Propaganda alert
James Glanz’s article about Basra sets, perhaps, a new record for propaganda from the NYT. To understand why the course of American foreign policy is beset by serial disasters like a car with a bad transmission problem, one has to understand that the info Americans get about foreign countries is saturated with a corporatist, conservative and essentially ignorant world view, as reporters with a free marketing, America-centric mindset meet subalterns with the same mindset. Like means like, the group groupthinks, and the kids outside dance around torched American tanks.
Glanz’s article centers on the fantasies of some of his informants – all of the upper class or working for them, all business people – about Southern Iraq. The most hilarious of the images he conjures up is Basra as another Singapore. Oh Singapore, where life has been totally sacrificed to the seven virtues of highly efficient people! It is the dead breath of the American dream in a small foreign place, and don’t you know, Timesmen just love it – as long as they can get away for the weekend, perhaps nobly freeing sex slaves in Thailand to the tune of Onward Christian soldiers, like Kristof.
What isn’t mentioned in Glanz’s article? Hmm, let’s start with the fact that the South is the stronghold not of a Singapore-ist faction, but of a theocratic faction. There were local elections in the South which somehow didn’t get into Glanz’s article. Pity, that. He has a nice dreamy sentence about an American friendly, free enterprising Southern Iraqi state: “Several different versions of a southern Iraqi republic have been proposed. One would include only the three or four southernmost provinces - Basra, Muthanna, Dhi Gar and Maysan” Funny, not mentioning that Sadr’s political party won the local election in Maysan, and came in second in Muthanna. Well, Sadr of course is one of those problematic characters outside the Narrative, and it is best to ignore him. Especially as he seems to have the weird idea that Americans have come to exploit Iraq instead of liberate it. How much nicer to find people who understand our way of life – so civilized! such dealmakers! Surely these are the kind of people an empire that runs on oil can rely on.
There’s a kind of rule of thumb, here. When the NYT announces something definite about Iraq – say, for instance, the announcements last year that the army had completely destroyed the insurgents in Samarra – one should expect a completely contradictory next announcement - as in, Battles in Samarra, ten dead in Samarra, etc., etc. Glanz’s article is an ill omen for poor Basra.
Sunday, February 27, 2005
Saturday, February 26, 2005
The gorgeous
LI has high esteem for the ‘Gorgias.’ True, it isn’t as deep as the Parmenides, nor rich in images, like the Republic, nor sublime, like the Timaeus. But the dramatic form of the dialogue – the sense one gets of real people talking – fills the Gorgias as, perhaps, it fills no other dialogue – for there are always those moments when Plato is all too obviously pulling the strings.
It is in the Gorgias that Socrates unpacks his most radical ethical idea. It is an idea with a long career, but one that was, ultimately, indigestible to the Christian tradition that took so much from Plato: the idea that each man wills the good.
This struck the Athenians as a truly insane proposition. There’s a wonderful bit in the Gorgias where Socrates and Polus (whose contempt for Socrates comes through in the dialogue like an animal scent) go around about power. Ostensibly, the dialogue is about rhetoric and its wonders, but Socrates piercing of the aura with which rhetoricians surrounded their art is busy with sharp thrusts, until we get to the core of his objection: rhetoric promotes a kind of sickness. That sickness attacks the mental vision.
Polus doesn’t understand what Socrates is talking about:
“POLUS: What do you mean? do you think that rhetoric is flattery?
SOCRATES: Nay, I said a part of flattery; if at your age, Polus, you
cannot remember, what will you do by-and-by, when you get older?
POLUS: And are the good rhetoricians meanly regarded in states, under the
idea that they are flatterers?
SOCRATES: Is that a question or the beginning of a speech?
POLUS: I am asking a question.
SOCRATES: Then my answer is, that they are not regarded at all.
POLUS: How not regarded? Have they not very great power in states?
SOCRATES: Not if you mean to say that power is a good to the possessor.
POLUS: And that is what I do mean to say.
SOCRATES: Then, if so, I think that they have the least power of all the citizens.
POLUS: What! are they not like tyrants? They kill and despoil and exile any one whom they please.”
The notion that power is the ability to do what one pleases gives Socrates his opening. He proceeds by the usual method, until Polus has agreed that to do what one pleases, one needs an object of what is pleasing, and to gain that object requires a sort of practical wisdom in the calculation and carrying out of one’s acts.
POLUS: Yes.
SOCRATES: And did we not admit that in doing something for the sake of
something else, we do not will those things which we do, but that other
thing for the sake of which we do them?
POLUS: Most true.
SOCRATES: Then we do not will simply to kill a man or to exile him or to despoil him of his goods, but we will to do that which conduces to our good, and if the act is not conducive to our good we do not will it; for we will, as you say, that which is our good, but that which is neither good nor evil, or simply evil, we do not will. Why are you silent, Polus? Am I not right?
POLUS: You are right.
SOCRATES: Hence we may infer, that if any one, whether he be a tyrant or a rhetorician, kills another or exiles another or deprives him of his property, under the idea that the act is for his own interests when really not for his own interests, he may be said to do what seems best to him?”
Socrates idea, back then, was unpopular. It is still unpopular. If I were to say, offhand, what separates an intellectual from a non-intellectual, it wouldn’t be reading, it wouldn’t necessarily be an extraordinary ability to reason – it would be the having of deeply considered, in some form, this Socratic belief. This is a quiet moment in which something split, irreparably, in Western civilization. The idea both that power is simply the ability to do cruel things, and that man does will evil, eventually becomes the central moral view of Christianity; the view that “we will as you say, that which is our good, but that which is neither good nor evil, or simply evil, we do not will,” is developed into the counter-intellectual tradition. It developed into humanism and even remains the core of the anti-humanistic revolt, which is a refusal to let delight be sacrificed to calculation, but is still based upon this vision of delight.
Why are we bringing this up? Because we have always been puzzled about how moral discourse, in the U.S., has transformed the holocaust into its moral touchstone of evil. We find this puzzling not because the Holocaust isn’t evil – it surely is – but because it is so easily dis-ownable, and so easily manipulated to make it seem, uniquely, a refutation of the Socratic insight.
By dis-ownable, we mean that the exclusive concentration on the holocaust disguises a more pertinent history of evils in the New World – evils that were a large part of a past that provides the ground for American wealth and greatness. It is enough to note, perhaps, that those of the founding fathers from the South who we, justly, admire, were also complicit in actions which, nowadays, we would punish by life sentences in maximum security prisons. If I went out and separated parentS and their children, keeping, say, the children for myself so that they could work for me, under threat of beating, and selling the parents to strangers in a distant state, I would be considered a monster – but Robert E. Lee’s parents, relatives of George Washington, did just that. Similarly, Andrew Jackson, for the ethnic cleansing of the Indians, would certainly be considered much like Milosovic today. And of course American apartheid went on and on – if your parents bought houses in the suburbs in the fifties or sixties, there’s a good chance they signed clauses not to sell their house to blacks.
As for the "proof" that evil exists, thanks to the Holocaust -- this is moral idiocy. For the 20,000 years Homo sapiens have lived with some primitive communication ability they were all wandering around without any "proof" of evil? This annexation of the Holocaust for ethical pointmaking makes some sense. Nobody could deny that the extermination camp is a major moral fact about Western civilization. But the ritual of denouncing the camps does not, as the years go by, increase the denouncers moral awareness of their own histories. By this, I mean those histories that have happened even in our lifetimes. Shall we list the genocides? Shall we set, alongside that list, where the weapons for them came from? And who made the money? Who benefited from the Mobutus, or from the various Pakistan generals? Who sold the Argentinians the helicopters with which to throw living humans into the sea, or who loaned the Argentinian junta the money to carry on with, and is still receiving an interest on it? As the Holocaust example has become a touchstone of evil, a museum, a cliche, instead of a real event, so, too, the connection between it and another form of state sponsored mass murder -- war -- also recedes into the mist. The Christian legacy to moral thinking -- evil -- is the great facilitator of these easy souvenirs and amnesias.
Anyway, lately, we’ve been reading a history of the glorious Haitian revolt against the French. Tomorrow we want to consider a few facts from that revolt and ask – why are these not part of the pool of our moral examples?
LI has high esteem for the ‘Gorgias.’ True, it isn’t as deep as the Parmenides, nor rich in images, like the Republic, nor sublime, like the Timaeus. But the dramatic form of the dialogue – the sense one gets of real people talking – fills the Gorgias as, perhaps, it fills no other dialogue – for there are always those moments when Plato is all too obviously pulling the strings.
It is in the Gorgias that Socrates unpacks his most radical ethical idea. It is an idea with a long career, but one that was, ultimately, indigestible to the Christian tradition that took so much from Plato: the idea that each man wills the good.
This struck the Athenians as a truly insane proposition. There’s a wonderful bit in the Gorgias where Socrates and Polus (whose contempt for Socrates comes through in the dialogue like an animal scent) go around about power. Ostensibly, the dialogue is about rhetoric and its wonders, but Socrates piercing of the aura with which rhetoricians surrounded their art is busy with sharp thrusts, until we get to the core of his objection: rhetoric promotes a kind of sickness. That sickness attacks the mental vision.
Polus doesn’t understand what Socrates is talking about:
“POLUS: What do you mean? do you think that rhetoric is flattery?
SOCRATES: Nay, I said a part of flattery; if at your age, Polus, you
cannot remember, what will you do by-and-by, when you get older?
POLUS: And are the good rhetoricians meanly regarded in states, under the
idea that they are flatterers?
SOCRATES: Is that a question or the beginning of a speech?
POLUS: I am asking a question.
SOCRATES: Then my answer is, that they are not regarded at all.
POLUS: How not regarded? Have they not very great power in states?
SOCRATES: Not if you mean to say that power is a good to the possessor.
POLUS: And that is what I do mean to say.
SOCRATES: Then, if so, I think that they have the least power of all the citizens.
POLUS: What! are they not like tyrants? They kill and despoil and exile any one whom they please.”
The notion that power is the ability to do what one pleases gives Socrates his opening. He proceeds by the usual method, until Polus has agreed that to do what one pleases, one needs an object of what is pleasing, and to gain that object requires a sort of practical wisdom in the calculation and carrying out of one’s acts.
POLUS: Yes.
SOCRATES: And did we not admit that in doing something for the sake of
something else, we do not will those things which we do, but that other
thing for the sake of which we do them?
POLUS: Most true.
SOCRATES: Then we do not will simply to kill a man or to exile him or to despoil him of his goods, but we will to do that which conduces to our good, and if the act is not conducive to our good we do not will it; for we will, as you say, that which is our good, but that which is neither good nor evil, or simply evil, we do not will. Why are you silent, Polus? Am I not right?
POLUS: You are right.
SOCRATES: Hence we may infer, that if any one, whether he be a tyrant or a rhetorician, kills another or exiles another or deprives him of his property, under the idea that the act is for his own interests when really not for his own interests, he may be said to do what seems best to him?”
Socrates idea, back then, was unpopular. It is still unpopular. If I were to say, offhand, what separates an intellectual from a non-intellectual, it wouldn’t be reading, it wouldn’t necessarily be an extraordinary ability to reason – it would be the having of deeply considered, in some form, this Socratic belief. This is a quiet moment in which something split, irreparably, in Western civilization. The idea both that power is simply the ability to do cruel things, and that man does will evil, eventually becomes the central moral view of Christianity; the view that “we will as you say, that which is our good, but that which is neither good nor evil, or simply evil, we do not will,” is developed into the counter-intellectual tradition. It developed into humanism and even remains the core of the anti-humanistic revolt, which is a refusal to let delight be sacrificed to calculation, but is still based upon this vision of delight.
Why are we bringing this up? Because we have always been puzzled about how moral discourse, in the U.S., has transformed the holocaust into its moral touchstone of evil. We find this puzzling not because the Holocaust isn’t evil – it surely is – but because it is so easily dis-ownable, and so easily manipulated to make it seem, uniquely, a refutation of the Socratic insight.
By dis-ownable, we mean that the exclusive concentration on the holocaust disguises a more pertinent history of evils in the New World – evils that were a large part of a past that provides the ground for American wealth and greatness. It is enough to note, perhaps, that those of the founding fathers from the South who we, justly, admire, were also complicit in actions which, nowadays, we would punish by life sentences in maximum security prisons. If I went out and separated parentS and their children, keeping, say, the children for myself so that they could work for me, under threat of beating, and selling the parents to strangers in a distant state, I would be considered a monster – but Robert E. Lee’s parents, relatives of George Washington, did just that. Similarly, Andrew Jackson, for the ethnic cleansing of the Indians, would certainly be considered much like Milosovic today. And of course American apartheid went on and on – if your parents bought houses in the suburbs in the fifties or sixties, there’s a good chance they signed clauses not to sell their house to blacks.
