Bollettino
Two things to read today.
One is Krugman’s editorial in the NYT. Krugman actually understands what a timeline is. Kerry apparently doesn’t – and don’t ask about the Bush hawks. To advocate one or another ‘fix’ in Iraq – for instance, internationalizing the conflict – at one time, and consider that one now has the answer to the ‘problem’ of Iraq, is to commit the central sin of central planning.
A year of mission accomplished has passed in Iraq. It has passed through Iraqi minds and bodies. And those minds and bodies live there. They can feel in their minds and bodies one thing: they aren’t items at the Pottery Barn. They aren’t broken. They aren’t bought. They aren’t ‘fixable.’ This arrogant and stupid rhetoric points to everything that is wrong with the occupation. Being humans, instead of figurines, events, over time, actually have acquired meaning for these people. Gosh. Hard as it is to believe that the Iraqis could be as fully human as Americans, some of them – I’ve heard on good authority – might even look at the carnage in Fallujah as less a lesson in the justice and goodheartedness of their liberators, and more as a reason for their liberators to go. Gosh. Vamoose. Figure out how to depart. They might even – like Americans, mourning the dead of 9/11 – think their dead are worth memorializing. They might even begin to suspect that one hundred fifty thousand people who do not speak their language, know nothing about their culture, and have only contempt for their humanity, don’t have their best interests at heart.
Second article to look at is in the WP.
Here’s an eyebrow raising graf in Josh White’s article:
“The surge in casualties in the past month has not changed the public's key judgments on Iraq, however. While Bush has clearly lost public support for his policies there, much of that erosion occurred before the current wave of violence. Bush's approval rating for dealing with the situation in Iraq stood at 45 percent in a Post-ABC News poll conducted two weeks ago, unchanged from mid-March but down from 55 percent in January. The president also has not suffered politically from the spiraling casualty count and continues to run even or slightly ahead of presumptive Democratic presidential nominee John F. Kerry in most polls.”
How’s that for saying, we don’t believe no stinkin’ CBS/NYT polls? Typical of the official newspaper of the hawks, too. Meanwhile, Powell has acknowledged a plunge in American support for the Iraq war. But Powell is as dust in the wind compared to the mighty AEI, a member of which White effusively quotes, as well as the usual retired general. No, no, no, no Iraqis – surely it is a waste of time to quote the Pottery Barn figures. As for antiwar people, are they American? Ditto for Dems from the Byrd side of the party. Quoting such just promotes treason.
Friday, April 30, 2004
Wednesday, April 28, 2004
Bollettino
According to the media, in the build up to the war on Iraq, D.C. was a regular little hive of the best and the most hawkish, with every little cell planning – wrongly, as it turned out – for “post-conflict” Iraq. Powell’s minions in the press like to point fingers at Rumsfeld for the overwhelming failure to plan the occupation; Rumsfeld’s minions talk of Powell as a softy and – for his work for Dad Bush – pretty much a traitor. However, it wasn’t that the occupation wasn’t planned well – the problem was that it wasn’t imagined well. Or even at all. Its planners had not only never served in uniform – for all of their constant analogizing to Japan and Germany, they apparently never asked a WWII vet what it was really like.
If somebody in the Wolfowitz circle had put down Richard Perle’s latest scorcher in Foreign Policy and taken up Norman Lewis’ diary of serving as an Intelligence Officer in occupied Southern Italy, “Naples, ‘44”, here is what they would have found: looting is so bad that telephone and telegraph wires are constantly cut down for the money that scrap copper brings in, but nobody closes down the flea market where scrap copper is sold; the Germans leave behind mines that periodically destroy buildings, and saboteurs that plant bombs; gangs of traditional criminals – the Camorra and the Mafia – take over vast stretches of territory; vendettas are pursued through massive snitching; the friendliest people will betray you or your information for astonishing reasons; economic aid, which is promised, never comes through, leading to disgust with the occupiers; and everybody fucks constantly.
The latter might not be happening now in Iraq – alas, our journalists are much more hidebound about such things than the journalists of yore. But a little acquaintance with literature should surely have alerted even the most ideologically blinded soul about what lay ahead. Southern Italy was never held out as a showcase analogy by the Rumsfeld crowd – partly because the more pernicious effects of the occupation are still present. Not for Southern Italy the Werkschaftswunder. The mafia, which Mussolini – not one to countenance other centers of power – drove out, were deliberately reintroduced by the Americans. Vito Genovese, if you can believe it, was an “advisor’ to one of the chief American military men – shades of Chalabi!
Lewis is a great capturer of absurd and symbolic action. His account of trying to rescue a peddler caught with copper wire involves him in the Catch 22 of the insane American military bureaucracy. Here’s a bit I cannot resist. Lewis is in court. The judge is trying cases of pilfering. The defendant is a “typical Neapolitan sweat of the kind the pretends to be half-witted to be allowed to get away with his jokes.” The judge earnestly tries to understand what is happening in the court:
Judge: “Didn’t he just say something about the Americans? What did he say?”
Interpreter: ‘just a stupid remark, your honour. Nothing to do with the case.
Judge: Will you please leave it to me to decide what has to do with the case, and what has not. I insist on knowing what he said.
Interpreter: He said: “when the Germans were here, we ate once a day. Now the Americans have come, we eat once a week.”
Judge: Ask him if it means nothing to him that we have freed him and his kind from Fascism. How can he talk about us and the Germans in the same breath?”
The interpreter translated the judge’s remarks and the old man rolled up his eyes, let out a derisive gabble, and then went through the motions of displaying his sexual parts. A gale of laughter went up.
Judge: I’m losing all patience with him. What does he say now?
Interpreter; With respect, your honor, he says, Americans or Germans, it’s all the same to him. We’ve been screwed by both of them.
Judge: He’s off his head. Get him out of my sight. Case dismissed.”
The earnest indignation of that Judge has become the weather that hangs over the CPA – an unholy mixture of self-pity, imaginative blindness, and the absolute inability to imagine that one’s motives could ever be impugned. Americans I know are as funny as the Neapolitan clown – but I have also seen the humorless judge types. It is exactly how the upper level managers talk, exactly – that same unholy buncombe, that same shabby disguise of self-interest as team effort, that same feeling of the utter godliness of all of one’s motives, which God kindly proves by granting one loads of money.
One of the reason those New Deal occupations were more successful than this failed effort was that the men in charge had had enough of the self-righteousness cut out of them by the Depression that they could actually listen. No such luck with our contemporary crew, who have gorged like pigs on their own p.r.
According to the media, in the build up to the war on Iraq, D.C. was a regular little hive of the best and the most hawkish, with every little cell planning – wrongly, as it turned out – for “post-conflict” Iraq. Powell’s minions in the press like to point fingers at Rumsfeld for the overwhelming failure to plan the occupation; Rumsfeld’s minions talk of Powell as a softy and – for his work for Dad Bush – pretty much a traitor. However, it wasn’t that the occupation wasn’t planned well – the problem was that it wasn’t imagined well. Or even at all. Its planners had not only never served in uniform – for all of their constant analogizing to Japan and Germany, they apparently never asked a WWII vet what it was really like.
If somebody in the Wolfowitz circle had put down Richard Perle’s latest scorcher in Foreign Policy and taken up Norman Lewis’ diary of serving as an Intelligence Officer in occupied Southern Italy, “Naples, ‘44”, here is what they would have found: looting is so bad that telephone and telegraph wires are constantly cut down for the money that scrap copper brings in, but nobody closes down the flea market where scrap copper is sold; the Germans leave behind mines that periodically destroy buildings, and saboteurs that plant bombs; gangs of traditional criminals – the Camorra and the Mafia – take over vast stretches of territory; vendettas are pursued through massive snitching; the friendliest people will betray you or your information for astonishing reasons; economic aid, which is promised, never comes through, leading to disgust with the occupiers; and everybody fucks constantly.
The latter might not be happening now in Iraq – alas, our journalists are much more hidebound about such things than the journalists of yore. But a little acquaintance with literature should surely have alerted even the most ideologically blinded soul about what lay ahead. Southern Italy was never held out as a showcase analogy by the Rumsfeld crowd – partly because the more pernicious effects of the occupation are still present. Not for Southern Italy the Werkschaftswunder. The mafia, which Mussolini – not one to countenance other centers of power – drove out, were deliberately reintroduced by the Americans. Vito Genovese, if you can believe it, was an “advisor’ to one of the chief American military men – shades of Chalabi!
Lewis is a great capturer of absurd and symbolic action. His account of trying to rescue a peddler caught with copper wire involves him in the Catch 22 of the insane American military bureaucracy. Here’s a bit I cannot resist. Lewis is in court. The judge is trying cases of pilfering. The defendant is a “typical Neapolitan sweat of the kind the pretends to be half-witted to be allowed to get away with his jokes.” The judge earnestly tries to understand what is happening in the court:
Judge: “Didn’t he just say something about the Americans? What did he say?”
Interpreter: ‘just a stupid remark, your honour. Nothing to do with the case.
Judge: Will you please leave it to me to decide what has to do with the case, and what has not. I insist on knowing what he said.
Interpreter: He said: “when the Germans were here, we ate once a day. Now the Americans have come, we eat once a week.”
Judge: Ask him if it means nothing to him that we have freed him and his kind from Fascism. How can he talk about us and the Germans in the same breath?”
The interpreter translated the judge’s remarks and the old man rolled up his eyes, let out a derisive gabble, and then went through the motions of displaying his sexual parts. A gale of laughter went up.
Judge: I’m losing all patience with him. What does he say now?
Interpreter; With respect, your honor, he says, Americans or Germans, it’s all the same to him. We’ve been screwed by both of them.
Judge: He’s off his head. Get him out of my sight. Case dismissed.”
The earnest indignation of that Judge has become the weather that hangs over the CPA – an unholy mixture of self-pity, imaginative blindness, and the absolute inability to imagine that one’s motives could ever be impugned. Americans I know are as funny as the Neapolitan clown – but I have also seen the humorless judge types. It is exactly how the upper level managers talk, exactly – that same unholy buncombe, that same shabby disguise of self-interest as team effort, that same feeling of the utter godliness of all of one’s motives, which God kindly proves by granting one loads of money.
One of the reason those New Deal occupations were more successful than this failed effort was that the men in charge had had enough of the self-righteousness cut out of them by the Depression that they could actually listen. No such luck with our contemporary crew, who have gorged like pigs on their own p.r.
Tuesday, April 27, 2004
Bollettino
A spate of stories in the media have been proclaiming the end of Chalabi – rather like chasing the Lord of Misrule from the scene at the end of a Tudor play. Shall we all get up and get married? Is there a God in Heaven? Certainly this would falsify parts of LI’s predictions about Iraq in the coming months, which we just prognostically emitted the other day. Were we so out of the loop?
While we believe that Chalabi himself is a stand-in for a policy default position of the hawks – that Iraq should be, in effect, an American colony – character does count. There is nobody around who has been groomed to quite such perfection as Chalabi – the man is from the Agency dream book of the 50s. A crook, an opportunist, a liar, and a blackmailer – you don’t get that Somoza combination at your nearest convenience food store. It is much harder to produce a tinhorn dictator than people think. So many of them think only of stealing the silverware. The real thing, the real defender of the Free World, thinks more ideologically, thinks further ahead, thinks of death squads, of selling off mineral rights, of establishing the family in all branches of industry and the state. With one nephew on the IGC with him, and one prosecuting Saddam Hussein, Chalabi has already shown his mettle. Are we going to throw our leading man away?
The Chalabi is done fad emerged from a Washington Post article last week. According to the article, Chalabi had offended Bush somehow, leading to consequences parallel only to those meted out by Louis XIV to his more rebellious nobles.
Here are the WP grafs that started the whole mini-juggernaut:
“At the top of the list of those likely to be jettisoned is Ahmed Chalabi, a Shiite politician who for years was a favorite of the Pentagon and the office of Vice President Cheney, and who was once expected to assume a powerful role after the ouster of Saddam Hussein, U.S. officials acknowledged.
Chalabi has increasingly alienated the Bush administration, including President Bush, in recent months, U.S. officials said. He generated anger in Washington yesterday when he said a new U.S. plan to allow some former officials of Hussein's ruling Baath Party and military to return to office is the equivalent of returning Nazis to power in Germany after World War II.”
Moreover, our man at the UN with the gluegun in his hand and Iraq in his sights, your friend and mine, a man who needs no introduction even though nobody knows just how the hell he got here, that’s right a round of applause for Mister Lakhdar Brahimi, is not, reportedly, too enthusiastic about Chalabi enthusiast. The NYT had a story this morning that congress might stop stuffing Chalabi’s pocket with the around 400,000 monthly supplement they pay him. Such degradation!
However, in this corner, we still don’t see it. Bush sometimes signals that he has regained his sanity. For instance, he came out foursquare for a Palestinian state. That would seem to be a shot at the Defense department crowd, where they like to say, with a smirk, the “so called occupied West Bank.” But the Cheney-Rumsfeld side is nothing if not persistent, and the recent concession about settlements in the West Bank is surely a stage on the way to an embrace of the Defense Department view. Similarly, that Chalabi has been attacked in the Post will surely be seen as a wound of honor.
But how will Chalabi counter-attack? We will be watching for his three press henchman, Hoagland, Hitchens, and Judy Miller, to do the initial work for him. His big threat is from the U.N. Thus, he has to use his little black bag of Saddam’s papers to reveal the corrupt dealings of the U.N. with the Meat Machine during the sanctions. Our bet is that this story will hit soon, and will spill over into whether we are going to allow a person that Chalabi calls, disdainfully, an “Arab nationalist,” to throw away one of our best and brightest. If, even now, Hitchens isn’t boiling up some screed about the perfidious U.N. and its sanction profiteering, LI will be surprised.
Whatever the weapon will be, however, I would not count a man out who is as adept at the fine arts of fraud and deceit as Chalabi.
A spate of stories in the media have been proclaiming the end of Chalabi – rather like chasing the Lord of Misrule from the scene at the end of a Tudor play. Shall we all get up and get married? Is there a God in Heaven? Certainly this would falsify parts of LI’s predictions about Iraq in the coming months, which we just prognostically emitted the other day. Were we so out of the loop?
While we believe that Chalabi himself is a stand-in for a policy default position of the hawks – that Iraq should be, in effect, an American colony – character does count. There is nobody around who has been groomed to quite such perfection as Chalabi – the man is from the Agency dream book of the 50s. A crook, an opportunist, a liar, and a blackmailer – you don’t get that Somoza combination at your nearest convenience food store. It is much harder to produce a tinhorn dictator than people think. So many of them think only of stealing the silverware. The real thing, the real defender of the Free World, thinks more ideologically, thinks further ahead, thinks of death squads, of selling off mineral rights, of establishing the family in all branches of industry and the state. With one nephew on the IGC with him, and one prosecuting Saddam Hussein, Chalabi has already shown his mettle. Are we going to throw our leading man away?
The Chalabi is done fad emerged from a Washington Post article last week. According to the article, Chalabi had offended Bush somehow, leading to consequences parallel only to those meted out by Louis XIV to his more rebellious nobles.
Here are the WP grafs that started the whole mini-juggernaut:
“At the top of the list of those likely to be jettisoned is Ahmed Chalabi, a Shiite politician who for years was a favorite of the Pentagon and the office of Vice President Cheney, and who was once expected to assume a powerful role after the ouster of Saddam Hussein, U.S. officials acknowledged.
Chalabi has increasingly alienated the Bush administration, including President Bush, in recent months, U.S. officials said. He generated anger in Washington yesterday when he said a new U.S. plan to allow some former officials of Hussein's ruling Baath Party and military to return to office is the equivalent of returning Nazis to power in Germany after World War II.”
Moreover, our man at the UN with the gluegun in his hand and Iraq in his sights, your friend and mine, a man who needs no introduction even though nobody knows just how the hell he got here, that’s right a round of applause for Mister Lakhdar Brahimi, is not, reportedly, too enthusiastic about Chalabi enthusiast. The NYT had a story this morning that congress might stop stuffing Chalabi’s pocket with the around 400,000 monthly supplement they pay him. Such degradation!
However, in this corner, we still don’t see it. Bush sometimes signals that he has regained his sanity. For instance, he came out foursquare for a Palestinian state. That would seem to be a shot at the Defense department crowd, where they like to say, with a smirk, the “so called occupied West Bank.” But the Cheney-Rumsfeld side is nothing if not persistent, and the recent concession about settlements in the West Bank is surely a stage on the way to an embrace of the Defense Department view. Similarly, that Chalabi has been attacked in the Post will surely be seen as a wound of honor.
But how will Chalabi counter-attack? We will be watching for his three press henchman, Hoagland, Hitchens, and Judy Miller, to do the initial work for him. His big threat is from the U.N. Thus, he has to use his little black bag of Saddam’s papers to reveal the corrupt dealings of the U.N. with the Meat Machine during the sanctions. Our bet is that this story will hit soon, and will spill over into whether we are going to allow a person that Chalabi calls, disdainfully, an “Arab nationalist,” to throw away one of our best and brightest. If, even now, Hitchens isn’t boiling up some screed about the perfidious U.N. and its sanction profiteering, LI will be surprised.
Whatever the weapon will be, however, I would not count a man out who is as adept at the fine arts of fraud and deceit as Chalabi.
Sunday, April 25, 2004
Bollettino
We went to see the Omar Faruk Tekbilek ensemble last night at the University of Texas.
Listening to Turkish music is one of those odd habits of our middle age. There is something about it that is very Paul Bowles-ish. Bowles’ typical Westerners, nervous, intellectual, self-absorbed, and (all unknown to themselves) wrapped in such layers of babyfat egotism that they are permanently distanced from experience, usually gain experience in a sudden and fatal shock, all at once. It comes out of nowhere. It leaps at them as they become curious – for these people are always curious. In fact, they have made a virtue out of curiosity. They come from a culture in which curiosity has merged with entertainment. And experience does come to them. It comes from a sandstone landscape for which they are absolutely unprepared. It comes from a kidnapping, it comes from the collapse of all of their presumptions. It comes as a great slap from some archaic strata of being that they are unaware of – think, in fact, to have overcome by succedaneum – since their ancestors, they imagine, overcame it. And are no longer worth thinking about, having completed their task. And then the experience is there. A smelly canvas sack, the cutting off of a tongue, a branding, a selling into slavery. For Bowles’ characters, history is everything that has been put between themselves and such fates – history is the progress that has made such fates unimaginable. Progress has made a world in which all contacts are, on principle, chosen.
This world is in direct opposition to the world of fate. LI has chosen the world of choice. We are liberals, here. But we have the dialectical longing for our opposite that always appears where liberalism appears. Turkish music is the very music of the world of fate. Listening to the Faruk (a man with an amazingly broad face that he shakes so, while singing, that it seems to have become permanently wrinkled in transverse bands, instead of the usual up and down direction of wrinkling ) play the zurna, a raucous pipe that emits a sound that both mocks yearning and evokes it, it is hard not to feel that the Western form of life – that swaddled, babyish life of the mouth and the dick and the screen entranced eye -- is going to disappear. The zurna, which is short, and has a blaring, flanged spout at the end of it, seems to come to life in Faruk’s hands – to be playing him, in fact. Yes, it was as if that slightly mocking sound, that stunted, blaring horn, was possessed of a spirit that in turn possessed the player. The zurna seems to be the master – and a vaguely devilish one.
We went to see the Omar Faruk Tekbilek ensemble last night at the University of Texas.
Listening to Turkish music is one of those odd habits of our middle age. There is something about it that is very Paul Bowles-ish. Bowles’ typical Westerners, nervous, intellectual, self-absorbed, and (all unknown to themselves) wrapped in such layers of babyfat egotism that they are permanently distanced from experience, usually gain experience in a sudden and fatal shock, all at once. It comes out of nowhere. It leaps at them as they become curious – for these people are always curious. In fact, they have made a virtue out of curiosity. They come from a culture in which curiosity has merged with entertainment. And experience does come to them. It comes from a sandstone landscape for which they are absolutely unprepared. It comes from a kidnapping, it comes from the collapse of all of their presumptions. It comes as a great slap from some archaic strata of being that they are unaware of – think, in fact, to have overcome by succedaneum – since their ancestors, they imagine, overcame it. And are no longer worth thinking about, having completed their task. And then the experience is there. A smelly canvas sack, the cutting off of a tongue, a branding, a selling into slavery. For Bowles’ characters, history is everything that has been put between themselves and such fates – history is the progress that has made such fates unimaginable. Progress has made a world in which all contacts are, on principle, chosen.
