Bollettino



Lately, we’ve been reading the collection of Italo Calvino’s bric a brac published this spring as A Hermit in Paris. The book contains some essays, some autobiographical musings, and a journal of Calvino’s first journey to the U.S., in 1959, under the auspices of a Ford Foundation grant. We were fascinated to learn that the Ford Foundation, no doubt doing its cold war duty to advertise the culture of the free world, brought four European writers to America that year: Calvino, Hugo Claus, Arrabal, and Claude Ollier. Gunter Grass was supposed to be part of this merry band, but couldn’t make it. Calvino is nicely bitchy about his comrades -- Claus he doesn’t know and takes for granted is a minor from a minor country, Ollier – the nouveau romaniste -- he considers to be an ignoramus, and Arrabal the anarchist amuses him with his ceaseless complaints (for instance, Arrabal accuses Goytisolo of blocking his career in Francist Spain because he doesn’t write in the socialist realist strain and isn’t anti-Franco enough), in addition to which Calvino relishes the fact that, once the four land in New York, Arrabal is almost physically frightened of the beatniks he meets (like Alan Ginsburg, who comes to a party with a ‘disgusting black straggly beard, mistakes Arrabal for a kindred soul, since Arrabal also boasts a beard, and makes some moves on him): “Ginsburg lives with another bearded man as man and wife and would like Arrabal to be present at their bearded couplings. When I get back to the hotel, I find Arrabal looking frightened and scandalized because they wanted to seduce him.” Arrabal, Calvino claims, reveals that his set of beatniks in Paris are very clean, live in beautifully appointed houses with refrigerators and televisions, and “only dress up in dirty clothes to go out.”



Cold War culture, o saisons! o chateaux! Calvino loves New York. Nevertheless, he pulls himself out of it to travel around the country in 1960. Some of his comments have that visitor from another planet air about them, especially for an American. For instance, Calvino is a communist at this time. So he takes an interest in the 1960 presidential election. It is, he assures people in letters he sends back home, pretty much given that the Republican will win. This is good, because his opponent is a conservative Catholic. Calvino has seen enough conservative Catholics back in Italy. So much for the international charm of JFK.



One of Calvino’s autobiographical essays, Portraits of Duce, was published in the New Yorker last year. It is a catalogue of the images of Mussolini that Calvino remembers from childhood. And of how Mussolini’s face figured as more than an image of fascist power – it infiltrated the space of all faces in Italy in the fascist years.



Here is a graf::



“The other salient feature of these first official images of the dictator was the pensive pose, the prominent forehead seeming to underline his capacity for thought. In one of the affectionate games that people used to play at the time with children of one or two years, the adult would say, "Do Mussolini's face," and the child would furrow his brow and stick out angry lips. In a word, Italians of my generation carried the portrait of Mussolini within themselves, even before they were of an age to recognize it on the walls, and this reveals that there was (also) something infantile in that image, that look of concentration which small children can have, and which does not actually mean that they are thinking intensely about anything.”



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Bollettino



A friend of mine who is pretty far to the right sent me an email about Swift Boat Veterans about a month ago. I thought, at the time: you gotta be kidding me. Bush, with an incredibly bad military record, can’t afford to open this little can of worms up.



I was wrong. The Bush campaign correctly gauged Kerry’s weakness – a massive, senatorial vanity that makes Oedipus’ hubris look like the shrinking modesty of a closet virgin. Kerry’s response has been, throughout, a comic exercise in hauteur. It is as if Kerry feels that we will all feel his pain that he, John Kerry, a senator, a presidential candidate, is being unfairly attacked in a tv ad. Wow – a presidential candidate attacked in a slimy way! That he has made this into an issue of Bush condemning or not the ads shows …. well, a pretty bad instinct in Kerry. Hardball does not consist of insisting that your opponent dominate the game. Surely even in the incubator of egocentricity and bad but expensive hair that is D.C., surely someone around Kerry could have gently said: get over it. But no: this utterly boring and irrelevant issue is bearing beautiful fruit for the Bush campaign. Kerry’s partisans are all in a lather – all of them amplifying the vanity response, all of them insisting on the utterly godlike heroism of the young Kerry, deigning to become a grunt from his position of privilege in the Ivies – we all should be so honored! I'm weeping in my whiskey! All of them determined to stick with the story of Kerry the hero unworthily blemished to the very end.



If, instead, Kerry had accepted being attacked, and attacked back – if he hadn’t sanctimoniously “condemned” moveon’s quite mild ads on Bush – he’d be in much better shape. Liberals have a tendency to confuse their arrogance with decency – they love that word decency – when, in reality, their niceness is all context dependent. I say: bring on the dirty campaigning. If I had inherited a million bucks, I could afford to be decent too. Or indecent. The truth is, most of us don’t have any choice about it – that’s what a restricted income does for ya. So we plug up the interstices with a few moral acts, gorge on superstitions in response to our dim awareness that we are vulnerable to everything in this universe and are going to die without having eaten enough, fucked enough, thought enough, or enjoyed any one moment enough, and plug along from one besotted moment to another thinking about sex, if we are lucky and our libido hasn’t been broken by our exhaustion. I really believe that the Dem establishment doesn’t have a clue. Hence, a small town Babbitt like Rove can look like a genius just for acting like a redneck drunk, since this provokes the most maddening, and unintentionally hilarious, responses from Dems. Their noses immediately go in the air. They act sullied. They begin talking about honor, by which they mean – I, me, my ego, my preciousness, was actually INSULTED by that lout. Can you imagine? This righteous indignation plays out as a particularly nauseating blend of petulance. The mask comes down. The hoi polloi insult and are insulted all of the time. It is our art form. And if you can’t deal with that, how are you going to deal with things like, uh, war?



It has still not resonated with the Dems that they are no longer the default party. Incredible as that seems, they still respond to these things as though they were still number one. This happens. Many American manufacturers, faced with competition from the Japanese in the seventies, folded not because the Japanese could make stuff cheaper, but because the Americans were arthritic about service, produced crap, had an executive structure that was stuck in cement, crushed innovation, and had so constituted themselves around a Pavlovian routine – put out crap, get back money – that they were unable to understand the changed circumstances.



This would be extremely funny if we had some other opposition party we could go to. Alas, the Dems are it, and their screw ups are threatening to land Bush, once again, in an office he so richly does not deserve.



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Bollettino



LI has been trying to catch up with Daedalus. The summer issue is, apparently, full of blasts against Bush. Alas, LI hasn’t figured out how to get back door access to the issue. So we went back to Winter 2003, which we could get access to. Winter 2003 is dominated by liberal interventionism a la Michael Ignatieff. However, there were a few articles that resisted the wish fulfillment fantasy of Harvard intellectuals being showered with flowers as they rode on tanks into various liberated cities. (This is, by the way, a narrative pattern which we associate with the Cold War – but LI wonders about the order of cause and effect here. The narrative surely precedes the Cold war – in fact, it seems to be a narrative to which American intellectuals have been attached at least since the war against the “bandits” in the Phillipines at the turn of the twentieth century. There are plenty of hints of it in the Civil War. To disassociate the narrative from its object is a necessary preliminary step in the analysis of American foreign policy, in LI’s humble opinion. That America is one of the most warlike states in the modern era – which used to be a charge of lefty historians, and has been taken up as a badge of honor of righty historians -- makes it important to understand how Americans see war. We haven’t really seen any work on this that doesn’t immediately try to make a moral point – showing, perhaps, the gravitational pull of the way Americans see war. What we would like is a heuristic/pragmatic analysis jenseits the good war/bad war dichotomy.)



But HOLD YOUR HORSES, as LI’s dear old dad used to say. We are drifting away from the point of this post, as we are wont to do. Here’s the point: Daniel Dennett’s article, On failures of freedom & the fear of science, should be read by all who can get ahold of the thing. It is obviously a lure for the book he subsequently published, Freedom Evolves – and that is rather funny, in a Derridian way, since the article begins its meditation on the fear that science is somehow undermining our autonomy by meditating on those successful lures that cast into doubt the whole notion of rationality upon which autonomy is founded. At least, in the Kantian sense of the term.



