Bollettino



Edith Wharton was twenty five when she and her husband dined out for the first time with Henry James. Wharton recalled her idea of impressing James: “to put on my newest Doucet dress and look my prettiest.” For a lot of critics, this says it all: Wharton is James in a Doucet dress. Wharton herself, who started in the decade after meeting James, was immediately dubbed as his imitator, which must have justly irritated her. Besides which, in the time she was closest to him, around 1905 to 1910, she was not at all an admirer of what she considered the balderdash indirections of his late style.



LI is not at all an admirer of Edith Wharton. Or even, I should say, a detractor. There are certain American writers to whom I feel I owe a debt of reading. Willa Cather, John O’Hara, and Edith Wharton are among my ghostly creditors – even though the debt they would have paid back poses a very Derridian question – is there a debt of reading that is paid by reading? But I will hold off on that for another day. My debt to Wharton has now been at least partially paid. I’ve read The Reef . I say partial payment because I have an idea that this novel is not, like The Age of Innocence or The House of Mirth, Wharton’s most characteristic piece. Those who know Wharton best, at least, make that claim.



According to Millicent Bell’s tremendously intelligent essay tracing the influences, such as they were, of James upon Wharton, The Reef was the novel in which Wharton finally got it – that is, got what she could get from James, apart from the theme of international rich folk. In Bell’s nice phrase, Wharton replaces the “chaotic compound of points of view” characteristic of her earlier work with “the elaborate working out on all sides of a central situation.” Which means that she carefully plots her incidences and the way they are articulated according to some strong anchoring p.o.v. – the perspectives, in fact, of two characters, George Darrow and Anna Leath. Bell compares the construction, here, to the Golden Bowl: “in neither novel is there a crowd of minor characters to give a sense of social density, a Balzacian perspective of milieu such as James had once aimed for.” But The Reef, according to Bell, was as far as Wharton would take her late Jamesianism. In the novels that came after, she “returned to a form that was more natural to her.” The lesson in perspective, which is the lesson of the master, can now be used to advance Wharton’s own sense of the more crowded, more Balzacian world, as you can use a flashlight to advance in a dark cave.



Perhaps this is why I found The Reef so compulsively readable – I’m a sucker for the late James. I am using Bell’s essay as my critical anchor instead of Anita Brookner’s intro to the Penguin I’m reading, because Brookner’s essay is so ineffably stupid. It is the worst of introductory essays – it is not only stupid in itself, but an invitation to stupidity on the part of the reader. Brookner’s idea is that the modern reader will simply be irritated by Anna Leath’s scruples, since the modern reader has long ago cut all the Gordian knots of sexual ethics. This is not only incredibly smug, with the small world smugness of the upper class British liberal, it isn’t even likely. In 2004, it is very likely that a woman who discovers that the man she is about to marry has slept with the woman her stepson is about to marry would tend towards a lot of mental casuistry. It is as if Brookner prefaced an edition of Oedipus Rex by remarking that, nowadays, Oedipus would simply have been cured by a therapist, or a bracing spell on an electroshock bed. Such thinning down of the text, such formal stupidity, clears the ground for Brookner to give us her soap opera-ish perspective on the book – we don’t like Anna Leath for being a worrier, or George Darrow for being controlling, or Sophy Viner for being a whiner – and hey, who should play them in the Masterpiece Theater version?



However, I have come to praise Edith Wharton, not to bury Anita Brookner. Or rather, to point out a certain thrilling Nietzschian thread in the book.



The drama of the last part of The Reef is all in the way in which Anna Leath alternately accepts and rejects her belief that George Darrow was involved in some kind of intrigue with her daughter’s governess (and fiancé of her stepson), Sophie Viner . The movement between acceptance and recoil is not just about the sexual core of Darrow’s relationship with Viner, but it hangs within the deeper current of her gradually gathering perception that she could only truly know the meaning of that relationship by having led a different kind of life, one in which both the abject and sublime nuances of sex and feeling were available to her as experiences, rather than as the mere content of the rules of social decorum. Ironically, Darrow offers her the chance to have just that experience, and in offering her that chance, illuminates just the poverty of her experience up to this moment. She realizes, through Darrow, how solitary she has really been – even though she has been married, and had a child. As Anna conceives it, her solitude consists in an abnormal chastity of experience. She feels a cumulative want of contact. As she gains a deeper sense of the fact that Darrow’s offer comes only with her acknowledgment, for good and bad, of Darrow’s own sexual experience, she conceives her choice as one that thrusts its options upon her as between pardoning Darrow and remaining loyal to her own total past.



To make this point, Wharton uses a really interesting reference to classical culture.



Here is Anna, confronting George in Paris:



“For she was aware, in her own bosom, of sensations so separate from her romantic thoughts of him that she saw her body and soul divided against themselves. She recalled having read somewhere that in ancient Rome the slaves were not allowed to wear a distinctive dress lest they should recognize each other and learn their numbers and their power. So, in herself, she discerned for the first time instincts and desires, which, mute and unmarked, had gone to and fro in the dim passages of her mind, and now hailed each other with a cry of mutiny.”



Wharton reinforces this metaphor a few pages on, after Anna is embraced by George:



“He came nearer, and looked at her, and she went to him. All

her fears seemed to fall from her as he held her. It was a

different feeling from any she had known before: confused

and turbid, as if secret shames and rancours stirred in it,

yet richer, deeper, more enslaving.”



Wharton does some interesting things with Anna, who starts out as a rather insipid widow in a French chateau. The dialectically resplendent image of slaves dressed as freeman whose freedom would depend on recognizing each other as slaves corresponds to Anna’s odd liberation. It is a liberation into a world that isn’t free, a world in which the slaves wear slave costumes and signal to each other with abandon. And it is also a world in which feeling slips away from confidence in feeling. That’s an interior shift that Anna cannot, in the end, quite endure. We wondered, reading these paragraphs, if Wharton had ever read Melville; and in particular, Benito Cereno.



It is always good to keep in mind that Nietzsche, who wrote about slaves, never met any. But any American writer who wanted to could meet them, at least before the Civil War, and could meet ex slaves after the Civil War. For an American, there was no distance between the slave and master relationship and his own history. Slavery was in our blood, and the blood of slaves was in our money. And let's not forget either -- as I did, the first time I wrote this paragraph -- that the American writer could have even been a slave.



Anna’s classical metaphor echoes a bit earlier in the book, too. The book begins with the long episode of George Darrow’s trip to Paris with Sophy Viner. He knows Viner, only vaguely, from the house of a (from all accounts) rather bohemian hostess, for whom she worked as a factotum. Sophy Viner is pretty; she is tough; she wants to be an actress, a desire that in itself marks her, in Darrow’s mind, as “artistic” – i.e. loose. But it is Darrow who seduces her, who holds her in Paris longer than she can even afford to stay there; it is Darrow who takes her to plays. One of the plays is Oedipe. Viner’s reaction to it is premonitory of the role that she will play in Anna and Darrow’s narrative. Darrow is bored with the piece. The couple go out to walk in the intermission, and he expresses his boredom. Sophy, however, can’t believe he isn’t enthralled, and gives him her reason for being enthralled:



“As if the gods were there all the while, just behind them, pulling the strings?" Her hands

were pressed against the railing, her face shining and

darkening under the wing-beats of successive impressions.



Darrow smiled in enjoyment of her pleasure. After all, he

had felt all that, long ago; perhaps it was his own fault,

rather than that of the actors, that the poetry of the play

seemed to have evaporated...But no, he had been right in

judging the performance to be dull and stale: it was simply

his companion's inexperience, her lack of occasions to

compare and estimate, that made her think it brilliant.



"I was afraid you were bored and wanted to come away."



"BORED?" She made a little aggrieved grimace. "You mean

you thought me too ignorant and stupid to appreciate it?"



"No; not that." The hand nearest him still lay on the

railing of the balcony, and he covered it for a moment with

his. As he did so he saw the colour rise and tremble in her

cheek.



"Tell me just what you think," he said, bending his head a

little, and only half-aware of his words.



She did not turn her face to his, but began to talk rapidly,

trying to convey something of what she felt. But she was

evidently unused to analyzing her aesthetic emotions, and

the tumultuous rush of the drama seemed to have left her in

a state of panting wonder, as though it had been a storm or

some other natural cataclysm. She had no literary or

historic associations to which to attach her impressions:

her education had evidently not comprised a course in Greek

literature. But she felt what would probably have been

unperceived by many a young lady who had taken a first in

classics: the ineluctable fatality of the tale, the dread

sway in it of the same mysterious "luck" which pulled the

threads of her own small destiny. It was not literature to

her, it was fact: as actual, as near by, as what was

happening to her at the moment and what the next hour held

in store.



