Bollettino



I heard John Kerry on NPR a couple of days ago. It was a completely sad experience. Kerry was asked what he would do, if he was president, about Iraq. His answer was that he would go to the U.N.



Now, Kerry is a smart man. He is an experienced man. His committee investigations of B.C.C.I in the 90s, and of the Central American conflicts in the 80s, were smart and well done, although limited. But to answer with the favored gesture of the Dembots � to promote process as an answer in itself � is just the kind of thing that will reelect Bush. The only thing you get, when the answer is process, is processed cheese.



How should he have answered? This is what I would have said:



I�m not president right now, and right now is a crucial time in Iraq. So let�s talk about what President Bush should do to remove Iraq as an issue next year. Three things come to mind immediately



1. End the p.r. aspect of the war. In Vietnam, the army would take a hill simply to have it reported on the news that they took a hill. That soon demoralized troops, and eventually corrupted the whole military effort in that war. In this war, we are hearing all about troops building schools. Meanwhile, on the side, we are also hearing that the guerillas are supplying themselves from huge dumps of conventional weapons, including surface to air missiles, because we don�t have enough military personnel on the ground to destroy these things. This is, to put it bluntly, lunatic. If you don�t prioritize military missions for the army in a hostile situation, you shouldn�t have any responsibility for the army. Be a man, pull the school builders, cut off the enemy�s ability to acquire weapons. Period.



2. Dispel the air of sleaze about this war. The war wasn�t fought for the top ten contributors to the Republican party. The President needs to make an example of Halliburton, which has been caught price gouging to the tune of almost 400 million dollars in its reselling and mark up of oil in Iraq. Busting Halliburton would send a message that this war is not about exploitation. If you want to give free propaganda to the enemy, continue awarding juicy contracts to the likes of Worldcom, and continue letting politics, rather than the marketplace, determine the bidding process.



3. Stop the constitutional madness. Constitutions are paper. If we think that leaving a constitution behind is going to guarantee our interests, we are na�ve to a dangerous degree. The administration should immediately start an election project, and plan to hold nationwide elections for an assembly in the next three months. The Iraqis want this � polls show it. If Iraqis don�t have something to defend, they won�t defend it. If they don�t have something to support, they won�t support it. The general rule of thumb, in history, is that occupying powers become more, not less, unpopular as time goes on. Shaky analogies to the exceptions, in Germany and Japan, aren�t going to change this. The dynamic in Iraq has to change now, it has to change in such a way that the Iraqis are left with the impression that Americans are allies, not bosses, and it has to change at the top.



Easy. Instead, we get Dem candidates who�ve been advised by their managers and their entourages to remain as mealy mouthed as possible. We don�t think Kerry is going to get elected. But he does really have things to say � he is alive, he is experienced, he is a better person than the wanker on NPR. He should try to remember this.

Bollettino



Are we thinking enough about coitus interruptus?

You there, in the back. I�m talking to you.



The question is prompted by an article in The Journal of Interdisciplinary History entitled, "They prefer withdrawal". If this sounds like a distant echo of Bartleby�s cry (I prefer not to) � well, surely some scholar somewhere is even now busily connecting Bartleby�s angst to forms of birth control you can invent in your very own home.



Here�s the intro graf:



Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, contemporary advocates of "modern" methods of birth control denigrated withdrawal as ineffective, unpleasant, and even physically and psychologically harmful. Yet, the available evidence on birth control in Britain (and elsewhere) has consistently suggested that withdrawal continued to be the most widely used method of family limitation even into the interwar decades, after more than a half-century of sharply falling national fertility. The use of withdrawal was frequent despite such contemporaneous developments in reproductive technology as the invention of caps and diaphragms (often confusingly called pessaries or check pessaries), their dispersal in a growing number of birth-control clinics, the manufacture of spermicidal pessaries, the commercialization of sheaths, and, in the 1930s, the production of the latex condom. Why, the interwar experts wondered, "in spite of such obvious disadvantages, is this method practised by millions of people?"



Kate Fisher and Simon Szreter, the authors, have no single answer for that question. However, they have gone back over a fascinating, if rather bizarre, survey of old age pensioners in a town in Northern England. The survey concentrated on these folks former marital sexual practices. As Fisher and Szreter point out, these surveys are usually skewed female, since it is rare that males participate in family studies. Why? They don�t explain this. But the survey, or at least Fisher and Szreter�s explanation of it, seems to confirm several broad Foucaultian theses about the interaction between popular practices and the disciplinary technostructures that sought to capture and organize those practices. A lot of work has been done about the great onanism scare of the 18th century. This work has a sub-text � my, aren�t we more sexually liberal now. But sexual liberalism as a program necessarily entails its own coercive agenda. Apparently, the great war on coitus interruptus � a war launched on behalf of �health� and �psychological well being,� a war waged on behalf of tolerance and pleasure and all of the other bullet points of the sexually liberal, was based, itself, on selected truths. As Norman Mailer suspected half a century ago, the devil (insofar as the devil is a technician) was trying to annex the sexual sphere � to purify the site of pleasure before pleasure begins, an airbrushing gesture that still shapes sex as entertainment -- through science:



"THE SAFEST FORM OF CONTRACEPTION": WITHDRAWAL AS A RELIABLE METHOD OF BIRTH CONTROL Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, birth-control campaigners were united in condemning withdrawal as a highly unreliable method of birth control, prone to failure and frequent unwanted pregnancies. Cox in Clinical Contraception maintained that it was both the most "primitive" and the "most unreliable method in use" and highlighted four causes of failure: "premature emission"; "presence of spermatozoa in the pre-ejaculatory secretion"; "re-entry after ejaculation," "without effective cleansing"; and "motile sperms ... which succeed in traversing the vagina and reaching the os." 5



Subsequent scientific and medical advice has mellowed somewhat. By 1971, Peel and Potts could take a much more agnostic position in their medical Textbook of Contraceptive Practice: "If there are no good reasons for recommending it neither are there any obvious grounds for discouraging it among couples who have already decided on the method and appear to be relatively happy with it." In fact, recent data on the efficiency of withdrawal has concluded that its failure rate is similar to that of the diaphragm and the rhythm method (withdrawal 19 percent, rhythm 20 percent, diaphragm 18 percent, condoms, 12 percent, and contraceptive pills 8 percent). However, Peel and Potts were not prepared to recommend the method to newcomers; they were more favorably inclined toward the appliance and chemical methods available by the 1970s. Contemporary advice and family-planning literature has continued in this vein, only actively promoting "modern" methods. The failure rates for withdrawal are sometimes highlighted in such literature, one author insisting by contrast, "for consistent and correct users, barrier method effectiveness is quite high." Rarely has anyone suggested that withdrawal might be an effective [End Page 270] technique with the proper care and skill; rather, such care and skill were to be seriously doubted. 6



Of course that skill is doubted. Whether the struggle is against masturbation or against withdrawal, the principle is always the same: people don�t have the skill to use the genitals they were supplied with in the womb. That most secret and divided moment in the Enlightenment project � riven between freedom, on the one hand, and the control of nature, on the other hand � finds its natural subject in the sexual, where freedom and nature clash by night, an ignorant army of withdrawers, masturbators, male gazers, and whores against the know-it-alls, purveyors of survey questions, doctors and academics.



The ignorant constitute the only army I belong to. Onward Christian soldiers.

We received a letter this morning from a p.r. guy at one of the big publishing houses. We'd squabbled with the guy over the galley of a book we are supposed to be reviewing. The squabble is over. However, he included a little jab in his message, about how he doubted, at one point, that we were a "legitimate reviewer."



How we wish that was true! Legitimate book reviewer? We would rather be accused of public wanking.



But that is unfair. With public wanking, at least, there are some benefits, some feedback. Friends that you can make in prison.



Be that as it may -- we wonder about the current craze for reviewing reviewers. Most book reviews suffer from tediousness more than � horrid, preppy word � snarkiness. Yet here comes James Atlas, doing a NYT magazine piece on Dale Peck solely because Peck has written few pans in the TNR slinging insults at Rick Moody and David Foster Wallace. As if this was new and noteworthy..



Well, since I am a professional book reviewer until they turn off the lights in this joint, why not pile on. In this case, piling on means reviewing Deborah Friedell�s review of Neal Stephenson�s Quicksilver in the TNR this week. It is a pan. And it is,as a review, so obviously badly made and so badly thought out that it can stand in for a lot of the vices endemic to the trade. This isn't to diss Friedell -- we can sympathize with every bad decision Friedell made, and that the editor allowed.



I have also reviewed Quicksilver � I did it for the News and Observer. Maybe it is even up on the net. My review was lukewarm. I thought Cryptonomicon was a beautifully done novel, and I was disappointed that Quicksilver was so � disorganized.



Friedell is not coy about her opinion of the novel: after quoting a comment about the book in Time Magazine, she writes: �There is nothing category-defying about this ridiculous book�



That sentence ends the third paragraph. It is characteristic of the TNR �rip em to shreds� reviewing style � it is how Peck reviews. We can see why the editor and the writer think it is a good idea to front an exaggeratedly ill tempered judgment. It gives the reader the idea that okay, the hanging court is in session. However, we think that the writer and editor should resist the temptation, most of the time, to start off with an extreme judgment, instead of building up to one. I�ve violated that rule myself plenty of times, but mostly in order to praise a book I think is not going to attract attention unless I do a little dance at the beginning of my piece. My worst reviews are when I let the bad temper out, prematurely. Far better to let the defendant hang himself.



However, the beginning of Friedell�s review commits a far worse crime against the rules of reviewing. It begins, a la Kael, by associating the book with other reviews.