Dennett has never been shy about constructing straw men, and we think his construction of Kantian autonomy is one of them – even though it points to a fault that was obvious to the Romantics, and has been obvious to anyone who reads Kant since: the dismissal of emotions from the realm of moral evaluation. A dismissal that makes one masochistic exception – the feeling of humility is accorded a place in Kant’s schema.



Dennett’s straw man, however, is less invalidating than it might be when one considers that the economic construction of rationality is founded on a very imperfect – indeed, absolutely un-empirical – notion of the relation between feeling and calculation.



Dennett, unlike most philosophers, knows how to write. He doesn’t start out with some quasi bad science fiction “thought experiment.” He starts out with Candid Camera:



“Allen Funt was one of the great psychologists of the twentieth century. His informal demonstrations on Candid Camera showed us as much about human psychology and its surprising limitations as the work of any academic psychologist. Here is one of the best (as I recall it many years later): he placed an umbrella stand in a prominent place in a department store and filled it with shiny new golf-cart handles. These were pieces of strong, gleaming stainless-steel tubing, about two-feet long, with a gentle bend in the middle, threaded at one end (to screw into a threaded socket on your golf cart) and with a handsome spherical plastic knob on the opposite end. In other words, about as useless a piece of stainless-steel tubing as you could imagine--unless you happened to own a golf cart missing its handle. He put up a sign. It didn't identify the contents but simply said: "50% off. Today only! $5.95." Some people purchased them, and, when asked why, were quite ready to volunteer one confabulated answer or another. They had no idea what the thing was, but it was a handsome thing, and such a bargain! These people were not brain-damaged or drunk; they were normal adults, our neighbors, ourselves.



We laugh nervously as we peer into the abyss that such a demonstration opens up. We may be smart, but none of us is perfect, and whereas you and I might not fall for the old golf-cart-handle trick, we know for certain that there are variations on this trick that we have fallen for, and no doubt will fall for in the future. When a psychologist demonstrates our imperfect rationality, our susceptibility to being moved in the space of reasons by something other than consciously appreciated reasons, we fear that we aren't free after all. Perhaps we're kidding ourselves. Perhaps our approximation of a perfect Kantian faculty of practical reason falls so far short that our proud self-identification as moral agents is a delusion of grandeur.”



Dennett’s big idea is to reconcile a robust scientific idea of the human animal, with its salts, pumps, evolutionary history, proteins, and unconscious adaptations, to the traditional idea of a self. He doesn’t consider that the idea of a self he is considering, and to some extent caricaturing, arose in the same ideological space as the project of positive science. To consider that, Dennett would have to have recourse to that most yucky of words for an analytically trained philosopher, dialectics. Instead, Dennett uses another pop figure, Tom Wolfe, to make a point about the irrationality of pushing a “traditional” view of the self into discussions of what that self, concretely and collectively, does. Dennett quotes Wolfe objecting to the mass distribution of Ritalin to cure ADD. Or is it ADH? We can never get those pseudo-disorders right. In any case, Dennett compares this to Wolfe coming out whole heartedly against glasses as corruptors of the myopic -- inhibitors of myopic grit. It should be said that Wolfe invites this criticism, for after pointing out, quite correctly, the epidemic of overprescribing, he attributes it to an ethos of irresponsibility. Wolfe has taken a minor and inconsistent property of the social phenomenon as its core and spirit -- which is typical of the ever new journalistic Wolfe. However, Dennett’s criticism of Wolfe is founded on the “scientific” case that Ritalin somehow cures a dopamine imbalance that in itself seems unphilosophically souped up:



“In his recent book Hooking Up, Tom Wolfe deplores the use of Ritalin (methylphenidate) and other methamphetamines to counteract attention deficit hyperactivity disorder in children. He does this without pausing to consider the mass of evidence that indicates that some children have a readily correctable--evitable--dopamine imbalance in their brains that gives them a handicap in the self-control department just as surely as myopia does:”



To accept this is to accept the idea that the explosion of ADH diagnoses is ‘scientific” – which in turn ignores scientific evidence we have in abundance about faddish diseases and diagnoses, from the vapors in the Victorian era to Attention deficit disorder in our own. In fact, it is to engage in just the kind of scientism that Larry Laudan attacked in 1981 in a much cited article entitled "A Confutation of Convergent Realism." Laudan shows, in that article, that there are many scientific consenses that we no longer believe as “scientific,” like the caloric theory of heat. The reason we don’t believe them does not have to do with their lack of success, but with their gradual lack of congruence with other parts of the evolving scientific world picture. That Dennett thinks the dopamine hypothesis – the diagnosis of ADH – is as solid as the diagnosis of myopia is a hardcore position that even ADH researchers would probably back away from – and that methabetamines “correct” it the way lenses correct myopia is a truly odd position to take. We can explain the latter – but who has explained the former? The explanations for the success of methabetamines sounds similar to stories about the success of lobotomies, or of shock therapy, of earlier period of science.



So – a little dense criticism there. Sorry. But do read the Dennett article.

Bollettino



LI is cautiously optimistic about the latest developments in Iraq. It has always been our position that:



a. the U.S. occupation is neither motivated by the desire for democracy nor conducive to it;

b. that the insurgents are neither motivated by the desire for democracy nor conducive to it;

c. that the mass of Iraqis are motivated to produce a state that is democratic – has separate legislative, executive and judicial branches, has elections, guarantees certain basic rights.



Our opinion was that the struggle between the U.S. and the insurgents created a command vacuum in which democracy can actually happen – that is, in which the Iraqis can take power into their own hands. However, that struggle could equally stifle Iraqi autonomy. In fact, for the last four or five months, it has looked increasingly like stifling was the name of the game. Obviously, Allawi, the U.S. puppet, looks for his leadership cues to the standard Middle Eastern tyrant model. That he can use U.S. troops to devastate his opponents – as he has done in Najaf – gives him an advantage in Iraq. But that the U.S only cooperates in operations that it finds in its own interest is as definite a constraint as a noose. It is the noose in which Allawi is strangling. Meanwhile, Sadr represents the traditional combination of mafioso and religious leader by which the Iraqi poor have managed to extract a certain grudging level of services from the Iraqi elite. The price for this -- to the poor -- is extremely high. It freezes social arrangements, frees the state from its responsibility to its citizens, and establishes a strata of violent middlemen.



Sistani has ambiguously represented c. Ambiguity is so inscribed into his survival program that he has had a hard time letting it go. But the march from Basra to Najaf shows that he just might be the kind of Iraqi leader we’ve been longing for. At least it shows that he realizes Allawi is on a crash course with the popular will. That Americans think that nightly news showing young Iraqi men being ground into hamburger by American firepower will spontaneously light a fire of admiration for the Yankees in the Iraqi soul is further evidence of the American delusion that Iraq is located in some other part of the world, and inhabited solely by Rotarians and G.O.P. activists.



The NYT’s story about the end of the battle of Najaf drips with the embedded’s melancholic realization that Americans won’t have a chance to kick the maximum amount of ass. And so the war decays, day by day. Here’s how the NYT article ends:



“Since American troops toppled the Hussein government 16 months ago, Ayatollah Sistani has been careful to maintain an equivocal position on American military actions, usually condemning any use of force, by the Americans or the rebels. That left open the possibility that in Najaf, he could distance himself from the Americans by condemning the damage inflicted on the Old City by American bombs and tanks, and even leave Mr. Sadr free to claim that he acted all along to defend the shrine against American attacks.

One of the last American actions before the cease-fire went into effect involved the use of a 2,000-pound, laser-guided bomb to strike a hotel about 130 yards from the shrine's southwest wall, in an area known to American commanders as "motel row."”

The reporters (Filkins and Burns) just loved that last parting shot.



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Bollettino



Back in November of 03 – about 500 American, and God knows how many Iraqi deaths ago – it became apparent enough that the occupation was being botched that the ardent pro-war party started throwing around analogies. The one that was particularly beloved was to Germany. Somehow, you don’t hear a lot of comparisons of occupied Germany to occupied Iraq nowadays. Even the rabidly gullible have given that analogy up. At the time (Nov. 13), LI wrote:



”There’s a pernicious meme that emerged at the end of the �hostilities� in Iraq. The meme was that occupying Iraq would be much like occupying Germany or Japan at the end of World War II. Now, the elements of the likeness, here, were broadly two: The U.S. invaded another country. The U.S. occupied that country. This is about as far as we could go with that analogy. Not only is this a different country, with a very different history. Not only did the occupation of Germany and Japan take place in the face of the Soviet Union’s own occupation of what became East Germany, and of Eastern Europe. But the U.S. of that time was a much different place, too. It was coming out of a Great Depression and the incredible mounting of a war effort that overshadowed anything the U.S. government had ever done before. Etc.”



