Adios, LI readers.
This has been immense fun. However, as a habit, blogging has become too expensive for Mr. LI. We received a notice, today, about our electricity. Make the throat slashing gesture -- we have no money to pay it. We have no money to pay rent, etc., etc. And really, it simply takes too muich time, right now, to do this blog.
On the bright side, as one of the "self-employed" of the Bush economy, I have just gotten off the phone with the aid agencies suggested by the City of Austin, and have really understood for the first time what the Bush era means. The City suggested the United way, which suggested St. Mary's, Christian Services, Baptist Community Center. This, of course, surprised us. Asking if there were any more, uh, robust agencies to act as my advocate, if not to offer temporary relief, I was told, No.
This makes complete sense, of course. It is not that the poor in this country are being ruled with indifference -- rather, they evoke unmitigated hostility among the Republican gentry. Losers, whiners, and a reserve army of failure, we are the turds. Having representatives who might look through the bylaws of, say, a power company to discover regulations that protect the poorest payers is just the kind of thing we don't want to encourage. Dependence, you know.
A pity.
So, time for LI to plunge into the bowels of the Temporary Relief for Needy Families. And as any counsellor for the poor knows, the first thing to do is to wean the poor from their bad habits. The poor are always shooting themselves in the foot with their addictions. So it has proven with LI. This habit really has to stop.
So, time to yank the thing. We will leave up the archives and the site for about two weeks, but then, it is coming down. It is too tempting to continue it, and we simply can't afford to. Interesting as it has been to give a worm's eye view of the world, this worm needs a new hole to crawl through, at the very least.
Now for that struggle for food stamps. Wish us well.
Friday, January 16, 2004
Thursday, January 15, 2004
Bollettino
Trollopians everywhere, take note: according to the Daily Telegraph, the Church of England might be selling off its most expensive bishop’s palaces:
“THE CHURCH of England is preparing to sell some of its ancient bishops' palaces and houses as part of a cost-cutting review.
The Church Commissioners said yesterday that they would introduce guidelines to maximise the income from properties and those proving too expensive to maintain may be put on the market.”
As we all know, the Bishop’s Palace in Barchester is the center of the world – at least, the world Trollope made. Of course, there are the political novels, the Irish novels, the novels and novels Trollope poured out, but the Barchester series is at the center of this universe. Our Tory impulse is to simply hang down our head when we read that the Church might actually be letting some vulgarian bidder, some Saatchi or other, get his hooks on jewels like these:
“Among the historic houses is Auckland Castle, a 90-room Gothic pile set in six acres, lived in by Bishops of Durham for nearly 900 years. The present bishop occupies a four-bedroom apartment there.
Hartlebury Castle has been home to Bishops of Worcester for even longer and Rose Castle, a fortified manor with listed wallpaper on the Cumbrian border with Scotland, has housed Bishops of Carlisle since the 13th century.
The Bishop of Bath and Wells has a 13th century moated palace whose swans learn to ring a bell when they want to be fed, but this is expected to escape the axe as it makes a profit from tourism and conferences. In a recent reassessment, however, the Bishop of Bristol's eight-bedroom Queen Anne house in Clifton has been sold, and the See House in Wakefield will be put up for sale.”
One remembers the agony of Crawley, the poor curate in the Last Chronicle of Barset, whose suffering increased with his knowledge, and the expense of whose knowledge came out of the happiness of his family. In Chapter IV, Mrs. Crawley has just been to see the lawyer about the matter of a bad check to the butcher. In Trollope’s usually adroit manner, a debt becomes the timer in this novel. The Crawley family is crawling with debts. Debts and cultural capital out the scrawny Crawley behind. The book is, in many ways, like one of those allegorical Victorian pictures – on one side, the Bishop’s Palace, and on the other side, the clergyman’s hovel. Mrs. Crawley comes home to a darkened house, and this is how Trollope lavishes its material weight upon us. When Mrs. Crawley tries to tell her husband what the attorney says, this is his reply:
'But none to crush me as this will crush me. Well; what am I to do? Am I to go to prison--tonight?' At this moment his daughter returned with a candle, and the mother could not make her answer at once. It was a wretched, poverty-stricken room. By degrees the carpet had disappeared, which had been laid down some nine or ten years since, when they had first come to Hogglestock, and which even then had not been new. Now nothing but a poor fragment of it remained in front of the fire-place. In the middle of the room there was a table which had once been large; but one flap of it was gone altogether, and the other flap sloped grievously towards the floor, the weakness of old age having fallen into its legs. There were two or three smaller tables about, but they stood propped against walls, thence obtaining a security which their own strength would not give them. At the further end of the room there was an ancient piece of furniture, which was always called 'papa's secretary', at which Mr Crawley customarily sat and wrote his sermons, and did all work that was done by him within the house. The man who had made it, some time in the last century, had intended it to be a locked guardian for domestic documents, and the receptacle for all that was most private in the house of some paterfamilias. But beneath the hands of Mr Crawley it always stood open; and with the exception of the small space at which he wrote, was covered with dog's-eared books, from nearly all of which the covers had disappeared.
There were there two odd volumes of Euripides, a Greek Testament, an Odyssey, a duodecimo Pindar, and a miniature Anacreon. There was half a Horace--the two first books of the Odes at the beginning and the De Arte Poetica at the end having disappeared. There was a little bit of a volume of Cicero, and there were Caesar's 'Commentaries' in two volumes, so stoutly bound that they had defied the combined ill-usage of time and the Crawley family. All these were piled upon the secretary, with many others--odd volumes of sermons and the like; but the Greek and Latin lay at the top, and showed signs of frequent use. There was one arm-chair in the room--a Windsor chair, as such used to be called, made soft by an old cushion in the back, in which Mr Crawley sat when both he and his wife were in the room, and Mrs Crawley when he was absent. And there was an old horsehair sofa--now almost denuded of its horsehair--but that, like the tables required the assistance of a friendly wall. Then there was a half a dozen of other chairs--all of different sorts --and they completed the furniture of the room. It was not such a room as one would wish to see inhabited by an beneficed clergyman of the Church of England; but they who know what money will do and what it will not, will understand how easily a man with a family, and with a hundred and thirty pounds a year, may be brought to the need of inhabiting such a chamber. When it is remembered that three pounds of meat a day, at ninepence a pound, will cost over forty pounds a year, there need be no difficulty in understanding that it may be so. Bread for such a family must cost at least twenty-five pounds. Clothes for five persons of whom one must at any rate wear the raiment of a gentleman, can hardly be found for less than ten pounds a year a head. Then there remains fifteen pounds for tea, sugar, beer, wages, education, amusements and the like. In such circumstances a gentleman can hardly pay much for the renewal of furniture!”
It is truly fascinating how the novel embedded in itself the tracking shot -- for this description of the Crawley chattels is one long tracking shot, from the couple to the child to the carpet to the table to the books to the desk. And like a tracking shot, what is shown is, by being shown, immediately symbolic. It is that instant when the the thing quickens into expression, when collection becomes scene.
The contrast with the gentlemanly circumstances of the Bishop, and his much lesser interest in pagan classics, runs through the book. And the Bishop's problem with his bossy wife. Bishop Proudie is a typical Church of England high official – very good for ceremonial purposes, but no damn backbone. Mrs. Proudie is one of Trollope’s great characters: narrow, proud, petulant, incapable of understanding religion beyond its ceremonial trappings, a conventional figure whom convention cannot satisfy, and (as we know from previous books) susceptible to Enthusiasm. In short, a Victorian Everywoman.
Well. And so that’s that. They fight WWI, they fight WWII, they conquer half the planet, and in the end, it comes down to this.
To think that the Bishop of Durham is practically camping like a student in his palace – practically lives there in LI-like squalor – is shaming.
What’s truly worse is that these palaces are going to rack and ruin merely because England is passing through a temporarily ferocious capitalist phase. Of course, the privatizations of today, and the Thatcherism, will eventually be swallowed up by the larger stream of English history. It would be a shame, however, for the damage those things have already done to engulf and drown the bishop’s palaces.
One knows exactly what the Bishop of Barchester would say: oh dear.
Trollopians everywhere, take note: according to the Daily Telegraph, the Church of England might be selling off its most expensive bishop’s palaces:
“THE CHURCH of England is preparing to sell some of its ancient bishops' palaces and houses as part of a cost-cutting review.
The Church Commissioners said yesterday that they would introduce guidelines to maximise the income from properties and those proving too expensive to maintain may be put on the market.”
As we all know, the Bishop’s Palace in Barchester is the center of the world – at least, the world Trollope made. Of course, there are the political novels, the Irish novels, the novels and novels Trollope poured out, but the Barchester series is at the center of this universe. Our Tory impulse is to simply hang down our head when we read that the Church might actually be letting some vulgarian bidder, some Saatchi or other, get his hooks on jewels like these:
“Among the historic houses is Auckland Castle, a 90-room Gothic pile set in six acres, lived in by Bishops of Durham for nearly 900 years. The present bishop occupies a four-bedroom apartment there.
Hartlebury Castle has been home to Bishops of Worcester for even longer and Rose Castle, a fortified manor with listed wallpaper on the Cumbrian border with Scotland, has housed Bishops of Carlisle since the 13th century.
The Bishop of Bath and Wells has a 13th century moated palace whose swans learn to ring a bell when they want to be fed, but this is expected to escape the axe as it makes a profit from tourism and conferences. In a recent reassessment, however, the Bishop of Bristol's eight-bedroom Queen Anne house in Clifton has been sold, and the See House in Wakefield will be put up for sale.”
One remembers the agony of Crawley, the poor curate in the Last Chronicle of Barset, whose suffering increased with his knowledge, and the expense of whose knowledge came out of the happiness of his family. In Chapter IV, Mrs. Crawley has just been to see the lawyer about the matter of a bad check to the butcher. In Trollope’s usually adroit manner, a debt becomes the timer in this novel. The Crawley family is crawling with debts. Debts and cultural capital out the scrawny Crawley behind. The book is, in many ways, like one of those allegorical Victorian pictures – on one side, the Bishop’s Palace, and on the other side, the clergyman’s hovel. Mrs. Crawley comes home to a darkened house, and this is how Trollope lavishes its material weight upon us. When Mrs. Crawley tries to tell her husband what the attorney says, this is his reply:
'But none to crush me as this will crush me. Well; what am I to do? Am I to go to prison--tonight?' At this moment his daughter returned with a candle, and the mother could not make her answer at once. It was a wretched, poverty-stricken room. By degrees the carpet had disappeared, which had been laid down some nine or ten years since, when they had first come to Hogglestock, and which even then had not been new. Now nothing but a poor fragment of it remained in front of the fire-place. In the middle of the room there was a table which had once been large; but one flap of it was gone altogether, and the other flap sloped grievously towards the floor, the weakness of old age having fallen into its legs. There were two or three smaller tables about, but they stood propped against walls, thence obtaining a security which their own strength would not give them. At the further end of the room there was an ancient piece of furniture, which was always called 'papa's secretary', at which Mr Crawley customarily sat and wrote his sermons, and did all work that was done by him within the house. The man who had made it, some time in the last century, had intended it to be a locked guardian for domestic documents, and the receptacle for all that was most private in the house of some paterfamilias. But beneath the hands of Mr Crawley it always stood open; and with the exception of the small space at which he wrote, was covered with dog's-eared books, from nearly all of which the covers had disappeared.
There were there two odd volumes of Euripides, a Greek Testament, an Odyssey, a duodecimo Pindar, and a miniature Anacreon. There was half a Horace--the two first books of the Odes at the beginning and the De Arte Poetica at the end having disappeared. There was a little bit of a volume of Cicero, and there were Caesar's 'Commentaries' in two volumes, so stoutly bound that they had defied the combined ill-usage of time and the Crawley family. All these were piled upon the secretary, with many others--odd volumes of sermons and the like; but the Greek and Latin lay at the top, and showed signs of frequent use. There was one arm-chair in the room--a Windsor chair, as such used to be called, made soft by an old cushion in the back, in which Mr Crawley sat when both he and his wife were in the room, and Mrs Crawley when he was absent. And there was an old horsehair sofa--now almost denuded of its horsehair--but that, like the tables required the assistance of a friendly wall. Then there was a half a dozen of other chairs--all of different sorts --and they completed the furniture of the room. It was not such a room as one would wish to see inhabited by an beneficed clergyman of the Church of England; but they who know what money will do and what it will not, will understand how easily a man with a family, and with a hundred and thirty pounds a year, may be brought to the need of inhabiting such a chamber. When it is remembered that three pounds of meat a day, at ninepence a pound, will cost over forty pounds a year, there need be no difficulty in understanding that it may be so. Bread for such a family must cost at least twenty-five pounds. Clothes for five persons of whom one must at any rate wear the raiment of a gentleman, can hardly be found for less than ten pounds a year a head. Then there remains fifteen pounds for tea, sugar, beer, wages, education, amusements and the like. In such circumstances a gentleman can hardly pay much for the renewal of furniture!”
It is truly fascinating how the novel embedded in itself the tracking shot -- for this description of the Crawley chattels is one long tracking shot, from the couple to the child to the carpet to the table to the books to the desk. And like a tracking shot, what is shown is, by being shown, immediately symbolic. It is that instant when the the thing quickens into expression, when collection becomes scene.
The contrast with the gentlemanly circumstances of the Bishop, and his much lesser interest in pagan classics, runs through the book. And the Bishop's problem with his bossy wife. Bishop Proudie is a typical Church of England high official – very good for ceremonial purposes, but no damn backbone. Mrs. Proudie is one of Trollope’s great characters: narrow, proud, petulant, incapable of understanding religion beyond its ceremonial trappings, a conventional figure whom convention cannot satisfy, and (as we know from previous books) susceptible to Enthusiasm. In short, a Victorian Everywoman.
Well. And so that’s that. They fight WWI, they fight WWII, they conquer half the planet, and in the end, it comes down to this.
To think that the Bishop of Durham is practically camping like a student in his palace – practically lives there in LI-like squalor – is shaming.
What’s truly worse is that these palaces are going to rack and ruin merely because England is passing through a temporarily ferocious capitalist phase. Of course, the privatizations of today, and the Thatcherism, will eventually be swallowed up by the larger stream of English history. It would be a shame, however, for the damage those things have already done to engulf and drown the bishop’s palaces.
One knows exactly what the Bishop of Barchester would say: oh dear.
Wednesday, January 14, 2004
Bollettino
Economics is the science of explaining how the totalling of an economic model in its collision with reality is really not as bad as it looks. In fact, in the economist's version, it is reality that is at fault!
In this, it shares a lot with the science of selling used cars. The latest unemployment numbers certainly point to the ruinous nature of the Bush fiscal policy. While pumping into the system 600 billion some dollars that the state has to borrow, plus the money that it has on hand, is going to produce short term growth, that growth won’t necessarily engender employment. This lesson was learned, by left-wing Keynsians, in the inflation haunted seventies. Right wing Keynsians are reproducing the conditions for that fiasco from the other end.
We read, with mounting hilarity, the analysis of unemployment produced by the London Times Business editor, Anatole Koletsky. The numbers do look bleak, according to Koletsky, but that is because you aren’t looking hard enough. If you look under the numbers, and then you look around for other numbers, what you discover is an employment boom in America.
AK starts from the collision:
"Friday's US employment figures were undeniably a shock to economists (including myself) who have been expecting a strong global expansion, led by American growth."
The rest of the article, he talks himself into believing that the collision didn't take place. It is very funny. We especially like this part:
"But were the employment statistics really all that bad? Looking below the surface, the US economic figures still present an extremely positive story - albeit with a nasty sting in the tail.
The most important point -apart from noting that a single month of figures can never have much significance in its own right -is that Friday's stagnant employment figure was inconsistent with every other indicator of the state of the US economy. Figures on GDP, industrial production, layoff announcements, weekly jobless claims and the monthly surveys by the Institute of Purchasing Management (which have a 50-year track record of correctly anticipating cyclical movements in the US economy) have all been pointing unambiguously to strong employment growth.
"In such conditions, it is wise to ignore the rogue statistic..."
Indeed, such is the wisdom of the economists. There is the problem, however, that the rogue number might, after all, be the extraordinary 3rd quarter growth. As AK knows, each of the last two years have witnessed spurts that petered out.
