Bollettino



Let others analyse the debates. LI is much too fearful to watch them – or listen on the radio. One reaches a point of saturation with the maunderings of Bush. Lately, Kerry has been on a roll. We hope that he continues to press the attack in this debate. But we are afraid of the timing – it is late to have to press the attack. The time for that was, properly, during and after the convention…



Well, no bitching, now. We cross our fingers.



And on to … Madame Bovary.



There is nothing better than reviewing the translation of an old classic. First, it allows the translator to discretely reveal his or her own incredible erudition. Second, one can pick at the text – curiously, few reviewers of novels really seem to care about close reading the things. Close reading your average novel, admittedly, is like trying to find a plot in the clothes going around in a drier. It isn’t worth it. But when it is worth it, it is worth it all the way – or so we have found. We are never happier than with a good or great novel to review, and an angle – a way of reading it that we want to bring out in the review.



The Atlantic this month offers Clive James on a new translation of Madame B. We have a few points to pick with him.



One of those points is about cliché.



“Minting his every phrase afresh, Flaubert avoided clichés like poison. "Avoid like poison" is a cliché, and one that Flaubert would either not have used if he had been composing in English or have flagged with italics to show that he knew it came ready-made.”



This is of course exactly wrong. Flaubert’s love/hatred of bêtise would never stoop to italicizing a cliché – indeed, that would be doubling the howler. James has obviously forgotten that the clichés in Flaubert come, so often, in conversation, or in the reproduction of somebody else’s writing. To italicize, here, would ruin the whole texture of the thing. Cliches are very much like in jokes – to hear them as clichés requires that you have educated your hearing in a certain way. This has now become a little flattened -- any tv writer worth his subscription to teen People can create a "like" hobbled debutante for cheap giggles. But Flaubert, like Swift, felt cliches the way other people feel a toothache, or some other shooting body pain that somehow has to be compulsively played with -- they are both hilarious and deadly – a p.o.v. not unsimilar to Bloy’s. Leon Bloy, you will recall (no you won’t – as I pointed out above, vigorously exercising one’s erudition in some subject or other is one of the joys of reviewing the translations of the classics. Hey, James goes on about the texture of Turgenev’s prose in Russian, so I have an excuse) thought of clichés as encoding a deadly, satanic wisdom by which the bourgeoisie was drawing down upon its head the divine condemnation it so richly deserved. Flaubert had a more resigned, secular view of the bourgeoisie – he just thought of them as ending civilization and inaugurating a thousand year Reich of banality, or something like that.



This is why Flaubert’s richest use of the cliché is just in contexts in which he does not, grossly, underline it. The italics would ruin the whole thing. Funny that James doesn’t see that.



Then there is the matter of translation. James, I think justly, court-martials certain choices of the newest translator, Margaret Mauldon. Here he pops off, rather deliciously, with some needed pendantic intervention, as the AA people put it:



“Professor Malcolm Bowie, who wrote the informative introduction, makes much ado in his back-of-the-jacket blurb about Flaubert's precision, which the professor assures us is matched by Mauldon's brand-new and meticulously accurate translation of the actual work. Any reader wishing to believe this is advised to start on page one. He had better not open the book accidentally at page 178, on which we find Emma's lover Rodolphe justifying to himself his decision to ditch her. Rodolphe is supposed to be a creep, but surely he never spoke the French equivalent of late-twentieth-century American slang: "And anyway there's all those problems, all that expense, as well. Oh, no! No way! It would have been too stupid."



Just to be certain that Rodolphe never spoke like a Hollywood agent, we can take a look at the same line in the original: "Et, d'ailleurs, les embarras, la dépense ... Ah! non, non, mille fois non! Cela eût été trop bête!" The perfectly ordinary, time-tested English idiom "No, no, a thousand times no!" would have fitted exactly.”



So far, he has Mauldon in a corner and she is going down under the assault of the furious fisticuffs, or something like that. But then James refers to the previous Oxford translation, from the fifties. And here, we think, he isn’t using his ear:



“In Alan Russell's translation of Madame Bovary, first published by Penguin in 1950, there is no "No way!" Probably the phrase did not yet exist, but almost certainly Russell would not have used it even if it had. What he wrote was "No, no, by Heaven no!" Not quite as good as "a thousand times no!" perhaps, but certainly better than "No way!": better because more neutral, in the sense of being less tied to the present time.”



To my ear, that “heaven’s no” is just so fake British toff-ish. Is Rodolphe an equivalent of a fake British toff? No, we imagine him to be much more in the vein of a provincial Musset – without the poetic genius. Often, Musset himself seems to forget the poetic genius, using it as an excuse for being a leach, letch and toady. No, the “heavens” comes, faintly but distinctly, from a whole other realm – it is something that a much more naïve, much more egocentric and less self-reflective man would say. Something, in short, that we can imagine in Trollope, but not in Flaubert. Not, we hasten to say, in this context, with this character – surely the cieux! exclamation is in Flaubert somewhere, perhaps in Salambo.



There. We’ve forgotten the debates. We’ve almost forgotten the current bêtise. But not quite.

Bollettino



The wonderful thing about money



George Packer’s article about the ethnic discontents in Kirkuk is a study in what happens when justice is conceived of as the restoration of the past. Kirkuk was Arabized under Saddam. The program Saddam followed doesn’t seem too different from the programs by which the Israelis displaced the Palestinians, or the way American city planners, in the fifties, displaced blacks in urban centers. Of course, neither the Israelis nor the Americans, in the end, used poison gas -- one should always remember that the degree of violence, here, makes all the difference. But one should also remember that the degree of violence doesn't transform anything basic about the relation between the exploiters and the exploited.



Packer's article is all a tissue of miseries, and of injustice piled on injustice. Kirkuk is now claimed by the Kurds and the Turkomen, while at the same time it is nominally under the control of the Iraqi state.



Packer mentions, in passing, a British woman, Emma Sky, who exists in the narrative as a counter-narrator. Her story is not the grim one in which Packer evidently believes, but a liberal story.



“The first representative of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Kirkuk, and the most influential advocate for the city with Paul Bremer, the head of the C.P.A., was Emma Sky, a slim, brown-eyed, thirty-six-year-old Englishwoman. Sky speaks some Arabic and once worked with Palestinians in the West Bank; though she opposed the invasion of Iraq, she volunteered to join the occupation authority. Upon arriving in Kirkuk, she saw that the most urgent task was to reassure alienated Arabs and Turkomans that the triumphant attitude of their Kurdish neighbors did not mean there was no future for them here. As Sky travelled around the province, her prestige among Arabs soared. Ismail Hadidi, the deputy governor and an original Arab, gave her his highest praise: “We deal with her as if she’s a man, not a woman.”



"Sky believes passionately that Kirkuk can be a model for an ethnically diverse Iraq. “People have to move away from this zero-sum thinking,” she told me in Baghdad. “Kirkuk is where it all meets. It all comes together there. Yes, you can have a country of separate regions, where people don’t have to deal with other groups. But can you have a country where people are happy with each other, where people are at ease with each other? I think Kirkuk is going to tell you what kind of country Iraq is going to be.” Compared with the problems in Israel and Palestine, Sky said, Kirkuk’s can be solved relatively easily. “Kirkuk you can win. Kirkuk doesn’t have irreconcilable differences—yet.”



We don’t know if Packer, who evidently believes the situation in Kirkuk is tending unstoppably towards a mini-civil war, or Sky is right. But we do know that the Kirkuks of the world are monuments to a world before money. That’s a very attractive world to the romantic consciousness. Myself, having little or no money most of the time, I often rage against filthy lucre. But it does embody one great and peaceable characteristic: by abstracting the possessors of it into the pure subjects beloved by Kantian idealism, it uproots this whole world of hatreds.



Surely a similar thought (minus the crack about Kantian idealism) must have occurred to Adam Smith, given the similar history of Scotland. The Scottish highlands were being decimated by the English in Saddam-ist style in the eighteenth century, since the highlanders language, customs and loyalties were suspect to London. This, of course, motivated (to use a bland word for having a bayonet thrust in your ass) the great Highlands immigrations to America. The breaking up of the clans, and the re-structuring of property claims, left a huge impress even now on Scotland.



“Scotland has the most unequal distribution of land in western Europe and it is even more unequal than Brazil which is well-known for its land injustices. In a country of over 19 million acres, over 16 million acres is privately owned rural land. Two-thirds of this land is owned by 1252 landowners, (0.025% of the population). And these estates are extremely large. One quarter of the privately owned rural land is in estates of 30,700 acres and larger, owned by just 66 landowners (Wightman: 1999).”





Smith may not have sympathized with the Highland clans, and certainly, as an ideologist, he was ready to do a death dance over the complicated feudal system of land ownership. However, chapter 4 of The Wealth of Nations is still one of the great analyses of the kinds of civilization that are defined by their internal structures of production and their external chances for exchange – it is the kind of analysis that we now call Marxist – and in that chapter Smith says much that is relevant to the current situation in Kirkuk. To quote a little of this chapter here would mean choosing not to quote it all – and it is all quotable. Smith takes for granted that vanity is as great a mover of human history as sympathy, and he shows the stages by which the great landed proprietors essentially gave away their power over their retainers, a power that rested upon a certain socially necessary generosity, in order to divert wealth to their own individual satisfactions. In order for this to be accomplished, there had to be a market that would supply such luxuries and goods as would be worth spending money on. The culture of consumerism, once it got a foothold, inevitably decayed the culture of feudal power, without central authority having to lift a finger.