Our problem with the analogy was both with the logical form of it – as guides to the future, analogies from the past have to be examined pretty skeptically – and with the content of it – Iraq was like neither Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan. We noted that the differences – for instance, in the scale of destruction visited upon Germany and Japan, in contrast to that visited upon Iraq – pretty much vitiated the extrapolations we could make from the former occupations.



We are happy to note that an article in the Summer issue of International Security bears out our point. “Occupational Hazards: Why Military Occupations Succeed or Fail,” by David M. Edelstein, presents a study of occupations that begins, well, as if Edelstein were reading LI:

“When Gen. Eric Shinseki, chief of staff of the U.S. Army, testified in February 2003 that an occupation of Iraq would require "something on the order of several hundred thousand troops," officials within George W. Bush's administration promptly disagreed.1 Within two days, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld declared, "It's not logical to me that it would take as many forces following the conflict as it would to win the war"; Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz characterized Shinseki's estimate as "wildly off the mark."2 More than a year after the occupation of Iraq began, the debate continues over the requirements and prospects for long-term success.3 History, however, does not bode well for this occupation. Despite the relatively successful military occupations of Germany and Japan after World War II, careful examination indicates that unusual geopolitical circumstances were the keys to success in those two cases, and historically military occupations fail more often than they succeed.”



Edelstein took a data set of twenty four military occupations. These included US occupations of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, but also extended to the allied occupation of France in 1815. Edelstein has developed a taxonomy of occupations with which we are not concerned. He scotches the common idea that length alone creates successful occupations – one of Niall Ferguson’s standard arguments. The key grafs are as follows:



“The crux of my argument is that military occupations usually succeed only if they are lengthy, but lengthy occupations elicit nationalist reactions that impede success. Further, lengthy occupation produces anxiety in impatient occupying powers that would rather withdraw than stay. To succeed, therefore, occupiers must both maintain their own interest in a long occupation and convince an occupied population to accept extended control by a foreign power. More often than not, occupiers either fail to achieve those goals, or they achieve them only at a high cost.



Three factors, however, can make a successful occupation possible. The first factor is a recognition by the occupied population of the need for occupation. Thus, occupation is more likely to succeed in societies that have been decimated by war and require help in rebuilding. The second factor is the perception by the occupying power and the occupied population of a common threat to the occupied territory. If the survival of the occupied country is threatened, then the occupying power will want to protect a country that it has already invested resources in and considers geopolitically significant, and the occupied population will value the protection offered to it. The third factor involves credibility. Occupation is likely to generate less opposition when the occupying power makes a credible guarantee that it will withdraw and return control to an indigenous government in a timely manner. When these three conditions are present, occupying powers will face less resistance both in the occupied territory and at home; they will be given more time to accomplish their occupation goals, and, therefore, will be more likely to succeed. Absent these three conditions, occupying powers will face the dilemma of either evacuating prematurely and increasing the probability that later reintervention will be necessary or sustaining the occupation at an unacceptable cost.



My conclusions with regard to the contemporary occupation of Iraq are not sanguine. Whereas war-weary Germans and Japanese recognized the need for an occupation to help them rebuild, a significant portion of the Iraqi people have never welcomed the U.S.-led occupation as necessary. Further, the common analogy between the occupations of Germany and Japan and the occupation of Iraq usually undervalues the central role that the Soviet threat played in allowing those occupations to succeed.”



We don’t imagine the New Crusaders are going to read Edelstein’s piece – they have moved on to other equally dodgy arguments. But for those who are actually concerned about the Iraq war, it really is essential reading.



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Bollettino



While NYC prepares for an occupation, Paris celebrates a liberation. A neat, although somewhat spurious, antithesis. LI is home from NYC, and our impression is that the Republican convention really should have been held, as Tom DeLay suggested, on cruise boats outside of Manhattan. DeLay’s suggestion was prompted, apparently, by his belief that New York City isn’t in America. Also, isn’t the Republican Party about yachting before everything? Alas, it appears that DeLay’s party is locked into various landlubber’s contracts forcing them to celebrate the most incompetent administration since Harding’s in various suspiciously smelly venues physically connected to Satan's lair.



Paris, at the moment, is more concerned with the Liberation that happened in 1944. In the Independent today there is an article about one aspect of the celebration. The French government is encouraging volunteers to dance down the streets of Paris. But not boogey – not that “rocknroll mayonnaise.” Alex Duval Smith was embedded with one group of potential lindyhoppers who were being groomed by a government sponsored dance instructor.



"Five, six, seven, eight..." The counting of my impatient dance teacher, Michael Casajus, is still ringing in my ears. "Girls and boys, I will have none of this rock'n'roll mayonnaise," he shouted as he restarted the Glenn Miller track, hoping desperately for some improvement in our dance steps.The trouble was that Casajus is a professional dancer, hired by the City of Paris to knock the dancing shoes of 1,000 Parisians into shape for the celebrations tomorrow of the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the French capital. His pupils, myself included, mostly saw the class at the Gymnase Saint-Merri, opposite the Pompidou Centre, as an opportunity for some free fun courtesy of the French taxpayer.”



I am hoping to hear more from this from LI’s correspondent in Paris, LI’s friend M. The Liberation festival will end in a ball. Here’s another graf from the article:



“The preparations for the Liberation commemorations - which include poetry in the Metro and photographic poster displays in the streets - have successfully brought together Parisians of all ages. The volunteer dancers - who were mainly recruited through adverts in newspapers - are expected to dress in period clothes that they have been encouraged to make - or alter for the occasion - at a sewing workshop in the 4th-arrondissement town hall. There have also been sessions in 1940s hairstyling, and even one called "dying your legs with tea".



Perhaps Michael Bloomberg should have thought about something similar – issuing, for instance, gray or pea green uniforms, with CSA sewed onto them, to commemorate the true spirit of the GOP at the moment – the party of Jeff Davis, Strom Thurmond, and Gone with the Wind. The note should be Richmond, Virginia, circa 1862.

Bollettino



LI is in NYC for the moment. We wrote a one sentence post that Blogger, somehow, didn’t register. We would play by play this visit, except that that information is privileged: we are using it to embody the life of one of the characters in the novel we are writing. We have also considered the topic of NYC on the eve of Bush’s tropic of cannibals convention, but we would only say the expected: given our own political and cultural prejudices, and those of our friends, we did not meet, shall we say, with a lot of receptivity to the idea from Gothamites.



So no, just a small note about economics. The NYT published an article about the oil price shock Friday that encapsulated current Wall Street wisdom. That wisdom scoffs at the idea that an oil price spike, in a semi-deflationary climate, is going to do much to this economy. What amazes us about such wisdom is that the same people who are continually ranting about globalism seem so unable to apply it to such things as oil price spikes. Here’s the deal, as we see it – the oil price spike’s effects on this country will come via China and Japan. Those countries, as the price of oil goes over 50 dollars a barrell, are going to have to divert the money they have been spending to buy dollars – to buy T-notes, for instance -- to buying oil. What this means is that the dollar will go down while the U.S. government will be forced to increase interest to attract buyers of its debts. This is a perfect double whammy. The odds of it increase as oil moves upwards. The U.S. has relied heavily, for the last three years, on Asian banks to float our fiscal mismanagement. As the contrarian investors like to point out, this is because the U.S. has no savings. We are a black pit of debt, with the credit card taking the place of the social welfare state. The importance of the oil price spike isn’t in the effect it will have on the American motorist, but the effect it will have on Asian banks. Is this so hard to see?



As usual, Gretchen Morgenson in the Times gets both the cw and what’s wrong with it:

“A throng of strategists on Wall Street argue that rising crude prices do not hurt as much as they have in the past because the economy is not as energy dependent as it once was. The amount of energy needed to generate $1 in gross domestic product has fallen by roughly 50 percent in the past three decades, according to Morgan Stanley.”