Still, you need some statistic, somewhere, to continue to perform your shamanic function. Luckily AK has one, having been pointed there, no doubt, by the WSJ editorial board, which has lately given up economics in favor of examining the entrails of cows and such. Cow say, Bush, he very very good!
"The survey of payroll employment, conducted by a questionnaire sent to US employers, normally attracts more attention than the survey of households because it is less volatile from month to month. But over longer periods (such as 12 months) the two surveys have always moved closely together. In the past year, how-ever, the usual relationship has broken down (see top chart). According to the payroll survey the US economy lost 74,000 jobs in the year to December, but the household survey shows a healthy increase of 2.02 million jobs. So which should we believe?
To me the answer seems very clear: the household survey is right and the payroll survey is wrong."
This kind of hocus pocus is disappointing. Kaletsky is, in general we think, right to point to the inflationary load that is being generated by the Bush budget and the Fed's enabling of that budget. His problem is that he doesn't want to see what he is seeing -- an inflationary load and a week job economy.
The survey of businesses, it is true, doesn’t pick up small business starts. However, there is another explanation for the divergence. That is the length of this recession. The survey of households distinguishes between unemployed and ‘self-employed” without really asking too many questions. Kolatsky knows as well as anyone else how soft the ‘self-employed’ category is. People routinely describe themselves ‘upward’ to surveyors. That’s why 14% of Americans surveyed describe themselves as being in the upper 1% income bracket.
LI recently answered a survey, and for the first time, we answered unemployed to the question of what we did. It felt extremely uncomfortable. Of course, we could say self employed. Self employment last year grossed us some 8 thousand bucks – a real fortune. We rounded out the pittances we made from reviews by getting some day labor as a house painter, etc. This month, we owe 350 dollars in rent and, as the month comes to its halfway point, we have made zero house painting, zero on our articles, and zero has come in from our plea to LI readers, making a grand total of zero.
That is self employment. The difference between self employment and unemployment, in my case, is that the later is a step upward. We have no doubt that the extra unemployed, having every incentive to describe themselves with optimism, have, over time, either dropped from the rolls of the unemployed, or turned unemployment into a "choice.' It makes you feel better to think that you are self employed. So a former designer waters plants for some connections, earns a third of what she did earn, sends out resumes and gets no reply, and puts herself down as self-employed. This happens over and over. It isn't a pick up -- it is a symptom of a creeping and chronic malady.
There is no talking one’s way out of the employment picture wrought by the extreme of fiscal irresponsibility and the diversion of hundreds of billions to the richest percentiles, a diversion that has purchased an investor boom, but hasn’t trickled down to tighten the labor market in the least. From May of last year to yesterday, LI has sent off approximately 75 responses to job advertisements. We have received one interview. This is over a range of jobs – liquor store clerk, law office receptionist, customer service representative. It is drier than a dead man’s tongue out there.
Surely the investor boom will trickle down this year. There are signs of that in Austin. Up and down fifth street, there are new and very expensive apartment condos. In the past two years, perhaps 40,000 square feet of office space has been added just to downtown Austin. Yet we don’t see any rush to occupy either those condos – which start at 300,000 – or those office spaces. This is speculation of a non-risky kind – usually, after two years of economic doldrums, the American business cycle comes roaring back. But don’t believe the diagnosticians who, not hearing a heartbeat, decide that hearts beating aren’t the main thing. They are. If anything, the unemployment rate is probably understated, by not counting people like me. When Koletsky claims that two million jobs were added to the payrolls last year, I think that this is only evidence that the man is suffering from an almost terminal case of delirium partisans, a disease caused by bending over backwards to defend the Republican economic policy.
Economics is the science of explaining how the totalling of an economic model in its collision with reality is really not as bad as it looks. In fact, in the economist's version, it is reality that is at fault!
In this, it shares a lot with the science of selling used cars. The latest unemployment numbers certainly point to the ruinous nature of the Bush fiscal policy. While pumping into the system 600 billion some dollars that the state has to borrow, plus the money that it has on hand, is going to produce short term growth, that growth won’t necessarily engender employment. This lesson was learned, by left-wing Keynsians, in the inflation haunted seventies. Right wing Keynsians are reproducing the conditions for that fiasco from the other end.
We read, with mounting hilarity, the analysis of unemployment produced by the London Times Business editor, Anatole Koletsky. The numbers do look bleak, according to Koletsky, but that is because you aren’t looking hard enough. If you look under the numbers, and then you look around for other numbers, what you discover is an employment boom in America.
AK starts from the collision:
"Friday's US employment figures were undeniably a shock to economists (including myself) who have been expecting a strong global expansion, led by American growth."
The rest of the article, he talks himself into believing that the collision didn't take place. It is very funny. We especially like this part:
"But were the employment statistics really all that bad? Looking below the surface, the US economic figures still present an extremely positive story - albeit with a nasty sting in the tail.
The most important point -apart from noting that a single month of figures can never have much significance in its own right -is that Friday's stagnant employment figure was inconsistent with every other indicator of the state of the US economy. Figures on GDP, industrial production, layoff announcements, weekly jobless claims and the monthly surveys by the Institute of Purchasing Management (which have a 50-year track record of correctly anticipating cyclical movements in the US economy) have all been pointing unambiguously to strong employment growth.
"In such conditions, it is wise to ignore the rogue statistic..."
Indeed, such is the wisdom of the economists. There is the problem, however, that the rogue number might, after all, be the extraordinary 3rd quarter growth. As AK knows, each of the last two years have witnessed spurts that petered out.
Still, you need some statistic, somewhere, to continue to perform your shamanic function. Luckily AK has one, having been pointed there, no doubt, by the WSJ editorial board, which has lately given up economics in favor of examining the entrails of cows and such. Cow say, Bush, he very very good!
"The survey of payroll employment, conducted by a questionnaire sent to US employers, normally attracts more attention than the survey of households because it is less volatile from month to month. But over longer periods (such as 12 months) the two surveys have always moved closely together. In the past year, how-ever, the usual relationship has broken down (see top chart). According to the payroll survey the US economy lost 74,000 jobs in the year to December, but the household survey shows a healthy increase of 2.02 million jobs. So which should we believe?
To me the answer seems very clear: the household survey is right and the payroll survey is wrong."
This kind of hocus pocus is disappointing. Kaletsky is, in general we think, right to point to the inflationary load that is being generated by the Bush budget and the Fed's enabling of that budget. His problem is that he doesn't want to see what he is seeing -- an inflationary load and a week job economy.
The survey of businesses, it is true, doesn’t pick up small business starts. However, there is another explanation for the divergence. That is the length of this recession. The survey of households distinguishes between unemployed and ‘self-employed” without really asking too many questions. Kolatsky knows as well as anyone else how soft the ‘self-employed’ category is. People routinely describe themselves ‘upward’ to surveyors. That’s why 14% of Americans surveyed describe themselves as being in the upper 1% income bracket.
LI recently answered a survey, and for the first time, we answered unemployed to the question of what we did. It felt extremely uncomfortable. Of course, we could say self employed. Self employment last year grossed us some 8 thousand bucks – a real fortune. We rounded out the pittances we made from reviews by getting some day labor as a house painter, etc. This month, we owe 350 dollars in rent and, as the month comes to its halfway point, we have made zero house painting, zero on our articles, and zero has come in from our plea to LI readers, making a grand total of zero.
That is self employment. The difference between self employment and unemployment, in my case, is that the later is a step upward. We have no doubt that the extra unemployed, having every incentive to describe themselves with optimism, have, over time, either dropped from the rolls of the unemployed, or turned unemployment into a "choice.' It makes you feel better to think that you are self employed. So a former designer waters plants for some connections, earns a third of what she did earn, sends out resumes and gets no reply, and puts herself down as self-employed. This happens over and over. It isn't a pick up -- it is a symptom of a creeping and chronic malady.
There is no talking one’s way out of the employment picture wrought by the extreme of fiscal irresponsibility and the diversion of hundreds of billions to the richest percentiles, a diversion that has purchased an investor boom, but hasn’t trickled down to tighten the labor market in the least. From May of last year to yesterday, LI has sent off approximately 75 responses to job advertisements. We have received one interview. This is over a range of jobs – liquor store clerk, law office receptionist, customer service representative. It is drier than a dead man’s tongue out there.
Surely the investor boom will trickle down this year. There are signs of that in Austin. Up and down fifth street, there are new and very expensive apartment condos. In the past two years, perhaps 40,000 square feet of office space has been added just to downtown Austin. Yet we don’t see any rush to occupy either those condos – which start at 300,000 – or those office spaces. This is speculation of a non-risky kind – usually, after two years of economic doldrums, the American business cycle comes roaring back. But don’t believe the diagnosticians who, not hearing a heartbeat, decide that hearts beating aren’t the main thing. They are. If anything, the unemployment rate is probably understated, by not counting people like me. When Koletsky claims that two million jobs were added to the payrolls last year, I think that this is only evidence that the man is suffering from an almost terminal case of delirium partisans, a disease caused by bending over backwards to defend the Republican economic policy.
Tuesday, January 13, 2004
Bollettino
Hmm. We don’t know if we can pat ourselves on the back yet, but it does look like our projection about the Shi’ite response to Saddam’s capture is starting to assume the outlines we predicted.
“Officials held a round of urgent meetings in Washington and Baghdad in the wake of the rejection on Sunday by a powerful Shiite religious leader, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, of the administration's complex plans to hold caucuses around the country to select an interim legislature and executive in a newly self-governing Iraq. Officials say they are responding to the cleric's objections with a new plan that will open the caucuses to more people and make their inner workings more transparent.
Administration officials also expressed concern about a separate part of Ayatollah Sistani's statement on Sunday that demanded that any agreement for American-led forces to remain in Iraq be approved by directly elected representatives.”
If you will cast your mind back, faithful reader, you’ll remember that we said, a day or two after the capture of Saddam:
“With Saddam rendered irrelevant, the third factor in Iraqi politics can now come into play � and come into play in such a way as to disturb Wolfowitz�s dream of Pax Chile on the Euphrates. That third factor is the Shi’ite demand for elections. Americans have been blocking this demand, because the American backplan is to somehow thrust a Chalabi or Chalabi like figure on Iraq. This thrusting was to be called democracy, not rape. So far, with Chalabi, it has pretty much failed …
In our opinion, the combinations now at work in Iraq are about to tumble to a new configuration. And this is not going to make the Pentagon happy. Our bet, right now, is that the following will emerge as the combination of forces in Iraq in the next, oh, two or three months:
The resistance will continue. It is a headless resistance. Whether it gets a brain will make a lot of difference, here. Our bet is that it won’t.
The Council is going to have to over-reach or dissolve. They�ve been put in an impossible middle position by the Americans. The question of who and how and for what Saddam H. is tried is going to be a point around which the Council will have to concentrate, for good or ill. We think that the Council, which is as brainless as the resistance, will try to over-reach and submit at the same time, and that it just won�t work any more. Alienating its patron, and alienated from its land, the Council will change radically.
Southern Iraq, assured by Saddam�s capture, will finally show a restiveness that America can ill afford. This, we think, will shape whatever happens next in Iraq. As to what that shape will be --- we have no idea. In truth, the Bushies have been so blinded to what is happening in Iran that they dont realize that the conservative mullahs are, ideologically, their best friends. We think the clerical Shi�a elite, which has obtained a considerable amount of capital, is eager to find an excuse to privatize, and to inject its capital into the global monetary flows. Whether that influences the Shia elite in Iraq is something we don�t know enough about to predict.”
Hey, that looks pretty good at the moment.
So, the comedy of multi-cultural misunderstanding goes on. It is rather amazing that Americans in 2004 are acting the way Americans in 1904 acted in the Philippines – as if they were dealing with an inferior race. But, in fact, that is exactly what they are doing. These grafs are wholly believable, and wholly astonishing:
“Now that Ayatollah Sistani has rejected the system as not democratic enough, administration officials said they were intensifying efforts in all of Iraq's governorates and in cities and towns to hold local meetings to select delegates to the caucuses.
The new hope in Washington, the officials said, was in effect to make the caucus system look more democratic without changing it in a fundamental way.”
Right. It’s the beads approach – give those savages beads, and in return they’ll give you Manhattan. Hell, worked four hundred years ago, oughta work today. So much for the much lauded moral politics of the Wolfowitz crowd. It’s democracy without any of that pesky will of the people stuff. And really, how can the people object when we’ve imposed on them a perfectly decent savage, one Chalabi, who even learned the charming American art of swindling – he’s almost as civilized as us!
However, a hopeful point should be made. We originally thought that there might be a lot more violence in Southern Iraq, due to the capture of S. There hasn't been. Really, there is a chance for a peaceful revolution here, after all: one bringing with it the prefiguration of Iraqi democracy without the servility towards the Americans. A good thing, a very good thing.
Hmm. We don’t know if we can pat ourselves on the back yet, but it does look like our projection about the Shi’ite response to Saddam’s capture is starting to assume the outlines we predicted.
“Officials held a round of urgent meetings in Washington and Baghdad in the wake of the rejection on Sunday by a powerful Shiite religious leader, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, of the administration's complex plans to hold caucuses around the country to select an interim legislature and executive in a newly self-governing Iraq. Officials say they are responding to the cleric's objections with a new plan that will open the caucuses to more people and make their inner workings more transparent.
Administration officials also expressed concern about a separate part of Ayatollah Sistani's statement on Sunday that demanded that any agreement for American-led forces to remain in Iraq be approved by directly elected representatives.”
If you will cast your mind back, faithful reader, you’ll remember that we said, a day or two after the capture of Saddam:
“With Saddam rendered irrelevant, the third factor in Iraqi politics can now come into play � and come into play in such a way as to disturb Wolfowitz�s dream of Pax Chile on the Euphrates. That third factor is the Shi’ite demand for elections. Americans have been blocking this demand, because the American backplan is to somehow thrust a Chalabi or Chalabi like figure on Iraq. This thrusting was to be called democracy, not rape. So far, with Chalabi, it has pretty much failed …
In our opinion, the combinations now at work in Iraq are about to tumble to a new configuration. And this is not going to make the Pentagon happy. Our bet, right now, is that the following will emerge as the combination of forces in Iraq in the next, oh, two or three months:
The resistance will continue. It is a headless resistance. Whether it gets a brain will make a lot of difference, here. Our bet is that it won’t.
The Council is going to have to over-reach or dissolve. They�ve been put in an impossible middle position by the Americans. The question of who and how and for what Saddam H. is tried is going to be a point around which the Council will have to concentrate, for good or ill. We think that the Council, which is as brainless as the resistance, will try to over-reach and submit at the same time, and that it just won�t work any more. Alienating its patron, and alienated from its land, the Council will change radically.
Southern Iraq, assured by Saddam�s capture, will finally show a restiveness that America can ill afford. This, we think, will shape whatever happens next in Iraq. As to what that shape will be --- we have no idea. In truth, the Bushies have been so blinded to what is happening in Iran that they dont realize that the conservative mullahs are, ideologically, their best friends. We think the clerical Shi�a elite, which has obtained a considerable amount of capital, is eager to find an excuse to privatize, and to inject its capital into the global monetary flows. Whether that influences the Shia elite in Iraq is something we don�t know enough about to predict.”
Hey, that looks pretty good at the moment.
So, the comedy of multi-cultural misunderstanding goes on. It is rather amazing that Americans in 2004 are acting the way Americans in 1904 acted in the Philippines – as if they were dealing with an inferior race. But, in fact, that is exactly what they are doing. These grafs are wholly believable, and wholly astonishing:
“Now that Ayatollah Sistani has rejected the system as not democratic enough, administration officials said they were intensifying efforts in all of Iraq's governorates and in cities and towns to hold local meetings to select delegates to the caucuses.
The new hope in Washington, the officials said, was in effect to make the caucus system look more democratic without changing it in a fundamental way.”
Right. It’s the beads approach – give those savages beads, and in return they’ll give you Manhattan. Hell, worked four hundred years ago, oughta work today. So much for the much lauded moral politics of the Wolfowitz crowd. It’s democracy without any of that pesky will of the people stuff. And really, how can the people object when we’ve imposed on them a perfectly decent savage, one Chalabi, who even learned the charming American art of swindling – he’s almost as civilized as us!