As for the "proof" that evil exists, thanks to the Holocaust -- this is moral idiocy. For the 20,000 years Homo sapiens have lived with some primitive communication ability they were all wandering around without any "proof" of evil? This annexation of the Holocaust for ethical pointmaking makes some sense. Nobody could deny that the extermination camp is a major moral fact about Western civilization. But the ritual of denouncing the camps does not, as the years go by, increase the denouncers moral awareness of their own histories. By this, I mean those histories that have happened even in our lifetimes. Shall we list the genocides? Shall we set, alongside that list, where the weapons for them came from? And who made the money? Who benefited from the Mobutus, or from the various Pakistan generals? Who sold the Argentinians the helicopters with which to throw living humans into the sea, or who loaned the Argentinian junta the money to carry on with, and is still receiving an interest on it? As the Holocaust example has become a touchstone of evil, a museum, a cliche, instead of a real event, so, too, the connection between it and another form of state sponsored mass murder -- war -- also recedes into the mist. The Christian legacy to moral thinking -- evil -- is the great facilitator of these easy souvenirs and amnesias.
Anyway, lately, we’ve been reading a history of the glorious Haitian revolt against the French. Tomorrow we want to consider a few facts from that revolt and ask – why are these not part of the pool of our moral examples?
Friday, February 25, 2005
Spraying the Bates fly
There’s a wonderful post on a science blog about the irrational right’s fondness for DDT. As a corollary to that love of the toxin, the Right has always cultivated a nice flame of hatred for one of LI’s heroines, Rachel Carson, to whom we owe the continuing existence of the bluebird and the osprey on the East Coast of North America. Few Americans have left behind anything that valuable. LI likes the way that the aura of Rachel Carson still retains her power to drive the Right wild – for Carson marked the end of that happy stage of corporate capitalism when the social cost of production could be shoved off without remark onto third parties (this is politely termed externality by economists. Bank robbers more honestly call it a stick up). In any case, the banning of DDT was symbolically as well as environmentally important. DDT had been promoted as the cure all for malaria. In fact, it worked well, for a limited time, against the anopheles mosquito which carry p. falciparum, the malaria pathogen.
Unfortunately, the evolutionary theory that the Right wants to ban from schools is a cruel reality that rules both inside and outside the classroom. Mosquitos have a much higher rates of reproduction than birds. Thus, the natural selection that would promote the spread of a DDT resistant variant of mosquito works faster across mosquito populations than in, say, ospreys. Hence, ospreys go down to the extinction point while mosquito populations that bear malaria recover from DDT quite handily. Of course, that means developing another insect spray, since you’ve wiped out the natural predators of the mosquito – isn’t that special? Environmental damage can be good for your stockholders. Luckily, capitalism needn’t be that evil – unlike consumer goods, like guns and drugs, insecticides are rather easy to ban.
The evolutionary story is the not unexpected lesson from the great spraying of the late fifties and early sixties. That spraying was justified only as a temporary expedient, while the first world resourced the search for a malaria cure. But – there was no such resourcing. Big Pharma went on to puzzle over male pattern baldness in CEOs, for which there was a big market in pseudo-drugs. In terms of the third world, the only thought in the heads of the drug makers was squeezing as much IP profit as possible from sucker countries that signed up to American sponsored trade agreements that installed vile American IP standards in these countries – which, of course, would have destroyed the nineteenth century American economy when it was developing. It is called colonialism, and – mockingly – free trade, by which the Right means the granting of monopoly power to businesses by the state. Ah, there is something the state does superbly, it turns out.
Tim Lamber at his blog, Deltoid, sprays the arguments that are being advanced Tech Central’s anti-enviro shill, one Roger Bate, that use of DDT in Sri Lanka is the best means to ward off potential post tsunami malaria . Bate apparently thinks that DDT carries with it some disturbance to the mosquitos organism such that even if it doesn’t kill the mosquito, it acts as like OFF to ward off mosquitoes – and thus should be sprayed within houses.
Of course, Bate is pulling these facts out of his … well funded career as a front man for various industry lobbies.
The Deltoid blog has a very nice run down of the numerous errors being spread by anopheles Bate-ius, here.
And – we are late in this – we urge readers to check out Krugman’s NYRB article about social security. Most lefty economists, when they start talking about social security, end up sounding like musicologists talking about rock and roll – the point is lost in the analytic clutter. Krugman, however, is perfectly clear about the spuriousness of the argument against social security. The Economist, not long ago, wrote an analysis of Bush’s proposals showing that they were disastrous, but still supported privatizing Socia Security because “it is wrong for the government to guarantee retirement.” This, in essence, is the motive for the whole hub-bub – an ideological one, an absolutist anti-state-ism, and not an economic one. There’s no economic argument against Social Security that isn’t an argument against any private pension fund.
PS -- Our friend Paul objected to that last sentence -- see his comment. Upon thinking about it, it might misrepresent Krugman's point. That point is that an aging, health care spending population is going to affect all institutions in the U.S. But Krugman's article doesn't specifically talk about the problems that are being encountered, right now, by private pension plans. My mix up.
There’s a wonderful post on a science blog about the irrational right’s fondness for DDT. As a corollary to that love of the toxin, the Right has always cultivated a nice flame of hatred for one of LI’s heroines, Rachel Carson, to whom we owe the continuing existence of the bluebird and the osprey on the East Coast of North America. Few Americans have left behind anything that valuable. LI likes the way that the aura of Rachel Carson still retains her power to drive the Right wild – for Carson marked the end of that happy stage of corporate capitalism when the social cost of production could be shoved off without remark onto third parties (this is politely termed externality by economists. Bank robbers more honestly call it a stick up). In any case, the banning of DDT was symbolically as well as environmentally important. DDT had been promoted as the cure all for malaria. In fact, it worked well, for a limited time, against the anopheles mosquito which carry p. falciparum, the malaria pathogen.
Unfortunately, the evolutionary theory that the Right wants to ban from schools is a cruel reality that rules both inside and outside the classroom. Mosquitos have a much higher rates of reproduction than birds. Thus, the natural selection that would promote the spread of a DDT resistant variant of mosquito works faster across mosquito populations than in, say, ospreys. Hence, ospreys go down to the extinction point while mosquito populations that bear malaria recover from DDT quite handily. Of course, that means developing another insect spray, since you’ve wiped out the natural predators of the mosquito – isn’t that special? Environmental damage can be good for your stockholders. Luckily, capitalism needn’t be that evil – unlike consumer goods, like guns and drugs, insecticides are rather easy to ban.
The evolutionary story is the not unexpected lesson from the great spraying of the late fifties and early sixties. That spraying was justified only as a temporary expedient, while the first world resourced the search for a malaria cure. But – there was no such resourcing. Big Pharma went on to puzzle over male pattern baldness in CEOs, for which there was a big market in pseudo-drugs. In terms of the third world, the only thought in the heads of the drug makers was squeezing as much IP profit as possible from sucker countries that signed up to American sponsored trade agreements that installed vile American IP standards in these countries – which, of course, would have destroyed the nineteenth century American economy when it was developing. It is called colonialism, and – mockingly – free trade, by which the Right means the granting of monopoly power to businesses by the state. Ah, there is something the state does superbly, it turns out.
Tim Lamber at his blog, Deltoid, sprays the arguments that are being advanced Tech Central’s anti-enviro shill, one Roger Bate, that use of DDT in Sri Lanka is the best means to ward off potential post tsunami malaria . Bate apparently thinks that DDT carries with it some disturbance to the mosquitos organism such that even if it doesn’t kill the mosquito, it acts as like OFF to ward off mosquitoes – and thus should be sprayed within houses.
Of course, Bate is pulling these facts out of his … well funded career as a front man for various industry lobbies.
The Deltoid blog has a very nice run down of the numerous errors being spread by anopheles Bate-ius, here.
And – we are late in this – we urge readers to check out Krugman’s NYRB article about social security. Most lefty economists, when they start talking about social security, end up sounding like musicologists talking about rock and roll – the point is lost in the analytic clutter. Krugman, however, is perfectly clear about the spuriousness of the argument against social security. The Economist, not long ago, wrote an analysis of Bush’s proposals showing that they were disastrous, but still supported privatizing Socia Security because “it is wrong for the government to guarantee retirement.” This, in essence, is the motive for the whole hub-bub – an ideological one, an absolutist anti-state-ism, and not an economic one. There’s no economic argument against Social Security that isn’t an argument against any private pension fund.
PS -- Our friend Paul objected to that last sentence -- see his comment. Upon thinking about it, it might misrepresent Krugman's point. That point is that an aging, health care spending population is going to affect all institutions in the U.S. But Krugman's article doesn't specifically talk about the problems that are being encountered, right now, by private pension plans. My mix up.
Wednesday, February 23, 2005
The birth of the spirit of the American military
My friend Paul at Fragmenta Philosophica pinned me, the other day, for willful exaggeration. I had written a War Crime alert about Ramadi – but as I had to admit to Paul, I don’t honestly think the U.S. is going to do to Ramadi what it did to Falluja.
However, there was a deeper level to our debate on his site. The deeper level had to do with what kind of war is happening in Iraq. LI often tries to penetrate the American veil of ignorance and discover an Iraqi perspective to the war, since it is mainly an Iraqi war. This post will be dedicated to another task: what kind of war is it from the American perspective?
Before the war began, back in 2002, we wrote a post about the spirit of the American military. Our idea back then was this: the American military style emerged from two conflicting ideals. On the one hand, there is the Grant style of fullscale assault. On the other hand, there is the McClellan style, of the maximum preservation of American life. The Grant style is especially adapted to assaultive wars. These wars are characterized by the fact that the enemy is large and, roughly, technologically equivalent to the U.S., and the American losses are politically acceptable. World War I and II are classic instances of this. Usually, though, American aggressions fall outside of this orbit. In order to poetically conciliate both the spirits of Grant and McClellan, the U.S. has developed its incredible military technology – to which it has devoted an extraordinary amount of resources. (The poetry of the state, you might say, is war. Which is why LI prefers the prose of the state – which is social welfare). It might be that the American imperium will be known, long after it disappears, for its weapons mania, a thing that, like the Great Wall of China, will puzzle succeeding generations.
A good example of the conciliation of Grant and McClellan was the dropping of the atom bomb, which is regularly defended as a way of saving American lives. We won’t get into that controversy now, except to say that other military regimes – say Napoleon’s – did not put such a premium on saving the lives of their soldiers.
So much for assaultive wars. Unfortunately for the American foreign policy elite, most American wars are not assaultive. And the war in Iraq is no exception to that rule.
What happens when a guerilla war is fought with assualtive methods?
In another period, the peak of the colonial/racist era in 1900, the Philippines war was fought in exactly that manner, with the rounding up and internment of the native population, random massacres of Filipinos, etc., etc., all in order to produce a direct protectorate in the Philippines. Even so, it was an unpopular war in the U.S. More popular have been the countless interventions in Central America and the Caribbean, the scale of which has been minimized due to the fact that a native praetorian force is on hand to take over necessary repressive tasks.
Iraq, in contrast to the Philippines, is an almost perfect example of the misapplication of assaultive methods in a guerrilla war. The political principle behind the war has been simple: a non-sacrificial jingoism. The Bush administration calculated that war would be politically advantageous as long as the spirit of McClellan was honored, as it was in Desert Storm. That calculation was right, domestically. Although the public is always saying it supports its troops, there is a range of casualties that the public will simply forget. If three to five soldiers die per day in Iraq, the public won’t wink – it won’t even care if the army those soldiers fight in gets its medical benefits cut, or is grossly chiseled by military contractors, etc., etc. But this calculation also hems in the range of military strategies deployable in Iraq. This means that, in effect, any counter-insurgency strategy that dramatically increases the number of American deaths will be politically aborted, even if this turns out to be the only strategy that will ‘win” the war.
So much, then, for background. Now, Falluja. The battle in Falluja was fought as though Falluja were Stalingrad, except that the Americans had that technological domination of the air, and that firepower, to truly decimate the enemy and preserve their own. One problem, though: when the enemy is so mixed in with the civilian population, decimating the enemy means creating vast number of collateral casualties. Vast numbers of collateral casualties –by which I mean refugees as well as injured and killed – supply an insurgent force with exactly what it needs to remain viable – a large, mobile, hostile group that scales across the country, which can support its daily operation and supply its manpower.