But Morgenson is not buying this story. Her take is a traditional one: regardless of the weak labor market, regardless of the continuing oversupplies that are pushing down certain consumer and durable goods, high oil prices mean spreading inflation through the whole bloodstream of the economy. And that is a recipe for recession:

"No one knows, of course, where oil prices could go. But Mr. Roach [Stephen Roach, a Morgan Stanley analyst] said that recent levels are approaching oil-shock territory. And that makes the United States economy especially vulnerable to a recession.

Mr. Roach said the price of oil must stay at current levels for between three and six months to produce a true energy shock. It may not. But if it does? In the past, Mr. Roach found that oil shocks have always been followed by recessions.

…

What all three [recessions] had in common, Mr. Roach said, was that the economy was stalling when the oil shock hit. In both 1973 and 1990, the economy was growing 2.2 percent annually. In the second half of 1979, growth was even weaker, averaging 0.6 percent, annualized. An oil shock, he said, "rarely comes at a time of economic strength and resilience when we can shrug it off and keep growing."

At a time when deep structural damage is being made to America's post-war economic culture of a kind to revolutionize the middle class -- by dumping them into the revolutionary/reactionary class of the exploited and immiserated -- the newspapers focus on the tussle between Kerry and a bunch of reactionary vets. It is a sign, surely, of how bad things are. It is also a sign of what bad advice Kerry is getting -- this is a one day phenomena that could easily be stopped by Kerry stepping out of the faux hero persona, which fits him like a cheap suit on an obvious cutout, and telling, briefly, what he did, and asking voters to compare it with what George Bush did. Period.

And then we can get to the real issue of debating the disastrous choices with which we have been landed by the malignacy of the crew which presently holds power in Washington.

Bollettino

The reductum ad absurdum happening among Shiite tombs outside of Najaf shows, among other things, how absolutely blind D.C. still is to its war and where it is fighting it. There are no editorials asking the question they should be asking: why are we in Najaf? Indeed, a complicated question. Is it because Sadr’s thuggish militia has invaded a sovereign town? Hmm, sounds like – well, sounds like what is happening in Kirkuk with the Kurdish militias. Sounds like what we agreed to in Fallujah. Sounds, indeed, like what we promoted in bringing Chalabi and his men into Baghdad. So let’s think up a different reason. The original reason – to get rid of a minor irritant to Paul Bremer’s proconsulship – has slipped away into history. The story that Sadr was a minor and unpopular leader, much purveyed among the embedded press in April, has slipped away with the Bremer era. The new story is that the inhabitants of Najaf welcome the American intervention. That might well be true – but alas, Najaf is not Iraq. It is not Sadr city in Baghdad. It is not the Shiite South. It is a city in which the respectable make good money on the piety that sends endless streams to Najaf.

The LA Times has a think piece on the subject today by Tyler Marshall – who seems much less credulous of the American military’s wishful thinking than Alex Berenson at the NYT. Here is the heart of the article:

"Is it better for Iraq and the political process and for democracy to embrace these people or suppress these people?" said political analyst Khudeir Dulaimi in Baghdad.



"It is better to engage the country [including] his followers, who are very great in number. If we suppress them, they will emerge again."



Hussein Shahristani, a nuclear scientist who had sought the prime minister's job, agreed. "Despite the hundreds killed in Najaf and other cities, the sense I get ... is that people are more sympathetic to Muqtada than ever before," he said.



Analysts believe that a key to Sadr's political clout has been his emergence as the only national symbol of defiance to the massive U.S. military presence that remains in Iraq despite the formal hand-over of sovereignty. As the U.S. presence grows more unpopular, Sadr's aura gains more luster.”

This is from Bush’s interview with Tim Russert on February 7 of this year:

“The thing about the Vietnam War that troubles me as I look back was it was a political war. We had politicians making military decisions, and it is lessons that any president must learn, and that is to the set the goal and the objective and allow the military to come up with the plans to achieve that objective. And those are essential lessons to be learned from the Vietnam War.”

There’s a DJ in Bush’s mind that does the scratching. Scratch compassion and gaybaiting, scratch conservativism and spending like a drunken sailor, scratch tax breaks for small this and that and 200 million dollar tax windfalls for members of America’s fortunate set. Here, the cutting between thinking and doing has achieved a truly historical status of dumb. Dumb and Dumber, it appears, is as premonitory of the current phase of American history as the Marriage of Figaro was of the French Revolution. While the comment on Vietnam is mostly nonsense, there is a core of sense to it: there are wars in which the strategy that Americans have embraced since Ullyses Grant – massive manpower, massive firepower, crushing movement – doesn’t work. In fact, it doesn’t work except in wars of a scale like the Civil War. The war in Iraq is a politician’s war par excellence in Bush’s confused terms – its starts and stops are dictated not by tactical advantages, but by strategic ones. We are throwing American bodies into the fire in battles that are unnecessary, and from the results of which we have to retreat. The strategy is being set by a set of ignoramuses in D.C., quintessential corridor politicians. It is a strategy that seems, every day, to be more independent of, and contradictory to, the tactical encounter with reality in Iraq. That encounter is full of an angry population that responds to house to house searches, checkpoints, surgical missile strikes on wedding parties and the like with rage. It is full of gaps – a doomed search for non-existent WMD, and an inability to guard the arms depots from which we know the Iraqi guerrillas get their weapons; stop and start occupations of towns in coordination with a half fictitious Iraqi army; the painting of creaky schoolhouses by soldiers in a country of 40 to 60 percent unemployment, as an effort to win the hearts and minds of students who have all vivid memories of their fathers face down in the dust, spreading them for another army raid on a suspected terrorist nest.

And now, as a legacy tribute to Paul Bremer, we are attacking one alleged murderer, Muqtada Sadr, on behalf of another one. This is playing out in that scene of dumb and dumber glimmer and glamor, the arrogant and, for most of the last year, useless, negligent, and propagandizing American media, where pundits get giggly talking about the “tough” – i.e. murderous – Allawi, the man who blew up civilians in terrorist incidents (like setting cars with bombs in them in public squares) in the fight against Saddam. Such are the joys of bringing democracy to Iraq.

Bollettino



Nicholas Lemann’s interesting Talk of the Town piece pokes through the ashes of one of the great original Cold War threatmongering sets, The Committee on The Present Danger. That Committee, formed in the McCarthy era to wrest anti-communism from the vulgar and demagogic and relocate it on a higher echelon – namely, Harvard – was headed by James Conant, the great patron of Thomas Kuhn, and one of Harvard’s “forward looking” presidents. Lemann points out that the first Committee was formed to advocate for a universal draft. And one of Conant’s assistants on this ultimately quixotic quest was John Kerry’s father.



Lemann’s history lesson backgrounds the spurious reconstruction of the Committee on The Present Danger, run by your usual assortment of neocon Post Office Wanted types: Joe Lieberman, Newt Gingrich, and the rest of the breathy, self-regarding crowd. They generated a little excitement by hiring an ex Reagan admin. employee who had been capturing a stream of revenue for his little ones by fronting for Jorg Haider’s neo-Nazis in D.C. Unfortunately, in a display of callousness towards the rules of the capitalist game, after word leaked that Peter Hannaford had fed on Haider’s leftovers, the man was tossed. But, according to the CPD, this is no time for distracting controversies. No, we have at least two more wars to drum up under the indefatigable leadership of George Bush. The Committee wants us to be aware of the militant Islamic threat. And the two major threats are, you guessed it, the Palestinians and the Iranians.



D.C. has been described as Hollywood for ugly people. These ugly people are, in fact, exceedingly Hollywoodish, having contrived one absolute bomb – the occupation of Iraq – and moving on to the occupation of Iraq 2: Iran, the evil twin. One’s faith in Kerry, who seems unable to mount a critique of the worst foreign policy disaster since the Vietnam war, wavers – until we realize what goodies the Bush culture has hidden up its sleeve. In another lifetime -- say, in 2000 -- I would dismiss that as stupid threatmongering of another order. Sure, extremists hang around the Republican party, but the outlines of foreign and domestic policy don't change that much. Now, of course, that isn't true. It is only too easy to see Bush charging into Iran, with an inadequate force, and killing tens of thousands of Iranians, and thousands of Americans, in pursuit of the Crusade: to make the world safe for Christianity.



