Remora

Michael Thomas' column in the NYO, which is a jackdaw's nest of various bright and shiny objects (not that Limited Inc, in the nest of our own iridescent preening, objects) includes a little attack on Homi Bhabha. It flows from reporting that the Harvard football team beat the Yale football team (sports news of trifling importance) to this graf:



"That very same morning, The New York Times practically gasped with orgasmic excitement in reporting at length on another Harvard triumph: the appointment to a tenured professorship of one Homi K. Bhabha, a well-known spouter of multiculturist twaddle, bunkum and flapdoodle, formerly of the (it figures!) University of Chicago. This is an appointment that henceforth obliges us to capitalize the "cant" in "Cantabrigian." I have had my eye on this Bhabha for some time now, since I encountered him by chance on that invaluable Web site, Arts & Letters Daily (www.aldaily.com), and his stuff has to be read to be believed. He makes Derrida and Foucault sound like Orwell. Do you remember the ridiculous diction affected by the late Alec Guinness in the role of Professor Godbole in A Passage to India? Mr. Bhabha to the life! And now Godbole�s back, and Harvard�s got him!"



Now, Limited Inc has no love of jargon. But the idea that Foucault and Derrida are fonts of jargon, which seems set in stone among a newspaper commentariat whose contact with de la Grammatologie or Surveiller et Punir was limited to that sophmore class with the skinny Marxist prof, seems comic to us. The fact is, these guys only know the Frenchies by way of the jargony that were quoted about 1981 in New Criterion and have been recycled ever since. But this doesn�t mean we think Bhabha is on that level. No, reading this man, one is reminded less of Derrida and more of Faith Popcorn, or Tom Peters � basically, he aims at telling the tales of the tribe in the approved manner of the tribe. The tribe, of course, of lefty academics who are, at heart, simple souls, but are as ashamed of that simplicity as Adam and Eve were of their nudity when God made the housecall. So Bhabha�s usual course is to intro in ineffable Timespeak (an idiolect parodied to a t by Robert Coover in The Public Burning) and proceed in a confusing, affectless theory-speak, in which there�s no outside world, no test for whether an idea is good or bad, but only a high sensitivity to whether it is politically right or left. Here's a fragment from Bhabha's snoozer, Nation and Narration:



�Nations, like narratives, lose their origins in the myths of time and only fully realize their horizons in the mind's eye. Such an image of the nation - or narration - might seem impossibly romantic and excessively metaphorical, but it is from those traditions of political thought and literary language that the nation emerges as a powerful historical idea in the west. An idea whose cultural compulsion lies in the impossible unity of the nation as a symbolic force. This is not to deny the attempt by nationalist discourses persistently to produce the idea of the nation as a continuous narrative of national progress, the narcissism of self-generation, the primeval present of the Volk. Nor have such political ideas been definitively superseded by those new realities of internationalism, multi-nationalism, or even 'late capitalism', once we acknowledge that the rhetoric of these global terms is most often underwritten in that grim prose of power that each nation can wield within its own sphere of influence. What I want to emphasize in that large and liminal. image of the nation with which I began is a particular ambivalence that haunts the idea of the nation, the language of those who write of it and the lives of those who live it. It is an ambivalence that emerges from a growing awareness that, despite the certainty with which historians speak of the 'origins' of nation as a sign of the 'modernity' of society, the cultural temporality of the nation inscribes a much more transitional social reality.�

And so on. The nations like unspecified narratives (narratives, in this world, don�t really exist, they are simply all ineffably one, all immersed in the cosmic cum of just being that magical word, narrative) losing their origins in the myths of time is so close to National Geographic, circa 1959, having them lose their origins in the mists of time, that I wonder if there isn�t some homophonic thing goin down, here � if Dr. Freud is in the house, please call. But after we lift ourselves out of these myths of time (hmm, I wonder if he is talking about the castration of Chronos, here? Otherwise, I have no clue as to what myths of time these are, or why they are myths, or how myths aren�t narratives tout court, or whether the narrative of national progress is the same as that myth of national regress by which, for instance, 19th century German nationalists sought to unify the Reich as a competitor to France and Britain (but here, of course, I�m indulging in the myth and the mist of history -- aberrant factism is banned, as we know, from the Island of Laputa)), we make the long climb through narcissism and liminality to the vecu � the lives, ah yes, of those who are living �it� � the it of course being language, or ambivalence, or the liminal image, or something. But we are with those living Volk ourselves, we are united with them, in Homi Bhabha�s world.

In the room the women come and go/talking of Michaelangelo, after all.

Remora



"...headlong themselves they threw

Down from the verge of Heaven: eternal wrauth 865

Burnt after them to the bottomless pit.

�Hell heard the unsufferable noise; Hell saw

Heaven ruining from Heaven, and would have fled

Affrighted; but strict Fate had cast too deep

Her dark foundations, and too fast had bound. 870

Nine days they fell; confounded Chaos roared,

And felt tenfold confusion in their fall

Through his wild Anarchy; so huge a rout

Incumbered him with ruin. Hell at last,

Yawning, received them whole, and on them closed� 875

Hell, their fit habitation, fraught with fire

Unquenchable, the house of woe and pain.

Disburdened Heaven rejoiced, and soon repaired

Her mural breach, returning whence it rowled."





Which is how John Milton described the fall of Enron. Less cosmically, the NYT describes the tenfold confusion in Houston in this way:



"Enron's swift collapse left the prospects of 21,000 employees in doubt and wiped out what was left of the holdings of stock investors, including some big mutual funds, as shares that sold for $90 in August 2000 crashed to close yesterday at 61 cents. It roiled the Treasury market and tarnished the standing of the big New York banks that both advised on the deal and poured their own cash into the company. And it left in tatters the reputation of Enron's chief executive, Kenneth L. Lay, a confidant and campaign backer of President George W. Bush.



The Treasury Department, the Federal Reserve and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission said they had monitored Enron's impact on the financial and energy markets yesterday; officials who would comment said they saw no dangerous ripple effect."



CNN commentator Mike Sivy has already drawn the Lessons of Enron -- although a year ago the teaching and the prophets and the very constellations in the sky were differently disposed. Here's Sivy's sense of the fall:



"First, let's just take a moment of silence to register the sheer scale of the Enron disaster. $85 to 65 cents in less than a year. That's like something from a television sitcom. Even more incredible, there were a fair number of analysts recommending the stock even after it was down 95 percent. One poor fellow actually downgraded the stock from "strong buy" to "hold" on Wednesday. And top mutual fund companies, such as Janus, were major shareholders as recently as the end of the third quarter."



Well, at Limited Inc we are mere peasants, but we still wonder how, given that we are seeing the largest bankruptcy in history -- one that is being aggravated by the inability of Satan, or in this case Ken Lay, to bend his knee to that great divinity, arithmatic - we wonder how that disaster concords with the Treasury department, the Federal Reserve, and the FERC conclusion that the market will soon repair her mural breach, and we'll all be able to turn our lonely eyes to Saddam Hussein or similar villains while driving our SUVs to the mall for Christmas. Hmm. Something seems out of focus in this picture. Are these the same guys who're investigating the anthrax letters?



We are reminded of the doings of 1901. A hundred years ago, James Hill discovered that his company, the Northern Pacific Railroad, was being bought out from under him by his deadly rival, Edward Harriman. Hill's ally, J.P. Morgan, directed a counter-strategy, but the share of stock available, by the time battle was joined, was not great. Now, the battle attracted a lot of short sellers, who pledged, as short sellers do, to sell stock they didn't yet possess. They were betting, of course, that Northern Pacific Stock would go down, do that they could make a handy profit on the spread between the price they sold for and the price they bought for. But here's what happened. The price, on May 9, went up. It opened at 320, then it went up to 700, then 1000. Shorts were ruined, of course, and having to liquidate their other assets, other stocks fell sharply. At the end of the day, Northern Pacific fell 675 from its high when the brokers basically stopped the battle between Harriman and Hill and put some stock on the block. The panic in the markets, caused by, basically, a shark fight, stimulated public revulsion of a kind that made regulation of the market politically possible.



As for what will happen now that Enron lies in ruins, and commentators near and far assure us that there was nothing wrong with the model ("energy de-regulation now, energy de-regulation forever" is the motto of these stalwarts), well it depends on whether anybody is paying attention as our gov picks gingerly through the bones.

Remora



Clash of civilizations -- the continuing saga.

An article about an exorcism turned bad in New Zealand gives us a little Weegee snap of the sometimes dark alleys of the Christian faith. In this instance, a Korean pastor bounced on one of the members of his congregation while she was held down by other members of his congregation. He grabbed her neck, he roughhoused her, she cried out. He went after that devil inside her body with his faith's customary singlemindedness, but he ended up killing the poor woman. At first the minister though that her spirit had merely gone to heaven for a brief respite, a strictly R & R stay. When her body turned black, he explained that this was just God's way of renewing her. But God's ways aren't man's, and the pastor was duly reported to the police, who took him in on a murder charge.



A sad story all the way around, but enlivened a bit by expert testimony from another exorcist (the intersection of the courtroom and expertise produces, the most enchanting monsters of reason):



"Longtime evangelist Wilfred Subritsky, who has written books on casting out demons and who has done thousands of deliverances, told the jury that it was only necessary to lightly place hands on a possessed person for him or her to be touched by the Holy Spirit.



Under no circumstances would he try to physically force a demon from a person."