That people you don�t like like a novel you don�t like is a cheap shot to take against a novel, usually. It�s malign sociology, and it depends on no control but the reviewer�s idea of some dreadful amorphous crowd that is brought together out of the reviewer's deepest dislikes. Reviewing can never wholly leave out snobbery, but the trick is in maintaining just the right dialectical distance. To review with reference to other reviewers, or a supposed audience, almost always collapses that dialectic, leaving in its wake a snobbery bereft of aesthetic values. The locus classicus of this kind of thing is Kael�s review of West Side Story, which reviewed, at length, the reviews of West Side Story. The reviews were by liberals, and they were by critics who didn�t like musicals. And, by an easy transition, West Side Story was accused of being a fake. Compared not to other musicals, but to the way it was compared to other musicals by reviewers. Now, there might be something in that, but reviewers should be very cautious about guilt by association. Kael�s review came some eight years after McCarthy had perfected that technique. It was unfair and ignorant in the hands of McCarthy, and in the hands of Kale, it bore those hallmarks still. Pauline Kael was surely the McCarthy of reviewers, and her influence has extended far beyond film reviewing -- which is why we are talking about her here. Friedell is probably unconscious that she is stepping in Kael's footsteps, but she is. Surely, if a work stinks, you can find reasons for saying it stinks in itself -- a sort of Kantian stinkiness.



It isn�t that I am immune to this kind of thing: I did it with a review I wrote of the last Houellebecq novel. I did it to be funny. I understand how it seems like a good intro. But really, it is a suck intro. It is coming into the ring and uncorking an under the belt shot first thing. It might amuse the crowd, but it is, for good reason, frowned upon by amateurs of the sweet art.



If, however, you are going to begin with a dirty shot, make sure you�ve covered your ass. For a reviewer, that means showing that you�ve read the book. Friedell, distressingly, shows that she has skipped around largely in the book. That makes sense, if she thinks it is a ridiculous book, but it vitiates her credentials as a reviewer. Now, Quicksilver is 900 some closely printed pages. There are longeurs in the book you could drive a Hummer through. But those nine hundred some pages are filled with, at the very least, extensive and multiple plots. Friedell tells us the plot of the first book as if it wraps around the whole novel. It very definitely doesn�t:



�Although Quicksilver has moments where it diverges into fantasy and science fiction, most of the novel is easily categorized as historical fiction. Its subject is one Daniel Waterhouse, a curious but far from brilliant scientist, whom Stephenson plops Forrest Gump-like into a Who's Who of early modern English thought. The novel begins in 1713, with the apparently amaranthine Enoch Root (a mysterious figure who appears also in the twentieth-century world of Cryptonomicon) convincing our hero to leave his home in Massachusetts Bay so as to end the discord of England's scientists over who first invented calculus. Newton discovered it first, but Leibniz published it first, and it is up to Daniel Waterhouse to patch these momentous things up.



Will he succeed where history failed? That may be fodder for Stephenson's next tome.�



Indeed. What Friedell is skipping, here, is the last two thirds of the book. There is the plot, in the second book, of Eliza and Jack�s ostrich feather market move, which brings us into physical contact with Leibnitz. There is Jack�s capture by pirates at the end of the second book. And there are the multiple court intrigues of the third book that result in the glorious revolution � with the term �revolution� borrowed from astronomy, and � in Stephenson�s version � promoted by Daniel Waterhouse. The novel may be bad or good, but it is definitely about the tying together of science, economics and politcs. That�s central to the thing. But one feels that Friedell just doesn�t care:



�Mainly we observe the goings-on of what becomes London's Royal Society, an organization dedicated to spreading the good tidings of the "New Philosophy"--a method of inquiry that would subject everything in the known world, from human language to optics and the heavens, to empirical study. Stephenson is adept at conveying the Royal Society's intellectual vigor, its sense that all was open to study and to debate, that the world was new and ripe for analysis. But what draws Stephenson to the Royal Society is surely its veneration of fact.�



At this point, we have to wonder whether Friedell has read Gulliver�s Travels. The relation between the Island of Laputa and what Stephenson is describing is pretty evident in the text, and one of the points of the thing is not just that the Royal Society venerated fact � it is that the Society experimented to make facts. To not understand that is to not understand the whole point. Look, act, describe � this is what is radical, what is new about the Royal Society, and the New Philosophy. There is nothing magic in facts -- a belief in ghosts is a belief that ghosts are a fact. The question is all in proofs. But it is obvious from the above paragraph that this is not obvious, or important, to Friedell. Fair enough � but if you aren�t interested in such things, surely a disclaimer is in order. As in: I have no interest in the history of science. Something like that. There are hosts of things that I, as a reviewer, am not interested in. I have read at least fifty short story collections all about the emotional lives of hard drinking divorcees in falling down blue collar neighborhoods, and I�ve realized that this is not something that interests me that much. Unless it is treated comically. That�s my blindness. As a reviewer, I think there are ways to work around that. But if you are reviewing for a magazine, and you have the room � instead of, say, for Kirkus � then you should come up to the bumper, baby, and just say it.



Instead, Friedell goes on a cherrypicking expedition. For someone who has obviously skipped through the mass of the book, this is a bold and hazardous course � and the signs are bad. For instance, she concentrates on, well, on the first fifty pages. For instance, to drive home the point that the characters talk like wax figures in a Disney exhibit about the 17th century, she quotes the following:



�Here is a typical exchange:



"He'd been pestering me with letters... He'd been doing it for years--ever since sending letters had become possible again."



"What made it possible?"



"In my neck of the woods--for I was living in the town of Saxony, called Leipzig--the peace of Westphalia did."



"1648!" Ben says donnishly to the younger boy. "The end of the Thirty Years' War."



"At his end," Enoch continues, "it was the removal of the King's head from the rest of the King, which settled the Civil War and brought a kind of peace to England."



Now, the Ben in question (Ben Franklin) is a schoolboy. And, in context, this is not such an awkward conversation. But more importantly, to cull items this heavily from the first fifty pages, after proclaiming your contempt for the novel, makes the reader think, hmm� did she really read this novel? And that is the worst thing for the reader to be thinking, because it de-legimates the whole process. We are surprised that the TNR book editor allowed this to go through.



Friedell does score some hits. Stephenson is terrible about his women characters. He is too nervous to give them the full sexist treatment, a la Mailer � but he is too sexist, or at least too much the pop author, not to want them to be sexy. So he makes them beautiful and brainy, in a very clumsy way � one is reminded of the Playboy Centerfold bios, where the questions are about favorite books and ambitions, as if the naked gals were job interviewing for a non-tenure position at a junior college. In Quicksilver, Eliza, a courtesan with all the airs of some up and coming Harvard grad, circa 1990. is the female interest. The anachronism of her gestures, talk and attitude is obviously intended � it is a cartoonish joke. But it doesn�t work.



Here�s the best part of Friedell�s review:



�What is remarkable about Jack and Eliza's exchange is its shallowness, its superfluity. (The same may be said of the whole book.) Stephenson does not seem to know what to do with his characters except to have them exchange facts. In the book's appendix, Stephenson provides a dramatis personae listing more than a hundred names. It is a dire necessity in a book in which it is simply impossible to tell characters apart. Any number of these people could exclaim, "He must still be representing the late Charles II, who was crowned in 1651 after the Puritans chopped off the head of his father and predecessor. My King was crowned in 1654." There is no evidence that Stephenson has given any thought to how a seventeenth-century woman might talk to a seventeenth-century man, about how her understanding of the world might infuse her speech.�



Hanging on to that criticism, she gets in some above the belt shots about Stephenson�s writing. Stephenson has the ability to create enormous prose riffs. However, he is also guilty of pages of stiff, wooden writing. Friedell doesn�t care about those riffs � which ultimately makes her pan less effective.



�When Stephenson tries to add romance to the mix, he is unable to lose his idiot-savant tone, and what results are the most embarrassing sections of the novel. "Monmouth got himself worked round to a less outlandish position, viz. sitting up and gazing soulfully into Eliza's nipples." Into the nipples? There is also an adolescent obsession with men titillated by lesbianism and women made fierce by menstrual tension. ("'This may fire or it may not,' she said in French. 'You have until I count to ten to decide whether to gamble your life or your immortal soul on it. One ... two ... three ... did I mention I'm on the rag? Four....'") But these sections are mercifully brief: Stephenson always needs to hurry back to the matter of when and where Charles I was beheaded.�



Gazing into the nipples � that is a genuine find. Sometimes, Friedell takes a scalp. If I was Stephenson, this paragraph would make me wince. Too bad it wasn�t backed up with a better structure. Too bad one�s impression is that Friedell never finished the damn thing.

Bollettino



We recommend New Yorker�s film issue. The New Yorker has shook off, mostly, the baleful influence of Pauline Kael � thank God � P.K.�s style and p.o.v. having the effect, on us, that mold has on a immune deficiency shut-in -- and has a real writer on films in Anthony Lane. We resisted Lane at first � what, another English critic at another major magazine? Wasn�t one James Wood enough? But luckily, Lane is a much better writer than Wood, and not so given to his own agenda � as Wood is given to judging everything under the viewpoint that Saul Bellow is the central novelist of our time � that he can�t lapse, happily, into spontaneous likes and dislikes. Too much eclecticism in a critic is bad � it shows a lack of that conscious impressionability that we presume must accompany the experience of however many years� worth of art. To remain an ing�nue after seeing five, ten years of films, you have to be as brainless as Rex Reed. However, too little willingness to depart from one�s ideology � too little willingness to grudge the surprises of pleasure � make a critic rigid. Only this kind of mental arteriosclerosis could explain, for instance, Wood�s displeasure, in his well known review of Delillo�s Underworld, that the novel was really good. Of Denby, the other critic, we can�t say anything good. We�ve never read him and liked it. He is one of those critics who grasps a clich� the way a child will grasp the guard-rail going up the stairs. He doesn�t have any aesthetic sense that he brings to films � that is, any more than the average guy who watches enough tv might house in his soul. In other words, he�s just another popcorn muncher. Most movie critics are.