We think this model is full of exceptions, but it is still a wonderfully organized vision of social change. Here Smith comes to the end of the process he is describing. He pulls back, and extends his gaze to other, pre-capitalist societies around the world:



“The tenants having in this manner become independent, and the retainers being dismissed, the great proprietors were no longer capable of interrupting the regular execution of justice, or of disturbing the peace of the country. Having sold their birth-right, not like Esau, for a mess of pottage in time of hunger and necessity, but, in the wantonness of plenty, for trinkets and baubles, fitter to be the playthings of children than the serious pursuits of men, they became as insignificant as any substantial burgher or tradesmen in a city. A regular government was established in the country as well as in the city, nobody having sufficient power to disturb

its operations in the one, any more than in the other.



It does not, perhaps, relate to the present subject, but I cannot help remarking it, that very old families, such as have possessed some considerable estate from father to son for many successive generations, are very rare in commercial countries. In countries which have little commerce, on the contrary, such as Wales, or the Highlands of Scotland, they are very

common. The Arabian histories seem to be all full of genealogies; and there is a history written by a Tartar Khan, which has been translated into several European languages, and which contains scarce any thing else; a proof that ancient families are very common among those nations. In countries where a rich man can spend his revenue in no other way than by

maintaining as many people as it can maintain, he is apt to run out, and his benevolence, it seems, is seldom so violent as to attempt to maintain more than he can afford. But where he can spend the greatest revenue upon his own person, he frequently has no bounds to his expense, because he frequently has no bounds to his vanity, or to his affection for his own person. In

commercial countries, therefore, riches, in spite of the most violent regulations of law to prevent their dissipation, very seldom remain long in the same family. Among simple nations, on the contrary, they frequently do, without any regulations of law ; for among nations of shepherds, such as the Tartars and Arabs, the consumable nature of their property necessarily

renders all such regulations impossible.”

"No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation. We say we are for the Union. The world will not forget that we say this. We know how to save the Union. The world knows we do know how to save it. We -- even we here -- hold the power, and bear the responsibility. In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free -- honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth. Other means may succeed; this could not fail. The way is plain, peaceful, generous, just -- a way which, if followed, the world will forever applaud, and God must forever bless. – Abraham Lincoln, Message to Congress, 1862



The reference to other nations is by no means incidental to Lincoln's understanding of what was at stake in America's conflict. In history's ongoing struggle between despotism and self-government, he was prepared to believe that America was earth's "last best hope"-not as the world's economic colossus or imperial hegemon but as an exemplar of what politics, with all its limitations, can accomplish. – Jean Bethke Elshtain





My way of living leads me to be about the courts of justice; and there, I have sometimes seen a good lawyer, struggling for his client's neck, in a desperate case, employing every artifice to work round, befog, and cover up, with many words, some point arising in the case, which he dared not admit, and yet could not deny. Party bias may help to make it appear so; but with all the allowance I can make for such bias, it still does appear to me, that just such, and from just such necessity, is the President's struggle in this case. – Abraham Lincoln, Speech on the War with Mexico, 1848



LI was reading James Chace’s review of John Gaddis’ brief for Bush’s foreign policy in the NYRB yesterday, when we came across the “last best hope of the earth” quotation, and realized something: we'd been seeing that phrase a lot. The more we thought about it, the more we thought that the use and misuse of this phrase tells us a lot about the neo-con use and misuse of history. The neo-cons, it seems, have gotten into Lincoln’s phrase like termites getting into a house. Elshtain is typical of the lot. The quote above is from the exile Clinton years, where the longing for a grand purpose -- in other words, Machtlust -- was in the air.



Notice how Elshtain uses it to defend an imperialist view of America’s destiny. Notice, too, that the spiritual heirs of Jeff Davis, having taken over the present GOP, have decided to take over its past, too. In the context of Lincoln’s message to Congress, it is hard to see the message that Elshtain implies: that of considering America eschatologically justified in pursuing a messianic foreign policy. One recalls that the Abraham Lincoln Elshtain is remaking in the image of an anti-communist stalwart was, in reality, the Congressman who lost his seat by strongly and stoutly opposing the Mexican war.



The Mexican war is, in fact, a much better analogy to the imperialist adventure in Iraq than the Civil War. One should recall that the original Texas revolt against Mexico was motivated, in part, by a genuine desire to throw off the yoke of Mexico’s tyrant, Santa Ana, and, in part, by a genuine desire to throw off the yoke of that Mexican law that forbade slavery. The Truth goes marching on.



In any case, if we took Elshtain’s distortion of Lincoln’s words at face value, we ought to ask: how true are they? Is America the earth’s last best hope?



The short answer is no. Not the last – many hopes have arisen since the civil war. Gandhi, for instance, not only provided a definite hope for mankind, but turned – not to Abraham Lincoln, but to Tolstoy and Ruskin. And Gandhi’s example, in turn, became the great hope of – the Civil Rights movement in the heart of the last great hope itself, America, which was toiling in the maze of official apartheid up through the sixties.



Did the US bring hope to Central and South America since the time of Lincoln? No. It has brought tyranny, mass murder, and mass exploitation. The record of US imperialism in Central America is comparable to Stalin’s record of “liberation” in Eastern Europe – a dismal chronicle of small killings and large thefts. And that policy has left behind the same impoverishment. Did the US bring hope to Europe? Yes. In World War I and II, the U.S., both from policy and from the domestic renewal of the democratic temperament, used its force against the worst of the earth’s forces. The Cold War is a much more mixed story. The struggle between superpower’s tempered the American tendency to obnoxiousness (see Central and South America, above). From force of circumstance, America favored global policies that were certainly to the advantage of Europe.

Our reference to struggle brings out another point lost in the messianic drool of such as Elshtain. To talk of America as the bearer of moral, or universal, interests is much like talking about some tech company as the bearer of scientific advances. It is a misunderstanding of the role of competition in the whole system. We understand that companies work best when they compete, and work worst when they monopolize. Likewise, when the U.S. monopolizes, as it has done in South and Central America, it rapidly degenerates into an oppressor. Like other imperial oppressors, it justifies its extortions and the blind triumph of its advantage by an appeal to universal, or moral, values. In reality, those values only serve particular national interest. Conservatives, who are skeptical of the Gnostic elevation of the state to the status of some mystical representative of reason, do characteristically tread a dialectical circuit that brings them, in pursuit of their own sense of order, to their own form of gnosticism – a patriotism that assumes exactly the same role as that accorded the state by liberal thinkers. You can see this happening with Burke, as he moves from opposition to the French Revolution to support for Pitt’s ideological war against the French Revolution. The principles that cause Burke to decry the power grab of the ‘theorizers” in the Reflections fall to the rhetoric of a crusade that can only be justified on the grounds of “theory” – and so Burke undermined his own position, and supported acts of the state which brought to an end the traditional English order for which he fought.



The moral frivolousness of the war in Iraq requires two delusions. One is the delusion that America is a moral, instead of a political, entity. The other, and dependent delusion is that America thus represents the desire, or the hopes, of the Iraqi people. And so Americans shield themselves from the emotional and political results of slaughtering masses of Iraqi civilians in pursuit of a goals that are, really, of no business to this country – for instance, the war against the ‘thuggish’ Sadr on behalf of the ‘thuggish’ Allawi. In his wildest dreams, Lincoln couldn’t have imagined that the last best hope on earth would leave the scorching mark of its inspiration on the town of Najaf, located in a far away Ottoman province. The triumph of the filibusters in the GOP is one of the sadder signs of our political degeneracy.

Bollettino



Last week we wrote a review of Capote’s Letters for the Chicago Sun-Times. Lately, there’s been a significant dip in the quantity of LI’s review-writing. This is a good thing – writing reviews is generally a stinky business, unappreciated, underpaid, taking up a huge amount of time, in terms of reading and research and getting the first damn paragraph down, for comparatively little payback in terms of even the most miserly of nature’s rewards, the writer’s self satisfaction at a thing finally and forthrightly said.



In the course of our research, we read Plimpton’s Capote. It is one of those have recorder, will transcribe kind of books. Like Edie. Norman Mailer told an anecdote about meeting Capote in Brooklyn. Mailer at the time was renting a studio in a working class part of Brooklyn. Capote came over, and the two decided to get a drink, so they went to the neighborhood bar, ‘down on Montague Street near Court – a big Irish bar with a long brass rail at which were lined up fifty reasonably disgruntled Irishmen drinking at three thirty in the afternoon.” So Mailer and Capote went there, Capote wearing a gaberdine cape. “He strolled in looking like a beautiful faggot prince. It suddenly came over me. My God, what have I done? I walked behind him as though I had very little to do with him. And Truman just floated through. As he did, the eyes – it was like a movie shot – every eye turned automatically to look at him with a big Irish “I’ve seen everything now”. … It took me half an hour for the adrenaline to come down. I figured people would get rude and I’d get into a fight.”



That, to my mind, is what the fifties was about. Drinking, fighting in bars. There is an image of the fifties as a peaceful time that is based on crime statistics. You can clean out the toilet with those figures – the wifebeating, the kids beating the hell out of each other on street corners, the gaybaiting, little Southern town pinchings and lynchings of blacks, none of that was going to be picked up by the cops, or put into some lousy copbook.