However, a hopeful point should be made. We originally thought that there might be a lot more violence in Southern Iraq, due to the capture of S. There hasn't been. Really, there is a chance for a peaceful revolution here, after all: one bringing with it the prefiguration of Iraqi democracy without the servility towards the Americans. A good thing, a very good thing.
Sunday, January 11, 2004
Bollettino
We went to a story in the Observer about grunt discontents. The story pointed us to a highly commendable site, run by the Veterans for Common Sense.
When Time magazine named the soldier the Man of the Year, there was something about the gesture reminiscent of Uriah Heep rubbing his hands together – an unctuous hypocrisy, if you will. Because, beyond the photo ops, the common soldier of America’s current war is being treated dismally by a government that pinches its pennies, when it comes to family leave for reservists, while throwing its billions away, when it comes to contracting with Halliburtan. It stinks.
The Veterans for Common Sense site has a compilation of articles about the collective dump the Pentagon is taking on Times Man of the year. For instance:
1. The wounded. Has there ever been an American war in which the censorship was so hamfisted, and the response of the press was so pussyfooted? In WWII, the press advocated for the GI; in this war, the press so far has advocated for a total of one GI, Jessica Lynch. The rest of them – the 2,841 wounded by offical count on January 7 – have somehow missed out on the Made for Tv movie, and the million dollar book deal. They are also missing out on their rights, not that this is going to make any headlines:
“Most service members severely wounded in Iraq and returned to the United States are treated at Walter Reed.
In a letter sent this week to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Dave Gorman, executive director of Disabled American Veterans, complained that the DAV is being blocked from carrying out its congressionally chartered mission.
Gorman questioned measures that require hospital pre-screening and approval of all visits, and full-time escorts during those visits, according to the letter a copy of which CNN obtained. Gorman said because of those escorts there is a lack of privacy over matters the counselors discuss with patients and their families at Walter Reed.”
2. Money. One of the great things about casting the soldier as a hero is that you don’t have to pay for heroes. I mean, Hercules getting a disability pension? Oh, forget it. It’s enough that Tom Cruise plays him in a cheesy Hollywood movie – one of those movies that, for the one millionth time, says NOTHING about the pay structure of the Army and the National Guard. So Times runs its suck piece; the Defense Department tries to “cut fat’ by cutting out the 300 million extra bucks that go to families for combat pay and family leave. And it isn’t an issue. We’d much rather see smiling dudes in camouflage hoisting a flag than think about paying them a decent salary. The gross inequalities that have become a structural part of the American system since the 80s have created a callousness that is most evident here. If you destroy unions and divert as much money as possible to the wealthiest, eventually the soldier – who is, after all the medals are taken off, another worker – is just going to have to take it on the chin. And there’s going to be more chin-taking as the war goes into its second year. Why? Because the deep, pervasive lying that took place as the Bushies organized this war meant that fighting it had to be done at the least political cost. No selective service here. No preparation for long term combat. Rather, we call up the Reserves – units that should, as the name implies, be Reserves. And as this AP article in the Army Times makes clear, that is the Rumsfeld policy. All military operations have to have a great code name: Operation Eagle, or Thunderbolt, or something. For this one I suggest "The Three Stooges come to the Defense Department".
“Back-to-back wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have stretched the Army thin. Nearly two-thirds of its active duty brigade-sized units are deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan. When the troops currently in Iraq rotate out this spring, the U.S. plans to lean heavily on the National Guard and Reserves for replacements. The Pentagon said Wednesday that the number of U.S. military reservists called to active duty jumped by more than 10,000 in the past week.
“What we’re trying to do is to manage the force now so that we don’t have a falloff in recruitment or retention a year from now, and then have a gap where we have to scramble to rectify that,” Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Tuesday.”
Ah, the gibberish just flows and flows from the Donald! He’s the Ed McMahon of bad planning!
3. Meanwhile, back on the home front. The Observer mentioned a Military Families Who Speak Out. The site has some interesting letters. An articulate and impassioned letter from Jessica D. Salamon to President Bush caught our eye. She makes a sensible suggestion: “Please do all of us a favor and don't talk about the sacrifices we are making until you know what they are.”
Pursuant to that request, she enumerates some of her sacrifices. Her husband joined the Ohio National Guard. This turned out to be a bad move, since “he thought being in a local unit would make the most difference in his immediate world. He also thought I would best accept his enlistment because traditionally the National Guard stays home to protect the US, our citizens, and our beloved Constitution.” And it does – normally. But Mr. Salamon wasn't calculating on the political cowardice stalking D.C., where the feel good rodomontade of the belligeranti is paid for by the blood of the citizenry. Ms. Salamon explains what her particular sacrifice is all about:
“When you speak of sacrifices, what do you picture? Do you picture apple-cheeked wives going out to sell war bonds or become Rosie the Riveter? Because that is not the reality of the sacrifices currently being made by military families. I welcome you to spend a day with me. It will be a long day, though, because I am unemployed and have trouble sleeping at night because I am under a lot of stress. I wait all day for my husband to call. I have to have my cell phone with me at all times because I am afraid to miss a call. I won't shop in the grocery store very long, because I don't get a signal in there and I'm afraid that he will call while I am in there. I cry every time I hang up with him because all of the joy and emotion is gone from his voice, he doesn't sound like the husband I married eight months ago, nor the man I have been with for nearly six years.
I spend much of my day writing him letters and printing articles off of the internet for him to read. I try to convince him that things will be better for us when he returns.
We haven't had a very good year, you see. We married in haste in April because we thought his unit was to be deployed then. My husband graduated with a degree in Computer Science and although he is a talented programmer, he was unable to find a job. In August, our home in Columbus was destroyed in a flash flood and we lost everything we owned. Our whole life washed away in one rain storm. We moved to northeastern Ohio to be near our families and try to rebuild our lives. We were both unemployed then. In November, we got the orders for my husband to report on Dec. 6 for mobilization. He was allowed to come home for Christmas, but our holiday was tainted by the fact that everyone had questions about his deployment and the fact that he was only allowed a three day pass. He didn't get to come home for New Year's, he will miss his birthday this month and our first anniversary in April. We may never get to go on a honeymoon. His orders are for eighteen months, so things are not looking up for us in the immediate future.”
Ms. Salamon obviously doesn’t realize what compassionate conservatism is all about – as you make the sacrifices, you store up your joys in heaven, not on earth! On earth, we have to sacrifice to make sure that people in Cheney's income bracket, poor pressed things, and those poor mutual funds investors, and especially those poor, suffering people in the energy industry don’t suffer the untold harm of taxation and regulation. Consequently, we don’t have the money for pesky little things like extending unemployment insurance. And we certainly can't take gravy out of the mouths of the numerous well entrenched military industries (Dyncorps, SIAC, Martin Marietta, Boeing) just to sprinkle some on the families of those who are really doing the fighting, can we? That’s going way too far.
We went to a story in the Observer about grunt discontents. The story pointed us to a highly commendable site, run by the Veterans for Common Sense.
When Time magazine named the soldier the Man of the Year, there was something about the gesture reminiscent of Uriah Heep rubbing his hands together – an unctuous hypocrisy, if you will. Because, beyond the photo ops, the common soldier of America’s current war is being treated dismally by a government that pinches its pennies, when it comes to family leave for reservists, while throwing its billions away, when it comes to contracting with Halliburtan. It stinks.
The Veterans for Common Sense site has a compilation of articles about the collective dump the Pentagon is taking on Times Man of the year. For instance:
1. The wounded. Has there ever been an American war in which the censorship was so hamfisted, and the response of the press was so pussyfooted? In WWII, the press advocated for the GI; in this war, the press so far has advocated for a total of one GI, Jessica Lynch. The rest of them – the 2,841 wounded by offical count on January 7 – have somehow missed out on the Made for Tv movie, and the million dollar book deal. They are also missing out on their rights, not that this is going to make any headlines:
“Most service members severely wounded in Iraq and returned to the United States are treated at Walter Reed.
In a letter sent this week to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Dave Gorman, executive director of Disabled American Veterans, complained that the DAV is being blocked from carrying out its congressionally chartered mission.
Gorman questioned measures that require hospital pre-screening and approval of all visits, and full-time escorts during those visits, according to the letter a copy of which CNN obtained. Gorman said because of those escorts there is a lack of privacy over matters the counselors discuss with patients and their families at Walter Reed.”
2. Money. One of the great things about casting the soldier as a hero is that you don’t have to pay for heroes. I mean, Hercules getting a disability pension? Oh, forget it. It’s enough that Tom Cruise plays him in a cheesy Hollywood movie – one of those movies that, for the one millionth time, says NOTHING about the pay structure of the Army and the National Guard. So Times runs its suck piece; the Defense Department tries to “cut fat’ by cutting out the 300 million extra bucks that go to families for combat pay and family leave. And it isn’t an issue. We’d much rather see smiling dudes in camouflage hoisting a flag than think about paying them a decent salary. The gross inequalities that have become a structural part of the American system since the 80s have created a callousness that is most evident here. If you destroy unions and divert as much money as possible to the wealthiest, eventually the soldier – who is, after all the medals are taken off, another worker – is just going to have to take it on the chin. And there’s going to be more chin-taking as the war goes into its second year. Why? Because the deep, pervasive lying that took place as the Bushies organized this war meant that fighting it had to be done at the least political cost. No selective service here. No preparation for long term combat. Rather, we call up the Reserves – units that should, as the name implies, be Reserves. And as this AP article in the Army Times makes clear, that is the Rumsfeld policy. All military operations have to have a great code name: Operation Eagle, or Thunderbolt, or something. For this one I suggest "The Three Stooges come to the Defense Department".
“Back-to-back wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have stretched the Army thin. Nearly two-thirds of its active duty brigade-sized units are deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan. When the troops currently in Iraq rotate out this spring, the U.S. plans to lean heavily on the National Guard and Reserves for replacements. The Pentagon said Wednesday that the number of U.S. military reservists called to active duty jumped by more than 10,000 in the past week.
“What we’re trying to do is to manage the force now so that we don’t have a falloff in recruitment or retention a year from now, and then have a gap where we have to scramble to rectify that,” Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Tuesday.”
Ah, the gibberish just flows and flows from the Donald! He’s the Ed McMahon of bad planning!
3. Meanwhile, back on the home front. The Observer mentioned a Military Families Who Speak Out. The site has some interesting letters. An articulate and impassioned letter from Jessica D. Salamon to President Bush caught our eye. She makes a sensible suggestion: “Please do all of us a favor and don't talk about the sacrifices we are making until you know what they are.”
Pursuant to that request, she enumerates some of her sacrifices. Her husband joined the Ohio National Guard. This turned out to be a bad move, since “he thought being in a local unit would make the most difference in his immediate world. He also thought I would best accept his enlistment because traditionally the National Guard stays home to protect the US, our citizens, and our beloved Constitution.” And it does – normally. But Mr. Salamon wasn't calculating on the political cowardice stalking D.C., where the feel good rodomontade of the belligeranti is paid for by the blood of the citizenry. Ms. Salamon explains what her particular sacrifice is all about:
“When you speak of sacrifices, what do you picture? Do you picture apple-cheeked wives going out to sell war bonds or become Rosie the Riveter? Because that is not the reality of the sacrifices currently being made by military families. I welcome you to spend a day with me. It will be a long day, though, because I am unemployed and have trouble sleeping at night because I am under a lot of stress. I wait all day for my husband to call. I have to have my cell phone with me at all times because I am afraid to miss a call. I won't shop in the grocery store very long, because I don't get a signal in there and I'm afraid that he will call while I am in there. I cry every time I hang up with him because all of the joy and emotion is gone from his voice, he doesn't sound like the husband I married eight months ago, nor the man I have been with for nearly six years.
I spend much of my day writing him letters and printing articles off of the internet for him to read. I try to convince him that things will be better for us when he returns.
We haven't had a very good year, you see. We married in haste in April because we thought his unit was to be deployed then. My husband graduated with a degree in Computer Science and although he is a talented programmer, he was unable to find a job. In August, our home in Columbus was destroyed in a flash flood and we lost everything we owned. Our whole life washed away in one rain storm. We moved to northeastern Ohio to be near our families and try to rebuild our lives. We were both unemployed then. In November, we got the orders for my husband to report on Dec. 6 for mobilization. He was allowed to come home for Christmas, but our holiday was tainted by the fact that everyone had questions about his deployment and the fact that he was only allowed a three day pass. He didn't get to come home for New Year's, he will miss his birthday this month and our first anniversary in April. We may never get to go on a honeymoon. His orders are for eighteen months, so things are not looking up for us in the immediate future.”
Ms. Salamon obviously doesn’t realize what compassionate conservatism is all about – as you make the sacrifices, you store up your joys in heaven, not on earth! On earth, we have to sacrifice to make sure that people in Cheney's income bracket, poor pressed things, and those poor mutual funds investors, and especially those poor, suffering people in the energy industry don’t suffer the untold harm of taxation and regulation. Consequently, we don’t have the money for pesky little things like extending unemployment insurance. And we certainly can't take gravy out of the mouths of the numerous well entrenched military industries (Dyncorps, SIAC, Martin Marietta, Boeing) just to sprinkle some on the families of those who are really doing the fighting, can we? That’s going way too far.
Saturday, January 10, 2004
Bollettino
We’ve examined the combinations with regard to Iraq. Let’s examine the combinations with regard to Bush’s re-election.
Most analysis of the election that LI reads in the paper is determined by a very short horizon: what happened this week. Or last week. And what the polls say about it.
But let’s try to take another approach, and look at the bad news and good news possibilities held by this year. If good news is taken to help Bush, what good news can he expect?
It was the orthodoxy – from October to December – that he would be enjoying great economic headlines in 2004. The newest employment figures rather kick that in the head. Plus the figures that aren’t being publicized – the dip dip dip of the value of the dollar. If unemployment doesn’t go down, the money flowing into the market might start seeking to take advantage of the dollar’s currently low status. This would be a double whammy of bad news for Bush.
This is the hardest thing to predict. Economists have never found a way to map their models over the actual working economy, even though certain models do have predictive power in the long run. But what matters, at the moment, is that if there is no change, this will be bad news for Bush. That possibility should hedge any prediction of a Bush landslide, such as those that are being pitched about by the right. Because bad news, here, is either remain the same news, or actual bad news – the return of the recession --
The best news, outside of a boom, for Bush would be the capture or killing of Osama bin Laden. The timing of Saddam H.’s capture was really fortunate for the Dems – if it had happened in June of this year, for instance, the good news would certainly float Bush into the general election like the Queen of the Rose Bowl.
So, one would expect a stirring up of the troops to bring Bush Osama’s head. Best time for him would be about August. If I were a Democrat, I would be figuring out how to pre-empt that. Bush has rather screwed himself, here, however: there are not enough American troops, we think, to operate against Osama as Americans operated against Saddam. This means relying on the Pakistanis or Afghans to capture the guy. We imagine that there will be some shift of troops from Iraq to Afghanistan this year, but we wonder whether that won’t bring up more questions than it is worth.
I think all the good news has been squeezed out of Iraq. The news from now to November is probably going to be bad. American casualties, recalcitrant Iraqis, blah blah blah. The best option for the administration is closing down discussion of Iraq, but that will be difficult when it defines the administration. Especially given the jingos who want to take a shot at Syria and Iran. The consensus of D.C. people seems to be that Iraq will be a net gain for Bush, but I don’t see how they figure that.
LI thought surely corruption – the culture of corruption in top management, and the complicity of Bush’s people in that corruption – would be a big Bush deficit. It hasn’t worked out that way. Put this down to our class bias. In actuality, even people who were totally screwed by Enron just aren’t interested in seeing Jeff Skilling’s head on a platter.