This world is in direct opposition to the world of fate. LI has chosen the world of choice. We are liberals, here. But we have the dialectical longing for our opposite that always appears where liberalism appears. Turkish music is the very music of the world of fate. Listening to the Faruk (a man with an amazingly broad face that he shakes so, while singing, that it seems to have become permanently wrinkled in transverse bands, instead of the usual up and down direction of wrinkling ) play the zurna, a raucous pipe that emits a sound that both mocks yearning and evokes it, it is hard not to feel that the Western form of life – that swaddled, babyish life of the mouth and the dick and the screen entranced eye -- is going to disappear. The zurna, which is short, and has a blaring, flanged spout at the end of it, seems to come to life in Faruk’s hands – to be playing him, in fact. Yes, it was as if that slightly mocking sound, that stunted, blaring horn, was possessed of a spirit that in turn possessed the player. The zurna seems to be the master – and a vaguely devilish one.
Friday, April 23, 2004
Bollettino
On December 14 of last year, after the capture of Saddam, LI “played the combinations”. That is, we looked at the effects that could ensue from the capture as combinations of possible worlds, as Leibnitz might have put it.
This is what we said:
“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 Shiite 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 don’t realize that the conservative mullahs are, ideologically, their best friends. We think the clerical Shia 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.
Montesquieu, in the Considerations, makes a very shrewd remark: Ce qui gate presque toutes les affaires, c’est qu’ordinairement ceux qui les entreprennent, outre la reussite principale, cherchent encore de certains petits succes particuliers, qui flattent leur amour-propre et les rendent contents d�eux.
(What spoils almost all affairs is that ordinarily, those who undertake them seek, outside of the principle goal, certain small particular successes, which flatter their amour-propre and make them satisfied with themselves).
This is the history of the last six months of the occupation of Iraq.”
Time, now, to play the combinations again with the upcoming June 30 handover of power to the Iraqis. First, though, we should recognize that the handover is a complete sham. Iraq will have “limited sovereignty,” as the Bush people put it this morning in the NYT, meaning the new government will neither be able to make laws, nor have any control whatsoever over American forces operating in their own territory. If its legs are made of cloth, there’s a hole in the back for a hand, and its jaws are operated by moving your fingers, it is properly a puppet.
The Bush policy, which has consistently been a mad real life version of what the King's Counselors advice in the Anderson tale of the King and the Invisible Clothes, will be to stridently insist that the puppet is a man. Although it will also draw a wink wink advantage from the puppet being a puppet.
In order to understand the context of the handover, one has to draw the major lesson of this long, terrible two week stretch: – Bush faces practically no domestic opposition. This has truly shocked LI. Kerry’s campaign is justly wounded, perhaps fatally, by the incompetence, wretchedness, and cynicism of the candidate during the last month. Kerry has broadcast, in pretty clear terms, the following message to the voters: under President Kerry, the best we can hope for is the dispatch of even more American troops to be killed in Iraq. To sweeten the thought, he does want to put a UNESCO sticker on every green helmet. Shall we put our hands in the air now, ladies and gents?
If that is an opposition, I say to hell with it. LI, the perpetual naïf, has been stunned that Kerry’s mind meld with Joe Lieberman has not evoked a whimper even from the supposedly independent left side. The Atrioses and the American Prospects don’t care what Kerry says – they simply want him to win. It is a replay of the far fetched scenario of Gore’s campaign – diss your most likely voters, and then try to bully them into not voting for a third party candidate who represents exactly what they believe. So we have the spectacle of Kerry applauding Sharon’s policy of assassinating Palestinian leaders (never mind that the policy will certainly be paid for in American blood in Iraq), a man who has yet to suggest how we could exit from Iraq, a man who so evidently disrespects the people of Iraq that it has not yet occurred to him that the solution, in Iraq, is to return Iraq to the Iraqis – we have this man, and we, Lefties all, are supposed to queue up to vote for him.
Kerry seems to have quickly jettisoned the Democrat persona he was forced to bear against Howard Dean, and arrayed himself as a Daschle moderate. Daschle’s strategy is to stand very firmly against privatizing Social Security, unless it is done under a Democratic administration. That is about it, in terms of principle and policy, the height and breadth of the Democratic commitment to anything like justice. Consequently, the Dems lose and lose elections. And they cling ever more tightly to their strategy. They do like to indulge in a rhetoric of indignation, but their acts breathe the corrupt air of complete submission. How could they not? These people go to the same country clubs as the Bush people, employ the same DC wonks, play the same trivial games of gotcha. It is painful to see how Kerry’s sex change of a campaign is being coddled on the left side. Very painful. Kerry needed Howard Dean, in the same way the Grandmother, in ‘A Good Man is Hard to Find,” needed the Misfit: ‘She would have been a good woman,” said the Misfit, “if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”
So: Here is one given: the lack of any real opposition to Bush (and supposing, as I am beginning to, that he wins the presidential election, his upcoming victory becoming more and more evident over the next couple of months). And here is an event: the June 30th “handover”. What scenarios can we spin out of that?
The strong signal this week is the ‘appointment’ of Chalabi’s nephew, Salam to head the prosecutorial team against Saddam Hussein. Our December combinations were way too hasty about the trial, and very wrong about the modification of the Bush policy of pushing an autocracy on the Latin American model on Iraq. As has been well publicized, the U.S. has supplied Chalabi and his death squad with all of the records of Saddam Hussein’s secret police. Trials are well known instruments for legitimating the usurpation of power. Until recently, LI thought that the Chalabi plan was never going to come off – that the CPA itself, as well as the White House, was too riven by doubts about Chalabi to unite behind him. But things are beginning to take on that familiar, Rumsfeldian cast. Rumsfeld likes nothing better than a fait accompli. The apparent bumbling of the question, who are we turning Iraq over to? – dodged by both Bremer and Bush – might not really be bumbling at all. The full effect of the fait accompli is wrung out of an initial period of uncertainty. This has all the hallmarks of the classic Rumsfeldian M.O. Given the nonexistent state of the opposition to Bush, it is hard to imagine the anointing of Chalabi – as head of some puppet organization – will provoke an outcry among the Dems. His appointment, of course, will be conditioned by just that reference to “limited sovereignty.” Surely, the reasoning will go, Chalabi will not be able to do too much harm, given the limited extent of his power.
If Chalabi is given executive power in Iraq by the Americans, the combinations become very interesting.
On the one hand – Chalabi has been wooing Sistani intensely. On the other hand, Sistani knows that his own legitimacy could be endangered by embracing a man so disliked by Iraqis that in the admittedly imperfect ORI poll conducted in February, Chalabi was the most distrusted politician in Iraq – ranking well over Saddam Hussein himself.
Our guess is that if the Rumsfeldians put their little Mussolini in play, there will be: minimal opposition in this country; and fear and loathing in an Iraq squeezed between the bullying ur-Saddamist remnant and the Americans. Chalabi is no doubt combing the secret police files for things he can hold over Sistani or his associates. No doubt, he will find something. But we wonder if it will really count. So far, Chalabi has demonstrated a masterly understanding of Americans. But he seems genuinely puzzled by Iraqis.
The last time we played the combinations, we were more optimistic. We believed that the CPA’s battle with the Resistance would make the June 30th handover more important than the CPA knew. Imagine the CPA as Wiley the Coyote, and the June 30th date as a big black circle he’d painted on a rock, in the likeness of a railroad tunnel. Image Wiley hearing a whistle sound, and looking at his work in puzzlement, and then being run over by a train that comes through it. This, we thought, loomed as a real possibility, There is a budding civil society in Iraq. We know vaguely of its outline through the imperfect polls and the dumb sociology of newspaper and magazine articles, with their insistence on interviews with the man in the street. This is the movement that the Bush people will have to oppress if they are going to complete their dream of Iraq. Chalabi is the perfect instrument to do the Bush’s dirty work here. To avert that, LI’s hope is that those who were prepared to do organizational work for Kerry desert the sorry man, and organize for a long term anti-war campaign. Because this is going to be a very long and ugly war.
PS -- for a more optimistic view of the 'new' policy in Iraq, read David Ignatius' column in today's WP. LI once interviewed Ignatius, and came away with a very favorable impression. The man worked as a correspondent in Lebanon through the eighties, and has a pretty clear grasp of Middle Eastern reality, unlike his WP op ed colleagues.
On December 14 of last year, after the capture of Saddam, LI “played the combinations”. That is, we looked at the effects that could ensue from the capture as combinations of possible worlds, as Leibnitz might have put it.
This is what we said:
“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 Shiite 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 don’t realize that the conservative mullahs are, ideologically, their best friends. We think the clerical Shia 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.
Montesquieu, in the Considerations, makes a very shrewd remark: Ce qui gate presque toutes les affaires, c’est qu’ordinairement ceux qui les entreprennent, outre la reussite principale, cherchent encore de certains petits succes particuliers, qui flattent leur amour-propre et les rendent contents d�eux.
(What spoils almost all affairs is that ordinarily, those who undertake them seek, outside of the principle goal, certain small particular successes, which flatter their amour-propre and make them satisfied with themselves).
This is the history of the last six months of the occupation of Iraq.”
Time, now, to play the combinations again with the upcoming June 30 handover of power to the Iraqis. First, though, we should recognize that the handover is a complete sham. Iraq will have “limited sovereignty,” as the Bush people put it this morning in the NYT, meaning the new government will neither be able to make laws, nor have any control whatsoever over American forces operating in their own territory. If its legs are made of cloth, there’s a hole in the back for a hand, and its jaws are operated by moving your fingers, it is properly a puppet.
The Bush policy, which has consistently been a mad real life version of what the King's Counselors advice in the Anderson tale of the King and the Invisible Clothes, will be to stridently insist that the puppet is a man. Although it will also draw a wink wink advantage from the puppet being a puppet.
In order to understand the context of the handover, one has to draw the major lesson of this long, terrible two week stretch: – Bush faces practically no domestic opposition. This has truly shocked LI. Kerry’s campaign is justly wounded, perhaps fatally, by the incompetence, wretchedness, and cynicism of the candidate during the last month. Kerry has broadcast, in pretty clear terms, the following message to the voters: under President Kerry, the best we can hope for is the dispatch of even more American troops to be killed in Iraq. To sweeten the thought, he does want to put a UNESCO sticker on every green helmet. Shall we put our hands in the air now, ladies and gents?
If that is an opposition, I say to hell with it. LI, the perpetual naïf, has been stunned that Kerry’s mind meld with Joe Lieberman has not evoked a whimper even from the supposedly independent left side. The Atrioses and the American Prospects don’t care what Kerry says – they simply want him to win. It is a replay of the far fetched scenario of Gore’s campaign – diss your most likely voters, and then try to bully them into not voting for a third party candidate who represents exactly what they believe. So we have the spectacle of Kerry applauding Sharon’s policy of assassinating Palestinian leaders (never mind that the policy will certainly be paid for in American blood in Iraq), a man who has yet to suggest how we could exit from Iraq, a man who so evidently disrespects the people of Iraq that it has not yet occurred to him that the solution, in Iraq, is to return Iraq to the Iraqis – we have this man, and we, Lefties all, are supposed to queue up to vote for him.
Kerry seems to have quickly jettisoned the Democrat persona he was forced to bear against Howard Dean, and arrayed himself as a Daschle moderate. Daschle’s strategy is to stand very firmly against privatizing Social Security, unless it is done under a Democratic administration. That is about it, in terms of principle and policy, the height and breadth of the Democratic commitment to anything like justice. Consequently, the Dems lose and lose elections. And they cling ever more tightly to their strategy. They do like to indulge in a rhetoric of indignation, but their acts breathe the corrupt air of complete submission. How could they not? These people go to the same country clubs as the Bush people, employ the same DC wonks, play the same trivial games of gotcha. It is painful to see how Kerry’s sex change of a campaign is being coddled on the left side. Very painful. Kerry needed Howard Dean, in the same way the Grandmother, in ‘A Good Man is Hard to Find,” needed the Misfit: ‘She would have been a good woman,” said the Misfit, “if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”
So: Here is one given: the lack of any real opposition to Bush (and supposing, as I am beginning to, that he wins the presidential election, his upcoming victory becoming more and more evident over the next couple of months). And here is an event: the June 30th “handover”. What scenarios can we spin out of that?
The strong signal this week is the ‘appointment’ of Chalabi’s nephew, Salam to head the prosecutorial team against Saddam Hussein. Our December combinations were way too hasty about the trial, and very wrong about the modification of the Bush policy of pushing an autocracy on the Latin American model on Iraq. As has been well publicized, the U.S. has supplied Chalabi and his death squad with all of the records of Saddam Hussein’s secret police. Trials are well known instruments for legitimating the usurpation of power. Until recently, LI thought that the Chalabi plan was never going to come off – that the CPA itself, as well as the White House, was too riven by doubts about Chalabi to unite behind him. But things are beginning to take on that familiar, Rumsfeldian cast. Rumsfeld likes nothing better than a fait accompli. The apparent bumbling of the question, who are we turning Iraq over to? – dodged by both Bremer and Bush – might not really be bumbling at all. The full effect of the fait accompli is wrung out of an initial period of uncertainty. This has all the hallmarks of the classic Rumsfeldian M.O. Given the nonexistent state of the opposition to Bush, it is hard to imagine the anointing of Chalabi – as head of some puppet organization – will provoke an outcry among the Dems. His appointment, of course, will be conditioned by just that reference to “limited sovereignty.” Surely, the reasoning will go, Chalabi will not be able to do too much harm, given the limited extent of his power.
If Chalabi is given executive power in Iraq by the Americans, the combinations become very interesting.
On the one hand – Chalabi has been wooing Sistani intensely. On the other hand, Sistani knows that his own legitimacy could be endangered by embracing a man so disliked by Iraqis that in the admittedly imperfect ORI poll conducted in February, Chalabi was the most distrusted politician in Iraq – ranking well over Saddam Hussein himself.
Our guess is that if the Rumsfeldians put their little Mussolini in play, there will be: minimal opposition in this country; and fear and loathing in an Iraq squeezed between the bullying ur-Saddamist remnant and the Americans. Chalabi is no doubt combing the secret police files for things he can hold over Sistani or his associates. No doubt, he will find something. But we wonder if it will really count. So far, Chalabi has demonstrated a masterly understanding of Americans. But he seems genuinely puzzled by Iraqis.
The last time we played the combinations, we were more optimistic. We believed that the CPA’s battle with the Resistance would make the June 30th handover more important than the CPA knew. Imagine the CPA as Wiley the Coyote, and the June 30th date as a big black circle he’d painted on a rock, in the likeness of a railroad tunnel. Image Wiley hearing a whistle sound, and looking at his work in puzzlement, and then being run over by a train that comes through it. This, we thought, loomed as a real possibility, There is a budding civil society in Iraq. We know vaguely of its outline through the imperfect polls and the dumb sociology of newspaper and magazine articles, with their insistence on interviews with the man in the street. This is the movement that the Bush people will have to oppress if they are going to complete their dream of Iraq. Chalabi is the perfect instrument to do the Bush’s dirty work here. To avert that, LI’s hope is that those who were prepared to do organizational work for Kerry desert the sorry man, and organize for a long term anti-war campaign. Because this is going to be a very long and ugly war.
PS -- for a more optimistic view of the 'new' policy in Iraq, read David Ignatius' column in today's WP. LI once interviewed Ignatius, and came away with a very favorable impression. The man worked as a correspondent in Lebanon through the eighties, and has a pretty clear grasp of Middle Eastern reality, unlike his WP op ed colleagues.
Thursday, April 22, 2004
Bollettino
Two sites to go to today.
One is Juan Cole’s excellent analysis of the current state of play in the Pentagon operation to make Chalabi our Somoza in Iraq. Cole encountered point man for Chalabi -- Perle -- at a Senate hearing, yesterday. As Cole points out, that Perle was testifying there at all is bizarre, since Perle's ignorance of Iraqi culture -- and Middle Eastern culture in general -- should surely bar him from testifying in a forum meant for expert testimony.
Yesterday, on NPR, they interviewed the man’s nephew, Salam, who is to be, in a bizarre and self-discrediting move, the official prosecutor of Saddam, and not one question was asked about his background. Also, LI was heartened to read Cole’s note because Cole takes the same position LI took since last year about Sisteni’s insistence on elections, and why they should have been held by now.
Second, the IWPR site publishes an excellent battlefield report on Falluja from an Iraqi perspective.
We particularly liked the visit to the sniper -- or the kidnapping to visit the sniper. The whole scene is like something from one hundred fifty years ago, in the Caucasus:
“In front of him, Aqil [one of the journalists] sees a man dressed in loose pyjama pants and a button-down shirt. Only his eyes are visible through his yishmagh.
Beside him is propped a Dragunov, a Russian-made sniper rifle issued only to the elite of the Iraqi military. Everything about the man, the room, and his weapon is spotlessly clean.
In a slow, deep voice, Abu Walid told Aqil that he had been brought here to "let American forces know about our power".
The American casualty figures – 70 soldiers killed throughout Iraq since April – are a lie, he says, "I myself killed maybe 100 soldiers. Every day we destroy at least three vehicles, just in the gateway to Fallujah, in Gurma. Americans are liars."
There is no ideological ax ground in the reportage, by the way. It is simply a narrative from a perspective that has been ridiculously neglected in the past couple of weeks.
Two sites to go to today.
One is Juan Cole’s excellent analysis of the current state of play in the Pentagon operation to make Chalabi our Somoza in Iraq. Cole encountered point man for Chalabi -- Perle -- at a Senate hearing, yesterday. As Cole points out, that Perle was testifying there at all is bizarre, since Perle's ignorance of Iraqi culture -- and Middle Eastern culture in general -- should surely bar him from testifying in a forum meant for expert testimony.
Yesterday, on NPR, they interviewed the man’s nephew, Salam, who is to be, in a bizarre and self-discrediting move, the official prosecutor of Saddam, and not one question was asked about his background. Also, LI was heartened to read Cole’s note because Cole takes the same position LI took since last year about Sisteni’s insistence on elections, and why they should have been held by now.
Second, the IWPR site publishes an excellent battlefield report on Falluja from an Iraqi perspective.
We particularly liked the visit to the sniper -- or the kidnapping to visit the sniper. The whole scene is like something from one hundred fifty years ago, in the Caucasus:
“In front of him, Aqil [one of the journalists] sees a man dressed in loose pyjama pants and a button-down shirt. Only his eyes are visible through his yishmagh.
Beside him is propped a Dragunov, a Russian-made sniper rifle issued only to the elite of the Iraqi military. Everything about the man, the room, and his weapon is spotlessly clean.
In a slow, deep voice, Abu Walid told Aqil that he had been brought here to "let American forces know about our power".
The American casualty figures – 70 soldiers killed throughout Iraq since April – are a lie, he says, "I myself killed maybe 100 soldiers. Every day we destroy at least three vehicles, just in the gateway to Fallujah, in Gurma. Americans are liars."
There is no ideological ax ground in the reportage, by the way. It is simply a narrative from a perspective that has been ridiculously neglected in the past couple of weeks.
Tuesday, April 20, 2004
Bollettino
Charming little site, crammed with old, rare texts and illustrations. I got this little anecdote from Taine’s The Life and Philosophical opinions of a cat. I thought, somehow, it applied to Iraq. Since we are all applying analogies to that happy country nowadays, I thought I’d apply one of my own. Although I’m still not sure what it means.
.
“My paws having become solid, I ventured out into the world and soon became fast friends with a goose, an estimable beast, for she had a warm belly. I loved to crush myself under it , and while I was doing so, its philosophic discourses educated me. She said that the fore-court was a republic of allies, and that the most industrious, man, had been chosen for the leader, while even the dogs, although turbulent, were our faithful guards. I cried with tenderness under the belly of my good friend.