Ever since Tina Brown organized the synergy between celebs and the New Yorker mystique (which is much like saying, ever since Stalin organized the collective farming in the Ukraine � it smoothes over a, to say the least, controverted history), the magazine has made an effort to pump out some good stuff re pop culture. Contra Renata Adler, the New Yorker isn�t dead, and the writing sometimes achieves a sprightliness reminiscent of the golden age. It is, at the very least, light years from the sycophantic dribble that Vanity Fair sprinkles on its half clothed ing�nues � who, in the moment of the camera flash, have already expended their little fame half lives, and are already on the way back to the dinner time theater. As for the breathy appreciations of flawless super stars, they are as inhuman as a car company�s press releases about next year�s models. At VF, its all merely the skin above the skull. I look at those stars, their skins as bumpless as nylon � and, one feels, as liable to a run if handled ungently -- and their hair � oh, to have the money to buy the shampoo to give my hair even a tenth of that bounce and body, as they say on the ads! and I simply want to dine on them. To eat all of them. Or to quote Thom Gunn's Moly:



"Into what bulk has method disappeared?



Like ham, streaked. I am gross---grey, gross, flap-eared.



The pale-lashed eyes my only human feature.

My teeth tear, tear. I am the snouted creature



That bites through anything, root, wire, or can.

If I was not afraid I'd eat a man. "





To return to the New Yorker -- there�s a profile of a screenwriting guru, who was represented in that stinker Spike Jonez film that wasted Meryl Streep � he�s the guy the Nicolas Cage character goes to when he�s stuck on his script. But we really liked best a piece by a Tad Friend � is there, really, a man named Tad Friend in L.A., and did he escape from some as yet undiscovered Nathaniel West manuscript? -- who provides a microscopic view of the fine art of screenwriting � which is all in getting credit. Here�s a good graf:



�Studios almost always want two things from a revision: it should "raise the stakes" and "make us care about the main character more." A script doctor often accomplishes both feats at once by adding what the director Sidney Lumet has called a "rubber ducky" scene: a backstory explaining that a character became cruel or troubled because his mother took a rubber ducky away from him when he was a little boy. (The standard rubber duckies are being orphaned, being orphaned and poor, having your wife die, and having a bad woman do you wrong.) The director Garry Marshall gave "Pretty Woman" a rubber ducky when he spruced up the scene in which Edward lolls in the bathtub with Vivian and reveals that his father left his mother for another woman when he was young, taking his money with him, after which the mother died. "I was very angry with him," Marshall has Edward say, explaining why he became a corporate raider and plundered his father's company. "It cost me ten thousand dollars in therapy to say that sentence: 'I was very angry with him.' " Marshall told me, "When the actors are both naked in the tub, it's a good time to do exposition-the audience listens."



That exposition, man. Gotta have that. And the rubber ducky thing, gotta have that. Actually, this explains almost half of the suck films I�ve ever seen.



Or this:



Every script bears traces of its procession of authors, like rings on a tree stump. Carl Gottlieb, one of the screenwriters of "Jaws," has been a W.G.A. arbiter more than thirty times. "Reading the first version of something like 'The Terminator' or 'The Hulk,' you say, 'Oh, I see-that's why they bought it,' " Gottlieb says. "By the third or fourth writer, they're punching the material sideways. Then, two or three writers after that, a writer introduces one or two ideas that really make it work, and you think, This is a terrific fucking script. Then you read draft No. 9, and think, O.K., the director has put his stamp on it. Then No. 10, and the main character has much longer speeches: Aha, this is where Schwarzenegger signed on and they had to make him happy. Then you read the final script, No. 12, the movie you see, and it's O.K., but, boy, you wish they'd shot No. 7 or No. 8. The problem is the people responsible for fabulous draft No. 7 didn't have to worry about casting it, or about having a big opening weekend, which requires explosions, shattering glass, exploitative nudity, and a lesbian scene that the lead actress can talk about on Leno."



I could keep quoting, until I reproduced the entire piece. Friend gives excellent graf. Trust me on this one. Read it.

Bollettino



Alterman�s new column excoriates the Dems for their latest Dem failure. Basically, they blew their chance, again, on a no brainer -- using the 87 billion dollar Bush bill to take large, partisan, bloody hunks out of this administration's hide. It's the special Daschle incompetence. That Gephardt, who represents the other half of this losing duo, thinks he has a chance in hell of being elected president shows the astonishing things that can happen to your ego in D.C.



It wasn't always like this. Dem pols were once a byword for hard cases. The Dems, after all, were a streetfighting party � they came out of East coast inner cities with a chip on their shoulders. Bobby Kennedy was this kind of Dem � underhanded, fierce, vengeful. And by and large, successful. The new, kinder Dems are roll-overs for the cannibal Christian wing of the Republican party.



Here's how the issue was manipulated: the question became, how much of the sum was going to be considered a loan. Wrong issue, guys. As any Dem bull from the forties or fifties could have told you, this should have been a vote about the money that has already been spent. And in particular, the billion, two billion, three billion dollars worth of looting that went on, with the smirking compliance of Rumsfeld's military. The Army Corps of Engineers estimated that looting at a billion in May. Who knows what the numbers are. We don't, because no Dem demanded them.



William Proxmire, bless his tin pan soul, would have known in an instant what to do. He would have taken Rumsfeld's words, in his press conference about looting on April 12, and he would have stuffed them down the throats of every administration official who appeared on tv over the last two weeks.



After Rumsfeld made clear, in that conference, that the looting was just a minor annoyance, maybe even a sign of high spirits and freedom, he said this:



Let me say one other thing. The images you are seeing on television you are seeing over, and over, and over, and it's the same picture of some person walking out of some building with a vase, and you see it 20 times, and you think, "My goodness, were there that many vases?" (Laughter.) "Is it possible that there were that many vases in the whole country?"



Could a man paint more of a target on himself? But when you are facing an opposition of bumblers, it doesn't matter. Which is why we watch these things unroll in a certain stuporous horror, out here in the hinterlands, ruled by a brainless faction that is opposed by a spineless one.

Bollettino



My friend H. (who has told me, in the past, to distinguish more rigorously, in this blog, between H., which always refers to H., and Saddam H., which always refers to the meat monster) � my friend H., to begin again, has sent me a piece he wrote for the Iranian on allergies. It�s a clever bit of troping on that sneeze inducing topic, beginning with Juliet�s question, �what�s in a name? A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.� This phrase has been so trampled over the centuries that it has become a clich� for clich�s. But H. actually sees something in it from an unexpected direction. Nobody that I know has made the connection between names, roses, pollen, and histamines before. H. does.





�Juliet's anxiety stems in part from the contradiction between a name and the reality it represents. Historical enmity between the Capulet and Montague families is an impediment to the desires unfolding in Juliet's body for a reality embodied by Romeo the lover. Juliet wonders: "what is Montague, it's not a hand, nor foot, nor arm, nor face, nor any other part belonging to a man...tis his name that is Juliet's enemy."

Now, allergy is widely understood as a reaction caused by the mistaken perception of the body that an otherwise harmless substance is a threat. Once your mind perceives a substance as an invading allergen, then, the immune system tries to eliminate it in a process that makes life a living hell. Either the mind "suspects" and torments the body or the body "knows" and re-educates the mind.



The first reaction might be psychosomatic but it is no less real. What the mind thinks, the body acts on. Allergy is life writ large. Our reaction to a given "reality" -- our perception of it -- is very much linked to what that reality is named. Whether it is called Romeo or a Montague, liberty or licentiousness, a daisy cutter or an incinerator of human flesh, a martyr or a thug blowing up innocent kids, veal parmesan or butchered and mostly burned baby calf topped by her mother's milk -- names will have a lot to do with how we come to perceive a reality embodied.�



Oddly enough, allergies haven�t really figured in great lit like, say, tuberculosis. In fact, who among the great literary characters is seized with insupportable sneezing and watery eyes at just the wrong moment? Not even in Balzac, where all things are dared. Not even among the Russians. Although who knows � there is a back field of Russian literature that contains surprising things. Yes, the Magic Mountain of the Allergy set awaits its author.



It looks like H. will be intermittently essaying for the Iranian. Look for him. Click here for another of his pieces.

Bollettino



Martin Jay, who has spent his life dissecting and explaining the texts of some of the 20th century�s most dialectically challenging thinkers (Adorno, Benjamin), is a strangely hamfisted writer. In this season�s Salmagundi, he has a long, and rather depressing essay entitled "Ariel Sharon and the rise of the new anti-semitism." The newness of the anti-semitism is, we suppose, that there are less accusations of ritual murder this time around � but otherwise, it seems pretty much the old story of Jewish conspiracies, traced by Norman Cohen all the way back to the first century.



First things first. The most depressing part of the essay � depressing because it is so plain silly � is the end.



�One place to begin on both sides would be to declare a total moratorium on comparisons of the actions of the others with the Nazis, which does nothing but close off any possible discussion of real grievances and how to resolve them. Playing the Nazi card discredits the one who resorts to it more than its target. Another would be the recognition that for all its centrality to Jewish identity, Israel as it is presently constituted does not translate into an automatic synonym for Jews in all their variety. Even within Israel, there is, after all, significant opposition to the policies of the present rightwing government,37 as the courageous "refuseniks" in the army who resist service in the occupied territories demonstrate. The identification of all Jews with Israel, which seems to be an excuse for antiSemitism in some quarters, is as troubling as the menacing insistence on the part of some of Israel's defenders that all Jews must rally behind it, right or wrong.�



Does Jay really think that, from the sandbox of the Salmagundi, he can declare a moratorium on Nazi comparisons? This is the dinnertable statement unworthy of being articulated as a serious suggestion. The �sides� are not organized to do things like declare moratoriums. The very idea of some intellectual fatwa is fatuous. The other suggestion is more interesting, but as Jay approaches an idea here, he spins off at a tangent and never quite reaches it. And the reasons he never quite reaches it are spread throughout the article, creating the copula that entitles it: Ariel Sharon and�



We really are experiencing a wave of anti-semitism in the world. The last time the anti-semitic frequency was this loud was in the seventies, when it became ugly in Poland and the U.S.S.R. And surely what is happening in Israel is bound up in the current wave. Jay begins the article with a quote � and of course it is an insulated quote, insofar as we are told that it comes from a Jew:



� "No one since Hitler," my dinner partner heatedly contended, "has done as much damage to the Jews as Ariel Sharon. For the first time in half a century, anti-Semitism is once again legitimated on a worldwide scale." This stunning accusation, made during a gracious faculty soiree in Princeton while the far less convivial occupation of Jenin was underway halfway around the world, was leveled by one of the most admired poets of our day. A man who weighs his words carefully, he is also proudly identified with his Jewish heritage. His sentiments do not sit easily with the truculently pro-Israeli consensus that dominates American Jewry, but they are worth taking very seriously nonetheless. Contained in his charge is a double provocation. First is the assertion that anti-Semitism has indeed returned to become a serious, perhaps even lethal threat to Jews everywhere, including America. And second is its placing the blame squarely on the shoulders of Israel's political leader, whose actions have produced the very insecurity for his people that the founding of Israel was designed to end.�



As so often in the discussion of anti-semitism and Israel, Jay begins by tying the Gordian knot instead of slicing through it. He then proceeds to tug ineffectually at the loops.