As for Bad news that could help Bush – the one thing that springs to mind is another attack on the Homeland. LI believes that this possibility should sink the Prez – after all, he’s been in office three years. No way to blame this one on Clinton. But the Republicans have invested years of irrationally aggressive rhetoric with the electorate. We all like to think that the bully is unmasked, in the end, but in reality, the bully can go on for a long time. If there is an attack in September or October, Bush is a shoo-in. Again, this is due to multiple failings – for instance, the failure of the press to investigate why we were vulnerable to four parties of truly amateur hijackers in 2001; whether the Bush administration’s findings about the attack on the U.S.S. Cole in June of that year should have sent up flags; etc. etc. The official story has solidified: a heroic president, making it back in a crisis to D.C., and directing a response that crushed the enemy. The counter-story is confused: should Bush have pre-empted Osama bin? But aren’t we critics of pre-emption? It doesn’t have clarity or momentum. If an attack comes early this year, a lot will depend on the scope .of it. LI doesn’t see how the U.S. can scrape up an extra 400 billion dollars to inject into the economic system to counter the inevitable bad effects of an attack on the scale of 9/11. However, never underestimate the credit limit of Uncle Sam.
That’s the coldest eye we can cast on the possible major good and bad news during the next eleven months. Of course, LI is not a prophet or magician. Low level events – from some personal failing or virtue of Bush, to some celebrity trial, to whatever – can change the value of these factors trememdously. But it is a good start on constructing the salient combinations for this election – and a much better exercise than some exegesis of the polls, which seems to be the only thing journalists know how to do.
In a later post, we will try to properly construct these factors into combinations.
We’ve examined the combinations with regard to Iraq. Let’s examine the combinations with regard to Bush’s re-election.
Most analysis of the election that LI reads in the paper is determined by a very short horizon: what happened this week. Or last week. And what the polls say about it.
But let’s try to take another approach, and look at the bad news and good news possibilities held by this year. If good news is taken to help Bush, what good news can he expect?
It was the orthodoxy – from October to December – that he would be enjoying great economic headlines in 2004. The newest employment figures rather kick that in the head. Plus the figures that aren’t being publicized – the dip dip dip of the value of the dollar. If unemployment doesn’t go down, the money flowing into the market might start seeking to take advantage of the dollar’s currently low status. This would be a double whammy of bad news for Bush.
This is the hardest thing to predict. Economists have never found a way to map their models over the actual working economy, even though certain models do have predictive power in the long run. But what matters, at the moment, is that if there is no change, this will be bad news for Bush. That possibility should hedge any prediction of a Bush landslide, such as those that are being pitched about by the right. Because bad news, here, is either remain the same news, or actual bad news – the return of the recession --
The best news, outside of a boom, for Bush would be the capture or killing of Osama bin Laden. The timing of Saddam H.’s capture was really fortunate for the Dems – if it had happened in June of this year, for instance, the good news would certainly float Bush into the general election like the Queen of the Rose Bowl.
So, one would expect a stirring up of the troops to bring Bush Osama’s head. Best time for him would be about August. If I were a Democrat, I would be figuring out how to pre-empt that. Bush has rather screwed himself, here, however: there are not enough American troops, we think, to operate against Osama as Americans operated against Saddam. This means relying on the Pakistanis or Afghans to capture the guy. We imagine that there will be some shift of troops from Iraq to Afghanistan this year, but we wonder whether that won’t bring up more questions than it is worth.
I think all the good news has been squeezed out of Iraq. The news from now to November is probably going to be bad. American casualties, recalcitrant Iraqis, blah blah blah. The best option for the administration is closing down discussion of Iraq, but that will be difficult when it defines the administration. Especially given the jingos who want to take a shot at Syria and Iran. The consensus of D.C. people seems to be that Iraq will be a net gain for Bush, but I don’t see how they figure that.
LI thought surely corruption – the culture of corruption in top management, and the complicity of Bush’s people in that corruption – would be a big Bush deficit. It hasn’t worked out that way. Put this down to our class bias. In actuality, even people who were totally screwed by Enron just aren’t interested in seeing Jeff Skilling’s head on a platter.
As for Bad news that could help Bush – the one thing that springs to mind is another attack on the Homeland. LI believes that this possibility should sink the Prez – after all, he’s been in office three years. No way to blame this one on Clinton. But the Republicans have invested years of irrationally aggressive rhetoric with the electorate. We all like to think that the bully is unmasked, in the end, but in reality, the bully can go on for a long time. If there is an attack in September or October, Bush is a shoo-in. Again, this is due to multiple failings – for instance, the failure of the press to investigate why we were vulnerable to four parties of truly amateur hijackers in 2001; whether the Bush administration’s findings about the attack on the U.S.S. Cole in June of that year should have sent up flags; etc. etc. The official story has solidified: a heroic president, making it back in a crisis to D.C., and directing a response that crushed the enemy. The counter-story is confused: should Bush have pre-empted Osama bin? But aren’t we critics of pre-emption? It doesn’t have clarity or momentum. If an attack comes early this year, a lot will depend on the scope .of it. LI doesn’t see how the U.S. can scrape up an extra 400 billion dollars to inject into the economic system to counter the inevitable bad effects of an attack on the scale of 9/11. However, never underestimate the credit limit of Uncle Sam.
That’s the coldest eye we can cast on the possible major good and bad news during the next eleven months. Of course, LI is not a prophet or magician. Low level events – from some personal failing or virtue of Bush, to some celebrity trial, to whatever – can change the value of these factors trememdously. But it is a good start on constructing the salient combinations for this election – and a much better exercise than some exegesis of the polls, which seems to be the only thing journalists know how to do.
In a later post, we will try to properly construct these factors into combinations.
Friday, January 9, 2004
Bollettino
In our series of posts about Libya, we listed three dishonorable honorables – federal judges whose recently disclosed behavior during the Edwin Wilson trial should lead to the resignations of the two of them still on the bench, D. Lowell Jensen and Stephen Trott, and should cast a shadow over the third, Stanley Sporkin, who served as a judge in the very prominent D.C. Federal Court.
Today, the NYT has a story about the Monsanto Judge. It is so nice when a major corporation has a judge in its pocket, it so makes one feel that capitalism is being guarded from its enemies.. The judge, Rodney W. Sippel, is a Clinton appointee – by way of Gephardt. When he was a mere lawyer for Husch & Eppenberger, he worked as a lawyer for Monsanto, and is even listed as a Monsanto lawyer on a price fixing case. Now, as a Judge, he is presiding over a Monsanto price fixing case. Oh, and he forgot to disclose that previous connection. But not to worry! We are assured by the archons of good behavior in the law world, consulted by the Times, that he is an honorable guy and would NEVER, EVER be biased in favor of his former bread and butter.
After quoting the code in the matter of when a Judge is supposed to recuse himself (“The Judicial Code of Conduct says that "a judge shall disqualify himself or herself in a proceeding in which the judge's impartiality might reasonably be questioned, including but not limited to instances in which: the judge has a personal bias or prejudice concerning a party, or personal knowledge of disputed evidentiary facts concerning the proceeding." The code also says a judge should disqualify him or herself if "the judge served as lawyer in the matter in controversy, or a lawyer with whom the judge previously practiced law served during such association as a lawyer concerning the matter"), the Times got a Professor Stephen Giller on the line. Giller is sophisticated enough to know that if we are going to go by the wording of the judicial code, why, you just aren’t going to get the kind of rulings that will countenance the spirit of blithe corporate corruption:
“Prof. Stephen Gillers at New York University Law School, however, said that while Judge Sippel probably should have disclosed his relationship with Monsanto, there did not appear to be enough evidence to disqualify him from the price-fixing case because the earlier case - even if he had worked on it for Monsanto - was not the exact same case.
"These are not sufficiently connected to be the same matter," Professor Gillers said, referring to the code of conduct. "The judge has not violated the code of conduct but he could have and should have told the parties about his prior relationship."”
Gillers interpretation of the code would, of course, practically eviscerate it. But what the hell, eh? How are you going to put in those billable hours for corporate giants, bring home the half a mil, and still get your cushy behind ensconced in the seat of judgment otherwise?
Sippel, meanwhile, has put the letter asking him to be recused under seal – which is not, according to the article, very standard behavior. Using the Giller principle, however, that unless a judge is caught slaughtering people with an automatic weapon on a downtown street at noon, he hasn’t violated any petty code, Sippel’s behavior isn’t going to earn him any demerits.
However, perhaps the Gillers principle only works when the Judge has been appointed by a Democrat president. In a case this summer in which a Wyoming Judge, a Republican, overturned Clinton’s rules against roads on national lands, it came out afterwards that the Judge had about a million dollars invested with oil companies. Gillers is quoted in the Denver Post as saying “Brimmer [the Judge in question] had an obligation to notify the parties of his holdings. 'You can't bury your head in the sand. You have to know your assets and know how they may be affected by cases that come before you,' he said.
Gillers said that in his opinion, Brimmer should have recused himself.”
Conflict of interest, you know, a veritable mosaic. It’s why we need ethical “experts.”
In our series of posts about Libya, we listed three dishonorable honorables – federal judges whose recently disclosed behavior during the Edwin Wilson trial should lead to the resignations of the two of them still on the bench, D. Lowell Jensen and Stephen Trott, and should cast a shadow over the third, Stanley Sporkin, who served as a judge in the very prominent D.C. Federal Court.
Today, the NYT has a story about the Monsanto Judge. It is so nice when a major corporation has a judge in its pocket, it so makes one feel that capitalism is being guarded from its enemies.. The judge, Rodney W. Sippel, is a Clinton appointee – by way of Gephardt. When he was a mere lawyer for Husch & Eppenberger, he worked as a lawyer for Monsanto, and is even listed as a Monsanto lawyer on a price fixing case. Now, as a Judge, he is presiding over a Monsanto price fixing case. Oh, and he forgot to disclose that previous connection. But not to worry! We are assured by the archons of good behavior in the law world, consulted by the Times, that he is an honorable guy and would NEVER, EVER be biased in favor of his former bread and butter.
After quoting the code in the matter of when a Judge is supposed to recuse himself (“The Judicial Code of Conduct says that "a judge shall disqualify himself or herself in a proceeding in which the judge's impartiality might reasonably be questioned, including but not limited to instances in which: the judge has a personal bias or prejudice concerning a party, or personal knowledge of disputed evidentiary facts concerning the proceeding." The code also says a judge should disqualify him or herself if "the judge served as lawyer in the matter in controversy, or a lawyer with whom the judge previously practiced law served during such association as a lawyer concerning the matter"), the Times got a Professor Stephen Giller on the line. Giller is sophisticated enough to know that if we are going to go by the wording of the judicial code, why, you just aren’t going to get the kind of rulings that will countenance the spirit of blithe corporate corruption:
“Prof. Stephen Gillers at New York University Law School, however, said that while Judge Sippel probably should have disclosed his relationship with Monsanto, there did not appear to be enough evidence to disqualify him from the price-fixing case because the earlier case - even if he had worked on it for Monsanto - was not the exact same case.
"These are not sufficiently connected to be the same matter," Professor Gillers said, referring to the code of conduct. "The judge has not violated the code of conduct but he could have and should have told the parties about his prior relationship."”
Gillers interpretation of the code would, of course, practically eviscerate it. But what the hell, eh? How are you going to put in those billable hours for corporate giants, bring home the half a mil, and still get your cushy behind ensconced in the seat of judgment otherwise?
Sippel, meanwhile, has put the letter asking him to be recused under seal – which is not, according to the article, very standard behavior. Using the Giller principle, however, that unless a judge is caught slaughtering people with an automatic weapon on a downtown street at noon, he hasn’t violated any petty code, Sippel’s behavior isn’t going to earn him any demerits.
However, perhaps the Gillers principle only works when the Judge has been appointed by a Democrat president. In a case this summer in which a Wyoming Judge, a Republican, overturned Clinton’s rules against roads on national lands, it came out afterwards that the Judge had about a million dollars invested with oil companies. Gillers is quoted in the Denver Post as saying “Brimmer [the Judge in question] had an obligation to notify the parties of his holdings. 'You can't bury your head in the sand. You have to know your assets and know how they may be affected by cases that come before you,' he said.
Gillers said that in his opinion, Brimmer should have recused himself.”
Conflict of interest, you know, a veritable mosaic. It’s why we need ethical “experts.”
Thursday, January 8, 2004
Bollettino
LI readers should rush right out and read the winter issue of Common Knowledge. Surely that is the best general scholarly journal since Raritan. Well, okay, there’s Critical Inquiry, but let's not quibble. Common Knowledge has devoted the to the ‘second world:” Central and Eastern Europe. This is a world of drowned kingdoms – Austro-Hungary, the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, Bohemia, and the like. Even as they were drowning, certain writers – Joseph Roth, Robert Musil, Andrei Bely – caught a last, fantastic glimmer.
But we wanted to quickly go to the Galin Tihanov’s “Why Did Modern Literary Theory Originate in Central and Eastern Europe? (And Why Is It Now Dead?).” Cognescenti will know that we are according the highest praise when we say that Tihanov encyclopedic, smart essay reminds us of T.J. Clark. Tihanov doesn’t have Clark’s tactile ability – Clark’s ability to describe a painting so that you can track it with your eye, if your eye was endowed with super-intelligence (alas, as Duchamp pointed out, the eye is dumb). Tihanov isn't quite to that point yet, and he is too specialized, from what I have seen of his other work, but he does pose pertinent questions, and comes up with really interesting answers.
Since the title is a question, let’s cut to the chase. Here is the answer, two thirds of the way through the essay:
“A new form of conceptualization is the reliable, if often belated, sign of the arrival of a new regime of relevance, as whose product it eventually emerges. Thus despite the many, if subtle, links and shades between regimes of relevance in the twentieth century, we can say that literary theory emerged in Eastern and Central Europe in the interwar decades as one of the conceptual products of the transition from a regime of relevance [End Page 78] that recognizes literature for its role in social and political practice to a regime that values literature primarily for its qualities as an art. Literary theory, however, was only one such form of conceptualization, though probably the most representative and interesting: the regime of artistic relevance (as opposed to that of social and political relevance) had been in evidence, after all, since long before the seventy years during which literary theory flourished. This regime emerged in the last quarter of the eighteenth century as a response to the changing status of art in the bourgeois marketplace; it made its first important, but self-contradictory and not always consequential, moves in the work of the Romantics (hence the significant if often vague role of Romanticism in the work of modern literary theorists); it continued through the years of aestheticism and l'art pour l'art, down into the first decades after World War II, with the American New Criticism as its high point and death knell.”
A few explanations. By ‘regime of relevance,” Tihanov is referring to the set of assumptions, the tones, the examples, and the privileged references that constitute the unity of a certain discourse over a certain time within a certain social group It is a unity not of ideas, but of ways of considering ideas.
By literary theory, Tihanov is not talking about the endless stream of student papers finding symbolism in the Scarlet Letter. Even though those are the social detritus left over as literary theory mummifies. Tihanov’s idea is that literary theory constructed, as an object, literature; it endowed literature with the characteristic of autonomy within the social whole; it then explored literature with reference to that founding autonomy; and it used that autonomy to legitimate its analysis of the peculiar linguistic structures that populate literary texts.
As Tihanov sees it, that view of literature, and by implication that kind of literary theory, originated in the 2nd world – in Russia, parts of the Austro-Hungarian empire, Poland, etc. – between the first world war and the thirties. The great figures of this era – Jakobson, Lukacs, Ingarten, Mukarovsky, Bakhtin, Shklovsky – circulate, in Tihanov’s view, as innovators and connectors, condensing their own sometimes marginal experience – as exiles, for instance, or opponents of particular political orders – into the constitution of literary theory. Now, of course, anyone familiar with the English school, from I.A. Richards to Leavis, or familiar with the influence of Taine not only on a generation of French literary critics, but, in this country, on Edmund Wilson, might want to protest on the foreclosure of some of the main lines of literary theory’s history. And there is certainly a problem with including Lukacs in this group, and excluding Benjamin and Adorno. I would certainly revise Tihanov’s last sentence: “aestheticism and l'art pour l'art” did indeed continue, as the organizer of a regime of relevance, “down into the first decades after World War II, with the American New Criticism…” but surely Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory was its “high point and death knell.” In fact, Adorno writes in that book like a tolling bell, with the clapper of dialectic going back and forth until the bell cracks.
Adorno, unmentioned, seems to be the ghost of Hamlet’s father in this piece, moaning under the elaborate woodwork. As Tihanov surveys, rather gloomily, the end of the golden age, isn’t that the Cultural Industry I hear creaking in the background?