This is not an election between two of the best and the brightest, but between a mad evangelical gunslinger and the town’s creepy High Church minister. What we need is to paint everything in America red -- a la High Plains Drifter -- and elect a willing midget president.

Bollettino



Martin Luther had suggested that before his Fall Adam "could have seen objects a hundred miles off better than we can see them at half a mile, and so in proportion with all the other senses."

-- Original Sin and the Problem of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe, Peter Harrison, Journal of the History of Ideas 63.2 (2002) 239-259



LI promised. last week, to dilate upon the charming intricacies of Joseph Glanvill – one of our promising posts, which the ardent reader might have reckoned among the graveyard of so many others – the extended post about ritual and novel reading, the post that continued the study of Francis Bacon and Thomas Babbington Macaulay, all the dead soldiers, all the semi-erudition, all the LI voice – trumpery and desperation. But no! We were serious this time.



However, after reading Peter Harrison’s excellent article, that deflation of our original motive set in. Glanvill, we originally thought, was some ignored genius of bad ideas – rather like that Victorian savant, Gosse, who wrote Omphalos, a book suggesting that the oh so uncomfortable fossil record indicating a date for the creation of the earth somewhat greater than Bishop Ussher’s reckoning of 6000 years was actually due to God strewing the planet with counterfeits – evidences of a past that never was. Borges, as our readers know, devoted an essay to Gosse, even as he admitted to never having read the book. But surely Glanvill’s thesis that all the instruments of science in the Early Modern Era – the microscope, the telescope, the improved compass – embodied, in dead metal and glass, Adam’s everyday sensorium – surely this deserved an essay in Borges’ finest style.



Glanvill is not a writer of Sir Thomas Brown’s dignity – is involuted prose seems less an attempt to overlay English with a Latinate brilliance than a flailing attempt to communicate from deep inside some ecclesiastical-scholarly hole. But about Adam, he is clear enough:



“Adam needed no Spectacles. The acuteness of his natural Opticks (if conjecture may have credit) shew'd him much of the Coelestial magnificence and bravery without a Galilaeo's tube: And 'tis most probable that his naked eyes could reach near as much of the upper World, as we with all the advantages of art. It may be 'twas as absurd even in the judgement of his senses, that the Sun and Stars should be so very much, less then this Globe, as the contrary seems in ours; and 'tis not unlikely that he had as clear a perception of the earths motion, as we think we have of its quiescence.”



Now, this emblematic, instrumental Adam, we thought, was a will of the whisp of Glanvill’s brain. But Harrison shows that, for the early modern scientists, science itself was a sign. For some, it was an eschatological sign – the regaining of Adam’s original perceptions, via, say, the microscope, meant that we were, perhaps, in the last days. This is a way of interpreting science that is simply bizarre, according to the positivist tradition. But there it is. Harrison’s essay refers to the work of other researchers who have complicated, to say the least, the Whig tradition of science history.



Harrison (whose insights into these historic currents make LI extremely jealous) has a nice graf summing up the Catholic religious context:



“A major point of contention in early-modern assessments of Adam's Fall and its cognitive effects was to do with the extent to which the faculties which Adam used to acquire knowledge were damaged. The Protestant reformers had typically tended to elevate the abilities of the prelapsarian Adam and stress the comparative depravity of the present human condition. Their negative appraisals of human cognitive powers were opposed to a long-standing scholastic view, according to which the natural perfections with which the human race had been originally endowed—including the powers of reason—had emerged relatively unscathed from the sorry episode in the Garden of Eden. The "natural gifts," wrote Thomas Aquinas, "remained after sin." Reason was one such natural gift. The "light of natural reason," Aquinas explained, "since it pertains to the species of the rational soul, is never forfeit from the soul." 26 What befell Adam after the Fall, was for Aquinas and his scholastic successors a privation only of supernatural powers, rather than a corruption of human nature. Subsequent developments in the theology of the Franciscans were even more dismissive of original sin, harking back to the more benign assessments of the nature of Adam's sin more typical of Church Fathers before Augustine. 27 The whole enterprise of natural theology, for which Aquinas' "five ways" is the classical model, was premised upon this optimistic view of the natural powers of the human intellect. Moreover, it was on this basis that the natural philosophy of the "pagan" writers, most notably Aristotle, was in principle acceptable to the medieval schools, for there was no reason to be suspicious of learning which had sprung from the exercise of natural and universal principles of reason. To be sure, Aristotle and the other ancients had known nothing of the divine will, nor of God's salvific plan; neither could they cultivate the supernatural virtues of faith, hope, and love. But these deficiencies, however crucial they might prove on the day of judgment, would not prejudice the accumulation of natural knowledge.”



Harrison holds on to an important binary in finding his way through the labyrinth of Early Modern controversy. On the one hand, there is the view of imperfection as a negative thing, a loss; on the other hand, there is imperfection as corruption. Many English Protestants seem to cluster around the latter idea. From our viewpoint, the modern view – the rejection of reason as the guide to science, and the elevation of the senses – seems a wholly secular thing. But it was, at the time, interpreted by the actors involved in it in heavily theological terms. Adam was a continual reference. Harrison has dug up some wonderful quotes. We love this one from Robert South, an English divine, who contrasts Adam’s time, in which "Study was not then a duty, night watchings were needless," with our current sad state: “the doom of fallen man, to labour in the fire, to seek truth in profundo, to exhaust his time and impair his health, and perhaps to spin out his days, and himself into one pitiful, controverted conclusion."



LI could easily take that as a motto.

Bollettino



So we are having an election between two candidates who both think going into Iraq when we did was just fine and dandy. One believes in magic thinking, as Freud called it – that his thoughts directly operate on the world. It helps that God, in the usual trinity shape – your Dad, Dick Cheney, and the holy ghost of CEO America – has spoken to you directly. One believes in complicated thinking—that is, he believes that you have to amass a bodyguard of excuses to justify hope being on the way as you carefully avoid making any commitment to any action whatsoever. One believes in the Coalition of the Willing, the other believes in the Coalition of the Unwilling -- that somehow other allies are going to take a look at the shark filled pool in Iraq and want to jump right in, given a sweet invitation with an RSVP attached. One asks the question, knowing what we know right now, would you have gone into Iraq, and the other answers yes, proving that Mutual Destruction is not only a theory of nuclear deterrence but an apt description of the Bush/Kerry contest.



Meanwhile, the polls show the majority of Americans would answer no. Those people don’t have a candidate.



What the war is about – what the mission accomplished – is glimpsed in this offhand report from the WP. The reporter, who is obviously having an identity crisis (am I a war correspondent or a rodeo rider?) begins with a few macho references to 'dip', as though he'd been embedded in a baseball dugout. But he proceeds to describe, in detail that cannot be excrutiating enough, the senseless deaths of two American soldiers, one a boy of 19, the other a father, patrolling, for reasons that nobody understands, a region of Western Iraq that we had no business occupying, and that we are busy enacting our Pavlovian passive aggressive foreign policy on. Here's what happens -- a sniper kills one guy, a bomb kills another, and a town is searched for the sniper; an Iraqi military officer is consulted, and he unrolls the Allawi world vision -- shoot one person from each residence -- that has "same as the old boss' written all over it. It is evident, just from the description of the Iraqi young men that were forced to lie in the dirt with their hands behind their backs while soldiers broke locks on various shop doors, that another reason to hate America is being generated in this little affair. If there were any justice, the names of the guys -- Gunnery Sgt. Elia Fontecchio, 30, and Lance Cpl. Joseph Nice, 19 -- would be tatooed on Bush's butt.



But they won't be. There is no justice. This war shows, among other things, how far this country has drifted from having political mechanisms that are ultimately controlled by the people. The only thing the people can control are their tears, as they count up the losses and fight undignified battles with a government for a bare minimum of benefits.



And Kerry -- ready to report for duty Kerry -- would have said yes to this marriage to the bride of Frankenstein? I can't think of a sicker statement.