When it comes to any analysis of a prejudice, I find it invigorating to ask: why should the speaker be considered free from the prejudice? Why, for instance, should I assume that you assume I am not a bigot, an anti-semite, a homophobe, a sexist? Personally, I have moments in which it would be fair to say all of those things about me. My Grandfather was a traditional anti-semite. That it is possible that my Great Grandfather was passing for Gentile gave my Grandfather�s anti-semitism that tasty pathological twist. On the other hand, he lived in a ninety percent Jewish neighborhood in Syracuse. My father�s inherited this prejudice, but it rather broke down with my Dad. He believed Jews were good with money, and the old story about Jewish bankers. Unlike his father, however, these opinions didn�t really have much to do with his life. If his kids had converted to Judaism, it wouldn�t have made my Dad turn a hair.



Raised in a Georgia suburb, I rather resented the lack of Jews in our lives. To me, as a kid, Jews represented culture. They represented urbanism. They were on the other side of the divide from Southern Baptists and the jock rednecks of my high school.



Because of this upbringing, because of my absurd philo-semitism and the absence of experience that nurtured it, I was simply unaware of certain prejudices against Jews, and really remained so until I moved North, to New Haven, years ago. It was in New Haven that I heard, for instance, that Jews were stingy. I�d never heard that one before. Remarks about Jews being this way or that were shockingly common in the North.



On the whole, anti-semitism is not the prejudice for my subconscious. That prejudice is against blacks, which is the overwhelming and archetypal lesson for a white child in the Southern suburbs. To be less manichean about it -- there was also a lesson in the success of the civil rights movement when I was a kid. So there are two mental energies, there. My mental life, as a product of civilization, is constituted by the biases I overcome. They come back, and I overcome them again. So I have overcome a bias against blacks, a bias that was put there by the whole history of apartheid in this country, but the only way I can say that I am not a racist and make it true -- make it something I believe about myself -- is to continue that struggle. Those whites who segregate themselves into a world of snow whiteness and then condemn the bigotry of rednecks have no sympathy from me.



I am speaking of the phenomenology of bigotry � not its social content. It is one of the oddities of our lives that the subject of prejudice so confusingly compounds feeling and social fact. It is as if social fact were a mere expression of feeling, a vehicle for it. So if the feeling ends � if, magically, Trent Lott wakes up one day and doesn�t feel bigoted against blacks � then the social fact must end. This is nonsense � the social fact is semi-autonomous, and persists for a whole set of reasons that are separate from feeling, including, simply, the systematic advantage conferred by the social fact � but it is very alluring to that American instinct for reducing problems to the dissatisfactions of the self.



So switching to social fact � there is something in the depressing fact that there is a growing anti-semitism on the Left. That is depressing because it is one of the great claims of the Left � really, its greatest claim on my affections � that the Left was especially responsible for freeing Jews from the civil oppressions to which they were subject in Europe. Historically, there wasn�t a rightwing movement on the continent, in the 19th and most of the 20th century, that wasn�t pervaded with anti-Semitic sentiments. They could be mildly Eliotic, or they could be rabidly Hitlerian, but they were certainly part and parcel of what conservatism meant. This, by the way, isn�t true of Britain � D�Israeli being the great counter-example. Why it wasn�t true of Britain is a curious story that, at least to my knowledge, hasn�t been sufficiently explored. When Mosley tried to import continental anti-semitism in the 20s, it flopped. That there was a fund of bigotry among the English upper classes is certainly true, and I think it probably grew in the first half of the 20th century, but it was never as ignoble and systematic as it was among the European elites.



But the truth about the Left is that there was a current of anti-semitism there from the very beginning � the Voltairian inheritance, you might say.



Jay devotes a part of his essay to analyzing a man who analyzed this history, an Albert Lindemann. Lindemann�s book, Esau�s Tears, seems to be about the way an intellectual can talk himself, by insensible stages, into maintaining a bigot�s position. We are going to quote three long grafs:



�Once the door is open to considering the complicity of those who suffer in their own suffering, so the fear goes, it is a short step to its justification. An understandable aversion to giving any satisfaction to the victimizers creates a taboo against even posing the question.

A recent example of this fear can be found in the overheated reception of a flawed, but provocative book entitled Esau's Tears:Modern Anti-Semitism and the Rise of the Jews by the University of California, Santa Barbara historian Albert Lindemann and published by the Cambridge University Press in 1997. Among its many disturbing conclusions, perhaps the most unsettling was the claim that "the rise of the Jews" after the Enlightenment-by which Lindemann meant the achievement of civil liberties, economic success, demographic expansion and intellectual distinction-had ignited the aggression against them, setting ablaze embers of resentment that had smoldered perhaps as far back as the invention of monotheism's jealous God. Although arguing that responses to that rise were by no means uniform in different contexts-Hungary, the United States, Italy and Britain, he shows, were relatively benign-and acknowledging the power of mythic imagery in the minds of anti-Semites, Lindemann nonetheless insisted that "whatever the power of myth, not all hostility to Jews, individually or collectively, has been based on fantastic or chimerical visions of them, or on projections unrelated to any palpable reality. As human beings, Jews have been as capable as any other group of provoking hostility in the everyday secular world."19

As his title suggests, Lindemann urged his readers to understand the point of view of "Esau," the son of Isaac and Rebecca who is tricked out of his heritage in the Bible by his brother Jacob and whose descendants, the Edomites, are figured as gentiles in Jewish lore. Although Jews tended to denigrate Esau as a coarse and hairy brute, anti-Semites often turned him into a hero against the wily and cunning Jacob. While acknowledging the danger in this simple reversal, Lindemann nonetheless wants to get inside of the skin of the Edomites and make some sense of their hostility in relation to a real stimulus from without.



One way Lindemann makes his argument is to employ precisely the same tactic Patai used in citing Ibn Khaldun in his critique of Said: reminding us of critical Jewish statements about their own people that anticipate or echo those of anti-Semites themselves. He notes that Zionists sometimes called diaspora Jews "objectionably detestable" and called for a "reform" of their offensive behavior, and recalls the well-known disparagement of Ostjuden by their German cousins. Whether or not such statements are expressions of self-hatred, to use the category that the German-Jewish writer Theodor Lessing popularized in 1930,(20) or betray identification with the aggressor, they show that a simple imposition from without argument fails to do justice to the complexity of the issue. Even Jacob, it seems, could adopt Esau's perspective at least some of the time.�



Jay�s discussion of Lindemann reminds me of a scene in The Demons. There is a meeting of a political group in the small town in which Dostoevsky�s story is set, and at the meeting someone gets up excitedly and reads paragraphs from a paper he has written that proves, by the iron laws of logic, that a society that is totally free (the revolutionary objective) is identical to a society in which everyone has become a slave. This conclusion is greeted with hoots, boos, and the unexpected approval of the organizer of the meeting.



We�ll talk more about Lindemann in another post.

Bollettino



I love history of science journals. Or, the higher antiquitarianism. So one of my favorite reads is Osiris. The winter issue of the journal is out, and it is all about the polis as the site of scientific research. We�d like to call the attention of readers of Limited Inc to two articles.



The first is by Theresa Levitt, �Organizing sight, seeing organization: the diverging optical possibilities of city and country.� It is the very Balzacian story of two men who engaged in a fierce debate over light in the 1820s in Paris. Here�s Levitt�s establishing graf:



�Francois Arago created the polarimeter in 1811, after discovering that polarized light, when passed through a doubly refracting prism and a piece of mica, divided into two, complementary-colored beams. This new instrument, whose colorful images indicated the presence of polarized light, was at the heart of what is often called the early-nineteenth-century revolution in optics. (1) Most histories characterize this event as a duel between the wave and particle theories of light. These accounts almost always end in 1821, when a very public and nasty debate between Arago and Jean-Baptiste Biot concluded with a decided victory for the wave theory. In the aftermath, as the story goes, Arago and his band of undulationists reigned over Paris, while Biot, the last of the corpuscularians, slunk away in defeat to his country estate in Nointel.�



Even the names could have come out of la Comedie Humaine. We also love the giggle-worthy undulationists � Levitt is being naughty. Arago, it turns out, was a scientist showman. A breed that was thick on the ground in the nineteenth century. Faraday would give Christmas lectures to children on the physics of the candle � not a hobby one can imagine today�s physicists engaging in. Arago, of course, knew that his instrument needed a little theater in order to interest the salons. So this is what he did:

�Into the Parisian salons, Arago took a version of his original polarimeter modified for public viewing. He had instructed his instrument maker, Jean Baptiste Francois Soleil, to replace the thin sheets of mica with pieces of gypsum engraved with decorative images. The carving had been done in such a way that under ordinary light, nothing could be seen. But under polarized light, brightly colored images emerged, showing flowers, butterflies, and even Arago's name surrounded by laurel wreathes. The effect proved sensationally popular among the audiences--people collectively witnessing the visual display.�

Arago�s friend, the father of Prosper Merimee, popularized a system of complementary colors based on the science of the polarimeter. This system penetrated, by way of the salons, to Delacroix and Baudelaire.



According to this site, Arago's life story was taken as a model by Jules Verne for one of his tales. Oddly, Levitt doesn't mention this.