If Falluja had been fought in such a way as to lower the collateral casualties – if Falluja, in other words, hadn’t been knocked down – the Americans could have killed as many insurgents, but they would have had to pay a very high price in their own ranks. Ironically, however, they would truly, then, have achieved something closer to a strategic victory. The residents of Falluja wouldn’t, then, have been dispersed. The scenes coming from Falluja would have been of fighters dying, on both sides, rather than of fighters and babies and old men dying, on one side. In our opinion, the spike in violence after Falluja, and the collapse of the election throughout the Sunni areas of Iraq, could well have been avoided if the U.S. had abandoned both Grant and McClellan and fought the guerillas without their usual maximal regard for American life.
Domestically, however, that would have been impossible. If a thousand Americans had died in retaking Falluja, Bush would not be having a jolly time asset stripping social security; he would be trying to find another secretary of defense. A thousand American deaths would have been considered a disaster in this country.
This is the push-pull that leads the Americans to fight the way they do, and leads, in turn, to the idea, on the Arab ‘street’, that America is as criminal as Al Qaeda. It is also why Americans should get out of Iraq now, with a set date, period.
My friend Paul at Fragmenta Philosophica pinned me, the other day, for willful exaggeration. I had written a War Crime alert about Ramadi – but as I had to admit to Paul, I don’t honestly think the U.S. is going to do to Ramadi what it did to Falluja.
However, there was a deeper level to our debate on his site. The deeper level had to do with what kind of war is happening in Iraq. LI often tries to penetrate the American veil of ignorance and discover an Iraqi perspective to the war, since it is mainly an Iraqi war. This post will be dedicated to another task: what kind of war is it from the American perspective?
Before the war began, back in 2002, we wrote a post about the spirit of the American military. Our idea back then was this: the American military style emerged from two conflicting ideals. On the one hand, there is the Grant style of fullscale assault. On the other hand, there is the McClellan style, of the maximum preservation of American life. The Grant style is especially adapted to assaultive wars. These wars are characterized by the fact that the enemy is large and, roughly, technologically equivalent to the U.S., and the American losses are politically acceptable. World War I and II are classic instances of this. Usually, though, American aggressions fall outside of this orbit. In order to poetically conciliate both the spirits of Grant and McClellan, the U.S. has developed its incredible military technology – to which it has devoted an extraordinary amount of resources. (The poetry of the state, you might say, is war. Which is why LI prefers the prose of the state – which is social welfare). It might be that the American imperium will be known, long after it disappears, for its weapons mania, a thing that, like the Great Wall of China, will puzzle succeeding generations.
A good example of the conciliation of Grant and McClellan was the dropping of the atom bomb, which is regularly defended as a way of saving American lives. We won’t get into that controversy now, except to say that other military regimes – say Napoleon’s – did not put such a premium on saving the lives of their soldiers.
So much for assaultive wars. Unfortunately for the American foreign policy elite, most American wars are not assaultive. And the war in Iraq is no exception to that rule.
What happens when a guerilla war is fought with assualtive methods?
In another period, the peak of the colonial/racist era in 1900, the Philippines war was fought in exactly that manner, with the rounding up and internment of the native population, random massacres of Filipinos, etc., etc., all in order to produce a direct protectorate in the Philippines. Even so, it was an unpopular war in the U.S. More popular have been the countless interventions in Central America and the Caribbean, the scale of which has been minimized due to the fact that a native praetorian force is on hand to take over necessary repressive tasks.
Iraq, in contrast to the Philippines, is an almost perfect example of the misapplication of assaultive methods in a guerrilla war. The political principle behind the war has been simple: a non-sacrificial jingoism. The Bush administration calculated that war would be politically advantageous as long as the spirit of McClellan was honored, as it was in Desert Storm. That calculation was right, domestically. Although the public is always saying it supports its troops, there is a range of casualties that the public will simply forget. If three to five soldiers die per day in Iraq, the public won’t wink – it won’t even care if the army those soldiers fight in gets its medical benefits cut, or is grossly chiseled by military contractors, etc., etc. But this calculation also hems in the range of military strategies deployable in Iraq. This means that, in effect, any counter-insurgency strategy that dramatically increases the number of American deaths will be politically aborted, even if this turns out to be the only strategy that will ‘win” the war.
So much, then, for background. Now, Falluja. The battle in Falluja was fought as though Falluja were Stalingrad, except that the Americans had that technological domination of the air, and that firepower, to truly decimate the enemy and preserve their own. One problem, though: when the enemy is so mixed in with the civilian population, decimating the enemy means creating vast number of collateral casualties. Vast numbers of collateral casualties –by which I mean refugees as well as injured and killed – supply an insurgent force with exactly what it needs to remain viable – a large, mobile, hostile group that scales across the country, which can support its daily operation and supply its manpower.
If Falluja had been fought in such a way as to lower the collateral casualties – if Falluja, in other words, hadn’t been knocked down – the Americans could have killed as many insurgents, but they would have had to pay a very high price in their own ranks. Ironically, however, they would truly, then, have achieved something closer to a strategic victory. The residents of Falluja wouldn’t, then, have been dispersed. The scenes coming from Falluja would have been of fighters dying, on both sides, rather than of fighters and babies and old men dying, on one side. In our opinion, the spike in violence after Falluja, and the collapse of the election throughout the Sunni areas of Iraq, could well have been avoided if the U.S. had abandoned both Grant and McClellan and fought the guerillas without their usual maximal regard for American life.
Domestically, however, that would have been impossible. If a thousand Americans had died in retaking Falluja, Bush would not be having a jolly time asset stripping social security; he would be trying to find another secretary of defense. A thousand American deaths would have been considered a disaster in this country.
This is the push-pull that leads the Americans to fight the way they do, and leads, in turn, to the idea, on the Arab ‘street’, that America is as criminal as Al Qaeda. It is also why Americans should get out of Iraq now, with a set date, period.
Tuesday, February 22, 2005
"I return to hell."
Remember the narrative of the nineties? The Olive Tree and the Lexus narrative? The inevitable march of capital over the sullen bodies of obstetric leftists? The final, historic turn to private enterprise all over the third world? Latin America was the happy, happy example for NYT shills of the process like Thomas Friedman, who has turned his supernatural talent for bad advice to Iraq these days – appropriately enough. The war in Iraq can considered, in some ways, the logical extension of the globalization ideology – if you don’t like private enterprise, we’ll kill you.
Two items today should be noted.
One is an old item, from the Guardian, Feb. 12. Go to it. It is a review of a unique document, the diary of a Brazilian woman, Carolina Maria de Jesus, who spent her life in the “insoluble hell” of a Sao Paulo shanty town – Beyond all pity. Maria de Jesus’s money life – our Siamese twin/devil in this life – was spent gathering junk to sell. Especially papers, waste papers, according to the author of the article, Felipe Fortuna:
“De Jesus wrote out of her poverty. By day and by night, waste paper and writing paper were the materials from which she built her life: by day, she made money by gathering and sorting paper, but at night, when she could, she would confront the blank pages of her notebook.
'The diary is not, by definition, a controlled creative process, nor is it a fictional work: it is a text bound by dates, which develops chronologically, without the need for climaxes. Nevertheless, the diary of De Jesus always records her life in the shanty town as an experience of overcoming, to which the succession of days and nights is crucial. All of a sudden, she will record how she doesn't know what the next day will bring, whether there will be any paper to sort, and therefore any food. She is in a constant state of precariousness, like someone who for years experiences work in a hospital, prison or mental asylum. And the life of De Jesus is as surprising as her text, both to her and her readers.”
Maria de Jesus saw the shantytown as the eternal impress of an active degradation which was dragging her to the bottom, and which would drag her children to the bottom, a perspective that might make some purveyors of identity politics nervous. Ourselves, we understand the irritation – living on the edge of your nerves sensitizes you to the trivial, to the neighbors’ disgusting behavior, to the law that rules out all generous gestures as suicidal. Here’s an example of an entry:
“The birthday of my daughter Vera Eunice. I wanted to buy a pair of shoes for her, but the price of food keeps us from realising our desires. Actually we are slaves to the cost of living. I found a pair of shoes in the garbage, washed them, and patched them for her to wear.
I didn't have one cent to buy bread. So I washed three bottles and traded them to Arnaldo. He kept the bottles and gave me bread. Then I went to sell my paper. I received 65 cruzeiros. I spent 20 cruzeiros for meat. I got one kilo of ham and one kilo of sugar and spent six cruzeiros on cheese. And the money was gone.
I was ill all day. I thought I had a cold. At night my chest pained me. I started to cough. I decided not to go out at night to look for paper. I searched for my son Joao. He was at Felisberto de Carvalho Street near the market. A bus had knocked a boy into the sidewalk and a crowd gathered. Joao was in the middle of it all. I poked him a couple of times and within five minutes he was home.”
Another piece of more ephemeral news comes to us via today’s NYT, which reports, unsurprisingly, that privatization is dead in Latin America.
“El Alto, Bolivia -- Piped water, like the runoff from the glaciers above this city, runs tantalizingly close to Remedios Cuyuña's home. But with no way to pay the $450 hookup fee charged by the French-run waterworks, she washes her clothes and bathes her three children in frigid well water beside a fetid creek.
So in January, when legions of angry residents rose up against the company, she eagerly joined in. The fragile government of President Carlos Mesa, hoping to avert the same kind of uprising that toppled his predecessor in 2003, then took a step that proved popular but shook foreign investors to their core. It canceled the contract of Aguas del Illimani, a subsidiary of the $53 billion French giant Suez, effectively tossing it out of the country and leaving the state responsible.”
The swing back is going to be interesting – especially as the ideologues attempt to explain the conjunction of economic recovery and that horrid state, interfering in the economy:
“No companies have been more buffeted than those running public utilities offering water, electrical and telephone services, or those that extract minerals and hydrocarbons, which, like water, are seen as part of a nation's patrimony.
In Peru, despite major economic growth, foreign investment fell to $1.3 billion last year from $2.1 billion in 2002. Ecuador has also seen investments sag, as oil companies that once saw the country as a rosy destination have faced the increasingly determined opposition of Indian tribes and environmental groups.
Argentina, which has taken a decidedly leftist path in the economic recovery following its 2001 collapse, has recouped only a fraction of the investments it attracted just a few years ago.”
Investment from the outside – the dulcet, rustling sounds of dollars coming into a country – was accompanied, throughout the eighties and nineties, by another sound – the sucking sound of capital leaving the country to pay for both an unsustainable boom in imported consumer items and the mausoleum like piles of monstrous, useless debt. We will see if Latin American left leaning governments – even those, like Brazil’s, pursuing right leaning economic policy – start to understand that investment from the outside should come from Latin American countries themselves.
Remember the narrative of the nineties? The Olive Tree and the Lexus narrative? The inevitable march of capital over the sullen bodies of obstetric leftists? The final, historic turn to private enterprise all over the third world? Latin America was the happy, happy example for NYT shills of the process like Thomas Friedman, who has turned his supernatural talent for bad advice to Iraq these days – appropriately enough. The war in Iraq can considered, in some ways, the logical extension of the globalization ideology – if you don’t like private enterprise, we’ll kill you.
Two items today should be noted.
One is an old item, from the Guardian, Feb. 12. Go to it. It is a review of a unique document, the diary of a Brazilian woman, Carolina Maria de Jesus, who spent her life in the “insoluble hell” of a Sao Paulo shanty town – Beyond all pity. Maria de Jesus’s money life – our Siamese twin/devil in this life – was spent gathering junk to sell. Especially papers, waste papers, according to the author of the article, Felipe Fortuna:
“De Jesus wrote out of her poverty. By day and by night, waste paper and writing paper were the materials from which she built her life: by day, she made money by gathering and sorting paper, but at night, when she could, she would confront the blank pages of her notebook.
'The diary is not, by definition, a controlled creative process, nor is it a fictional work: it is a text bound by dates, which develops chronologically, without the need for climaxes. Nevertheless, the diary of De Jesus always records her life in the shanty town as an experience of overcoming, to which the succession of days and nights is crucial. All of a sudden, she will record how she doesn't know what the next day will bring, whether there will be any paper to sort, and therefore any food. She is in a constant state of precariousness, like someone who for years experiences work in a hospital, prison or mental asylum. And the life of De Jesus is as surprising as her text, both to her and her readers.”
