouldn't have built it anyway. And who profited from it but American weapons manufacturers, American construction companies, and etc. When you think about the importance of SA to the Arabic world, this is the elephant in the room.
So - there are things the left, or at least a lefty leaning guy like me, can suggest about the future.
Monday, October 15, 2001
Remora
Renata Adler and Joan Didion - can I name four things I like about them? I like the way in which these two women stay resolutely out of the loop. I like the unblinking gaze they cast upon the loop. I like the way dates are important to them, documents are important to them, rhetorical impasses are important to them. The way they proceed by looking, rather than feeling. A hard thing to do, because it can addict you to the disconnect, to an automatic blankness of response, as if blankness were somehow more objective. However, in a political culture that has debased outrage and routinized indignation (indignation is the default mode on MSNBC, the cheap standard, news talk shows look more and more like bad marriages, we watch a man bellow and wonder how high his voice can get, how much face he can put in another person's face, and we know, hey, this is an act), we go to the slow take for the sake of, well, beauty. A balance, a classicicm. So it is nice that Renata Adler is interviewed extensively here -- even if, to appreciate the interview, you have to have an sense of the stakes, which are admittedly pretty rarified stakes (I'll have mine well done, please). Briefly, the New York Times has made it its business, over the past year, to cut Adler down. The beef if that Adler won't get with the program about Watergate. She insists that John Sirica, far from being a Watergate hero, was a rather stupid man with a shady past. Now, sometimes I disagree with Adler violently. I think her defense of Westmoreland, who sued 60 minutes, was wrongheaded. But she is a fascinating writer. There are writers who dig carefully, have an archeologist's concern for levels, damage, evidence. You don't get sloppy with your artifacts, you are intensely concerned with where and when they appear, you are intensely concerned with context.
Joan Didion is a greater writer, which makes it all the more unfortunate that she was interviewed by one Tom Christie for the LA Weekly. This indigestible melange is how he segues into the interview.
"THERE'S SOMETHING UNSETTLING ABOUT JOAN DIDION. Perhaps it's the body of work, and the fact that she's one of few living writers whose name can be shaped unapologetically into an adjective: Didionesque. Or perhaps it's the clean, calm, almost soporific style with which she eviscerates the likes of Bob Woodward and Michael Isikoff and Cokie Roberts in her new book, Political Fictions (Knopf), a collection of eight lengthy essays on the American political process."
A calm, almost soporfic style, that also slices and dices? She writes like a sleepy surgeon, or is it a drugged Ronco announcer? Or perhaps a fishmonger with insomnia? This is writing that throws out the words and lets the sense come creeping after it. The encounter between this cerebrally dormant style and Didion is like the encounter of an umbrella and a sewing machine on an ironing board, as Lautreamont once said. Or maybe it isn't -- what the heck, just ink it in. The motto, I guess, of the LA Weekly.
In other news -- Alan has gotten a fan letter for his rebuttal of my Friday post -- but hey, I got a fan letter too. So score is one to one.
Renata Adler and Joan Didion - can I name four things I like about them? I like the way in which these two women stay resolutely out of the loop. I like the unblinking gaze they cast upon the loop. I like the way dates are important to them, documents are important to them, rhetorical impasses are important to them. The way they proceed by looking, rather than feeling. A hard thing to do, because it can addict you to the disconnect, to an automatic blankness of response, as if blankness were somehow more objective. However, in a political culture that has debased outrage and routinized indignation (indignation is the default mode on MSNBC, the cheap standard, news talk shows look more and more like bad marriages, we watch a man bellow and wonder how high his voice can get, how much face he can put in another person's face, and we know, hey, this is an act), we go to the slow take for the sake of, well, beauty. A balance, a classicicm. So it is nice that Renata Adler is interviewed extensively here -- even if, to appreciate the interview, you have to have an sense of the stakes, which are admittedly pretty rarified stakes (I'll have mine well done, please). Briefly, the New York Times has made it its business, over the past year, to cut Adler down. The beef if that Adler won't get with the program about Watergate. She insists that John Sirica, far from being a Watergate hero, was a rather stupid man with a shady past. Now, sometimes I disagree with Adler violently. I think her defense of Westmoreland, who sued 60 minutes, was wrongheaded. But she is a fascinating writer. There are writers who dig carefully, have an archeologist's concern for levels, damage, evidence. You don't get sloppy with your artifacts, you are intensely concerned with where and when they appear, you are intensely concerned with context.