We love the way Wharton has set this up. We love the way she comes at us with this pre-emptive notion of luck, since of course her whole plot turns upon a piece of bad luck, a coincidence. And we love the way that destiny, in a slave society, becomes luck, in a free one. And how the atavistic yearning for the rituals of the slave society colonizes our passions, exists in the perpetual underground of the unconscious.

Bollettino



I wrote yesterday’s post after a fatiguing day sawing down and piling up cedar trees on a ranch – have to earn money any way I can. In any case, the fatigue showed.



Today, I read a quote from some interview with Mel Gibson, who was, indirectly, the subject of my last post. In the interview, Gibson took issue with those people who “blame the Church for the Holocaust.” He had a name for these people: secular Jews.



Unfortunately, in the effort to be evenhanded, and in the even greater effort to be non-controversial, the American media discusses the issue of the Catholic church’s rich Anti-Jewish history with caution. To give you a taste of what “radical” Catholic opinion was like back in the day, go to this site about the Croatian Ustashi. The Ustashi was the Croatian equivalent of the Nazi party. Its roots were clerical, its intellectuals taught at Catholic Universities, and when it came time to build the concentration camps, its priests were right there, blessing the mass slaughter of the Jews and the Serbs.



Here’s a typical excerpt from the Catholic press at that time:





"Up to the birth of Christ, Jewish atavism proved its sinful inclinations toward knavery, its lack of gratitude to God, its ruthless selfishness, its disobedience toward the heads of the state, its anarchism, its love of profit-making through the accumulation of worldly goods by means of corruption, bloodthirstiness, despotism, lasciviousness and homosexuality, incorrigible stubbornness and haughtiness ... Having realized all this, we dare to conclude that the Jews have always been destructive regardless of whether they governed themselves or were governed by others. The Jews will never change, because according to the laws of psychology their national soul cannot change for the better as long as the human race continues to exist."



I didn’t see the interview with Gibson, but it would have been nice if the interviewer was educated enough to ask revealing questions. My guess is that there was no mention, in the interview, of the Jasenovac Concentration Camp. It was here that the dirty spirit of one hundred fifty years of Catholic invective against the Jews finally came to fruition. A Franciscan, Miroslav Filipovic, was put in charge of the camp. The rules were a bit different than what one would expect from a follower of St. Francis of Assisi. Filopivic later claimed, in a probable understatement, that he’d ordered the killing of about 40,000 people at the camp. If you are in the mood for it, here’s the testimony of one of the survivors of the camp. Much has been made of the fifteen minutes of whipping time in Gibson’s film. Compare it to the tender mercies of Father Devil, as he was known:



Fra Filipovic's] voice had an almost feminine quality which was in contrast with his physical stature and the coarseness of his face... I was hardly seated, and as I sank into my sad thoughts, I heard the orders "Fall in - Fall in!"

...Old Ilija, an Ustasha, appeared in the threshold of the hut, a revolver in one hand and in the other, a lash... Before us passed six men, their hands tied before their backs with chains. The Ustashi had their revolvers loaded and aimed. Fra Sotona walked over and approached our group.

"Where is our new doctor?" I knew he meant me.

"He is here," someone replied. He came a little nearer, looking at me with an insolent, ironic, bizarre manner.

"Come here, doctor," he said, "to the front row, so that you will be able to see our surgery being performed without anesthetic. All our patients are quite satisfied. No sighs, nor groans can be heard. Over there are the head and neck specialists, and we have need of no more than two instruments for our operations."

And Fra Sotona caressed his revolver with one hand and his knife with the other ... Looking at these victims who, in a few moments would be in another world, fear written on each face, no one could penetrate the depth of their moral abyss. They silently watched the gathering crowd of more pitiful people, more condemned people like themselves.

Fra Filipovic approached a group of them. Two shots rang out, two victims collapsed, who began to twitch with pain, blood surging from their heads intermingling with the brain of one or the eyes of the other.

'Finish off the rest!' cried Filipovic to the executioner as he put his revolver away. “



Secular Jews make such fusses about such things, being, well, secular, and Jews, and all. Unsightly.



Perhaps, you will say, this is just some peculiarity of Croat Catholicism. Surely the Vatican eventually responded. This is true. They responded after the war. At the highest levels, they systematically smuggled Catholic war criminals out of Europe, so they could escape imprisonment by the Allies. Many of them went to Argentina. The effect was delayed, but the years of the Dirty War showed that packing these people off on the rat lines did make a difference.



Looking elsewhere, we find another state run by a Clerical Nazi Party – the Slovak Republic. Here, a Father Tiso became head of state, supported of course directly by the Nazi party. Catholic historians, who look around for evidence that the Vatican opposed the mass killing of the Jews, often cite the letters sent from the Vatican to Tiso about the deportation of Slovak Jews to the death camps. Indeed, this happened in 1944, and there is a nice, comprehensive account at the Catholic Information Network site . The Holy See protested the deportation of Slovak Jews from a labor camp at Sered to Bergen Belsen. This protest was seconded by Father Tiso.



But before we bestow the ADL man of the year award to Father Tiso, it is necessary to see what other action was taken by his government in relation to Slovak Jews.

- in 1939, on the accession of Father Tiso’s party to power in Slovakia, Jews were forbidden from certain professions.

- In 1940, with the cooperation of Eichman, who advised the Tiso administration, Jews were singled out for the yellow star. They were also committed to labor camps. Expropriation of the wealth of the Jewish Slovak community commenced.



You will not find the Holy See intervening to protest these measures.

The truth is, the Holy See never embraced and actively opposed, most of the time, the exterminationist agenda. The pre World War II Church was, indeed, anti-Jew (a word I prefer to the milky anti-Semitic), but wanted that prejudice embodied in certain cultural and legal restrictions on Jews, not in such things as labor camps or yellow stars. Given that the church’s agenda was to hold onto this prejudice, but to fight the de-humanization and murder of Jews, the Vatican did battle, by its own lights, with the Nazis. The fascisms of Tiso and the Ustashi were of a virulence that was not mainstream. The more decorous notions of order promoted by Catholic thinkers like Eliot are probably closer to the Catholic norm, with their complaint about the modernizing, atheistical strain in society that can be laid at the feet of the Jew.

There. If I was going to place Mel Gibson on the anti-Jew meter, he isn’t even close to Father Tiso. He is, however, typical of the American form of bigotry, which is more about blackballing from clubs, and jokes about Jews with the right listeners. And of course there’s his Dad, who is further in the direction of Father Tiso. These bigots can be recognized by the bristly defensiveness that emerges when they are called about their bigotry. There isn’t, really, any mystery here.



Oh, but before I finish this post with my oh so sophisticated dismissal of Gibson’s anti-Jewism, let me link to this account of a more disgusting and dangerous variant. It isn’t as if Father Tiso’s spirit is dead.



We especially liked the response of the current Slovak charge d’affairs regarding the laws restricting Jews in the professions. This is ur-Gibsonism:



“While he acknowledges that there was anti-Semitism in Slovakia during the wartime period, he argues that some of the first laws targeting Jews, specifically the ones restricting the number of Jewish lawyers and doctors, were not altogether anti-Semitic.

"I'm saying that particular one was not solely anti-Semitic," he says. "I think that one was based on the social justice of trying to get other people into those professions over and above the one minority.’”

Bollettino



I was out drinking with some friends the other day when the topic of Mel Gibson’s Jesus film came up. Now, I had experienced for myself Gibson’s dim religious wattage in the forgettable Signs, and from what I’d read about the Gibson movie, beyond the anti-jewish bits, it looked to me like the clunkiest Hollywood realism – which consists of an almost fetishistic appreciation of the artifacts peculiar to a historical epoch or situation, vitiated by the emplacement of the most physically unlikely specimen of California health -- the blond, dazzlingly toothed actor or actress -- in the midst of it. There was an article in the NYT about what Jesus looked like, a little froth on the Gibson publicity circuit, and the man who wrote it, who was mounting his own meticulously detailed Jesus bio-pic, was adamant that he must be a wiry peasant, about 5’3” – no Hollywood charmer.



Well, we wonder about the 5’3” – although we do concede the point that a man who wanders on foot the length and breadth of Judea is probably going to be wiry. It is hard to think of a man as fat as, say, Nero, as a messiah. For one thing, he was no pedestrian. Jesus was a pedestrian – how is that for a bumper sticker?