Maria de Jesus saw the shantytown as the eternal impress of an active degradation which was dragging her to the bottom, and which would drag her children to the bottom, a perspective that might make some purveyors of identity politics nervous. Ourselves, we understand the irritation – living on the edge of your nerves sensitizes you to the trivial, to the neighbors’ disgusting behavior, to the law that rules out all generous gestures as suicidal. Here’s an example of an entry:
“The birthday of my daughter Vera Eunice. I wanted to buy a pair of shoes for her, but the price of food keeps us from realising our desires. Actually we are slaves to the cost of living. I found a pair of shoes in the garbage, washed them, and patched them for her to wear.
I didn't have one cent to buy bread. So I washed three bottles and traded them to Arnaldo. He kept the bottles and gave me bread. Then I went to sell my paper. I received 65 cruzeiros. I spent 20 cruzeiros for meat. I got one kilo of ham and one kilo of sugar and spent six cruzeiros on cheese. And the money was gone.
I was ill all day. I thought I had a cold. At night my chest pained me. I started to cough. I decided not to go out at night to look for paper. I searched for my son Joao. He was at Felisberto de Carvalho Street near the market. A bus had knocked a boy into the sidewalk and a crowd gathered. Joao was in the middle of it all. I poked him a couple of times and within five minutes he was home.”
Another piece of more ephemeral news comes to us via today’s NYT, which reports, unsurprisingly, that privatization is dead in Latin America.
“El Alto, Bolivia -- Piped water, like the runoff from the glaciers above this city, runs tantalizingly close to Remedios Cuyuña's home. But with no way to pay the $450 hookup fee charged by the French-run waterworks, she washes her clothes and bathes her three children in frigid well water beside a fetid creek.
So in January, when legions of angry residents rose up against the company, she eagerly joined in. The fragile government of President Carlos Mesa, hoping to avert the same kind of uprising that toppled his predecessor in 2003, then took a step that proved popular but shook foreign investors to their core. It canceled the contract of Aguas del Illimani, a subsidiary of the $53 billion French giant Suez, effectively tossing it out of the country and leaving the state responsible.”
The swing back is going to be interesting – especially as the ideologues attempt to explain the conjunction of economic recovery and that horrid state, interfering in the economy:
“No companies have been more buffeted than those running public utilities offering water, electrical and telephone services, or those that extract minerals and hydrocarbons, which, like water, are seen as part of a nation's patrimony.
In Peru, despite major economic growth, foreign investment fell to $1.3 billion last year from $2.1 billion in 2002. Ecuador has also seen investments sag, as oil companies that once saw the country as a rosy destination have faced the increasingly determined opposition of Indian tribes and environmental groups.
Argentina, which has taken a decidedly leftist path in the economic recovery following its 2001 collapse, has recouped only a fraction of the investments it attracted just a few years ago.”
Investment from the outside – the dulcet, rustling sounds of dollars coming into a country – was accompanied, throughout the eighties and nineties, by another sound – the sucking sound of capital leaving the country to pay for both an unsustainable boom in imported consumer items and the mausoleum like piles of monstrous, useless debt. We will see if Latin American left leaning governments – even those, like Brazil’s, pursuing right leaning economic policy – start to understand that investment from the outside should come from Latin American countries themselves.
Monday, February 21, 2005
War crimes alert
John Burns, the NYT reporter who is to the American army what the legendary guinea pig is to the legendary S.F. polysexual, breathlessly informs us that the same tactics that were used against Falluja are now being turned against Ramadi.
“Between August and November, the strategy drove Shiite rebels out of the holy city of Najaf, forced a standdown by the same group in Baghdad's Sadr City district, and ended Sunni insurgents' stranglehold on Falluja, a major staging post for attacks.
The Falluja offensive ended with much of the city reduced to rubble, and insurgent groups still capable, weeks later, of mounting attacks from isolated pockets of resistance.
But American commanders acknowledged a more compelling reason that the offensive had proved less decisive than they had hoped. Many rebels fled ahead of the offensive, some north to Mosul, some southeast toward Sunni strongholds south of Baghdad, and others to Ramadi, 40 miles to the west, where insurgents last year took a measure of control almost on a par with their takeover of Falluja.”
Hey, how’s this for a compelling counter-narrative: a foreign army comes in, destroys hospitals, the majority of houses and small businesses, commits acts of terrorism both from the air and on the ground against a civilian population, and disperses it with maximum cruelty across the countryside – and population retaliates? Of course, I’m merely joking: surely the civilian population rejoiced at having its children shot at, its homes leveled, its religion desecrated, and it refugees treated to repeated humiliation by the Americans, because they knew that really, in our hearts, we are freedom lovin’ band. Rat Pack nation under God, just swingin’ in old Mesopotamia.
So, in the hall of shame, where the Sand Creek massacre stands next to My Lae and Falluja, we will soon be inscribe the name Ramadi. We can look forward to a lot of pics of kids burned to the gills, young men gutted, and the like, in the next few weeks. Discomforting, but just think what it feels like to the Iraqis.
John Burns, the NYT reporter who is to the American army what the legendary guinea pig is to the legendary S.F. polysexual, breathlessly informs us that the same tactics that were used against Falluja are now being turned against Ramadi.
“Between August and November, the strategy drove Shiite rebels out of the holy city of Najaf, forced a standdown by the same group in Baghdad's Sadr City district, and ended Sunni insurgents' stranglehold on Falluja, a major staging post for attacks.
The Falluja offensive ended with much of the city reduced to rubble, and insurgent groups still capable, weeks later, of mounting attacks from isolated pockets of resistance.
But American commanders acknowledged a more compelling reason that the offensive had proved less decisive than they had hoped. Many rebels fled ahead of the offensive, some north to Mosul, some southeast toward Sunni strongholds south of Baghdad, and others to Ramadi, 40 miles to the west, where insurgents last year took a measure of control almost on a par with their takeover of Falluja.”
Hey, how’s this for a compelling counter-narrative: a foreign army comes in, destroys hospitals, the majority of houses and small businesses, commits acts of terrorism both from the air and on the ground against a civilian population, and disperses it with maximum cruelty across the countryside – and population retaliates? Of course, I’m merely joking: surely the civilian population rejoiced at having its children shot at, its homes leveled, its religion desecrated, and it refugees treated to repeated humiliation by the Americans, because they knew that really, in our hearts, we are freedom lovin’ band. Rat Pack nation under God, just swingin’ in old Mesopotamia.
So, in the hall of shame, where the Sand Creek massacre stands next to My Lae and Falluja, we will soon be inscribe the name Ramadi. We can look forward to a lot of pics of kids burned to the gills, young men gutted, and the like, in the next few weeks. Discomforting, but just think what it feels like to the Iraqis.
Sunday, February 20, 2005
In the NYT Magazine, there is a small piece by Jim Holt about intelligent design. The point Holt is making is of the traditional burlesque variety - the often incredible “sloppiness” of design of creatures in nature that so often renders them so unfit that they go extinct argues, at the very least, that the intelligence doing the designing is of a low order. However, Holt’s piece includes a paragraph we can’t let go by:
“From a scientific perspective, one of the most frustrating things about intelligent design is that (unlike Darwinism) it is virtually impossible to test. Old-fashioned biblical creationism at least risked making some hard factual claims -- that the earth was created before the sun, for example. Intelligent design, by contrast, leaves the purposes of the designer wholly mysterious. Presumably any pattern of data in the natural world is consistent with his/her/its existence.”
This is wrong, and it is the wrong way to go to overthrow ID. A testable proposition usually means one in which observations can be hooked to quantities of some kind. Those quantities are what make possible predictions – and, in fact, it is often the quantitative effect one is watching. ID, like any theory, tells us enough about the world that we can look around and see whether what it says relates to what we find. So, the old burlesque principle (did Adam have a navel, yuck, yuck) is not going to cut it.
What should we look for if ID is true? Our post here gives you the background. To cut to the chase: where there’s a watch, there’s a watch factory. The increasing complexity of design entails a parallel increase in material evidence for that design. Thus, ID is as testable as any other theory – if that material evidence is spotty, then ID would be disputable. That the material evidence, so far, is completely and seamlessly non-existence makes it a good bet that ID is less likely to be true than, say, medical astrology. That its advocates have never lifted a finger to find the material trail that leads to ID events shows pretty much that we are dealing with buncombe artists – which do seem to infest the ranks of the evangelical set.
Unfortunately, those who argue against ID are so convinced that it is nonsense (understandably) that they don’t take it seriously enough to ask about its consequences. If they treated it more seriously as a theory, its gross inaccuracies would more quickly expose it as nonsense.
“From a scientific perspective, one of the most frustrating things about intelligent design is that (unlike Darwinism) it is virtually impossible to test. Old-fashioned biblical creationism at least risked making some hard factual claims -- that the earth was created before the sun, for example. Intelligent design, by contrast, leaves the purposes of the designer wholly mysterious. Presumably any pattern of data in the natural world is consistent with his/her/its existence.”
This is wrong, and it is the wrong way to go to overthrow ID. A testable proposition usually means one in which observations can be hooked to quantities of some kind. Those quantities are what make possible predictions – and, in fact, it is often the quantitative effect one is watching. ID, like any theory, tells us enough about the world that we can look around and see whether what it says relates to what we find. So, the old burlesque principle (did Adam have a navel, yuck, yuck) is not going to cut it.
What should we look for if ID is true? Our post here gives you the background. To cut to the chase: where there’s a watch, there’s a watch factory. The increasing complexity of design entails a parallel increase in material evidence for that design. Thus, ID is as testable as any other theory – if that material evidence is spotty, then ID would be disputable. That the material evidence, so far, is completely and seamlessly non-existence makes it a good bet that ID is less likely to be true than, say, medical astrology. That its advocates have never lifted a finger to find the material trail that leads to ID events shows pretty much that we are dealing with buncombe artists – which do seem to infest the ranks of the evangelical set.
Unfortunately, those who argue against ID are so convinced that it is nonsense (understandably) that they don’t take it seriously enough to ask about its consequences. If they treated it more seriously as a theory, its gross inaccuracies would more quickly expose it as nonsense.
Saturday, February 19, 2005
Portents
If the Bush administration’s embrace of both unilateralism and third world deficit financing really does signal the twilight of the American era – and if projections of the budget deficits to come are accurate, it is hard to see post Bush America as anything more than a much bleaker place – one wonders what happens after the hegemon self destructs?
There’s a story in Fortune this week by Vivienne Walt about the deals being made between the Iranian government and China’s businesses that might be a small indicator. A little background music, maestro.
The U.S., pursuing its cordon sanitaire around Iran, long ago set itself up for a Persian Gulf policy that was completely at odds with reality. Of course, the Bush people, exemplary nitwits, have been the enthusiastic gravediggers of that policy, going from an unnecessary invasion to a war crime studded occupation to the current narcotized superfluity as patrons of the coming Iraq Islamic Republic. Always trust these people to turn stupid policies into disastrous ones, paid for by more borrowing. We would be more up in arms at this site about, say, the asset stripping going under the name of “social security reform” if it weren’t for the thought that every dollar borrowed to put into the pockets of the super-rich is another dollar that won’t go towards the WMD of hegemony.
Having successfully rendered the U.S. more vulnerable to the attacks of the intact Al Qaeda, and committing the U.S. to a failing policy in which another thousand or so American kids will be pointlessly slaughter, while they themselves are encouraged to pointlessly slaughter, the Bush people have been feeling their oats lately, which is why the beady eye has been cast on Iran. Yet as the world knows, the U.S. can’t afford to invade Iran, since it has neither the manpower nor the money. It can come up with both. However, to come up with both would mean alienating the Snopes set, who solidly support Bush only to the extent that he provides inspiring occasions for Snopesian national anthem singing and tax cuts to disguise the coming encroachment on inkind benefits. To actually snatch Snopesian kids and have them die pointlessly in advancing on Teheran might actually interrupt the wet dream, thus sharpening the Snopesian eyesight for the rip off of any hope for their own retirement, and the increasing costs of keeping the old folks in chicken wings and arthritis pills.
Here’s the key graf from the Fortune article:
“Under the gas agreement reached last October, China will import more than 270 million tons of natural gas over the next 30 years from Iran's South Pars field in the Persian Gulf, the largest natural-gas reserve on the planet, which Iran shares with its tiny neighbor Qatar. That will bring Iran about $70 billion in hard currency. And that's just the start. The two-part deal also gives Sinopec a half-share in one of Iran's most important new discoveries, the Yadavaran field, an energy-rich area in southwest Iran, allowing the company to explore for oil over the next few decades. With the field's oil reserves estimated at about 17 billion barrels, China's operations could be worth another $100 billion.”