Joan Didion is a greater writer, which makes it all the more unfortunate that she was interviewed by one Tom Christie for the LA Weekly. This indigestible melange is how he segues into the interview.
"THERE'S SOMETHING UNSETTLING ABOUT JOAN DIDION. Perhaps it's the body of work, and the fact that she's one of few living writers whose name can be shaped unapologetically into an adjective: Didionesque. Or perhaps it's the clean, calm, almost soporific style with which she eviscerates the likes of Bob Woodward and Michael Isikoff and Cokie Roberts in her new book, Political Fictions (Knopf), a collection of eight lengthy essays on the American political process."
A calm, almost soporfic style, that also slices and dices? She writes like a sleepy surgeon, or is it a drugged Ronco announcer? Or perhaps a fishmonger with insomnia? This is writing that throws out the words and lets the sense come creeping after it. The encounter between this cerebrally dormant style and Didion is like the encounter of an umbrella and a sewing machine on an ironing board, as Lautreamont once said. Or maybe it isn't -- what the heck, just ink it in. The motto, I guess, of the LA Weekly.
In other news -- Alan has gotten a fan letter for his rebuttal of my Friday post -- but hey, I got a fan letter too. So score is one to one.
Sunday, October 14, 2001
Remora
A little late to announce this -- but Jacques Derrida, to whom we at Limited Inc are constantly alluding (unless we take our regular meds packet), won the Theodor Adorno prize, worth around 100,000 bucks. Yes, I'd never heard of it either. Seems that Godard and Boulez are past winners. Der Spiegel has a nice photo of Jacques looking tough to go with the story.
Oh, and Jurgen Habermas won a peace prize in Germany. He took the occasion to call for (what else? ) dialogue with Islam.
A little late to announce this -- but Jacques Derrida, to whom we at Limited Inc are constantly alluding (unless we take our regular meds packet), won the Theodor Adorno prize, worth around 100,000 bucks. Yes, I'd never heard of it either. Seems that Godard and Boulez are past winners. Der Spiegel has a nice photo of Jacques looking tough to go with the story.
Oh, and Jurgen Habermas won a peace prize in Germany. He took the occasion to call for (what else? ) dialogue with Islam.
Dope.
Yesterday Alan wrote an extensive reply to my Friday post. You'll remember, that Post was a harsh appraisal of an article in Salon. Here's my reply to Alan, who I must thank for livening up my site this weekend.
Alan,
I'll concede your point about Buddhism, because you know what you are talking about, and I don't. I will admit that, childishly, I wrote those jibes against Buddhism partly to rouse you to write something. Sorry -- but it worked.
There's three more serious points you make, and that I'd like to take up.
Fundamentalism.
Connerney's point about fundamentalism is, I think, folded into a larger argument which claims that fundamentalist Islam, although only one part of Islam, correctly gives weight to an Islamic principle - jihad. And given that principle, Connerney can compare Islam in general with Judaism and Christianity in general. The argument is a little assymetrical, because Connerney doesn't make the same point about fundamentalist Christianity -- that is, he doesn't make the point that fundamentalist Christianity gets some part of Christianity right. He gets sidetracked into a sociological comparison between fundamentalist Islam and fundamentalist Christianity. As I said in my previous post, I think he's simply wrong, here. But there is something depressing and dumb about simply tallying up the atrocities on both sides -- fundamentalist Islam generates apartheid against women, fundamentalist Christianity generates apartheid against blacks in South Africa, and so on. Your point is well taken that fundamentalism can "only be formulated after fully historical approaches to religious scripture have been developed -- source criticism and form criticism and that sort of thing." But in terms of the larger argument Connerney is mounting, I'm not sure if this isn't a red herring. I'll concede that the Croatian priesthood that blessed the execution of the Serbs might very well have been well versed in source criticism, but what I am after, and what I think Connerney's article is after, is how the religion institutionalizes behaviors. In other words, is there any common thread that runs through fundamentalist Christianity, Catholicism, and other forms of Protestantism so that I can say that my little list of atrocities is consistently motivated?