One morning the cook approached us with a benevolent air, stuck out her hand, and exhibited a whole handful of grain. The goose stuck out its neck, which the cook proceeded to grab, grabbing hold at the same time of a big knife. My uncle, an alert philosopher, hurried to the scene and commenced to exhort the goose, who was carrying on most indecorously: ‘dear sister,’ he said, the farmer, after having eaten your flesh, will be that much smarter and will watch that much better over our well being; and the dogs, being nourished on your bones, will be that much more capable of defending us. Under this torrent of words, the goose fell silent, for its head was totally cut off, and a sort of red pipe stuck out of the neck, which bled. My unclue hurried to the head and carried it away quickly; for me, a little taken aback, I approached the puddle of blood. Without reflecting, I dipped my tongue in it It was good blood, and I hurried to the kitchen to see if I could find any more.
“Mes pattes étant devenues solides, je sortis et fis bientôt amitié avec une oie, bête estimable, car elle avait le ventre tiède ; je me blotissais dessous, et pendant ce temps ses discours philosophiques me formaient. Elle disait que la basse-cour était une république d’alliés ; que le plus industrieux, l’homme, avait été choisi pour chef, et que les chiens, quoique turbulents, étaient nos gardiens. Je pleurais d’attendrissement sous le ventre de ma bonne amie
Un matin la cuisinière approcha d’un air bonasse, montrant dans la main une poignée d’orge. L’oie tendit le cou, que la cuisinière empoigna, tirant un grand couteau. Mon oncle, philosophe alerte, accourut et commença à exhorter l’oie, qui poussait des cris inconvenants : "Chère soeur, disait-il, le fermier, ayant mangé votre chair, aura l’intelligence plus nette et veillera mieux notre bien-être ; et les chiens, s’étant nourris de vos os, seront plus capables de vous défendre." Là-dessus l’oie se tut, car sa tête était coupée, et une sorte de tuyau rouge s’avança hors du cou qui saignait. Mon oncle courut à la tête et l’emporta prestement ; pour moi, un peu effarouché, j’approchai de la mare de sang, et sans réfléchir, j’y trempai ma langue ; ce sang était bien bon, et j’allai à la cuisine pour voir si je n’en aurais pas davantage.’
Charming little site, crammed with old, rare texts and illustrations. I got this little anecdote from Taine’s The Life and Philosophical opinions of a cat. I thought, somehow, it applied to Iraq. Since we are all applying analogies to that happy country nowadays, I thought I’d apply one of my own. Although I’m still not sure what it means.
.
“My paws having become solid, I ventured out into the world and soon became fast friends with a goose, an estimable beast, for she had a warm belly. I loved to crush myself under it , and while I was doing so, its philosophic discourses educated me. She said that the fore-court was a republic of allies, and that the most industrious, man, had been chosen for the leader, while even the dogs, although turbulent, were our faithful guards. I cried with tenderness under the belly of my good friend.
One morning the cook approached us with a benevolent air, stuck out her hand, and exhibited a whole handful of grain. The goose stuck out its neck, which the cook proceeded to grab, grabbing hold at the same time of a big knife. My uncle, an alert philosopher, hurried to the scene and commenced to exhort the goose, who was carrying on most indecorously: ‘dear sister,’ he said, the farmer, after having eaten your flesh, will be that much smarter and will watch that much better over our well being; and the dogs, being nourished on your bones, will be that much more capable of defending us. Under this torrent of words, the goose fell silent, for its head was totally cut off, and a sort of red pipe stuck out of the neck, which bled. My unclue hurried to the head and carried it away quickly; for me, a little taken aback, I approached the puddle of blood. Without reflecting, I dipped my tongue in it It was good blood, and I hurried to the kitchen to see if I could find any more.
“Mes pattes étant devenues solides, je sortis et fis bientôt amitié avec une oie, bête estimable, car elle avait le ventre tiède ; je me blotissais dessous, et pendant ce temps ses discours philosophiques me formaient. Elle disait que la basse-cour était une république d’alliés ; que le plus industrieux, l’homme, avait été choisi pour chef, et que les chiens, quoique turbulents, étaient nos gardiens. Je pleurais d’attendrissement sous le ventre de ma bonne amie
Un matin la cuisinière approcha d’un air bonasse, montrant dans la main une poignée d’orge. L’oie tendit le cou, que la cuisinière empoigna, tirant un grand couteau. Mon oncle, philosophe alerte, accourut et commença à exhorter l’oie, qui poussait des cris inconvenants : "Chère soeur, disait-il, le fermier, ayant mangé votre chair, aura l’intelligence plus nette et veillera mieux notre bien-être ; et les chiens, s’étant nourris de vos os, seront plus capables de vous défendre." Là-dessus l’oie se tut, car sa tête était coupée, et une sorte de tuyau rouge s’avança hors du cou qui saignait. Mon oncle courut à la tête et l’emporta prestement ; pour moi, un peu effarouché, j’approchai de la mare de sang, et sans réfléchir, j’y trempai ma langue ; ce sang était bien bon, et j’allai à la cuisine pour voir si je n’en aurais pas davantage.’
Bollettino
LI’s friend, R., recently got a job telemarketing a medical software designed to accelerate patientflow to various medical facilities in the Southwest. You can imagine how fun this is. The pay was great too – seven bucks per. Since R. had recently totaled his car, while experiencing an extensive stint of unemployment, he had to peddle to reach his well appointed office – which was a computer on the same table as the community fax machine, and a phone with a cord that didn’t quite reach all the way to his desk (meaning he had to leave the phone on the floor and wheel back in his chair and bend over and press the buttons on the phone to make the calls from the numbers listed on the Excel spread sheets with those same numbers listed before him). Since the bike ride was seven miles – downhill getting there, uphill getting back, R. would get tired going home, so he was always looking for shortcuts. Last Friday, he decided he would peddle to the nearest bus stop and go on the bus to the center of Austin, and from thence he’d peddle home, stopping on the way for a tall one. He took several buses that all ended up not going to the center of Austin, but that gave him much bus experience. So, he told me, “I’m sitting there and a guy comes in and he has a reddish, rather squashed face under a filthy gimme cap, and the bus is crowded. The squashed face guy sits down and looks across at this kid, a boy wearing a soft convenience store robbery type cap slouched in his seat in the inimitably insolent slouch of a teenage boy, and in a loud voice he says, how are you today kid? The kid doesn’t respond, so he says, that bad, eh? Then he looks around for people who might want to converse with him. Seeing nobody up to the task, he decided to utter loud aphorisms that we could all learn from, like: what goes around comes around; and (more obscurely) the terminator terminated.
“After a while, he got off the bus – although one had the impression that he got off at some randomly selected stop. He didn’t look like a man who had business to attend to. The man I was sitting next to kept watching him in fascination, and when he got off the bus he leaned forward and said to the large black man with the gold chain around his thick neck who was sitting there in front of us, did you hear that? The black man said, I heard it. The man said, he said, the terminator terminated. The black man said, I don’t believe that man was packing.”
R. told me this to impress me that the juice of life and the glory of literature was on the bus. He said, “I wouldn’t have been surprised if Van Gogh’s ear had raced down the aisle of that bus at that very moment, like a scared mouse. If you are looking for the very epicenter of American abjection, you will find it on the bus.”
I said, ‘am I looking for the very epicenter of American abjection? I thought I was writing a crime novel.”
These things have reminded LI of two recent reading experiences. Which we will get into in the next post.
LI’s friend, R., recently got a job telemarketing a medical software designed to accelerate patientflow to various medical facilities in the Southwest. You can imagine how fun this is. The pay was great too – seven bucks per. Since R. had recently totaled his car, while experiencing an extensive stint of unemployment, he had to peddle to reach his well appointed office – which was a computer on the same table as the community fax machine, and a phone with a cord that didn’t quite reach all the way to his desk (meaning he had to leave the phone on the floor and wheel back in his chair and bend over and press the buttons on the phone to make the calls from the numbers listed on the Excel spread sheets with those same numbers listed before him). Since the bike ride was seven miles – downhill getting there, uphill getting back, R. would get tired going home, so he was always looking for shortcuts. Last Friday, he decided he would peddle to the nearest bus stop and go on the bus to the center of Austin, and from thence he’d peddle home, stopping on the way for a tall one. He took several buses that all ended up not going to the center of Austin, but that gave him much bus experience. So, he told me, “I’m sitting there and a guy comes in and he has a reddish, rather squashed face under a filthy gimme cap, and the bus is crowded. The squashed face guy sits down and looks across at this kid, a boy wearing a soft convenience store robbery type cap slouched in his seat in the inimitably insolent slouch of a teenage boy, and in a loud voice he says, how are you today kid? The kid doesn’t respond, so he says, that bad, eh? Then he looks around for people who might want to converse with him. Seeing nobody up to the task, he decided to utter loud aphorisms that we could all learn from, like: what goes around comes around; and (more obscurely) the terminator terminated.
“After a while, he got off the bus – although one had the impression that he got off at some randomly selected stop. He didn’t look like a man who had business to attend to. The man I was sitting next to kept watching him in fascination, and when he got off the bus he leaned forward and said to the large black man with the gold chain around his thick neck who was sitting there in front of us, did you hear that? The black man said, I heard it. The man said, he said, the terminator terminated. The black man said, I don’t believe that man was packing.”
R. told me this to impress me that the juice of life and the glory of literature was on the bus. He said, “I wouldn’t have been surprised if Van Gogh’s ear had raced down the aisle of that bus at that very moment, like a scared mouse. If you are looking for the very epicenter of American abjection, you will find it on the bus.”
I said, ‘am I looking for the very epicenter of American abjection? I thought I was writing a crime novel.”
These things have reminded LI of two recent reading experiences. Which we will get into in the next post.
Saturday, April 17, 2004
Bollettino
Part II
LI should have posted a few more links to Danielle Allen in our last post. The London Review of her book on punishment in Athens is particularly rich. Reviewers must tread a path between overreach and mere description. This reviewer maxes out on over-reach, barely getting to Allen’s book at all. Still, it is full of interesting explanations of the Athenian system of punishment -- suggesting, bizarrely, that Athens was less like Jefferson's Virginia than like Mao's China.
Allen's book – The World Of Prometheus – was published by Princeton University Press, which has an excellent policy of publishing chapters from their books on the web. Go here to the first chapter of Allen’s book. We love this intro paragraph:
“One of the most important but least acknowledged features of the modern world is that individuals no longer punish for themselves. By this I do not suggest, as so many have, that over time a dark Dionysiac and ancient age of mad blood vengeance has ceded to an era of rational, legally based state punishment and Apolline brightness. I refer rather to the quite specific fact that the modern age has produced the public prosecutor to replace the lay prosecutor as the person responsible for seeing that wrongdoing is dealt with. In the ancient world the victims of wrongs had to enter into judicial processes in order to prosecute their own cases. The modern age has produced the state representative who acts on behalf of wronged individuals and who is supposed to prosecute impartially, disinterestedly, and dispassionately. The invention of the public prosecutor is a small historical detail--small enough to slip out of most history books--but its consequences have been great and systematic.”
Now, to get back to Allen’s essay.
According to Allen, there is a structural problem in any democracy. While democratic government claims to represent all of the people, governance necessarily involves actions which are to the advantage of some, and to the disadvantage of other, people. The task of governance is to assure the latter group that its specific disadvantages will be so assimilated into greater long term advantages that its sacrifices will not have been in vain. This sets the problem of sacrifice before the disadvantaged group.
For the last hundred and fifty years, sacrifice has been a central anthropological theme, since it seems to indicate that the political economy existed even among peoples with no institutionalized market or state. In one of the most cited and moving passages in Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of the Enlightenment, sacrifice is linked both to the Freudian notion of sublimation and the Marxist problem of how the exploited can be complicit in their own exploitation. For A and H., the image of sacrifice – and the implacable logic that makes every particular sacrifice insufficient – can be glossed from that passage in the Odyssey in which Odysseus is lashed to the mast in order to hear the song of the sirens. The song of the sirens, “who know all things that have happened on earth,” embodies the longing for the irretrievable – for what has been surrended in the very constitution of time, which divides itself, for the subject, into the past, present and future. The economy of sacrifice, according to this scenario, pervades our sense of the continuity of the self in time. This is why mourning is that most peculiar of pains – the pain of remembered pleasure. Mourning is the mode through which the sacrificial element in time (conceived as the total connection of the self with itself) is, to use the old Hegelian term, sublated – that is, this is how loss is preserved. A. and H. wrote their book in 1947, as mourners at Europe's funeral. These keeners at the grave have sharp eyes. Here is how they describe the crucial scene in which the ship passes the Sirens:
Its [Civilization’s] way was that of obedience and work, over which shines sensual fulfillment as a semblence, as disenfranchised beauty. Odysseus’ thought, hostile alike to his own death and his own happiness, knows this. He knows only two possibilities of escape. One he prescribes to the sailors. He has them stop their ears with wax; they must row forward using their bodily strength. He who wishes to survive must not be susceptible to the temptation of the irrevocable; he can endure it only by not being able to hear it. Society takes care of that. The workers, fresh and concentrated, must look only forward and leave what lies by the side. The compulsion that leads to diversion from the task must be grimly sublimated in the progressive order of striving. It is in this way they become practical. Odysseus, as the Master who has others work for him, chooses the other possibility. He does listen, but bound, impotently, to the mast. The greater the seductive power of the song, the stronger he is bound – in the same way, since, the bourgeois man also stubbornly avoids his happiness.”
(LI’s translation,)
We think Adorno and Horkheimer’s text is (perhaps indirectly) one of those in the background of Allen’s reading. It helps tremendously that, as a classical scholar, Allen is very aware of the civic construction of sacrifice. Ellison’s awareness was less scholarly, and more dramatic.
Remember, from our last post, that the issue of sacrifice rises to the surface of the text in the Invisible Man’s confrontation with Hambro, the spokesman for the brotherhood. Hambro has instructed the I.M. that the party is sacrificing action in Harlem for other actions. The I.M. questions both the interest of the decisionmakers who have ordered this sacrifice, and the very nature of sacrifice itself:
“I.M. articulates one last criterion for determining the legitimacy of particular sacrifices: sacrifice becomes illegitimate when one person or group regularly sacrifices for the rest. Instead, sacrifices must be reciprocated. The weak have been incorporated into the democratic polity only when they are in an equal position to request sacrifice from others…”
This, of course, begs the question of how one defines the weak. Isn’t the demand for equality of sacrifice really the demand for transcending weakness itself? And is that possible? If democratic governance really and necessarily proceeds through acts which always comport some sacrifice by some group, then some group must, in that instance, be the weak. But it seems to us that governance, if it is rational and not arbitrary – if it is, in other words, the concrete project of the governors – is never going to wholly make up to the weak specified by the previous sacrifice with the next one. Moreover, real weakness is not re-defined in every instance of sacrifice, but by the skew evidenced over a series of sacrifices. Where does this skew emerge from? It emerges from the perceptions and biases of the Grundherr, as Adorno and H. call Odysseus.
In order to restore some necessary element of the accidental to the logic of sacrifice, then, what must be done? The answer is written in the whole fabric of the left: resistance.
We’ve gone a long way from Iraq, but we can now apply some of our musings about sacrifice to the paradox of occupation in Iraq: the CPA, in order to really “install” democracy in Iraq, must create its own resistance. Or, more specifically, the logic for its own resistance. Only a real resistance will supplant the armed resistance that crystallized around a Ba’athist remnant, and is now spreading to other parts of Iraqi society. The CPA has, however, no notion of this whatsoever. They operate in high denial mode, claiming that the only sacrifices that are being made burden the Americans. The claim to sacrifice is the claim to weakness – insofar as one has made the sacrifice. But if the pattern of sacrifice shows that those who claim this weakness are actually the powerful – if it shows that their sacrifices are more in the nature of investments, from which they seek a return, while the sacrifices of others are in the nature of permanent losses – we have a situation ripe for the kind of bad faith that characterizes all authoritarian societies, in which the strong engross the claims of weakness, using them to justify more and more intense acts of oppression against the weak. It is a bad faith that arises, first, in the discourse, and then creeps into power. The newspapers cry for the policemen, and the policemen eventually answer the cry – by shutting down newspapers.
Is there a way out of this impasse?
Part II
LI should have posted a few more links to Danielle Allen in our last post. The London Review of her book on punishment in Athens is particularly rich. Reviewers must tread a path between overreach and mere description. This reviewer maxes out on over-reach, barely getting to Allen’s book at all. Still, it is full of interesting explanations of the Athenian system of punishment -- suggesting, bizarrely, that Athens was less like Jefferson's Virginia than like Mao's China.
Allen's book – The World Of Prometheus – was published by Princeton University Press, which has an excellent policy of publishing chapters from their books on the web. Go here to the first chapter of Allen’s book. We love this intro paragraph:
“One of the most important but least acknowledged features of the modern world is that individuals no longer punish for themselves. By this I do not suggest, as so many have, that over time a dark Dionysiac and ancient age of mad blood vengeance has ceded to an era of rational, legally based state punishment and Apolline brightness. I refer rather to the quite specific fact that the modern age has produced the public prosecutor to replace the lay prosecutor as the person responsible for seeing that wrongdoing is dealt with. In the ancient world the victims of wrongs had to enter into judicial processes in order to prosecute their own cases. The modern age has produced the state representative who acts on behalf of wronged individuals and who is supposed to prosecute impartially, disinterestedly, and dispassionately. The invention of the public prosecutor is a small historical detail--small enough to slip out of most history books--but its consequences have been great and systematic.”
Now, to get back to Allen’s essay.
According to Allen, there is a structural problem in any democracy. While democratic government claims to represent all of the people, governance necessarily involves actions which are to the advantage of some, and to the disadvantage of other, people. The task of governance is to assure the latter group that its specific disadvantages will be so assimilated into greater long term advantages that its sacrifices will not have been in vain. This sets the problem of sacrifice before the disadvantaged group.
For the last hundred and fifty years, sacrifice has been a central anthropological theme, since it seems to indicate that the political economy existed even among peoples with no institutionalized market or state. In one of the most cited and moving passages in Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of the Enlightenment, sacrifice is linked both to the Freudian notion of sublimation and the Marxist problem of how the exploited can be complicit in their own exploitation. For A and H., the image of sacrifice – and the implacable logic that makes every particular sacrifice insufficient – can be glossed from that passage in the Odyssey in which Odysseus is lashed to the mast in order to hear the song of the sirens. The song of the sirens, “who know all things that have happened on earth,” embodies the longing for the irretrievable – for what has been surrended in the very constitution of time, which divides itself, for the subject, into the past, present and future. The economy of sacrifice, according to this scenario, pervades our sense of the continuity of the self in time. This is why mourning is that most peculiar of pains – the pain of remembered pleasure. Mourning is the mode through which the sacrificial element in time (conceived as the total connection of the self with itself) is, to use the old Hegelian term, sublated – that is, this is how loss is preserved. A. and H. wrote their book in 1947, as mourners at Europe's funeral. These keeners at the grave have sharp eyes. Here is how they describe the crucial scene in which the ship passes the Sirens:
Its [Civilization’s] way was that of obedience and work, over which shines sensual fulfillment as a semblence, as disenfranchised beauty. Odysseus’ thought, hostile alike to his own death and his own happiness, knows this. He knows only two possibilities of escape. One he prescribes to the sailors. He has them stop their ears with wax; they must row forward using their bodily strength. He who wishes to survive must not be susceptible to the temptation of the irrevocable; he can endure it only by not being able to hear it. Society takes care of that. The workers, fresh and concentrated, must look only forward and leave what lies by the side. The compulsion that leads to diversion from the task must be grimly sublimated in the progressive order of striving. It is in this way they become practical. Odysseus, as the Master who has others work for him, chooses the other possibility. He does listen, but bound, impotently, to the mast. The greater the seductive power of the song, the stronger he is bound – in the same way, since, the bourgeois man also stubbornly avoids his happiness.”