Bollettino



So we are having an election between two candidates who both think going into Iraq when we did was just fine and dandy. One believes in magic thinking, as Freud called it – that his thoughts directly operate on the world. It helps that God, in the usual trinity shape – your Dad, Dick Cheney, and the holy ghost of CEO America – has spoken to you directly. One believes in complicated thinking—that is, he believes that you have to amass a bodyguard of excuses to justify hope being on the way as you carefully avoid making any commitment to any action whatsoever. One believes in the Coalition of the Willing, the other believes in the Coalition of the Unwilling -- that somehow other allies are going to take a look at the shark filled pool in Iraq and want to jump right in, given a sweet invitation with an RSVP attached. One asks the question, knowing what we know right now, would you have gone into Iraq, and the other answers yes, proving that Mutual Destruction is not only a theory of nuclear deterrence but an apt description of the Bush/Kerry contest.



Meanwhile, the polls show the majority of Americans would answer no. Those people don’t have a candidate.



What the war is about – what the mission accomplished – is glimpsed in this offhand report from the WP. http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A61168-2004Aug12?language=printer The correspondent, who is obviously having an identity crisis (am I a war correspondent or a rodeo rider?) begins with a few macho references to 'dip', as though he'd been embedded in a baseball dugout. But he proceeds to describe, in detail that cannot be excrutiating enough, the senseless deaths of two American soldiers, one a boy of 19, the other a father, patrolling, for reasons that nobody understands, a region of Western Iraq that we had no business occupying, and that we are busy enacting our Pavlovian passive aggressive foreign policy on. Here's what happens -- a sniper kills one guy, a bomb kills another, and a town is searched for the sniper; an Iraqi military officer is consulted, and he unrolls the Allawi world vision -- shoot one person from each residence -- that has "same as the old boss' written all over it. It is evident, just from the description of the Iraqi young men that were forced to lie in the dirt with their hands behind their backs while soldiers broke locks on various shop doors, that another reason to hate America is being generated in this little affair. If there were any justice, the names of the guys -- Gunnery Sgt. Elia Fontecchio, 30, and Lance Cpl. Joseph Nice, 19 -- would be tatooed on Bush's butt.



But they won't be. There is no justice. This war shows, among other things, how far this country has drifted from having political mechanisms that are ultimately controlled by the people. The only thing the people can control are their tears, as they count up the losses and fight undignified battles with a government for a bare minimum of benefits.



And Kerry -- ready to report for duty Kerry -- would have said yes to this marriage to the bride of Frankenstein? I can't think of a sicker statement.

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Bollettino



LI feels pretty shamefaced that we are way behind a breaking story. Corinne Maier is an economist at Electricité de France. She works part time. She usefully used her free time to write a guide to fooling around at work, Bonjour Paresse, or Hello Laziness. Sensibly enough, she knows most of us, while filled with bitterness and mockery towards the corporate behemoths, still labor in our little cubicles to make them happy. What are we to do – become revolutionaries? That’s a bit out of date, and they pick you up and put you in unpleasant prisons and whatnot. So Maier advises the art of reading the newspaper discretely, missing meetings, taking long lunches, and leaving early. Also – never go out in the hall without a file under your arm.



The poor woman somehow attracted the attention of the bosses. Her pamphlet was published by a small press, but somebody must have slipped a copy under some muckety muck’s door. According to Liberation:



En mai, Corinne Maier, chercheuse économiste d'EDF, publie un pamphlet sur le monde de l'entreprise : Bonjour paresse, de l'art et de la nécessité d'en faire le moins possible en entreprise (1) (Libération du 10 mai). Deux mois après, elle est convoquée pour un entretien en vue d'une sanction. Motif : «Non-respect de l'obligation de loyauté manifestée à plusieurs reprises : lire le journal en réunion, quitter les réunions de groupe, révélateur de la stratégie individuelle clairement affichée dans l'ouvrage Bonjour paresse, visant à gangrener le système de l'intérieur.» [Aiming to gangrene the system from within? Shades of Stalin’s wreckers!!!] Et avoir fait état de sa qualité d'agent EDF sans autorisation.

Prétextes. «Depuis douze ans, je suis une salariée sans histoire, s'étonne Corinne Maier. Et subitement, ils découvrent que je suis une pétroleuse car je sèche une réunion...» Les motifs affichés par la direction ne sont que des prétextes, estime l'intersyndicale montée pour l'occasion : de nombreux chercheurs EDF écrivent articles et livres sans jamais être inquiétés. «Quant à lire son journal en réunion, n'en parlons pas, rigole Yann Cochin, de SUD Energie. Arriver avec une pile de dossiers et travailler dessus en pleine réunion pour montrer qu'on est débordé, c'est le top du top... [As for reading her newspaper at meetings, don’t even say it,” chuckles Yan Cochin, of SUD Energy. “You come with a pile of files and you work on them in plain sight to show how overwhelmed you are, that’s the top of the top]. Au mieux, la réaction de la direction est un gag grotesque. Au pire, un acte liberticide : l'entreprise veut tenir un rôle grandissant dans la société et nous n'aurions pas le droit de la critiquer ?»



Another article about her is in the Telegraph, which gives the colorful list of her chapter titles: “Chapter titles include "The cretins who sit next to you", "Business culture my arse" and "Why you lose nothing by resigning".



Googling her name, I discovered that she is, all so discretely, a Lacanian. Who says the Lacanian Maos are dead? We are just sleeping, darlin'.

“…nay, is not the Universe itself, at bottom, properly an Intrigue?” – Thomas Carlyle



In the late nineties, Norma Baig was in trouble. She had, for instance, the FBI on her tail. They were interested in whether she had tried to defraud her mother, Asma Bagain, by claiming that her mother’s house was her own in order to borrow money against it. Then there was the court complaint that she had beat her mother in law and threatened to kill her, which was part of the general mess, apparently, of being married to John Toliopoulos. During one of her separations from Toliopoulos, she stayed with a woman named Brandy Murphy. According to the Australian paper The Age, Brandy only learned that she was living with a genius when Norma left:



"Norma left Chicago on the Labour Day weekend in August 1999. I had been her best friend for five years. We were inseparable. I thought I knew everything about Norma, so when she left I was really upset. I used to sit in her room and cry."

…



"She once told me that she was writing a book," Ms Murphy said, "but that it was too private and personal to show me. After she left, I found some things she had written which were pure fantasy about her father, and how she wanted to die and thought she was evil. It was really heartbreaking stuff."



One likes to hear stories like this. It is like an anecdote in Vasari – one of those about a famous artist who was discovered, all naïve and shepherding and shit, drawing some perspective laden scene by another artist, and taken up and educated in a studio. For Norma’s little sketch pointed to the larger life ahead of her as a Fake. Not a minor fake, not an everyday seller of promises that never pan out, not a down on her high heels confidance man – no, that wasn’t Norma. The sketch about being, to use Alice Walker’s disgusting verb, incested, was all about an instinct. Yes, in the early nineties, if you were going to make it big in the confession game, incest was what it was all about. Daddy peeping in on you, Daddy and you in the shower, the return of all your repressed memories via the wonders of modern therapy, with its rediscovery of an innocence within children of all sexual knowledge that a psychoanalyst could only gape at. Roll over Sigmund Freud and tell Mrs. Grundy the news. This was when we were living in a nation that believed, in its tiny little heart, that day care centers could double as Satanic cult drive-ins; this was a nation willing to arrest, in one case, almost a whole police force (in Olympia, Washington), on the charge that they had been making with the big cloven hoofed guy and forking babies and such. This, as we now know, was the acme of progress and Western Civilization.