Texts
But first, let's consider what you say about the Qu'ran and the Bible. Your suggestion that " when an utterance is made in the second person [as it is in the Qu'ran] directed to a nonspecific You, when the content of that utterance makes it possible to take the utterance to be of universal applicability, (applicable to all people in all places and at all times, or at all times subsequent to the time of the utterance), that is a natural way to interpret the utterance. And so those utterances have been interpreted in the Islamic tradition." That sounds right to me. But the upshot, surely, should be that that the Qu'ran limits the variety of Islams, not that it eliminates them. Sufis and Dervishes make out of those imperatives a mystical sense -- orthodox Sunni Muslims make something else.
And you are right about the Bible -- it is a madman's attic.
However, I think you are wrong to diss my quotes from the bloodier chapters of the Old Testament. If one Christian reads the Bible and resolves to love his neighbor as himself, and another resolves not to suffer a witch to live, I wouldn't say the latter doesn't understand the Bible -- I would say he doesn't understand what parts of the Bible we don't take seriously in 2001. And that shift isn't in the Bible, but outside of it, in the world. In other words, I think you overestimate the power of texts in these religions, and underestimate the power of the organized body of interpreters. Perhaps I think this because I don't have a stake in thinking that the Bible (or the Qu'ran) is true in any spiritual sense. Still, what's important to me is your larger point, about the centrality of war or struggle in Islam. This gets us to our most important point.
The Fatal Comparison
When Berlusconi announced that Western Civilization was superior to Eastern, he was opening the floodgates. The superiority of the West used to be relatively undisputed in the West, but since the end of the colonial era, the creed has been rather battered. Only Samuel Huntington and a few sour Straussians bothered to man the ramparts any more. The triumphalist conviction has come galumphing back in the wake of September 11th. Connerney's article is definitely in that vein. Now I think you, Alan, think that I was sort of harsh to Connerney - vitriolic, unfair, and wrongheaded. But I still contend the guy is either ignorant of sophistical when he compares Christianity and Islam. This isn't because I am particularly prejudiced against Christianity. I make no bones about being an atheist, but I can see the attraction of religion, and I understand people who take Jesus as their savior. I come from those people. Nor do I think Islam should be understood on some sliding scale - the usual relativist, multi-culty mumbo-jumbo. No, my problem is that Connerney can't mount a fair comparison when the comparison is obvious. It is between the centrality of jihad and the centrality of conversion.
I said that I wanted to find a thread connecting the various forms of Christianity. Christianity never presented itself as a philosophy, of which one can be persuaded. It presented itself as a means of salvation, to which one can be converted. To ignore conversion, as Connerney does, is to bowdlerize Christianity - to make it historically inexplicable.