(LI’s translation,)
We think Adorno and Horkheimer’s text is (perhaps indirectly) one of those in the background of Allen’s reading. It helps tremendously that, as a classical scholar, Allen is very aware of the civic construction of sacrifice. Ellison’s awareness was less scholarly, and more dramatic.
Remember, from our last post, that the issue of sacrifice rises to the surface of the text in the Invisible Man’s confrontation with Hambro, the spokesman for the brotherhood. Hambro has instructed the I.M. that the party is sacrificing action in Harlem for other actions. The I.M. questions both the interest of the decisionmakers who have ordered this sacrifice, and the very nature of sacrifice itself:
“I.M. articulates one last criterion for determining the legitimacy of particular sacrifices: sacrifice becomes illegitimate when one person or group regularly sacrifices for the rest. Instead, sacrifices must be reciprocated. The weak have been incorporated into the democratic polity only when they are in an equal position to request sacrifice from others…”
This, of course, begs the question of how one defines the weak. Isn’t the demand for equality of sacrifice really the demand for transcending weakness itself? And is that possible? If democratic governance really and necessarily proceeds through acts which always comport some sacrifice by some group, then some group must, in that instance, be the weak. But it seems to us that governance, if it is rational and not arbitrary – if it is, in other words, the concrete project of the governors – is never going to wholly make up to the weak specified by the previous sacrifice with the next one. Moreover, real weakness is not re-defined in every instance of sacrifice, but by the skew evidenced over a series of sacrifices. Where does this skew emerge from? It emerges from the perceptions and biases of the Grundherr, as Adorno and H. call Odysseus.
In order to restore some necessary element of the accidental to the logic of sacrifice, then, what must be done? The answer is written in the whole fabric of the left: resistance.
We’ve gone a long way from Iraq, but we can now apply some of our musings about sacrifice to the paradox of occupation in Iraq: the CPA, in order to really “install” democracy in Iraq, must create its own resistance. Or, more specifically, the logic for its own resistance. Only a real resistance will supplant the armed resistance that crystallized around a Ba’athist remnant, and is now spreading to other parts of Iraqi society. The CPA has, however, no notion of this whatsoever. They operate in high denial mode, claiming that the only sacrifices that are being made burden the Americans. The claim to sacrifice is the claim to weakness – insofar as one has made the sacrifice. But if the pattern of sacrifice shows that those who claim this weakness are actually the powerful – if it shows that their sacrifices are more in the nature of investments, from which they seek a return, while the sacrifices of others are in the nature of permanent losses – we have a situation ripe for the kind of bad faith that characterizes all authoritarian societies, in which the strong engross the claims of weakness, using them to justify more and more intense acts of oppression against the weak. It is a bad faith that arises, first, in the discourse, and then creeps into power. The newspapers cry for the policemen, and the policemen eventually answer the cry – by shutting down newspapers.
Is there a way out of this impasse?
Thursday, April 15, 2004
Bollettino
Part I
Danielle Allen is one of those U. of Chicago prof who has swept the MacArthur genius circuit. She is a scholar of classics and of African American literature, a pretty rare and cool combo. LI read her essay on Ralph Ellison in this season’s Raritan with an eye on what is happening in Iraq. The essay, “Ralph Ellison on the Tragicomedy of Citizenship”, speaks to – or is it for? an occupied population – and one occupied by people who claim, by some perpetually unfolding mystery, to speak for the occupied, even as they evacuate the place in the discourse where the occupied could, possibly, have a voice.
But to Allen’s fascinating essay. She begins by pointing out, as all scholars of Ellison have done before her, the key political disagreement between one important critic of the book, Irving Howe, and Ellison himself. Howe objected to the de-politicization of race in the novel -- and what he took to be Ellison's acceding to a liberal and conformist ethos that avoided the politics of race. Allen shrewdly understands that a great book’s critics say things that are already forecast in the book itself – in fact, great novels are prophetic to the extent that they contain characters, asides and symbols that already stage the argument with their future critics. In this case, Allan claims that Ellison’s often stated interest in ritual, especially rituals of humiliation, should serve us as a guide to just that political subtext of the novel that its critics claimed it lacked. Its critics weren’t reading hard enough.
Allen concentrates on three encounters that mark the Invisible Man’s career. The first of them is the famous Battle Royal, which remains in the memory of even the most casual reader of the book. Here’s a brief synopsis.
The narrator’s school speech about humility has won such praise in the community that a white group proposes to give him a scholarship, requiring only that he read the speech to them. He arrives to find the whites surly and drunk. A stripper comes in, and barely makes it through a few moves before she has to escape this crowd. Then a battle is staged between ten black boys who are blindfolded. The Invisible Man is, of course, thrown into the battle too.
This is what Allen says:
“Bloodied and debased, I.M. [Allen’s initials for the narrator] is finally allowed to speak and begins, among yells and laughter, in this context of humiliation, his paen to, of all things, humility. As the context for his speech has been shifted, however, so too his memory has been jolted out of place, for instead of pledging, in accord with his written text, that he will devote himself to ‘social responsibility,’I M resoundingly commits himself to social equality. Ellison writes: ‘the laughter hung in sudden stillness. I opened my eyes, puzzled. Sounds of displeasure filled the room…’Say that slowly, son!” Realizing his mistake, I.M. feels a flutter of fear before retracting his desire for ‘equality’, affirming his commitment to social responsibility, and finding himself rewarded.”
This is the Governing Council’s own situation. The social responsibility we want from the Iraqis shouldn’t encroach on our hierarchical edge over them – shouldn’t, in other words, presume on an equality so radical as to equate an Iraqi death – an invisible thing, something that Iraqis can, of course, mourn in private, but that can’t be allowed to intrude in any gross manner on the American public space – with an American death – a tremendous thing, something that must be revenged to the second and third generation. And the GC, after going through the Battle Royal of affirming every one of Bremer’s wishes, of rubberstamping even their own mock elevation to a power that is only an attenuated form of powerlessness, the power of Roman senators in the era of Caligula, are required, now, to rubberstamp Bremer’s closure of Sadr’s newspaper, and Bremer’s use of a corrupt court’s murder warrant, and the U.S. high command’s destruction of Falluja. This is a long crawl on the belly, and it has obviously hurt some of the Council. Most, mere lechers and bagmen, have proven themselves classically indifferent to everything but their own skins – or, in the case of Chalabi, have used the occasion to float various power-grabbing ideas through a bunch of D.C. proxies (see Jim Hoagland’s op ed piece in the Post yesterday for an especially greasy hint that now would be a good time for the U.S. to officially recognize Chalabi’s militia – a sort of 'bring on the death squads and freedom fighters, boys" to round out Bush's Reagan parody). Others, however, have steered a course between responsibility and abjection.
Well, do you trade a certain number of deaths for being cycled through the upward mobility promised by the system? Certainly that has to be on Iraqi minds. On the one hand, they are watching the U.S reward Israel’s conquests in the West bank, and on the other hand, they are having to endure an occupation that grows out of the U.S. claim that conquest – Saddam’s conquest of Kuwait – is such an ultimate evil that it justifies a decade of war and sanctions, crowned by an invasion. They have to stitch together the consistency here, which is wholly racial – the justice or injustice of a land grab depending on the ethnicity of the land grabber -- just as it is with the Invisible Man.
As Allen points out – with regard to the Invisible Man – humiliation, sacrifice, and acceptance have political aspects:
‘By presenting the I.M’s in terms of such categories as sacrifice, agreement and responsibility, Ellison lays bare how politics structures ordinary life and psychic experience. He names the rituals that give human life its meaning and that undergird our common actions. His writing is an X ray machine that reveals the skeleton of democratic life. The skeleton is made of what Ellison called rituals.”
One doesn’t have to read far, in analyses of the Iraq situation, to find people talking about how the Iraqis feel humiliated by the war, and of the psychological aftereffects of this. But there is an odd silence about the other side of that humiliation: is it such an accident that the Iraqis feel humiliated? Wasn’t humiliation written into the script, one of the great unconscious motives in this war? Didn't we want to humiliate them? Where there is an effect, as any Freudian can tell you, there is unconscious desire. The denial of the U.S. desire to humiliate is part of the greater discursive pattern, in which the Americans present themselves not as representatives of a state with appetites and interests, but rather as radiant spacemen of virtue, riding in on attack helicopters. As long as Americans treat their country as a moral force, rather than as a nation, they will have a debased and juvenilized foreign policy.
More on Allan's essay tomorrow.
Part I
Danielle Allen is one of those U. of Chicago prof who has swept the MacArthur genius circuit. She is a scholar of classics and of African American literature, a pretty rare and cool combo. LI read her essay on Ralph Ellison in this season’s Raritan with an eye on what is happening in Iraq. The essay, “Ralph Ellison on the Tragicomedy of Citizenship”, speaks to – or is it for? an occupied population – and one occupied by people who claim, by some perpetually unfolding mystery, to speak for the occupied, even as they evacuate the place in the discourse where the occupied could, possibly, have a voice.
But to Allen’s fascinating essay. She begins by pointing out, as all scholars of Ellison have done before her, the key political disagreement between one important critic of the book, Irving Howe, and Ellison himself. Howe objected to the de-politicization of race in the novel -- and what he took to be Ellison's acceding to a liberal and conformist ethos that avoided the politics of race. Allen shrewdly understands that a great book’s critics say things that are already forecast in the book itself – in fact, great novels are prophetic to the extent that they contain characters, asides and symbols that already stage the argument with their future critics. In this case, Allan claims that Ellison’s often stated interest in ritual, especially rituals of humiliation, should serve us as a guide to just that political subtext of the novel that its critics claimed it lacked. Its critics weren’t reading hard enough.
Allen concentrates on three encounters that mark the Invisible Man’s career. The first of them is the famous Battle Royal, which remains in the memory of even the most casual reader of the book. Here’s a brief synopsis.
The narrator’s school speech about humility has won such praise in the community that a white group proposes to give him a scholarship, requiring only that he read the speech to them. He arrives to find the whites surly and drunk. A stripper comes in, and barely makes it through a few moves before she has to escape this crowd. Then a battle is staged between ten black boys who are blindfolded. The Invisible Man is, of course, thrown into the battle too.
This is what Allen says:
“Bloodied and debased, I.M. [Allen’s initials for the narrator] is finally allowed to speak and begins, among yells and laughter, in this context of humiliation, his paen to, of all things, humility. As the context for his speech has been shifted, however, so too his memory has been jolted out of place, for instead of pledging, in accord with his written text, that he will devote himself to ‘social responsibility,’I M resoundingly commits himself to social equality. Ellison writes: ‘the laughter hung in sudden stillness. I opened my eyes, puzzled. Sounds of displeasure filled the room…’Say that slowly, son!” Realizing his mistake, I.M. feels a flutter of fear before retracting his desire for ‘equality’, affirming his commitment to social responsibility, and finding himself rewarded.”
This is the Governing Council’s own situation. The social responsibility we want from the Iraqis shouldn’t encroach on our hierarchical edge over them – shouldn’t, in other words, presume on an equality so radical as to equate an Iraqi death – an invisible thing, something that Iraqis can, of course, mourn in private, but that can’t be allowed to intrude in any gross manner on the American public space – with an American death – a tremendous thing, something that must be revenged to the second and third generation. And the GC, after going through the Battle Royal of affirming every one of Bremer’s wishes, of rubberstamping even their own mock elevation to a power that is only an attenuated form of powerlessness, the power of Roman senators in the era of Caligula, are required, now, to rubberstamp Bremer’s closure of Sadr’s newspaper, and Bremer’s use of a corrupt court’s murder warrant, and the U.S. high command’s destruction of Falluja. This is a long crawl on the belly, and it has obviously hurt some of the Council. Most, mere lechers and bagmen, have proven themselves classically indifferent to everything but their own skins – or, in the case of Chalabi, have used the occasion to float various power-grabbing ideas through a bunch of D.C. proxies (see Jim Hoagland’s op ed piece in the Post yesterday for an especially greasy hint that now would be a good time for the U.S. to officially recognize Chalabi’s militia – a sort of 'bring on the death squads and freedom fighters, boys" to round out Bush's Reagan parody). Others, however, have steered a course between responsibility and abjection.
Well, do you trade a certain number of deaths for being cycled through the upward mobility promised by the system? Certainly that has to be on Iraqi minds. On the one hand, they are watching the U.S reward Israel’s conquests in the West bank, and on the other hand, they are having to endure an occupation that grows out of the U.S. claim that conquest – Saddam’s conquest of Kuwait – is such an ultimate evil that it justifies a decade of war and sanctions, crowned by an invasion. They have to stitch together the consistency here, which is wholly racial – the justice or injustice of a land grab depending on the ethnicity of the land grabber -- just as it is with the Invisible Man.
As Allen points out – with regard to the Invisible Man – humiliation, sacrifice, and acceptance have political aspects:
‘By presenting the I.M’s in terms of such categories as sacrifice, agreement and responsibility, Ellison lays bare how politics structures ordinary life and psychic experience. He names the rituals that give human life its meaning and that undergird our common actions. His writing is an X ray machine that reveals the skeleton of democratic life. The skeleton is made of what Ellison called rituals.”
One doesn’t have to read far, in analyses of the Iraq situation, to find people talking about how the Iraqis feel humiliated by the war, and of the psychological aftereffects of this. But there is an odd silence about the other side of that humiliation: is it such an accident that the Iraqis feel humiliated? Wasn’t humiliation written into the script, one of the great unconscious motives in this war? Didn't we want to humiliate them? Where there is an effect, as any Freudian can tell you, there is unconscious desire. The denial of the U.S. desire to humiliate is part of the greater discursive pattern, in which the Americans present themselves not as representatives of a state with appetites and interests, but rather as radiant spacemen of virtue, riding in on attack helicopters. As long as Americans treat their country as a moral force, rather than as a nation, they will have a debased and juvenilized foreign policy.
More on Allan's essay tomorrow.
Tuesday, April 13, 2004
Yet Lucian, a rhetorician also, in a treatise entitled, How a history ought to be written, saith thus: 'that a writer of history ought, in his writings, to be a foreigner, without country, living under his own law only, subject to no king, nor caring what any man will like or dislike, but laying out the matter as it is.' – Hobbes in the introduction to his translation of Thucydides
LI recommends the Sy Hersch story on Afghanistan in the current Nyorker. It should be read in conjunction with the stories that are coming out concerning both the Bush administration’s pre-9/11 readiness to counter terrorist activity and its post 9/11 actions in so doing, or not. It has been our contention, all along, that the heart of the case against Bush is summed up by what happened not before 9/11, but in response to it -- that is, a massive and willful blindness to the reality of an attack by a nomadic, well entrenched jihadist group, with roots in the mujahdeen movement the U.S. not so covertly supported in the 80s in Afghanistan. The willfulness of this blindness was in thinking that any terrorist group is ultimately anchored in some state’s policy. Thus, the U.S. fought Osama bin Laden with one hand tied behind its back in the winter of 2001-2002, and ultimately satisfied itself with the collapsing of the precarious shell of Taliban governance in Afghanistan, as if the Taliban had been anything more than a bribed provider of a hideaway for Al Q. The Bush administration then took up its pre 9/11 obsession with Saddam Hussein, with the consequences we all know. LI thinks that it is completely odd that some of those consequences have received absolutely zero attention from the American press or public, since they include the flourishing of the Al Qaeda organization – in spite of the less than convincing statements of Bush concerning the killing or taking hostage of 2/3rds of the Al Qaeda leadership. Surely this radically misunderstands Osama bin Laden’s role as a symbol of recruitment, the network between the jihadist fighters in Central Asia (as in Chechnya) and Al Qaeda, and its ability to plug into local jihadist groups.
LI has written about this with the obsessiveness of Richard Dreyfuss piling the mashed potatoes on his plate in Close Enconters. Were we nuts? Well, it is nice to have the confirmation of a study by the Pentagon, which is being reported in the Nyorker article. Here’s a money shot graf. Hersch discusses Clarke’s larger and more interesting criticism of the Bush administration (that the diversion into Iraq subverted the war against terrorism), and then writes:
“Clarke's view of what went wrong was buttressed by an internal military analysis of the Afghanistan war that was completed last winter. In late 2002, the Defense Department's office of Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict (solic) asked retired Army Colonel Hy Rothstein, a leading military expert in unconventional warfare, to examine the planning and execution of the war in Afghanistan, with an understanding that he would focus on Special Forces. As part of his research, Rothstein travelled to Afghanistan and interviewed many senior military officers, in both Special Forces and regular units. He also talked to dozens of junior Special Forces officers and enlisted men who fought there. His report was a devastating critique of the Administration's strategy. He wrote that the bombing campaign was not the best way to hunt down Osama bin Laden and the rest of the Al Qaeda leadership, and that there was a failure to translate early tactical successes into strategic victory. In fact, he wrote, the victory in Afghanistan was not, in the long run, a victory at all.”
Don’t expect the papers to touch this gingerly topic anytime soon, since they have gone along with the script.
…
LI has been conducting an interesting knock about with a certain Rajeev over at Crooked Timber, in the comments section. Rajeev, flatteringly enough, has actually read this endless series of graphomanic posts, or some of them, and has even spotted LI’s big themes about Iraq. He’s nailed us, in short. Rajeev disagrees with our viewpoint, but his main criticism is with our framing distance. He asks, reasonably, how LI can talk about the ‘Americans” in Iraq, as if LI himself weren’t a born and bred Yankee.
It is true – I like to maintain a pretence of distance between myself and what ‘we’ - the ‘americans’- are doing in Iraq. As my little quote from Hobbes indicates, I think that the intellectual gain from that distance, the ability to see in terms of sharp outlines, is worth the emotional loss – the loss of being cut off from a ‘we’. However, I am not totally happy with the accounting, here. The mask of allegiance is woven out of passions that are incomprehensible – at least in their force and connection – to the outside observer. This makes the supposedly clear vision that I bring to what is happening in Iraq inadequate – beyond the inadequacy of pure ignorance. It isn’t just that I have no personal acquaintance with how Iraqis think, I have cut myself off from the personal acquaintance with how Americans think.
The gain, here, is to see the encounter of different projects and their adaptation to each other and circumstances without thinking that I am watching a morality play between the forces of good and the forces of evil. The loss is that the CPA., in particular, is incomprehensible to me in its more extreme moments. In moving against both Sunni paramilitary groups and the Sadr Shiites, the CPA shows that it is more, well, conceited than even I gave it credit for. Only behind the mask would one be able to understand the thousand and one impulses that feed into that conceit.
However, I am not so cut off from the “we Americans’ that I don’t recognize who is running the CPA. And I think this is part of the difficulty. People like Bremer and the people around him have shaped their careers in the least democratic organizations in America – big business and the lobbying bureaucracies. It is all either command and control or spin. Furthermore, they are heirs to the forces that have always seen democracy as something to be brought before a judge and fined. If the CPA really wants to promote democracy in Iraq, why not translate Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals into Arabic? Why not import organizers of demonstrations, anti-globalization activists – all those who like to activate peaceful transformative change. If anything, Iraq needs a King or a Gandhi, not a Sadr or a Chalabi.
LI recommends the Sy Hersch story on Afghanistan in the current Nyorker. It should be read in conjunction with the stories that are coming out concerning both the Bush administration’s pre-9/11 readiness to counter terrorist activity and its post 9/11 actions in so doing, or not. It has been our contention, all along, that the heart of the case against Bush is summed up by what happened not before 9/11, but in response to it -- that is, a massive and willful blindness to the reality of an attack by a nomadic, well entrenched jihadist group, with roots in the mujahdeen movement the U.S. not so covertly supported in the 80s in Afghanistan. The willfulness of this blindness was in thinking that any terrorist group is ultimately anchored in some state’s policy. Thus, the U.S. fought Osama bin Laden with one hand tied behind its back in the winter of 2001-2002, and ultimately satisfied itself with the collapsing of the precarious shell of Taliban governance in Afghanistan, as if the Taliban had been anything more than a bribed provider of a hideaway for Al Q. The Bush administration then took up its pre 9/11 obsession with Saddam Hussein, with the consequences we all know. LI thinks that it is completely odd that some of those consequences have received absolutely zero attention from the American press or public, since they include the flourishing of the Al Qaeda organization – in spite of the less than convincing statements of Bush concerning the killing or taking hostage of 2/3rds of the Al Qaeda leadership. Surely this radically misunderstands Osama bin Laden’s role as a symbol of recruitment, the network between the jihadist fighters in Central Asia (as in Chechnya) and Al Qaeda, and its ability to plug into local jihadist groups.