Such are the disputes between the high doctors of the church.

nothing

Remora



Limited Inc is no fan of either John Rawls or Ronald Dworkin. Philosophers who produce casuistry which reads like memos from Kafka's Castle, are, in our eyes, under grave suspicion of boring without a licence. Unless they are doing something completely original -- you know, like exploring the ontology of holes. But in the conservative City Journal there is an attack on the dull duo that is below par even by the debased standards of the Manhattan Institute (the foundation, darling, that puts out the journal). In an article by John Kekes, we are forced, at a certain point, to feel some lukewarm solidarity with the pair. Dull they may be, but they don't deserved to be sniped at by a moron. Not that Kekes is a moron, of course -- for all we know he might put on his pants one leg at a time like anybody else. But judging by the quality of this article, he probably tries to put them on three legs at a time, and trips into the dresser in the process.



Here's how Kekes makes his overall point in 1 and one half astonishing grafs:



"After all, a just government ought to treat everyone with equal consideration, and, they assert, doing so requires legislation aimed at the equalization of property. This economic egalitarianism goes far beyond the uncontroversial claim that people should have equal political and legal rights. Economic egalitarianism requires depriving the 86 percent of citizens who live above the poverty level of a substantial portion of their legally owned property in order to give it to the 14 percent who live below it.



The impassioned egalitarian rhetoric that asserts this supposed obligation cows many people into acquiescence. But no such obligation exists, and the appeal to it is absurd, because it requires the equalization of the property of rapists and their victims, welfare cheats and taxpayers, spendthrifts and savers. No reasonable person can believe that we are obliged to treat the moral and immoral, the prudent and imprudent, the law-abiding and the criminal with equal consideration. While we may have an obligation to help those who are poor through no fault of their own, it is absurd to suppose that if, as a result of bad choices, people find themselves below the poverty level, then it becomes the obligation of the government to help them by confiscating a considerable portion of the property of everyone else."



Now, anybody who has read Rawls justification of welfare, which is about minimum standards of bien-etre, knows that Kekes is not just caricaturing Rawls, but living on another planet. Only such a lunar habitation would explain finding "impassioned egalitarian rhetoric' in A theory of Justice. It is as impassioned as an accountant's christmas card -- ask any poor philosophy student. Even his percentages seem screwy. Why would 86 percent of citizens above the poverty level have to be deprived of a "substantial portion of their property" in order to equalize the amount held by the 14 percent below it -- that would only be true if the 14 percent below it were enormously below it, and if the 86 percent, who were equidistant from the 14 percent, held an amount of wealth that was, coincidentally, both substantially part of their collected wealth, and equal to the sum which the 14 percent would have to possess in order to be equal to the 86 percent. Of course, that is absurd to begin with. We could repair Kekes argument slightly if we were given corollary figures to decide this issue (as in some sum for the total wealth in the system, some sums for how that wealth is really divided up, etc) but what is the point? Since Kekes ignores the fact that the 86 percent and the 14 percent cover, inter alia, enormous internal differences in wealth, what we have, here, is a veritable aria of nonsense. Limited Inc only hopes that Kekes limits the intellectual damage he does to the confines of academia, and doesn't seek a job in the world of, say, business; although if he must, we'd recommend the accounts received department at Enron -- he'd be a perfect Enron man, where the motto is: math illiteracy no bar to advancement! Of course, this is besides the main point, which is that there is nothing in Rawls or Dworkin that envisions that kind of transfer of wealth. It is one thing to make a case for a reductio ad absurdam - that, in other words, the logic Rawls or Dworkin is using would lead us down the old slippery slope to Kekes conclusion; it is another thing to start with ad absurdam and freefall like a mad parachutist. Kekes, though, is only compounding an unfortunately common error among the "impassioned" rhetoricians of the right. We are reminded of Plato's early dialogue, Euthydemus, in which Socrates engages with two brothers, Euthydemos and Dionysodorus, who've just learned "philosophy" - that is, they've learned how to play with the connotations and denotations of words. Actually, in the almost Beckettian comedy of this dialogue, we find Kekes' spiritual lumpen ancestors -- people who simply can't think. An unfortunate handicap for a thinker. When Euthydemus proves that not only is he not Dionysodorus' brother, but that Socrates has no father, we come upon an uncannily familiar logic, one applied everyday by the George Wills, the John Kekes, and the Weekly Standards of this world:



What, replied Dionysodorus in a moment; am I the brother of

Euthydemus?

Thereupon I said, Please not to interrupt, my good friend, or

prevent Euthydemus from proving to me that I know the good to be

unjust; such a lesson you might at least allow me to learn.

You are running away, Socrates, said Dionysodorus, and refusing to

answer.

No wonder, I said, for I am not a match for one of you, and a

fortiori I must run away from two. I am no Heracles; and even Heracles

could not fight against the Hydra, who was a she-Sophist, and had

the wit to shoot up many new heads when one of them was cut off;

especially when he saw a second monster of a sea-crab, who was also

a Sophist, and appeared to have newly arrived from a sea-voyage,

bearing down upon him from the left, opening his mouth and biting.

When the monster was growing troublesome he called Iolaus, his nephew,

to his help, who ably succoured him; but if my Iolaus, who is my

brother Patrocles [the statuary], were to come, he would only make a

bad business worse.

And now that you have delivered yourself of this strain, said

Dionysodorus, will you inform me whether Iolaus was the nephew of

Heracles any more than he is yours?

I suppose that I had best answer you, Dionysodorus, I said, for

you will insist on asking that I pretty well know-out of envy, in

order to prevent me from learning the wisdom of Euthydemus.

Then answer me, he said.

Well then, I said, I can only reply that Iolaus was not my nephew at

all, but the nephew of Heracles; and his father was not my brother

Patrocles, but Iphicles, who has a name rather like his, and was the

brother of Heracles.

And is Patrocles, he said, your brother?

Yes, I said, he is my half-brother, the son of my mother, but not of

my father.

Then he is and is not your brother.

Not by the same father, my good man, I said, for Chaeredemus was his

father, and mine was Sophroniscus.

And was Sophroniscus a father, and Chaeredemus also?

Yes, I said; the former was my father, and the latter his.

Then, he said, Chaeredemus is not a father.

He is not my father, I said.

But can a father be other than a father? or are you the same as a

stone?

I certainly do not think that I am a stone, I said, though I am

afraid that you may prove me to be one.

Are you not other than a stone?

I am.

And being other than a stone, you are not a stone; and being other

than gold, you are not gold?

Very true.

And so Chaeredemus, he said, being other than a father, is not a

father?

I suppose that he is not a father, I replied.

For if, said Euthydemus, taking up the argument, Chaeredemus is a

father, then Sophroniscus, being other than a father, is not a father;

and you, Socrates, are without a father."



Ah, I can only imagine the young Kekes nodding vigorously to this, and noting in the margin: Socrat. has no father! Interesting!!!! Must note - perhaps a virgin b.?

Death tolls. Why does Limited Inc circle this rebarbative topic again and again, like the Biblical canine slinking back to its biblical dejecta? Simple answer, honey, is: it is history � yours and mine, for ever and ever, world without end, amen.



As I said in yesterday�s post, the historians of the Soviet Empire (file under evil) have a disconcerting habit of flaming each other about death toll numbers. How many died in the de-kulakization of the early 30s? Robert Conquests figures are holy writ to the National Review crowd, while the Nation crowd views them as insufferable puffery, fixing the death accounting books. (The same ideological divide, but a differently distributed disposition to skepticism, presides over the number of Sanction dead in Iraq.) The vested interest in increasing death toll numbers is in contrast to the usual political positions taken by the people who brandish the numbers. The larger the number, the greater the ideological difference between the accuser and the particular criminal regime. The deconstructionist in me can�t resist pointing to a sort of hostile mimicry instituted by this habit. It is as if, in order to memorialize a mass killing, the eulogists need to kill a greater number, if only figuratively. The same economic motive operates among the killers, as we know from records of the GPU and the SS. The greater the number of victims, the greater the productivity.



I�ve submitted a proposal to write about this for a more remunerative publication, so I am not going to get into it here � no use throwing pearls before swine (not you, gentle reader � Limited Inc is speaking figuratively). But the war of numbers among the historians is reminiscent of other number wars � for instance, in the estimation of demonstration crowds. I�m tempted to allude, extensively, to the master thinker of crowd symbols, Elias Canetti. But in perusing his book, Crowds and Power, I came upon a section on the increasing crowd, but not the increasing crowd of the dead. That the dead don�t fuck is one of the laws of a nature, even among the myths. But that they can increase � that we are prepared to increase them statistically, if not by the discovery of individual cases � is a modern phenomenon that must have its roots in one of Canetti�s crowd symbols.

Dope

Limited inc is quite familiar (as, I assume, hypocrite lecteur, you are too) with mass murder as a background phenomenon. After all, we all grew up in a world where the weaponry stored underground in Arkansas and the Ukraine would be more than sufficient to wipe the whole breed of Yahoos from the earth; along, probably, with many other breeds -- chihuahas, siamese cats, etc. This knowledge was, properly, bystander knowledge -- to use Karl Krauss' distinction between Dasein and Dabei-sein. The era, in other words, of Black magic.



But Limited Inc has not had the honor of personal, sensual acquaintance with mass murder. No rifle butt aimed for the lower back propelled us into a pit at Babi Yar; no NKVD boot landed on our ms in a cramped Moscow apartment. We never had to swallow our teeth, or our feces, in a basement in the Lubyanka prison, as did Meyerhold, the great theater director, before he confessed; never had to confront our formerly friendly neighbors in some Rwanda ville, neighbors armed with machetes and ready for a go with the daughter, wife, and even, shockingly, our own most precious carcass. We have the privilege of not even having to care too much about these things, and of course we exercise it, in the same way we turn switches on or off and buy our French roast coffee beans at Whole Foods. No big deal.