You present a hypothetical: Imagine a Christian being handed a Bible asked, "OK, where's the meat? If I've only got time to read a small part of this thing to get the most important ideas, what should I read?" Now, your own reply to your hypothetical shows that you and I went to different churches when we were kids. Because I went to a Southern Baptist church, and I can answer that question even now, from memory: "For God so loved the world that he gave his only beloved son that whosoever believeth in him shall not perish but have everlasting life." To say that as we used to in Sunday school, put hyphens between the words, and say it like you are running downstairs. Your own response to your hypothetical is nice, it emphasizes the ethical and aesthetic sides of Christianity, but historically, all of that was secondary. If belief in Jesus is so important that non-belief can be punished by eternal flames, than recommendations that you be nice to your local Samaritan sort of go by the by. In fact, this is where a conversion based religion with a salvationist creed is truly insidious -- it posits a judgment of people outside of ethics, based on what their 'heart' -- that organ so favored by our current Prez - contains. It is this that explains the ability of an organized religion that is based on belief in a God who tells us to love one another to calmly organize auto de fes, harbor a rancid, and intermittently deadly, prejudice against Jews, and to commit numberless atrocities (of which I could make a Homeric catalogue, but won't) against its own set of unbelievers. Connerney might feel there are ameliorating circumstances, but the terminuses of his comparison are obvious. Not filling in the Christian end -- ignoring conversion - is cheating. He confesses, after all, to teaching religious studies, so he should have some familiarity with the subject. That he skews the article the way he does makes me pity with tears in my eyes - well, okay, not that much -- the poor kids of Iona.
And one last note about Judaism. There isn't a conversion function that I know of in Judaism, which distinguishes it in a major way from the two other religions. Furthermore, Judaism, for about 1900 years, had to survive in a hostile environment, in which it was always on the verge of persecution. Therefore, as an organized body, it has built in limits to the damage it can do. Spinoza might be expelled from the synagogue, but they weren't going to go after Descartes with torches.
There it is.
Roger
Yesterday Alan wrote an extensive reply to my Friday post. You'll remember, that Post was a harsh appraisal of an article in Salon. Here's my reply to Alan, who I must thank for livening up my site this weekend.
Alan,
I'll concede your point about Buddhism, because you know what you are talking about, and I don't. I will admit that, childishly, I wrote those jibes against Buddhism partly to rouse you to write something. Sorry -- but it worked.
There's three more serious points you make, and that I'd like to take up.
Fundamentalism.
Connerney's point about fundamentalism is, I think, folded into a larger argument which claims that fundamentalist Islam, although only one part of Islam, correctly gives weight to an Islamic principle - jihad. And given that principle, Connerney can compare Islam in general with Judaism and Christianity in general. The argument is a little assymetrical, because Connerney doesn't make the same point about fundamentalist Christianity -- that is, he doesn't make the point that fundamentalist Christianity gets some part of Christianity right. He gets sidetracked into a sociological comparison between fundamentalist Islam and fundamentalist Christianity. As I said in my previous post, I think he's simply wrong, here. But there is something depressing and dumb about simply tallying up the atrocities on both sides -- fundamentalist Islam generates apartheid against women, fundamentalist Christianity generates apartheid against blacks in South Africa, and so on. Your point is well taken that fundamentalism can "only be formulated after fully historical approaches to religious scripture have been developed -- source criticism and form criticism and that sort of thing." But in terms of the larger argument Connerney is mounting, I'm not sure if this isn't a red herring. I'll concede that the Croatian priesthood that blessed the execution of the Serbs might very well have been well versed in source criticism, but what I am after, and what I think Connerney's article is after, is how the religion institutionalizes behaviors. In other words, is there any common thread that runs through fundamentalist Christianity, Catholicism, and other forms of Protestantism so that I can say that my little list of atrocities is consistently motivated?
Texts
But first, let's consider what you say about the Qu'ran and the Bible. Your suggestion that " when an utterance is made in the second person [as it is in the Qu'ran] directed to a nonspecific You, when the content of that utterance makes it possible to take the utterance to be of universal applicability, (applicable to all people in all places and at all times, or at all times subsequent to the time of the utterance), that is a natural way to interpret the utterance. And so those utterances have been interpreted in the Islamic tradition." That sounds right to me. But the upshot, surely, should be that that the Qu'ran limits the variety of Islams, not that it eliminates them. Sufis and Dervishes make out of those imperatives a mystical sense -- orthodox Sunni Muslims make something else.
And you are right about the Bible -- it is a madman's attic.