What about M. Biot, our corpuscularian? Alas, he went the way of Bouvard and Pechucet. Here�s what Levitt has to say about him:

�In 1822, when Biot purchased an estate near the small town of Nointel in Beauvais, he joined a widespread rush of French nobility back to the countryside following an 1821 law restoring property claims to emigres. (31) Biot's own move was hardly a restitution of family privilege. He was born and raised in Paris, the son of a midlevel functionary. Yet he was not shy about acting the part of the local notability, and throughout the 1820s, he engaged in a virtuoso self-reinvention as country gentleman, even signing his name "Biot, proprietaire." Soon after moving to Nointel, he ran for mayor of the town; once elected, he began presiding magnanimously over the local population.

Biot also began cultivating his land and making pronouncements on the proper relationship between agriculture, industry, and the central state. Indeed, breaking off his string of several-hundred-page memoirs on the physical sciences, the only item he published in the twelve years from 1822 to 1834 was an open letter in 1829 to the director of the Revue Britannique, expressing dissatisfaction with the Paris-centric agricultural system.�

To crown Biot�s retreat from enlightenment to reaction, he started hanging around with suspect Jesuits who were heavy on the light rhetoric. As in the light of reason dimmed by the light of God, and the secrets of God being darkness to the rational mind. Etc. etc. And, in a truly inspired move, he started rotating his polarimeter. Not for him the Arago stasis, so characteristic of urban decay. No, Biot, was set on discovering hidden rotary powers within the �lan vital itself.



Levitt�s essay is, among other things, a nice counteweight to critics, like Bloom, who have no use for the New Historicist school � among other matters, she sheds some light on Stendhal�s use of color that wouldn�t be shed by intuiting psychoanalytic causes for composing titles out of colors.



After Levitt, we liked Jens Lachmund�s Exploring the city of rubble: botanical fieldwork in bombed cities in Germany after World War II. Again, the title is rich in allusions. One thinks of Koeppen. Or of Grass.



Here are two grafs that present the problem:



�After 1945, rubble was a feature of virtually all German cities. Dresden, Stuttgart, Darmstadt, Hamburg, and Kiel were among the most destroyed. The largest fields of rubble, however, existed in the center of the city of Berlin. According to a contemporary survey, about 28.5 square kilometers (the size of the city being 72) of the built-up area had been bombed. In all cities, steps toward reconstruction began soon after the war. Bombed areas were cleared and leveled, creating open spaces awaiting eventual construction projects. Sometimes kiosks or provisional storage places were erected in these spaces; sometimes they were fenced off with billboards. Following the example of Kiel and its Gayk Waldchen, the newly constructed park named after the city's mayor, Andreas Gayk, some cities decided to plant trees and bushes in the bombed areas and thereby turn ugly wastelands into parks. Often no larger than a single plot or an earlier block of houses, they, like the Gayk Waldchen, were supposed to be temporary places that would eventually be built over. As already mentioned, in Berlin the pace of this urban reconstruction was much slower than in other German cities. Not only was it less attractive to invest money in a politically isolated city whose economic future remained uncertain, but many areas of rubble were located on the borderline dividing the two Berlins. These were reserved as potential construction ground for rebuilding the center of Berlin should reunification ever occur.

Rubble mounds became another feature of postwar cities. When they cleared the bombed areas, the cities used a large amount of the rubble for construction work; but there remained a lot of material, which had to be disposed of within the urban area or its surroundings. (5) Due to the size of West Berlin and the extent of destruction, the amount of rubble was tremendously high and the problem of disposal became particularly pressing. Unlike elsewhere, carrying the rubble out of the city was rarely possible. The western part of Berlin not only lacked efficient transportation facilities but also was politically separated from its surroundings. After abandoning plans to pour a layer of rubble over the city's largest inner-urban forest, the Tiergarten, the government constructed several centralized dumping grounds, mostly on existing parklands and forests. Shaped as natural-looking hills and planted with dense vegetation, they were meant to enrich the landscape of the surrounding parks or forests.�

That they even considered paving, or rubbling, over the Tiergarten blows my mind.



Lachmund goes on to make up a word � ruderal � and talk, at systematic length, about the biologists who studied the flora that grew up in the rubble areas. Send this article to the Pentagon: they can include the study of ruderal flora as another sign of the happy, happy progress that is making life for Bremer�s Iraqis better and better.

Bollettino



You have read this before: the news story or opinion column that surveys the European scene and emphasizes the spooky number of Europeans who believe that 9/11 was a set-up. And you�ve read this before: the news story or opinion column that surveys the Middle Eastern scene and emphasizes the spooky number of Muslims who believe that 9/11 was the work of the Jews, or was planned by the Bush administration. Such exposes of mass gullibility have become a fixture in the American press, one answer to the perennial question: why do they hate us? Answer: they are cretins. A good example of this kind of thing is linked here: Anne Applebaum�s column about the Frankfurt Book fair for the Washington Post. She knits together the two popular motifs, moving from the claim that a German translation of Thierry Meyssan�s L�effroyable imposture, the most famous of the conspiracy books, had mounted to best seller status in Germany, to a news story about some German group that was demanding a victim status for the German dead in World War II and the period afterwards equal to the status of the Jews.



It is odd that Applebaum, who is as conversant with contemporary Russian history as any American journalist, should take for granted the sufficiency of this news story type. We feel there is something missing here. For surely the willingness to see conspiracy in the events of 9/11 is conditioned, in the European and Arab world, by a set of attacks that happened between September 3rd and 13th in 1999. This set of attacks has sunk into the background for most Americans. The attacks consisted of explosives planted at various apartment buildings in Moscow and Volgodonsk along with a string of explosions outside of Moscow, resulting in more than 300 deaths. These attacks are still used today to justify that second Chechnian war. The outrage that followed them allowed Putin to outdistance any electoral rival, thus providing Boris Yeltsin�s court with a loyal successor who, it turned out, went along with his part of the deal: none of the Yeltsin family, for instance, is in jail for massive peculation. The butchers, one might say, have covered the thieves.



The odd thing about these bombings is that there is very good reason to think they were not planted by Chechen terrorists at all. There�s very good reason to think that there was a conspiracy, directed by Russian security forces, to create a reason to go to war in Chechnya and � killing two birds with one sugar sack full of explosives � also creating an air of hysteria that would ensure the selection of Putin to the presidency. That very good reason isn�t hidden from Europe, or the Muslim world. The use of Chechens as a useful ethnic bait, the cynical manipulation of extreme Islamicists by forces close to Yeltsin in order to split Chechen nationalism, or at least discredit it, and the subsequent slaughter in Chechnya � which goes on, by the way; the latest reports say that the casualty figures for the Russians in the last year in Chechnya are the highest since the war began in 1999 � have not been obscured behind some veil.



The bombings of September, 99, were, from the start, rather murky affairs. Especially odd was the fact that the FSB, the Russian successor to the KGB, seemed so clueless about catching the perps. That did not prevent the wholesale arrest and deportation of the Chechen community in Moscow. But as to the evidence at the explosion sites � well, that was treated with an almost criminal negligence.



Rumors soon began to fly that FSB incompetence was motivated, to say the least. And they concentrated on an incident that happened in Ryazan. This incident is explained by an ex FSB officer, Aleksandr Litvinenko in a book entitled The FSB is blowing up Russia. The book is the most detailed account of the curious incidents of September 22-23. On that night, two men and a woman in a track suit planted a sugar sack in the basement of an apartment in Ryazan. The sugar sack almost surely contained an explosive, hexogene. Luckily, the men were spotted. The apartment building was evacuated. The sacks were taken out of the basement. They were tested and found to have hexogen. Then the men who planted the sacks were found. Here�s where things get interesting � the men were FSB men. Suddenly, the FSB gets involved in the investigation. The first thing that it finds is that the sacks contained sugar alone. How about the tests that showed hexogen? That came from the hands of the investigator, who, it was claimed, a week before, had somehow touched hexogen. And apparently not washed his hands in a week. What were the FSB men doing? It was an �exercise.� A preparedness drill.



The FSB cover story is so weak that it was surely compounded as an afterthought. That the security forces could be so sure of impunity that they created a story that wouldn�t fool a moron indicates the astonishing level of cynicism here. Who, after all, is going to tell?



There was a reason for that cynicism beyond the mere accretion of power on the part of the FSB. The people who knew about the explosives at a higher level knew � and were part of -- the whole web of connections that tied Yeltsin�s court to various factions in Chechnya. Most notoriously, there was a seemingly inscrutable connection between oligarch Boris Berezovsky and various Chechen Islamicist groups. The group that launched the raid on Daghestan from Chechnya in 1999 was headed by a group who seemed to be entirely funded by Berezovsky. Since 99, Berezovsky has fallen out with Putin � who, it turns out, is the kind of godfather who doesn�t tolerate competing oligarchs. Berezovsky�s various lootings are now on the docket in the Moscow judiciary, while the man himself is on the lam, claiming that he has evidence of the link between the FSB and the bombings in Moscow.



How has the Russian govenment responded to these accusations? By condemning Litvinenko as a traitor in court -- an old and familiar gesture. This is an excerpt from an interview with Litvinenko:



�In an unexpected development, an official Russian government newspaper, Rossiiskaya Gazeta, in its March 30 issue, published a lengthy interview with Aleksandr Litvinenko, a former lieutenant colonel in the FSB, who recently received political asylum in Great Britain. Some excerpts:

Interviewer: "You took part in preparing the film 'Assassination [Attempt] against Russia,' in which the participation of the FSB in the explosions of the [apartment] houses in Moscow and Volgodonsk and the preparing of an explosion in Ryazan' are discussed. Do you seriously believe that?"

Litvinenko: "I have direct proof in relation to the attempt to blow up an [apartment] house in Ryazan. I am in possession of facts that not sugar, as the FSB maintains, but [the explosive] hexogen was placed under that house, and that it was employees of Patrushev [the director of the FSB] who placed it there."

Interviewer: "Are you prepared to present this proof?"