Which brings us, by an intellectual detour, to Aileen Kelly's essay on Stalinism, murder and time in the current NYRB.



Kelly is part of an often abused scholarly tribe, along with Sheila Fitzgerald and a few others, who study Stalinism as a phenomenon apart from what Koestler and Robert Conquest said about it. I'm going to get to that in my next post. But I wanted to share two grafs that will point you to this article.





"Brooks cites one revealing anecdote on what it was like for the ordinary Soviet citizen to live in a utopian temporality. The German Communist Wolfgang Leonhard, who grew up in Moscow, describes his confusion when in 1935 he and his mother sought to replace their outdated 1924 map of Moscow and discovered that the new map contained all the improvements destined to be completed by 1945: "We used to take both town plans with us on our walks from then on�one showing what Moscow had looked like ten years before, and the other showing what it would look like ten years hence." As Brooks says, "what had vanished or, more exactly, become compressed between two dream worlds was the present."



And this irresistible graf:



"We can still only speculate on Stalin's motives and the wider pressures that led to the orgy of violence. Yet Lewis Siegelbaum's analysis of letters from ordinary citizens shows that very many did not question the policy of repression itself, ascribing "excesses" in this respect only to particular individuals: a common suspicion was that "enemies of the people" had wormed their way into the NKVD and, by arresting loyal Communists, were attempting to undermine Soviet power. Substantial numbers of the Party elite seem to have seen the Terror as a necessary defensive operation. Those who (we may assume) did not, such as the veteran Bolshevik Nikolai Bukharin, were forced to use the official rhetoric. In a letter to Stalin which he hoped would save him from execution after his trial in 1938, he protests his innocence of the charges against him, but writes that "there is something great and bold about the political idea of a general purge...[which] encompasses 1) the guilty; 2) persons under suspicion; and 3) persons potentially under suspicion.""

Remora



Steven Glover in the Spectator discusses what we didn't know and when we didn't know it in Afghanistan. Points for dispassion -- the current fashion in punditry seems to require that the writer bark, whine and growl on the page, and finally pee on his foes, all the better to show you his convictions. This has arisen from the point-counterpoint tv format for mixing together ideas and viewer interest, I suspect. Glover remarks that the press almost universally gave the Northern Alliance no chance, and credited the Taliban with a great, mystifying resilience. Both of those positions have been overturned by circumstances. He also claims that the bombing was much more efficient than the anti-war side gave it credit for being.



The latter is the only part of his article with which I have a problem. To assess how good the bombing is, one would have to get through the great blank thrown up by the American military. Actually, one would also have to have the desire to get through that great blank; given the servility of the press corps towards all things military since 9/11, this would be to expect supererogation on the part of some journalist, and honesty in his editor, which is the kind of fortunate conjunction we just haven't seen since, well, the high 80s. Those who did press into the country carried back pictures of kids and old people wounded by high explosives dropped continuously by American airplanes. Perhaps those high explosives did some military good in the beginning. And it might be the damage so inflicted on the Taliban was irreparable. One thing we can surely say about the Taliban is that it has no depth. Or rather, its resource was Pakistan. Cut off from Pakistan, it crumbled. Did the bombing hasten the collapse? If we rely on previous situations -- if we take Kosovo as a guide -- we'd have to say that bombing without let up a civilian population that is closely integrated with a military organization can lead to a military breakdown. But there might be a question of costs yet to arise -- because that kind of destruction can leave in its wake consequences that will bite our ass. There are advantages to processing territory by way of traditional soldiery that aren't considered by the TAC people in the Pentagon. One is that a population is more likely to consider its opponents honorable if they can see them.



In any case, it is worth pondering Glover's last graf:



"My feeling is that almost all of us �reporters, pundits, academics and politicians � know much less about Afghanistan than we think we do, and perhaps less than we give the impression of doing. Let us be frank: most of us had never heard of Mazar-i-Sharif until a few weeks ago, and yet we have been pontificating about its strategic significance as though we were familiar since childhood with the curve of its hills. In the absence of detailed knowledge, we have fallen back on theories and fragments of history about the Northern Alliance recycled by journalists who probably do not know what they are talking about. In short, we have been peering through a glass pretty darkly. The lesson I will draw from the rout of the Taleban is that none of us has much idea what is going to happen, and that the Sun�s celebrations may therefore possibly be premature."

Dope.

Limited Inc has passed the thousand hit mark. We probably passed it a while ago -- we only put a site meter on this page a month after we started it. Of course, the site meter also reads our own visits to the page, so subtract that from the total, add the unknowns that might have visited here, and we figure the sum is close to a thousand. If we had money, I guess we'd have the more sophisticated meter tool that would discount our visits, and make useful statistical chop suey for our marketing department, and suggest fabulous ways to promote ourselves. And would even, in its spare time, write these damn posts.

Unfortunately, as noted in a previous post, we are going through a bit of a famine. In terms of money. In terms of lack of money. In terms of not being paid for our work. In terms of thinking that maybe, all the checks that should be winging our way crossed with anthrax soiled mail, and have been thrown away. So we can't afford another site meter, or even a pair of running shoes, or a steak dinner, or a bottle of tequilla, at the present moment.

Such is fate. Happy Thanksgiving, everybody in the house!

Remora

Gretchen Morgenstern's column this morning begins with the impressive run up in the stock market. She notes, as Rob Walker at Slate did on the 15th, that the market is up 20% over its post 9/11 low.



Here's a quote that is at the heart of her article:



"James Paulsen, chief investment officer of Wells Capital Management in Minneapolis, is of two minds on the recent rally. "Part of me says, how often does an equity investor have everybody from the Bank of Japan, the United States Congress, the European Central Bank and the Fed working day and night to get equities up?" he asked. "That's a hugely bullish thing to bet against. I don't disagree we're going to get a bounce and the recession will end, but I wonder how strong the recovery will be."



Mr. Paulsen is particularly concerned about the financial position of American consumers, many of whom have binged on borrowing and now face unemployment. Even though mortgage rates fell a few weeks ago, they have backed up again, reducing the potential savings from refinancings for many consumers."



Walker's piece mulls over a commonplace of Wall Street. Walker is too smart a fella to fall for it, but he does put the conventional wisdom in a nutshell (and you thought only oak trees and other vegetables could put things in nutshells, right? well, journalists put things in nutshells for Limited Inc to crack, with its big parrot like beak. So, don't ask any more tedious questions, or I'll throw some more cliches at you):



"One school of thought has long held that the stock market is not quite the reactive thing we often imagine it to be, but rather that it anticipates events. The crash of 1929, for instance, did not cause the Great Depression, but rather predicted it. One recent articulation of these ideas was the book The Message of the Markets, by CNBC anchor Ron Insana, published last year. One of the anecdotes in that book is Insana's recap of the market's reaction to the Jan. 17, 1991, launch of Operation Desert Storm. The Dow rose 105 points, and "the greatest bull market to ever take place on Wall Street got its start on the day the Gulf War began." Insana's point, and the theme of the book, is that while many experts at the time were predicting all manner of doom and gloom, the collective wisdom of the markets simply "knew better" and knew it sooner."



The idea that the stock market encodes information, and that that information is somehow predictive, is one of those nice ideological sleight of hands that tries to make a silk purse out of a sow belly future. In the last week, Limited Inc has been reading a history of the market, Toward Rational Exuberance, by Mark Smith. We found the parts about the early twentieth century pretty engrossing. Just as 9/11 seemed to signal the beginning of world disorder, and was followed by a equities suicide leap, the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand was followed by a market collapse. But in 1915 and 1916, American companies discovered the wonders of modern warfare. The money that flowed into American coffers was magical. If this happened today, what you would see is a bigger spread between price and earnings. What happened in 1916 was just the reverse. The ratio of the price of stock to the amount of the dividend went down, eventually hitting a historic low of 4 to 1 in 1916. Why? Well, this is one of the mysteries, kids. If we put on our explorer hat (a pith helmet, actually. We always write these posts accoutered - or would one say haberdashed? - in a pith helmet, but otherwise naked), we would have to venture into the psychology of expectation. In those days, those far off days, stocks were considered, with reason, to be a much higher risk than bonds. So the dividend on stocks had to be serious. So from the earnings end, that ate at the P/E ratio. At the stock end, there was the competition with bonds, which to the generation of 1910 seemed a much more secure financial instrument. This has reversed in our day, starting in the late fifties. That something like this can reverse is itself curious -- how does the horizon of expectation, which is a composite of different expectations, suddenly transform itself? And how are those expectations encoded into the price level of individual stocks? In spite of the Efficient Market Hypothesis people, it is hard to see where the market is getting its 'extra' information from. We aren't going to offer our own theory on this - we have delusions of grandeur around here, but we aren't crazy. But it does seem that traders, right now, are reading each others price levels much more than they are reading the extra-market indicators. In literature, this is referred to as post-modernism. In finance, it is the royal highway to a bust. Which makes sense - pomo is what happened when modernism, which tried to refer to everything in the world, all of history, the cavemen and the Minoans as well as aviation daredevils and occult fads, found that it couldn't. It couldn't cohere. So our advice to traders is: read the last cantos of Ezra Pound, those jagged fragments, and beware, beware.

Remora



The question of the day, reader, is what ever happened to Maureen Dowd.