In the summer issue of the Gettysburg Review, this came home for us in a really wonderfully understated essay, Learning to Fight, by a former basketball player, James McKean,. author of a book of essayes entitled Home Stand: A Memoir of Growing Up. Here’s the intro graf:



“Five paragraphs into Richard Ford's New Yorker essay "In the Face," I realized it had taken me years to recognize such men and even longer to stay the hell away from them. Analyzing his own penchant for confrontation and physical violence, Ford explains how he grew up in the fifties in Mississippi and Arkansas, where hitting someone in the face "meant something." It meant you were brave, experienced, impulsive, dangerous, and moving toward "adulthood, the place we were all headed-a step in the right direction." Oh no, I thought, here we go again. By the end of the essay, where he says that he himself is a man "who could be willing to hit you in the face" in response to "some enmity, some affront, some inequity or malfeasance," I wanted to find an Exit sign.”



McKean strings together a number of incidents around the fact that his height has, all through his life, flashed out a mysterious insult that seems to stop a certain type of man in his path – it is as if his physically towering there had been taken as just the kind of affront or inequity that this kind of man must take care of, Richard Ford style, by striking out. McKean grew up in Washington state – where my friend D. currently lives. I know from D’s stories about the life in his little town that Washington is a good state to live in if you want to get in a brawl with a drunk. It isn’t all sobersided living there, reader. McKean grew up there in the fifties, and sixties, and he well describes an aspect of the world that I remember from boyhood, a world in which there were other boys around who would actually hit you. Girls too. A world in which it was possible that you would be dragged off your bike by some larger kid and have to decide where to kick, bite or gouge the said kid. A fist could materialize suddenly from out of nowhere, or a spitball, or a stone, it could come out of the universe and upside your head. Myself, I can't say that I was beat up as a boy. I had my defensive wiles. But I was keenly aware of those lower down the food chain, the perpetually bullied. My fighting was confined to the house, where I battled my brothers. Luckily for them, and for me, my brothers are twins. My ability as an older brother to bully them was limited by the alliance between them that made them two bodies instead of one. And of course there is the fact that they became fairly physically strong, and I'm still the same old skinny shit with a wet paperbag punch.



I probably wouldn't have been good with just one younger male body to boss around. A rough sense of justice gets knocked into you by fair fights. Odd, that world. It is a struggle to concretely realize those chemicals, those aggressions and fears, in an imaginative sense when you have shuffled off that larval stage. Probably if LI were a dad, it would be easier. But being childless, we don’t have tons of contact with boys, and boy’s life. I have my doubts that it is as rough for your average middle class son as it used to be. The civilizing process, and the traumatic circle the wagons style of living popular in the suburbs, has probably doused a lot of the adrenaline raising moments. Or has it?



McKean’s essay makes it clear that being a shade under seven feet has its disadvantages. For one thing, short aggressive guys feel called upon to take you on, or even to suddenly pop you – which is how McKean lost a front tooth.



Here’s another graf and a half



“What I never developed, however, was a lightning bolt right hand. Growing straight up, I had too much else to learn. I remember being sixteen, carefree for a moment in the summer, listening to "Duke of Earl" as I strode through my mother's kitchen, heedless and head bobbing, only to crack my forehead on the top of the dining room door. My eyes crossed. The house shook. Ears ringing and lights popping, I had discovered the edge of the world at last. The standard world, that is, for all manufactured things are measured to a norm. As I kept growing, the world stuck out its knees and elbows. Nothing fit. Not dothes, not cars, not the desks at school. All the tables for measuring height and weight stopped before I stopped. When I sat down in the movie theater, the people behind me groaned and moved five seats over. …



No sleeping bags or backpacks. No spelunking. No basements. No cabin cruisers. No airplane seats. No slow dancing cheek to cheek. No calm and carefree moments while navigating the world, for there were lamps and tables and chairs and glassware balanced everywhere-a panorama of traps. My reach far exceeded my grasp, and bless the poor wreckage in between.”



LI highly recommends searching out this essay.

Bollettino



Here’s an item that hasn’t gotten much American press. From Jacques Follorou in Le Monde:



The Brother of Osama bin Laden issued summons by French court.



Yselam Bin Laden, the half brother of Osama, residing in Switzerland, has been issued a warrant to appear as a witness in a court in Paris Monday, September 27, by Prosecuting Judge, Renaud Van Rymbeke, in regard to his financial ties with the leader of the 9/11 attacks.



… Yeslam Bin Laden, who has already appeared before a magistrate, has indicated that he has not had contact with his half brother for twenty years. In a letter to Le Monde, he has claimed that the activity of his firm was limited to a pool by subscription of investments recommended by well known, established banks.



On September 6, an expert collaborating with Swiss authorities, Jean-Charles Brisard, communicated to Van Rymbeke some facts which seem to contradict this story. According to him, the Swiss authorities have obtained from UBS bank in Geneva, in the course of their own investigation, documents showing that Yeslam and Osama deposited a sum in that establishment as part of a common account between 1990 and 1997.



Opened on August 17, 1990, this account figured among 54 others created to protect the funds of the Bin Laden family according to Brisard, who is working for a lawyer representing 9/11 victims. According to him, UBS documents indicate that Omar and Haider bin Laden, two other brothers of Osama, confirmed its opening. On August 17, 1990, a first deposit of 450,000 dollars was made, and Yeslam and Osama were the sole authorized signatories for it. Finally, UBS confirmed to a general commission in Berne that Osama bin Laden was the unique “economic beneficiary.”



One of the more comic aspects of the brouhaha that arose around Fahrenheit 9/11 was the often repeated comment that the Saudis who were airlifted out of the country in the week after the attack had been thoroughly questioned by the FBI. This killer factoid was solemnly brandished, a gun still smokin’ by the cohort of the usual talking heads. They went about their 'factchecking" with all the asinine assurance that marks the mulish stupidity of the D.C. commentariat, moving mechanically from one talking point to the next. .



UBS, you will recall, is the financial giant which currently boasts former Senator Gramm of Texas on its roster of employees. They scored that coup after they swallowed Enron’s electronic energy marketing division, which was put on the market after Enron, which boasted Wendy Gramm, the Senator's wife, on its board of directors, went belly up. Apocalypse is a party where everybody knows everybody else's money.

Bollettino



LI has been trying, and failing, to say something with some reach, some truly novelistic depth, about the symbiotic relationship between the fantasies of Bush’s supporters and the essential falsity of Bush’s vision of Iraq – a falsity that can be summed up as the large, enduring and apparently insurmountable incongruity between means and ends in Iraq.



We thought we were on to something by thinking about alibis. We thought about how alibis, used by defendants in court, have to be contoured not only to assume the shape of truth, but to assume that shape of truth that one presumes the jury would find truthful. Hence, the overlapping of sometimes contradictory or incompatible accounts. So we rummaged through a bunch of Greek texts from Lysias to Antiphon, looking at defense speeches.



Finally, though, we couldn’t make this post cohere.



So we dropped it. And wheeling about on the web, we came face to face with Perry Anderson’s second article about French intellectual culture, in the LRB. So we thought, as Francophiles, that here was a natural sighting for our put upon readers.



Anderson’s casts the usual saturnine Marxist glance, but there is something a bit too kneejerk about that disenchantment and its garage sale metaphors. He does present us with a nice problem. How is it that France, in the aftermath of 68, tended not to the left, but to the vaguely right? How is it that Francois Furet’s drumming for the French tradition of liberalism, of all things, climbed to play a dominant role in French intellectual politics of the Mitterand era and after?



We don’t care much for Anderson’s hurried dismissal of the 19th century’s liberal thinkers as a group of villainous intellectual pygmies, Constant, Guizot and Tocqueville. It would be nice to see Tocqueville treated without the breathless and inane admiration that he receives from American writers, who overestimate him and never place him in the context of his life’s work. But Anderson’s drive-by knock, that Tocqueville is the hangman of the Roman Republic, is too trifling for words. Similarly, his complaint that Constant colluded to elevate Napoleon to the leadership. He did, but he also put up a pretty gutsy howl against the wars of conquest Napoleon proceeded on – with a better sense of the injury that such militarism does to culture than Marx, who coming a generation later, sighed that Napoleon didn’t occupy Germany long enough.



That remark has had untold pernicious consequences.



We did like Anderson pointing to a fact that is routinely ignored by establishment media like the NYT and the Economist. France has, for the last thirty years, found itself saddled with a governing class who, whether socialist or conservative, ends up trying to institute the neo-liberal project. And for thirty years, the population has refused. Every government that has tried it has been voted out of office, or fallen due to some strike.



That’s rather admirable. Surely if the people of France hadn’t taken the power into their own hands, the French medical system would have become the mess it is in other places in the world – like the U.S. and the U.K. Ditto with the great shift towards privatizing retirement.



So – a nice combination of gossip and a little soupcon of mental nourishment. Check out the article.

Bollettino



The Hobby war



When war broke out in Europe in 1914, the German army at

once took the offensive. According to its doctrine, all acts in battle were to be governed by one thought: forward against the enemy at any cost.8 Since Germany’s strategy was tied to the ‘short war’ concept, the German high command under Helmuth von Moltke the younger gave little thought to the state of public opinion, although it was ready to ‘energetically suppress all attempts to undermine the political truce’. In mid-August 1914 the chief of the general staff of the field army was satisfied with the ‘popular unanimity of enthusiasm’ and ‘the united attitude of the parties and the press towards war’.9 The so-called spirit of 1914 thus entered German war mythology.10

– “Ludendorff and Hitler in Perspective: The Battle for the German Soldier’s Mind, 1917–1944” by

Jürgen Förster



One of the mysteries of the war in Iraq is that the war’s most ardent supporters are also the most ardent supporters of Bush. On the face of it, something is wrong here.