Interestingly, the market opened up by China has interested India, as well. Feelers are out from India to Iran. We have no doubt that, as these deals congeal into infrastructure, it becomes much more risky for the U.S. to bomb the place.
One of the monuments of the Bush era – its elevation of hypocrisy to the golden rule – is embodied in no Southern entrepreneur so much as Richard Scrushy, erstwhile head of HealthSouth. For amusement’s sake, we urge our readers to take a gander at the NYT article about him. Scrushy is a piece of work – cut from the same cloth, actually, as his fellow entrepreneur, Bush, but without the family connections that made it possible for the latter to climb unscathed out of the hole of petty corporate crime. Scrushy, our readers will remember, provided much amusement for LI in the first denuding wave of corporate melt-downs back in 2002.
Here are three grafs which somehow give off a whiff of Karl Rove:
“Mr. Scrushy, 52, began attending Guiding Light not long before his indictment in 2003 on charges of overseeing a $2.7 billion conspiracy to defraud shareholders of HealthSouth, a chain of rehabilitation hospitals he started two decades ago. A spokesman for Mr. Scrushy said Mr. Scrushy had given money to Guiding Light, but he declined to specify how much. "He has always supported the churches he attends," the spokesman, Charlie Russell, said.
It is not uncommon, of course, for someone in the public eye who has fallen from grace to migrate to a house of prayer. But Mr. Scrushy's new emphasis on his ties to Birmingham's large black population and his churchgoing ways have many people in this city asking, is it all part of his defense strategy? About 70 percent of Birmingham is African-American, and of the 18 jurors and alternates at his trial, 11 are African-American.
The danger is that Mr. Scrushy's very public moves could backfire, especially considering that inside the courtroom his lawyers are following a different, and decidedly uncharitable, strategy. His legal team has been aggressively seeking to tarnish the reputations of Mr. Scrushy's former employees who are testifying against him. In fact, in late January, one lawyer, Jim Parkman, of Dothan, Ala., accused a former HealthSouth executive of being a heavy-drinking philanderer.”
The article goes on:
“These actions have astounded some former associates of Mr. Scrushy, who was known around Birmingham for the conspicuous display of his wealth before his problems with the law. According to a list of assets drawn up by federal prosecutors, Mr. Scrushy owns two Cessna jets; a Lamborghini Murcielago and a Rolls Royce Corniche; three Miros, two Chagalls and a Picasso; and several multimillion-dollar homes.
"In all my visits to the executive suite at HealthSouth, I never saw a black person there, not among the executives, the doctors or the secretaries," said Paul Finebaum, a radio talk-show host and former business associate of Mr. Scrushy. "The first time I heard religion and Richard Scrushy mentioned in the same sentence was when I read about him going to Guiding Light Church. I think he must be running out of options."
Somehow, we love it…
If the Bush administration’s embrace of both unilateralism and third world deficit financing really does signal the twilight of the American era – and if projections of the budget deficits to come are accurate, it is hard to see post Bush America as anything more than a much bleaker place – one wonders what happens after the hegemon self destructs?
There’s a story in Fortune this week by Vivienne Walt about the deals being made between the Iranian government and China’s businesses that might be a small indicator. A little background music, maestro.
The U.S., pursuing its cordon sanitaire around Iran, long ago set itself up for a Persian Gulf policy that was completely at odds with reality. Of course, the Bush people, exemplary nitwits, have been the enthusiastic gravediggers of that policy, going from an unnecessary invasion to a war crime studded occupation to the current narcotized superfluity as patrons of the coming Iraq Islamic Republic. Always trust these people to turn stupid policies into disastrous ones, paid for by more borrowing. We would be more up in arms at this site about, say, the asset stripping going under the name of “social security reform” if it weren’t for the thought that every dollar borrowed to put into the pockets of the super-rich is another dollar that won’t go towards the WMD of hegemony.
Having successfully rendered the U.S. more vulnerable to the attacks of the intact Al Qaeda, and committing the U.S. to a failing policy in which another thousand or so American kids will be pointlessly slaughter, while they themselves are encouraged to pointlessly slaughter, the Bush people have been feeling their oats lately, which is why the beady eye has been cast on Iran. Yet as the world knows, the U.S. can’t afford to invade Iran, since it has neither the manpower nor the money. It can come up with both. However, to come up with both would mean alienating the Snopes set, who solidly support Bush only to the extent that he provides inspiring occasions for Snopesian national anthem singing and tax cuts to disguise the coming encroachment on inkind benefits. To actually snatch Snopesian kids and have them die pointlessly in advancing on Teheran might actually interrupt the wet dream, thus sharpening the Snopesian eyesight for the rip off of any hope for their own retirement, and the increasing costs of keeping the old folks in chicken wings and arthritis pills.
Here’s the key graf from the Fortune article:
“Under the gas agreement reached last October, China will import more than 270 million tons of natural gas over the next 30 years from Iran's South Pars field in the Persian Gulf, the largest natural-gas reserve on the planet, which Iran shares with its tiny neighbor Qatar. That will bring Iran about $70 billion in hard currency. And that's just the start. The two-part deal also gives Sinopec a half-share in one of Iran's most important new discoveries, the Yadavaran field, an energy-rich area in southwest Iran, allowing the company to explore for oil over the next few decades. With the field's oil reserves estimated at about 17 billion barrels, China's operations could be worth another $100 billion.”
Interestingly, the market opened up by China has interested India, as well. Feelers are out from India to Iran. We have no doubt that, as these deals congeal into infrastructure, it becomes much more risky for the U.S. to bomb the place.
One of the monuments of the Bush era – its elevation of hypocrisy to the golden rule – is embodied in no Southern entrepreneur so much as Richard Scrushy, erstwhile head of HealthSouth. For amusement’s sake, we urge our readers to take a gander at the NYT article about him. Scrushy is a piece of work – cut from the same cloth, actually, as his fellow entrepreneur, Bush, but without the family connections that made it possible for the latter to climb unscathed out of the hole of petty corporate crime. Scrushy, our readers will remember, provided much amusement for LI in the first denuding wave of corporate melt-downs back in 2002.
Here are three grafs which somehow give off a whiff of Karl Rove:
“Mr. Scrushy, 52, began attending Guiding Light not long before his indictment in 2003 on charges of overseeing a $2.7 billion conspiracy to defraud shareholders of HealthSouth, a chain of rehabilitation hospitals he started two decades ago. A spokesman for Mr. Scrushy said Mr. Scrushy had given money to Guiding Light, but he declined to specify how much. "He has always supported the churches he attends," the spokesman, Charlie Russell, said.
It is not uncommon, of course, for someone in the public eye who has fallen from grace to migrate to a house of prayer. But Mr. Scrushy's new emphasis on his ties to Birmingham's large black population and his churchgoing ways have many people in this city asking, is it all part of his defense strategy? About 70 percent of Birmingham is African-American, and of the 18 jurors and alternates at his trial, 11 are African-American.
The danger is that Mr. Scrushy's very public moves could backfire, especially considering that inside the courtroom his lawyers are following a different, and decidedly uncharitable, strategy. His legal team has been aggressively seeking to tarnish the reputations of Mr. Scrushy's former employees who are testifying against him. In fact, in late January, one lawyer, Jim Parkman, of Dothan, Ala., accused a former HealthSouth executive of being a heavy-drinking philanderer.”
The article goes on:
“These actions have astounded some former associates of Mr. Scrushy, who was known around Birmingham for the conspicuous display of his wealth before his problems with the law. According to a list of assets drawn up by federal prosecutors, Mr. Scrushy owns two Cessna jets; a Lamborghini Murcielago and a Rolls Royce Corniche; three Miros, two Chagalls and a Picasso; and several multimillion-dollar homes.
"In all my visits to the executive suite at HealthSouth, I never saw a black person there, not among the executives, the doctors or the secretaries," said Paul Finebaum, a radio talk-show host and former business associate of Mr. Scrushy. "The first time I heard religion and Richard Scrushy mentioned in the same sentence was when I read about him going to Guiding Light Church. I think he must be running out of options."
Somehow, we love it…
Friday, February 18, 2005
LI was reading a paper by a philosopher, Alexander Bird, the other day. The paper defended the view that scientific progress is measured by the accumulation of knowledge – on the Baconian scheme – rather than measured by its generation of true statements, as the semantic philosophy of science would have it. It is coming out in Nous.
So far, so good. But then we came across this counterfactual:
“Imagine a scientific community that has formed its beliefs using some very weak or even irrational method M, such as astrology. But by fluke this sequence of beliefs is a sequence of true beliefs. These true beliefs are believed solely because they are generated by M and they do not have independent confirmation. Now imagine that at time t an Archimedes-like scientist in this society realises and comes to know that M is weak. This scientist persuades (using different, reliable 4 methods) her colleagues that M is unreliable. This may be that society’s first piece of scientific knowledge. The scientific community now rejects its earlier beliefs as unsound, realising that they were formed solely on the basis of a poor method.
“On the semantic view this community was making progress until time t (it was accumulating true beliefs) and then regressed (it gave up those beliefs). This, it seems, contradicts the verdict of our intuitions about this episode. The acquisition of beliefs by an unreliable method cannot be genuine scientific progress, even if the beliefs so acquired are, by accident, true. Far from being a regressive move, giving up those unreliably produced beliefs, because of a now well-founded belief that they were unreliably produced, is positive, progressive step. So the semantic view yields a description in terms of progress and regress that conflicts with what we are intuitively inclined to say.”
We don’t mean to pick on Dr. Bird, but this is a rather neat demonstration of what we call the fallacy of the epistemologically deviant condition. The counterfactual only gets off the ground once we suppose “a scientific community that has formed its beliefs using some very weak or even irrational method M, such as astrology. But by fluke this sequence of beliefs is a sequence of true beliefs.” The last sentence gives us, as a sort of axiom, the framing epistemological conditions that will allow us to judge the Bird’s counterfactual.
However, the last sentence is actually a historically contingent statement, even though it is be treated as an axiom – something that is true a priori. Since it is historically contingent, the fact that it is true entails a story about the discovery that makes it true. Such a story would necessarily overlap with the example it is supposedly framing. This means that the story of how, by some fluke, a community’s irrational beliefs, M, were also true beliefs would entail an investigation, if true, that would be formally equivalent to the investigation mounted by the Archimedes like scientist in the story.
The epistemologically deviant condition is a form of begging the question. It is, unfortunately, all too common in analytic philosophy. My friend Alan and I have been arguing, on his site, about Chalmers, the consciousness-man. Chalmers has a weakness amounting to addiction for epistemologically deviant conditions. His most famous argument, which revolves around postulating a zombie human double that can cogitate, speak, and behave like a human being, but doesn’t have conscious experience of being like a human being, violates the conventions of framing in exactly the same way Bird does, above. It is for this reason that these arguments never work.
However, I am less interested in their implausibility than in their motivation. These philosophic fictions share a frustration with the more artistic fictions of novelists and film-makers: how to pack all the information the author has into the story. The voice-over in a film is a perfect example of the kind of artistic compromises that emerge in the struggle between the creator and the material. The voice over doesn’t really have a logical place. Is it supposed to represent the Still-Sprache going on in the head? Is it supposed to be the filmic equivalent of the inaugural moment in first person stories – the fiction that some “I” has sat down to write a story? Oftentimes, the voiceover presents itself in the conventions of written fiction’s first person. Anybody who writes fiction knows the frustration of sticking with the person of the teller – including the frustration of third person telling, which is always about the writer’s calculated interference in the angle and unrolling of the story.
ps -- because I'm an incompetent logician, and because, frankly, nobody cares, I usually don't bother with the technical side of my arguments. But in this case, the technical side would go something like this:
Given a framing condition, S, containing a fact, s, that entails an argument, z.
And given a counterfactual, T, such that S frames T, containing a fact t;
If t entails z, then I'd call the counterfactual badly formed.
There's nothing here, really, except another self reference paradox. Usually, this is disguised by suppressing the epistemological source of s -- in other words, suppressing the answer to the question, how do we know s? It has been my experience that counterfactuals involve assumptions that usually render them either superficial or badly formed. Why? Because, on the one hand, if we can mount a straightforward argument for the framing facts, then we don't need the counterfactual; and if we can't, and have to fall back on the counterfactual, then it is illegitimately prior in the line of argument to itself -- in other words, we have the problem of the vicious circle.
For those few and hardy souls who've actually reached this point in the post, congratulations. Most of you have justly fled -- but I'm not going to do this kind of thing too often.