The Maureen Dowd of the ancien regime, circa 1999, was, to use a reviewer's phrase (one of those phrases that emerge, in the last minutes before the review has to get off in the mail, from the lumber room of previous blurbs, blurbs which the reviewer has vowed never, ever to use, which the reviewer has said to himelf, in the depths of the reviewer night, the midnight hour, the hour of ghosts and conscience, at least I have never written a word that could be mistaken for something written by Roger Ebert -- Limited Inc has been there, child) compulsively readable. Or at least her compulsions were our compulsions. Dowd had some kind of x-ray power she could turn on the Clintons, with all their bumptious sex and it takes a village sweet talk. There's a kid's game called Battleship -- it is still being sold out there, I believe, in the mall universe into which Limited Inc so rarely ventures. In the game, both players attach little plastic ships to pegs punched in a square space that is divided into a numbered and lettered grid. The little plastic ships are of various sizes, and in the ships there are holes. The number of the holes gives you the practical value of the ship. Above that square there is a screen, which reproduces the square space. That screen is blank, and represents your opponent's space: that square into which he has plugged his plastic ships. A hostile tabula rasa, except of course, for your opponent, it isn't a tabula rasa -- his ships populate it, his tabula is occupied. Each player has little plastic pegs, which count as torpedos. A Player "shoots" at another one by announcing a position - say A6. If the other player's vessel is not on A6, it is a miss, but if the plastic vessel is anchored there, you have to say, hit. Hit is the ritualistic word. Every torpedo is plugged into the blank screen, and so gradually a pattern emerges. Even the misses, then, are important, because you begin to see gaps, you begin to see possibilities, shapes emerge -- the battleship, the cruiser, the submarine. A version of that game is also played, to a large extent, by the press corps in D.C., who are always aiming at a grid that they can't see until they hit something. That grid is the government.

Dowd's hits were extraordinary.

Lately, Dowd's hit percentage is way down. Her column today is bottom of the barrel. Here's how it begins:



"It is hard to fathom how a part of the world that produced Cleopatra � who perfumed the sails of her boat so men would know she was coming and ruled with elegant authority, signing one tax decree "Make it happen" � could two millenniums later produce societies where women are swaddled breeders under house arrest"



Say what? "Don't know much about history/don't know much about geography..." That beach boy's song, our secret national anthem, seems apposite here, where Egypt and Afghanistan are jumbled up, and we are supposed to be surprised that, in the space of a mere two thousand years, cultures change. Obviously, Dowd wants her Cleopatra reference desperately enough that she is willing to go to any lengths to get it. That she could have used, oh, I don't know, Benazir Bhutto as a current reference seems to have escaped her, partly because that would tangle up our cultural stereotypes -- after all, that Bhutto was the leader (a very bad leader) of a Muslim nation contrasts in an odd way with the US's resolutely male line of presidents.

Obviously, Dowd didn't flunk out of her high school history course, even if today's column might make you wonder. Her problem is that she doesn't want to 'hit' - she is giving a pass to Bushypoo's reign. This is a game that depends on hits, however. Although inertia on the NYT op ed page can get you a career a la William Safire, it is a shame to see a woman who can file her teeth with the best of em allow herself to be practically veiled. Tear that veil off, Maureen. Plug in. Try G8, or E7. Get back in the game!.

Remora



Another article about Bush's ties with the bin Ladens, this time in In These Times (which is going to be publishing a review of mine in the next week. Okay, Limited Inc is biased towards these guys. In these Times? Hey, greatest little lefty mag in American, if you ask us).







The story would be uninteresting if it claimed, as others have claimed, that the Bushes have financial interests in common with the bin Laden family's interests. This, to my mind, is a rather sleazy guilt by association technique. Rosalyn Carter was once photographed with the Reverand Jim Jones, but that doesn't mean she was privy to the Guyana Punch Bowl massacre. I don't think the left should make semi-racist background noises about Saudi financiers. If you are an Arab with money, you aren't necessarily dirty. I am rather shocked at how easily the progressive mind can embrace that stereotype.



More interesting is the description of Bushypoo's ties with BCCI, the notorious suckers bank international that came apart, along with Clark Clifford's reputation, in the early nineties. Ah, Children, you don't remember Clark Clifford? Once a D.C. giant, laid low by the BCCI scandal. Like most D.C. giants, his reputation depended on his context -- that D.C. sterility, that D.C. second handedness, which even in Henry Adams' day was the outstanding quality of the town:



"Every hope or thought which had brought Adams to Washington proved to be absurd. No one wanted him; no one wanted any of his friends in reform; the blackmailer alone was the normal product of politics as of business."



But lets not be harsh -- our D.C. giants exude the morals of the blackmailer, without necessarily practicing his arts.



Well, to continue: the BCCI connection would make sense as a channel for money to and from various political "action" groups, like Osama bin Laden's. Most interesting part of the In these Times article is the last two grafs:



'Worst of all, bin Mahfouz [a BCCI 'principal', whatever that means]allegedly has been financing the bin Laden terrorist network�making Bush a U.S. citizen who has done business with those who finance and support terrorists. According to USA Today, bin Mahfouz and other Saudis attempted to transfer $3 million to various bin Laden front operations in Saudi Arabia in 1999. ABC News reported the same year that Saudi officials stopped bin Mahfouz from contributing money directly to bin Laden. (Bin Mahfouz�s sister is also a wife of Osama bin Laden, a fact that former CIA Director James Woolsey revealed in 1998 Senate testimony.)





When President Bush announced he is hot on the trail of the money used over the years to finance terrorism, he must realize that trail ultimately leads not only to Saudi Arabia, but to some of the same financiers who originally helped propel him into the oil business and later the White House. The ties between bin Laden and the White House may be much closer than he is willing to acknowledge."



What those connections are actually about is the impossibility of being rich and being unplugged into this world where everyone plugs in. And if you are rich and buying flight training simulators for your on the leash apprentices, you are still, as a wealthy man, doing business with the men and companies your apprentices, unleashed, are going to attack. The point here isn't that Bush was secretly financing bin Laden, but that the bin Ladens of the world are battling against the network in which they are as stuck as Brer Rabbit was in the tarbaby. It is this that made the 9/11 attack not only criminal, but vain in the deepest sense. The world isn't going back there.

Remora



Carol Morehead at Index has a must read or not read or don't know if one should read article on the Taliban propensity to torture (limited inc has a definite limit, not inc., on how much torture in a text we can stomach). We were feeling a little guilty about celebrating the victory of the Northern Alliance. James Ridgeway, who we certainly respect, at the Village Voice had some scoriating things to say about the thuggishness of said Good Witch of the North Alliance, and the American responsibility vis a vis Afghanistan:



"Shielding the refugees from the marauding Taliban and tribal fighting led by the U.S.-backed thugs of the Northern Alliance will almost surely necessitate a long-term commitment of American ground forces in Central Asia."





But as one reads through Ridgeway's article, one gets an uncomfortable sense that Ridgeway considers everything that happens in Afghanistan somehow the fault of the USA. In actuality, the threat of mass starvation in Afghanistan preceded the War. In fact, it is one of the great crimes of the Taliban regime. Although they were undoubtedly on the spot when it came to such central public policy issues as destroying pagan images, ie art, the systematic persecution of women in Afghanistan, the Taliban's one great contribution to political discourse, wasn't just a human rights disaster, it also targeted the most educated part of the population. Now, my readers can surely connect the dots: the blame, if we are looking for blame, for the starvation that is even now sending out its tentacles in camps of Afghan refugees, can't be fixed to the US. Blame, hmm. Of course, in one overriding sense it can be, but that sense has less to do with our cruel bombing campaign then our previous interventions and our macro-managing of the world economy, etc. etc. The ironically positive side of this war is that the US will be more inclined, now, to feed the hungry. Four months ago, I don't think that was the case.



Well, here's an excerpt from one of Morehead's interviews. It is with a man who the Taleban (as Morehead spells it) suspected of some kind of subversive activity:



"I was constantly questioned. Sometimes I would be hit with chains or a cable. Most of the time it was with a chain on my stomach. I was given very little food, perhaps half a piece of bread twice a day. I was moved to another prison, where they left me in a hole full of rubbish and stagnant water. Sometimes they poured boiling water down my back.



"They put me into a cage with dogs. I was moved again, to the Department of Intelligence. Here they put pieces of wood between my fingers, and then squeezed my hands. Then they put heavy stones on my eyes and tied a cloth around my head very tightly. I screamed all the time. They also hung weights from my testicles."



A.H. was certain that he would be executed. He managed to escape down the open toilet and through the sewer. Many of the injuries suffered during torture at the hands of the Taleban have been aggravated by wounds received during fighting and attacks by opposition forces.

Dope

'Hunger reduces one to an utterly spineless, brainless condition, more like the after-effects of influenza than anything else," Orwell claimed in Down and Out in Paris and London.



Well, Limited Inc is on that downward spiral too, at the moment, although for less highminded reasons than Orwell. We have discovered that we are living anachronistically, ie the old habit of advancing freelancers money when they don't have it has, we've found in the last two weeks, simply died. It has been replaced by a new habit: you simply don't pay your writers until they have no money whatsoever. Then you see if they can get back on track. There has to be a scientific interest in this, the way there is in, say, cutting the olfactory nerves of a rat and seeing if it makes a difference in his cage life. By treating the intelligentsia to the bottomless pit of poverty (and lets face it, people like Limited Inc are despised anyway for their snobbishness and sniping), surely insights into animal ethology will abound.



So yesterday was day zero for us. The last dollar was taken from the bank. With seven dollars left in our pocket, we looked about the world and realized, we were dead meat.