Supporting the war would seem to mean that one desires a winning strategy to a goal.



In this way, supporting the war in Iraq shouldn’t be that different from, say, supporting your local football team. If that team is the best in the country and it went through a series of matches in which it started to lose, fans would soon be asking pointed questions about the coach and about the star players. Money would be brought up – money, in America, is tightly coupled (it is our favorite myth) with merit. Radio station talk shows would be deluged with callers pointing out that the quarterback has a multimillion dollar salary, or the coach has a multimillion dollar salary, and that they aren’t delivering, and what are we going to do about it, etc. , etc.



The analogy is not perfect, of course, but it says something about the rationality of “supporting a side.” The counter-argument would be something like, well, the true fan should bear with the team as if loses, since the moral support thus lent leads to better team performance. The latter is a case of “magic thinking” – that is, the idea that an event can be willed into existence without the intermediation of an act. Mass magic thinking goes into such things as reviving Tinkerbell, dieting, and finding Jay Leno funny.



In the case of Iraq, the criteria for success were laid out, very clearly, by the Bush administration at the beginning of the war. They laid out how much it would cost; they laid out how many troops it would take to win it; and they laid out the goal of installing democracy in Iraq. The last entailed privatizing the economy, federalizing the state, creating a division of power between executive, legislative, and judicial branches, and guaranteeing human rights.



In the past fourteen months, they have been wrong to an n-tuple on the amount it would cost, wrong on the amount of troops it would take to win it, and unable or unwilling to hold an election, or even to make stick the constitution that they so widely publicized before the dissolution of the CPA. (one of the many surprising and interesting things in Peter Galbraith’s NYRB article about Iraq was that the constitution, which made headlines in the NYT as it was being contentiously sewn together, turned out to be illegal. Under international law, the moment sovereignty is transferred from the occupier to the host country, the occupiers laws are null and void. In other words, the Allawi government quietly liquidated the constitution. This provoked not one headline). The markers of the failure are clear not only in money spent, but in terms of lives lost and number wounded.



Now, in this case, failure has many fathers, and they have made themselves prominent. We know who decided to invade and occupy Iraq with 150,000 men: Donald Rumsfeld. We know what happened to the General who claimed that that figure understated the reality by half or a third: he was retired. We know who claimed the war would cost in the region of 10 billion dollars: Paul Wolfowitz. We know who went through the intelligence about Iraq: Douglas Feith. Their actions are in the public record.



And we also know this: not one subordinate has suffered for these failures; not one lesson has been learned. Dramatic tactical shifts have occurred on the field as the U.S. military, responding to political pressure, has started to fight a war that is almost a replica of the Vietnam war – take a territory, withdraw from a territory. However, the overriding feature of this war remains the same: the Bush administration wants to fight it while refusing to finance it, or man it. It is a new thing: a superpower hobby war.



If the pro-war side were animated by the same rationality that dictates the behavior of, say, the fan, one would imagine that, for instance, the warbloggers would be spewing the blackest kind of bile at Bush. One would imagine that there would be widespread demands for more troops to be sent to Iraq – a lot more troops, double the amount now on the ground there. The scandal of not having spent the 18 billion dollars in Iraq that was earmarked for the place a year ago would be constantly a theme. Although the goal of installing democracy is a bit hazy, and the support for it in America seems to be a massive act of bad faith more than anything else, surely there should be widespread unhappiness with fourteen months spent appointing the Iraqi power structure out of a pool of exiles who, every man jack, have created militias for themselves, and, to put it kindly, “usurped’ property for their leaders.



That hasn’t happened. Instead, a curious other thing has happened.



On Paul Craddick’s website a few days ago, Paul linked to an article by Victor Davis Hanson , who has been writing about the war for the NRO for two years now. LI doesn’t much care for Hanson as a military theorist or historian. John Keegan, equally conservative, is infinitely wiser. So is Anthony Beevor. However, the quote Paul extracted seems so typical of the moral frivolity, the non-engagement, of the prowar party that we had to quote it ourselves:



"It is always difficult for those involved to determine the pulse of any ongoing war. The last 90 days in the Pacific theater were among the most costly of World War II, as we incurred 50,000 casualties on Okinawa just weeks before the Japanese collapse. December 1944 and January 1945 were the worst months for the American army in Europe, bled white repelling Hitler's last gasp in the Battle of the Bulge. Contemporaries shuddered, after observing those killing fields, that the war would go on for years more. The summer of 1864 convinced many that Grant and Lincoln were losers, and that McClellan alone could end the conflict by what would amount to a negotiated surrender of Northern war aims."



There’s something so bathetic about these heroic instances, a separation from the reality principle so deep, that it cries out for the proper novelistic treatment. In the Civil War, Lincoln issued the largest call up of volunteers ever effected in the U.S. By 1864, the North had experienced two years of the draft. Grant relied on the manpower that Lincoln was willing to provide him, and in the Virginia campaign lost the equivalent of the number of American soldiers in Iraq. This, to hold a territory that is one tenth the size of Iraq. By WWII, of course, totale Mobilmachung, as Ernst Juenger put it – total mobilization – put all the hostile states on a war footing. Even the Vietnam War was resourced, although Johnson feared to mobilize the country on the scale the war called for.



The case of the Iraq war shows that a superpower can be wealthy enough to start and engage in a losing war for a number of years. Support for the war and Bush is conjoined by one shared mental trait: willing the end and refusing to will the means. Instead of a draft, the pro-war people demand – a comforting analogy. It is as if the doctor prescribed warm milk for gangrene. Instead of holding the people who botched the occupation responsible, instead of drawing the obvious conclusion from their pack of analogies – that the number of soldiers is critical to winning a war -- the prowar side holds that the analogies themselves will win the war. Meanwhile, the military, who insisted for months last year that there were only about 2,000 insurgents – or “terrorists” – in Iraq, can calmly announce that they killed 2,000 insurgents in Najaf in August without anybody raising an eyebrow. Even Hitler’s propaganda machine, at the time of Stalingrad, would have hesitated to put these kind of lies over. But partly that is because the people of Germany were experiencing the war. The chief thing about the war in Iraq so far is that the experience of it is segregated, for the most part, to expendable populations: the Iraqis themselves, and a volunteer army composed mostly of working class kids. Hence, the hobby of killing them off is, at the moment, politically cheap.



And so the prowar people collude in shifting the one criteria that counts in a war – who is wining and who is losing – to the criteria of whether the U.S. is good or not – to the question of how many schools have been built, rather than the question of how many school children have been killed. That school children will be killed is an inevitable corollary to waging a modern war – LI doesn’t doubt that. That is the burden of supporting a war. But that those school children are being killed in a war that is being waged as an expensive hobby, an airplane model war, transforms those deaths into an indictment of post 9/11 America, where obliviousness has been fatally merged with power lust. This war retains its precarious popularity only to the extent that it is conducted frivolously, which is why Bush is the perfect person to wage it.



Our quote, from Jürgen Förster’s article about morale in Germany during two world wars, will be the occasion of our next post.

Bollettino



LI was part of a research project the other day. A graduate student invited us and about four other bloggers to talk with her in a chat room about what we did. It was a pretty enjoyable scene, and we learned some new, fine acronyms – like MSM for main stream media. At one point LI suggested that bloggers don’t report the facts – we aren’t journalists – but frame them. We were surprised that this was generally disputed.



Well, perhaps LI is deluded on this one, but we still think most blog reporting consists of playing Google roulette. In the spirit of which…



The Washington Post published a White House pr release about Iraq in the implausible shape of a news article yesterday, suggesting that, as John Negroponte says in it, "When it comes to calling the plays on the field, especially on sensitive military operations, there's only one quarterback, and his name is Allawi." Negroponte’s metaphor, referring to a game that isn’t played in Iraq, is more truthful than he perhaps realizes. Metaphors, like symptoms, don't lie. The article was a fluff piece in general, in line with a whole history of fluff pieces about various American puppets and proxies that have been installed – with just such heavy breathing by American ambassadors – over the years. We imagine you could substitute Duarte’s name for Allawi, or Thieu’s, or whoever. The imperialist pretence is strictly for American consumption – or rather, American press consumption.



So a forgettable article in the vein of agit-prop, another lie in the mill that keeps running on American and Iraqi blood. But our eye was caught by one sentence in the piece: “Allawi's credibility is also still on the line, despite an early August poll indicating varying degrees of support from more than 60 percent of Iraqis.”



Wow. This 60 percent figure was surely some of that good news that was being suppressed by the ever liberal press. The odd thing about the sentence was the vagueness of its allusion to the poll.



So we looked around via google and finally found the source, something called the IRI, or International Republican Institute..



The IRI institute, from its webpage, looks like it could have been set up by John Negroponte. The place has just appointed a former Bush official president; has just given Condoleeza Rice, of all people, some freedom award; and is right on track with the good news bein’ suppressed by the bad press meme the Bushies have pushed for the last year and a half.



The result is an organization whose polling results are as trustworthy as, well, Saddam Hussein’s vote totals in 2002.