So far, so good. But then we came across this counterfactual:
“Imagine a scientific community that has formed its beliefs using some very weak or even irrational method M, such as astrology. But by fluke this sequence of beliefs is a sequence of true beliefs. These true beliefs are believed solely because they are generated by M and they do not have independent confirmation. Now imagine that at time t an Archimedes-like scientist in this society realises and comes to know that M is weak. This scientist persuades (using different, reliable 4 methods) her colleagues that M is unreliable. This may be that society’s first piece of scientific knowledge. The scientific community now rejects its earlier beliefs as unsound, realising that they were formed solely on the basis of a poor method.
“On the semantic view this community was making progress until time t (it was accumulating true beliefs) and then regressed (it gave up those beliefs). This, it seems, contradicts the verdict of our intuitions about this episode. The acquisition of beliefs by an unreliable method cannot be genuine scientific progress, even if the beliefs so acquired are, by accident, true. Far from being a regressive move, giving up those unreliably produced beliefs, because of a now well-founded belief that they were unreliably produced, is positive, progressive step. So the semantic view yields a description in terms of progress and regress that conflicts with what we are intuitively inclined to say.”
We don’t mean to pick on Dr. Bird, but this is a rather neat demonstration of what we call the fallacy of the epistemologically deviant condition. The counterfactual only gets off the ground once we suppose “a scientific community that has formed its beliefs using some very weak or even irrational method M, such as astrology. But by fluke this sequence of beliefs is a sequence of true beliefs.” The last sentence gives us, as a sort of axiom, the framing epistemological conditions that will allow us to judge the Bird’s counterfactual.
However, the last sentence is actually a historically contingent statement, even though it is be treated as an axiom – something that is true a priori. Since it is historically contingent, the fact that it is true entails a story about the discovery that makes it true. Such a story would necessarily overlap with the example it is supposedly framing. This means that the story of how, by some fluke, a community’s irrational beliefs, M, were also true beliefs would entail an investigation, if true, that would be formally equivalent to the investigation mounted by the Archimedes like scientist in the story.
The epistemologically deviant condition is a form of begging the question. It is, unfortunately, all too common in analytic philosophy. My friend Alan and I have been arguing, on his site, about Chalmers, the consciousness-man. Chalmers has a weakness amounting to addiction for epistemologically deviant conditions. His most famous argument, which revolves around postulating a zombie human double that can cogitate, speak, and behave like a human being, but doesn’t have conscious experience of being like a human being, violates the conventions of framing in exactly the same way Bird does, above. It is for this reason that these arguments never work.
However, I am less interested in their implausibility than in their motivation. These philosophic fictions share a frustration with the more artistic fictions of novelists and film-makers: how to pack all the information the author has into the story. The voice-over in a film is a perfect example of the kind of artistic compromises that emerge in the struggle between the creator and the material. The voice over doesn’t really have a logical place. Is it supposed to represent the Still-Sprache going on in the head? Is it supposed to be the filmic equivalent of the inaugural moment in first person stories – the fiction that some “I” has sat down to write a story? Oftentimes, the voiceover presents itself in the conventions of written fiction’s first person. Anybody who writes fiction knows the frustration of sticking with the person of the teller – including the frustration of third person telling, which is always about the writer’s calculated interference in the angle and unrolling of the story.
ps -- because I'm an incompetent logician, and because, frankly, nobody cares, I usually don't bother with the technical side of my arguments. But in this case, the technical side would go something like this:
Given a framing condition, S, containing a fact, s, that entails an argument, z.
And given a counterfactual, T, such that S frames T, containing a fact t;
If t entails z, then I'd call the counterfactual badly formed.
There's nothing here, really, except another self reference paradox. Usually, this is disguised by suppressing the epistemological source of s -- in other words, suppressing the answer to the question, how do we know s? It has been my experience that counterfactuals involve assumptions that usually render them either superficial or badly formed. Why? Because, on the one hand, if we can mount a straightforward argument for the framing facts, then we don't need the counterfactual; and if we can't, and have to fall back on the counterfactual, then it is illegitimately prior in the line of argument to itself -- in other words, we have the problem of the vicious circle.
For those few and hardy souls who've actually reached this point in the post, congratulations. Most of you have justly fled -- but I'm not going to do this kind of thing too often.
Thursday, February 17, 2005
Impatience as politics
In an essay on Turgenev, Isaiah Berlin cited the review of one of his first novels, On the Eve, by a radical Russian critic, Dobrolyubov:
" 'If you sit in an empty box, and try to upset it with yourself inside it, what a fearful effort you have to make! But if you come at it from the outside, one push will topple the box."... Those who are truly serious must get out of the Russian box, break off every relationship with the entire monstrous structure, and then knock it over from the outside."
This is our feeling about the U.S.A. at the moment -- although it alternates, every day, with other feelings. What American writer, after all, can afford to be out of the box? But what American writer can afford not to dream, at least, about climbing out and giving it a splendiferous kick? So one ends up half in and half out of Dobrolyubov's box.
This is the awkward state that has prompted LI to examine our impatience, exhibited at large on this site, at least since the start of the Iraq war. In the last post, with the help of the Gospels, we analyzedimpatience from the situational perspective. But what about total impatience? What if the obstacle in one’s way seems to be a total, encompassing structure -- a box, if you will. Or a coffin. What if the jab of passion -- Jesus' hunger, the barfly's thirst -- is not provoked by any one momentary need, but the sum total and onslaught of all one’s needs? What if my lungs are filled with the debris of the million media meditated stupidities that circulate around in the very air of this country, getting in one's pores? It smells like America, every day. What if one wakes up in a catacomb, and is assured that it is the homeland?
Questions which occurred to me reading Chekhov’s The Duel, which Chekhov wrote in 1891, after making his trip to the penal colony of Sakhalin Island. In our first post about this, we said that if we were to teach history class about Lenin, we would certainly assign Chekhov. Reading Chekhov in the age of Bush, which is making Lenins of us all, gives us a renewed sense of two intellectual responses to an era that deliberately wallows in its own ignorance, that deliberately and viciously tears down the characters of its best and most intelligent members while lavishing admiration on its brutes, its monied, its vacuous: resignation and impatience.
In our post about the image of Bolshevism that Cold War ideologues claimed to derive an from Dostoevsky’s analysis of nihilism, the claim received its plausibility from the idea that Stalin’s crimes demonstrated the truth of the Dostoevskian dictum, if there is no God, everything is permitted. In choosing Chekhov as our literary lens, we want to paraphrase that dictum, exchanging it for something like: if there is no God of love, then love is not permitted. In one way, it is easy to see how we can move from the desire to blow up the bonds of affection that tie God to us and us to God to the fear that this means pulling the rug out from under all social bonds of affection. If the love of God is an interested illusion, the projection of an emotion upon an imaginary object – one begins to wonder about the supposedly real objects of one’s affections, and about the very process of that projection. The future of an illusion – isn’t it to be smashed? And that, we think, is the disturbing thing about The Duel.
In an essay on Turgenev, Isaiah Berlin cited the review of one of his first novels, On the Eve, by a radical Russian critic, Dobrolyubov:
" 'If you sit in an empty box, and try to upset it with yourself inside it, what a fearful effort you have to make! But if you come at it from the outside, one push will topple the box."... Those who are truly serious must get out of the Russian box, break off every relationship with the entire monstrous structure, and then knock it over from the outside."
This is our feeling about the U.S.A. at the moment -- although it alternates, every day, with other feelings. What American writer, after all, can afford to be out of the box? But what American writer can afford not to dream, at least, about climbing out and giving it a splendiferous kick? So one ends up half in and half out of Dobrolyubov's box.
This is the awkward state that has prompted LI to examine our impatience, exhibited at large on this site, at least since the start of the Iraq war. In the last post, with the help of the Gospels, we analyzedimpatience from the situational perspective. But what about total impatience? What if the obstacle in one’s way seems to be a total, encompassing structure -- a box, if you will. Or a coffin. What if the jab of passion -- Jesus' hunger, the barfly's thirst -- is not provoked by any one momentary need, but the sum total and onslaught of all one’s needs? What if my lungs are filled with the debris of the million media meditated stupidities that circulate around in the very air of this country, getting in one's pores? It smells like America, every day. What if one wakes up in a catacomb, and is assured that it is the homeland?
Questions which occurred to me reading Chekhov’s The Duel, which Chekhov wrote in 1891, after making his trip to the penal colony of Sakhalin Island. In our first post about this, we said that if we were to teach history class about Lenin, we would certainly assign Chekhov. Reading Chekhov in the age of Bush, which is making Lenins of us all, gives us a renewed sense of two intellectual responses to an era that deliberately wallows in its own ignorance, that deliberately and viciously tears down the characters of its best and most intelligent members while lavishing admiration on its brutes, its monied, its vacuous: resignation and impatience.
In our post about the image of Bolshevism that Cold War ideologues claimed to derive an from Dostoevsky’s analysis of nihilism, the claim received its plausibility from the idea that Stalin’s crimes demonstrated the truth of the Dostoevskian dictum, if there is no God, everything is permitted. In choosing Chekhov as our literary lens, we want to paraphrase that dictum, exchanging it for something like: if there is no God of love, then love is not permitted. In one way, it is easy to see how we can move from the desire to blow up the bonds of affection that tie God to us and us to God to the fear that this means pulling the rug out from under all social bonds of affection. If the love of God is an interested illusion, the projection of an emotion upon an imaginary object – one begins to wonder about the supposedly real objects of one’s affections, and about the very process of that projection. The future of an illusion – isn’t it to be smashed? And that, we think, is the disturbing thing about The Duel.
Wednesday, February 16, 2005
“He was inadequate, certainly, even laughable at times, but he was a thinker and not a dictaphone, and when he blew his brains out he did the job thoroughly. – Eleanor Clark
First, to brag: We notice that Juan Cole today quietly proposed the analogy to Mehdi Bazargan we floated last week. Hey, LI is, in its own eccentric way, sometimes ahead of the game.
...
LI is growing increasingly snappy about the multitude of political imbecilities against which, as a citizen of the Leviathan, we have to strive. Mentally, at least. There was a meme on the ‘sphere a week or so ago about how liberals can express their love for America. Apparently, the thing to do at the moment is to find lyrical words to match the catch in the throat and the heart whenever Old Glory goes by. LI wants to know – how does America love us? We want a little return glow. We want America not to try to kill us, rob us, or send the cops and the taxmen to club us in order to extract the uber-tithe now demanded by the wealthy. There’s a certain battered wife pathology that comes out of all these liberal cries of amorous passion, like Olive Oil weeping for her Brutus.
The fact is, we don’t love America, and our creed is that love of country, in some utopian future, will attenuate to the vanishing point throughout the world. It is the usual Imagine-Lennon-hippie-shit thing. However, we do like America. Like it since our bones and gristle formed here, our heart first went thud thud thud here, our tongue shapes English as only an American can, and we could no more imagine ourselves exiting in this world without America than we could imagine ourselves existing without oxygen. We would like America even more if a few changes were made around here…
So – to hook up by such awkwardly indirect means to an earlier post – we were talking about how Chekhov’s The Duel explained something about Lenin. We never exactly explained what we meant. This post is still going to differ the moment of interpretation, because we want to first say philosophical things about our snappishness. Or, more generally, about impatience. To leap frog ahead, there’s a certain politics of impatience that was all over European culture in the first quarter of the twentieth century. And we’ve noticed that impatience has become our own primary mode of understanding American politics under the current regime.
Now, onto Mark 11.
.....................................................................................
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We charge a competitive rate for content and copy editing, proofing, indexing, and translating. We specialize in humanities and the social sciences. We have, in the past four months, completed a diverse array of projects including:
-- substantive editing of a book on process ontology;
-- substantive editing of a monograph on migration in Argentina;
-- substantive editing of an article on Paul Ricoeur;
-- substantive editing of an article on nominalism in mathematical philosophy;
-- substantive editing of a conference paper on scientific realism; and
-- translation of a turn of the century Austrian linguist whose work on speech errors was used by Freud.
We translate from German and French into English. We have developed successful relationships with Swiss, Danish and German academics. Scholars for whom English is a second language are urged to consider our services. We deliver ASAP for those on short deadlines for conference papers, articles, or chapters.
Write rgathman@netzero.net for details.
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..................................................................................……………
A little exegetical work, here. In Mark 11, we are told of Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem. This is interwoven with a story that is seemingly minor and rather shocking – it seems to have been interpolated from a book about a sorcerer, since it recounts something that is more like a magic trick than a miracle. But it was noted. The Gospels are many things, but one thing they aren’t is garrulous. What is noted there is significant.