However, not to fear. We will try the milk and bread routine, see if it works. And until the phone company cuts us off, we are going to continue giving you the fine products of our imagination here at this site.



Hey ho, Silver and away!

Remora



Limited inc thought that Bushy's hunting metaphors about Afghanistan were way too Big Daddy -- going hunting for those otherskinned coons, it just conjures up the images, n'est-ce pas? And lately the Big Daddy side has been putting its foot down. The booted black foot. Since it looks like we might capture some jihadists, yesterday an emergency decree came down that should be rejected with revulsion by the right thinking. Oh, not that it is going to be. Not when people want blood on their tongue, want to taste it. Here's the WP headline: Military May Try Terrorism Cases: Bush Cites 'Emergency'

By George Lardner Jr. and Peter Slevin

And here are the last grafs:



"Some legal scholars such as John Norton Moore, director of the Center for National Security Law, had favored the creation of an international tribunal by the United Nations Security Council to deal with the Sept. 11 attacks and their aftermath, but others said such tribunals typically drag on for years and lose impact.



"This was an armed attack on the United States, not just a mass murder or a serial killing," said Philip A. Lacovara, a former deputy solicitor general. "It is appropriate to deal with it as a crime against humanity." He also noted that international tribunals created by the United Nations do not authorize the death penalty."



Ah, without the death penalty what good is a court? You can't eat your vittles if you don't kill em first. Who, by the way, is this Lacovara character? Here's his resume.

.htm. A quick computer search reveals that Lacovara has had the fortune to be persecuted as too liberal by certain conservative Republicans in the Reagan years, and the even greater fortune of having argued in the Supreme Court against Nixon's special privileges argument in re his tapes during the golden Watergate years. Such gestures towards a certain inner decency have made him a much quoted man; mostly, his quotes are standard right-wing boilerplate. Never say that dissent, when used cleverly, is a bar to advancement.



Michael Ryan at Tom Paine writes a short protesting note about, well, the injustice of the executive order.



Here are two grafs:

"... now, thanks to an executive order, those of us who don't hold American citizenship -- visitors, green card holders, legal aliens, illegal aliens -- can forget all about the civil liberties that go with due process in the American justice system.



"People of my generation shuddered at Costa Gavras' film Z, which depicted what can happen in a civilized society like Greece when the military takes over the so-called "justice" system. All of us were outraged when Alberto Fujimori's Peru introduced trial by anonymous military judges. We rail against the Chinese system of dragging dissenters before rigged courts before packing them off for decades of imprisonment. Now we seem to be ready to go down the same road."



We are going down that road with this order. No doubt. The unjustifiable detentions, the signs from the margins that marginal political belief is being harried -- it is back to nightside. And, really, it is so tiresome to write about -- Limited Inc can't even find anything clever to say in defense of the obvious, which is that Bush's emergency order is odious, repulsive to decency, and a blot on his already very much blotted reign.

Elias Norbert, in his The Civilizing Process, took one of Erasmus' minor works, a book on manners written for boys, as a measure of the civilizing process, such as it was, in the 15th century. Manners, of course, in Erasmus' time were not simply an adjunct to behavior, but the emblem of status and the mark of one's subtlety. Subtlety is power, in the Renaissance. Elias was fortunate to discover Erasmus' text, for it turns out that the humanist had a school teacher's ineradicable impulse to correct the slouching, wayward boy:



"If you pass by any ancient Person, a Magistrate, a Minister, or Doctor, or any Person of Figure, be sure to pull off your Hat, and make your Reverence: Do the same when you pass by any sacred Place, or the Image of the Cross. When you are at a Feast, behave yourself chearfully, but always so as to remember what becomes your Age: Serve yourself last; and if any nice Bit be offer'd you, refuse it modestly; but if they press it upon you, take it, and thank the Person, and cutting off a bit of it, offer the rest either to him that gave it to you, or to him that sits next to you. If any Body drinks to you merrily, thank him, and drink moderately. If you don't care to drink, however, kiss the Cup. Look pleasantly upon him that speaks to you; and be sure not to speak till you are spoken to. If any Thing that is obscene be said, don't laugh at it, but keep your Countenance, as though you did not understand it; don't reflect on any Body, nor take place of any Body, nor boast of any Thing of your own, nor undervalue any Thing of another Bodies. Be courteous to your Companions that are your Inferiors; traduce no Body; don't be a Blab with your Tongue, and by this Means you'll get a good Character, and gain Friends without Envy."



Still good advice, although impossible for Limited Inc to take: we guffaw at obscenities like regular jackasses when we aren't making them ourselves. But we were reminded of Erasmus because a friend invited us today to dine in the cafeteria of the place that she works. That place shall be nameless. Suffice it to say that in the cafeteria, there were numerous, numerous men of around my own age -- middle age, that is -- sitting at tables that looked exactly like the cafeteria tables we once sat at in high school. You have to see this room: a big open space, an atrium space, and it is lunch time, and these men have come out with their selections of the rye bread with the ham and american cheese with the mustard and the fixings on it, the bit of salad or fruit, the coffee or soft drink, the pie. And here Limited Inc was, sitting among this crew of middle managers who, even as they ate, exuded a certain sad achievement, a certain niche of income and marriage and children that can not be, if God is in his heaven, taken away from them, but that they have a nasty, sneaking suspicion in every dream and failed erection is actually being, by forces unseen, taken away from them -- you have to see this. My companion to my left, to whom I directed the sparkles of my wit, barely looked at me. A handsome guy, I thought, but he was obviously wondering who let in the lunatic as he stuffed the forkfuls in his maw and talked about Thanksgiving. The man sitting across from him was a more favored, as in old time, table talk companion, and so his was the Thanksgiving being speculated about. There's another guy sitting to the left of the man sitting across from us, a short guy with white hair and a snub nose, whose eyes would sometimes iridesce with a certain balefulness, although not at anything said in particular, but at some interior vicissitude of memory in which he was either bested or in some obscure way, insulted. The conversation was mainly about the politics of the day, and mainly bloodily ferocious - standard conservative prattle. But what impressed yours truly was not the conversation so much but the end of the meal. One guy after another would finish, then slightly shift his tray away from him, sit back, and cross his arms over his chest. I checked, and it was like choreographed: the sit-back-cross-arms rippling across the room. Think, this happens every day. Still, it was impressive -- the testosterone of a hundred guys with a hundred families putting their arms up like that, as though these arms were tools -- the pipe wrench, the garden shears -- they were hanging in the garage. They'd used em, and now it was time to hang them up.

And I thought, how odd. I live, or lived, among a more boho set of male bodies, and hands and arms do these things at the table: support heads; tear napkins slowly into shreds; make gestures illustrating some conversational point; or lie on the table to give support and even rhythm to the fingers drumming. It took me back to my father's world, where arms did go up to the chest. I found this fascinating and slightly archaic, and it impressed me, once again, with my dizzy disconnect from a good part of white America -- like the old Talking Head's song that ends with David Byrne's squirrely voice singing: I couldn't do the things the/way those people do/I couldn't live there/if you paid me to.

Remora



We should supplement yesterday's rattled post. Although it is good news that the Taliban is collapsing, it is good news with the smell of a corpse. In today's NYT,

David Rohde has written a grim account of the victory over the Taliban.



lede grafs:



"Near an abandoned Taliban bunker, Northern Alliance soldiers dragged a wounded Taliban soldier out of a ditch today. As the terrified man begged for his life, the alliance soldiers pulled him to his feet.



They searched him and emptied his pockets. Then, one soldier fired two bursts from his rifle into the man's chest. A second soldier beat the lifeless body with his rifle butt. A third repeatedly smashed a rocket- propelled-grenade launcher into the man's head."



Later on, Rohde goes for that small but telling little foreign correspondant flourish: in the abandoned Taliban encampment, there's a cooked goat's head on a wooden plate that's been hastily left behind. Shades of Scoop, E. Waugh's scathing novel about journalists on exotic binges.



So -- is the N.A. going to be as brutal as the Taliban? They are certainly going to be less organized. It would be easy to forecast, from the squabbling of their commanders right now, that civil broils loom. Still, the Taliban was a malign force, and we are happy they are dissolving.

Remora



Last night, Limited Inc was planning on writing that there is, at last, good news: if the Taliban has suffered a major defeat by the Northern Alliance yesterday, and if the reports today that the defeat is having a broad, knock down effect, then it is good news all the way around. Here's the graf from the AP story, in the LAT:



"Opposition fighters punched through Taliban defenses about noon today after a punishing attack by U.S. B-52 bombers. Taliban positions began to fall one by one along the main road into Kabul.



A senior opposition commander, Bismillah Khan, said his troops had halted their advance at Mir Bacha Kot, about 12 miles north of Kabul, and were awaiting orders."



The bombing has got to stop. We don't believe the guff about the bombers. But now, with a traditional victory at hand, we have another reason to pull the plug on the bomb squad. Now, mind you, we haven't lost our minds here: this good news is not absolutely good. It would even be very bad, sicne the warlord ridden Northern Alliance isn't anybody's dream of a liberating force. What Afghanistan needs, right now, is massive amounts of food and an organization that can manage distributing it. It needs, in the future, secular humanism of a type -- that is, it needs a system that doesn't penalize women, allows basic human rights, and is allergic to rape, looting, and other ills Afghani governments have been heir to. Well, I don't think Afghanistan is going to get that with the peculiar piratical coalition that has been bringing the fight to the Taliban. If this is good news, it is a comparative good: like being told your house is infested with termites, instead of in flames.