LI has written about this with the obsessiveness of Richard Dreyfuss piling the mashed potatoes on his plate in Close Enconters. Were we nuts? Well, it is nice to have the confirmation of a study by the Pentagon, which is being reported in the Nyorker article. Here’s a money shot graf. Hersch discusses Clarke’s larger and more interesting criticism of the Bush administration (that the diversion into Iraq subverted the war against terrorism), and then writes:
“Clarke's view of what went wrong was buttressed by an internal military analysis of the Afghanistan war that was completed last winter. In late 2002, the Defense Department's office of Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict (solic) asked retired Army Colonel Hy Rothstein, a leading military expert in unconventional warfare, to examine the planning and execution of the war in Afghanistan, with an understanding that he would focus on Special Forces. As part of his research, Rothstein travelled to Afghanistan and interviewed many senior military officers, in both Special Forces and regular units. He also talked to dozens of junior Special Forces officers and enlisted men who fought there. His report was a devastating critique of the Administration's strategy. He wrote that the bombing campaign was not the best way to hunt down Osama bin Laden and the rest of the Al Qaeda leadership, and that there was a failure to translate early tactical successes into strategic victory. In fact, he wrote, the victory in Afghanistan was not, in the long run, a victory at all.”
Don’t expect the papers to touch this gingerly topic anytime soon, since they have gone along with the script.
…
LI has been conducting an interesting knock about with a certain Rajeev over at Crooked Timber, in the comments section. Rajeev, flatteringly enough, has actually read this endless series of graphomanic posts, or some of them, and has even spotted LI’s big themes about Iraq. He’s nailed us, in short. Rajeev disagrees with our viewpoint, but his main criticism is with our framing distance. He asks, reasonably, how LI can talk about the ‘Americans” in Iraq, as if LI himself weren’t a born and bred Yankee.
It is true – I like to maintain a pretence of distance between myself and what ‘we’ - the ‘americans’- are doing in Iraq. As my little quote from Hobbes indicates, I think that the intellectual gain from that distance, the ability to see in terms of sharp outlines, is worth the emotional loss – the loss of being cut off from a ‘we’. However, I am not totally happy with the accounting, here. The mask of allegiance is woven out of passions that are incomprehensible – at least in their force and connection – to the outside observer. This makes the supposedly clear vision that I bring to what is happening in Iraq inadequate – beyond the inadequacy of pure ignorance. It isn’t just that I have no personal acquaintance with how Iraqis think, I have cut myself off from the personal acquaintance with how Americans think.
The gain, here, is to see the encounter of different projects and their adaptation to each other and circumstances without thinking that I am watching a morality play between the forces of good and the forces of evil. The loss is that the CPA., in particular, is incomprehensible to me in its more extreme moments. In moving against both Sunni paramilitary groups and the Sadr Shiites, the CPA shows that it is more, well, conceited than even I gave it credit for. Only behind the mask would one be able to understand the thousand and one impulses that feed into that conceit.
However, I am not so cut off from the “we Americans’ that I don’t recognize who is running the CPA. And I think this is part of the difficulty. People like Bremer and the people around him have shaped their careers in the least democratic organizations in America – big business and the lobbying bureaucracies. It is all either command and control or spin. Furthermore, they are heirs to the forces that have always seen democracy as something to be brought before a judge and fined. If the CPA really wants to promote democracy in Iraq, why not translate Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals into Arabic? Why not import organizers of demonstrations, anti-globalization activists – all those who like to activate peaceful transformative change. If anything, Iraq needs a King or a Gandhi, not a Sadr or a Chalabi.
Monday, April 12, 2004
Bollettino
The man who wasn't there
John Kerry has decided to run a unique campaign. So far, he is running as either “None of the Above” or “Me too, and double it!”
Here we have a perfect Kodak moment: Bush, receiving a warning that any sane executive would take seriously, retiring to his ranch to rest on his tax cutting laurels in August, 2001. Did the man even alert his own secretary of treasury that the FBI suspected hijackers were present in the U.S.? No, he didn’t. There is a comfortable myth that is starting to fall apart, which says that nineteen hijackers succeeding in three different venues is one of those ‘can’t stop it’ kind of things. That it is an unusual, indeed, unique act of terrorism is swept under the rug. The most startling thing about the hijacking is less the first plane that slammed into the WTC. It is that the second plane did. The second plane screamed – system-wide collapse.
Kerry’s response to this has been: no comment.
Kerry’s response to Iraq is even worse. It is to “internationalize’ the situation and send in more U.S. troops. And he wants me to vote for this? Kerry hasn’t commented about the vital element in the whole Iraq fiasco – the Iraqis. As in, he has never criticized the reliance on Chalabi, he has never said that we should work more with al Sistani, he’s made no comment about our surprising, or sinister, hesitation in really putting in place representative institutions, he’s said nothing about the rather criminal use of the criminal courts to blackmail Sadr that we know was undertaken by the CPA (which, incidentally, discredits the one thing that is truly necessary for democracy in Iraq – an independent judiciary. One that is wholly subservient to executive power is one that is wholly corrupt. Martial law operates not only to exert direct pressure on the percieved enemies of the state, but to preserve the integrity of the court. A court that issues murder warrants selectively for an occupying power is doomed to Iraqi contempt). His view of Iraq, if he is serious, will get us ever deeper into an impossible situation. Kerry battle cry is that of a man who has served on way too many committees – process, and more process. Meanwhile, the world ends.
John Kennedy once wrote a book, Why England Slept, about the period before WWII. We are experiencing something unique – a whole nation is sleeping during the war. Call it: Why America can’t wake up. And if Kerry keeps sleepwalking through this election, he will surely lose people like me.
The man who wasn't there
John Kerry has decided to run a unique campaign. So far, he is running as either “None of the Above” or “Me too, and double it!”
Here we have a perfect Kodak moment: Bush, receiving a warning that any sane executive would take seriously, retiring to his ranch to rest on his tax cutting laurels in August, 2001. Did the man even alert his own secretary of treasury that the FBI suspected hijackers were present in the U.S.? No, he didn’t. There is a comfortable myth that is starting to fall apart, which says that nineteen hijackers succeeding in three different venues is one of those ‘can’t stop it’ kind of things. That it is an unusual, indeed, unique act of terrorism is swept under the rug. The most startling thing about the hijacking is less the first plane that slammed into the WTC. It is that the second plane did. The second plane screamed – system-wide collapse.
Kerry’s response to this has been: no comment.
Kerry’s response to Iraq is even worse. It is to “internationalize’ the situation and send in more U.S. troops. And he wants me to vote for this? Kerry hasn’t commented about the vital element in the whole Iraq fiasco – the Iraqis. As in, he has never criticized the reliance on Chalabi, he has never said that we should work more with al Sistani, he’s made no comment about our surprising, or sinister, hesitation in really putting in place representative institutions, he’s said nothing about the rather criminal use of the criminal courts to blackmail Sadr that we know was undertaken by the CPA (which, incidentally, discredits the one thing that is truly necessary for democracy in Iraq – an independent judiciary. One that is wholly subservient to executive power is one that is wholly corrupt. Martial law operates not only to exert direct pressure on the percieved enemies of the state, but to preserve the integrity of the court. A court that issues murder warrants selectively for an occupying power is doomed to Iraqi contempt). His view of Iraq, if he is serious, will get us ever deeper into an impossible situation. Kerry battle cry is that of a man who has served on way too many committees – process, and more process. Meanwhile, the world ends.
John Kennedy once wrote a book, Why England Slept, about the period before WWII. We are experiencing something unique – a whole nation is sleeping during the war. Call it: Why America can’t wake up. And if Kerry keeps sleepwalking through this election, he will surely lose people like me.
Saturday, April 10, 2004
Bollettino
The NYT business section, which is always worth reading on Sunday, has a long story about a bank in D.C. – Riggs bank. It is a private, homey kind of D.C. bank – for the champagne and chauffeur set, as one of their interviewees puts it. They do a roaring trade in blood money for the Saudis and Equatorial Guinea. Also, incidentally, they’ve done the Bush family one of the characteristic favors banks and businesses like to do the Bush family: as the story blandly puts it, “deepening its links to the Bushes, Riggs also bought a money management firm owned by Jonathan Bush, the former president's brother, in 1997.”
It’s the Equatorial Guinea money that is bringing them down at the moment. The NYT is behind the ball on this story – the Nation had a story six months ago about Equatorial Guinea’s suRprising redemption in the eyes of the U.S. It used to be a backwater African dictatorship run with the usual large splashes of blood by Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo:
“Mr. Obiang assumed power in 1979 after his uncle was killed in a military coup. The United States ended diplomatic relations with his government in the mid-1990's but rekindled relations last year as the Bush administration moved to support efforts to tap new oil supplies outside the Middle East. Equatorial Guinean officials opened government and personal accounts at Riggs in 1995.
EXXON MOBIL entered into a profit-sharing arrangement with Mr. Obiang's government in order to secure drilling rights there.”
Profit sharing with the government, here, is a soothing way of saying that they massively and regularly bribe Mr. Obiang to splash the blood of anybody who will get in Exxon Mobil’s way as they pump out oil for the world market. Mr. Obiang, knowing that money must go to money, returns that money to the states in the form of running it through the Riggs bank. As the Times reports, the Riggs bank has already had a bit of trouble accounting for the mysterious flows of Saudi money through the bank – some of which has no doubt gone jihadist. In the case of the EG money, the bank put an ace named Mr. Kareri in charge of seeing that the blood drenched bucks were treated within the limits of the law. Mr. Kareri had a flexible view of those limits:
“Riggs investigators discovered that Mr. Kareri approached Mr. Obiang's son in Washington last year and solicited money to buy a car, according to three people with direct knowledge of the event. Mr. Obiang's son gave Mr. Kareri an undated, signed $40,000 check with no payee designated, these people said. Mr. Kareri, they said, then altered the check to change its value to $140,000, wrote a friend's name on the payee line, and then maneuvered to have the funds redirected to his wife.”
Read the Times story, and then read the Nation story here by Ken Silverstein – who is, incidentally, the author of a currently much discussed book about private military companies, ie mercenaries.
The NYT business section, which is always worth reading on Sunday, has a long story about a bank in D.C. – Riggs bank. It is a private, homey kind of D.C. bank – for the champagne and chauffeur set, as one of their interviewees puts it. They do a roaring trade in blood money for the Saudis and Equatorial Guinea. Also, incidentally, they’ve done the Bush family one of the characteristic favors banks and businesses like to do the Bush family: as the story blandly puts it, “deepening its links to the Bushes, Riggs also bought a money management firm owned by Jonathan Bush, the former president's brother, in 1997.”
It’s the Equatorial Guinea money that is bringing them down at the moment. The NYT is behind the ball on this story – the Nation had a story six months ago about Equatorial Guinea’s suRprising redemption in the eyes of the U.S. It used to be a backwater African dictatorship run with the usual large splashes of blood by Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo:
“Mr. Obiang assumed power in 1979 after his uncle was killed in a military coup. The United States ended diplomatic relations with his government in the mid-1990's but rekindled relations last year as the Bush administration moved to support efforts to tap new oil supplies outside the Middle East. Equatorial Guinean officials opened government and personal accounts at Riggs in 1995.
EXXON MOBIL entered into a profit-sharing arrangement with Mr. Obiang's government in order to secure drilling rights there.”
Profit sharing with the government, here, is a soothing way of saying that they massively and regularly bribe Mr. Obiang to splash the blood of anybody who will get in Exxon Mobil’s way as they pump out oil for the world market. Mr. Obiang, knowing that money must go to money, returns that money to the states in the form of running it through the Riggs bank. As the Times reports, the Riggs bank has already had a bit of trouble accounting for the mysterious flows of Saudi money through the bank – some of which has no doubt gone jihadist. In the case of the EG money, the bank put an ace named Mr. Kareri in charge of seeing that the blood drenched bucks were treated within the limits of the law. Mr. Kareri had a flexible view of those limits:
“Riggs investigators discovered that Mr. Kareri approached Mr. Obiang's son in Washington last year and solicited money to buy a car, according to three people with direct knowledge of the event. Mr. Obiang's son gave Mr. Kareri an undated, signed $40,000 check with no payee designated, these people said. Mr. Kareri, they said, then altered the check to change its value to $140,000, wrote a friend's name on the payee line, and then maneuvered to have the funds redirected to his wife.”
Read the Times story, and then read the Nation story here by Ken Silverstein – who is, incidentally, the author of a currently much discussed book about private military companies, ie mercenaries.
Thursday, April 8, 2004
Bollettino
So I met a man yesterday, had lunch with him. He was a friendly, bald, gray moustached man, eating carrots out of a Tupperware case. We fell into conversation, and at one point he said that he was in Vietnam. We’d been talking about war. I’d mentioned that I’d read that soldiers in Vietnam were issued Dexedrine and various speed pills to get them through the next encounter. And he’d said that that was countenanced, but it wasn’t officially approved, then told me the tale of his war – and ended up by adding, as a little sidenote, that people do funny things in war. A friend of his, for instance. He blasted an eight year old girl. Came upon her in some go through the village maneuver. Little darling kept approaching him. He got out the rifle, warned her to go back, and she kept approaching like Viet bad seed, and he let her have it. And, he said, she exploded, meaning that she’d been wired.
Then the guy said, two war crimes there, really. One is killing the eight year old, one is the Cong wiring her up.
I said yes.
This was not supposed to be happening again. That girl, that bomb, that GI, those dreams, that crippled life, that ended life, that desolation wrought on a citizenry by its own government, intoxicated by power and lies – no, this was not supposed to happen again. I remember hearing stories like that man’s – who was placidly chewing his carrots – when I was eighteen, nineteen. In the seventies, you were always running into vets who were never coming home, you could tell it from their eyes and their raddled faces, and especially their laughs, and their stories. And you knew much of it was bullshit. But you also knew that so much external damage implied something had happened the way a crater implies a shell.
Here are pictures from Falluja. I don’t find images of viscera and blood particularly sickening. It happens. Nor am I against violence per se – it is no joke that liberty is purchased with blood. But this isn’t liberty. This is senseless retaliation, for purposes that have been so wound in a labyrinth of Bush’s photo op politics as to be long lost; as these pictures go out to Baghdad and Basra, they pretty much put an end to the ‘good feeling’ that Americans are always polling the Iraqis to pull out of them, our colonialism with a smiley face.
I admit it -- I was fooled. I thought there was something like a learning curve operating in the bowels of the CPA. That Bremer had recognized his mistakes. I was wrong. They have learned nothing. Nothing, amazingly enough. These are people on whom all experience is lost.
So I met a man yesterday, had lunch with him. He was a friendly, bald, gray moustached man, eating carrots out of a Tupperware case. We fell into conversation, and at one point he said that he was in Vietnam. We’d been talking about war. I’d mentioned that I’d read that soldiers in Vietnam were issued Dexedrine and various speed pills to get them through the next encounter. And he’d said that that was countenanced, but it wasn’t officially approved, then told me the tale of his war – and ended up by adding, as a little sidenote, that people do funny things in war. A friend of his, for instance. He blasted an eight year old girl. Came upon her in some go through the village maneuver. Little darling kept approaching him. He got out the rifle, warned her to go back, and she kept approaching like Viet bad seed, and he let her have it. And, he said, she exploded, meaning that she’d been wired.
Then the guy said, two war crimes there, really. One is killing the eight year old, one is the Cong wiring her up.
I said yes.
This was not supposed to be happening again. That girl, that bomb, that GI, those dreams, that crippled life, that ended life, that desolation wrought on a citizenry by its own government, intoxicated by power and lies – no, this was not supposed to happen again. I remember hearing stories like that man’s – who was placidly chewing his carrots – when I was eighteen, nineteen. In the seventies, you were always running into vets who were never coming home, you could tell it from their eyes and their raddled faces, and especially their laughs, and their stories. And you knew much of it was bullshit. But you also knew that so much external damage implied something had happened the way a crater implies a shell.
Here are pictures from Falluja. I don’t find images of viscera and blood particularly sickening. It happens. Nor am I against violence per se – it is no joke that liberty is purchased with blood. But this isn’t liberty. This is senseless retaliation, for purposes that have been so wound in a labyrinth of Bush’s photo op politics as to be long lost; as these pictures go out to Baghdad and Basra, they pretty much put an end to the ‘good feeling’ that Americans are always polling the Iraqis to pull out of them, our colonialism with a smiley face.
I admit it -- I was fooled. I thought there was something like a learning curve operating in the bowels of the CPA. That Bremer had recognized his mistakes. I was wrong. They have learned nothing. Nothing, amazingly enough. These are people on whom all experience is lost.
Wednesday, April 7, 2004
Bollettino
The neo-cons never cease to generate ideas – bad ideas. Incredibly bad ideas.
There has been a lot of speculation about why in the world the CPA would provoke Sadr at this point in time by closing down his newspaper. The result, as we see, is twenty American deaths and mounting, not to mention – because nobody mentions them – the Iraqi deaths, which must be over fifty to eighty.
This article in the Asian Times quotes one Larry Diamond, from the dreaded Hoover institute, that explains part of the mystery:
"We are on the edge of a generalized civil war in Iraq," said Larry Diamond, a senior adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), who told Inter Press Service that occupation authorities must follow through on any crackdown against Muqtada's forces by disarming and dismantling all of Iraq's militias if the transition process and future elections are to have any hope of success.
Diamond, a democracy specialist at the Hoover Institution in California, also called on the administration to sharply increase the number of US troops in Iraq in order to disarm and dismantle the militias, and accused Iran of financing and arming Muqtada and other Shi'ite militias, which he says are building up arms in advance of elections or possible civil war.
"Iran is embarked on a concerned, clever and lavishly resourced campaign to defeat any effort to create a genuine pluralist democracy in Iraq, and we've been sitting back," he said in what has become a growing refrain among neo-conservatives and administration officials who blame Tehran for the coalition's growing problems among the Shi'ites."
In other words, it wasn’t Sadr the loony toons CPA was after – they were striking at Iran. It has been one of the causes of the diehard War fans that we went into Iraq as a preliminary thing, and we are going to follow up by going into Syria and Iran too – a general war-o-rama, followed by privatized Social Security, patriotic mercury in the water, and tax cuts for victims of the SEC’s Gestapo like war on the best and the brightest, that’s the deal. The nightmare world of Bush-ist wish fulfillment is unlikely to be in the offing any time soon, but these players have a puzzling and disproportionate influence. Puzzling, because they have proven to be wrong so often that they have become political liabilities. If there is one thing the Bush administration notices, it is political liability.
So what we are seeing in Iraq is the result of the idea that we had to strike at Iran by striking at those of Iraq’s shi’ites who are close to Iran. As Diamond puts it at the end of this revealing article, better to clean up the militias now, rather than later.
And this man is being paid by the CPA? Surely we need to pack him up and ship him gently back to the Stanford Campus, where he can extensively analyze communist influence in the Civil Rights movement, circa 1965.
The neo-cons never cease to generate ideas – bad ideas. Incredibly bad ideas.
There has been a lot of speculation about why in the world the CPA would provoke Sadr at this point in time by closing down his newspaper. The result, as we see, is twenty American deaths and mounting, not to mention – because nobody mentions them – the Iraqi deaths, which must be over fifty to eighty.
This article in the Asian Times quotes one Larry Diamond, from the dreaded Hoover institute, that explains part of the mystery:
"We are on the edge of a generalized civil war in Iraq," said Larry Diamond, a senior adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), who told Inter Press Service that occupation authorities must follow through on any crackdown against Muqtada's forces by disarming and dismantling all of Iraq's militias if the transition process and future elections are to have any hope of success.