Anyway, my drinking friends were all going out to see the movie. One of them was interested to hear that I did not consider Jesus to be the son of God, and she remarked that she couldn’t imagine living without God. To which I made some conciliatory remarks about how I consider God to be what we are made of, and what everything else is made of. A goofy enough theology to get by when you don’t want to be pressed on the point. Another of my friends told about seeing a special about the movie – everybody seems to have seen a special about the movie – that showed how they manufactured a crucifixion, complete with a nail entering a hand. Hmm. My impulse was to say, how awful – the crucifixion as F/X shocks even me. But then I thought that this was par for the course as far as my reactions are concerned – only someone for whom religion is a matter of beautiful pictures and poetry would be discomforted by such tackiness. Tackiness, as Flannery O’Connor knew, was no bar to religious ecstasy.



For those interested in the portrayal of Christ, there’s an essay on the birth of the paradigmatic connection between image, power, and religion in this season’s American Journal of Philology, written by a Francis James. It is entitled Living Icons: Tracing a motif in verbal and visual representation from the second to the fourth centuries C.E. It is James’ contention that images – as in portraits, descriptions of persons with an emphasis on their visual aspect, instead of a stereotypical reference to the fact that they had a visual aspect – comes into textual play in these centuries. Not coincidentally, they come into play in terms of lives of holy men and Byzantine emperors. And they not only come into play, but they refer to their own quality of visualizing by making reference to painted or sculpted images. So an emperor, like Constantius, can be described entering into a town in triumph by referring to the way he looks like a painted image, and the way he looks like a painted image is referred to, consciously, by the way he is stiff, the way he glances with dignity at the crowds, etc., etc.



Here’s a graf from the article:



Thus it appears that it was the writers of the Second Sophistic who

specifically developed ekphrasis as a description of works of art, and in

so doing they explored and exploited the relation between word and

image for their own literary purposes. The author of the Philostratean

Imagines, arguably the most powerful work of ekphrasis in antiquity,

presents a tour of an entire gallery—possibly real, possibly imaginary12—

signaling a new departure in which viewer and object enter into a complex

reciprocally assimilating relationship. In Imagines the reader becomes

the viewer in the gallery. Preoccupied with “looking” at the pictures

and the learned interpretations of the docent character, the reader is

absorbed into the text and forgets that he or she is a reader. The acts of

reading and viewing are compounded, their boundaries blurred.13 Similarly,

and also from the late second or early third century C.E., Longus’s

novel Daphnis and Chloe purports to be an immense ekphrasis.14 The

distinction and conotation of verbal and visual representation was being

deliberately and artistically pursued at the very cutting edge of Roman

imperial high culture.



Indeed, the face is, as Deleuze puts it in Mille Plateaux, a social machine.



In an odd way, living without TV has cut me off from this machinery in its most frenzied historical phase. I am dying outside history, getting my images filtered through the constraints on the bandwidth of my computer. They are all, essentially, fuzzy. This is probably a good thing.

Bollettino



PS – we urge readers to peruse this James Surowiecki article about Big Pharma, and then compare it to the LI criticism of a former Surowiecki piece on big pharma. We reproduce our piece, all the way back from 2001, here. Has Surowiecki been sneaking glances at our humble blog? The suggestion that he makes – that smaller R&D firms represent the coming wave of research, while the Pharma dinosaurs should either learn to market efficiently or die in their own stupors, is exactly the point we were making about the way monopoly has practically driven efficiency out of the big Pharma culture. Here’s our humble little piece:



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



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



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



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

6:54 PM

Bollettino



LI is finishing up the 13th chapter of our novel – hurray! And so, at such a solemn moment, we’ve been contemplating the spirit of comedy. Yes, we know there are giants’ footsteps, here, and we tread, comparatively, with a munchkin’s size 7. Still, when you are working on a fictional, comic account of an attempted rape, you think, why am I trying to make this funny, as well as, why is this, or not, funny?



When in need of help, I always go to an expert. Or so I’ve been instructed by the Reader’s Digest and the Poison warning label on insecticide cans. So I decided to look up the current research on comedy. This took me, bien sûr, to recent issues of Humor: the international journal of research in humor. I am just catching up with the 2002 issues. As the readers of HIJRH are well aware, literary comedy is not where your average humor researcher majorly focuses, especially when there are all those holes in the correspondence between threatening facial expressions of chimpanzees (barring teeth) and ritualistic smiling ceremonies of the Ainu. Or the like. I reluctantly scrolled through articles that would instruct me, with statistics, about the compatibility or incompatibility of husbands and wives reflected in a humor metric, and an article about the function of jokes in a medical context, to give my undivided attention to Salvatore Attardo’s reading of Wilde’s texts in Humorous Texts: a Semantic and Pragmatic Analysis. Or, at least, the cheat sheet, Christie Davies’ fine review. Any man who is willing to go mano a mano with Oscar, as Jr. Bush said to his Dad one humid Georgetown night, is all right with us. Davies begins his review by summing up Attardo’s achievement:



Perhaps the most significant innovation to be found in Attardo’s work

is the introduction of the idea of the ‘jab line’, and his use of it to discuss

texts in terms of particular con.gurations of jab and punch lines. In a

joke, an entity that must end with an uproarious punch line in which

the unexpected is suddenly revealed, the humorous jab lines thrown out

en route to the punch line are of secondary interest but in a longer

narrative it is essential to consider both the nature of each jab and the

pattern and sequence of jabs that make up the humorous text. Attardo

applies his method to a number of well-known humorous texts including

Voltaire’s Candide, Thomas Love Peacock’s Nightmare Abbey and Lord

Arthur Saville’s Crime by Oscar Wilde in an innovative and illuminating

way.



It turns out that he not only applies his method, but uses it to quantify. Quantifying the density of the jab lines in Oscar Wilde is a perversity that even Wilde never dreamed of – but seriously, ladies and germs, we are interested io the ways and wherefores of this mapping of laughs. As we had already learned from the sociobi articles in the HIJSH, the evolutionary theory of laughter right now couples it to tickling. And tickling is something like jabbing. So we had a vague sense that we were being carried smoothly down the currents of the finest scholarship. Here is Davies to elucidate:



“Let us take for example a line from Wilde’s description

of the people attending Lady Windermere’s reception in which ‘‘a perfect

bevy of bishops kept following a stout prima donna from room to room’’.

Attardo notes the humorous script oppositions of bishops/prima donna,

normal/abnormal, shows that they are in proximity and that the bishops

are being targeted and wonders whether there are further jabs here based

on alliteration and whether in addition stout is opposed to beautiful. Yet

to this reviewer the humorous thrust of the passage appears quite different

with the key opposition being between spiritual and carnal. The

bishops are in a bevy a collective term more usually applied to birds or

animals than to clergymen (who are not beauties either) and are in keen

sexual pursuit of the prima donna whom they follow eagerly from room

to room presumably in the hope that there will be an episcopal score.

The stout prima donna far from being a stereotypically fat and repulsive

opera singer is for them buxom and zaftig, a Junoesque beauty with all

the allure of the stage. What did the bishops say to the actress? Yet if

Salvatore Attardo and I see different jabs in different places and interpret

the jabs differently, how is the problem of the observer to be resolved?”



Indeed, Davies’s question does intrude, rather, the bothersome subjective. The image of these bishops, with their Episcopal skirts, one presumes, flying about, following a prima donna of a certain rotund and orotund quality – dare one dare the sexual proclivities on display, here? -- seems, to us, indicative of some dysfunction at the heart of the world. Nietzsche asked if there were any scientific truths that could only be apprehended through laughter – a profound question. Perhaps the whole evolution of sex is one. In Darwinian terms, could there be a more severe failure in the signals of sexual ornamentation that, presumably, play in the background of every animal pursuit?



Attardo, at least, is happy with his own analysis; not least because, given the distribution of jab lines, he can then plot their density. There’s a small glitch here – as Davies points out, the thinning of jab lines in the text corresponds to his sense of where the text is funniest, when one might expect a thickening of jab lines. Surely there is a Zen koan lurking here about clapping at a jab line with one hand or something. Like someone who thinks the funniest jokes are those that nobody laughs at, Davies is obviously a party pooper.



But I share Davies sense of humor, which is why I am such an unsuccessful player on the world stage.



Anyway, this got me thinking that I’d like to share one of Thurber’s letters to E.B. White. It concerns E.M Foster’s Abinger Harvest. Thurber particularly liked the essay on Howard Overing Sturges, a minor belle-lettrist now best known for being Henry James’ friend. Thurber writes:



Writes Foster, in all seriousness: Stugis… wrote to please his friends, and deterred by his failure to do so he gave up the practice of literature and devoted himself instead to embroidery, of which he had always been fond.’ It’s a way out, all right.