Well, this good news turned sour this morning, for us, when we were awakened by a friend who said, another plane is down. Since one of our favorite people, indeed, a friend of the heart, was flying out of NYC today, this was sickening news. Luckily, Miruna, our friend, is alright, and at this moment headed, via train, to New Orleans. But we are still whirling.

Dope



Gretchen the light of my eyes -- as a biz journalist you have no peer, but... but I must confess that my heart is straying. Yes, Limited Inc just became acquainted with the Guardian's Gregory Palast. We were looking for earlier articles on Argentina, once hailed, in the carefree days when The Lexis and The Olive Tree was supposedly the law and the prophets, as this amazing success story. The South American way (sing it to a Carmen Miranda beat) went via Chile on to the wondrous policies of the USA, where free enterprise made everything (the water, the roads, the women) so much better. That mythical USA, which today is heading resolutely towards budget deficits, still lives in the advice proferred by American officials like Condoleeza Rice, who had the affrontery to suggest that Argentina repair its budget the other day. Condoleeza doesn't seem to have noticed that, with the American economy taking a serious dive, nobody is so silly as to worry about deficits in the Heimat. But in Argentina, where the economy hasn't taken a dive -- it is the unconscious victim sitting in a burning automobile that just skidded off the road and plummeted down a cliff -- in Argentina, the IMF, in its glorious wisdom, advised a major cut in government spending. The advice came with dope, of course, some 15 billion bailout that went not to the wretched of the earth or the unemployed truckdrivers but to such argentinian stalwarts as Emerging Markets man Steve Hanke:

As Palast points out:

"Now do the arithmetic. On Argentina's $128bn of debt, normal interest plus the 16 per cent surcharge by lenders comes to about $27bn a year. In other words, Argentina's people probably won't net one penny from the $26bn loan package. Little of the bail-out money escapes New York, where it lingers to pay interest to US creditors holding the debt, big fish such as Citibank and little biters such as Steve Hanke. Hanke is president of Toronto Trust Argentina, an 'emerging market fund' that loaded up 100 per cent on Argentine bonds during the last currency panic, in 1995.



Cry not for Steve, Argentina. His annual return that year of 79.25 per cent put the Toronto trust at the top of the speculation league table. This year he'll do it again."



Turn the page with me, children, for the next episode of our exciting story! Oh, I forgot to tell you the title of the book? Let's see, let me get my glasses. Here it is! "How to impoverish a country and influence people!" Recommended, it says, for MBAs. What's that? You want a fairy tale? !! This is a fairy tale, a tale of how an enchanting American prince helped screw up a whole kingdom, and feels like maximum macho unapologetic about it! Like any good capitalist. For here he is, Steve with his 79.25 per cent, in the pages of Forbes magazine, which is always generously opening its double column to the true friends of working people.



Read this enchanting piece, where Steve claims credit for having started Argentina on the road to recovery:



"When I first met Carlos Menem in 1989, he had just been elected president of Argentina and was promoting a program to liberalize its sick economy. Menem's problem was hyperinflation. Until it was killed, his reforms would remain on hold.



What to do? Argentina had already tried almost every hyperinflation antidote in the book, and all had failed. By mid-1990, Kurt Schuler and I had produced a sound money blueprint, Banco Central o Caja de Conversi�n. It called for an orthodox currency board regime that would put Argentina's central bank in a straitjacket."



The straitjacket is, you will remember, one of Tom Friedman's favorite metaphors too. Hanke wasn't totally wrong in his prescriptions, even if the intersection between Menem's reforms and Hanke's currency board strongly favored the investment class. Also (time and time again we have to say this at Limited Inc because monetarists are strangely averse to thinking of capitalism as a creative system) there are other influences on inflation, including the competition that comes with imports. And if inflation goes down, as it did in Argentina, it is a mistake to attribute it to any one cause. But that said, the restraint inherent in pegging the peso to the dollar made sense in that context. It makes no sense now. Instead of a straitjacket, it has become a noose. But Steve can't let go of his creation. His latest column on Argentina is a pathetic defense of a policy that has pretty much ruined the country. We won't take our scissors to this seriously screwed up article, but we must quote one marvelous bit. Steve, like some quack doctor, touts his one size fits all currency solution like this:



"Countries that exited from flawed soft regimes and adopted currency boards or "dollarized" in the 1990s have all seen dramatic improvements in their macroeconomic indicators. Examples include Argentina, Estonia, Lithuania, Bulgaria, Bosnia and Ecuador. Indeed, a shift from a soft regime to a hard one has always ended a currency crisis." Wow, get on board that train, boys. The prosperity of Bosnia awaits you!



There is a more general lesson to be learned from the Argentine crisis, though it won't be. When the class that profits from speculation makes the public policy of a country, the country will eventually suffer. In an essay on Adam Smith, Walter Bagehot explained why nations in the 18th century made a mistake in chosing merchants and factory owners as their favored advisors on economic policy: "Seemingly the most obvious person to consult on matters of trade is the trader; the person who, on first sight, seems likely to know most about a thing, is the person who makes it; and accordingly, the European governments had taken counsel with the producer. But, unhappily, the producer was just the wrong person to consult. What he wanted was a high price for his article, and a monopoly of the market in which to sell it; and the laws he recommended were inevitably framed, more or less, to obtain his wishes; whereas, the interest of the nations which the governments were trustees for, and which they were sincerely desirous to serve, was a "low price", unrestricted commerce from abroad, and a freedom for every one to buy or sell everything at home."



Self interest dictates, to the 79.25 percenter, an economic policy in which the debt the government owes the garbageman for picking up the garbage is secondary to the debt the government owes the emerging markets man for picking up the government's bonds. In reality, a government, unlike a retail store, benefits more from the garbageman. In fact, the bonds are only useful insofar as the garbageman is paid. The world is turned upside down by the New Economy. As always when it is a question of some doubtful utopia, we are told that upside down is its natural disposition. This is the immemorial prejudice of the ideologue; the ultimate critique of the Hanke's of the world is in Gullivers Travels -- book three, the island of Laputa.



And for a more personal side of the Argentine crisis, see this article in the Miami Herald

Dope



We at Limited Inc don't usually read ourselves. We simply go forward to the next topic, with a certain contempt for lingering over the dead and the wounded -- the solecisms, logical gaps, and misspellings of previous posts. But we forced ourselves to read ourselves this morning -- or at least read two week's worth of posts. So many opportunities squandered! So many sensible things dissipated in vain stylistic preening! It is appalling. On the bright side, we are doing a better job of editing, lately. Or so we hope. And the mistakes we make are, after all, dinner table mistakes -- for the whole point of this log is to produce the same effect of spontaneity as is produced by conversation. Our point here is to reassure our readers that we are trying to get better and better. Of course, since our readers are silent, never using the comment tool we took such pains to install on this site, our correctives are still one-sided -- too dependent on our own erratic p.o.v. So it goes.

Remora



Idiocy, open idiocy, in public, like nudity in public, has a certain low erotic charm.



So Limited Inc should have been pleased to read an article that, from beginning to end, is a tissue of error, misreading, illogic, and special pleading. Not since Clinton defended oral sex as a form of non-sex have we seen something like this. It is Jonathan Rauch, who seems to have the brains of a damaged green pea, writing in the Atlantic about why Bush one was right to stop his big bad war before we had taken out (if you'll remember) a man who was "another Hitler". Somehow, though, Limited Inc.'s joy in the piece was mitigated by its racism, its vile sense of American privilege, and our sense that it is depressingly representative of conservative foreign policy thinking.



Rauch gives various implausible and weasily reasons for Bush's great foreign policy failure. His big Ace, which he draws like everybody in the house is going to gasp, is that the fall of Saddam would have split Bushy's coalition. This is bogus. As Patrick Cockburn has reported, the Bush administration's decision that the possible split-up of Iraq would make the Sauds and Turks bolt was taken without consulting the Sauds and Turks; officials from both states have said, in the wake of Iraq's preservation, that they were prepared to pay the price for ridding themselves of Saddam. What the Bush people didn't seem to realize is that Saddam had a reputation all over that was bad enough, scary enough, that the allies could be brought to the sticking point.



But Rauch isn't simply an ace man. He wants to play other cards as well. For instance, here he is as a stone bitch realpolitiker: "The goal of the Gulf War, for Bush and the Arab allies alike, was not to impose a new order on the region but to restabilize the old one. Strategically speaking, that meant caging the overweening Saddam, not toppling him."



Why gee, boys and girls, that does that sound a bit different from what Mr. Bush said to the good old American people, don't it? But given Rauch's contempt for the idea of democracy in the Middle East, it isn't surprising that he has a pretty high level of contempt for it in America, too. Why announce your real war aims to the country, after all -- I mean, they merely elected you, the scumbags.



And of course there is the little matter of what started the intifada in Iraq in the first place -- Bush's famous announcement that he welcomed revolt against Saddam Hussein. SImply skipped over by the inestimable Rauch, who has a true brownnoser's instinct for what parts to leave out of a story. But if pressed he'd no doubt chuckle -- it was a sort of in-joke, I guess. See how many Iraqis believe it and watch em die! Those cut up clowns in the white house, man, they'll joy buzzer you every time!



Having gone blissfully forward in error and deception like a sinner in Pilgrim's Progress, Rauch picks up speed, now: "Tactically, too, destroying Saddam looked costly. The Republican Guard was melting as fast as it could into Basra. Rooting it out could have meant street combat, with significant American and civilian casualties. No one�not the allies, not Bush, and not the Pentagon�relished fighting that type of war, particularly when doing so was not clearly necessary."