“A good example of this interpenetration and competition of regimes within the space of a single article is Jakobson's 1919 piece "The Tasks of Artistic Propaganda," where he uses Marxist parlance and arguments to champion a Formalist and futurist agenda. 51 The interaction of regimes of relevance also explains, to a degree at least, the attempts of the Formalists and the Prague Circle to participate in the struggle for the distribution of social and cultural capital in the new states. Perhaps needless to say, the regime of social and political relevance was eventually imposed by force at the expense of the regime of aesthetic relevance, and with devastating consequences for literary theory in Russia. Similarly, in the 1960s we can begin to discern the complex overlap of all three regimes that I have described: a lingering appreciation of literature on the basis of literariness; the eruptive sway of literature in social and political discussions at universities in Paris, Prague, and Berkeley; and finally, the withdrawal into private consumption of literature as a largely escapist medium in the face of increasingly mediated forms of communication and the enhanced commodification of leisure. Today, the regime of relevance validating literature as a source of experience and entertainment overlaps with the freshly transfigured regime of social and political relevance exemplified in the struggle for "representative" national and global canons. What we need especially to bear in mind while studying literature and literary culture is that, while quite different regimes of relevance coexist at any one time, one of them comes to the fore—whether manifestly or obliquely—as the leading component in the mix.”
The last sentence, in particular, seems to appeal to a necessity that I wouldn't grant. Under Tihanov's words is an image that comes from a distorted picture of evolution, in which there is a tree with a direction, and competition that creates one kind of every species in an environment. That, however, isn't true, as Stephen Jay Gould pointed out. To be jargonish, the rhizomatic moment occurs at the cultural juncture of TV and deconstruction. I would contend, actually, that the retreat to the internal exile of literature, in the face of TV, like some terrible Big Brother, getting into our speech, our pockets, our dreams, is a distinct regime that has rooted itself, weirdly enough, in the technology that has put TV in retreat – the technology that enables you to read this, gentle reader.
Don't count on hegemony. Tihanov needs to read the latest Nielsen ratings.
Still – a very thought provoking piece. Read it.
LI readers should rush right out and read the winter issue of Common Knowledge. Surely that is the best general scholarly journal since Raritan. Well, okay, there’s Critical Inquiry, but let's not quibble. Common Knowledge has devoted the to the ‘second world:” Central and Eastern Europe. This is a world of drowned kingdoms – Austro-Hungary, the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, Bohemia, and the like. Even as they were drowning, certain writers – Joseph Roth, Robert Musil, Andrei Bely – caught a last, fantastic glimmer.
But we wanted to quickly go to the Galin Tihanov’s “Why Did Modern Literary Theory Originate in Central and Eastern Europe? (And Why Is It Now Dead?).” Cognescenti will know that we are according the highest praise when we say that Tihanov encyclopedic, smart essay reminds us of T.J. Clark. Tihanov doesn’t have Clark’s tactile ability – Clark’s ability to describe a painting so that you can track it with your eye, if your eye was endowed with super-intelligence (alas, as Duchamp pointed out, the eye is dumb). Tihanov isn't quite to that point yet, and he is too specialized, from what I have seen of his other work, but he does pose pertinent questions, and comes up with really interesting answers.
Since the title is a question, let’s cut to the chase. Here is the answer, two thirds of the way through the essay:
“A new form of conceptualization is the reliable, if often belated, sign of the arrival of a new regime of relevance, as whose product it eventually emerges. Thus despite the many, if subtle, links and shades between regimes of relevance in the twentieth century, we can say that literary theory emerged in Eastern and Central Europe in the interwar decades as one of the conceptual products of the transition from a regime of relevance [End Page 78] that recognizes literature for its role in social and political practice to a regime that values literature primarily for its qualities as an art. Literary theory, however, was only one such form of conceptualization, though probably the most representative and interesting: the regime of artistic relevance (as opposed to that of social and political relevance) had been in evidence, after all, since long before the seventy years during which literary theory flourished. This regime emerged in the last quarter of the eighteenth century as a response to the changing status of art in the bourgeois marketplace; it made its first important, but self-contradictory and not always consequential, moves in the work of the Romantics (hence the significant if often vague role of Romanticism in the work of modern literary theorists); it continued through the years of aestheticism and l'art pour l'art, down into the first decades after World War II, with the American New Criticism as its high point and death knell.”
A few explanations. By ‘regime of relevance,” Tihanov is referring to the set of assumptions, the tones, the examples, and the privileged references that constitute the unity of a certain discourse over a certain time within a certain social group It is a unity not of ideas, but of ways of considering ideas.
By literary theory, Tihanov is not talking about the endless stream of student papers finding symbolism in the Scarlet Letter. Even though those are the social detritus left over as literary theory mummifies. Tihanov’s idea is that literary theory constructed, as an object, literature; it endowed literature with the characteristic of autonomy within the social whole; it then explored literature with reference to that founding autonomy; and it used that autonomy to legitimate its analysis of the peculiar linguistic structures that populate literary texts.
As Tihanov sees it, that view of literature, and by implication that kind of literary theory, originated in the 2nd world – in Russia, parts of the Austro-Hungarian empire, Poland, etc. – between the first world war and the thirties. The great figures of this era – Jakobson, Lukacs, Ingarten, Mukarovsky, Bakhtin, Shklovsky – circulate, in Tihanov’s view, as innovators and connectors, condensing their own sometimes marginal experience – as exiles, for instance, or opponents of particular political orders – into the constitution of literary theory. Now, of course, anyone familiar with the English school, from I.A. Richards to Leavis, or familiar with the influence of Taine not only on a generation of French literary critics, but, in this country, on Edmund Wilson, might want to protest on the foreclosure of some of the main lines of literary theory’s history. And there is certainly a problem with including Lukacs in this group, and excluding Benjamin and Adorno. I would certainly revise Tihanov’s last sentence: “aestheticism and l'art pour l'art” did indeed continue, as the organizer of a regime of relevance, “down into the first decades after World War II, with the American New Criticism…” but surely Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory was its “high point and death knell.” In fact, Adorno writes in that book like a tolling bell, with the clapper of dialectic going back and forth until the bell cracks.
Adorno, unmentioned, seems to be the ghost of Hamlet’s father in this piece, moaning under the elaborate woodwork. As Tihanov surveys, rather gloomily, the end of the golden age, isn’t that the Cultural Industry I hear creaking in the background?
“A good example of this interpenetration and competition of regimes within the space of a single article is Jakobson's 1919 piece "The Tasks of Artistic Propaganda," where he uses Marxist parlance and arguments to champion a Formalist and futurist agenda. 51 The interaction of regimes of relevance also explains, to a degree at least, the attempts of the Formalists and the Prague Circle to participate in the struggle for the distribution of social and cultural capital in the new states. Perhaps needless to say, the regime of social and political relevance was eventually imposed by force at the expense of the regime of aesthetic relevance, and with devastating consequences for literary theory in Russia. Similarly, in the 1960s we can begin to discern the complex overlap of all three regimes that I have described: a lingering appreciation of literature on the basis of literariness; the eruptive sway of literature in social and political discussions at universities in Paris, Prague, and Berkeley; and finally, the withdrawal into private consumption of literature as a largely escapist medium in the face of increasingly mediated forms of communication and the enhanced commodification of leisure. Today, the regime of relevance validating literature as a source of experience and entertainment overlaps with the freshly transfigured regime of social and political relevance exemplified in the struggle for "representative" national and global canons. What we need especially to bear in mind while studying literature and literary culture is that, while quite different regimes of relevance coexist at any one time, one of them comes to the fore—whether manifestly or obliquely—as the leading component in the mix.”
The last sentence, in particular, seems to appeal to a necessity that I wouldn't grant. Under Tihanov's words is an image that comes from a distorted picture of evolution, in which there is a tree with a direction, and competition that creates one kind of every species in an environment. That, however, isn't true, as Stephen Jay Gould pointed out. To be jargonish, the rhizomatic moment occurs at the cultural juncture of TV and deconstruction. I would contend, actually, that the retreat to the internal exile of literature, in the face of TV, like some terrible Big Brother, getting into our speech, our pockets, our dreams, is a distinct regime that has rooted itself, weirdly enough, in the technology that has put TV in retreat – the technology that enables you to read this, gentle reader.
Don't count on hegemony. Tihanov needs to read the latest Nielsen ratings.
Still – a very thought provoking piece. Read it.
Wednesday, January 7, 2004
Note from LI
Well, we’ve been doing this for two and a half years. As our faithful readers know (LI has bitched often and loud enough that they ought to know), LI has been luxuriating in the character stiffening circumstances of the Bush recession, like a man falling downstairs on his ass who pretends it is a cheap form of chiropractery. Another tough month is upon us. As we were walking home with our groceries – you know, the Fosters and the salami – we figured, why not beg a little. No doubt, too, we’ve been influenced by a scarifying book that we are reviewing for the Austin Chronicle, The Working Poor, by David Shipler. It is a work of journalist ethnography concerning the forty to sixty million Americans who make enough money not to be considered poor, but too little money not to be considered credit risks. Shiplen went around, talking to these people. The authorial persona was sometimes condescending, but mostly pretty on top of things. For instance, he notices the way all Americans have seemingly acceded to the idea of the sacredness of businesses. He tells one of those humdrum horror stories about a woman whose 14 year old semi-retarded daughter unthinkingly confided that she was afraid when he Mom left for the late shift. Of course, her Mom has no options – there’s no welfare system that is going to support her – but the government, in the form of the principal of the school, felt bound to report abuse, or potential abuse, and so the state contemplated taking the child. The process involved consulting psychologists, driving the working mother almost crazy, and pushing for her to get another job – but nobody from this group called her factory to ask that she be put on the day shift. Nobody. I mean, one can’t interfere with the perfect working of the mysteries of capital, even as the state gets out its needle nosed pliers to pluck apart the innards of its poorest citizens.
And so it goes. The 40 hour a week, the 6.50 an hour divorcee clerk. The roofer supporting the three kids and the bedridden wife. Etc., etc.
So many anecdotes, and all of them went straight through the LI heart. The incorrigible unforesightedness of the working poor, the desire to fit in the system, to pay off debts, to be normal, to have the phone company not add that extra late fee, to have the cable and (criminal luxury!) dentistry – all of those virtues that lock you into poverty. All of the virtues whose systematic violation by the CEOs of even the most penny-ante of the Fortune 500 has become routine. An obsolescence that signals that the bourgeois ethical code is now, like something given away to Goodwill, yesterday’s fashion.
So that is what this post is about. Those of you who come here often enough, and like to come here (and from whom I haven’t already borrowed money that I can never pay back – that party can send me shaming emails) should consider sending us some of the ready as a sort of end of the year gift. And it isn’t tax deductible, either. We are talking 1 to 10 bucks --- nothing higher, and no pennies please – we detest pennies. They are always falling out of the LI pocket. We look around LI HQ, and there’s always some damn penny on the floor.
If you feel like it, then, here’s where you should send the lucre: Roger Gathman, 615 Upson, #203 Austin Texas 78703.
If you don’t feel like it, buy yourself a vodka martini on us.
Oh, and apologies to D. – he hates these kinds of posts. D. thinks I ought to have some sense of dignity.
And he’s known me, what, for twenty years?
Well, we’ve been doing this for two and a half years. As our faithful readers know (LI has bitched often and loud enough that they ought to know), LI has been luxuriating in the character stiffening circumstances of the Bush recession, like a man falling downstairs on his ass who pretends it is a cheap form of chiropractery. Another tough month is upon us. As we were walking home with our groceries – you know, the Fosters and the salami – we figured, why not beg a little. No doubt, too, we’ve been influenced by a scarifying book that we are reviewing for the Austin Chronicle, The Working Poor, by David Shipler. It is a work of journalist ethnography concerning the forty to sixty million Americans who make enough money not to be considered poor, but too little money not to be considered credit risks. Shiplen went around, talking to these people. The authorial persona was sometimes condescending, but mostly pretty on top of things. For instance, he notices the way all Americans have seemingly acceded to the idea of the sacredness of businesses. He tells one of those humdrum horror stories about a woman whose 14 year old semi-retarded daughter unthinkingly confided that she was afraid when he Mom left for the late shift. Of course, her Mom has no options – there’s no welfare system that is going to support her – but the government, in the form of the principal of the school, felt bound to report abuse, or potential abuse, and so the state contemplated taking the child. The process involved consulting psychologists, driving the working mother almost crazy, and pushing for her to get another job – but nobody from this group called her factory to ask that she be put on the day shift. Nobody. I mean, one can’t interfere with the perfect working of the mysteries of capital, even as the state gets out its needle nosed pliers to pluck apart the innards of its poorest citizens.
And so it goes. The 40 hour a week, the 6.50 an hour divorcee clerk. The roofer supporting the three kids and the bedridden wife. Etc., etc.
So many anecdotes, and all of them went straight through the LI heart. The incorrigible unforesightedness of the working poor, the desire to fit in the system, to pay off debts, to be normal, to have the phone company not add that extra late fee, to have the cable and (criminal luxury!) dentistry – all of those virtues that lock you into poverty. All of the virtues whose systematic violation by the CEOs of even the most penny-ante of the Fortune 500 has become routine. An obsolescence that signals that the bourgeois ethical code is now, like something given away to Goodwill, yesterday’s fashion.
So that is what this post is about. Those of you who come here often enough, and like to come here (and from whom I haven’t already borrowed money that I can never pay back – that party can send me shaming emails) should consider sending us some of the ready as a sort of end of the year gift. And it isn’t tax deductible, either. We are talking 1 to 10 bucks --- nothing higher, and no pennies please – we detest pennies. They are always falling out of the LI pocket. We look around LI HQ, and there’s always some damn penny on the floor.
If you feel like it, then, here’s where you should send the lucre: Roger Gathman, 615 Upson, #203 Austin Texas 78703.
If you don’t feel like it, buy yourself a vodka martini on us.
Oh, and apologies to D. – he hates these kinds of posts. D. thinks I ought to have some sense of dignity.
And he’s known me, what, for twenty years?
Bollettino
Smoking guns... aborting the dreams of a swindler
Well, the WP has finally tracked down the most terrible threat ever to be faced by the American Republic. Yes, I’m talking of the truly awesome WMD capacity nursed, like a snake nurses its kittens, by Saddam the Monster. They have a picture of the reason we went to war on their site, here.
Is it scary or what? One wonders if the paper got an ultra security clearance to publish these two extremely dangerous and war-worthy diagrams. Perhaps they can be waved in the air when our POTUS addresses Congress for the annual round-up.
In other Iraqi news today...
The WSJ is fronting an important story about Iraq’s oil industry, today. After extensively pondering how to get away with it, the U.S. is apparently backing away from privatizing Iraq’s oil.
“U.S. advisers and Iraqi oil officials, now studying how to organize Iraq's vast but dilapidated oil industry, are leaning heavily toward recommending the formation of a large state-run petroleum company. If adopted, the move could sharply curtail the role of international oil corporations for years.
'Officials of the U.S.-led occupation have been pushing liberalization in most parts of the Iraqi economy. But in the politically sensitive oil sector, occupation advisers say they strongly support establishing a state-owned company similar to those in neighboring Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.”
T
here are some interesting sub-themes about the swindler – Chalabi – the Pentagon’s point man in Iraq -- who has “championed a much firmer free-market line,” and will probably be unhappy at the thought of having this opportunity for his brand of corruption being taken out of his hands. Chalabi’s dream of being Iraq’s Mussolini has been rudely handled by reality since the fall of Baghdad. But who needs Mussolini when you have the Russian oligarchs? Obviously, the man’s licked his lips over that kind of money. His theft of some millions in Jordan pales by comparison.
“In an interview this fall, Mr. Chalabi chided U.S. occupation officials. "They won't act in any way to give the impression that they came to Iraq for oil," he said. "This is a correct policy, of course, but this delays us."
"Mr. Bahr al-Uloum, the interim oil minister, appears to share views similar to Mr. Chalabi's. The son of another prominent Governing Council member, Mr. Bahr al-Uloum is a New Mexico-educated petroleum engineer. He has aggressively courted foreign oil companies and publicly backed privatization of oil-related businesses such as refineries and pipelines. He also has recently purged a number of the senior oil technocrats who are counseling a more conservative approach.””