Then, further on: “I once went to Sturgis’ house myself – years ago… My host led me up to the fireplace, to show me a finished specimen of his embroidery. Unluckily there were two fabrics near the fireplace, and my eye hesitated for an instant between them. There was a demi-semi-quaver of a pause. Then graciously did he indicate which his embroidery was, and then did I see that the rival fabric was a cloth kettle-holder, which could only have been mistaken for embroidery by a lout. Simultaneously I received the impression that my novels contained me rather than I them. He was very kind and courteous, but we did not meet again.’”



Now, in my opinion, Thurber underestimates Foster, whose whole oeuvre is devoted to undermining seriousness and the deathly pall it casts on life. On the other hand, notice how Thurber reading Foster creates the Thurber in Foster -- the embroidery surely would fit not only fit into a Thurber story, but existed, perhaps, only to be put, later, into a Thurber story. At least, that is what Mallarme would have said, if he'd been born in Columbus Ohio, too. But we have to ask, how would our inestimable Professor Attardo explain Foster’s letter? Who let the jab lines in?

Bollettino



After the first few months of WWI, according to Niall Ferguson’s The Pity of War, the German general staff knew that their one major hope (to knock out a stronger, more numerous enemy quickly) had been dashed. At this point, the Chief of Staff uttered the immortal words that sum up the incorrigible stupidity of the military mindset: “even if we are ruined by it, it was still beautiful.” One wonders if any Russian general feels the same this week, the fifteenth anniversary of the Russian evacuation of Afghanistan.



It is funny. I went through the eighties as a very active protestor. I talked every day with various leftist friends. We all talked about Nicaragua. None of us talked about Afghanistan. Even when the place was invaded, in 1979, the event was overshadowed, to the average American mind, by what was happening in Iran. Who knew that it was all about the leakage, the leakage? It never penetrated that there was some meaning in the fact that the largest CIA outpost in the world, after Langley, was located in Islamabad. About which we still know next to nothing.



Well, here was a small war (merely a million or so dead and wounded) with big consequences. It struck a fatal blow to one of the great empires of the post WWII world, and its aftermath kidneypunched the other. Just think: the demoralization of the Soviet army – in a country that devoted 15 percent of its GDP to the army, a country in which the army was, supposedly, the only thing that worked – materially deteriorated Soviet morale. Gorbachev, Chernobyl – yes, there were many small stages on the way to the final Soviet rust-out, but Afghanistan was definitely the music in the background, just as Vietnam was the music in the background in the seventies.



And then, the other empire, America the Good. America blindly and blithely arming happy Islamicists with Stinger missiles. Afghanistan was photo op number one for the up and coming right winger in the 80s. How could we not have known? When a group that has an unerring sixth sense for unlucky decisions, not to mention dirty, inhuman ones, was so involved in resisting the Russians in the mountains, we should have paid more attention. The allies are always dirty – Laotian generals neckdeep in opium money, Contra torturers, etc., etc. But since the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, it seemed like an easy call to support whoever opposed them. The whole tangle of that history is still tangled, and we doubt we are going to be handed the thread by the 9/11 commission. But we know it is there – just look at the first WTC bombing, look at who facilitated it and how they got here. For instance, look at this Atlantic article, written in 96, which traces the the Cia’s development of the radical Islamic network through the exemplary life of Sheikh Omar Abdul-Rahman, the man who was financed and nurtured by the CIA almost to the day he was arrested, in New Jersey, for planning the blowing up of the World Trade Center.





“WHEN Sheikh Omar entered the United States, in July of 1990, via Saudi Arabia, Peshawar, and Sudan on a much-disputed tourist visa issued by an undercover agent of the CIA, his primary purpose was to set up a U.S. infrastructure, a funding mechanism, and an organizational base for Egypt's militant Islamic groups -- an undertaking that he had largely accomplished by the time of his arrest in 1993.”



Those are the larger toxic spills. But I think, even more than the macro and visible events, what happened in Afghanistan set off a chain of small wars that are still going, and that will just get worse if the causes of them aren't made clear, and resistance to those causes doesn't coalesce around a progressive standard. Chechnya is the worst of them at the present time. The U.S., for its own reasons, abetted Yeltsin, one of the great thieves of our time, and – as is the case when you deal with the devil – was forced, by circumstances, to abet Putin. We’ve previously posted about the ‘terrorism of mirrors” that inflected Putin’s campaign for president – terrorist acts in 99 that were attributed to Chechens, even as all indications point to a dirty operation by Putin’s own national police department.



So what happens in the last two weeks? More of the collateral c. from Afghanistan, by way of Chechnya. One of Putin’s strident critics is Boris Berezovsky. We have no time for Boris’ moral character – he hasn’t got any. But that made him a perfect in between man to plan things between Moscow and Chechnya in 99, that oddest of years. When Yeltsin melted in his pilfered fats off the throne, leaving space for Putin, the former head of the secret police started operating like former heads of secret police operate: getting rid of his enemies, and wacking former associates. Boris Berezovsky was among the casualties. When Berezovsky fled to London, he started ratting out the whole dirty deal that had used the death of thousands of Chechnians as a prop to keep the electorate voting for Putin, and implicitly voting to protect Yeltsen’s family from jail time. Ivan Rybkin, the presidential candidate who disappeared, reappeared in a disoriented state, then hightailed it for London himself, was another loud critic of the Chechnyan policy. He was, supposedly, being funded by Berezovsky. Both of these are not harmless critics, in Putin’s view, since both know where the bodies were buried – and I don’t mean that figuratively.



A regime founded on a classic totalitarian big lie – the attack by the Chechens – exists only by means of small lies, the shattered fragments that reflect the original lie to the point of maximum distortion, renews its energies by periodical reinvigorating the causes of violence -- even if it has to counterfeit those causes, produce them in the secret police hq. So no one should be surprised that, as it is an election season, here comes the subway bombing. There are multiple levels in the terrorism that haunts Moscow at election time. Inexplicably, the system keeps failing in elementary ways, all the gates between Grozny and Moscow keep opening up, inexplicably the gross tolls of violence always seem to favor Putin’s ever more nationalistic stances. Yulia Latynina has a scathing column about that subway bombing. Here are few grafs:



“Terrorist acts will continue to happen in Russia for two reasons.

First, because it is in the very nature of the system in place in Chechnya. Chechen field commanders produce terrorist acts, just as the Ostankino meat plant produces sausages. It's their business, just as is the case in Palestine. In both Chechnya and Palestine, there are people with power, influence and money who would not have power, influence and money if there were no terrorist acts.

It is not easy to fight terrorism even in a normal country, just as it is not easy to deal with gangrene even in a clean operating theater.

If, however, the operating theater is located in a pigsty, the nurses have pinched all the lightbulbs and the surgeon is not thinking about how to do the operation right, but about how he can cut off the patient's hand with his gold watch -- then it's a very different matter. And that is the second reason why terrorist acts will continue to occur.”



The problem with taking sides, in Russia, is that the sides are so filthy. It is like a fight in a locked toilet stall where the toilet has overflowed. Latynina properly attacks Putin’s populism, his war on the oligarchs – but this isn’t to defend the owners of Yukos, who basically stole the company from the state. This is a turf war in Shark land, and one’s challenge has to be promoting those sharks who, for their own sharkish reasons, are using the ultimate shock tactic of truth. The truth, at the moment, doesn’t matter – a situation bound to drive a writer mad. A parallel exists in this country, but let’s not go there right now. Barthes used the word “effect” to signify the aura, the premium, that surrounds certain writers, celebrities, objects. In Russia’s situation, the opposite is happening – call it effectlessness. Truth is ripped from its pragmatic coordinates – it is, contra William James, what doesn’t work.



Chechnya goes on. That's the saddest, sickest monument to what the cold war oligarchs, on both sides, did to us.

¶ 4:04 PM

Bollettino



Lately, all the news from Iraq has been gloomy. So why do I feel like Iraq’s situation is the best it has been in decades?



It comes, I suppose, from my screwy take on this war. I recently looked at two media forums. In Open Democracy, there is a report on the debate at the New School between Hitchens, Danner, Powers , and Frum. Hitchens and Frum represented the right wing pro-war side, Danner and Powers representing the responsible anti-war side. Hitchens was the only optimist in the bunch. Danner and Powers think Iraq is spinning out of control, and Frum, representing the muted panic of the Bushies, thinks we all have to work together, ie stop criticizing Bush.