Let's see if this is true. The Republican units were paniced. There were revolts breaking out in the Shiite South and the Kurdish north, and they were successful at taking cities. We had the military force on line, on site, to make those revolts successful. We had the power to overthrow a dictator who had initiated a terrible eight year war, which he'd won by using chemicals, and one moreover who had built his power upon the murder of tens of thousands of his own people. We had that power, but oh, we didn't "relish" this. Why? Because Bushypoo and his advisors are "realists." The don't believe Arabs deserve anything so uppity as democracy, or a say so in their own governance. That would have a "bad effect" on, say, the Saudi peninsula, that is ruled by a family of autocratic looters. Never do to upset them. Our intent, at this point, was to imprison a people. Our motives were consonant with our history -- or at least that part of it that exterminated the Indians.



Limited Inc read the article so far as merely another tedious apologetic for our former loser president's mistakes, and not a very bright one at that. But then we got to Rauch's crowning moment and we rather lost our joy in the piece --because it is the moment in which mere cretinism yields to a depth of morally malignity rather repulsive to contemplate:



"Moreover, until 1990 Saddam had been a savage bully, but one America had done business with. It was reasonable to expect that after the fighting he might settle down, play by the rules, and pocket billions in diverted development aid like any self-respecting kleptocrat."



A bully, at my school, was someone who hit other people. With his fist. One guy I remember once put a needle in the toe of his boot, and kicked with it. But at Mr. Rauch's school, apparently, a bully was a little more aggressive - he was the guy who put the Sarin in the air ducts in the bathroom, apparently. The guy who set up torture chambers in the janitor closets. The guy who supplied his buddies with automatic rifles the better to systematically shoot down unarmed civilians in order to put fear into his enemies. Other people call such things a 'crime against humanity', but the knowing Rauch would smile at such naivete. Of course, for the Rauchs, only one crime against humanity has ever happened in history -- on September 11, 2001.

Dope



Going to New Mexico to kill a man -- that was Limited Inc's brainstorm a few days ago, when it occured to us that there was a feature story in Texas sending a crack team of hangmen, out of our well known heart, to our needy neighbor, New Mexico, to help inject a killer and child rapist with a lethal fluid. Texas and New Mexico refused to give the names of the bourreaux, our Lone Star Rosenkranz and Guildenstern, but it suddenly occured to Limited Inc that some magazine somewhere would be interested in this story. Too late: on the same day, Clark, the childkiller, was murdered by the state.



The Albuquerque Tribune ran a big story about Terry Clark, the killer and killed.



Joline Gutierrez Krueger had the byline. Here are the crucial grafs:



"Terry Clark does not seem like a monster in letters and phone calls from death row, rare glimpses of a man few have come to know - or have wanted to - since that day 15 years ago when he put three bullets in a 9-year-old girl's head.



The state Supreme Court affirmed Clark's death sentence on July 8, 1999. Dena Lynn Gore had already been almost 13 years gone, longer dead in a White Oaks cemetery than she was alive. Clark had spent those years as inmate No. 34930 in the state penitentiary, segregated from the general population more for his own safety than anything and allowed out of his cell one hour a day.



"Yeah, this place is a trip," he wrote Sept. 28, 1999. "I have met a lot of people in here, and it has not been all bad. But I still do not wish to die of old age in here, either. Nothing could be offered me to want to spend my life in this place. Nothing!!"



Clark had grown weary of Mitchell's attempts to save him from execution, and he began filing briefs on his own seeking the right to waive counsel and the right to die as the courts had ordered."



In short, the classic American psychodrama. Clark wants to commit suicide, the state wants to kill him, and the opponents of the state committing the capital crime of murdering murderers (or other criminals) trying to prevent the machine from operating one more time.



Our p.o.v. has been outlined in some scattered post a week or so back: we oppose the death penalty. But our more novelistic interest is in the executioners. Our readers by now are way ahead of us: of course, you are thinking, what would be perfect for this post, Mssrs. Limited Inc, is a nice long quote from Joseph de Maistre's amazing and sinister defense of the ancien regime, Soirees de St-Petersburgh. Wow, such readers we have! We are totally in synch with your wishes! And besides, it is one of the great moments in political rhetoric, de Maistre's astonishing elogium to the hangman. Here's our translation:



"I believe that you are all too clever not to have more than once meditated on the fact of the hangman. What is this inexplicable being who prefers, before all the other agreeable, lucrative, honest and even honorable jobs in the world crowding upon the mind which muses on human force or dexterity, that of tormenting and even putting to death his fellows? That head, that heart, are they made like our own? Don't they contain something peculiar and strange to our nature? For me, I can't doubt it. He is made like us on the outside; he is born like us; but he is an extraordinary being, and in order that he exist in the human family there had to have been issued a decree, a fiat of the Creative Power. He is created like a world. See what he is in the opinion of men, and understand, if you can, how he can ignore that opinion or confront it! hardly has authority chosen his residence, hardly has he taken possession of it when his neighbors recoil, giving him the blind eye. In the middle of this solitude, this sort of vacuum formed around him that he lives alone with his female and his little ones, who make known to him the pleasing sounds of the human voice. Otherwise, he would known nothing but shrieks... a lugubrious signal is given, an abject minister of justice comes to knock on his door and tell him he is needed. He gets up, he goes, he arrives at a public place entirely filled with a palpitating, dense crowd. They throw him a poisoner, a parricide, a blasphemer. He grasps the wretch, stretches him out, ties him to a horizontal cross. He lifts his arm, while a horrible silence surrounds him, and one hears only the cry of bones breaking under the iron rod and the screams of the victim. He unties him, carries him to the wheel. The broken limbs dangle in the spokes. The head hands miserably, the hairs stand up, and the mouth, like a urnace, only gargles, at intervals, some bloody words to call upon death. He finishes, our hangman. His heart is beating, but it is with joy. He applauds his own work, he says in his heart: no one runs the wheel better than me. He climes down, he extends his bloody hand, and justice tosses him some gold coins which he carries off, making a passage through the ranks of the horrified audience that yield to him as he passes. He goes back and sits at his take and eats. Then, he goes to bed and sleeps. The next day, in waking up, he reflects on anything else than what he did yesterday. Is this a man? Yes. God receives him in his temples, and permits him to pray. He is not a criminal, yet no language would consent to say that he is virtuous, honest, estimable, etc. No moral praise is due him, for all such praise supposes a human relationship, and he has none. Yet all grandeur, all power, all obedience rests on the executioner. It is the horror and the tie of all human association. If you take this incomprehensible agent from the world, in that instant order is turned into chaos, thrones are thrown into the abyss, and society disappears."

Remora



Story of the day is the further melt-down of Enron. Remember Enron? Company voted most likely to be evil during the Bushy era? The company that once traded at 80 dollars per, and now is trading at a tenth of that? The company that might be sold to Dynegy (not, alas, Dynasty, which would have been soooo appropriate -- all Texas companies bear an uncanny resemblence to tv shows about Texas, and though Enron is based in Houston, the Dallas comparison, down to the match between J.R. and Ken Lay, Enron's CEO, is downright separated at birth). A year ago, the idea that a no-name would acquire one of Wall Street's hot shot companies - a company that treated California much like one of Marquis de Sade's heros treated the unfortunate Juliette -- would have been an ultra-giggle. Now, of course, those who are still invested in the energy trading or whatever it does company are praying this is the good news. The story in Fortune by Bethany McLean is a pretty good intro to the depths to which Enron's sunk:



Story by Bethany Maclean in Fortune:



Ending grafs go for the jugular, or in this case the balance sheet.



"Perhaps the biggest concern is the true profitability of Enron's core business, its energy trading operation. The heart of the Enron story, the stuff that captivated Wall Street, was the company's transformation from a stodgy gas pipeline into a technology phenomenon that could make a market in anything, from electricity to broadband. It's impossible to know if Enron has used the partnerships and off-balance-sheet vehicles to influence its reported earnings. Enron also mingles profits from asset sales with its trading income--and despite its pledges, in the most recent quarter the company provided less, not more, disclosure on that front. In addition there are questions about how aggressively Enron books trading-related revenue. In fact, a knowledgeable source at a competitor says that Enron recognizes its revenues at two to five times the rate of that company's. If energy trading is really such a fabulous business for Enron, why does it need to play so many games?



As for Ken Lay, who was once thought to be in Jack Welch's league, he has accomplished the truly remarkable feat of destroying much of what was left of Enron's credibility in just a few short months--along with some of his own. Some observers suspect that the problem is not that Lay is avoiding questions, but that he doesn't know the answers. In either case, Lay is a long way from keeping his promises. "



Irony (which is now, of course, officially unpatriotic) is that Fortune was a big pumper of Enron's cyber with-it-ness in the day. I'll find the links for that later today.

Limited Inc is starting from the fourth chapter of Ezekial tonight. So get a stiff drink.



"And, behold, I will lay bands upon thee, and thou shalt not turn thee from one side to another, till thou hast ended the days of thy siege.



Take thou also unto thee wheat, and barley, and beans, and lentiles, and millet, and fitches, and put them in one vessel, and make thee bread thereof, according to the number of the days that thou shalt lie upon thy side, three hundred and ninety days shalt thou eat thereof.



And thy meat which thou shalt eat shall be by weight, twenty shekels a day: from time to time shalt thou eat it.



Thou shalt drink also water by measure, the sixth part of an hin: from time to time shalt thou drink.