Here’s the killer results for our quarterback in Baghdad:



“Over 51% of Iraqis polled felt that their country is headed in "the right direction," up slightly from IRI's May/June poll. More telling, the number who feel that things are heading in "the wrong direction" has dropped from 39% to 31% over the same time period.



Some of this confidence may be a result of wide public support for the Iraqi Interim Government. Prime Minister Allawi holds an enviable approval rating, with 66% rating him as either "very effective" or "somewhat effective." Likewise, President al-Yawer enjoys the support of 60.6% of Iraqis polled who say that they "completely trust" or "somewhat trust" him.”



Now, usually in a country where there is an exponential increase in the amount of violence – where there are battles raging in Najaf, Karbala, Baghdad and Mosul, bombing strikes against Falluja and the like – the words “right direction” don’t exactly pop out. But not with the hip-happy Iraqis the IRI has polled! They are crazy in love with us – in fact, a full half of them, according to the poll, supported the invasion!



One wonders – did the WP byliners, Robin Wright and Rajiv Chandrasekaran, purposely leave out the name of the source of the poll, or did they even bother to research the White House pr sheet? Reporting or dictation -- you decide.



Comically, after duly announcing that Allawi was running around with the football we bought him, Americans standing about like nature's humble waterboys, the same byliners reported in another story that the Iraqi government announced it would release two women prisoners in response to the demands of the kidnappers – only to be overruled by the waterboys.



“The Iraqi Ministry of Justice announced the impending release of Taha Wednesday morning, insisting it had nothing to do with the demands of the kidnappers of Americans Armstrong and Hensley and their British housemate, Kenneth Bigley.



Later in the day, however, a spokesman for the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad said that that the women "are in our legal and physical custody. They will not be released imminently. Their legal status, like the other detainees, is under constant review."



That one story totally contradicts another is seemingly no problem for the WP journalists. To keep the war effort going, Americans need to be lied to in small ways and large. After all, this is the war the WP helped whip up last year.



What’s the line in the Dylan song, Highway 61, about promoting the next world war?



“… he found a promoter who nearly fell on the floor

“I’ve never engaged in this kind of thing before, but – yes

I think it can be very easily done…”

Bollettino



Since LI has been slamming Kerry, fair play (as well as Pavlovian psychology) suggests that we praise him for good moves. So let's get it up for the speech on Iraq yesterday. Sure, he should have made it two months ago. Sure, the delay was inexplicably self-subverting… But the speech was firm, just, and outlined what Bush did badly and what Kerry will do to fix those mistakes. We now actually have two candidates with two positions. It is like having ... a democracy.



Our only complaint is that he should connect, as clearly as possible, what William Saletan, in a rather smarmy summary of Kerry's speech in Slate, calls "opportunity cost." We call it the failure to confront reality. We are talking about the subordination of the war on terrorism part of the war on terrorism to a sideshow. Kerry should learn to say Osama bin Laden's name. And then he should say it a lot. He should take a hint from this column by Joe Conason in the NY OBS commemorating bin Laden's survival and flourishing three years after 9/11. Three years ago we were promised that bin Laden would be taken dead or alive; as Conason reminds us, the dead, here, don't include Osama, but do include 1,000 U.S. GIs, and 10-13,000 Iraqis. It's a joke served very coldly to us this 9/11.

Bollettino



One of our favorite stories about predictions concerns a bet made in the seventies between Paul Ehrlich, a famous biologist and environmentalist, and Jules Simon, a libertarian economist. Ehrlich, who believed that population would push the use of natural resources to the breaking point, took a bet on a basket of metals in 1980. The bet was about the price of the metals in 1990. If Ehrlich’s thesis was right, the price of the metals would obviously go up. Simon bet they wouldn’t. Simon won.



This is often interpreted, by libertarians, as proof that environmentalism is all hooey. LI thinks that interpretation is all hooey. Actually, the alarmism of Ehrlich, on one end, and the regulatory momentum that was set in place during the Nixon years, worked to make industry greener – both in the U.S. and abroad. In other words, prediction doesn’t happen in a neutral environment: that a prediction is made in a certain context can have an effect on the outcome. Environmental alarmists have been wrong partly because they have been effective – their alarmism had induced changes in the industrial system such that the supply of copper necessary to sustain the system per person in the global system, for instance, in 1980, was much less in 1990. This is called, by management people, loose coupling.



Keeping this in mind, LI has been thinking about the Bush second term.



The most obvious question is: what will that term mean for Iraq, and the Middle East in general?. We don’t have any predictions per se, but we do think we can spot the components of the possible scenarios.



We think that Bush’s re-election has to be viewed in the larger context of the other Republican victories. As this Post story makes clear, Kerry’s campaign doldrums aren’t just affecting his prospects, but the prospects of the Dems in the house. Essentially, if Bush wins big, the Senate’s minority of Democrats will shrink. This will remove what little restraint the opposition party provided in D.C. The House, of course, is going to become Republican to an almost insurmountable degree. Texas, for instance, is on the verge of putting in place about ten new Republican reps.



Given the vast and almost incomprehensible incompetence of the Bush people in managing the ‘war on terrorism’ so far, in other circumstances this would surely signal an expansion of the war in the Middle East to Syria and Iran. The post Powell State Department would certainly be on-line for that adventure. And it will be vigorously pushed by the Pentagon pump house gang. One of the real winners in the upcoming election will be Cheney, whose side – the President’s base – will be massively owed.



One thing this will certainly mean, given the characteristic bloodthirstiness of this group, is a lot more Iraqi deaths. The Vietnam comparisons are always to the number of Americans killed – not to the number of Iraqis killed. But with the re-installation of an ultra-hawkish wing in D.C. (who will justly take the election as a legitimation of their methods) surely we will see an acceleration of Rumsfeld’s kind of warfare – the terror bombing of Fallujah, the pillage of Najaf, that kind of thing. The Bush people have been pushing a re-definition of the aim in Iraq as ‘working democracy” – which means that they will skew what election process they allow, in January, to put in an American puppet. Allawi is the candidate right now, and he does have one essential quality – he will rubber stamp any terror tactics the U.S. forces take against the Iraqi population. But it is hard to see how an election, no matter how corrupt, could be won by Allawi. Without opposition in Washington, however, there might be no pressure to hold elections at all. Postponing the elections next year would surely be on the Pump house wish list.



What are the constraining factors here? We think the major constraint is the Bush fear of having to resource its war. It has been obvious for some time, in Iraq, that the distance between what Bush says is the goal in Iraq and Iraqi reality could have only been bridged if Iraq were treated as a serious occupation. That would require about two to three times the manpower that is there right now. Instead, this war is being fought like a child playing with the puddles from its bottle of milk on the high chair – American soldiers go into an area, ”pacify” it, then withdraw. Then the insurgents return. Going to war with Iran and/or Syria is going to require a lot more military manpower. We think the fear of that will drive the Bush administration to make threats, and to maybe use its airpower, but not to invade. The worst case scenario would be: seeing that we need a proxy in the Middle East, Wolfowitz et al encourage an Israeli attack on Syria.



The down side of the constraint on Bush’s aggression is that the administration will increasingly use Rumsfeld tactics. That is why we expect a big upsurge in Iraqi deaths – that will be the major characteristic of at least the first year of the Bush administration. At a certain number of deaths, as Saddam Hussein has shown, a country can be pacified. Will the Bush people reach this threshold?



Another component enters the picture, here. That’s the unknown variable of the network that has radiated out from Al Qaeda. Again, the vast, almost incomprehensible incompetence shown by the Bush people in the past, vis a vis Al Qaeda, will no doubt continue. So far, the Bush’s have benefited enormously from their errors – from the attack on the towers itself, from the comedy of the WMD, and from actually colluding in the preservation of a continuing Al Qaeda threat in Peshawar. Each of these were failures that should have brought down the administration. Instead, they renewed the allegiance of the American public to this administration. Will the thinking in the administration change about these things? We’d guess that the answer, for Pavlovian reasons, is no. When the button rings and the animal responds badly, and is rewarded multiply for the bad response, it will keep responding in the same way when the bell rings again. Other terrorist attacks, in Europe, Latin America, or the U.S., will be mishandled in the same way, and surrounded by the same aura of propaganda that will disallow criticism of the performance as a subtle aiding of the perpetrators.



To sum up: four more years of Bush, if these components are near correct, will lead to a multiple of Iraqi deaths, more successful terrorist attacks, and a belligerence towards Iran and Syria that will either encourage a war between Israel and Syria, or will, at the least, lead to some American military action, short of war, targeting one of those countries. Wild cards here are the effectiveness of the Al Qaeda like organizations – will they, for instance, opt for what, to an outside observer, seems like the obvious ploy? Namely, disrupting the flow of oil. Especially Saudi oil. Will the Saudi royals, through its usual combination of mass murder and bribery, be able to tamp down its rebels? And finally, if Israel under Likud has already managed to seize a goodly portion of the West Bank. Will it be satisfied with that amount, or will it try for more?



There is a loose coupling between the economy and foreign policy. We are going to compartmentalize the economy, keeping in mind that the boundary, here, is abstract, and that economic factors – an oil crisis, for instance, or some radical shift in the value of the dollar – can have incalculable effects on the components we’ve outlined above.



PS An excellent preview of coming attractions in the second Bush term is given in today's thuggish Washington Post editorial on Iran. It is extremely useful reading, the real "blood in our mouths" thing: mass murder as foreign policy, from the same people who gave us the invasion last year. No doubt the editorialist will keep his kids well away from any dying -- there's nothing like sending the working class off to kill the working class to make a newspaper feel good about itself.