Then, in the Guardian, there is an article, writers on the war, which polls prominent writers about their own pro or con-ness about the conflict. I was happy to see that the majority were anti-war, but unhappy to see that the instinct to distrust Bush had not extended to any very deep thought about Iraq at present.



Summarizing the LI position, it would go something like this: Bush’s argument for war disguised an all to familiar American imperial adventure. As in Latin America, the administration was trying to take out a hostile dictator and replace him with a compliant puppet, under whose benevolent gaze the U.S. could spread its fine mesh of corporate interest, engulfing the resources and wealth of a conquered protectorate.



What Iraq demonstrated is that intervention on this scale, and at this distance, is not going to happen. The Empire has limits. More, the unintended consequence of the intervention was the removal of a truly horrendous regime, and the opening to an at least tentatively democratic one. Good news.



This happened as the result of two happy accidents. The first accident was the sheer incompetence and unpreparedness of the Americans in advancing towards their goal. The idea of stuffing a swindler like Chalabi down the throat of the population was quickly abandoned as impractical. The ‘liberated’ population didn’t follow the script. The looting destroyed vital infrastructure, while the infrastructure itself, after eleven years of sanctions, was incredibly decayed. Misstep after misstep was made by the imperialists, who were most successful, apparently, at building concrete berms to keep out the dangerous wogs.



Meanwhile, happy accident number two was happening. The resistance turned out to be dogged and disruptive. Like the Bush administration, the resistors were guided by a bad intention – a pure power grab – and a much worse history, that of mass murderers. They squared off against the occupiers, and as they did so, they relieved the Iraqi population from the consequences that would have ensued from a successful Bush plan – puppet status, nationwide respectable looting to the advantage of corporations and exiles. This more subtle looting, it turns out, has been forced to prey only on the American taxpayer, who is pumping money on the grand scale into keeping Cheney's retirement benefits very, very real.



The tide turned, we think, with the capture of Saddam H. This capture, in one blow, operated against the Americans and the resistance. The utter bankruptcy of the resistance, and its futility, was finally and conclusively exposed, on the one hand. On the other hand, the last excuse not to resist the Americans was blown away. The Iraqi masses could now operate without fearing the return of Saddam. And their first action was to counter the occupation.



This is why we think the elections Sistani wants are so important. Both the Bushies and the liberals are opposed to them, because they both share a managerial ideology. They both talk about democracy, but they want it organized to the point where their side retains power.



Well, we’d love to see secular democratic socialists retain or return to power in Iraq, but we believe process can't be separated from content; that top down implementation of a secular state evolves top down governance, usually by the military. If you think that insulating a progressive group against real politics works, look around you in the world. It is a fatal and stupid thing to do. It creates a malignant alliance between progressives in the country and their sponsors out of the country. This, in turn, attenuates the rooting of the progressive wing within the country until it represents, to the people at large, one more aspect of a colonialist ethos.



The consequence of a direct election might well be a triumph for a reactionary, theocratic party. But we think that if that party is going to triumph, it is going to triumph no matter how much the NGOs think they can manage the country into their various versions of liberal democracy. Far better to strengthen the parties that oppose theocracy within the country from the beginning, far better to take up the election challenge, have them begin to understand the mechanism of electoral politics, than to try to manage a detour around "petty politics". Which is why we are rather disappointed that people who truly do want to see the triumph of a secular state that measures its surrenders to neo-liberalism against an ideal of social welfare are locked into the scared mode. Sure, Iraq teeters on a blood bath of factional struggle – but, as nobody seems to remember, the Kurds went through the same struggle in the 90s, and seem to have not only survived it, but become much more secular, democratic, etc., etc. Not that we think the two Kurdish warlord parties are the last word in secularism .. however, the opportunity exists, there. Given that the Americans are blindly working towards freeing Iraq of debt and repairing the infrastructure, whoever wins the elections will have a better position than Iraq has had since 1979.



This isn't to underestimate the body count. Actually, it is hard to even estimate the body count in this country -- nobody counts it. However, the alternative body count was worse -- the attrition from sanctions, the hopelessness of Saddam, the blighting of all promise.



Of course, we are probably wrong about much of this, re the real situation in Iraq. But we have a lively distrust the prejudices of Danner, Hitchens, Powers and Frum, who are also probably wrong about much of the real situation in Iraq. In neither forum, you’ll notice, is there … an Iraqi.

Bollettino





It was bound to happen eventually…







The George Bush who won the electoral college in 2000 had run as a rather wealthy, rather conservative suburban dad. While he wasn’t exactly approving of gays and feminists, he was tolerant. He had African-American buddies – not in the neighborhood, but at work. Sure, like any suburban dad, he harbored a few crackpot theories – his were about evolution and economics – but these seemed harmless. With his Texas accent and Crawford ranch, Bush seemed not so much like John Wayne as like a guy who had purchased the complete John Wayne video library and stacked them up on the video shelf, there to accumulate the dust of non-use.







9/11 changed that. Three years later, 9/11 doesn’t seem like the Battle of Hastings or Stalingrad – a historical turning point. It is a much referred to event, but that reference is a substitute for memory, since real memory is still too painful. Read Gail Sheehy’s remarkable report on the evidence that has accumulated for what happened that day, and the visceral panic pain comes back.





9/11 might not have changed everything, but it did change Bush, in two stages. Sheehy’s article reminds us of the first stage. For a crucial twelve hours, Bush pretty much lost control.







This isn’t to disparage him in particular. Karl Weick, a well known psychologist, has made a study of disasters. In a famous paper about a fire that killed several firefighters in Montana, he tracked the unfolding disarray that led to their deaths, and gave it a name: the collapse of sensemaking. Those routines by which we usually organize and manage events (the official procedures, the instruments, the tacit knowledge, the interpersonal trust) all seem to fall apart simultaneously. When Atta’s group took over the plane in the first twenty minutes out of Boston, the effect of that information seems to have produced a rapidly transmitted and magnified shock all along the system that connects the power establishment with the instruments of control. One has only to notice Bush’s response to the first crash, registered by Sheehy through one of her witnesses, the wife of one of the pilots: "I can’t get over what Bush said when he was called about the first plane hitting the tower: ‘That’s some bad pilot.’" Like any other mook that day, Bush didn't know what to make of the information.







The response to the infliction of such trauma on a system of power can move in several ways. It can produce surrender, resistance, regroupment, etc. etc. In Bush’s case, it became of crucial importance to overcome the initial evidence of panic. He did that, in the next week, by acting with a fortified coolness. The power system regrouped. The attack, while symbolically painful, actually changed nothing about the real balance of power. In order to overcome that moment of weakness we all saw on 9/11, Bush and his constituency – the whole nation, at the time – colluded in a little pretence that it hadn’t happened. We re-edited the past. Bush, in the meantime, reached some compact with his inner John Wayne to get himself – and us – over the hump.







This worked all too well to satisfy two desires – the public’s, for a narrative that included a hero to get us out of this horrible situation, and Bush’s, to measure up to the man he wanted to be. As Bush metamorphosed into John Wayne, he erased his earlier fumbles; as he erased those fumbles, he gained popularity; as he gained popularity, he armed himself against those – the press, the opposition – who might have a motive to point to those fumbles. And, as importantly, the D.C. court system began to exert its influence on him, stroking his vanity with the flattery he obviously craved -- that he actually was some avatar of the Duke.







In 2000, nobody, including Bush, would have bought that story. There has always been a vagueness in Bush’s background, and it has always been connected to the sometimes inappropriate fervor with which he publicly embraces Jesus. Sophisticates who think of that as political gesturing are not sophisticated enough – Bush’s need for salvation is palpably real. William James called it the Will to Believe. George Bush would certainly have gone down the road so shoddily essayed by his brother Neal, of Silverado S and L fame, if he hadn’t, as A.A. puts it, accepted a higher power. The need to do so wasn’t held against him by the electorate in 2000. Who among us, after all, hasn’t felt that need? And who can really make a virtue out of resisting it? Rather, the resistance turns on finding substitutes for it – higher powers, after all, can be history, can be art, can be all the Godheads in the pantheon. Atheistic monkeys haven’t yet evolved.







Unfortunately for Bush and his political advisors, they have forgotten this. They have sold themselves on the John Wayne persona. The Bush who once needed Jesus has reversed that formula : now Jesus needs him. Even discounting as exaggerated reports that Bush has talked about himself as some important figure in God’s plan for the world, something did click in his head after 9/11 that corresponds with that kind of arrogance. Why? Let me suggest that the weakness he showed on 9/11 was all too reminiscent, to Bush himself, of certain inglorious episodes in his past. His subsequent arrogance fills in the blanks that Bush has willed into his own biography.