Litvinenko: "I am prepared. Not to the [Russian] procuracy--that is, a criminal organization. And not to the FSB--that is a terrorist organization. When the public commission which is presently being formed by [Duma deputy] Sergei Yushenkov has been created, then under the condition that honest people make up that commission I will give them all the materials which I have in my hands concerning the crimes committed by the leadership of the FSB.... Yesterday through the Internet I appealed to all officers of the FSB who participated in the 1999 explosions to come forward and admit it."





For us, the interesting thing is that hints of most of this information had leaked out by 2000. It didn�t take long. And yet, in the West, Putin, like Yeltsin before him, was treated as an ally. The tepid condemnations of Russia�s moves against Chechnya � moves that were every bit as savage as Milosovic�s moves against Bosnia � was a liner note to the more important harmony between the Russian regime and the American. That harmony has been strengthened, even, during the Bush period. Oddly enough, an administration that seems to want, not so subconsciously, to bomb Paris, is incredibly chummy with Putin, who is as anti-war as any major leader.

What does this say to the Arabs, the Germans, the Indonesians, etc.?

This is my guess: it says that the West will condone a high degree of fraud, even amounting to the creating atrocities against one�s own citizens, in order to perpetrate foreign policies that are directed, by some coincidence, against mainly Islamic ethnic groups.



The fraud in the system of governance that is continually generating references to itself as democratic can�t help but be ultimately crippling. I have yet to see any connection made between the Muslim reception of 9/11 and the Muslim reception of the war in Chechnya. I would, however, guess that the frauds of September, 99, have had a strong bearing on the idea that the attack in September, 2001 was of an all too familiar shape and form. This isn�t to discount overt anti-semitism. It isn�t to discount anti-Americanism. But to dwell on these as the sole generators of the belief in super-power fraudulence is to blind yourself to a significant, although underinvestigated, piece of recent history.

Bollettino



LI likes to consider that we are a moral shrew � that we prod against the dead mass of atrocity in this world, to the extent that a Lilliputian can prod against a leviathan; that we unhesitatingly criticize our own country knowing that the only moral force that has ever moved America is that force which is unafraid to confront the crimes of the powerful and label them as crimes; that we are, in a word, militantly informed.



Such BS.



Well, we�ve been writing for two years, and we haven�t even delved into Chechnya. We haven�t said word one about the perhaps two million who have disappeared in the great ten years war in Central Africa. As a moral shrew, you�d have to say that LI is a very parochial moral shrew.



So let�s repair a bit of this. We have been trying to catch up with Chechnya, lately, reading the reports of Anna Politskovskaya, a Russian journalist who courageously went into the country in 99, during the course of the second great battle of the post Soviet state against the Checchnyian people. Or against the people in that territory on the map labeled Chechnya. We were horrified. Just the photographs from Grozny are like nothing we�ve seen in the post World War II era. A city of about half a million has been wiped out in the last decade. Wiped out more completely than Sarajevo. Bombed into a state of Hobbesian nature � that nature which comes after civilization has invented the instruments to express its discontent, that nature in which the beast becomes the brute, and the brute is drafted, armed, and considered dangerous. Nature plus kidnapping � that�s Chechnya.



To repair our lack of information, here, we�ve searched the web. There is an amazing site, sponsored by the conservative Hoover Institute (sponsored, the site will tell you, by the Jamestown institute, but a closer reading of the fine print makes it clear that this is Hoover�s baby). A simply scathing article entitled �RUSSIA HAS LOST THE WAR IN CHECHNYA by Andrei Piontkovsky is today�s must read. It compares, in clarity and despair, with the articles Pasolini wrote just before he was assassinated. It is a good place to start understanding the Chechnyan war. That war is linked, as though following some secret and subterrean influence to what happened in Bosnia, to what happened on 9/11, to what is happening in Afghanistan, and to Iraq. There are very good reasons Bush looked into the eyes of Putin and saw a soul mate. Putin�s election, based on selling an ill thought out war on terrorism, in 99, looks like it was copied by the Bush campaign people for the midyear election in 2002.



Piontkovsky fronts his article with three grafs of enormous polemical power:



�Russia has lost this war forever precisely because of the mass bombings of cities and shellings of villages, and the "zachistki" security sweeps and extortions of bribes and ransoms. The overwhelming majority of Chechens now hate us--and that includes those who are forced to collaborate with us. Our army, to which we assigned tasks unsuitable to its very nature, is now dissolving before our eyes as it is drawn ever more deeply into shady transactions with oil, with federal "reconstruction" subsidies--and with the kidnapping and selling of hostages.

Did we enter Chechnya in order to end the ransoming of slaves, or in order to go into that business ourselves? If the latter, what is the difference between the Russian military and the bandits? According to human rights advocates, more than a thousand Russian citizens have been kidnapped by members of our security agencies in the course of "zachistki." Either they have disappeared without a trace, or their corpses, mutilated by torture, have been sold to their families. But our authorities deny such findings. In April the procurator of the Chechen Republic stated that only a few hundred citizens of Russia had been kidnapped by our servicemen. "Only" a few hundred--this of course is mass terror against one's own countrymen.



Especially striking was one particular point in President Vladimir Putin's appeal to the Chechen people just before the March constitutional referendum. Our president expressed his wish that the Chechens' fears of nighttime knocks on the door would disappear forever, that they would see a complete end to "zachistki" and to robbery at checkpoints. Excuse me, but the president of the Russian Federation is not Mother Teresa or a UN official. The president of Russia is commander in chief of those very same troops who are kidnapping and robbing. Is our commander in chief unable to stop our death squads--or does he just not want to? I don't know which answer is the more frightening. �



We take a ghoulish interest in that evaluation of life by the gross � the �only a few hundred citizens of Russia had been kidnapped by our servicemen.� This is the mindset of incompetent despotism, Definitely, it is here. This is the happy happy happy mood of the conservative commentariat vis a vis Iraq. The bone underneath the clown's mask was revealed by a Republican congressman in Washington who recently said that the "the story of what we've done in the postwar period is remarkable," adding, "it is a better and more important story than losing a couple of soldiers every day." Or as Piontkovsky writes, quoting Macbeth:

I am in blood

Stepp'd in so far that, should I wade no more,

Returning were as tedious as go o'er.



Iraq is not Chechnya � or at least not yet. Although the U.S. press has so played down Iraqi casualties that, in essence, the dead vanish (a word that was a favorite, when I was a kid, to describe the massacre of Indians on the North American continent � the Cherokees, the Mohawks, the Creeks, they would �vanish� as the frontier was settled), one of the things about the war, so far, has been the remarkable control of America�s WMD. If you do the war math, you get about 15 thousand Iraqi deaths � I take that figure from the reports I�ve read. Remarkably, among all the op ed writing that the war has unleashed, every one brushs past those numbers. It is as if we fought a ghost army. How is it possible to analyze a human situation in which certain deaths make less sound than feathers falling in the void? I throw that question out just to demonstrate my own naivete and stupidity. Obviously, the media has done a brilliant job of airbrushing those corpses from recent history. In this, the Russian media is the American model. Piontkovsky, again, about Putin:



�Chechnya is our collective neurosis, our collective diagnosis. Vladimir Putin is simply one of us.



After this obscure bureaucrat was made prime minister and heir to Boris Yeltsin, the political technicians of "the family" used their financial and propaganda resources to sell us a heroic myth: The energetic officer of our special services, who, with his precise, laconic orders, was thrusting our regiments into the heart of the Caucasus, bringing fear and death to our enemies. The female heart of Russia, yearning for a powerful commander, was captivated by the heroic young lover.



Three years passed. The more the authorities controlled, the more we began to sense that they were behaving in a strangely unauthoritative way. They were not succeeding in actually solving any of the country's serious economic or social problems, including those related to Chechnya. A growing number of people were calling for negotiations and an end to the war. The legend of Putin the hero was dissolving, and some of our oligarchs were beginning to develop an alternative myth: That of the young, energetic nickel-industry manager, a man so rich that he would not even need to do any further thieving. Putin's re-election in 2004--or, to be more precise, his re-appointment--began for the first time to seem less than certain. But then once again, as if by accident, a tragic event took place that breathed new life into the apparently exhausted Putin myth: Chechen guerrillas seized hundreds of hostages in a Moscow theater. From the standpoint of Putin's political interests, that episode ended brilliantly.�



And again: �On this issue he is a man of passions. See how his face is transformed and his eyes enflamed whenever the topic of Chechnya comes up, how his emotions break through his usual restraints to express themselves in the coarse slang of criminals.�



Bush is another type of leader. The stylistic quirk of reverting to cowboy language has been much remarked on � but our feeling is that this is merely show business. This is the coached Bush, the apt pupil, the Andover Texan. Who, with an idiot's mimicy, pantomimes those gestures his Dad was no good at. It turns out, Bush jr. is good at them. The real Bush is, here, the anti-Putin � a man whose grand emotions amount to the petty peevishness of a man driving an expensive car in a traffic jam: why don�t all the lesser cars get out of his way? Bush�s emotions are saved to be spent on himself alone. When Iraq looked like a way to political gain, he was engaged. Now that it looks like the sure way to political death, he is disengaged. After all, he has already pronounced the war done and had his party on the carrier. The rest is dross, something to be done by subordinates. This accounts for the tonelessness of the 87 billion dollar speech � we think that tonelessness is a truer gauge of Bush�s personality than the dead or alive language that so roiled up the Europeans. The truth about Bush is that he is a vacuum. Inanity propped up by fanaticism � that�s the hallmark of this presidency.



We'll do more weaving between Chechnya and Iraq next week.

Bollettino



Tom Friedman is up to his old tricks again. At the moment, he is sounding much like Dick Nixon. At least Nixon had some reason to speak about a 'silent majority" of Americans in the 1970s. Friedman's grotesque parody of the Nixonian moment is to talk about the silent majority of Iraqis. You will be unsurprised that Friedman, equipped with superspecial ESP, has tapped into the libido of this group. Yes, Virginia, there is a silent majority of Iraqis stolidly husking the corn out there, and Friedman is their prophet. Much as the tailors in the Hans Christian Andersen tale demonstrated their skill with invisible thread, Friedman, having given his views this mass status, is free to represent the Iraqi man in the street. And why not? After all, it looks like the constitution, which will make Iraq a find and dandy permanent representative of the Republican party, is a bit off in the future -- say ten to twenty years -- so at present, the governing symbols of Iraq are up for grabs. Friedman, like Chalabi, knows a power vacuum when he sees one.