Chip Cummins, whose byline is on this piece, ends with some speculation as to the replacement of al-Uloum if the state run oil company idea goes through.
Well... this reminds us of our frequent reference to the combinations that are possible in Iraq. If you will remember, we pointed out that Bush's betting on privatization, democracy by appointment of the Americans, and thinning down the troops was improbable -- the improbability compounded by each conjunction. We will have to review the combinations pretty soon. So far, the Shi'ite response to Hussein's capture has been much less intense than we expected.
What's up with that?
Smoking guns... aborting the dreams of a swindler
Well, the WP has finally tracked down the most terrible threat ever to be faced by the American Republic. Yes, I’m talking of the truly awesome WMD capacity nursed, like a snake nurses its kittens, by Saddam the Monster. They have a picture of the reason we went to war on their site, here.
Is it scary or what? One wonders if the paper got an ultra security clearance to publish these two extremely dangerous and war-worthy diagrams. Perhaps they can be waved in the air when our POTUS addresses Congress for the annual round-up.
In other Iraqi news today...
The WSJ is fronting an important story about Iraq’s oil industry, today. After extensively pondering how to get away with it, the U.S. is apparently backing away from privatizing Iraq’s oil.
“U.S. advisers and Iraqi oil officials, now studying how to organize Iraq's vast but dilapidated oil industry, are leaning heavily toward recommending the formation of a large state-run petroleum company. If adopted, the move could sharply curtail the role of international oil corporations for years.
'Officials of the U.S.-led occupation have been pushing liberalization in most parts of the Iraqi economy. But in the politically sensitive oil sector, occupation advisers say they strongly support establishing a state-owned company similar to those in neighboring Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.”
T
here are some interesting sub-themes about the swindler – Chalabi – the Pentagon’s point man in Iraq -- who has “championed a much firmer free-market line,” and will probably be unhappy at the thought of having this opportunity for his brand of corruption being taken out of his hands. Chalabi’s dream of being Iraq’s Mussolini has been rudely handled by reality since the fall of Baghdad. But who needs Mussolini when you have the Russian oligarchs? Obviously, the man’s licked his lips over that kind of money. His theft of some millions in Jordan pales by comparison.
“In an interview this fall, Mr. Chalabi chided U.S. occupation officials. "They won't act in any way to give the impression that they came to Iraq for oil," he said. "This is a correct policy, of course, but this delays us."
"Mr. Bahr al-Uloum, the interim oil minister, appears to share views similar to Mr. Chalabi's. The son of another prominent Governing Council member, Mr. Bahr al-Uloum is a New Mexico-educated petroleum engineer. He has aggressively courted foreign oil companies and publicly backed privatization of oil-related businesses such as refineries and pipelines. He also has recently purged a number of the senior oil technocrats who are counseling a more conservative approach.””
Chip Cummins, whose byline is on this piece, ends with some speculation as to the replacement of al-Uloum if the state run oil company idea goes through.
Well... this reminds us of our frequent reference to the combinations that are possible in Iraq. If you will remember, we pointed out that Bush's betting on privatization, democracy by appointment of the Americans, and thinning down the troops was improbable -- the improbability compounded by each conjunction. We will have to review the combinations pretty soon. So far, the Shi'ite response to Hussein's capture has been much less intense than we expected.
What's up with that?
Tuesday, January 6, 2004
Bollettino
And in other Cambodian news…
When LI was a mere whisp of a lefty, we worked at a now defunct hardware chain store in the paint and crafts department as a clerk. It was a good time for LI. We were moonily enamored of the woman who ran the department – a small, fierce, and (unfortunately for our heart) married woman, D. D. was a little Nubian queen, or thought she was; she was in continuous flirtatious battle with the assistant manager of the place, Henry. We were also going to college then. While the thought of attending a class is enough to makes us ill, now, then we were in the magic undergraduate continuum – everything in class connected with everything in life. It was like being an astronaut and discovering, after landing on a dark planet, a whole other civilization outside the capsule door.
It was around that time that Jesus fell out of our life, and Marx fell into it. We had the zeal of a convert when it came to politics. So we left political materials around in the lunch area, hoping … well, that some of the crew would be turned on to the theory of surplus value. Barring that, at least we could make people aware of the criminal American policy as it had been ruthlessly pursued in Southeast Asia. The latter was somewhat successful. I remember one of the crew asked me whether, as a communist, I had ever been beaten up. With the unspoken assumption being that it might be a good idea for someone to do the beating. Martyrdom! we treasured that remark.
One of the books LI put out was Sideshow, William Shawcross’s indictment of the Nixon/Kissinger war in Cambodia. That is still an eyeopening book. That the U.S. countenanced the wholesale, blind bombing of a country is still mindboggling. When we hear the likes of Hitchens condemning the criminal acts of the Iraqi guerrillas, we think about the fact that he is now pals with a set of people who were implicated in the much more extensive mass murder wrought by random carpet bombing, and we think: wow. It really isn’t worth it, gaining a pittance of notoriety in return for his soul. But who are we to understand these exchanges?
Which is why it was especially distressing, this year, that William Shawcross came out in virulent defense of Pax Americana. The New Statesman’s Jason Cowley, last month, wrote an article about the man that crawled in on little cat’s feet, and then inserted jaguar claws in the jugular. Shawcross has become a heavy defender of the Bush Pax idea. Worse, he is now proposing (oh say it isn’t so!) to write the biography of the Queen Mother for a cool million. This, from the man who quit the London Times when he found out that the editor was ghostwriting Henry Kissinger’s stuff.
According to the article, Shawcross, who is the son of one of the Nuremburg prosecutors, was a pretty glamorous item back in the late sixties.
“From the beginning Shawcross, who in 1971 married the writer Marina Warner, was interested in US power and the role and influence of that power in the world. He was a liberal internationalist; he wanted the United Nations to be strong so that it could act as a check and balance to US power, and to spread human rights and democracy. As a reporter, he witnessed the catastrophe in Vietnam, he understood how south-east Asia had the potential to become a laboratory for world destruction, and he wrote from Cambodia during the rise of the Khmer Rouge. He particularly despised the cynicism of Henry Kissinger. Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon and the destruction of Cambodia (1979), in which he highlighted the secret US bombing of Cambodia, is a fierce indictment of both Richard Nixon and Kissinger, whom he blamed for the American invasion of peaceful, agrarian Cambodia, the removal of Prince Sihanouk and, later, the murderous excesses of the Khmer Rouge. 'Cambodia was not a mistake,' he wrote. 'It was a crime.'
Page remembers how Shawcross became disaffected from the Sunday Times when the then editor, Harry Evans, agreed to edit Kissinger's memoirs. 'Kissinger is subliterate and William, like many others, thought that Harry, who is a good writer, was wrong to lend a war criminal like Kissinger such grace.'
Ah, the days of vivid, cartoon like enemies! Nixon was such a gift, in a way, to the band of leftist cultural critics – half journalist, half polemicist – and his withering away took away their great subject.
The article is mainly concerned with Shawcross’ conversion. The use of religious terminology doesn’t really seem quite right, here. Shawcross is simply growing more comfortable with his money, his position, and his self interest – a self interest that, carefully cultivated, lands you in deals for official biographies. Which is pure cream, since the point is to flatter the wealthy, not sell the damn things. For selling, go to the unofficial biographers – the Kitty Kellys. The official biographies are coffee table books that have all the bland tedium of coffee tables.
While contemplating the vastness of the Queen Mother’s intellect and her imprint on our time, Shawcross has apparently found the time to write another book, this one a rip roaring defense of the War in Iraq and a charge against its enemies – Saddam, Chirac, and the whole damn pack. The vituperation comes from years on the left – which is all the left leaves a writer like Shawcross, or Hitchens. This is much different from what it used to leave the conservative convert. In an earlier generation, the James Burnhams gained, from their years with Marx, a sense of method, a sense for the whole. The new lefts James Burnhams are pretty much at sea when it comes to method – underneath it all, they are led by their feelings. Feelings are very much a product of the environment – especially when the environment gets more and more upscale.
However, to be fair – it would be easy to feel like getting rid of Saddam H. would be a good thing. In fact, in the 90s, LI felt this strongly. We felt it strongly enough that we felt like the neo-cons were partially right – the U.S. had a moral obligation to help rid Iraq of the man. That obligation emerged from the Kuwait war, and from the regime of sanctions. It entailed supporting revolution in Iraq, no question. And no question, nobody was going to really support revolution in Iraq – the regime of scoundrels that the U.S. tried to implant after the fall of Baghdad was evidence enough of that. Our opposition to the war in Iraq was to this particular war, at this particular time -- not to the idea.
All of which means that we can appreciate how someone like Shawcross could be for a war to take Saddam H. down. However, Shawcross isn’t simply for taking someone like Saddam down – he is for establishing a U.S. empire. The Iraq War turned out to be a peculiar ideological transit point for ex lefties to get on the bus. It is a pretty good bus too -- the Murdochian bus, the Fox News bus, the Washington Post bus. And so they are off…
Our favorite graf in Cowley’s article is about Shawcross’ current circs:
“The home of the Shawcross family, an Elizabethan mansion called Friston Place, is at East Dean in East Sussex. It is there, with his third wife, the society heiress Olga Polizzi (of the Forte dynasty), that Shawcross regularly entertains Christopher Hitchens, John le Carre, assorted Saatchis, Richard Perle, the restaurateur Oliver Peyton, Tory grandees and other right-wing establishment figures. 'I remember going to Friston for a lunch party old Hartley was hosting for Margaret Thatcher,' says his friend and Sussex neighbour, the writer and academic Robert Skidelsky. 'Thatcher was on her way to Glyndebourne, and I remember that every time she wanted to make a point, she stamped her foot on the ground. And every time she stamped her foot, she unwittingly pressed a bell under the table, which sent the servants rushing into the room. William was there that day, and he is very good in that kind of company, because he's so charming. But I don't think he's serious in his work about the things I'm serious about, especially the search for truth . . . You begin by rebelling against pomp and power and end up by identifying with them.'
Maggie the mad and her stamping foot – what a great story! Really, it takes us back to the movie, The Ruling Class -- which, it turns out was not a black comedy, but a straightforward documentary about how the denizens of this ecological niche live. Pickled in their own preposterousness, how can you not love the wealthy and their bootlickers? They make for such rich anecdotes.
A final comment, then, which is a bit too revisionist about Shawcross for our taste, but still captures what happened to the guy:
“Others are less generous. 'Shawcross is a vintage product of the Eton/Oxford/Foreign Office elite,' says John Pilger. 'His coming hagiography on the Queen Mother is entirely understandable, as is his hagiography of Rupert Murdoch, whose rapacious power he admires. He was once thought by some to be a progressive, which was useful social currency then; we now understand better the kind of liberalism that wears a mask for great power.'”
And in other Cambodian news…
When LI was a mere whisp of a lefty, we worked at a now defunct hardware chain store in the paint and crafts department as a clerk. It was a good time for LI. We were moonily enamored of the woman who ran the department – a small, fierce, and (unfortunately for our heart) married woman, D. D. was a little Nubian queen, or thought she was; she was in continuous flirtatious battle with the assistant manager of the place, Henry. We were also going to college then. While the thought of attending a class is enough to makes us ill, now, then we were in the magic undergraduate continuum – everything in class connected with everything in life. It was like being an astronaut and discovering, after landing on a dark planet, a whole other civilization outside the capsule door.
It was around that time that Jesus fell out of our life, and Marx fell into it. We had the zeal of a convert when it came to politics. So we left political materials around in the lunch area, hoping … well, that some of the crew would be turned on to the theory of surplus value. Barring that, at least we could make people aware of the criminal American policy as it had been ruthlessly pursued in Southeast Asia. The latter was somewhat successful. I remember one of the crew asked me whether, as a communist, I had ever been beaten up. With the unspoken assumption being that it might be a good idea for someone to do the beating. Martyrdom! we treasured that remark.
One of the books LI put out was Sideshow, William Shawcross’s indictment of the Nixon/Kissinger war in Cambodia. That is still an eyeopening book. That the U.S. countenanced the wholesale, blind bombing of a country is still mindboggling. When we hear the likes of Hitchens condemning the criminal acts of the Iraqi guerrillas, we think about the fact that he is now pals with a set of people who were implicated in the much more extensive mass murder wrought by random carpet bombing, and we think: wow. It really isn’t worth it, gaining a pittance of notoriety in return for his soul. But who are we to understand these exchanges?
Which is why it was especially distressing, this year, that William Shawcross came out in virulent defense of Pax Americana. The New Statesman’s Jason Cowley, last month, wrote an article about the man that crawled in on little cat’s feet, and then inserted jaguar claws in the jugular. Shawcross has become a heavy defender of the Bush Pax idea. Worse, he is now proposing (oh say it isn’t so!) to write the biography of the Queen Mother for a cool million. This, from the man who quit the London Times when he found out that the editor was ghostwriting Henry Kissinger’s stuff.
According to the article, Shawcross, who is the son of one of the Nuremburg prosecutors, was a pretty glamorous item back in the late sixties.
“From the beginning Shawcross, who in 1971 married the writer Marina Warner, was interested in US power and the role and influence of that power in the world. He was a liberal internationalist; he wanted the United Nations to be strong so that it could act as a check and balance to US power, and to spread human rights and democracy. As a reporter, he witnessed the catastrophe in Vietnam, he understood how south-east Asia had the potential to become a laboratory for world destruction, and he wrote from Cambodia during the rise of the Khmer Rouge. He particularly despised the cynicism of Henry Kissinger. Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon and the destruction of Cambodia (1979), in which he highlighted the secret US bombing of Cambodia, is a fierce indictment of both Richard Nixon and Kissinger, whom he blamed for the American invasion of peaceful, agrarian Cambodia, the removal of Prince Sihanouk and, later, the murderous excesses of the Khmer Rouge. 'Cambodia was not a mistake,' he wrote. 'It was a crime.'
Page remembers how Shawcross became disaffected from the Sunday Times when the then editor, Harry Evans, agreed to edit Kissinger's memoirs. 'Kissinger is subliterate and William, like many others, thought that Harry, who is a good writer, was wrong to lend a war criminal like Kissinger such grace.'
Ah, the days of vivid, cartoon like enemies! Nixon was such a gift, in a way, to the band of leftist cultural critics – half journalist, half polemicist – and his withering away took away their great subject.
The article is mainly concerned with Shawcross’ conversion. The use of religious terminology doesn’t really seem quite right, here. Shawcross is simply growing more comfortable with his money, his position, and his self interest – a self interest that, carefully cultivated, lands you in deals for official biographies. Which is pure cream, since the point is to flatter the wealthy, not sell the damn things. For selling, go to the unofficial biographers – the Kitty Kellys. The official biographies are coffee table books that have all the bland tedium of coffee tables.
While contemplating the vastness of the Queen Mother’s intellect and her imprint on our time, Shawcross has apparently found the time to write another book, this one a rip roaring defense of the War in Iraq and a charge against its enemies – Saddam, Chirac, and the whole damn pack. The vituperation comes from years on the left – which is all the left leaves a writer like Shawcross, or Hitchens. This is much different from what it used to leave the conservative convert. In an earlier generation, the James Burnhams gained, from their years with Marx, a sense of method, a sense for the whole. The new lefts James Burnhams are pretty much at sea when it comes to method – underneath it all, they are led by their feelings. Feelings are very much a product of the environment – especially when the environment gets more and more upscale.
However, to be fair – it would be easy to feel like getting rid of Saddam H. would be a good thing. In fact, in the 90s, LI felt this strongly. We felt it strongly enough that we felt like the neo-cons were partially right – the U.S. had a moral obligation to help rid Iraq of the man. That obligation emerged from the Kuwait war, and from the regime of sanctions. It entailed supporting revolution in Iraq, no question. And no question, nobody was going to really support revolution in Iraq – the regime of scoundrels that the U.S. tried to implant after the fall of Baghdad was evidence enough of that. Our opposition to the war in Iraq was to this particular war, at this particular time -- not to the idea.