I think we can date exactly when the John Wayne schtick started to fall apart: May 1, 2003. The famous, or infamous, Mission Accomplished speech marked, I think, a fatal moment for Bush, when image began to diverge too far from reality to be recuperable. To understand that, one has to understand how the John Wayne persona acted to legitimate the War against Iraq.







That Bush lied and hyped about the threat Saddam presented is, I think, undeniable. However, I think that Bush’s defenders are right to point out that we didn’t go to war to counter an imminent threat. Rather, we went to war because we trusted the John Wayne persona. We went to war on faith. And, I think, so did Bush. He was gulled by his advisors, who wanted this war, he used the build-up to it for political ends against the Dems. But, ultimately, there has always been something a little irrational about this war. It isn’t that there aren’t motives for it a-plenty – it is that none of those motives quite fit the reason we went to war – or even the reason that Bush wanted to go to war. That is because the reason was, in a way, the change in Bush wrought by 9/11. We went to war because Bush decided to trust his instincts. The irony is that those instincts are implants, Bush’s own psychological Botox. We saw the naked man on 9/11. We saw the instincts in action. Stripped down to fight or flight, Bush flew and flew until the fight came reassuringly back. His new instincts were virtual ones – the instincts of the movie Wayne. But the old instincts were still there – the old Bush was still lurking.







Reality has a way of undoing confidence men, even confidence men who trick themselves. When Bush announced Mission Accomplished on May 1, you could see his John Wayne persona being sucked back into the old Bush. This is always the way Bush did business – from Harkin to the tax cuts. Once you’ve won one or two small bets, bet everything.







And always, in these cases, Bush has misread the data. Always he has misplaced the Will to Believe from where it works – as a personal remedy for overcoming bad habits – to where it doesn’t – which is the dimension of reality itself, that big resistant Other that will always, sooner or later, undermine our fondest wish, which is that we not die. The wish that the iron laws of probability will, this one time, yield to our libido.







Think, for a moment, of the Mission that was accomplished:



The war wasn’t paid for;

The enemy we ostensibly fought (Saddam) was unaccounted for;

The territory we occupied was much bigger, and more populous, than the strength of the forces we had to occupy it could manage on anybody's account;

The man we had favored to head Iraq – Chalabi – had gained no traction since we injected him into the area;

The weapons with which to attack American forces were not even partially in our control;





In the John Wayne narrative, the fadeout comes before civilization arrives. The town might be cleansed of bad men, but then comes the work of paying for the police and building the jail. The best Wayne pictures don’t show him as a leader, but as an outlier – an unaccountable force, as in the Searchers. Wayne doesn’t play the Commander in Chief for good reasons – he has no talent for the patient building, dickering and dealing that goes with maintaining leadership.







Between the Mission Accomplished speech and the Bring It on speech, the persona that Bush had crafted in 2002 came unglued. Surely the last year must seem, to Bush, uncannily like other bad years in his life. Like the year that he and his Harkin friends tried to exploit the opportunities supposedly opened up after the Gulf War I. Or the year his father lost the presidency. All those times in which Bush, who is a terrible businessman, refused to hedge his bets – only to have to hedge them hastily and unprofitably at the last moment. This is always the moment when someone else has to help him out. Bush has a talent for not, immediately, being humiliated by this. Baker, for instance, getting him out of a jam in Florida must have, must have made Bush feel small. And there must have been some satisfaction to lending his ear, in the fall of 2002, to those people who talked his Dad’s men down. 2002 was the election W. won on his own. However, it couldn’t last. Bizarrely, the cowboy persona that Bush and his advisors have crafted out of sheer rhetoric is the one that his political operatives are banking on to get him re-elected. For this reason, we think the capture of Osama now looms as Bush’s great chance in this election. It is a chance to reconnect with his own Will to Believe – which has, on the evidence of the MTP interview, degenerated into longwinded, and exculpatory, clichés. This in itself must be a little humiliating. Bush is just not the Ahab type – he’d rather forget the Great White Whale. We don’t really believe that Bush took Saddam so personally that the war was a get even crusade – after all, the one person with whom the war really got even was Bush’s dad. And he has rubbed that in, with talk about lost opportunities and democracy, ever since. But now that Saddam is captured, he has to go out there and manage to get Osama, who he would just as soon forget. Bush hates to be reminded of the past like this, just hates it. The past is so hard to shape to the way he'd like it to be.







Wayne, of course, is always forced, at a certain moment in his movies, to pardon himself – usually to some woman. Bush differs from a lot of conservatives in being quite comfortable with women, just because (in the one trait he actually does share with Wayne) he trusts women to forgive him. This, by the way, is a little but real victory of Bush over his circumstances, if stories of Barbara Bush are true, since one would think that the upbringing by such a harridan would have exactly the opposite effect. But here there are no forgiving women, no Laura's, to bring him home. It is symbolic in more than one way that Bush, at the moment, is calling on his ex girlfriends to remember that he really did go to Guard training in Alabama. After all, he said so...







The public and private images that have been at play over the past three years have a dream logic. No psychoanalyst would be surprised that Bush is now being hit simultaneously with two things: the Kay report and the AWOL charges. Both operate as factors in one complex, one delusion. And both are dangerous to Bush because both are about who he really is. If we went to war on John Wayne’s sayso, Wayne can’t, as the going gets tough, dissolve into a wealthy suburban dad. The superhero’s agon must go on, and on, until we understand what we have always already understood -- there really aren’t any superheros. Caught in the toils of the image that he had to assume in order to go on, we are watching the mask come off, and the skin come with it. The Guard service is a trivial issue, but it resonates not so much because of Kerry’s medals – although those help – but because of the central weakness of trying to run a man on a character that has been fabricated out of an historical instance’s need. We’d still lay odds that Bush, the incumbent, will win this election, but the Democrats have a secret weapon that just might do the trick for them: the real George Bush. If the voters remember the man they didn’t elect in 2000, Bush will be the victim of an odd backlash, based on a deceit that he has talked himself and a great part of the nation into believing. While he richly deserves to fall there is something classically pitiful in the way he has, like a flawed hero in a Thomas Hardy novel, so amply and thoughtlessly contrived the means of his own downfall.

Bollettino



The Next Klondike



“George Sigalos, a Halliburton executive, recently gave a speech at a conference in Washington for businesspeople who hoped to obtain government contracts in Iraq. Many in the crowd had paid nearly four hundred dollars to attend, drawn by descriptions of Iraq as “the next Klondike,” as James Clad, an official with the U.S. Overseas Private Investment Corporation, a federal agency, put it.”



LI urges readers to link on over to Jane Meyer’s article about Halliburton in the New Yorker. As any anti-war obsessive knows, the old American strictures against war profiteering have entirely vanished under the beneficent regard of the Bush administration, which seems to have rediscovered the old time-y virtues of Tammany Hall and the Teapot Dome. However, one is a little surprised by the gleeful rubbing of hands among the mafia of corrupt players. They all find the very idea of contributing to Republican causes in order to ensnare government contracts to be a normal, and even a patriotic, method for transforming war into profit. At one time, the decencies were adhered to – the State was not considered a rube to be duped in public at least; the gentlemen from Morgan and Dupont would, when hauled before committees, usually make some statements indicating one’s patriotic duty and the like. That was before the Rand-ian revolution in D.C., where the selfish interests of the millionaire are considered justification in itself for any action, from mindless tax cutting to bombing Middle Eastern countries and stealing their oil. We live in the age of bald faced robbers, and none is balder, or has more face, than Cheney. Mayer traces his present behavior back in his career – from his time as Defense Secretary, where he targeted Defense cuts that would solely effect Democratic districts, to his free and easy days under Donald Rumsfeld under Nixon, where he dispensed with the bureaucracy at the Office of Economic Opportunity and outsourced business to his cronies. Ah, and before that, he was a little spy on campuses, working for some anti-communist nut – a delightful tidbit in a wholly despicable resume. One funny note – quail hunting seems to have been very very good to Cheney. He was elevated to the lucrative CEO post at Halliburton after going quail hunting with the directors. Currently, he has a suit pending before a Supreme Court that includes Anthony Scalia, with whom – you guessed it – he recently went quail hunting. The suit is to decide whether the documents relating to Cheney’s energy policy task force – basically, a pollute and profit venture – should be made available to the public.



There is some justification for engaging private companies in taking over services previously done by the government. That justification rests on the idea that competition, which is the vehicle through which the private sector theoretically operates, will bring down costs and create efficiencies.