Diamond, a democracy specialist at the Hoover Institution in California, also called on the administration to sharply increase the number of US troops in Iraq in order to disarm and dismantle the militias, and accused Iran of financing and arming Muqtada and other Shi'ite militias, which he says are building up arms in advance of elections or possible civil war.
"Iran is embarked on a concerned, clever and lavishly resourced campaign to defeat any effort to create a genuine pluralist democracy in Iraq, and we've been sitting back," he said in what has become a growing refrain among neo-conservatives and administration officials who blame Tehran for the coalition's growing problems among the Shi'ites."
In other words, it wasn’t Sadr the loony toons CPA was after – they were striking at Iran. It has been one of the causes of the diehard War fans that we went into Iraq as a preliminary thing, and we are going to follow up by going into Syria and Iran too – a general war-o-rama, followed by privatized Social Security, patriotic mercury in the water, and tax cuts for victims of the SEC’s Gestapo like war on the best and the brightest, that’s the deal. The nightmare world of Bush-ist wish fulfillment is unlikely to be in the offing any time soon, but these players have a puzzling and disproportionate influence. Puzzling, because they have proven to be wrong so often that they have become political liabilities. If there is one thing the Bush administration notices, it is political liability.
So what we are seeing in Iraq is the result of the idea that we had to strike at Iran by striking at those of Iraq’s shi’ites who are close to Iran. As Diamond puts it at the end of this revealing article, better to clean up the militias now, rather than later.
And this man is being paid by the CPA? Surely we need to pack him up and ship him gently back to the Stanford Campus, where he can extensively analyze communist influence in the Civil Rights movement, circa 1965.
Tuesday, April 6, 2004
Bollettino
There’s a Crooked Timber post about Hitchens article about Falluja. We haven’t read the latest outburst from Mr. Hitchens – after a while, it gets depressing to watch a man with no motor control trying to thread a needle. What interested us about the post was the end of it. After taking Hitchens to task for writing that the lynching in Falluja proved just how right we were to invade Iraq, the CT writer adds:
“… it seems appropriate to ask of everyone who seems certain of the rightness of their position on the war, whether there are any developments that would lead them to say, “OK, I was wrong.” For instance, if there is a functioning and independent Iraqi democracy within two years, which lasts for at least a further five, then I think that ought to shake the convictions of hardened opponents. But I don’t think that’s likely.”
On the face of it, what could be more reasonable than to apply the pragmatic principle of success or failure to positions that are, after all, built lock and stock in the context of social action? Yet this seems to LI to be a profoundly misleading move, one that a., denies agency to the Iraqis, b., misunderstands the deep and various levels of objection to the war in the first place, and c., posits an objectionable, and in the end pseudo-scientific relationship between politics and history. Wring those bland and seemingly reasonable words a bit, in other words, and you get a bad and typical thing, indicative of how deeply embedded in the intellectual mindset is that model of control and planning which developed in the 18th century and still defines the political role of the thinker in the West.
Let’s go to a. One of the more startling things about the Iraq invasion has been the framing racism of it all. Look, for instance, at the Washington Post’s Portrait of the Fallen – pictures of the casualties in Iraq – and you will notice … no Iraqis. Not only has the Defense department made no effort to collect information on Iraqi deaths, but the systematic downplaying of those deaths actually impedes any effort to understand what is happening there through the sieve of Western media. The values accorded to life and death, here, are the biopolitical substratum of the traditional racist images that have been set into motion by the occupation of Iraq. And not just by the Bush side, either. The great bien-pensant meme on the liberal side has been for more troops, or international troops, in conjunction with a suspension of Iraqi self-rule, so we can teach these people autonomy. It is the usual parent/child image, with the non-Western Iraqis playing the part of the recalcitrant child. As children, of course, they are too emotional, they complain all of the time, they are superstitious, and they are violent. Best, then, to spread a grid of soldiers over them commanded by adult Western bureaucrats. The endless stories about “teaching” policemen and soldiers all hammer in the same theme – these people are children that we have to take care of. Get out the stick, or the helicopter, or the tank, when they get unruly. In the meantime, of course, the Westerners doing all of this training can remain superbly indifferent to the very language the Iraqis speak, and certainly to their history – how can children have a history? – and their desires, all tuned to that frequency of the libido that makes them grumblers and rioters.
The racist substratrum conditions c., the control and command model. That accident, unexpected outcomes, and struggle might have as much to do with Iraq becoming a democracy, or not, as any central plan created by D.C. bureaucrats is simply made invisible by the options proposed by CT’s post – the right or wrong, the “proofs” that legitimate a position taken according to time and circumstances. This is where LI feels Burkian conservative twinges – a conservatism that has almost disappeared in the world. Burke’s objection to “theorists” in politics is just to this kind of attitude. It takes social action as, essentially, mechanical. And so you take an attitude at time x, the attitude is informed by principle y, and then history happens – the machine grinds out a result – and you proof your attitude.
Foucault, bless his baldheaded heart, was onto this kind of thing in Surveiller et Punir. For LI, a position is an adaptation to circumstances, rather than an idea that hovers above them. It is LI’s own form of anti-intellectualism.
There’s a Crooked Timber post about Hitchens article about Falluja. We haven’t read the latest outburst from Mr. Hitchens – after a while, it gets depressing to watch a man with no motor control trying to thread a needle. What interested us about the post was the end of it. After taking Hitchens to task for writing that the lynching in Falluja proved just how right we were to invade Iraq, the CT writer adds:
“… it seems appropriate to ask of everyone who seems certain of the rightness of their position on the war, whether there are any developments that would lead them to say, “OK, I was wrong.” For instance, if there is a functioning and independent Iraqi democracy within two years, which lasts for at least a further five, then I think that ought to shake the convictions of hardened opponents. But I don’t think that’s likely.”
On the face of it, what could be more reasonable than to apply the pragmatic principle of success or failure to positions that are, after all, built lock and stock in the context of social action? Yet this seems to LI to be a profoundly misleading move, one that a., denies agency to the Iraqis, b., misunderstands the deep and various levels of objection to the war in the first place, and c., posits an objectionable, and in the end pseudo-scientific relationship between politics and history. Wring those bland and seemingly reasonable words a bit, in other words, and you get a bad and typical thing, indicative of how deeply embedded in the intellectual mindset is that model of control and planning which developed in the 18th century and still defines the political role of the thinker in the West.
Let’s go to a. One of the more startling things about the Iraq invasion has been the framing racism of it all. Look, for instance, at the Washington Post’s Portrait of the Fallen – pictures of the casualties in Iraq – and you will notice … no Iraqis. Not only has the Defense department made no effort to collect information on Iraqi deaths, but the systematic downplaying of those deaths actually impedes any effort to understand what is happening there through the sieve of Western media. The values accorded to life and death, here, are the biopolitical substratum of the traditional racist images that have been set into motion by the occupation of Iraq. And not just by the Bush side, either. The great bien-pensant meme on the liberal side has been for more troops, or international troops, in conjunction with a suspension of Iraqi self-rule, so we can teach these people autonomy. It is the usual parent/child image, with the non-Western Iraqis playing the part of the recalcitrant child. As children, of course, they are too emotional, they complain all of the time, they are superstitious, and they are violent. Best, then, to spread a grid of soldiers over them commanded by adult Western bureaucrats. The endless stories about “teaching” policemen and soldiers all hammer in the same theme – these people are children that we have to take care of. Get out the stick, or the helicopter, or the tank, when they get unruly. In the meantime, of course, the Westerners doing all of this training can remain superbly indifferent to the very language the Iraqis speak, and certainly to their history – how can children have a history? – and their desires, all tuned to that frequency of the libido that makes them grumblers and rioters.
The racist substratrum conditions c., the control and command model. That accident, unexpected outcomes, and struggle might have as much to do with Iraq becoming a democracy, or not, as any central plan created by D.C. bureaucrats is simply made invisible by the options proposed by CT’s post – the right or wrong, the “proofs” that legitimate a position taken according to time and circumstances. This is where LI feels Burkian conservative twinges – a conservatism that has almost disappeared in the world. Burke’s objection to “theorists” in politics is just to this kind of attitude. It takes social action as, essentially, mechanical. And so you take an attitude at time x, the attitude is informed by principle y, and then history happens – the machine grinds out a result – and you proof your attitude.
Foucault, bless his baldheaded heart, was onto this kind of thing in Surveiller et Punir. For LI, a position is an adaptation to circumstances, rather than an idea that hovers above them. It is LI’s own form of anti-intellectualism.
Sunday, April 4, 2004
Bollettino
Continuing from the last post.
Dispensing with the “Weberian fantasy” of state power, Wedeen starts off with a abridged history of modern Yemen:
“President Ali Abd Allah Salih has been in power for twenty-five years, as the leader of North Yemen since 1978, and of unified Yemen since its inception in 1990. Yet in spite of the regime’s durability, the Weberian fantasy of a state that enjoys a monopoly on violence—legitimate or otherwise—is not remotely evident. In a country of 18.5 million people, there are an estimated 61 million weapons in private hands.2 The state is incapable, moreover, of providing welfare, protection, or education to the population.”
The state – or at least the faction in charge of the state – was capable, in 1999, or mounting an election. Wedeen’s description of it is interesting as much for the analogy to Iraq, and what one suspects the CPA would like to do, as for its Yemeni context. Ali Abd Allah Salih’s government disqualified the one opposition candidate that could threaten it even in a minor way – a man named Muqbil. Instead, they appointed their opposition. It did not go unnoticed that this simple maneuver made the “opposition” meaningless:
“To replace the opposition’s candidate, the regime nominated one of its own Southern members, Nagib Qahtan al-Shaƒbi. The son of its first President, who was deposed and imprisoned in 1969 during a coup
d’état carried out by socialists, Nagib and his family had fled to Cairo where they had received support and protection for years from the anti-socialist North. Election day, then, offered people the choice between two candidates from the same party, the ruling President from the North, and the puppet-like contender whose origins were identifiably Southern. One published cartoon depicted Nagib as a wind-up toy. Ajoke echoed this sentiment: “Nagib is elected and is then asked, “What is the first thing you are going to do?’” He replies: “Make “Ali Abd Allah Salih President.”
Perhaps this was the model that the CPA was thinking about in their first draft of the ‘elections’ that would legitimate the occupation after June 30. Wedeen’s point, however, isn’t merely that the government both embraced democracy and made a mockery of it, but that the state’s assertion of power here was excessive – unnecessary. . Muqbil didn’t have a chance of winning, given the fact that the state exerted rigid control over the election procedure. It is the margin of over-control that puzzles Wedeen. Her answer is that we have to throw out the Weberian model of rationality and understand power, here, in terms of the logic of excess. That is, excessive acts, by gaining compliance, actually function to make the citizen “see” him or her self in terms of the state – as belonging to the state by voting for, or pretending to vote for, who runs the state. That important distinction – the essential instability of the place of the ruler in a democracy – is replaced by the merger of ruler and state, with the state’s democratic self-definition being something more in the nature of one of those entrenched boasts that identify the powerful. By the logic of excess “The elections communicated this absence of actual alternatives by presenting a bogus one.” We couldn’t help but think of the coalition’s own use of democracy. Again, there is the refusal to separate the state from its rulers – to accept the central instability at the heart of democracy. Again, there was the curious attempt to deform the process and form of election into a ritual of confirmation that would signal the absence of alternatives. In the CPA case, the original idea was to create caucuses of American vetted committees that would select slates that Americans had previously approved of. The American project in Iraq failed on this preliminary point, since the Shi’ites – through the intervention of al-Sisteni – blocked them. In doing so, the Shi’ites have been subjected to the kind of propagandistic treatment one expects in the American press – have been accused, basically, of wanting solely to gain power. The accusation has had the effect of disguising the fraudulence of the only American plan for democratizing Iraq -- by the radical and thorough extension of anti-democratic power. The caucuses were meant to make Iraqis complicitous in the American fraud -- to see themselves as subservient to the American scheme. But it didn't work.
The second thing we should point to in Wedeen’s essay is the issue of security. In Yemen’s case, the security issue came up in the course of a private crime, not a guerilla war. Still, the confrontation between the state’s use of direct power to perpetuate itself and its inability to exert power to protect its citizens is relevant to the Iraqi case. In fact, we suspect that the inability of the Americans to prevent the bombings in Baghdad and in Najaf in recent months have, more than anything else, undermined the acceptance of the occupation in Iraq. On the one hand, the CPA’s power is based on that most direct use of violence, invasion; on the other hand, their day to day use of that power is directed mainly towards protecting … Americans. The loss of life of Iraqi civilians is given amazingly short shrift in, say, the NYT, where more attention will be focused on the death of four American mercenaries than on the death of 200 Iraqis or 100 or 50 that are blown up or fired upon in any number of incidents over the past four months. This isn’t just the inherent racism that frames the entire US/Iraq encounter – it is centrally about the logic of excess by which the CPA has installed itself in Iraq.
But let’s turn to Yemen.
Here’s the story:
“The “murders in the morgue” case became public knowledge on 10 May 2000,when two mutilated female bodies were discovered at San’ a University. Two days later, police arrested a Sudanese mortuary technician at the medical school, claiming that he had confessed to raping and killing five women.
Muhammad Adam U’mar Ishaq (whose full name was rarely reported) was a forty-five-year-old Sudanese citizen who allegedly admitted to an increasing number of murders—sixteen in Yemen and at least twenty-four in Sudan, Kuwait, Chad, and the Central African Republic (The Observer, 11 June 2000). The Nasirist newspaper reported stories that he had killed up to fifty women (al-Wahdawi, 16 May 2000). It was said that Adam also implicated members of the university’s teaching staff who, he said, were involved in the sale of body parts. According to Brian Whitaker’s account in The Observer one month later, Adam “had enticed women students to the mortuary with promises of help in their studies, then raped and killed them, videotaping all of his actions. He kept bones as mementos, disposed of some body parts in sewers and on the university grounds, and sold others together with his victims’ belongings” (11 June
2000).”
Wedeen shows that the story of these killings, reported in different forms in different newpapers, provoked outrage not just at the killer, but at the state itself. There were street demonstrations as well as editorials; there were student demands; there were articles in the Army paper. All of which she shrewdly analyzes:
“Debates in newspapers, in the streets, during Friday mosque sermons and qat chews, and in government offices laid bare how easily civic terror can be generated by perceptions of ineffective state institutions, and how public appeals can be made on the basis of the moral and material entitlements that citizens of
even the most nominal of nation-states felt were due them (see Comaroff and Comaroff 1999). People were outraged that the university had not done more to protect its students or to investigate the disappearances. Criticisms focused on the incapacities of the state, the corruption and potential complicity of the regime, and the need for the seeming elusive but desirable “mu’assasat aldawla” (state institutions). In one qat chew I attended someone went so far as to claim that serial killings could never happen in the developed United States (a point I hastened to correct).”
The press, lately, has concentrated on the meme of the ‘complaining Iraqi’ – the Weekly Standard, which alternates between bile and hubris, sent Fred Barnes to Iraq (another neo-con cruise – surely some travel agency should take advantage of these pilgrims), and he returned to report that everything was going swimmingly, but that the Iraqis were distressingly ungrateful. They complain and complain.
The distance that has opened up between the American p.o.v. and the Iraqi p.o.v. is where the action will take place in the next phase of the occupation – its meaningless abdication on June 30 to a council that will still takes its orders from the CPA.
Wedeen’s essay concludes with such a rich expansion of the concept of “belonging” that we urge our readers to go and read it, especially for the way in which she takes discourse as a distributor of “belonging to” – a rather brilliant stroke. Alas, however, it is time for this post to stop.
Continuing from the last post.
Dispensing with the “Weberian fantasy” of state power, Wedeen starts off with a abridged history of modern Yemen:
“President Ali Abd Allah Salih has been in power for twenty-five years, as the leader of North Yemen since 1978, and of unified Yemen since its inception in 1990. Yet in spite of the regime’s durability, the Weberian fantasy of a state that enjoys a monopoly on violence—legitimate or otherwise—is not remotely evident. In a country of 18.5 million people, there are an estimated 61 million weapons in private hands.2 The state is incapable, moreover, of providing welfare, protection, or education to the population.”
The state – or at least the faction in charge of the state – was capable, in 1999, or mounting an election. Wedeen’s description of it is interesting as much for the analogy to Iraq, and what one suspects the CPA would like to do, as for its Yemeni context. Ali Abd Allah Salih’s government disqualified the one opposition candidate that could threaten it even in a minor way – a man named Muqbil. Instead, they appointed their opposition. It did not go unnoticed that this simple maneuver made the “opposition” meaningless:
“To replace the opposition’s candidate, the regime nominated one of its own Southern members, Nagib Qahtan al-Shaƒbi. The son of its first President, who was deposed and imprisoned in 1969 during a coup
d’état carried out by socialists, Nagib and his family had fled to Cairo where they had received support and protection for years from the anti-socialist North. Election day, then, offered people the choice between two candidates from the same party, the ruling President from the North, and the puppet-like contender whose origins were identifiably Southern. One published cartoon depicted Nagib as a wind-up toy. Ajoke echoed this sentiment: “Nagib is elected and is then asked, “What is the first thing you are going to do?’” He replies: “Make “Ali Abd Allah Salih President.”
Perhaps this was the model that the CPA was thinking about in their first draft of the ‘elections’ that would legitimate the occupation after June 30. Wedeen’s point, however, isn’t merely that the government both embraced democracy and made a mockery of it, but that the state’s assertion of power here was excessive – unnecessary. . Muqbil didn’t have a chance of winning, given the fact that the state exerted rigid control over the election procedure. It is the margin of over-control that puzzles Wedeen. Her answer is that we have to throw out the Weberian model of rationality and understand power, here, in terms of the logic of excess. That is, excessive acts, by gaining compliance, actually function to make the citizen “see” him or her self in terms of the state – as belonging to the state by voting for, or pretending to vote for, who runs the state. That important distinction – the essential instability of the place of the ruler in a democracy – is replaced by the merger of ruler and state, with the state’s democratic self-definition being something more in the nature of one of those entrenched boasts that identify the powerful. By the logic of excess “The elections communicated this absence of actual alternatives by presenting a bogus one.” We couldn’t help but think of the coalition’s own use of democracy. Again, there is the refusal to separate the state from its rulers – to accept the central instability at the heart of democracy. Again, there was the curious attempt to deform the process and form of election into a ritual of confirmation that would signal the absence of alternatives. In the CPA case, the original idea was to create caucuses of American vetted committees that would select slates that Americans had previously approved of. The American project in Iraq failed on this preliminary point, since the Shi’ites – through the intervention of al-Sisteni – blocked them. In doing so, the Shi’ites have been subjected to the kind of propagandistic treatment one expects in the American press – have been accused, basically, of wanting solely to gain power. The accusation has had the effect of disguising the fraudulence of the only American plan for democratizing Iraq -- by the radical and thorough extension of anti-democratic power. The caucuses were meant to make Iraqis complicitous in the American fraud -- to see themselves as subservient to the American scheme. But it didn't work.
The second thing we should point to in Wedeen’s essay is the issue of security. In Yemen’s case, the security issue came up in the course of a private crime, not a guerilla war. Still, the confrontation between the state’s use of direct power to perpetuate itself and its inability to exert power to protect its citizens is relevant to the Iraqi case. In fact, we suspect that the inability of the Americans to prevent the bombings in Baghdad and in Najaf in recent months have, more than anything else, undermined the acceptance of the occupation in Iraq. On the one hand, the CPA’s power is based on that most direct use of violence, invasion; on the other hand, their day to day use of that power is directed mainly towards protecting … Americans. The loss of life of Iraqi civilians is given amazingly short shrift in, say, the NYT, where more attention will be focused on the death of four American mercenaries than on the death of 200 Iraqis or 100 or 50 that are blown up or fired upon in any number of incidents over the past four months. This isn’t just the inherent racism that frames the entire US/Iraq encounter – it is centrally about the logic of excess by which the CPA has installed itself in Iraq.
But let’s turn to Yemen.
Here’s the story:
“The “murders in the morgue” case became public knowledge on 10 May 2000,when two mutilated female bodies were discovered at San’ a University. Two days later, police arrested a Sudanese mortuary technician at the medical school, claiming that he had confessed to raping and killing five women.