Jesus, then, is hungry. “… seeing a fig tree afar off having leaves, he came, if haply he might find any thing thereon: and when he came to it, he found nothing but leaves; for the time of figs was not yet.
And Jesus answered and said unto it, No man eat fruit of thee hereafter for ever.”
Another story then is told: Jesus going to Jerusalem and throwing the moneychangers out of the temple. He leaves the city, then, with the author implying that he felt some threat from the Pharisees. And then we get the end of the story of the fig tree:
And in the morning, as they passed by, they saw the fig tree dried up from the roots.
And Peter calling to remembrance saith unto him, Master, behold, the fig tree which thou cursedst is withered away.
And Jesus answering saith unto them, Have faith in God.
For verily I say unto you, That whosoever shall say unto this mountain, Be thou removed, and be thou cast into the sea; and shall not doubt in his heart, but shall believe that those things which he saith shall come to pass; he shall have whatsoever he saith.”
So, here is a template for an inquiry into the Sources and Nature of Impatience. What is impatience? The above story has always been rather shocking to the pious, since patience is considered a virtue, and the exemplary son of God, Little Lord Fauntleroy on the cross, is supposed to display all the virtues and good table manners too. Instead, he here displays the spoiled behavior of a prince in a fairy tale or gossip column.
A few notes:
1. Interesting that impatience should be thought of as something secondary to patience – as though patience were our primary attitude to time and the resolution of our wants. That’s a rather utopian turn for the language to take. Is it justified? One shouldn’t take language’s word for the way the world is – a mistake that philosophers make who think the royal road to the conceptual is through the etymological. At no point in its history does a word have any more semantic power than it has at any other point – I take this as a given. Still, we can take the word’s word for it that, to our society, in the vulgar conceptual schemas which web us about, there is something derivative, on the face of it, about impatience. And this would seem to indicate that patience is the thing to research, to find out about, if we want to find out about impatience. That the normal state is patience. But is the normal state felt as patient? Don’t we become conscious of our patience only in those instances in which it is called upon?
2. Mark’s story begins with hunger. Jesus is hungry. There’s a clue here, about impatience. If it is a perceptual transformation of an underlying patience, what is the stimulus to that transformation? Surely hunger, lust, need – the sharp end of the passions, scaling up from my urgent desire to urinate to the more complex desire to bring to some resolution my sexual attraction to some x. Impatience, in fact, bears the slight impress of that ritualization it achieves in fucking that we can see it in the corporal dance of impatience – the tapping foot, or the repetition of various meaningless sounds – some people hum, some people whistle, some people sigh to show impatience. Also, the angularity and jerkiness that comes over people who have reached a certain expressive point in their impatience.
3. The next element in Mark’s narrative is elegant: “And seeing a fig tree afar off having leaves, he came, if haply he might find any thing thereon: and when he came to it, he found nothing but leaves; for the time of figs was not yet.”
It is not, Mark carefully notes, the fig tree’s “fault” that it bears no figs. It is a healthy tree, and the time of figs was not yet. In a country where figs are common, one would imagine that the season at which fig trees bear figs was known to every adult. But the time for each tree varies. In any case, having no figs, the tree presents itself not as a medium to satisfy hunger, but as an obstacle to the satisfaction of hunger.
Now, this is the great hallmark of impatience. The fig tree isn’t actually an obstacle. It is a tree. It has its times. But impatience is projective and transformative – the hunger becomes equal to the lack of figs, and the lack of figs becomes intentional. Among other things, when impatient, I make the objects in the world intentional. Which implies that patience is an acceptance of the non-intentionality of things. Incidentally, in terms of the narrative itself, there’s some cognitive dissonance in the moral Jesus draws from the withering of the fig tree. On the one hand, there is the undoubted reference to patience in believing – to believe that what one says shall come to pass is the prophetic function. Jonah waiting outside of Ninevah for the walls to tumble is a proverbial instance. It is the condition of the catastrophe foreseen by the prophet that he can await it. On the other hand, there is undoubtedly the magician subtext – the idea that you, too, can do tricks just as good if he follow what I say. This dissonance reflects, perhaps, the conflict between the instrumental time of need, and the prophetic time of patience. One is reminded that the story of the fig tree sandwiches the story of the throwing of the moneychangers out of the temple – a fatal act of impatience on Jesus’ part.
Well, enough sermonizing for one day.
First, to brag: We notice that Juan Cole today quietly proposed the analogy to Mehdi Bazargan we floated last week. Hey, LI is, in its own eccentric way, sometimes ahead of the game.
...
LI is growing increasingly snappy about the multitude of political imbecilities against which, as a citizen of the Leviathan, we have to strive. Mentally, at least. There was a meme on the ‘sphere a week or so ago about how liberals can express their love for America. Apparently, the thing to do at the moment is to find lyrical words to match the catch in the throat and the heart whenever Old Glory goes by. LI wants to know – how does America love us? We want a little return glow. We want America not to try to kill us, rob us, or send the cops and the taxmen to club us in order to extract the uber-tithe now demanded by the wealthy. There’s a certain battered wife pathology that comes out of all these liberal cries of amorous passion, like Olive Oil weeping for her Brutus.
The fact is, we don’t love America, and our creed is that love of country, in some utopian future, will attenuate to the vanishing point throughout the world. It is the usual Imagine-Lennon-hippie-shit thing. However, we do like America. Like it since our bones and gristle formed here, our heart first went thud thud thud here, our tongue shapes English as only an American can, and we could no more imagine ourselves exiting in this world without America than we could imagine ourselves existing without oxygen. We would like America even more if a few changes were made around here…
So – to hook up by such awkwardly indirect means to an earlier post – we were talking about how Chekhov’s The Duel explained something about Lenin. We never exactly explained what we meant. This post is still going to differ the moment of interpretation, because we want to first say philosophical things about our snappishness. Or, more generally, about impatience. To leap frog ahead, there’s a certain politics of impatience that was all over European culture in the first quarter of the twentieth century. And we’ve noticed that impatience has become our own primary mode of understanding American politics under the current regime.
Now, onto Mark 11.
.....................................................................................
Advertisement
(Thanks to Gadflybuzz for carrying this advertisement)
Check out RWG Communications.
We charge a competitive rate for content and copy editing, proofing, indexing, and translating. We specialize in humanities and the social sciences. We have, in the past four months, completed a diverse array of projects including:
-- substantive editing of a book on process ontology;
-- substantive editing of a monograph on migration in Argentina;
-- substantive editing of an article on Paul Ricoeur;
-- substantive editing of an article on nominalism in mathematical philosophy;
-- substantive editing of a conference paper on scientific realism; and
-- translation of a turn of the century Austrian linguist whose work on speech errors was used by Freud.
We translate from German and French into English. We have developed successful relationships with Swiss, Danish and German academics. Scholars for whom English is a second language are urged to consider our services. We deliver ASAP for those on short deadlines for conference papers, articles, or chapters.
Write rgathman@netzero.net for details.
End Advertisement
..................................................................................……………
A little exegetical work, here. In Mark 11, we are told of Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem. This is interwoven with a story that is seemingly minor and rather shocking – it seems to have been interpolated from a book about a sorcerer, since it recounts something that is more like a magic trick than a miracle. But it was noted. The Gospels are many things, but one thing they aren’t is garrulous. What is noted there is significant.
Jesus, then, is hungry. “… seeing a fig tree afar off having leaves, he came, if haply he might find any thing thereon: and when he came to it, he found nothing but leaves; for the time of figs was not yet.
And Jesus answered and said unto it, No man eat fruit of thee hereafter for ever.”
Another story then is told: Jesus going to Jerusalem and throwing the moneychangers out of the temple. He leaves the city, then, with the author implying that he felt some threat from the Pharisees. And then we get the end of the story of the fig tree:
And in the morning, as they passed by, they saw the fig tree dried up from the roots.
And Peter calling to remembrance saith unto him, Master, behold, the fig tree which thou cursedst is withered away.
And Jesus answering saith unto them, Have faith in God.
For verily I say unto you, That whosoever shall say unto this mountain, Be thou removed, and be thou cast into the sea; and shall not doubt in his heart, but shall believe that those things which he saith shall come to pass; he shall have whatsoever he saith.”
So, here is a template for an inquiry into the Sources and Nature of Impatience. What is impatience? The above story has always been rather shocking to the pious, since patience is considered a virtue, and the exemplary son of God, Little Lord Fauntleroy on the cross, is supposed to display all the virtues and good table manners too. Instead, he here displays the spoiled behavior of a prince in a fairy tale or gossip column.
A few notes:
1. Interesting that impatience should be thought of as something secondary to patience – as though patience were our primary attitude to time and the resolution of our wants. That’s a rather utopian turn for the language to take. Is it justified? One shouldn’t take language’s word for the way the world is – a mistake that philosophers make who think the royal road to the conceptual is through the etymological. At no point in its history does a word have any more semantic power than it has at any other point – I take this as a given. Still, we can take the word’s word for it that, to our society, in the vulgar conceptual schemas which web us about, there is something derivative, on the face of it, about impatience. And this would seem to indicate that patience is the thing to research, to find out about, if we want to find out about impatience. That the normal state is patience. But is the normal state felt as patient? Don’t we become conscious of our patience only in those instances in which it is called upon?
2. Mark’s story begins with hunger. Jesus is hungry. There’s a clue here, about impatience. If it is a perceptual transformation of an underlying patience, what is the stimulus to that transformation? Surely hunger, lust, need – the sharp end of the passions, scaling up from my urgent desire to urinate to the more complex desire to bring to some resolution my sexual attraction to some x. Impatience, in fact, bears the slight impress of that ritualization it achieves in fucking that we can see it in the corporal dance of impatience – the tapping foot, or the repetition of various meaningless sounds – some people hum, some people whistle, some people sigh to show impatience. Also, the angularity and jerkiness that comes over people who have reached a certain expressive point in their impatience.
3. The next element in Mark’s narrative is elegant: “And seeing a fig tree afar off having leaves, he came, if haply he might find any thing thereon: and when he came to it, he found nothing but leaves; for the time of figs was not yet.”
It is not, Mark carefully notes, the fig tree’s “fault” that it bears no figs. It is a healthy tree, and the time of figs was not yet. In a country where figs are common, one would imagine that the season at which fig trees bear figs was known to every adult. But the time for each tree varies. In any case, having no figs, the tree presents itself not as a medium to satisfy hunger, but as an obstacle to the satisfaction of hunger.
Now, this is the great hallmark of impatience. The fig tree isn’t actually an obstacle. It is a tree. It has its times. But impatience is projective and transformative – the hunger becomes equal to the lack of figs, and the lack of figs becomes intentional. Among other things, when impatient, I make the objects in the world intentional. Which implies that patience is an acceptance of the non-intentionality of things. Incidentally, in terms of the narrative itself, there’s some cognitive dissonance in the moral Jesus draws from the withering of the fig tree. On the one hand, there is the undoubted reference to patience in believing – to believe that what one says shall come to pass is the prophetic function. Jonah waiting outside of Ninevah for the walls to tumble is a proverbial instance. It is the condition of the catastrophe foreseen by the prophet that he can await it. On the other hand, there is undoubtedly the magician subtext – the idea that you, too, can do tricks just as good if he follow what I say. This dissonance reflects, perhaps, the conflict between the instrumental time of need, and the prophetic time of patience. One is reminded that the story of the fig tree sandwiches the story of the throwing of the moneychangers out of the temple – a fatal act of impatience on Jesus’ part.
Well, enough sermonizing for one day.
Tuesday, February 15, 2005
Anthropology alert
Those who are interested in the everyday life of the average red state citizen should read this New York Times story about an upstanding Republican D.A. in Texas. See him prosecute drug users. See him inject himself with methamphetamine before his secretary. See his secretary turn him into the feds. See his ex-wife, interviewed at the Yellow Rose in Dallas, tell of finding crack, cocaine, marijuana and various other drugs around the house or in the barn during their Christian marriage to each other. See how his drug use, alcoholism, and racism were known before he was elected to the D.A. position. Here’s a swatch of dialogue that is pure Bush culture:
“Four years later Mr. Roach [the D.A.] beat Mr. Mann by 6 votes in a Republican primary marred by charges of fraud, and then beat him again - by 21 votes - after a court ordered a new election. He went on to win the general election.
Mr. Mann said the voters were chiefly swayed by Mr. Roach's highly popular family, particularly his stepfather, Weldon Trice, a beloved high school football coach.