Yet somewhere along the way, this justification gets lost. Halliburton has won the majority of its very, very profitable contracts because, the Pentagon claims, nobody else can do what Halliburton does. Even the Army Corps of Engineering – which claimed to have made its decision to reward Halliburton with contracts that are misleadingly said to be worth 1.2 billion dollars, since the contracts will ramify into other contracts – has lately backtracked:



“WASHINGTON — Faced with price-gouging allegations involving Vice President Dick Cheney's former company, the Army Corps of Engineers now acknowledges it acted alone in awarding Halliburton new business.

The corps initially suggested that experts from other U.S. agencies played an important role.

The Army Corps of Engineers told The Associated Press that the corps — not an evaluation team cited on its Internet site — chose Halliburton for a contract worth up to $1.2 billion. The corps is refusing to release records showing on what merits it made the decision.”



So the justification for outsourcing matters that used to be done by the Pentagon to private firms is that, being competitive, these firms will be more efficient; and the justification for selecting certain specific firms – like Halliburton – is that there is no competition for what they do. Wonderful. This, in a nutshell, is a new branch of logic in the field of justification – Bush logic. In other words, this is outsourcing without competition. Another word for this is developing a machinery to reward those in power now with the profits of the decisions they make, supposedly for the public, by ensuring their future recycling in private ventures – which will use their connected status to continue the parasitizing of Government monies. One of Mayer’s sources aptly sums up what is going on. After detailing the (sad, to me) profiteering done by Jack Kemp (a man who LI used to think was, at least, a morally decent sort) by creating a jack off company to consult about Iraq and oil – as if Jack Kemp knows jack all about either subject – and showing how former General Franks is now profiting from having headed U.S. forces in Iraq in April (apparently, Franks thinks of war as a sport –with himself, now, as an athlete out for commercial endorsements), Mayer writes:

“Franks’s lawyer, Marty Edelman, confirmed his client’s participation: “That is correct. But it is my understanding that he won’t be dealing with Iraq or the military for a year” (to comply with government ethics rules). Asked how Kemp and Franks had joined forces, Edelman said, “It seems like everyone on that level knows each other.” Edelman himself is now on the advisory board of Free Market Global.

Kemp’s second project, in which he said he would play an advisory role, is something called al-Ruba’yia. He describes it as a two-hundred-million-dollar fund to be invested in various ventures in Iraq, from energy to education. He is trying to attract American investors. Kemp is well positioned for this task: his political organization, Empower America, counts among its supporters some of the current Bush Administration’s top figures. Donald Rumsfeld, for example, is a former board member. “It’s like Russia,” the businessman said. “This is how corruption is done these days. It’s not about bribes. You just help your friends to get access. Cheney doesn’t call the Defense Department and tell them, ‘Pick Halliburton.’ It’s just having dinner with the right people.”



These people are so, so depressingly obvious that LI runs out of words to deal with them. The hand faulters -- the letters dissolve into their individual and irreducible sounds . How to build the right word, the one that will rid us of this beast?



PS -- also see the WP story about Cheney and Scalia's hunting expedition. It does contain one truly hilarious graf. After giving space to Scalia's reasons for not recusing himself from the case in which Cheney is asking the court to shut down requests to see what happened at the Energy policy group he formed, the paper says:



"Scalia's view may have described ethical norms in a clubbier Washington. But in today's climate, his off-court activities with Cheney were denounced by legal ethicists and editorial writers. "



A clubbier Washington? And when, pray tell, was that? The present era is about as clubby as D.C. has ever been.

Bollettino



“But though the nation be exempt from real evils, it is not more happy on this account than others. The people are afflicted, it is true, with neither famine nor pestilence; but there is a disorder peculiar to the country, which every season makes strange ravages among them; it spreads with pestilential rapidity, and infects almost every rank of people; what is still more strange, the natives have no name for this peculiar malady, though well known to foreign physicians by the appellation of Epidemic Terror.”



According to the sociologists, Stanley Cohen coined the phrase “moral panic” to talk about the sweeping fears that will suddenly go through all levels of a society. Cohen studied Mods and Rockers to find out, among other things, why sensational stories about Mod violence and deviance became, briefly, a staple of the British media. Cohen examined the mechanism of this sensation, from incident to report to response. In a sense, what he was doing, with a different vocabulary, was what Oliver Goldsmith had done two hundred years before, in his essay on Mad Dogs. Since I don’t believe Goldsmith’s essay has ever been referred to by those who have written about the history of moral panic, I thought I’d compare Goldsmith’s Epidemic Terror with Cohen’s moral panic – and in particular, the way in which Goldsmith used the epidemic image to medicalize an older image of rumor.



First, though, let’s talk a bit about Cohen’s terms. A good paper applying Cohen and Hall’s work to panics about language is on this site:





I get this quote from the site. Here’s how Cohen defines his term:



“Societies appear to be subject, every now and then, to periods of moral panic. A

condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a

threat to societal values and interests; its nature is presented in a stylised and

stereotypical fashion by the mass media; the moral barricades are manned by

editors, bishops, politicians and other right-thinking people; socially accredited

experts pronounce their diagnoses and solutions; ways of coping are evolved or

(more often) resorted to; the condition then disappears, submerges or deteriorates and becomes more visible. Sometimes the object of panic is quite novel and at other times it is something which has been in existence long enough, but suddenly appears in the limelight. Sometimes the panic passes over and is forgotten,

except in folklore and collective memory; at other times it has more serious and long-lasting repercussions and might produce such changes as those in legal and social policy or even in the way the society conceives itself.(1972:9)



The Epidemic Terror of Goldsmith’s essay is exactly of Cohen’s type-of thing-that-suddenly-becomes-visible, even though it has been in existence a long time: mad dogs.



Goldsmith, of course, is writing in a tradition about rumor and ignorance that goes back to Virgil's goddess of Rumor, who perches on the walls of the city. What is interesting about his essay is the direction he takes. It would be easy to employ the old routines that targeted ignorance and the mob. The term “mob” came into existence in the 18th century – it was a shortened form of mobile vulgarum, common people in movement. And Goldsmith, as well as any 18th century intellectual, wasn’t averse to tossing around a little abuse of the mob. However, he is more interested in mechanism than typology – he is after the dynamic of his “epidemic terror”. And to understand that, you have to pose some non-traditional questions that concern the about-ness of ignorance – questions that latter led Freud and Canetti to their (different) conclusions about crowd behavior.



Goldsmith begins with examples to show that epidemic terrors are both chronic and structurally similar:



“One year it issues from a baker’s shop in the form of a sixpenny loaf; the next, it takes the appearance of a comet with a fiery tail; the third, it threatens like a flatbottomed boat; and the fourth, it carries consternation in the bite of a mad dog.”



In all of the cases, the risk is disproportionate to the terror it spreads. However, the element I want to underline is that Goldsmith isn't showing that the disproportion is irrational -- he is trying to show how it is rationalized. Hence, my reference to Freud. The essay was probably penned sometime in the 1750s or 1760s. Supposedly England was swept with various epidemics of what surgeon John Hunter, who wrote about it in the 1780s, called canine madness. Goldsmith intentionally parallels two forms of madness – one is spread by a mad dog’s bite, while the other’s lines of infection are at first, mysterious. In both cases, though, the contagion model applies. The individual madness of the hyrophobe is paralleled by the collective madness of the crowd.



Goldsmith, as a good doctor, describes the outward symptoms of the ‘disease” of fearing mad dogs – people “sally from their houses with that circumspection which is prudent in such as expect a mad dog at every turning;” “a few of unusual bravery arm themselves with boots and buff gloves, in order to face the enemy…” In short, a city operates as though it were suddenly under imminent threat.



And what of that threat? Goldsmith observes how the discovery of whether a dog is mad or not resembles the old trial of dunking witches – if she floats, she’s a witch, if she drowns, she is innocent. Since the symptoms of being a mad dog are biting, or running away, crowds gather around dogs, jab or stone them, and then are either attacked – proof that the dog is mad – or escaped from – proof, again, that the dog is mad. Out comes the halter and the dog is hung.



“When epidemic terror is once excited, every morning comes loaded with some new disaster.” Goldsmith anticipates Cohen once again. In Cohen’s model, the menace has to be repeated over and over. In the age of the copy machine, tv, and radio (Cohen’s book dealt with the pre-Net age), the vector of transmission runs through these vast news machines. In Goldsmith’s day, the vector of transmission was still as much oral as it was print. What is interesting is that there will suddenly be a wave of information about the menace that runs through oral space – much like today’s “watercooler talk.” ‘As in stories of ghosts, each loves to hear the account, though it only serves to make him uneasy.” Goldsmith imagines a story beginning in some outlying area, where a woman is frightened by a dog. As the story is retold – and as it spreads towards more densely populated areas – the story’s characteristics change, until they assume the shape of the usual terror: a mad dog, a sudden attack, a highly placed woman who is suddenly transformed into a foaming hydrophobic on all fours.