Bollettino



The second term



LI would like to think that the defeat of George Bush is still a good bet. But we can’t trick our gut feeling. That our worst president – vacuous, dishonest, corrupt – is going to really win, instead of fake win, this election fills us with political despair. It is as though we’d been condemned to eke out the rest of our life on a diet of nothing but potato chips. Endless non-nutrition.



However, the polls record the obvious. Kerry’s strategy for defeating Bush has been a series of unbelievable miscalculations. It has not only eroded Kerry’s own image as a “leader” – those questions about leading the country can go up or down – but it has locked in an image of him as a loser. The worst numbers for Kerry are not in the for or against categories – they are in the question about who is going to win. This is a measurement of the sense of the race. The only way to dislodge an incumbent is to make the incumbent seem vulnerable. Here are the latest NYT numbers:



“The poll found that 61 percent of respondents expected Mr. Bush to win the election this fall; in March, shortly after Mr. Kerry clinched the Democratic nomination, just 44 percent thought Mr. Bush would win.”



The last election left a widespread taste of coup in the mouth. Coups work not so much because the coup’s leadership is popular as because the coup projects an image of inevitability. The image of force, of there being no alternative, has the effect of keeping people who oppose established power below the threshold where that dissatisfaction magically transforms itself from an intellectual mood into social action.



One wonders: what was the thinking behind making Kerry a Vietnam hero? The man’s credentials spring not from what he did to gain his medals, but from his coming home and articulating the reasons the Vietnam war was evil. And, in fact, his Senate career was not a mindless jog. Kerry’s book about terrorism, which he put out in the nineties, should have been the center of portraying the man as a leader against terrorism, and should have been contrasted with Bush's own record at every turn. He could well have pointed to it, and pointed to the inability of the present administration to constrain Al Qaeda and its affiliated terrorist network, and hammered Bush at every appearance with the demand that Al Qaeda be taken care of. Apparently, the Dems are so paralyzed by the idea of an October surprise that they have colluded, out of fear, in keeping Osama bin Laden's name out of this race.



The coulda beens pile up. He could have made the 9/11 commission’s report into what it actually was – a searing indictment of Bush. He could have turned around the rightwing meme about law enforcement as a mamby pamby way of “warring” against terrorism by showing that the real criteria in judging the war against terrorism is whether it works or not – not whether it is tough enough or not. As Kerry should know – I get this from his own book – terrorist organizations of the Al Qaeda variety rely on the same cell structure that the Mafia relied on. The victories over the Mafia in the nineties were achieved by international cooperation between law enforcement groups in Italy, Brazil, the UK, the USA, and other countries. They pooled information, for one thing, coordinated trials, coordinated investigations, and eventually rooted out the patrons of the Mafia. His book could have put real flesh on the hollowness of Kerry's line about internationalizing Iraq. By not foregrounding the criticism of Iraq in the larger criticism of the war on terror, Kerry essentially handed the issue to Bush.





Instead of playing to his strength, Kerry played to his weakness – his desire to pander. Pandering to the testosterone charged veteran constituency of Bush’s was never going to pick them off – it was simply going to get them talk radio riled against the anti-war protestor.



All of which means – it is time for lefties to start thinking about the landscape of Bush’s second administration. We’ll consider this in some posts next week.



PS -- there's a nice discussion of this over at Pierrot's Folly.

Bollettino



As many of LI’s readers know, the House refused to renew the ban on automatic weapons. We can now – or soon – buy as many Uzis as we want to.



The ban, we know, was largely symbolic, and contained enough hedges and exceptions that any gun dealer worth his bullets could find his way around them. It is doubtful that gun bans led to the decrease in the murder rate in the 90s. LI’s skepticism about gun control is such that we don’t care, one way or another, about the end of this provision of the Brady law.



The ancient equivalent of the automatic weapon was the polybolos. There’s an interesting rundown on military weaponry, and Archimedes inventions of clever weapons to outwit the Romans, in David Frye’s contribution to the October issue of Military history. He gives a nice survey of the situation in the Mediterranean in 200 BC, when the Romans encountered the resistance of Carthage to their empire building.



“Archimedes was a product of an age like none other in the history of the ancient world. He was born into the Hellenistic era, when Hellenistic culture was spreading rapidly across the Western world. It was an extraordinary period, an age of boundless ambition and audacity, when politicians, artists, writers, philosophers and even mathematicians refused to be held back by the conventions of the past. It was an era, too, of astonishing growth in military technology.



Hellenistic engineers inherited from earlier times a form of the catapult that resembled a large crossbow. They would not remain satisfied with that design for long. Like Hellenistic-era thinkers in every other field, they felt that they should not merely copy but improve the traditional form of things. Recognizing the limitations of the old design, they replaced the bow with two arms that were propelled by springs of twisted rope. Over time, their experimentation with new materials enabled them to fire heavier bolts, and eventually stone balls, over longer distances. Animal sinews and even human hair were pressed into service.



Hellenistic ingenuity was not limited to the search for better torsion springs, however. The Alexandrian inventor Ktesibios developed radically new catapults, one of which was powered by bronze springs, the other by pneumatic pistons. But even his efforts seem primitive compared to the designs of Dionysius of Rhodes. In an effort to improve the rate of artillery fire, Dionysius actually automated several steps (including the locking of the bowstring, the placing of the missile in the groove and the pulling of the trigger) in catapult operation. Those tasks that he did not fully automate he at least speeded up by adding a chain drive. Dionysius' new design was called the polybolos, or multishooter. It was arguably history's first automatic weapon.”



We’ve always found Archimedes a fascinating figure, and the conjunction of Roman expansion and Late Hellenistic culture one of the more unfortunate of history’s coincidences. Rome, with its genius for practicality, rather stifled the flowering of Greek thinking that was built upon a tradition that the West, since the Renaissance, has been trying to restore -- the two centuries after Aristotle. Stoic logic was a victim of the Roman hegemony. And Archimedes, himself, comes down to us as a piecemeal figure, half magus, half the familiar absent minded professor.



Plutarch (who must, bien sur, be read in Sir Thomas North’s translation) gives this account of Archimedes peculiarities:

“For all that he hath written, are geometricall proposicions, which are without comparison of any other writings whatsoever: bicause the subject whereof they treate, doeth appeare by demonstracion, the matter giving them the grace and the greatnes, and the demonstracion proving it so exquisitely, with wonderfull reason and facilitie, as it is not repugnable. For in all Geometry are not to be founde more profounde and difficulte matters wrytten, in more plaine and simple tearmes, and by more easie principles, then those which he hath invented. Now some do impute this to the sharpnes of his wit and understanding, which was a naturall gift in him: other do referre it to the extreame paines he tooke, which made these things come so easily from him, that they seemed as if they had bene no trouble to him at all. For no man livinge of him selfe can devise the demonstracion of his propositions, what paine soever he take to seeke it: and yet straight so soone as he commeth to declare and open it, every man then imagineth with him selfe he could have found it out well enough, he can then so plainly make demonstracion of the thing he meaneth to shew. And therfore that me thinks is like enough to be true, which they write of him: that he was so ravished and dronke with the swete intysements of this Sirene, which as it were lay continually with him, as he forgate his meate and drinke and was careles otherwise of him selfe, that oftentimes his servants got him against his will to the bathes, to washe and annoynt him: and yet being there, he would ever be drawing out of the Geometricall figures, even in the very imbers of the chimney.”



The sweet enticements of the Siren has been many a man's downfall.



Archimedes death is as symbolically significant as Socrates. War, theory and instruments -- the dark matrix out of which capitalism would arise -- are prefigured in this small butchery.



Here’s how Plutarch reports it:



“Syracusa beinge taken, nothinge greved Marcellus more than the losse of Archimedes. Who beinge in his studie when the citie was taken, busily seekinge out by him selfe the demonstracion of some Geometricall proposition which he hadde drawen in figure, and so earnestly occupied therein, as he neither sawe nor hearde any noyse of enemies that ranne uppe and downe the citie, and much lesse knewe it was taken: He wondered when he sawe a souldier by him, that had him go with him to Marcellus. Notwithstandinge, he spake to the souldier, and bad him tary untill he had done his conclusion, and brought it to demonstracion: but the souldier being angry with his aunswer, drew out his sword, and killed him.



Others say, that the Romaine souldier when he came, offered the swords poynt to him, to kill him: and that Archimedes when he saw him, prayed him to hold his hand a litle, that he might not leave the matter he looked for unperfect, without demonstracion. But the souldier makinge no reckening of his speculation, killed him presently. It is reported a third way also, sayinge, that certeine souldiers met him in the streetes going to Marcellus, carying certeine Mathematicall instrumentes in a litle pretie coffer, as dialles for the sunne, Sphaeres and Angles, wherewith they measure the greatnesse of the body of the sunne by viewe: and they supposing he hadde caried some golde or silver or other pretious Juells in that litle coffer, slue him for it. But it is most true, that Marcellus was marvelous sorie for his death, and ever after hated the villen that slue him, as a cursed and execrable persone: and howe he made also marvelous much afterwards of Archimedes kinsemen for his sake.”