According to our prophet, then, what's been up with that silent majority? Why, they've been oohing and awwwing over the Bush�s program for their country. Today�s column, after lambasting Cheney, very properly, for getting out to infrequently � the poor guy suffers from ideological auto-intoxication � Friedman gets down to brass tacks:



�Thankfully, there is one group of people the Bush team is listening to: Iraq's silent majority. Ironically, Iraq is the one place in the world where the Bush team has chosen not to become obsessed with terrorists, not to focus exclusively on them and their noise, but to just keep on building a better Iraq for Iraqis � the only way to counter terrorism in the long run � despite the bombs bursting in air.�



Now, listening to a silent majority must be something like listening to the sound of one hand clapping � a mystical experience for the initiated. Those of us who are uninitiated wonder about the patronizing tone of building a better Iraq for the Iraqis. Better? That�s the kind of bland talk that dispenses with such problems as who defines better, who pays for it, who does it, who profits from it. In actuality, better is being defined in D.C. instead of Baghdad � it is being defined by the free market types who can�t pursuade the U.S. to swallow the minimal state, maximal corporation policy, but think a supine Iraq might be just the place to try it out. Better is defined by people who are colluding in the continuing slide of Azerbaijan into a semi-monarchical despotism � where�s the talk about democracy there? There was a story in the Times yesterday about � remember? � the democratic wave in the former Soviet Union. Friedman was an enthusiast back then, plugging in with his magic ability to access the silent majorities of various cultures whose languages he doesn�t speak and whose day to day customs he doesn�t know. Here�s a snippet that revisits this past triumph of capital and civil society for all:



�It is a discouraging spectacle for those who proclaimed victory for democracy when Communism collapsed in Eastern Europe more than a decade ago � and who speak of that event today as a model for what they envisage as a democratic transformation in Iraq and the Middle East.

"There is no consolidated liberal democracy in the former Soviet Union except for the Baltic states," said Michael McFaul, a professor of political science at Stanford University. "There is the legacy of the state just dominating politics. It's not a level playing field, and Azerbaijan is an absurd example of that."



And so, today, we have a new prez in Azerbaijan who looks like the old prez -- cause he's his son! And not a peep from our present creators of Middle Eastern Democracy on the run.



As I recall it, one thing those places all had in common was � yes! � shock therapy economics. The imposition of wild west capitalism by all means necessary. And so -- to get back to the issue of betterness for all -- what's better for the Iraqis than more of the same. So lately, phase two of the occupation, the Bush-ites are pouring down the wide open maws of the Iraqi silent majority an economic policy that is conceded to have the probable effect of increasing unemployment. Just the thing for a place with a 60% unemployment rate. Luckily, there are some voices that are timidly saying, we prefer not to. They are even on the Council.



Now, the Council, having only nominal power and not having a hot-line to the silent majority of Iraqis, only counts when it rubberstamps the better-ness we are spreading all over Iraq. So we just won�t listen to, say, advice from the Finance minister:

�We suffered through the economic theories of socialism, Marxism and then cronyism," the official, Ali Abdul-Amir Allawi, said in an interview on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum's East Asia Economic Summit meeting here. "Now we face the prospect of free-market fundamentalism."



Our advice to Friedman -- since he feels free to offer his advice to us -- is to turn his bat like ears to voices like this. Because what the Occupation is planning for Iraq is beginning to seem, best case scenario, like a mitigated version of Azerbaijan. A sort of Chalabi's Azerbaijan. We don't think that is worth 87 billion dollars.

Bollettino



I�ve just reviewed one of those annual best of anthologies that picks poems, fiction, and that whore, creative non-fiction from the leading journals and tosses em up, in a huge, indigestible salad. There were maybe fifteen poems in the anthology. And here�s the thing: the poems weren�t even there enough to pronounce them as bad. They were a turned off tv in the room � a blank, blind gaze.



Why is poetry so bad right now?



There are maybe ten novelists and short story writers who broke into prominence in the nineties. At least five of them could be identified by any medium reader. You might not have read Infinite Jest, but you will recognize David Foster Wallace�s. You might not have read Secret History, but you will recognize Donna Tartt�s name. The same test would turn up approximately zero British or American poets.



This isn�t because of some great scandalous overthrow of technique. The make it new credo lasted, I�d say, about through Olson. I�m an eclectic kind of poetaster. Give me Lowell, give me the Black Mountain poets, give me George Oppen or Marianne Moore, and I can work with them. I know when I�m beat, I know when the poet�s demand that I learn how to read the poem is compelling, and when it isn�t. Today�s poets don�t really need to invent new forms, but I�d be happy to follow along if they did. In fact, they are very expert with forms. It�s just they have nothing to say. If they have something to say, usually, I guess, they move into fiction. Or creative �f., the aforesaid happy hooker. So instead, you get the dullest lines, ephemeral feelings that, in the catching, have no power to move even the prime feeler of them, and a quasi surrealistic jumble that moves the poem along, much as the janitor moves detritus down the hall with a big fat red cloth broom.. The poems all read like bad translations of themselves. There�s less logic in them, and less continuity, than you�d find in a Hollywood B movie. They are even more instantly forgettable than those movies, too.



What happened? I mean, through the seventies there was always some strong figure. Merrill, Plath, Thom Gunn. Even Anne Sexton, for Christ�s sake. I think the seventies is the last decade that I could name ten active American poets that I respected.



I know, the inevitable fallow periods. But this one is more fallow than most. You have to go back to the 1780s, perhaps, to find a decade where the poets are generally of such a low caliber. Even then, you had Crabbe. Perhaps it is that gathering the poets into huge poet reservations on campuses has denied them the kind of knock about experience they need. I mean, today�s Baudelaire has to get up early to photocopy his syllabus for the kiddies. While this isn�t really death to novelists, it seems to have killed poets. Poets need some roughing up. They need, well, some love for the English language � something that is sorely lacking in the poems I read. This isn�t HTML code, people. A little paste and copy and there you are -- but it is not something I'd want to do anything with, except maybe wipe my ass. Here's an old essay in the Atlantic Monthly that genteely dips into these waters. Alas, Goia has written the essay looking over her shoulder -- better not hurt anyone's feelings! -- which rather blunts the incisiveness of the thing. When she writes:



"Even if great poetry continues to be written, it has retreated from the center of literary life. Though supported by a loyal coterie, poetry has lost the confidence that it speaks to and for the general culture" -- you get the feeling of a seriously pulled punch. If great poetry is being written, it will eventualy find its place. The deal is, dude -- no great poetry is coming through. None. Nada. In any sense that I recognize as great poetry, viz, for instance, wanting to read it. Quoting it. Having it recur to me at odd intervals in my daily life. Having a sense that it is never fully plumbed. Etc.



Poetry magazine recently received something like a hundred million dollars � some fantastic sum. It is now a foundation. They should hire some researchers and figure this out.

Bollettino



In this country, the drug war is shaped by a cycle as inexplicable as the Mayan million year year. Every decade or so, a celebrity overdoses or generally gets in trouble with a drug. In the eighties, Len Bias, a basketball star, and -- it turned out - an avid tooter, suffered a heart attack, died, and was discovered to have traces of cocaine in his blood stream. Congress went bonkers, and built him their sweetest little memorial, all made out of millions of people�s lives, ticking away, 5- 15 years at a shot. Prison populations, you embrace multitudes, the Congress cried, faintly echoing Whitman. The thing was called the Drug Abuse act of 1986. The thing is with us still.



Unexpectedly, Rush Limbaugh, who one would imagine to have more trouble with bourbon than with heroin, is the celebrity for this year�s cycle. I�m not really interested in Rush Limbaugh as a person or as a controversialist, and I think it is rather funny that we are being treated to various snippets of what he had to say about the drug wars. Liberals dredge up his most neandrathalish pronuniciamentos and rightwingers counter with his occasional stabs at compassionate conservativism. Which certainly begs the question: is it true that the crimes committed by the upper class are excused if they aren't hypocritical? Is this the new rule? I didn't know. I thought that suborning your maid, apparently, to score meds for your stash was a black mark even in the account books of the wealthy.



More interesting than the verbiage, because more symptomatic of the cussed wrongheadedness of the drug war, is the idea that creeps into this discourse on little cat feet, viz, that a person is somehow less responsible for drug use if the use is to relieve pain. Rush, it seems, hurt his back. To relieve the pain, he used those habit forming prescribed meds. He found, like others have, that they were wonderfully soothing. Soon he wanted them around him. He wanted them available. He wanted a stash. Now, if he had just been a sixty year old with the hots for Florida party life, poontang, and medical heroine, that would have been terrible, and there'd be no question of him taking a break from an ongoing investigation so he can retire into a rehab center. No, that wouldn't have been right. Or so the discourse goes. Or so the implications underneath the discourse go. But wait: for the same action � soliciting quantities of prescription heroin illegally � there are two attitudes. One, which takes a grip on the fact that the drug abuse is about simply relieving pain (don't even think that the buzz that accompanies that is in any way a high, or in any way pleasurable), finds the full force and panoply of tragedy in it. The other, which gestures towards the fact that the drug is about frankly grooving on a high until the high grabs you like a devil and it grooves on you -- that is found to be disgusting and incarcerable. We�ve read more than a few comments that approximate that line of thought thrown at l�affaire Rush.



The distinction between recreational drug use and �medical� drug use is even inscribed in law. The habit forming drugs are legal, shooting out from BigPharma. The narcotics are illegal, shipped in by Big Mafia. So some go to jail for selling a couple of bags of spliff, and some have diplomas and dispense painkillers to the multitudes. Well, this is what we think. We think it�s the last rotten gasp of an old and honorable ascetic tradition. We think the division between recreational and non-recreational use, however helpful it might be in diagnosing the causes of behavior, shouldn�t be inscribed in the law at all.