However, I think you are wrong to diss my quotes from the bloodier chapters of the Old Testament. If one Christian reads the Bible and resolves to love his neighbor as himself, and another resolves not to suffer a witch to live, I wouldn't say the latter doesn't understand the Bible -- I would say he doesn't understand what parts of the Bible we don't take seriously in 2001. And that shift isn't in the Bible, but outside of it, in the world. In other words, I think you overestimate the power of texts in these religions, and underestimate the power of the organized body of interpreters. Perhaps I think this because I don't have a stake in thinking that the Bible (or the Qu'ran) is true in any spiritual sense. Still, what's important to me is your larger point, about the centrality of war or struggle in Islam. This gets us to our most important point.
The Fatal Comparison
When Berlusconi announced that Western Civilization was superior to Eastern, he was opening the floodgates. The superiority of the West used to be relatively undisputed in the West, but since the end of the colonial era, the creed has been rather battered. Only Samuel Huntington and a few sour Straussians bothered to man the ramparts any more. The triumphalist conviction has come galumphing back in the wake of September 11th. Connerney's article is definitely in that vein. Now I think you, Alan, think that I was sort of harsh to Connerney - vitriolic, unfair, and wrongheaded. But I still contend the guy is either ignorant of sophistical when he compares Christianity and Islam. This isn't because I am particularly prejudiced against Christianity. I make no bones about being an atheist, but I can see the attraction of religion, and I understand people who take Jesus as their savior. I come from those people. Nor do I think Islam should be understood on some sliding scale - the usual relativist, multi-culty mumbo-jumbo. No, my problem is that Connerney can't mount a fair comparison when the comparison is obvious. It is between the centrality of jihad and the centrality of conversion.
I said that I wanted to find a thread connecting the various forms of Christianity. Christianity never presented itself as a philosophy, of which one can be persuaded. It presented itself as a means of salvation, to which one can be converted. To ignore conversion, as Connerney does, is to bowdlerize Christianity - to make it historically inexplicable.
You present a hypothetical: Imagine a Christian being handed a Bible asked, "OK, where's the meat? If I've only got time to read a small part of this thing to get the most important ideas, what should I read?" Now, your own reply to your hypothetical shows that you and I went to different churches when we were kids. Because I went to a Southern Baptist church, and I can answer that question even now, from memory: "For God so loved the world that he gave his only beloved son that whosoever believeth in him shall not perish but have everlasting life." To say that as we used to in Sunday school, put hyphens between the words, and say it like you are running downstairs. Your own response to your hypothetical is nice, it emphasizes the ethical and aesthetic sides of Christianity, but historically, all of that was secondary. If belief in Jesus is so important that non-belief can be punished by eternal flames, than recommendations that you be nice to your local Samaritan sort of go by the by. In fact, this is where a conversion based religion with a salvationist creed is truly insidious -- it posits a judgment of people outside of ethics, based on what their 'heart' -- that organ so favored by our current Prez - contains. It is this that explains the ability of an organized religion that is based on belief in a God who tells us to love one another to calmly organize auto de fes, harbor a rancid, and intermittently deadly, prejudice against Jews, and to commit numberless atrocities (of which I could make a Homeric catalogue, but won't) against its own set of unbelievers. Connerney might feel there are ameliorating circumstances, but the terminuses of his comparison are obvious. Not filling in the Christian end -- ignoring conversion - is cheating. He confesses, after all, to teaching religious studies, so he should have some familiarity with the subject. That he skews the article the way he does makes me pity with tears in my eyes - well, okay, not that much -- the poor kids of Iona.
And one last note about Judaism. There isn't a conversion function that I know of in Judaism, which distinguishes it in a major way from the two other religions. Furthermore, Judaism, for about 1900 years, had to survive in a hostile environment, in which it was always on the verge of persecution. Therefore, as an organized body, it has built in limits to the damage it can do. Spinoza might be expelled from the synagogue, but they weren't going to go after Descartes with torches.
There it is.
Roger
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