Bollettino



"It is difficult to set any limit upon the capacity of men to deceive themselves as to the relative strength and worth of the motives which affect them: politicians, in particular, acquire so strong a habit of setting their projects in the most favourable light that they soon convince themselves that the finest result which they think may conceivably accrue from any policy is the actual motive of that policy. As for the public, it is only natural that it should be deceived. All the purer and more elevated adjuncts of Imperialism are kept to the fore by religious and philanthropic agencies: patriotism appeals to the general lust of power within a people by suggestions of nobler uses, adopting the forms of self-sacrifice to cover domination and the love of adventure. So Christianity becomes "imperialist" to the Archbishop of Canterbury, a "going out to all the world to preach the gospel"; trade becomes "imperialist" in the eyes of merchants seeking a world market.



It is precisely in this falsification of the real import of motives that the gravest vice and the most signal peril of Imperialism reside. When, out of a medley of mixed motives, the least potent is selected for public prominence because it is the most presentable, when issues of a policy which was not present at all to the minds of those who formed this policy are treated as chief causes, the moral currency of the nation is debased."

- Hobson, Imperialism



Hobson’s Imperialism is the last, fine fruit – well, not last: more like an autumn crabapple -- of a liberal, anti-imperialist tradition that goes back to Cobden and to the Burke of the bold, endangering speeches for the American colonists. Hobson saves his most sardonic comments for the rhetoric of imperialism, which by the end of the Boer war had come off the instruments of death it served. The mass murders of white descendents of Europeans in British Concentration Camps concentrated the European mind as the robbery of India, the robbery of Africa, and the robbery of China had not. It had even penetrated the notoriously unconcentrate-able British one.



In Hobson’s spirit, we thought we would ponder the wonderful value that has been squeezed from the little verb ‘give’ in this, our New Crusading époque. A verb of many uses, a fundamental verb. In German, es gibt means “there is” – and there is nothing more fundamental than there is, right? To give is to engage in a transaction. There is a school of anthropology which has investigated gift giving at length. Marcel Mauss saw the key to the gift, its dialectical endpoint, in the potlatch ceremony among the Kwaikutl, a feasting occasion that results in the seeming impoverishment of the richest Kwaikutl, who give their things away, even down to acts of pure destruction, such as burning canoes. All are losses which, according to Mauss, are recuperated by the accompanying gain of prestige.



We wonder if there isn't some submodality of the gift presiding over our fundamental giving relationship with the hapless Other lately. The pontificators favorite verb is "give": giving freedom to, giving independence to, giving democracy to – these are all gifts that are showered, like so much litter thrown out of speeding SUV's, on the fortunate third world every day by generous editorial writers, columnists, and politicians of the first (most important) world.



To instance this wonderful generosity, I could skim the blogosphere and come away, like the grinch, with multitudinous gifts. Bloggers are always giving something – from independence to Kurds to land on the west bank to Israelis. Oddly enough, there’s no mention of selling – it is always giving. This indicates the natural goodness, one supposes, of Western man. Alas, the conclusion to be drawn from this hollow charity -- the absurdity of the writer's position -- is very rarely drawn by the spirited weblogger. That we write from the nervous breakdown of weakness, from an insistent impotence, that we thrust ourselves into a sterile, exhausted discourse designed, basically, by thieves and madmen -- is, finally, the only good we -- us writers -- produce. Somehow, however, this escapes the swarms of givers. They give and give, and nothing is given -- and they give and they give, and no gratitude is given back. Or as Jesus, in one of his more Shakespearian moments, once put it: "They are like unto children sitting in the marketplace, and calling one to another, and saying, We have piped unto you, and ye have not danced; we have mourned to you, and ye have not wept."



With all that unreciprocated giving, it is predictable that a subtheme would start to grow. We give the Iraqis democracy, and they try to blow up our soldiers. So it is only right and fair that we bomb their cities, destroy their mosques, and in general make Iraq a better place for all.



However, the blogosphere is too easy, so I decided to skim the higher reaches of doxa. Here, for instance, is Mark Steyn talking about Palestine:



“For 10 years, the world has been trying to give a state to the Palestinians and the Palestinians keep tossing obstacles in their path.”



Here the giving transaction has the overtones of some didactic tale for Victorian children. How perverse of those Palestinians not to accept such a nice gift! Over those ten years, they have not only tossed obstacles in the path – refusing, for instance, to set up the old Christmas tree and sing the old carols – but they have had to be put down, in their ingratitude, to the extent of 6,000 some deaths. This is a case of giving, you will notice, in which there is an active subject – the world – doing the giving. That the world has a state in its capacious bag is an interesting proposition. Where is that state? Surely this is one of those present giving occassions in which the embarrassed receiver, upon tearing off the gift wrapping, notices marks of use. For instance, there seems to be a fence running through this state. There seem to be settlements on it – in fact, a lot more settlements than there were ten years ago! It is at these moments that the Palestinians probably wish they could write Miss Manners a letter: ‘Recently, we received a state in a big box. Upon opening it, however, we were shocked that it was obviously a little used! Not only that, but the big lug who gave it to us keeps closing his eyes whenever 10 or fifteen of us are murdered in the street by a bomb! Now, we don’t want to seem ungrateful, but is this really proper? Signed, puzzled in Hebron.”



However, Steyn’s 'world' is not usually the giver. Usually, as I said above, the giver is a ‘we’ – a secret sharer, the collective shadow cast upon the world by, well, some alter us. This is from an interview last year with Colin Powell.



“We want to turn Iraq over to the Iraqi people," he said. "But we want to give the people of Iraq a government that they can trust." He said this must be a representative form of government, and one that supports a nation that is living in peace with its neighbors and is free of weapons of mass destruction.”



Well, at least we got our last wish! Apparently we’ve searched up and down, and there’s no weapons of mass destruction there. We hope they are grateful for that, at least. In the meantime, the gift giving here is a little sticky. For instance, we did give the Iraqis a wonderful government that they can trust. But the Iraqis haven’t deserved the gift – they’ve displayed inordinate distrust of the government. Of course, as every parent knows, you promise a gift with such and such a feature, and you go looking for it in the store – but it turns out to be too expensive! Similarly, we were going to give this representative government to the Iraqis, when someone said, hold on there! Will it be representative of the Iraqis? Which made us all think, hmm, if we can’t trust the Iraqis cause they don’t trust the government we gave them, than a representative government would be one that we couldn’t trust. What a brain twister! Which is why we took off the shelf a second rate autocrat and dusted him off. He ought to be just the thing to, well, put down the untrustworthy Iraqis.



Last year, too, the Brits were in a gift giving mood. This is from a communique by British foreign minister Jack Straw:





“The dead and the missing are both the most painful reminder of Saddam’s dictatorship and the greatest symbol of our determination to give Iraq the future its people so richly deserve. I do not underestimate the scale of our task.”



Listening to that last year, I bet you the Iraqis didn’t know that the future we were going to give them looks like, well, yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that. However, as Straw promised, this is the future they deserve – which is what they get for not trusting the government that we gave them to trust in the first place. You know, getting a present comes with some responsibilities, too. For instance, wouldn't it be nice if the Iraqis, out of gratitude, offered us military bases so we could give the gift of democracy to Iran? Wouldn't that be decent? It means an awful lot to the guys in the White House who've been giving and giving to the Iraqis.





Finally, in this sweepstakes of giving, having gone down memory lane for our other examples to 2003, when we were all Richard the Lionhearts -- bliss it was then to be crusading for freedom -- you must remember this. Having taken Iraq under our tender loving care, there was much discussion of dividing the booty. However, we are not an immoral people. Whenever we do something immoral, we immediately find a moral reason for it. Our big idea back then was to give the Iraqis a share in the profits we’d make from their oil. Remember those days?





Josh Marshall, back in 2003, jumped whole heartedly on a plan to “give the oil back to the Iraqi people,” as the headline writer for one of his Hill piece aptly put it. Some called it the Alaska plan, because the citizens of Alaska get a share in the profits from the oil pumped up there. Marshall slipped in a phrase in his piece that makes one dream – or at least consider that it all has been a dream, these last terrible four years.. “…a Zogby poll reported that 59 percent of Americans support some form of the Alaska model for Iraq.” Wow! I wonder if the American people had been informed of Hague conventions regarding the constraints on the ability of occupying armies to make fundamental changes in a nation's economic relations? Apparently, that question wasn’t asked. But I think the poll shows us something about the generosity deep in the heart of the Western We – we have always been willing to go to new territories, to take the raw materials from those territories, and to, well, help the natives of those new territories out of their old fashioned ways. And once again we were as willing to do this. One wonders why nobody speaks of it anymore?

Bollettino



We are late linking to the American Academy of Arts and Science’s Bulletin for Spring, 2004. However, we would urge our readers to check out the article on McCarthy and McCarthyism. Nathan Glazer and Anthony Lewis contribute two not very rocking speeches in commemoration of the McCarthy-Army hearings, fifty years ago – but Sam Tannenhaus, one of the right’s best up and coming intellectuals, contributes a pretty sterling piece, especially considering that it remains under the 2,000 word mark.



For Tannenhaus, the problem posed by McCarthy is a part of a larger historical conundrum: how did the American right move from isolationist in the thirties to the interventionist anti-communism of the Cold War era?