If Rush had been using the drugs for pleasure, his use of it might actually have been easier to monitor and control. The pop image of recreational drug taking as an orgiastic enterprise is not generally true. However, it is true that shameful drug taking can lead to solitary excess, and the kind of seedy behavior that apparently went on in the Limbaugh household with the maid. Why? Because, as the social control of the drug is taken from the hands of the doctor to the hands of the solitary user, the kind of feedback that would spot problems, or that would ritualize the drug use in some way, is subverted. An interesting article from the eighties is all about this: Drug, Set, and Setting by Norman E. Zinberg. Zinberg cites the case of a bourgeois heroin user from South Africa. The first sentence is meant to be provocative: �Carl is an occasional heroin user.� Zinberg�s study was released before the Len Bias death, but it didn�t have much of an effect anyway. In the eighties, the old, Carter era liberalism was giving way to the new, Bennett era moralism. William Bennett, Bush I�s drug czar, famously said that drugs weren�t a medical problem, but a moral problem. He meant morale problem -- as in boosting the morale of the Republican electorate. By vastly accelerating the rate of incarceration for drug users, the Fed�s probably did untold damage to the eco-system of occasional drug use. Drug abuse is aggravated by drug crimalization insofar as the drug setting becomes an outlaw site � or it becomes the solitary mansion of a sixty some year old man in Palm Beach, Florida.



Zinberg was having none of it, back there in the eighties: �The new interest in the comparative study of patterns of drug use and abuse is attributable to at least two factors. The first is that in spite of the enormous growth of marihuana consumption, most of the old concerns about health hazards have proved to be unfounded. Also, most marihuana use has been found to be occasional and moderate rather than intensive and chronic.�



That, of course, is old stuff among hempheads. But Zinberg�s essay is not about the chemical concomitants of addiction or non-addiction, but the social forms that filter the addicted, the part time user, and the abstainer. This, to me, is the heart of the matter. Here are two grafs that lay out Zinser�s central contention:



�Of course, the application of social controls, particularly in the case of illicit drugs, does not always lead to moderate use. And yet it is the reigning cultural belief that drug use should always be moderate and that behavior should always be socially acceptable. Such an expectation, which does not take into account variations in use or the experimentation that is inevitable in learning about control, is the chief reason that the power of the social setting to regulate intoxicant use has not been more fully recognized and exploited. This cultural expectation of decorum stems from the moralistic attitudes that pervade our culture and are almost as marked in the case of licit as in that of illicit drugs. Only on special occasions, such as a wedding celebration or an adolescent's first experiment with drunkenness, is less decorous behavior culturally acceptable. Although such incidents do not necessarily signify a breakdown of overall control, they have led the abstinence-minded to believe that when it comes to drug use, there are only two alternatives�total abstinence or unchecked excess leading to addiction. Despite massive evidence to the contrary, many people remain unshaken in this conviction.

This stolid attitude inhibits the development of a rational understanding of controlled use and ignores the fact that even the most severely affected alcoholics and addicts, who may be grouped at one end of the spectrum of drug use, exhibit some control in that they actually use less of the intoxicating substance than they could. Moreover, as our interviews with ordinary citizens have shown, the highly controlled users and even the abstainers at the other end of the spectrum express much more interest in the use of intoxicants than is generally acknowledged. Whether to use, when, with whom, how much, how to explain why one does not use�these concerns occupy an important place in the emotional life of almost every citizen. Yet, hidden in the American culture lies a deep-seated aversion to acknowledging this preoccupation. As a result, our culture plays down the importance of the many social mores�sanctions and rituals�that enhance our capacity to control use. Both the existence of a modicum of control on the part of the most compulsive users and the general preoccupation with drug use on the part of the most controlled users are ignored. Hence our society is left longing for that utopia in which no one would ever want drugs either for their pleasant or their unpleasant effects, for relaxation and good fellowship, or for escape and oblivion.�



Exactly. Here's one way to show our sympathy with the poor addicted talk radio host: reform the Len Bias laws now.

Bollettino



Leonard Bast



If you rehearse the news of this week � the deaths and explosions in Iraq, the shredding of our excuse for a pre-emptive war, the double standard of an administration that, on the one hand, imprisons dark skinned men en masse for security reasons, and, on the other hand, claims the de facto right to leak illegal, punitive information, the continuing unemployment misery, the shadows cast by the mountain of debts piled up in two brief years by this country � you would think that now, if ever, was the progressive moment. That poses an ugly question, however: why, if this is the progressive moment, has a Republican actor been overwhelmingly swept into office in California?



We believe part of the answer lies in Howard�s End.



We�ve been reading Howard�s End with a lot of attention this week, as part of our on-going campaign to scope out things we can use in the classic novels. Foster is a wholly admirable writer. Here�s how he does that most difficult thing, letting time, blank time, pass: �And the conversation drifted away and away, and Helen�s cigarette turned to a spot in the darkness, and the great flats opposite were sown with lighted windows, which vanished and were relit again, and vanished incessantly�� This is superb on every level. The great flats opposite will soon be figuring in the story, for one thing, so their place as a sort of chronometer is appropriate � and yet, since the reader, at this point, doesn�t know that, their insertion here is one of those ways a writer insinuates his facts into the reader�s unconsciousness, becoming a sort of fate in the process, something that presses, however mildly, upon the reader, as we know that those lights will press upon Helen Schlegel � whose cigarette is (in a bit of a cheat) lit for an awful long time. The perfection of this kind of writing extends to the freedom it gives Forster with regards to his characters. Forster, again and again, will come out of his seemingly neutral role and make blatant and manipulative comments that he means to be read as blatant and manipulative. Thee reader, who is already caught up in the artificial fate spun by the text, has the sense, in these passages, that luck itself is speaking � that here at last privilege, the unfairness in things, is disclosing itself, becoming palpable.



Which brings us to Bast. Those who�ve read Howard�s End will remember that Bast is the striving clerk � the lowbrow from the East End whose entanglement with the Schlegel sisters will lead to disaster. Forster sizes up Bast with a famous passage. This passage crystallizes a mood and tone that, at least since the seventies, has been endemic to the American progressive culture. It comes in Chapter VI, which announces �We are not concerned with the very poor.� The hauteur of this announcement sets the whole tone for Leonard. He doesn�t have the Dickensensian advantage of rags and sentiment. No, he is merely one of the lowly. And the lowly must be squashed. �He knew that he was poor, and would admit it: he would have died sooner than confess any inferiority to the rich. This may be splendid of him. But he was inferior to most rich people, there is not the least doubt of it.� This, so far, is such a break with the politics of the English novel that we have to pause. Even Thackeray, who probably thought along these lines, never violated the novelistic rule here: the poor might be shown as greedy, criminal, ungenerous, etc. But at the end of the day, the poor anchor the novelistic notion of virtue. This is true not just in Bleak House, but in the Princess Cassamassima; in Vanity Fair, which departs about as far as any Victorian novel from the sentimentality that we associate with the Victorians, the excesses of the rich, or at least those who possess the credit of the rich, are projected, as it were, upon the screen of a society in which one man�s excess is the absence of another man�s bread.



What Lytton Strachey�s Eminent Victorians was supposed to have done, Forster, with these brief sentences, does; he rings down an era by negating its deepest sentiments. It is a curious gesture. There�s a fierce defense of caste encoded in it � a freezing of the social whole to preserve it from the social mobility that Wells� characters were all about � as well as Dickens. As well, perhaps, as Becky Sharp. This, in a way, is Foster's blow against the Invisible Man -- for the Invisible Man is from that class of the self-educated whose threat to Foster's own group will grow with the century. Forster effortlessly merges this affection for caste into the liberalism of his favored caste, whose progressive role is to worry, infinitely, about the social inequities at the origin of their wealth, even as they weld it as a weapon to defend their cultural privileges. This, I think, has a lot to do with the alienation between progressives and what would seem to be their natural constituency. Here is how Foster catalogues the gulf between Bast and the Schlegels (who, we later learn, are rich only by Bast like standards � between the three of them, they bring in a rentier income of about 1,900 pounds a year, not exactly wealth on the American scale -- but much more like the kind of income a tenured American professor can depend on): "He was not as courteous as the average rich man, nor as intelligent, nor as healthy, nor as lovable. His mind and his body had been alike underfed, because he was poor, and because he was modern they were always craving better food.�



The astonishing impudence of this affects a reader like me with the force of a slap in the face. It is, in fact, denied within the very narrative. We already have measured Charles Wilcox's manners, and found them wanting. When we later learn about Bast�s incredible patience with Jacky, the unlikely down at heels bathing beauty with whom he is living, we know immediately that no rich man would be as kind, or as lovable, in this kind of relationship � that is, no rich man in a novel. Forster, while blatant, does lace his presentation of Bast with irony. We watch Bast read the Stones of Venice, an activity Foster pokes a lot of fun at. Bast, we are told, has been �trying to form his style on Ruskin: he understood him to be the great master of English prose.� Of course, if we go back to the passage about the lights going on and off in the great flats opposite the Schlegels, we know that Bast isn�t the only one to absorb certain patterns of English prose from Ruskin. We know that the perfection of the dying phrase, �� which vanished and were relit again, and vanished incessantly� certainly comes out of Ruskin�s influence, if not Ruskin. That is inescapable. But rarely has a great writer been so undercut by another great writer � for Ruskin, become Leonard Bast�s standard of greatness, can certainly not be Bloomsbury�s.



I think it says a lot about the Progressive community that Schwarzenegger's obviously awful behavior towards women and men -- towards any subordinate, in fact -- was simply shrugged off by the electorate. The aftermath of the trashing of such as Paula Jones is not going to go away so easily. It discredits almost every word out of the mouth of the various feminists who enthusiasticaly piled on that Arkansas secretary whose down at heels-ness was every bit as painful as Foster's Jacky. Hypocrisy, which has become the conservative vice, is one thing; but meanness for the sake of power is something a lot scarier. That's because anybody who exists in that realm of the "craving for food' knows that meanness every day. The progressive movement without labor becomes Bloomsbury, and Bloomsbury is only attractive to people who live in Bloomsbury.