But I am getting ahead of myself. Norma left that sketch behind because, I believe, she knew, with the instinct of a great artist, that the time for mere tales of sodomizing were past. The fake’s art consists of finding just the right combination for the historical moment. Norma, fleeing the US with her husband in 1999, arrives in Australia. And then – another Norma appears. Norma Khouri. This Norma has a heartfelt tale to tell, a tale to make you cry. It is an especially heartwarming and shocking tale in the age of the new Crusade, the Post 9/11 era when the West discovered how civilized it was, after all, especially compared to the Middle East. In the era of the New Crusade, the right, which formerly gave its considered opinion about feminism by coining the term femi-nazi, was suddenly very, very upset at the condition of women in Moslem countries. In the Clinton years, Wendy Shalit could write a feeble anti-feminist book that ends on a note of respect for the Taliban’s enforcement of the laws of chador, and that book would be praised by no less than George Will; but in the era of the New Crusade, it turns out that feminism is one of the things that make us Good – as compared to the Bad, which was, in general, anything Middle Eastern (save Israel). Whether from instinct or from sheer brilliance, Norma Baig dropped the memoir about being ‘incested’ and wrote a book that conformed perfectly to the new victim vogue. How much better to show how much better we were than our enemies -- who, it turns out, weren't even Christian! So was born a seering memoir of Norma’s adventures in Lebanon, and the death of her best buddy Dalia. Dalia, the ravishing daughter of a Moslem brute, falls in love with a Christian. Secret, chaste meetings ensue, but Daddy (borrowing the murderous patriarch theme from Norma’s previous sketch) lurks, dagger in hand, in the shadows. With twelve blows of the dagger he dispatches his fair daughter, with only Norma left to tell the tale.



And so Norma’s memoir appears, and Norma is everywhere – Norma Khouri, the woman who fled from Lebanon. Tears spring to her eyes, a fund is mounted for the victims of honor killing, there are readings in high schools and art festivals, and appearances on American tv to promote Honor Lost – the title of the book for the American market – and everything is going swimmingly. In the background, it is true, there is the nattering of Arab women – Jordanian women, actually. According to the Christian Science Herald:



“The National Commission for Women in Jordan had independently discovered more than 70 errors in her book and sent this information earlier to Random House and to Simon & Schuster. Random House replied at the time that they stood by their author after being satisfied that she had changed names and places to protect people in Jordan.”



Alas, as the spirit of the New Crusade has dwindled, we have discovered a lot of, uh, intelligence errors. That first fine bloom of Western Civ triumphalism – that period after 9/11 when some of our greatest intellectuals, like Italian prime minister Berlusconi, proclaimed the unadulterated superiority of the West, or that portion of it with white faces, over the East, a sneaky and retrograde part of the Earth that needs a good invasion to set it straight – has rather wilted.



And so too has Norma’s story. The Sydney Herald investigated Norma Khouri and found Norma Baig. They found a married woman, not a single one; they found a refugee from Chicago and debt, rather than Lebanon and honor killing. And they published the story.



In so doing, they have elevated Norma Khouri. As a victim, Khouri was minor. As a Fake, however, she’s become a Rorschach test for the Zeitgeist. The crossing over of a particularly malignant strand of liberal decay – therapeutic liberalism, with its blind identity of victimhood with goodness – with conservative resentment finds its great artistic achievement in Norma. Her book could be praised not only by Ms. magazine, but by the National Review. A particularly heartfelt review of the book appeared in the American Outlook, penned by a NR contributor, Katherine Lopez. It begins with the standard Rightwing windup:



“To most Americans, and Westerners generally, it is inconceivable. A father kills his daughter because she fell for the wrong guy. But move East, and in some cultures that is just what is done. A reality no one speaks of.

Norma Khouri can’t stand the silence. She’s written Honor Lost: Love and Death in Modern-Day Jordan in honor of her best friend, Dalia. Dalia and Khouri met when they were three, and, as Khouri tells it, were nearly inseparable for the next twenty-two years. They were always challenging their culture, Dalia’s religion, and her father. They managed to convince him to allow them to open a hair salon in Amman. It was in the salon where she found the happiness that would ultimately lead to her death penalty.



Dalia, twenty-six years old, was killed—stabbed twelve times with a kitchen knife—for the sake of her family’s honor. Her scandalous behavior? She was seen in public with a Catholic man.”



You will not see such an outpouring of sympathy from the NRO about, say, the statesponsored kidnapping of the children of lesbians in this country, or the stabbing to death of some prostitute and the malign neglect of the ensuing police investigation. But for one brief shining moment, the party of Phyllis Schlafley was on the barricades with Gloria Steinem.

This was not simply an accident. Norma’s book, like all great Cons, is designed to confirm the beliefs of its marks. There is a delicacy in these things that shouldn’t be underestimated. There are two parts of Norma’s work that are particularly beautiful and must be saluted.



One was the creation of Dalia. As the daughter of a Moslem, of course she longs for fairer, Christian men. The opera must go on! But if Norma’s drama were set in, say, America, Dalia would have probably been, shall we say, physically intimate with her Christian knight. But no – Dalia, in her twenties, was entirely chaste! For a crowd that advocates the teaching of abstinence with truly Taliban like fervor, this was a dream come true. However much the New Crusaders vaunted the freedom of women, briefly, in that small post 9/11 moment, they were still the standard anti-abortion, anti-sex, and pro-family crowd we’ve all come to know and love. The same people who consider the showing of Janet Jackson’s nipple a major cause for legal reform. Norma’s infallible instinct here is truly dialectical. It elevates her, to my mind, from mere con artist to artist, period.



An artist, as opposed to a con artist, longs for a signature. And this is the second brilliant thing about Norma. In that wicked Eastern land where, unlike the U.S. or Australia, men are brutes to women, a certain dream logic takes hold. Just as Shakespeare set one of his romances in a Bohemia with a seacoast, so, too, Norma’s individuality revolts in her very text and discretely devises a signal that says: I am the maker of this thing. This supposed refugee from Lebanon gives her country a border with Kuwait.



The New York times ran an op ed piece by an Australian writer who asked the question: how did she get away with it? For Norma was more than a writer – she was a personality. She loved the spotlight. One is reminded of Carlyle’s essay on the Affair of the Necklaces. That affair was recently a movie, starring Hilary Swank – which is how we get our history out here in the sticks. Jean de la Motte, aka Valois, tricked the Cardinal de Rohan into buying a diamond necklace, ostensively for Marie Antoinette. Jean found some strumpet to play Marie, pocketed Rohan’s money, and sold the diamonds before she was caught. Ever afterwards people have wondered how Rohan could fall for such an obvious dupe, and how Jean could have hoped to get away with it. Carlyle writes:



“Cheerfully admitting these statements to be all lies; we ask, How any

mortal could, or should, so lie?



The Psychologists, however, commit one sore mistake: that of

searching, in every character named human, for something like a

Conscience. Being mere contemplative recluses, for most part, and

feeling that Morality is the Heart of Life, they judge that with all the

world it is so. Nevertheless, as practical men are aware, Life can go

on in excellent vigour, without crotchet of that kind. What is the

essence of Life? Volition? Go deeper down, you find a much more

universal root and characteristic: Digestion. While Digestion lasts,

Life cannot, in philosophical language, be said to be extinct: and

Digestion will give rise to Volitions enough; at any rate, to Desires

and attempts, which may pass for such. He who looks neither before

nor after, any farther than the Larder and State-room, which latter is

properly the finest compartment of the Larder, will need no Worldtheory,

Creed as it is called, or Scheme of Duties: lightly leaving the

world to wag as it likes with any theory or none, his grand object is

a theory and practice of ways and means. Not goodness or badness

is the type of him; only shiftiness or shiftlessness.”



Which is all there is to say about Norma, probably. One so hopes she doesn’t spoil everything by reverting to plan A (Daddy abused me). An artist should not go back on her work. At the moment, she is in seclusion, compiling evidence that she really has been living on the coast of Bohemia. A parallel news story caught our eye, however, as we were relishing Norma. Among the complaints about Norma is that the money that has supposedly been collected, through her agency, to help the suffering victims of honor killings in Jordan has seemingly disappeared en route. In keeping with Norma’s perfect sense of the Zeitgeist, the WP, similarly, reported that the U.S., tenderly stewarding the oil wealth of Iraq for the Iraqis, has inezplicably spent that money (who’d have thought it!) on big American defense contractors:



“For the first 14 months of the occupation, officials of the Coalition Provisional Authority provided little detailed information about the Iraqi money, from oil sales and other sources, that it spent on reconstruction contracts. They have said that it was used for the benefit of the Iraqi people and that most of the contracts paid from Iraqi money went to Iraqi companies. But the CPA never released information about specific contracts and the identities of companies that won them, citing security concerns, so it has been impossible to know whether these promises were kept.