“One of the mysteries to me, as I write about American conservatism, is how quickly and seamlessly the American Right moved from an isolationist, anti-interventionist position leading up to Pearl Harbor to an extreme interventionist position afterwards, particularly when it came to the Soviet Union. Why was it that, suddenly, conservatives wanted to fght the “great war” they hadn’t wanted to fght before?The answer is that most of them didn’t. Robert Taft and Joe McCarthy both opposed the Korean War initially. Yet some of us remember that when Douglas MacArthur wanted to take the war to China, Harry Truman fired him, and MacArthur became a martyr to the Right. In fact, the American conservative movement opposed almost all those interventions early on, and McCarthy identifed the perfect surrogate enemy. McCarthy’s approach was, in its

crude way, a very clever formulation. Basically, he said, “Why send American soldiers to die in Korea when all the Communists we have to fear are here at home? If we can get Dean Acheson and George Marshall and all the other bad guys out of the State Department, they won’t lure us into these death traps overseas.”

In other words, isolationism never really went away; it remained one of the submerged themes in American foreign policy that is still evident today. Isolationism was reborn as unilateralism. In fact, the two consort fairly easily. In the years leading up to World War II, the antiwar argument from the Right was that we did not want to involve ourselves in European wars. It actually doesn’t take a great leap from that to say we, alone, will fight the Cold War: We’ll oppose nato and the Marshall Plan as, again, the conservatives did and we’ll make it our single crusade against the enemy. And we are seeing this again in the war in Iraq.”



This, we think, is a fairly profound thesis. And Tannenhaus adds to it the fact that McCarthyism captured a very anti-elitist populism that was, in the 30s, the property of the left. In fact, Glazer and Lewis unconsciously underline Tannanhaus’ point: their speeches are larded with “respected” figures, like the President of GE and Walter Lippman, who opposed McCarthy. That opposition isn’t contemptible – far from it, we should all be grateful to the Liberal elite that tore McCarthy down -- but its language is revealing. The liberal elite had forged a culture that was quite comfortable with the state of affairs in the country, the balance between public and private power, because they dominated both spheres. It is interesting – as we have noted before – that conservative movements have depended so heavily on oil money. Much of that money comes from an entirely different sphere than that moved in by the president of GE, or by Eisenhower.



That sphere, we think, was and is caught up with Iraq as an intervention of another kind – one that brings democracy, one that builds a Marshall Plan. This rhetorical dressing is almost irresistible to the John Kerrys of the world – even though the Kerrys know, in their gut, that oil wealth doesn’t mean it when they say, Marshall Plan, or democracy. But the meaninglessness of these phrases is hard to get across in a campaing that is all phrases. And – discouragingly – that credibility gap will not disturb their constituencies at all. Nobody on the Right has even for a moment objected to the fact that the Bush administration’s announcement of a Marshall Plan for Afghanistan was followed by (unbelievably enough) a budget that proposed zero dollars for the country. Do people in Waycross, Georgia, planting their Bush signs in their front lawns really want to put their tax dollars towards a Marshall Plan for Afghanistan? Hell no. But they do like the ring of the idea. Similarly, the war party in the media is compulsively scornful of those people who “would have left Saddam Hussein in power” in Iraq, instead of supporting democracy – but they are absolutely uninterested in whether, indeed, the mechanisms of democracy are really being set up in Iraq. Tannenhaus throws a little light on the roots of this schizoid response.

Bollettino

Our friend T., in Nyc, wrote us a nice email about our last post. This is it.

Dear LI,



Thank you for stating my every fear in a solemn and muted post.



Amongst all those things that the unalayzed members of this current (and yet to be) regime do not admit is Zizek's observation that three widely-touted examples of democracy, touted each in their own particular and peculiar time, Taiwan, South Korea and Argentina were, each in their time, military dictatorships: this fact will NEVER be acknowledged, although it ought to be for it could save lives. But who is it that has had enough analysis to analyze this precedent?



A reminder, a quote that I sent to you about this time last year [the last clause I know for September 11 is a necessary point of reference for me, like any anniversary of a (literally) meaningful event; it is a period of extremely private sadness; it is, of course, something that I will not give-up, it is a Thing that permits me relief from every other concern or anxiety; nevertheless, it is a unique Thing that, pondering it, forces me to think therefrom to every other concern or anxiety] from The Emperor - there, then, at the end of Selasssie-I's reign, summer '74: "Mediocrity is dangerous: when it feels itself threatened it becomes ruthless... [F]ear and hatred bind them, and the barest forces prod them to action: meanness, fierce egotism, fear of losing their privileges and being condemned. Dialogue with such people is impossible, senseless." All of which, as you state so well and clearly, has nothing to do with Strauss or democracy. Yes, these are mediocre, ruthless, hateful, neurotically fierce, hysterically fearful, and, stylelessly, black on black; 'denial' is not a rich enough term."

Bollettino



Perhaps LI’s mood, lately, has effected our vision. We are seeing black in black. Our worst case scenario for this election seems to be coming true. Not only does Bush seem to be winning it, but he seems on the verge of winning it by a large margin.



So, is this just a case of a population taking a large detour from the reality principle – a mass neurosis? Mass neurosis among males has another name – war. Tom Friedman, the warmonger, gave as his reason for supporting the war in Iraq that we had to attack somebody after 9/11. You don’t have to charge 150 per to recognize a classic case of substitution and compulsion when it drops a bomb on you, or shanghais your kids making part time money in the Guard into a pointless death in the desert. We fight one war – a real one – with a comic dearth of troops and follow up, prolong it by way of incompetent mercenaries in Peshawar, while we turn our soldiers into mercenaries for an ex-Ba’athist president-for-life in waiting in Najaf, Mosul, Fallujah, and all the other names that grace the obituaries or the medical charts for the one limbed, the brain damaged, the scorched, and we crown this accomplishment with an election in which the moderate promises that he will have our soldiers out of there by 2008.



In the NYRB, this week, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. ponders how we got here in a review of The Vulcans. His answer, depressingly enough, is that we can lay a heaping helping of blame on Leo Strauss.



LI believes that Leo Strauss has as much to do with strategy in the Middle East as, say, the Shriners or the Freemasons. A lot of neoconservatives connected because they went to Chicago and took classes with Leo, or with one of the Straussians. The emphasis here should be on connection. Strauss’ idea of the noble lie, if that is his idea – wasn’t like Edison trying out that one last filament in the light bulb. The idea that you get ahead by telling people what they want to hear, while you are really pursuing another agenda, could have been jotted on a cocktail napkin by any Madison Avenue exec worth his expense account in the last one hundred years. We have serious doubts Paul Wolfowitz needed Hegel's Gesammelte Werke to figure out how to push a war through the soft maze of a D.C. establishment filled with corrupt know it alls and brownosers who all benefit from the military industrial complex -- otherwise known as metro D.C.'s major employer.



A more serious problem with Schlesinger’s article is that it accepts the Bush administration’s premises that the invasion of Iraq was about spreading democracy. Again, a brief glance at America’s history will tell us that none of the one hundred fifty some American military interventions were fought, according to American politicians, for anything else. We defeated the Indians, drove back the Mexicans, and penetrated the jungles of the Philippines for democracy. One imagines that if we had been able to poll Atilla’s horde, they would have mentioned “bigger horses” as a key motivator. Such is progress that our desire for a transportation system that guarantees all Americans the ability to make it on their own, at 65 mph, from LA to NYC, in metal capsules weighing 9 to 10 thousand pounds is now called democracy. In fact, the Pentagon pump house boys did, for a while, convince themselves that Iraqi households were filled with covert Republicans – and we don’t mean the Guard. That was because the only Iraqi they met socially was one named Chalabi. But even Paul Wolfowitz is not completely insane. The thought was that a new order in the Middle East could be implemented by an aggressive America with little native opposition, so that Israel would assume a first rank position, in alliance with Iraq and, eventually, a Pahlavi-ist Iran and a broken up Syria. This fits nicely with the traditional American pattern. In theory, it is a policy that could deliver on America’s two major interests – preserving Israel’s power, and preserving the state of the world’s oil economy – with a bonus – it would free us, to a certain extent, from an onerous relationship with Saudi Arabia.



Democracy, here, is merely a codeword for privatization. This can be thought of as the ultimate wave of privatization – taking away the oil from the various Middle Eastern governments that control it. The plan was, in fact, coherent with Cheney’s domestic plan, which had its meltdown in California in 2001, and will no doubt be back again in 2005.



The Wolfowitz doctrine hasn’t worked. It fact, it has exploded spectacularly, and will no doubt continue to create chaos down the road. However, this is neither because of democracy nor Strauss. Wolfowitz, a man who thinks Suharto (the one dictator outside of Mao who could compete with Saddam Hussein in the ‘Australian crawl through a sea of blood’ event) was a great man, could give a tinker’s damn about democracy. The American occupation of Iraq has been notable for a lot of things – the air bombing of cities we already occupy is one of them, that’s unique -- but democracy is not among them. The word has, of course, been used a lot, but to mistake that for the real thing is to mistake the phrase “yours sincerely” in everyday correspondence for a court administered oath. If democracy had been happening in Iraq, the most unpopular political figure in Iraq, Allawi, would not be running the place; the Iraqis themselves would be spending their oil money, instead of not having the power even to inquire into how it is spent; and the largest government building in Iraq, a palace paid for by Iraqi money for the past twenty five years, would not presently be the American embassy.



Of course, to admit that we aren’t fighting for democracy in Iraq would be to commit the sin against the holy ghost and the founding fathers, which is perhaps why an old Democratic politburo member like Schlesinger goes on about Leo Strauss. But perhaps, just as in psychoanalysis, the cure will only start when we admit what we really desire.



I’m not going to hold my breath waiting for that moment.