Muhammad Adam U’mar Ishaq (whose full name was rarely reported) was a forty-five-year-old Sudanese citizen who allegedly admitted to an increasing number of murders—sixteen in Yemen and at least twenty-four in Sudan, Kuwait, Chad, and the Central African Republic (The Observer, 11 June 2000). The Nasirist newspaper reported stories that he had killed up to fifty women (al-Wahdawi, 16 May 2000). It was said that Adam also implicated members of the university’s teaching staff who, he said, were involved in the sale of body parts. According to Brian Whitaker’s account in The Observer one month later, Adam “had enticed women students to the mortuary with promises of help in their studies, then raped and killed them, videotaping all of his actions. He kept bones as mementos, disposed of some body parts in sewers and on the university grounds, and sold others together with his victims’ belongings” (11 June
2000).”
Wedeen shows that the story of these killings, reported in different forms in different newpapers, provoked outrage not just at the killer, but at the state itself. There were street demonstrations as well as editorials; there were student demands; there were articles in the Army paper. All of which she shrewdly analyzes:
“Debates in newspapers, in the streets, during Friday mosque sermons and qat chews, and in government offices laid bare how easily civic terror can be generated by perceptions of ineffective state institutions, and how public appeals can be made on the basis of the moral and material entitlements that citizens of
even the most nominal of nation-states felt were due them (see Comaroff and Comaroff 1999). People were outraged that the university had not done more to protect its students or to investigate the disappearances. Criticisms focused on the incapacities of the state, the corruption and potential complicity of the regime, and the need for the seeming elusive but desirable “mu’assasat aldawla” (state institutions). In one qat chew I attended someone went so far as to claim that serial killings could never happen in the developed United States (a point I hastened to correct).”
The press, lately, has concentrated on the meme of the ‘complaining Iraqi’ – the Weekly Standard, which alternates between bile and hubris, sent Fred Barnes to Iraq (another neo-con cruise – surely some travel agency should take advantage of these pilgrims), and he returned to report that everything was going swimmingly, but that the Iraqis were distressingly ungrateful. They complain and complain.
The distance that has opened up between the American p.o.v. and the Iraqi p.o.v. is where the action will take place in the next phase of the occupation – its meaningless abdication on June 30 to a council that will still takes its orders from the CPA.
Wedeen’s essay concludes with such a rich expansion of the concept of “belonging” that we urge our readers to go and read it, especially for the way in which she takes discourse as a distributor of “belonging to” – a rather brilliant stroke. Alas, however, it is time for this post to stop.
Saturday, April 3, 2004
Bollettino
John Burns is one of the New York Times most intelligent foreign correspondents. The Times usually slathers an aggressive, heedless neo-liberal ideology on its foreign news, picking its stringers, in such places as Venezuala, from among the most notorious class of exploiters, and in general sending out people whose framework is a sort of rightwing Friedmanism. This makes it very hard to know what is happening in the rest of the world. In the case of Iraq, the NYT has been notoriously supportive of a mere propagandist, Judith Miller. She isn’t even a competent propagandist. Her famous article about the unnamed, disguised Iraqi scientist pointing to spots in the sand where WMD are buried could be used as a freshman journalism class joke. Miller is a throwback to the Hearst reporters that went to Cuba to supply America with grounds for a war with Spain, except that she doesn’t spread that rara avis plumage of jingoistic prose – no Richard Harding Davis she. Rather, she prefers the mothballed clichés of the Wolfowitz set.
Burns, however, went into hiding because of the toughness of his reporting about Saddam Hussein’s insane leadership of his country. So it was all the more jolting to read his analysis of the recent events in Fallujah. It was not only wildly misleading, but childish in its tones and theme. The theme is: why aren’t the Iraqis grateful to us Americans? The tone was like the whining of some sullen twelve year old heir whose gifts of his old clothes to the maid’s son still hasn’t convinced the boy to play with him. Such generosity! Such complaining people, these Iraqis! After all the electricity we’ve got going for them too.
As for the misleading part: the whole history of the American/Iraqi encounter in Fallujah was set by the massacre of 17 to 30 Iraqis in the occupying of the town. Why this happened still remains a mystery, although it is easy to guess that American trigger happy nervousness had a lot to do with it. What did not occur, however, was a ‘firefight’ – which is how Burns describes it.
That theme of gratitude/ingratitude reflects the deeper, entrenched racism that frames the whole neo-imperialist enterprise, with its unconscious (or sometimes conscious) presentation of Iraqis as “children”. The parent/child image has been a standard legitimating trope in the colonialist discourse since the Spanish waded ashore on Hispanola. In Iraq, its late efflorescence has caused the CPA to act in enormously irrational ways. That the horror of the lynching of the four mercenaries in Fallujah touches off a similar response in Burns, who should know better, does not bode well for US/Iraq relations. So instead of asking such journalist questions as: why is the Army using mercenaries in the Sunni triangle, and why were these four guys going into a town the army wouldn’t enter in an unarmored vehicle, he gives us his shock and dismay.
From the beginning, we have maintained that the top down implementation of civil change, such as was envisioned by all the Defense Department planners, goes against everything we know about the failures of central planning. That is hard earned knowledge for the left. Lately, we’ve been wondering what it means to combine the benefit of a welfare state with bottom up self organization – the kind of foreign policy that the left should be vigorously exploring. In thinking about this, we keep bumping into the name James C. Scott, the man who wrote “Seeing Like A State.” So we went to an essay in Studies in Comparative Society and History for a recent essay by Lisa Wedeen, entitled “Seeing like a Citizen”. Since the essay is about the interplay between state and culture in Yemen, we thought that it might have some suggestions about what the progressive project in Iraq would be like.
Wedeen discusses three events in Yemn. One is the first direct presidential election, held on September 23, 1999. The second is the tenth anniversary celebration of national unification, on May 22, 2000. And the third is the career of a serial killer who did his killings in a University setting. Here is how Weedon sees a community of thematic interest in these different threads:
Each of the events betrays a note of irony. The election was widely heralded
as “the first free direct presidential election” ever held in Yemen, and there was
never any doubt about the ability of the incumbent to capture a majority of the
vote. Yet the ruling party, on dubious legal grounds, barred the opposition’s
jointly chosen challenger from the race and then appointed its own opponent.
President ƒAli ƒAbd Allah Salih had a chance to win what the world would have
regarded as a fair and free election, but chose instead to undermine the process,
using the apparently democratic form to foreclose democratic possibilities. In
the case of the unification anniversary, both the preparations and the event itself
required the regime to introduce state-like interventions in domains where
they had never been seen before. In areas of everyday practice, such as garbage
collection and street cleaning, the state made itself apparent to citizens in ways
that could only serve to remind them of how absent it usually was. Finally, the
revelation that a shocking series of murders had taken place inside the state-run
university produced communities of criticism in which people found themselves
sharing a sense of belonging to a nation the existence of which was merely
imputed by the failure of the state to exercise its expected role of protecting
its citizens.”
As you can see, gentle reader, these are familiar themes in the Iraqi context. Wedeen wants to know why, firstly, a party in power would overreach to the extent of delegitimating its democratic standing for no apparent gain; secondly, why the state can come spasmodically to life, spending money on a ritual celebrating itself to the extent that it points its citizens to that expenditure – for instance, in cleaning up the streets before the celebration – and so points to its incompetence both before and after the celebration; and thirdly, why a ruling elite that exists in terms of its assertion of direct power can still leave the citizens of the state feeling unprotected. To put the third question less clumsily: why is the state so inefficient at security, given its emergence from an overtly militarized context?
Wedeen uses the word "belonging" -- a term that has grown suspiciously popular in the social sciences -- to link up to her titular image of seeing to make her general point: “Yemen demonstrates how events of collective vulnerability can bring about episodic expressions of national identification.”
We’ll get back to this essay in our next post.
John Burns is one of the New York Times most intelligent foreign correspondents. The Times usually slathers an aggressive, heedless neo-liberal ideology on its foreign news, picking its stringers, in such places as Venezuala, from among the most notorious class of exploiters, and in general sending out people whose framework is a sort of rightwing Friedmanism. This makes it very hard to know what is happening in the rest of the world. In the case of Iraq, the NYT has been notoriously supportive of a mere propagandist, Judith Miller. She isn’t even a competent propagandist. Her famous article about the unnamed, disguised Iraqi scientist pointing to spots in the sand where WMD are buried could be used as a freshman journalism class joke. Miller is a throwback to the Hearst reporters that went to Cuba to supply America with grounds for a war with Spain, except that she doesn’t spread that rara avis plumage of jingoistic prose – no Richard Harding Davis she. Rather, she prefers the mothballed clichés of the Wolfowitz set.
Burns, however, went into hiding because of the toughness of his reporting about Saddam Hussein’s insane leadership of his country. So it was all the more jolting to read his analysis of the recent events in Fallujah. It was not only wildly misleading, but childish in its tones and theme. The theme is: why aren’t the Iraqis grateful to us Americans? The tone was like the whining of some sullen twelve year old heir whose gifts of his old clothes to the maid’s son still hasn’t convinced the boy to play with him. Such generosity! Such complaining people, these Iraqis! After all the electricity we’ve got going for them too.
As for the misleading part: the whole history of the American/Iraqi encounter in Fallujah was set by the massacre of 17 to 30 Iraqis in the occupying of the town. Why this happened still remains a mystery, although it is easy to guess that American trigger happy nervousness had a lot to do with it. What did not occur, however, was a ‘firefight’ – which is how Burns describes it.
That theme of gratitude/ingratitude reflects the deeper, entrenched racism that frames the whole neo-imperialist enterprise, with its unconscious (or sometimes conscious) presentation of Iraqis as “children”. The parent/child image has been a standard legitimating trope in the colonialist discourse since the Spanish waded ashore on Hispanola. In Iraq, its late efflorescence has caused the CPA to act in enormously irrational ways. That the horror of the lynching of the four mercenaries in Fallujah touches off a similar response in Burns, who should know better, does not bode well for US/Iraq relations. So instead of asking such journalist questions as: why is the Army using mercenaries in the Sunni triangle, and why were these four guys going into a town the army wouldn’t enter in an unarmored vehicle, he gives us his shock and dismay.
From the beginning, we have maintained that the top down implementation of civil change, such as was envisioned by all the Defense Department planners, goes against everything we know about the failures of central planning. That is hard earned knowledge for the left. Lately, we’ve been wondering what it means to combine the benefit of a welfare state with bottom up self organization – the kind of foreign policy that the left should be vigorously exploring. In thinking about this, we keep bumping into the name James C. Scott, the man who wrote “Seeing Like A State.” So we went to an essay in Studies in Comparative Society and History for a recent essay by Lisa Wedeen, entitled “Seeing like a Citizen”. Since the essay is about the interplay between state and culture in Yemen, we thought that it might have some suggestions about what the progressive project in Iraq would be like.
Wedeen discusses three events in Yemn. One is the first direct presidential election, held on September 23, 1999. The second is the tenth anniversary celebration of national unification, on May 22, 2000. And the third is the career of a serial killer who did his killings in a University setting. Here is how Weedon sees a community of thematic interest in these different threads:
Each of the events betrays a note of irony. The election was widely heralded
as “the first free direct presidential election” ever held in Yemen, and there was
never any doubt about the ability of the incumbent to capture a majority of the
vote. Yet the ruling party, on dubious legal grounds, barred the opposition’s
jointly chosen challenger from the race and then appointed its own opponent.
President ƒAli ƒAbd Allah Salih had a chance to win what the world would have
regarded as a fair and free election, but chose instead to undermine the process,
using the apparently democratic form to foreclose democratic possibilities. In
the case of the unification anniversary, both the preparations and the event itself
required the regime to introduce state-like interventions in domains where
they had never been seen before. In areas of everyday practice, such as garbage
collection and street cleaning, the state made itself apparent to citizens in ways
that could only serve to remind them of how absent it usually was. Finally, the
revelation that a shocking series of murders had taken place inside the state-run
university produced communities of criticism in which people found themselves
sharing a sense of belonging to a nation the existence of which was merely
imputed by the failure of the state to exercise its expected role of protecting
its citizens.”
As you can see, gentle reader, these are familiar themes in the Iraqi context. Wedeen wants to know why, firstly, a party in power would overreach to the extent of delegitimating its democratic standing for no apparent gain; secondly, why the state can come spasmodically to life, spending money on a ritual celebrating itself to the extent that it points its citizens to that expenditure – for instance, in cleaning up the streets before the celebration – and so points to its incompetence both before and after the celebration; and thirdly, why a ruling elite that exists in terms of its assertion of direct power can still leave the citizens of the state feeling unprotected. To put the third question less clumsily: why is the state so inefficient at security, given its emergence from an overtly militarized context?
Wedeen uses the word "belonging" -- a term that has grown suspiciously popular in the social sciences -- to link up to her titular image of seeing to make her general point: “Yemen demonstrates how events of collective vulnerability can bring about episodic expressions of national identification.”
We’ll get back to this essay in our next post.
Friday, April 2, 2004
Bollettino
The Black and White world
In the 1730s, a French monk, Louis Bertrand Castel, invented a color ‘clavecin.” Following a suggestion by Athanasius Kircher that arrangements of colors corresponded to arrangements of sounds, the clavecin was designed to create color harmonies synchronized to music. That Kircher was invoked should tell us that Castel was an anti-Newtonian, which he was -- il doutait 'que Monsieur Newton n'eut jamais manié de prisme' – of the profound sort – Castel, like Kircher, still lived in a world in which science was an exquisite web of analogies. The kind of reductionism and mathematical method that Newton applied, without any pre-determining analogies, seemed like a desecration of that web. Blake had that same sentiment a century later, although by then the pre-modern understanding of nature had been irreversibly lost, along with the culture that sustained it. Castel’s example influenced the ever-peculiar Russian composer, Scriabin, in the 20th century.
Well, this is an odd starting place for a post about the world of black and white films and photographs – the world of technical photo-reproduction for most people from the mid nineteeth to the mid twentieth centuries. We start here because we want to touch the folk science of color -- the system of folk beliefs that contain schematics for the correspondence of color to words, sounds, moods, crimes and virtues. We’ve been thinking about that world because, somehow, we came across this exhibition of tabloid photographs. We find photos like this enormously and mysteriously appealing. In fact, it is hard to think of the modern era – from around 1900 through the 1950s – without thinking, unconsciously, in black and white. Kennedy’s assassination, for me, is in black and white, although I’m not really sure the Zapruder film was black and white. I’ve often wondered why nobody has explored how the optical values of the historical iconography spill over into our larger historical imagination.
It isn’t simply that black and white is a color scheme – as human things, colors in their mutual relations one with the other have human significances even as they do the "job" of blocking in figures that philosophers assign to them. There’s an old philosophical bias towards the figural and against color. Color is considered accidental, transitory, way too mutable. Here the old schematic bias, the old logocentrism, as Derrida puts it, flashes into sight and as quickly vanishes.
Try to imagine, for instance, the photo of the wifebeater on the ninth page of the exhibit in different colors. For me, this is almost impossible. Even if I saw the image colorized, it would revert to black and white in my memory, just as certain events -- say World War I -- happen in black and white in my memory. I cannot see it, mentally, in technocolor. The effect of the alleged wifebeater photo is all in the heavy face of the smiling husband, the blocked out head of the wife, and the hand holding -- a gesture that suddenly seems sinister. LI has remarked before, on some post, about the tension between caption and picture. This one has a caption that is a Dashiell Hamlett short story in a sentence: “William Charles November 28, 1947 Friday Held on suspicion of wife-beating.” Can he possibly not be guilty? No, every nuance here proclaims his guilt. But this is where we find the black and white world particularly eerie – it is as if those colors were not only necessary to his representation, but the secret determinants of his crime. It is as if those colors had the pervasive influence of the fates upon Mr. Charles – as if when he beat his wife, the act itself must have been in black and white.
...
On another note -- LI has finally made the Paypal thing work. Check it out.
The Black and White world
In the 1730s, a French monk, Louis Bertrand Castel, invented a color ‘clavecin.” Following a suggestion by Athanasius Kircher that arrangements of colors corresponded to arrangements of sounds, the clavecin was designed to create color harmonies synchronized to music. That Kircher was invoked should tell us that Castel was an anti-Newtonian, which he was -- il doutait 'que Monsieur Newton n'eut jamais manié de prisme' – of the profound sort – Castel, like Kircher, still lived in a world in which science was an exquisite web of analogies. The kind of reductionism and mathematical method that Newton applied, without any pre-determining analogies, seemed like a desecration of that web. Blake had that same sentiment a century later, although by then the pre-modern understanding of nature had been irreversibly lost, along with the culture that sustained it. Castel’s example influenced the ever-peculiar Russian composer, Scriabin, in the 20th century.
Well, this is an odd starting place for a post about the world of black and white films and photographs – the world of technical photo-reproduction for most people from the mid nineteeth to the mid twentieth centuries. We start here because we want to touch the folk science of color -- the system of folk beliefs that contain schematics for the correspondence of color to words, sounds, moods, crimes and virtues. We’ve been thinking about that world because, somehow, we came across this exhibition of tabloid photographs. We find photos like this enormously and mysteriously appealing. In fact, it is hard to think of the modern era – from around 1900 through the 1950s – without thinking, unconsciously, in black and white. Kennedy’s assassination, for me, is in black and white, although I’m not really sure the Zapruder film was black and white. I’ve often wondered why nobody has explored how the optical values of the historical iconography spill over into our larger historical imagination.
It isn’t simply that black and white is a color scheme – as human things, colors in their mutual relations one with the other have human significances even as they do the "job" of blocking in figures that philosophers assign to them. There’s an old philosophical bias towards the figural and against color. Color is considered accidental, transitory, way too mutable. Here the old schematic bias, the old logocentrism, as Derrida puts it, flashes into sight and as quickly vanishes.
Try to imagine, for instance, the photo of the wifebeater on the ninth page of the exhibit in different colors. For me, this is almost impossible. Even if I saw the image colorized, it would revert to black and white in my memory, just as certain events -- say World War I -- happen in black and white in my memory. I cannot see it, mentally, in technocolor. The effect of the alleged wifebeater photo is all in the heavy face of the smiling husband, the blocked out head of the wife, and the hand holding -- a gesture that suddenly seems sinister. LI has remarked before, on some post, about the tension between caption and picture. This one has a caption that is a Dashiell Hamlett short story in a sentence: “William Charles November 28, 1947 Friday Held on suspicion of wife-beating.” Can he possibly not be guilty? No, every nuance here proclaims his guilt. But this is where we find the black and white world particularly eerie – it is as if those colors were not only necessary to his representation, but the secret determinants of his crime. It is as if those colors had the pervasive influence of the fates upon Mr. Charles – as if when he beat his wife, the act itself must have been in black and white.
...
On another note -- LI has finally made the Paypal thing work. Check it out.
Thursday, April 1, 2004
Bollettino
“Beauty should not happen”
LI received a letter from our friend T. in NYC regarding our “beautiful woman” posts. It was addressed to the character in our novel, Holly Sterling – and like a spur in the ribs, it reminded us that we have not been writing the novel in the last week or two. T. has been a regular reader – with red pencil in hand – of the novel.
(Our excuse, our regular excuse, is that since we are close to being kicked out of our apartment, losing our electricity, and in general deprived of the amenities – like a slug under the salt, in other words -- we have other things on our mind. Samuel Johnson, in our humble opinion, might have been wrong – the threat of imminent hanging doesn’t wonderfully concentrate the mind – it fatally scatters it. Of course, we don’t claim to have the highwayman’s strong character. Or perhaps we have a different sense of the drama of our ending. Its sheer pettiness is insurmountable).
But to get back to T.’s letter – if you haven’t read the Beautiful Woman posts, it won’t make any sense to you. Go and read them – they begin two posts back.
We’ve edited and shortened the letter a bit.
"Holly dear,
You must obviously wonder of this intrusion. Its true that it is embarrassment that is at the forefront of my mind as I write to you; I ask and assume too much of your attention. After all, our first and only meeting was so brief that you can’t possibly remember this admirer, I could not have made any impression whatever; and, after all, you were already dead.