All of which means that we can appreciate how someone like Shawcross could be for a war to take Saddam H. down. However, Shawcross isn’t simply for taking someone like Saddam down – he is for establishing a U.S. empire. The Iraq War turned out to be a peculiar ideological transit point for ex lefties to get on the bus. It is a pretty good bus too -- the Murdochian bus, the Fox News bus, the Washington Post bus. And so they are off…
Our favorite graf in Cowley’s article is about Shawcross’ current circs:
“The home of the Shawcross family, an Elizabethan mansion called Friston Place, is at East Dean in East Sussex. It is there, with his third wife, the society heiress Olga Polizzi (of the Forte dynasty), that Shawcross regularly entertains Christopher Hitchens, John le Carre, assorted Saatchis, Richard Perle, the restaurateur Oliver Peyton, Tory grandees and other right-wing establishment figures. 'I remember going to Friston for a lunch party old Hartley was hosting for Margaret Thatcher,' says his friend and Sussex neighbour, the writer and academic Robert Skidelsky. 'Thatcher was on her way to Glyndebourne, and I remember that every time she wanted to make a point, she stamped her foot on the ground. And every time she stamped her foot, she unwittingly pressed a bell under the table, which sent the servants rushing into the room. William was there that day, and he is very good in that kind of company, because he's so charming. But I don't think he's serious in his work about the things I'm serious about, especially the search for truth . . . You begin by rebelling against pomp and power and end up by identifying with them.'
Maggie the mad and her stamping foot – what a great story! Really, it takes us back to the movie, The Ruling Class -- which, it turns out was not a black comedy, but a straightforward documentary about how the denizens of this ecological niche live. Pickled in their own preposterousness, how can you not love the wealthy and their bootlickers? They make for such rich anecdotes.
A final comment, then, which is a bit too revisionist about Shawcross for our taste, but still captures what happened to the guy:
“Others are less generous. 'Shawcross is a vintage product of the Eton/Oxford/Foreign Office elite,' says John Pilger. 'His coming hagiography on the Queen Mother is entirely understandable, as is his hagiography of Rupert Murdoch, whose rapacious power he admires. He was once thought by some to be a progressive, which was useful social currency then; we now understand better the kind of liberalism that wears a mask for great power.'”
Sunday, January 4, 2004
Bollettino
The new year begins, and one resolves to read the pile of academic journals that have accumulated under the socks and wine bottles in the corner. Yes, I know, faithful LI readers – where to start? Slavic Studies? The Psychoanalytic Journal of Society and Culture? American Studies?
Well, we recommend that you fling off the footware and testimony of bibulous nights from your winter copy of Journal of Religion, for there’s an article about one of those obscure figures we have all read and not read – the sad fate, that self-annullation, of the translator. The translator in question is James Legge. Anyone who has read any of the “Oriental Classics,” picked up an anthology of Confucian texts, or pondered the Tao Te Ching in a cheap and older paperback has read Legge. He was one of the indefatiguable Victorian era translators, like Max Muller. Yet what do we know about the man?
An article by D.E. Mungello entitled A Confucian voice crying in the Victorian wilderness *. Norman J. Girardot, The Victorian Translation of China: James Legge's Oriental Pilgrimage renders a portrait through a review of the recent book by Legge’s defender, Girardot.
What does Legge need to be defended from? Mungello puts the two sides of Legge’s unscholarly reputation pretty well:
“For a century after his death in 1897, Legge remained to most people an obscure Victorian anachronism. He was criticized from several sides. On the one hand, fellow Christian missionaries attacked him for his claim that the Chinese had recognized God in their ancient texts. They were appalled by his willingness to translate the ancient term Shangdi (Lord Above) as "God," which most of them regarded as blasphemous. They were even more appalled when he removed his shoes at the Altar of Heaven in Beijing in 1873 because he felt he was on "holy ground" (p. 87). On the other hand, professional sinologists criticized him for reading too much religious significance into Confucian and Daoist texts, which they preferred to interpret in more agnostic and secular terms. While Legge's translations were regarded as significant achievements, he was regarded essentially as a translator, without substantive intellectual breadth or depth. Those negative judgements diminished Legge's reputation for a century after his death. Now they have been revised in a carefully researched work by Norman J. Girardot. This revised assessment is not just about Legge, but even more about a fundamental reassessment of the importance of religion in Chinese philosophical teachings, particularly Confucianism and Daoism.”
Legge’s problem is, in a microcosm, the problem of the Victorian age – one in which the dominant intellectual current was a seemingly incompatible mixture of positivism and religion.
Legge was raised in a pious Scottish household – one of those where, as Legge puts it, "the voice of Moses was allowed ... too often to overpower the voice of Christ.” This, of course, is a typical Victorian dichotomy – a way of transforming Christ into a sentimental figure out of Dickens, good with children and stern about industrial accidents, but otherwise comfortable taking tea with Gladstone.
Legge became a missionary, and he developed a fascination with China. Alas, according to Girardot, “He was a good Latinist but lacked a musical ear, and this frustrated his desire "to speak and write as a Chinaman" (p. 34). Consequently, the master translator of ancient Chinese texts never mastered the tonal variations in the various Chinese colloquial dialects and could speak in only halting fashion with contemporary Chinese.” Legge was the opposite of a swashbuckling translator like Burton, of Arabian Nights fame, who viewed the mastery of languages as a sort of athletic achievement, with himself the decathlon champ. Nevertheless, Legge hied for Hong Kong soon after the British stole it. His first wife was made of too thin a material to endure the Far East, and like many a Victorian colonizer, Legge was soon left a widow. However, on a trip back to Britain he found himself a more durable mate. Apparently, as the minister of the Union Church, Legge advanced in Hong Kong society.
Legge wasn’t, however, the most successful of missionaries. Girardot tells the story of three Chinese boys that Legge took back to England with him as exhibits of the work of the English Christ in the Far East. They were seen by the queen, but on their return to Hong Kong, they quietly departed from Christian doctrine, and one of them even became a crook.
Legge’s translations would never have had the circulation they have had without Max Muller. The grafs about Muller are, to LI, fascinating. We have always enjoyed the dark brown volumes of the Sacred Books of the East. LI’s first acquaintance with Buddhism and Daoism was made when we were knee high to a post-structuralist, in the Decatur, Georgia public library. We stumbled across some of those volumes, checked them out, and found them absolutely puzzling. They were heavy with notes and Chinese writing. Every once in a while something like Biblical grandeur would glimmer out of a sentence or two. But obviously, we were in a very different world than the one projected by the Clarkston Georgia Baptist Church. At the same time, uhbeknownst to us, hippies around the world were getting turned on to the I Ching, which Legge translated -- although his translation was soon supplanted. Still, it must have puzzled his ghost.
Here are the grafs about Muller:
“One of the more fascinating subtopics of Girardot's work is his treatment of Legge's professional association with Max Muller (1823-1900), whose Sacred Books of the East Series (1879-1910) established the academic discipline of comparative religion. This was an age characterized by massive literary projects. The Sacred Books of the East project was one of several large team efforts of scholarship (including Benjamin Jowett's multivolume edition of the Greek classics and the Oxford English Dictionary) involving the Oxford University Press. Several large commercial publishing projects had been undertaken at that time, including the Encyclopedia Britannica and Leslie Stephen's Dictionary of National Biography, which appeared in sixty-three volumes in the years 1885-1900. But whereas these more commercial projects were very profitable, the Oxford University Press projects were published with great uncertainty about whether they would recoup publication costs. Hence, it was essential that a project like the Sacred Books of the East had a prominent scholar like Muller who could convince the press that the noble motive of advancing learning justified the financial risk. The series eventually produced fifty volumes in the years 1878-1910, and Legge's contributions were among the most significant. Moreover, the series generated a small profit for the press.
Girardot is fascinated by the contrasting lives of Muller and Legge. Whereas Legge was the quiet, misunderstood, and underrated missionary-scholar who lived an austere life, Muller was one of the academic stars of his age, constantly in the limelight and a welt-connected "prolific academic entrepreneur" (p. 2). Friedrich Maximilian Muller was born in Dessau the son of a German poet, published a work on Sanskrit fables at the precocious age of twenty-one, studied at Paris, and arrived in England in 1846 to edit Sanskrit manuscripts preserved in London and at the Bodleian Library in Oxford. Unlike Legge, Muller cultivated an active social life in England, mixing with literary figures, meeting politicians, and visiting Buckingham Palace. He married the socially prominent Georgina Grenfell.”
If, like LI, you find this kind of information inexplicably fascinating, read the article.
PS: For a truly bizarre view of Girardot's book, go to this First Things review. The victorian world view is not as superannuated as one would like to think. Alas.
The new year begins, and one resolves to read the pile of academic journals that have accumulated under the socks and wine bottles in the corner. Yes, I know, faithful LI readers – where to start? Slavic Studies? The Psychoanalytic Journal of Society and Culture? American Studies?
Well, we recommend that you fling off the footware and testimony of bibulous nights from your winter copy of Journal of Religion, for there’s an article about one of those obscure figures we have all read and not read – the sad fate, that self-annullation, of the translator. The translator in question is James Legge. Anyone who has read any of the “Oriental Classics,” picked up an anthology of Confucian texts, or pondered the Tao Te Ching in a cheap and older paperback has read Legge. He was one of the indefatiguable Victorian era translators, like Max Muller. Yet what do we know about the man?
An article by D.E. Mungello entitled A Confucian voice crying in the Victorian wilderness *. Norman J. Girardot, The Victorian Translation of China: James Legge's Oriental Pilgrimage renders a portrait through a review of the recent book by Legge’s defender, Girardot.
What does Legge need to be defended from? Mungello puts the two sides of Legge’s unscholarly reputation pretty well:
“For a century after his death in 1897, Legge remained to most people an obscure Victorian anachronism. He was criticized from several sides. On the one hand, fellow Christian missionaries attacked him for his claim that the Chinese had recognized God in their ancient texts. They were appalled by his willingness to translate the ancient term Shangdi (Lord Above) as "God," which most of them regarded as blasphemous. They were even more appalled when he removed his shoes at the Altar of Heaven in Beijing in 1873 because he felt he was on "holy ground" (p. 87). On the other hand, professional sinologists criticized him for reading too much religious significance into Confucian and Daoist texts, which they preferred to interpret in more agnostic and secular terms. While Legge's translations were regarded as significant achievements, he was regarded essentially as a translator, without substantive intellectual breadth or depth. Those negative judgements diminished Legge's reputation for a century after his death. Now they have been revised in a carefully researched work by Norman J. Girardot. This revised assessment is not just about Legge, but even more about a fundamental reassessment of the importance of religion in Chinese philosophical teachings, particularly Confucianism and Daoism.”
Legge’s problem is, in a microcosm, the problem of the Victorian age – one in which the dominant intellectual current was a seemingly incompatible mixture of positivism and religion.
Legge was raised in a pious Scottish household – one of those where, as Legge puts it, "the voice of Moses was allowed ... too often to overpower the voice of Christ.” This, of course, is a typical Victorian dichotomy – a way of transforming Christ into a sentimental figure out of Dickens, good with children and stern about industrial accidents, but otherwise comfortable taking tea with Gladstone.
Legge became a missionary, and he developed a fascination with China. Alas, according to Girardot, “He was a good Latinist but lacked a musical ear, and this frustrated his desire "to speak and write as a Chinaman" (p. 34). Consequently, the master translator of ancient Chinese texts never mastered the tonal variations in the various Chinese colloquial dialects and could speak in only halting fashion with contemporary Chinese.” Legge was the opposite of a swashbuckling translator like Burton, of Arabian Nights fame, who viewed the mastery of languages as a sort of athletic achievement, with himself the decathlon champ. Nevertheless, Legge hied for Hong Kong soon after the British stole it. His first wife was made of too thin a material to endure the Far East, and like many a Victorian colonizer, Legge was soon left a widow. However, on a trip back to Britain he found himself a more durable mate. Apparently, as the minister of the Union Church, Legge advanced in Hong Kong society.
Legge wasn’t, however, the most successful of missionaries. Girardot tells the story of three Chinese boys that Legge took back to England with him as exhibits of the work of the English Christ in the Far East. They were seen by the queen, but on their return to Hong Kong, they quietly departed from Christian doctrine, and one of them even became a crook.
Legge’s translations would never have had the circulation they have had without Max Muller. The grafs about Muller are, to LI, fascinating. We have always enjoyed the dark brown volumes of the Sacred Books of the East. LI’s first acquaintance with Buddhism and Daoism was made when we were knee high to a post-structuralist, in the Decatur, Georgia public library. We stumbled across some of those volumes, checked them out, and found them absolutely puzzling. They were heavy with notes and Chinese writing. Every once in a while something like Biblical grandeur would glimmer out of a sentence or two. But obviously, we were in a very different world than the one projected by the Clarkston Georgia Baptist Church. At the same time, uhbeknownst to us, hippies around the world were getting turned on to the I Ching, which Legge translated -- although his translation was soon supplanted. Still, it must have puzzled his ghost.
Here are the grafs about Muller:
“One of the more fascinating subtopics of Girardot's work is his treatment of Legge's professional association with Max Muller (1823-1900), whose Sacred Books of the East Series (1879-1910) established the academic discipline of comparative religion. This was an age characterized by massive literary projects. The Sacred Books of the East project was one of several large team efforts of scholarship (including Benjamin Jowett's multivolume edition of the Greek classics and the Oxford English Dictionary) involving the Oxford University Press. Several large commercial publishing projects had been undertaken at that time, including the Encyclopedia Britannica and Leslie Stephen's Dictionary of National Biography, which appeared in sixty-three volumes in the years 1885-1900. But whereas these more commercial projects were very profitable, the Oxford University Press projects were published with great uncertainty about whether they would recoup publication costs. Hence, it was essential that a project like the Sacred Books of the East had a prominent scholar like Muller who could convince the press that the noble motive of advancing learning justified the financial risk. The series eventually produced fifty volumes in the years 1878-1910, and Legge's contributions were among the most significant. Moreover, the series generated a small profit for the press.
Girardot is fascinated by the contrasting lives of Muller and Legge. Whereas Legge was the quiet, misunderstood, and underrated missionary-scholar who lived an austere life, Muller was one of the academic stars of his age, constantly in the limelight and a welt-connected "prolific academic entrepreneur" (p. 2). Friedrich Maximilian Muller was born in Dessau the son of a German poet, published a work on Sanskrit fables at the precocious age of twenty-one, studied at Paris, and arrived in England in 1846 to edit Sanskrit manuscripts preserved in London and at the Bodleian Library in Oxford. Unlike Legge, Muller cultivated an active social life in England, mixing with literary figures, meeting politicians, and visiting Buckingham Palace. He married the socially prominent Georgina Grenfell.”
If, like LI, you find this kind of information inexplicably fascinating, read the article.
PS: For a truly bizarre view of Girardot's book, go to this First Things review. The victorian world view is not as superannuated as one would like to think. Alas.
Friday, January 2, 2004
Notes
Readers of LI are urged to check out my friend H.’s new weblog, the Brooding Persian. If there was a truth-in-weblogging titles act, H. would be going by the letter of the law – he is a brooder among brooders, the Leonardo da Vinci of brooding. The first entries have a lot of nice impressions of life in Teheran, the city H. recently returned to – the American action movie, shown on late night tv, that preserves every shotgun blast and censors the shapely gams of an ice skater in a short skirt, the pharmacist who comes up with some wildly inventive geopolitical excuses for not having what H. wants on his shelves. Etc. Of course, right now, H. is all about the earthquake in Bam.
Check it out, here.
Readers of LI are urged to check out my friend H.’s new weblog, the Brooding Persian. If there was a truth-in-weblogging titles act, H. would be going by the letter of the law – he is a brooder among brooders, the Leonardo da Vinci of brooding. The first entries have a lot of nice impressions of life in Teheran, the city H. recently returned to – the American action movie, shown on late night tv, that preserves every shotgun blast and censors the shapely gams of an ice skater in a short skirt, the pharmacist who comes up with some wildly inventive geopolitical excuses for not having what H. wants on his shelves. Etc. Of course, right now, H. is all about the earthquake in Bam.
Check it out, here.