And thou shalt eat it as barley cakes, and thou shalt bake it with dung that cometh out of man, in their sight."



Yes, from time to time thou shalt drink; from time to time even eat meat, twenty shekels worth. This, my readers, is the emblem and essence of the writing life. This week, Limited Inc searched high and low for funds, having to meet certain emergencies, like rent. And of course we are begging in the full, arrogant knowledge that we command the language, the Queen's tongue. If this were the eighteenth century, man, we'd be cleaning up. But in our heart we know we are screwed -- command of the tongue is worth zip in the market place. We could have made more, this year, bagging hotdogs and white bread at the local store. This has gone on for three freelancing years, and each month Limited Inc decides, okay, I'll quit. This month we are making more of an effort, having put out resumes to spas and architects lauding our ability to answer the phone, file (you are a writer? Do you like know the alphabet? -- kewl!) and generally bake our barleycakes with the dung that cometh out of man, in their sight. So far, no responses. So we are doing as much as we can, on a freelance basis, with the Austin American Statesman. And crossing our fingers that something will take us out of this hell. Hell, you think, is a metaphor, but no, no, we are talking pretty realistically. What else do you call a world in which the man who designed the awful popup page which displays that awful, unnecessary and surely never bought X-2 digital camera or whatever it is (go to Yahoo for anything and you'll see what we mean) is living in the lap of luxury, raising his idiot children as he sees fit, while we are living the life of one of those dying 19th century bohemians. That has to be hell -- it is the overthrow of all rationality, all value, of Western Civilization itself ( lately given such high marks by the commentariat) in favor of mere piggery. Piggery forever.



On that note, take a look at Cynthia Cott's cutely named: are we dead yet:



Nice graf:



"In the media sector, an estimated 100,000 media jobs were eliminated in the past year or more, according to IWantMedia.com�and many editorial types fear a new wave of layoffs any day now."

Dope



Two posts tonight! Limited Inc.'s limited readership should appreciate this, although maybe they will groan over the verbiage. Sorry.



Ahem, vee vill begin our lecture mit ein simple fifisection of a wabbit...

Oops, sorry about that, ladies and germs -- wrong set of notes!

In the November 5th New Yorker there is a column by the astute but limited James Surowiecki, who makes the standard case against breaking the Bayer patent on Cipro. The case goes like this: to come up with an antibiotic takes years of R & D, and R & D costs beaucoup millions; so if in the end, the anti-biotic isn't a moneymaker, then R & D into other anti-biotics will be inhibited. Thus it is socially advantageous not to bust Bayer's balls, so to speak.



Unfortunately, as Surowiecki sleepwalks through his econ 101 lecture, he adds a number of facts that contradict his larger point, and support the idea that monopoly actually has an inhibiting effect on medically important R & D. He averts to the slowdown in antibiotic research after 1967, a generally agreed upon high point in the war against infectious diseases. That slowdown, he contends, was market driven:

"Besides, given the choice between making an anti-biotic that a person might take for two weeks once in a lifetime or developing an anti-depressant that a person would take every day for the rest of his life, drug companies naturally opted for the latter." If S. could be shaken out of his dogmatic slumbers for a bit and made to read back his own sentence, he might notice that monopoly, here, does the opposite of what he claims it does. It levels the field so that it makes it more profitable to de-emphasize exploring anti-biotic pharmaceuticals as compared to the more lucrative anti-depressives. In other words, bad research drives out good. And the penalty for that is minimal, given that anti-biotics are being held in a sixteen year bondage according to federal law, and the patent time frame is easily extendable. S. even is hip to the result of this: "that's why in the past twenty-five years they {big Pharma] have developed just one new class of anti-biotic." Well, let's look at correlations. We have an increasingly sophisticated sphere of intellectual property laws, and we have an increasingly debauched drug research system, more interested in those nifty sex-drive-n'-hair enhancers than in coming up with cures for multiple drug resistant tb. Now if the state were sensitive to this, it would not hand out monopoly power like candy. If there was a smaller time frame, the sex-drive-n-hair enhancers would have to be marketed more efficiently, as generic drug companies can come up with amazing copies quickly. In this atmosphere, the profitability of anti-biotic drugs as compared to others would go up, since there is less likely to be a major profit in copying them, and there is more reason to emphasize them for their developers. They would be mid-list drugs, steady sellers. Moreover, breaking up the monopoly power of big Pharma would recognize the R & D real world - which is networked through a university system largely subsidized by the good old Gov. Perhaps smaller companies can't compete with giant companies that dragoon, or tempt, researchers into more frivolous but lucrative research. But if there were more starters, there might just be more incentive to do that major research. In other words, more competition, lower entry costs, is what we should be aiming at.



Of course, Surowiecki's idea that tech comes when you lay out money as automatically as an old pooch trots to the dogfood bowl when you put out the Gainesburgers is pretty naive. It shows zero feeling for the history of the golden age of medicine, which was driven, pre-1967, much more by an ethos of public healthcare than by the numbers pharmaceutical giants are used to now. And another hint: the fons et origo of that era is clearly the biggest of all state endeavors of the 20th century -- as with most of our technology, the modern medical era can be tracked back to WWII. War is the mother of invention.

Notice

Hey, my hypocritical readers, what is up with you all? What is up, what is up/ in the house? I install this great little commenting widget, and I'm expecting, oh, I don't know, some damn disagreement. I mean, I'm trying to take controversial stands here! I'm trying to be a contrarian! What am I doing wrong? I mean, here I am alone in my apartment, nobody to argue with, and I think I'll just continue the enrag� tradition of the situationalists, breed the polemic fury of Trotsky with the goofiness of Wodehouse, I think this is gonna stir em up in the streets when I cut and paste my postings, and Alan tells me I made a grammatical error on one of the posts, and that is the breadth and the depth! Surely I can't be representing the bien pensant opinion -- surely I'm not mister average Joe! Oh say it ain't so! Okay, enough with the exclamation marks (I just think they are funny). How bout those economic heresies I casually spout, though? Or my AC/DC feelings about the war? Or the way I make fun of Bushypoo, like calling him Bushypoo - which goes back to his pop, who I also called Bushypoo. I look over who is coming to this site, and I am amazed how many people apparently think I'm posting naked Lolita picks, or that there is something ineffably sexy about misspelling girls "girles" (not really a misspelling, simply a quote from an Elizabethan translation of Plutarch. Those horn dogs must be maddened to land on such sterile shores. Not that I am going to get too moral about it -- when I search for porno, I put things like 'teenage girles' up myself.) Well, I feel like some marooned Rumpelstilskin here, jumping up and down without an audience. Sadness, man, sadness.

Remora



The New Statesman, "rather provocatively" focuses, this week, on American Imperialism. Ah, that phrase! We at Limited Inc used to let it roll off our tongue with a certain jouissance (and we use to let jouissance roll off our tongue with a certain frisson, don't you know? and so we pleasantly descended, on angel wings, the sub-Barthesian ladder, full of grad school certainty and hot air). And it is still a useful phrase, but we can't but take issue with the New Statesman's take on the Cold War:



"In this issue (pages 18-19), we publish a map, showing US interventions overseas since 1945 and entitled, rather provocatively, "The original rogue state". It is not an exhaustive catalogue. It does not show some of the more recent examples such as Somalia, the Balkans and Iraq; it subsumes Cambodia and Laos into Vietnam; it has no room for El Salvador or Cyprus. A similar map, published to show Soviet interventions up to 1989, would have highlighted many of the same areas (Angola and Afghanistan, for example) but, where Latin America features heavily on our map, the Soviet version would focus more on eastern Europe and the Caucasus.



"Almost any New Statesman reader would prefer to live in a world where America, rather than the Soviet Union, won the cold war. We may think that, if the latter had won, Moscow, Leningrad (as it is no longer called) and Minsk would have been the victims of terrorist attacks, not New York and Washington. The truth is that a Soviet-dominated world would have been so tightly controlled as to make terrorism extremely difficult and, as the control would have extended to the media, much less rewarding in its psychological and propaganda effects."



The "truth" about the Soviet dominated world has been out for some time; far from being Orwell's vision of an anthive, it was a world of factory workers drinking the cleaning fluid and criminal clans making the economy work, when it worked. There is an odd prejudice afloat in the world, shared by left and right alike, that totalitarian regimes are somehow better at violence, better at "domination." And so it is thought that democracies, going to war, have to towel off the democratic mascara and really get top down and Patton-ish, censor the press, throw the thousand or so "foreigners" in jail (as is being done right now -- see earlier post), etc. Well, though dictatorships are more violent, it is a different thing to say they are better at violence. Sure, Eichman made the trains run on time, but the US won the war and held an election in the midst of it, as well as completing it with another president than the one who started it. In other words, success in politics has to be looked at in terms of social reproduction, and democracy has been pretty ace at that, even if, as in the election our present POTUS stole, it is imperfect. That Churchill could be defeated in the election right after the war is a possibility folded into the expectations of those who fought the war. The vicious, immoral Vietnam war affected the overthrow of those who designed it, in this country; the stupid Afghanistan war pretty much broke the whole design of the Soviet empire. The Cold War was a peculiar war in many ways, but none more than this -- it put the systems themselves in competition. It was the way the militaries were built up, rather than a military clash, which decided the "war." There is a random element in real war, military genius, which makes it problematic to identify victory with some sort of systematic superiority of the winning party. Napoleon could have prevailed at Waterloo, but it is much harder to envision Brezhnev prevailing with his gasping system over one that was opening up such a clear and increasing lead in all the technologies that counted.