Although you are dead, I've heard stories of your beauty. Secondhand stories, its true, and none of them ever mentioned the color of your hair, and a few told me of your accent, but the last fact was not presented as integral to your beauty. No, I actually do not know how beautiful you were, but I can imagine....the fewer and sparer the tales, the more space for my imaginings. Anyway, I'm rather appreciative of beautiful women, and I've recently read a little book that gave me much cause to think about beauty, and divinity, and divinely beautiful women....I thought I might share this with you.
Will I offend you so much if I speak of Pierre Klossowski; will you be offended if I even merely invoking a few references in order to tell you a bit about beauty? Realize that as a beauty, you perhaps have little to say beyond the seeming affect it has had on others. That is your first person (if you will have one at all). My first person account is as pure as it can be on this matter. A reasonable concern of yours: Is what he [LI] has to tell me merely scopic? Perhaps; some would argue “Indeed and only.” Well, then, since you cannot have even a taste of the scopic (according to those who say “Indeed and only”), then I will offer a few observations from that place that cannot be yours.
I swear Holly, I'm not a pervert, but an author that dares to contemplate possible conclusions to the saga of Diana at her Bath as PK, is an author that I need more of in my life. Will you be offended by that possibility that Acteon, not quite all a stag, left hand still in human form, groping Diana’s breast, at the brink of penetrating the goddess in human form whereupon he is set upon by the ravenous hounds that rip him apart, drenching Diana in blood; or, alternatively, Acteaon wearing the bloody head of a stag upon his own, seduced by the goddess, rapturously on top of her….
No, I am not a pervert, but give me myth, Holly dear, just don't ask too much of my faith; engage me in tales of wondrous plausibility, and I will never demand that you tarry with the truth; you are dead Holly, which renders this the beginning and the end of our correspondence, but let me know the story of your beauty.
Divinity unto uselessness, if you prefer a theme.
Did the persona behind Limited, Inc. ever tell you one tale of the Invisible Woman? No, well, LI should have, for it might inform you of what is to come, and what becomes of you. The beautiful woman, such as yourself, need not be here, or there, exactly; its (please excuse and pardon me: your) presence is not always a matter of proximity, but intimate contact, at a distance or otherwise.
That sensation when one is before beauty, when one espies it, that then one is nearer to the "religious gravity" that Barthes finds the Lover provides. I am a far less discerning man; I need not the magnitude of a Lover – any beautiful woman will do. Contact at a distance; contact without the often unavailable or inconvenient facts and particularities of proximity; such is the space that I am trying to explain; I’m sure you have occupied that space, knowingly or not; think back to times before your demise…the attention of their conversation… the casual embrace….the touch at your wrist or shoulder…a glance from across the room: all of them abstract and indistinct in their formality, seemingly ordinary.
Preceeding that space?: Waiting. It is an unknown; that one, beknowst to one or not, is always waiting for beauty - that one is there only because one should not be there. Beauty should not happen; there is no apparent teleology to the encounter, it is rare and awkward and unusual. Although miracles surely do happen, one cannot predict them for they have no place amidst the rigors of prediction and verification; brilliant and extreme (the dictionary indicates of ‘beauty’ (etymologically related to 'bounty')); but it is all so much a matter of what beauty DOES - thus the examples that one might mine from the History of Western Lit., from Helen to Mademoiselle Marnaffe and to a more current date (the Dulcinea del Tobloso is a peculiar case, to be sure, but enough of my parody of erudition!). A beautiful woman does nothing for me, she is superfluous, unnecessary; yet she immediately ends that waiting and therefrom does that impressionistic sense of space and color ensue - wholly human for she is seen as a beautiful woman, but also ethereal; thus, a moment formally sublime.
What did your beauty do Holly? That is the story that I want to hear.
There is, of course, never anything normal about the peculiar charms of a beautiful woman - arms ever too long, face far to piqued, nose rather askew, hands very much too small, etc… but usually a disorganization well short of anything that might be a fetish. What is IT? Yes, what is it? It is, at least, that rare moment of apperception wherein one finds oneself amid both those things that are real and their unreal relations and affiliates, where simulacra are welcomed, as are shadows and echoes; where poses and masks are intimate and alluring.
“Beauty” as a word can only emerge (as it did), don't you think, Holly dear, after all the bother of the period of courtly love? One does not take on burdens and challenges inspired by beauty, one does no great deeds intoxicated by beauty for beauty, no matter how delirious one might become in the presence of beauty, there is neither obedience, nor loyalty, nor service to beauty (unless, of course, one is engaged in some part of the all so pernicious "beauty industry"; but that is far far apart from my fixation at present), while there may be inspiration in the seeing, there is nothing particularly ennobled by such inspiration. Ah, ideals, and idealistic and idyllic ways of telling of them!
A small confession, Holly dear, I am a limited man, a man devoid of grand themes and epic scales, without even the slightest hope of a Form. I have only and merely my few tales, fewer of which I know very well at all. I write to you only as an admirer of beautiful women.
The beauty that recurs as opposed to the fashion of a time; the beauty that remains, adorned or not; yes, that's the one. While a pretty girl may be like a melody, a beautiful woman is a requiem.
Perhaps, Holly dear, you became only a motif or a type. But be of good courage: becoming a woman of substance was never in your stars… to your benefit, if I don’t say-so myself. You will, like every other beauty, remain at a distance, connected to me no matter that distance, in fictive space, or otherwise. My shame, indeed, should either of us take the guise of the Object – that is reserved for my indiscretion: that I might become a nusiance and bother, interrupting your view of what it is that is of you attention.
Diana at her Bath? Pierre Klossowski? How might I get from mere beauty to the divine? All reasonable questions Holly dear.
“Only divinity is happy with its own uselessness.” There is, for us mere mortals, a terrifying vertigo to this aimless and useless existence; we require obscurity and false clarity. Here is the intimacy of divinity and beauty: beauty is its own uselessness; beauty requires as little relation to the sexual act as does love or the needs of procreation, as does any divine one.
Apprehending beauty is the end of the waiting that is integral to every other moment not proximate to beauty (moments unto that ceaseless cycle).
Again, under threat of boredom: What does beauty DO? The same question might be posed to divinity of mythological time: the tale of the gods is what they DO. “This mountainous horizon, these woods, this vale and these springs, do they thus have no reality except in her absence? […] The more absorbed I become in the appearance of these objects, the better I see what the breeze is tracing: her forehead, her hair, her shoulders – unless a more blustery wind is creasing her tunic farther into the hollow of her thighs, above her knees. […] More than ever I experience the dignity of the space as the most reasonable enjoyment of my mind, the moment her forehead, her cheeks, her neck, her throat and her shoulders take shape there and dwell there, the moment her unendurable gaze explores and her nimble fingers, her palms, her elbows and legs slice and strike the air.”
From the affect of beauty on the beholder, to Diana’s visage at her bath: “…yet this body, in which she will manifest herself to herself, she actually borrows from Actaeon’s imagination.”
I, in the company of a beautiful woman can no more dominate her than I might submit myself to the her; I can only be submitted by that unknown force of beauty and that made that moment of the encounter inevitable.
One visage of that force is the Daemon, the intermediary between the god and man, between the beautiful and the beholder: “It is I who teach you this, O Actaeon, I whose external form, malleable to the will of the gods, so well lends iteslf to espousing their unfathomable intentions in order to give your senses proof of their arbitraty existence.” Beauty interrupts the continual and recurring flow of obscurity unto arbitrariness. In mythological cases, the Daemon functions as the interruption, in other more temporal and far less dramatic moments, beauty does so.
Such an interpretation: the encounter of Acteon and Diana at her Bath: “This incidence still belongs to the world of irreversible and uninterrupted space: the danger, the risk – like that of the hunt and the bath after the hunt – lies in the fact that the sacred grove of Diana’s bath is situated in this same space, and that numerous paths which seem to lead nowhere run into that very place.”
Yes, it is that “morose delectation” of Actaeon that I savor every so often.
“’What I saw, I cannot say what it was.’ Not that what one cannot say, one might not more fully understand, nor that one cannot see what one does not understand. Actaeon, in the myth, sees because he cannot say what he sees: if he could say it, he would no longer see. Yet Actaeon, meditating in the grotto, confers on Actaeon suddenly busting into the sacred in which Diana is bathing, the following remark: I shouldn’t be here, that’s why I’m here. The real experience, however, would boil down to an absurd proposition: I was supposed to be here because I was not supposed to be here.”
Nunc tibi me posito visam velamine rares
Si poteris narrare, licet - Ovid
[Now you may tell you saw me here unclothed,/If you can tell at all.]
“As soon as one analyzes these words, one notes in them both the provocation and the irony […] The provocation: Say it, then, describe Diana’s nudity, describe my charms, that no doubt what you’re waiting for, what your fellow men would love to know. The irony: If you can tell at all!”
A beautiful woman, then, is a fragment that is not of a whole, before or after the encounter with her. The “system” of her beauty is never wholly psycho- or social. Her beauty is without the obligations of language and consciousness (thus, speechless and thoughtless). “She is a beauty, no matter her features.” – Diana Vreeland. If you can tell at all. The particular features of a beautiful woman are accidental; she is a phantasm without essence. As a phantasm, possession is without concept.
Yes, Holly dear, you are sterling, like every beautiful woman; never once did you go lightly or gently.
But now my imagination has taken-over, trespassing both beauty and fantasy. I have failed to even indicate the beauty of a woman that arises only in conversation; you and I, of course, will never converse.
I remain,
T.
“Beauty should not happen”
LI received a letter from our friend T. in NYC regarding our “beautiful woman” posts. It was addressed to the character in our novel, Holly Sterling – and like a spur in the ribs, it reminded us that we have not been writing the novel in the last week or two. T. has been a regular reader – with red pencil in hand – of the novel.
(Our excuse, our regular excuse, is that since we are close to being kicked out of our apartment, losing our electricity, and in general deprived of the amenities – like a slug under the salt, in other words -- we have other things on our mind. Samuel Johnson, in our humble opinion, might have been wrong – the threat of imminent hanging doesn’t wonderfully concentrate the mind – it fatally scatters it. Of course, we don’t claim to have the highwayman’s strong character. Or perhaps we have a different sense of the drama of our ending. Its sheer pettiness is insurmountable).
But to get back to T.’s letter – if you haven’t read the Beautiful Woman posts, it won’t make any sense to you. Go and read them – they begin two posts back.
We’ve edited and shortened the letter a bit.
"Holly dear,
You must obviously wonder of this intrusion. Its true that it is embarrassment that is at the forefront of my mind as I write to you; I ask and assume too much of your attention. After all, our first and only meeting was so brief that you can’t possibly remember this admirer, I could not have made any impression whatever; and, after all, you were already dead.
Although you are dead, I've heard stories of your beauty. Secondhand stories, its true, and none of them ever mentioned the color of your hair, and a few told me of your accent, but the last fact was not presented as integral to your beauty. No, I actually do not know how beautiful you were, but I can imagine....the fewer and sparer the tales, the more space for my imaginings. Anyway, I'm rather appreciative of beautiful women, and I've recently read a little book that gave me much cause to think about beauty, and divinity, and divinely beautiful women....I thought I might share this with you.
Will I offend you so much if I speak of Pierre Klossowski; will you be offended if I even merely invoking a few references in order to tell you a bit about beauty? Realize that as a beauty, you perhaps have little to say beyond the seeming affect it has had on others. That is your first person (if you will have one at all). My first person account is as pure as it can be on this matter. A reasonable concern of yours: Is what he [LI] has to tell me merely scopic? Perhaps; some would argue “Indeed and only.” Well, then, since you cannot have even a taste of the scopic (according to those who say “Indeed and only”), then I will offer a few observations from that place that cannot be yours.
I swear Holly, I'm not a pervert, but an author that dares to contemplate possible conclusions to the saga of Diana at her Bath as PK, is an author that I need more of in my life. Will you be offended by that possibility that Acteon, not quite all a stag, left hand still in human form, groping Diana’s breast, at the brink of penetrating the goddess in human form whereupon he is set upon by the ravenous hounds that rip him apart, drenching Diana in blood; or, alternatively, Acteaon wearing the bloody head of a stag upon his own, seduced by the goddess, rapturously on top of her….
No, I am not a pervert, but give me myth, Holly dear, just don't ask too much of my faith; engage me in tales of wondrous plausibility, and I will never demand that you tarry with the truth; you are dead Holly, which renders this the beginning and the end of our correspondence, but let me know the story of your beauty.
Divinity unto uselessness, if you prefer a theme.
Did the persona behind Limited, Inc. ever tell you one tale of the Invisible Woman? No, well, LI should have, for it might inform you of what is to come, and what becomes of you. The beautiful woman, such as yourself, need not be here, or there, exactly; its (please excuse and pardon me: your) presence is not always a matter of proximity, but intimate contact, at a distance or otherwise.
That sensation when one is before beauty, when one espies it, that then one is nearer to the "religious gravity" that Barthes finds the Lover provides. I am a far less discerning man; I need not the magnitude of a Lover – any beautiful woman will do. Contact at a distance; contact without the often unavailable or inconvenient facts and particularities of proximity; such is the space that I am trying to explain; I’m sure you have occupied that space, knowingly or not; think back to times before your demise…the attention of their conversation… the casual embrace….the touch at your wrist or shoulder…a glance from across the room: all of them abstract and indistinct in their formality, seemingly ordinary.
Preceeding that space?: Waiting. It is an unknown; that one, beknowst to one or not, is always waiting for beauty - that one is there only because one should not be there. Beauty should not happen; there is no apparent teleology to the encounter, it is rare and awkward and unusual. Although miracles surely do happen, one cannot predict them for they have no place amidst the rigors of prediction and verification; brilliant and extreme (the dictionary indicates of ‘beauty’ (etymologically related to 'bounty')); but it is all so much a matter of what beauty DOES - thus the examples that one might mine from the History of Western Lit., from Helen to Mademoiselle Marnaffe and to a more current date (the Dulcinea del Tobloso is a peculiar case, to be sure, but enough of my parody of erudition!). A beautiful woman does nothing for me, she is superfluous, unnecessary; yet she immediately ends that waiting and therefrom does that impressionistic sense of space and color ensue - wholly human for she is seen as a beautiful woman, but also ethereal; thus, a moment formally sublime.
What did your beauty do Holly? That is the story that I want to hear.
There is, of course, never anything normal about the peculiar charms of a beautiful woman - arms ever too long, face far to piqued, nose rather askew, hands very much too small, etc… but usually a disorganization well short of anything that might be a fetish. What is IT? Yes, what is it? It is, at least, that rare moment of apperception wherein one finds oneself amid both those things that are real and their unreal relations and affiliates, where simulacra are welcomed, as are shadows and echoes; where poses and masks are intimate and alluring.
“Beauty” as a word can only emerge (as it did), don't you think, Holly dear, after all the bother of the period of courtly love? One does not take on burdens and challenges inspired by beauty, one does no great deeds intoxicated by beauty for beauty, no matter how delirious one might become in the presence of beauty, there is neither obedience, nor loyalty, nor service to beauty (unless, of course, one is engaged in some part of the all so pernicious "beauty industry"; but that is far far apart from my fixation at present), while there may be inspiration in the seeing, there is nothing particularly ennobled by such inspiration. Ah, ideals, and idealistic and idyllic ways of telling of them!
A small confession, Holly dear, I am a limited man, a man devoid of grand themes and epic scales, without even the slightest hope of a Form. I have only and merely my few tales, fewer of which I know very well at all. I write to you only as an admirer of beautiful women.
The beauty that recurs as opposed to the fashion of a time; the beauty that remains, adorned or not; yes, that's the one. While a pretty girl may be like a melody, a beautiful woman is a requiem.
Perhaps, Holly dear, you became only a motif or a type. But be of good courage: becoming a woman of substance was never in your stars… to your benefit, if I don’t say-so myself. You will, like every other beauty, remain at a distance, connected to me no matter that distance, in fictive space, or otherwise. My shame, indeed, should either of us take the guise of the Object – that is reserved for my indiscretion: that I might become a nusiance and bother, interrupting your view of what it is that is of you attention.
Diana at her Bath? Pierre Klossowski? How might I get from mere beauty to the divine? All reasonable questions Holly dear.
“Only divinity is happy with its own uselessness.” There is, for us mere mortals, a terrifying vertigo to this aimless and useless existence; we require obscurity and false clarity. Here is the intimacy of divinity and beauty: beauty is its own uselessness; beauty requires as little relation to the sexual act as does love or the needs of procreation, as does any divine one.
Apprehending beauty is the end of the waiting that is integral to every other moment not proximate to beauty (moments unto that ceaseless cycle).
Again, under threat of boredom: What does beauty DO? The same question might be posed to divinity of mythological time: the tale of the gods is what they DO. “This mountainous horizon, these woods, this vale and these springs, do they thus have no reality except in her absence? […] The more absorbed I become in the appearance of these objects, the better I see what the breeze is tracing: her forehead, her hair, her shoulders – unless a more blustery wind is creasing her tunic farther into the hollow of her thighs, above her knees. […] More than ever I experience the dignity of the space as the most reasonable enjoyment of my mind, the moment her forehead, her cheeks, her neck, her throat and her shoulders take shape there and dwell there, the moment her unendurable gaze explores and her nimble fingers, her palms, her elbows and legs slice and strike the air.”
From the affect of beauty on the beholder, to Diana’s visage at her bath: “…yet this body, in which she will manifest herself to herself, she actually borrows from Actaeon’s imagination.”
I, in the company of a beautiful woman can no more dominate her than I might submit myself to the her; I can only be submitted by that unknown force of beauty and that made that moment of the encounter inevitable.
One visage of that force is the Daemon, the intermediary between the god and man, between the beautiful and the beholder: “It is I who teach you this, O Actaeon, I whose external form, malleable to the will of the gods, so well lends iteslf to espousing their unfathomable intentions in order to give your senses proof of their arbitraty existence.” Beauty interrupts the continual and recurring flow of obscurity unto arbitrariness. In mythological cases, the Daemon functions as the interruption, in other more temporal and far less dramatic moments, beauty does so.
Such an interpretation: the encounter of Acteon and Diana at her Bath: “This incidence still belongs to the world of irreversible and uninterrupted space: the danger, the risk – like that of the hunt and the bath after the hunt – lies in the fact that the sacred grove of Diana’s bath is situated in this same space, and that numerous paths which seem to lead nowhere run into that very place.”
Yes, it is that “morose delectation” of Actaeon that I savor every so often.
“’What I saw, I cannot say what it was.’ Not that what one cannot say, one might not more fully understand, nor that one cannot see what one does not understand. Actaeon, in the myth, sees because he cannot say what he sees: if he could say it, he would no longer see. Yet Actaeon, meditating in the grotto, confers on Actaeon suddenly busting into the sacred in which Diana is bathing, the following remark: I shouldn’t be here, that’s why I’m here. The real experience, however, would boil down to an absurd proposition: I was supposed to be here because I was not supposed to be here.”
Nunc tibi me posito visam velamine rares
Si poteris narrare, licet - Ovid
[Now you may tell you saw me here unclothed,/If you can tell at all.]
“As soon as one analyzes these words, one notes in them both the provocation and the irony […] The provocation: Say it, then, describe Diana’s nudity, describe my charms, that no doubt what you’re waiting for, what your fellow men would love to know. The irony: If you can tell at all!”
A beautiful woman, then, is a fragment that is not of a whole, before or after the encounter with her. The “system” of her beauty is never wholly psycho- or social. Her beauty is without the obligations of language and consciousness (thus, speechless and thoughtless). “She is a beauty, no matter her features.” – Diana Vreeland. If you can tell at all. The particular features of a beautiful woman are accidental; she is a phantasm without essence. As a phantasm, possession is without concept.
Yes, Holly dear, you are sterling, like every beautiful woman; never once did you go lightly or gently.
But now my imagination has taken-over, trespassing both beauty and fantasy. I have failed to even indicate the beauty of a woman that arises only in conversation; you and I, of course, will never converse.
I remain,
T.
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