Goldsmith’s epidemic terror includes all three elements of Cohen’s moral panic: exaggeration, the prediction that such things are inevitable, and symbolization. In Cohen’s case, the symbolization congealed around the image of the “Mod;” in Goldsmith’s case, around the image of the dog. The dog isn’t simply diseased, but mad – a disturbance of the rational faculties, a lowering of the censure between the Id and the ego – to use an anachronistic way to describe it.



We especially like the end of Goldsmith’s essay, because he goes to the heart of the terror – to the dog itself – and makes a little plaidoyer for the dog: “in him alone, fawning is not flattery.” “How unkind then to torture this animal that has left the forest to claim the protection of man! How ungrateful a return to the trusty animal for all its services!”



We could find many contemporary applications, n’est-ce pas?

Bollettino



One of the most illuminating and melancholic comments we’ve read in the NYT about our system was buried in this story about the potential Bush strategy in a camaign against Kerry. That strategy is utterly predictable (begin on a rabid note, accelerate from there): what attracted us was this ominous quote from the Kerry side:



“Another Kerry adviser was more blunt. "This is not the Dukakis campaign," the adviser said. "We're not going to take it. And if they're going to come at us with stuff, whatever that stuff may be, if it goes to a place where the '88 campaign did, then everything is on the table. Everything."



Everything that is wrong with the Democrats is in that quotation. “Everything,” presumably, won’t be on the table if the Republicans play nice. Which leads to the question: why? The Democratic party is heading for extinction when, demagraphically, it should be heading for hegemony. That's because it still thinks of itself as the establishment. Establishments have to keep “everything” from being purveyed to the mob, which won’t understand it, or the necessity for it: the million little deals that keep the class composition of this country a predetermined harmony, a chorus of money wending its way upward. So you have the DC. Covenant – we won’t speak of Bush’s military record; we won’t oppose Bush’s rush to war, or question the evidence for it; we won’t attack the obvious whitewashes in the press of everything from the joke of a budget to the joke of our alliance with Pakistan, the one country that not only bristles with the infamous Weapons of Mass Destruction but has made selling them part of its economy; we won’t question what happened that made 9/11 happen, etc., etc. This isn’t because the Democrats fear the Republicans – the Republicans will attack the Dems with vim and vigor regardless of how meak and mild they are. It is because the instinctive, protective gesture of the Dem establishment, which is white, male, and millionairish, is to keep the status quo alive – to preserve those conditions in which the white, male, and millionairish can continue to be comfortable.



This is why we are afraid of Dean getting out of the race. Dean being in the race did send some 50,000 volts through the somnolence of the Senatorial candidates. Kerry is looking better against Bush every day. But that aide’s comment bodes ill for this campaign. If Kerry thinks that he can keep anything off of the proverbial table, he will inevitably lose. Dukakis, contrary to media popular legend, didn’t lose because he was a cold fish, or a small chump of change in a tank, but because he swept aside the chief issue of the day, the nationwide looting of the S&Ls. Why? Because he was for the changes that made that looting possible. He and his opponent tacitly talked agreed to talk about anything except the main thing that was happening in America -- the creaking and squeaking in the financial system, due to the gross mal-distribution of money from the financial sector to the LBOs and third world dictators and real estate in New Jersey that was all falling down. Where there's a crisis, there are profiteers -- but if Dukakis had brought that up, it would threaten Democrats as well as Republicans. To look into that would be to look into systematic corruption, and beyond that to the real changes that were taking place in our country, the changes that were systematically sucking money out of the inner city (where it was replaced with the money that came from the market in drugs) and from the working class. Remember, of the Senators who were tarred with leaning on regulators to give obvious fraudulent S & Ls a clean bill of health, most of them were Dems.



That Kerry’s aide could ‘threaten” to put everything on the table is an insult to every citizen and a light cast on the dark, petrified ruin of our system. We shouldn’t have a party system that props up a corrupt compact of little deals about what is and what is not “proper” to put on the table. At least the Republicans, in their relentless attacks, are willing to put everything on the table – everything, that is, that they hate about the Dems. This is what they should be doing.



Let’s hope that Kerry’s campaign seriously considers how arrogant, ignorant and symptomatic it is to menace us with doing what they should be doing in the first place. The Democrats disenfranchise their best hope -- the people who don't vote -- when they compromise in order to retain their little domains of political power The everything that isn't on the table makes the non-voting majority suspect, rightly, that elections are a charade. If Kerry is going to run a campaign against Bush while simultaneously protecting the embedded privileges that Bush and his party represents, he'll lose.



Go after Bush's military record, go after his stewardship pre 9/11, fight him on the shores and fight him on the mountains. Elections aren't about the pols running in them -- they are about us, the poor voters. Everything is on the table for us, every day.



So fire that goon-ish aide, and run like a man, not a patrician mouse.

Bollettino



I talked to D., my best friend, yesterday, and he bitched about the end of this blog. So I told him that I have to spend my time finishing my novel, and he said that he’d been hearing that excuse for 20 years.



Well, score one for D.



However, I didn’t tell D. that the other reason I ended this blog was that it was slowly and surely driving me crazy. Reading the newspapers closely every day is a sure recipe for a quick trip to the rubber room, if you ask me. And not having to read them in order to comment on … well, anything, has made yours truly feel much lighter.



However, there can’t be too much harm in writing a much less concentrated blog. So instead of pulling this thing down, we will do our jumping jacks here occasionally. It can’t do any harm.



Today, we read Christopher Hitchens column in Slate about the missing WMD. It made us wonder how long they are going to continue to put up with Hitchens. It is one thing to be a contrarian; it is quite another to start writing like William Safire’s senile uncle. The contrast between Fred Kaplan’s shrewd piece and the Hitchens bit of administration puffery was startling. The percentage of bluster, in Hitchens’ writing, has always been high, but the percentage of shrewdness has been high enough to compensate for it. Lately, however, it has been almost completely bluster. Among the highlights of this latest glimpse of mental devastation was Hitchens’ complex put down of Maureen Dowd. According to Hitchens, the anti-war left is carrying water for the CIA. As an instance of this, he triumphantly spots Dowd associating the CIA with Ahmed Chalabi, Hitchens’ Mussolini-lite bud, and bundling these two incompatibles together as the source for the inflation of Saddam the H.’s threat. In his usual new style, Hitchens rushes for the debating point at the expense of the argument. Chalabi supplied intelligence to a wholly other group than the CIA, Hitchens tells us – correctly. Of course, he has to put it another way – that Chalabi was smeared by the CIA. Smearing, apparently, means asking for an accounting of monies received when Chalabi not only failed to deliver an overthrow, in the nineties, but seemed to be using Intelligence money to support his own jet set life style. That, for Hitchens, is a smear. It is like accusing the head of Enron of doing something fishy -- how dare they!



Anyway, score one for Hitchens in the match vs. Dowd. Alas, he makes his point by running down the field the wrong way, towards the wrong goal. His point, of course, is one that the water-carrying CIA lovin’ lefties have been making repeatedly – that the Pentagon took intelligence that it wanted to believe in from Chalabi, while scrutinizing with extreme prejudice any CIA intelligence that went against the A.C. narrative.



Since Hitchens has, in the past, abundantly credited Chalabi and his group with supplying intelligence on Iraq, surely he should, if he has any honesty left, ask his buddy about that. Was the intelligence as misleading as the accounting of various of Chalabi's businesses in the past? Maybe it is time for Hitchens to ask how a known financial crook became the Pentagon's golden boy.



…



On to the budget. Surely, the Dems have enough ammo, now, to run a McCarthyite campaign against Bush. The only logical explanation for Bush’s twin achievements – the destruction of the Atlantic alliance, and the subversion of the American economy – is that he is the Manchurian candidate. Barbara Bush must have been flashing those big playing cards at him a lot, recently. How else can one account for an administration that sorta misses one hundred thirty billion dollars in its estimation of its Medicare “reform” package; one that proposes raising Defense expenditures massively, making tax cuts on the wealthiest permanent, and projects halving the budget deficit by… what’s the year? 2009, by... growing the economy!



Surely the man is a plant. That's why the beady eyes are so cloudy, the voice is so hesitant. It must be the cards every morning. And, as he destroys one thing after another, the press is always there to try to make the evident irrationality seem normal. It is getting harder and harder to make that case.