Thursday, January 1, 2004
Bollettino
In the past four posts, we have mentioned the Washington Post editorial obsessively. Even to ourselves, LI is beginning to sound like the Spike Jones imitation of Peter Lorre. We return to it one more time, simply to underline another aspect that this editorial, carrying water for a disreputable agency, passes over in silence: the question of what to do about justices who collude in grossly unethical behavior before they become justices. The three men implicated in the verdict in Houston are:
Stanley Sporkin, retired, Federal Court, Washington, D.C.
D. Lowell Jensen, U.S. district judge, San Francisco
Stephen Trott, associate justice, ninth circuit.
Who are these vigilantes posing as officials of the U.S. government? A little research turns up three ripe bios. In the last year, the Dems blocked a few of Bush’s appointees, and that became a big deal, at least for the GOP. But if you look at the bios of the people who are already on the court, another question comes to mind: why doesn’t the Congress block more justices? Maybe all of them?
Start with Jensen. He came to D.C. as part of Meese’s “Alameda mafia” back in the 80s. He’d made a name for himself in California by prosecuting, in the sixties, various black radicals and student radicals. Everything about him seems like a caricature out of Philip Dick, or Thomas Pynchon. A user of informers, a breaker of dissent, a regular Politburo type of guy, plus a nice burnish of racism on the side. We were particularly interested in the case that gave him his start. It was the case of the Port Chicago mutiny. We’d never heard of it before we started delving into Jensen’s background. Interesting and symptomatic bit of American history. An explosion occurred at Port Chicago navy base in California that killed 300 some people in 1944. Most of the haulers and handlers for these ships were black. Being black, the soldiers weren’t expected to object to returning to an obviously dangerous situation in which safety precautions were not put in place on any scale to meet the obvious material dangers of the work. The site devoted to the incident explains:
“The black ammunition handlers, many of whom had quietly voiced concerns about safety, feared loading ammunition again. Fifty enlisted black men, including one with a broken arm, were tried for mutiny. The men stated they were willing to follow orders, but were afraid to handle ammunition under unchanged circumstances. They stated they had never been ordered to load ammunition, only asked "if they wanted to load ammunition."
All 50 were found guilty of "mutiny," and sentenced to 15 years. Review of the sentence brought reductions for 40 of the men to sentences of 8 to 12 years. Joe Small, who acted at foreman for his group of loaders and others who were willing to criticize the operation had their original sentence upheld. An appeal by Thurgood Marshall of the NAACP was denied. In 1944 the Navy announced that blacks at ammunition depots would be limited to 30% of the total. In 1945 the Navy officially desegregated.
In January 1946 the 50 "mutineers" were released from prison, but had to remain in the Navy. They were sent to the South Pacific in small groups for a "probationary period," and gradually released.”
Jensen’s beginnings prefigure his whole illustrious career. It is reminiscent of the way Gloucester’s hump prefigures the death of the little princes in the tower in Richard III. Enough of that klutz.
Sporkin is a more interesting and important character. Moreover, he’s a D.C. character. He was William Casey’s associate on the SEC in the seventies. When Reagan appointed Casey head of the CIA, he brought Sporkin with him. Much was made in the papers, at the time, about Sporkin’s supposed liberal and Democratic leanings. Being a liberal and a Democrat has never gotten in the way of obstructing justice in the service of some obscurely nasty anti-communist plan that the Pentagon or the CIA or the Executive office wants performed, something in which innocents in a foreign land will die, and D.C. clubmen, later, will chuckle. Sporkin was just right for the job. He became a 5th district judge in 1985, which was excellent timing. Because in 1986 the first indications of Iran-Contra came out. And Sporkin was intimately involved with all players in that scandal.
There’s a site devoted to Iran-Contra on which is assembled a sheaf of newspaper stories from the Post at the time, all concerned with Sporkin’s actions. During the Iran-Contra hearings, he was questioned about a document he backdated authorizing the illegal Iran end of the operation, and his answer tells us a lot about Sporkin’s view of the legal process. This is from a Mary McGrorey column in the WP..
“The committee lawyer who questioned him, Tim Woodcock, pointed out that the Hughes-Ryan law, which even spies are supposed to observe, calls for presidential approval of a covert action before it actually occurs.
Sporkin, who spoke in the loudest voice yet heard in the hearing room, obviously thought that the counsel was being picky and just a little bit unrealistic: `Well, I think it is important, obviously, in the perfect world. . . . to have the president authorize it, everything, in writing beforehand.'
But he didn't `flyspeck' it, and he retroactively authorized the third shipment, which had occurred within hours of his decision on the finding.
Sen. William S. Cohen (R-Maine) said that he had backdated the ratification of something that occurred without a presidential finding.
Said Sporkin, showing the cavalier spirit that informed the North-Casey orbit: `You can't straitjacket the president. . . . Someone can go out and do it, and later on you can do the paperwork.' Strains of Fawn Hall's seminal declaration that `sometimes you have to go above the written law.' “
Indeed. LI sees, in Sporkin’s actions and defenses of those actions, a startling similarity to the production of the fraudulent affadavit in Wilson’s trial. Is Sporkin a serial misleader?
It should be noted -- Wilson's habitual collaborators, and the people who prosecuted Wilson, all seemed to get drawn in, later, to the Iran-Contra Scandal. Jensen, too, was involved in that affair.
Our third villain provides the comic relief. All rise for the right Dishonorable Stephen Trott.
Trott has a background that cannot be introduced, at a lawyer's smoker, without some reference to his role as a sixties folksinger with Highwaymen. They had a modest hit. That is the extent of Trott's qualification for being a judge, actually. That and the kind of intellectual capacity he recently revealed in a speech to the Commonwealth Club in San Fran. The speech is a doozy, offering Trott’s ideas on torture:
“It's for these obvious reasons that we've asked our law enforcement and intelligence operations to focus more on the prevention of crimes that have not yet happened rather than on just solving the ones that have. One's instincts for survival would be in question if we did not endorse this preventative approach. But as is always the question, especially in a nation governed by the rule of law, is, How do we do it? And the second question is, To what extent, and for how long, do we have to recalibrate our notion of our civil liberties?”
“Suppose you are the head of the FBI and your chief special agent reports that he has intercepted a terrorist over the telephone talking to another terrorist in Washington, D.C., and the person you have just arrested has ordered the detonation of a dirty nuclear bomb in our nation's capital. Your chief agent tells you the problem is we don't know who this person we have arrested was talking to or where that person is. We don't know where the bomb is; all we know is that it's going to go off within 24 hours. Your agent tells you that there is an exception to the Miranda rule for circumstances like this, and you don't have to tell this terrorist before you talk to him that he has the right to remain silent or to consult with an attorney. He asks for permission to torture the terrorist until the terrorist tells you who the bomber is and where this nuclear weapon is. Do you tell your chief agent to prevent the extinction of Washington, D.C.? Or do you remember what the Supreme Court said in Rochin v. California, that any method that shocks the conscience violates due process and cannot be used in law enforcement? This is a hypothetical, but it takes on a certain air of reality after September 11, 2001.
Interestingly, Alan Dershowitz, the great civil libertarian, has suggested not only that torture in a ticking-bomb case would be constitutionally appropriate, but that we should also authorize federal judges where appropriate to entertain applications for torture warrants. Dershowitz believes that the FBI shouldn't make the decision by itself; it should go to a federal judge and apply for official permission to torture the terrorist to find out where the bomb is. He says, "An application for a torture warrant would have to be based on an absolute need to obtain immediate information in order to save lives, coupled with probable cause that the suspect had such information and is unwilling to reveal it. The suspect would be given immunity from prosecution based on information elicited by the torturer. The warrant would limit the torture to non-lethal means such as sterile needles stuck under his fingernails, inserted to cause excruciating pain without endangering life." Some people think this sounds wacky. If you were the head of the FBI, it might not sound wacky to you in a worst-case scenario.”
And so on. The sterile needles bit is good. Trott, remember, is actually a federal judge. As for the recalibration of our civil liberties -- well, they made the experiment in the trial of Edwin Wilson. Let us hope that the papers pick up on this obvious trail -- but let's not hope too much. The newspapers have been helpfully recalibrating our civil liberties for years. They've perfected the right not to know.
In the past four posts, we have mentioned the Washington Post editorial obsessively. Even to ourselves, LI is beginning to sound like the Spike Jones imitation of Peter Lorre. We return to it one more time, simply to underline another aspect that this editorial, carrying water for a disreputable agency, passes over in silence: the question of what to do about justices who collude in grossly unethical behavior before they become justices. The three men implicated in the verdict in Houston are:
Stanley Sporkin, retired, Federal Court, Washington, D.C.
D. Lowell Jensen, U.S. district judge, San Francisco
Stephen Trott, associate justice, ninth circuit.
Who are these vigilantes posing as officials of the U.S. government? A little research turns up three ripe bios. In the last year, the Dems blocked a few of Bush’s appointees, and that became a big deal, at least for the GOP. But if you look at the bios of the people who are already on the court, another question comes to mind: why doesn’t the Congress block more justices? Maybe all of them?
Start with Jensen. He came to D.C. as part of Meese’s “Alameda mafia” back in the 80s. He’d made a name for himself in California by prosecuting, in the sixties, various black radicals and student radicals. Everything about him seems like a caricature out of Philip Dick, or Thomas Pynchon. A user of informers, a breaker of dissent, a regular Politburo type of guy, plus a nice burnish of racism on the side. We were particularly interested in the case that gave him his start. It was the case of the Port Chicago mutiny. We’d never heard of it before we started delving into Jensen’s background. Interesting and symptomatic bit of American history. An explosion occurred at Port Chicago navy base in California that killed 300 some people in 1944. Most of the haulers and handlers for these ships were black. Being black, the soldiers weren’t expected to object to returning to an obviously dangerous situation in which safety precautions were not put in place on any scale to meet the obvious material dangers of the work. The site devoted to the incident explains:
“The black ammunition handlers, many of whom had quietly voiced concerns about safety, feared loading ammunition again. Fifty enlisted black men, including one with a broken arm, were tried for mutiny. The men stated they were willing to follow orders, but were afraid to handle ammunition under unchanged circumstances. They stated they had never been ordered to load ammunition, only asked "if they wanted to load ammunition."
All 50 were found guilty of "mutiny," and sentenced to 15 years. Review of the sentence brought reductions for 40 of the men to sentences of 8 to 12 years. Joe Small, who acted at foreman for his group of loaders and others who were willing to criticize the operation had their original sentence upheld. An appeal by Thurgood Marshall of the NAACP was denied. In 1944 the Navy announced that blacks at ammunition depots would be limited to 30% of the total. In 1945 the Navy officially desegregated.
In January 1946 the 50 "mutineers" were released from prison, but had to remain in the Navy. They were sent to the South Pacific in small groups for a "probationary period," and gradually released.”
Jensen’s beginnings prefigure his whole illustrious career. It is reminiscent of the way Gloucester’s hump prefigures the death of the little princes in the tower in Richard III. Enough of that klutz.
Sporkin is a more interesting and important character. Moreover, he’s a D.C. character. He was William Casey’s associate on the SEC in the seventies. When Reagan appointed Casey head of the CIA, he brought Sporkin with him. Much was made in the papers, at the time, about Sporkin’s supposed liberal and Democratic leanings. Being a liberal and a Democrat has never gotten in the way of obstructing justice in the service of some obscurely nasty anti-communist plan that the Pentagon or the CIA or the Executive office wants performed, something in which innocents in a foreign land will die, and D.C. clubmen, later, will chuckle. Sporkin was just right for the job. He became a 5th district judge in 1985, which was excellent timing. Because in 1986 the first indications of Iran-Contra came out. And Sporkin was intimately involved with all players in that scandal.
There’s a site devoted to Iran-Contra on which is assembled a sheaf of newspaper stories from the Post at the time, all concerned with Sporkin’s actions. During the Iran-Contra hearings, he was questioned about a document he backdated authorizing the illegal Iran end of the operation, and his answer tells us a lot about Sporkin’s view of the legal process. This is from a Mary McGrorey column in the WP..
“The committee lawyer who questioned him, Tim Woodcock, pointed out that the Hughes-Ryan law, which even spies are supposed to observe, calls for presidential approval of a covert action before it actually occurs.
Sporkin, who spoke in the loudest voice yet heard in the hearing room, obviously thought that the counsel was being picky and just a little bit unrealistic: `Well, I think it is important, obviously, in the perfect world. . . . to have the president authorize it, everything, in writing beforehand.'
But he didn't `flyspeck' it, and he retroactively authorized the third shipment, which had occurred within hours of his decision on the finding.
Sen. William S. Cohen (R-Maine) said that he had backdated the ratification of something that occurred without a presidential finding.
Said Sporkin, showing the cavalier spirit that informed the North-Casey orbit: `You can't straitjacket the president. . . . Someone can go out and do it, and later on you can do the paperwork.' Strains of Fawn Hall's seminal declaration that `sometimes you have to go above the written law.' “
Indeed. LI sees, in Sporkin’s actions and defenses of those actions, a startling similarity to the production of the fraudulent affadavit in Wilson’s trial. Is Sporkin a serial misleader?
It should be noted -- Wilson's habitual collaborators, and the people who prosecuted Wilson, all seemed to get drawn in, later, to the Iran-Contra Scandal. Jensen, too, was involved in that affair.
Our third villain provides the comic relief. All rise for the right Dishonorable Stephen Trott.
Trott has a background that cannot be introduced, at a lawyer's smoker, without some reference to his role as a sixties folksinger with Highwaymen. They had a modest hit. That is the extent of Trott's qualification for being a judge, actually. That and the kind of intellectual capacity he recently revealed in a speech to the Commonwealth Club in San Fran. The speech is a doozy, offering Trott’s ideas on torture:
“It's for these obvious reasons that we've asked our law enforcement and intelligence operations to focus more on the prevention of crimes that have not yet happened rather than on just solving the ones that have. One's instincts for survival would be in question if we did not endorse this preventative approach. But as is always the question, especially in a nation governed by the rule of law, is, How do we do it? And the second question is, To what extent, and for how long, do we have to recalibrate our notion of our civil liberties?”
“Suppose you are the head of the FBI and your chief special agent reports that he has intercepted a terrorist over the telephone talking to another terrorist in Washington, D.C., and the person you have just arrested has ordered the detonation of a dirty nuclear bomb in our nation's capital. Your chief agent tells you the problem is we don't know who this person we have arrested was talking to or where that person is. We don't know where the bomb is; all we know is that it's going to go off within 24 hours. Your agent tells you that there is an exception to the Miranda rule for circumstances like this, and you don't have to tell this terrorist before you talk to him that he has the right to remain silent or to consult with an attorney. He asks for permission to torture the terrorist until the terrorist tells you who the bomber is and where this nuclear weapon is. Do you tell your chief agent to prevent the extinction of Washington, D.C.? Or do you remember what the Supreme Court said in Rochin v. California, that any method that shocks the conscience violates due process and cannot be used in law enforcement? This is a hypothetical, but it takes on a certain air of reality after September 11, 2001.
Interestingly, Alan Dershowitz, the great civil libertarian, has suggested not only that torture in a ticking-bomb case would be constitutionally appropriate, but that we should also authorize federal judges where appropriate to entertain applications for torture warrants. Dershowitz believes that the FBI shouldn't make the decision by itself; it should go to a federal judge and apply for official permission to torture the terrorist to find out where the bomb is. He says, "An application for a torture warrant would have to be based on an absolute need to obtain immediate information in order to save lives, coupled with probable cause that the suspect had such information and is unwilling to reveal it. The suspect would be given immunity from prosecution based on information elicited by the torturer. The warrant would limit the torture to non-lethal means such as sterile needles stuck under his fingernails, inserted to cause excruciating pain without endangering life." Some people think this sounds wacky. If you were the head of the FBI, it might not sound wacky to you in a worst-case scenario.”
And so on. The sterile needles bit is good. Trott, remember, is actually a federal judge. As for the recalibration of our civil liberties -- well, they made the experiment in the trial of Edwin Wilson. Let us hope that the papers pick up on this obvious trail -- but let's not hope too much. The newspapers have been helpfully recalibrating our civil liberties for years. They've perfected the right not to know.
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