The CPA has said it has awarded about 2,000 contracts with Iraqi money. Its inspector general compiled records for the major contracts, which it defined as those worth $5 million or more each. Analysis of those and other records shows that 19 of 37 major contracts funded by Iraqi money went to U.S. companies and at least 85 percent of the total $2.26 billion was obligated to U.S. companies. The contracts that went to U.S. firms may be worth several hundred million more once the work is completed.”

Surely, if Norma is utterly shamed in Australia, she should have a job waiting for her at the Pentagon.

Bollettino

LI can’t pretend to understand the atrocity unfolding in Sudan – the latest atrocity. The “government” of Sudan is a criminal organization that happens to run a state – or at least fulfill the one state function of directed violence. The direction had been towards fighting the South – with the division between Arab Moslem and African Christian being the rubric by which bystanders tried to make sense of the thing.

It was obvious, however – and we noted this in our posts on Libya in December – that the next problem in Sudan was going to be in the West. What is happening there is a more traditional mass murder, on ethnic lines. We recommend the article by John Ryle in this week’s NYRB on “the harrowing of Darfur.”

“In the case of the south, where the victims were non-Muslims, the official rhetoric justifying the attacks used the vocabulary of holy war, of jihad. Murahaliin were transformed into Mujahideen. But the unofficial rhetoric of the conflict was racial, employing the terms abid (slave) and zurga (literally "blue," meaning black, i.e., not Arab, in Sudanese language), words that bear the weight of a history of discrimination and exploitation in Sudan, where ethnic groups claiming Arab descent assume a superiority over others. In the case of Darfur, the inhabitants are all Muslim, with the exception of some displaced southerners, but the province is a patchwork of Arab and non-Arab groups, of which the Fur are one of many. In the present conflict, in the absence of religious difference, it is racial rhetoric that has come to the fore. Adherents of the two rebel movements, the SLA and the JEM, are drawn, in varying proportions, from the three major non-Arab or "African" groups in the province, the eponymous Fur, the Massaleit, and the Zaghawa, while the Janjawiid are drawn from a number of pastoral Arab tribes who move in the same territory and compete for natural resources and political power.”

What we are seeing in Darfur is actually a window into the forces that have made world history – if we take away the helicopters and the automatic weapons, this is how the conquistadors came into the New World, how the slavers populated that new world with an enchained labor force, and how the loss of the population that made up that labor force, wrenched by the millions from an Africa in which the traditional forms of bondage and warfare were refunctioned to “fit” an international machine, made the various kingdoms and tribes of Africa vulnerable to further conquest by the Europeans. The same thing happened in the North, in Morrocco, for instance, and on the East Coast, with Arab slavers. Of course, once Europeans had accumulated enough capital, through genocide and theft, to move on to the next ‘stage” of civilization, they reversed themselves on the question of slavery, and used it as an excuse to conquer, colonize, and further exploit Africa – a neat trick.

Interestingly, according to Ryle, the scrim by which we on the outside understand what is happening in Darfur – another atrocity underwritten by radical Islamicists – distorts the actuality of Darfur. Both the Darfur rebels and the Khartoum government are animated by some Islamicist ideology:

“The current military regime of General Omar al-Bashir, which is known as the Ingaz (Salvation) government, came to power in a military coup in 1989, after overthrowing the elected government of Sadiq al-Mahdi, grandson of the Mahdi. The power behind the throne in the Salvation government, until a split in 2001, was the Islamist thinker Hassan al-Turabi, who is Sadiq's brother-in-law. Turabi was the architect of a new Islamist program that reached beyond the Arab elites to include Muslim African peoples in Darfur and elsewhere. But Turabi now languishes in Kober prison in Khartoum, accused of links to one of the rebel groups in Darfur, the Justice and Equality Movement. The Salvation government, like its civilian predecessor, seems to have reverted to an Arabist agenda, attempting to control the west of the country, as it attempted to control the south, by divide and rule.”

Bollettino

I’ve wanted to do a post about Joseph Glanvill for a while. Glanvill’s name has fascinated me ever since, as a kid, I encountered it in Poe’s story, Ligeia. That story is a typical Poe atmospheric, in which the matter seems to condense briefly out of a dense mental fog and proceed intermittently to some shocking horror that always just escapes the visceral. It is this flickering aspect of Poe that makes his stories seem like the way we remember our dreams – which is mostly what we mean by dream-like. Here’s how Poe begins the story:

“I CANNOT, for my soul, remember how, when, or even precisely where, I first became acquainted with the lady Ligeia. Long years have since elapsed, and my memory is feeble through much suffering. Or, perhaps, I cannot now bring these points to mind, because, in truth, the character of my beloved, her rare learning, her singular yet placid cast of beauty, and the thrilling and enthralling eloquence of her low musical language, made their way into my heart by paces so steadily and stealthily progressive that they have been unnoticed and unknown. Yet I believe that I met her first and most frequently in some large, old, decaying city near the Rhine.”

Notice the counterpoint between the tactile fact and the dreamlike doubt. The narrator starts out by not remembering something – an exceedingly odd way to begin a story. The confession of feebleness in the second sentence – which contests the pre-supposition of the narrator’s narrative competence that the reader brings to the reading of a story -- is in turn contested by the third sentence, which puts into doubt the epistemological grasp of narration itself – the Lady Ligiea “effect”, to use Barthes term, is produced at a level below that of the larger, grosser themes by which ‘story” grasps reality. And then the fourth sentence, a masterpiece of fogginess, descends to fact only to shirk before a proper name. The narrator ‘believes,” instead of remembers, that there were a series of meetings – where? In some large, old, decaying city near the Rhine. In other words, in one of a fifty or more places. The decay of the city is underlined by the absence of the proper name – for as we all know, the extreme point of a city’s decay is when the proper name is forgotten. And we all knew that even better in the Romantic era, with its vogue for ruins and digs.

One of Poe’s stylistic tricks is to always leave a discrepancy, a perceptible gap, between what the reader knows and what his sentences say. The sentences accumulate on the page, and properly one knows that these sentences should each be adding details to a picture beyond the text, should be making clearer some essential content, just as one knows about how to be awake without being taught -- waking being a natural state, rather than learned condition . Mysteriously, though, as the sentences pile up, the reader feels that he is being left behind, as in one of those dreams in which one walks and walks and, due to some unbearable, invisible weight, some supervenient heaviness, one never gets anywhere – one’s position in the road becomes an agonizing, incremental crawl, one’s attempt to climb the stairs becomes a sweaty effort to lift one gigantic foot up and forward, leveraging forward with paralyzed slowness.

This is the effect in Ligeia, just as it is in Pit and the Pendulum, or even the Fall of the House of Usher. In other stories, of course, the normal relationship between reader and information is maintained. In the Purloined Letter, for instance, Dupin will leap ahead of the reader with information about what happened and then (with the reader neatly eavesdropping somewhere outside the door the police commissioner has hastily closed as he rushes out to inform the Queen) lounge in his chair and tell us all about it. The logic of sequence is preserved.

Ligeia is a much sicker story – it is narrative infected with the sickness unto death. Given this kind of story, Glanvill’s name can’t but acquire a certain glamour for the reader. A phrase of Glanvill’s is placed as the epigraph for the story (and we all know how important his quotations were to Poe – his most analyzed story, The Purloined Letter, ends on one of those culled masterpieces of eccentric erudition), and as the story jerks into its start and stop motion, with Poe’s description of the “beauty’ of Lady Ligeia’s face one of his better jokes: his description shows us not a beauty, but a nightmarish monster, a face with long raven hair and distended eyes mounted upon a tall, emaciated figure. A haunt before her death, dying she utters Glanvill’s words: "Man doth not yield him to the angels, nor unto death utterly, save only through the weakness of his feeble will," which keys the entire fixation of the rest of the story.

Like the narrator of this story, my memory is feeble through much suffering, not to mention late payments for rent, and this splitting headache from the vodka cocktail last night. However, I believe I first read this story in a crumbling, suburban town, redolent every autumn of high school football fervors, near the banks of the Chattahoochee. I didn’t follow up that reading until years – and leaf driven years – and still more years – later. But in the decline of my mortal frame, I’ve sort of had a thing for reading 17^th century prose writers. And naturally I was lead, by this habit, to take down, in a figurative sense, or download, in a literal one, a volume or two of Joseph Glanvill’s.

Well, let’s get to that in the next post, shall we?