Mrs. Roach said their lives slid badly downhill in late 2003. She found glass smoking or snorting implements, foil packets with a burn hole, and white powder and a razor blade in their barn and spied on her husband sniffing something.
Mr. Roach said of his downfall, "It just presented itself."
He said that in July 2004 he had come across a glass pipe that Texas troopers had overlooked in searching a seized car. "A girl called it a crack pipe, so I assumed there was crack in it," he said. He took it home. "I happened to be having a bad day, so I smoked it in the barn," he said.”
And talking about those bad days – how about those projected deficits? The WP had a cute story about what it will take, when Bush leaves office in 2009, to mitigate the effects of having poured some trillion into the pockets of the pirate class, aka the rich and the super-rich, looted the social security system, destroyed environmental protection, and of course engaged in the mass murder of Iraqis and the correlative murder of some thousands of American soldiers. It turns out that these fine things cost more than pocket change
“If Congress were to pass Bush's Social Security plan and permanently extend his tax cuts, the budget deficit would bottom out at $251 billion in 2008, then climb steadily to $335 billion by 2015, according to an analysis by The Washington Post and the House Budget Committee's Democratic staff. Those figures assume, however, that Bush will secure all of his proposed spending cuts, that he will need no more emergency war spending and that there will be no changes to the alternative minimum tax, which Bush and other politicians want to rewrite to keep it from affecting more middle-class families in coming years. The AMT originally was designed to make sure wealthy people couldn't avoid paying some taxes.
With a fix to the AMT, deficits in a decade would likely reach $650 billion to $700 billion, said Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.). "The days of being everything to everybody are quickly coming to a close," he said, adding that a permanent extension of the Bush tax cuts would make it politically impossible to borrow the full cost of a Social Security fix. "We have to look at the deficit in a holistic way."
Not factoring in the cost of the war is decent of them – but you know, when you throw a barbecue, you have to buy the steaks. So throw in an extra 200 billion, and you do get a cool trillion deficit. That is a thing of beauty in itself. The question is: will the free ride be over? For the swarming imbeciles who inhabit the red states, itchy to vote for any Christian jihadist to come along, have experienced that sweetness of life that comes with buying binges at the mall and repeated viewings of The Passion, the pills from the internet and the spiritual advice from the infomercial which makes up their inner and outer lives up to now. They have their maxed out credit cards and their tax refunds and their medicare and their social security coming together in a nice harmonic convergence, keeping the housing activity bubbling in suburban Atlanta and Birmingham, and providing the comfortable conditions in which they can take time off and debate the real questions, like designing a school curriculum to maximize the cretinization of their children. However, will the Goths be waking up, in a few years, to discover that the good times are over? And what will they do, since they do control the government and will for the foreseeable future?
This is something blue state progressives should take seriously. Now is the time to slash taxes on the federal level; to radically lower Fica, to make sure that nobody in America who makes under one hundred thousand dollars is sending more than five to ten percent of that money to the Federal Government. Time to wake up and shift the onus of taxation to the states, since we see what the bozos in the Federal Government are doing and will be doing with that money, and it is nothing progressive. We see the Niagra ahead, and the ship of state, aka le bateau ivre, heading for it.
Mostly likely, there will be no waking up, and we will go over the edge with the milksap Dems wringing their hands and talking about moral values. However, lets try to be optimistic and envision, from Massachussetts to California, the blue states setting up their own social welfare networks, unplugging from the Snopes. Yes, let the Goths hunker down in their uncouth conclaves to untangle the knots of creationism, as is their wont, while their odious representatives in Washington make sure that they become, en masse, indentured servants of the credit card companies. The South has always had a fondness for indentured servitude...
Those who are interested in the everyday life of the average red state citizen should read this New York Times story about an upstanding Republican D.A. in Texas. See him prosecute drug users. See him inject himself with methamphetamine before his secretary. See his secretary turn him into the feds. See his ex-wife, interviewed at the Yellow Rose in Dallas, tell of finding crack, cocaine, marijuana and various other drugs around the house or in the barn during their Christian marriage to each other. See how his drug use, alcoholism, and racism were known before he was elected to the D.A. position. Here’s a swatch of dialogue that is pure Bush culture:
“Four years later Mr. Roach [the D.A.] beat Mr. Mann by 6 votes in a Republican primary marred by charges of fraud, and then beat him again - by 21 votes - after a court ordered a new election. He went on to win the general election.
Mr. Mann said the voters were chiefly swayed by Mr. Roach's highly popular family, particularly his stepfather, Weldon Trice, a beloved high school football coach.
Mrs. Roach said their lives slid badly downhill in late 2003. She found glass smoking or snorting implements, foil packets with a burn hole, and white powder and a razor blade in their barn and spied on her husband sniffing something.
Mr. Roach said of his downfall, "It just presented itself."
He said that in July 2004 he had come across a glass pipe that Texas troopers had overlooked in searching a seized car. "A girl called it a crack pipe, so I assumed there was crack in it," he said. He took it home. "I happened to be having a bad day, so I smoked it in the barn," he said.”
And talking about those bad days – how about those projected deficits? The WP had a cute story about what it will take, when Bush leaves office in 2009, to mitigate the effects of having poured some trillion into the pockets of the pirate class, aka the rich and the super-rich, looted the social security system, destroyed environmental protection, and of course engaged in the mass murder of Iraqis and the correlative murder of some thousands of American soldiers. It turns out that these fine things cost more than pocket change
“If Congress were to pass Bush's Social Security plan and permanently extend his tax cuts, the budget deficit would bottom out at $251 billion in 2008, then climb steadily to $335 billion by 2015, according to an analysis by The Washington Post and the House Budget Committee's Democratic staff. Those figures assume, however, that Bush will secure all of his proposed spending cuts, that he will need no more emergency war spending and that there will be no changes to the alternative minimum tax, which Bush and other politicians want to rewrite to keep it from affecting more middle-class families in coming years. The AMT originally was designed to make sure wealthy people couldn't avoid paying some taxes.
With a fix to the AMT, deficits in a decade would likely reach $650 billion to $700 billion, said Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.). "The days of being everything to everybody are quickly coming to a close," he said, adding that a permanent extension of the Bush tax cuts would make it politically impossible to borrow the full cost of a Social Security fix. "We have to look at the deficit in a holistic way."
Not factoring in the cost of the war is decent of them – but you know, when you throw a barbecue, you have to buy the steaks. So throw in an extra 200 billion, and you do get a cool trillion deficit. That is a thing of beauty in itself. The question is: will the free ride be over? For the swarming imbeciles who inhabit the red states, itchy to vote for any Christian jihadist to come along, have experienced that sweetness of life that comes with buying binges at the mall and repeated viewings of The Passion, the pills from the internet and the spiritual advice from the infomercial which makes up their inner and outer lives up to now. They have their maxed out credit cards and their tax refunds and their medicare and their social security coming together in a nice harmonic convergence, keeping the housing activity bubbling in suburban Atlanta and Birmingham, and providing the comfortable conditions in which they can take time off and debate the real questions, like designing a school curriculum to maximize the cretinization of their children. However, will the Goths be waking up, in a few years, to discover that the good times are over? And what will they do, since they do control the government and will for the foreseeable future?
This is something blue state progressives should take seriously. Now is the time to slash taxes on the federal level; to radically lower Fica, to make sure that nobody in America who makes under one hundred thousand dollars is sending more than five to ten percent of that money to the Federal Government. Time to wake up and shift the onus of taxation to the states, since we see what the bozos in the Federal Government are doing and will be doing with that money, and it is nothing progressive. We see the Niagra ahead, and the ship of state, aka le bateau ivre, heading for it.
Mostly likely, there will be no waking up, and we will go over the edge with the milksap Dems wringing their hands and talking about moral values. However, lets try to be optimistic and envision, from Massachussetts to California, the blue states setting up their own social welfare networks, unplugging from the Snopes. Yes, let the Goths hunker down in their uncouth conclaves to untangle the knots of creationism, as is their wont, while their odious representatives in Washington make sure that they become, en masse, indentured servants of the credit card companies. The South has always had a fondness for indentured servitude...
Monday, February 14, 2005
On the lynching front…
Since lynching academics seems to be all the rage in the 'sphere right now, we've found a deserving object: Berkeley law professor John C. Yoo. Why? Yoo didn’t make any little speeches to demonstrators. No, Yoo made himself responsible for electroshock, sleep deprivation, electrodes to the genitals – the standard American advice to rightwing death squads in the seventies and eighties. Yes, Yoo worked in the White House on normalizing torture. What was that phrase about little Eichmanns that is being bandied about? Here are some choice bits from the New Yorker story:
“The Bush Administration’s redefinition of the standards of interrogation took place almost entirely out of public view. One of the first officials to offer hints of the shift in approach was Cofer Black, who was then in charge of counter-terrorism at the C.I.A. On September 26, 2002, he addressed the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, and stated that the arrest and detention of terrorists was “a very highly classified area.” He added, “All you need to know is that there was a ‘before 9/11’ and there was an ‘after 9/11.’ After 9/11, the gloves came off.”
Laying the foundation for this shift was a now famous set of internal legal memos—some were leaked, others were made public by groups such as the N.Y.U. Center for Law and National Security. Most of these documents were generated by a small, hawkish group of politically appointed lawyers in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel and in the office of Alberto Gonzales, the White House counsel. Chief among the authors was John C. Yoo, the deputy assistant attorney general at the time. (A Yale Law School graduate and a former clerk to Justice Clarence Thomas, Yoo now teaches law at Berkeley.) Taken together, the memos advised the President that he had almost unfettered latitude in his prosecution of the war on terror. For many years, Yoo was a member of the Federalist Society, a fellowship of conservative intellectuals who view international law with skepticism, and September 11th offered an opportunity for him and others in the Administration to put their political ideas into practice. ...
Soon after September 11th, Yoo and other Administration lawyers began advising President Bush that he did not have to comply with the Geneva Conventions in handling detainees in the war on terror...
"The State Department, determined to uphold the Geneva Conventions, fought against Bush’s lawyers and lost. In a forty-page memo to Yoo, dated January 11, 2002 (which has not been publicly released), William Taft IV, the State Department legal adviser, argued that Yoo’s analysis was “seriously flawed.” Taft told Yoo that his contention that the President could disregard the Geneva Conventions was “untenable,” “incorrect,” and “confused.” Taft disputed Yoo’s argument that Afghanistan, as a “failed state,” was not covered by the Conventions. “The official United States position before, during, and after the emergence of the Taliban was that Afghanistan constituted a state,” he wrote. Taft also warned Yoo that if the U.S. took the war on terrorism outside the Geneva Conventions, not only could U.S. soldiers be denied the protections of the Conventions—and therefore be prosecuted for crimes, including murder—but President Bush could be accused of a “grave breach” by other countries, and be prosecuted for war crimes. Taft sent a copy of his memo to Gonzales, hoping that his dissent would reach the President. Within days, Yoo sent Taft a lengthy rebuttal.”
So, here’s a question: why is a man of such an odious moral character teaching at the University of California in Berkeley? Why isn’t this man properly shunned and ostracized? Where is CT, so eager to string up academics for immoral comments they make at rallies that are meaningless, when it comes to Yoo, whose freedom of speech had much more effect -- ask the detainees at Guantanamo Bay, or the people the U.S. outsourced to our torturing anti-democratic allies. Are the good folks at Berkeley going to hire some generals from Argentina next? Political science 101: getting rid of your opponents?
Here’s another tasty quote from the ever disgusting Comrade Yoo:
“Yoo also argued that the Constitution granted the President plenary powers to override the U.N. Convention Against Torture when he is acting in the nation’s defense—a position that has drawn dissent from many scholars. As Yoo saw it, Congress doesn’t have the power to “tie the President’s hands in regard to torture as an interrogation technique.” He continued, “It’s the core of the Commander-in-Chief function. They can’t prevent the President from ordering torture.” If the President were to abuse his powers as Commander-in-Chief, Yoo said, the constitutional remedy was impeachment. He went on to suggest that President Bush’s victory in the 2004 election, along with the relatively mild challenge to Gonzales mounted by the Democrats in Congress, was “proof that the debate is over.” He said, “The issue is dying out. The public has had its referendum.”
Thus spake the dregs.
Since lynching academics seems to be all the rage in the 'sphere right now, we've found a deserving object: Berkeley law professor John C. Yoo. Why? Yoo didn’t make any little speeches to demonstrators. No, Yoo made himself responsible for electroshock, sleep deprivation, electrodes to the genitals – the standard American advice to rightwing death squads in the seventies and eighties. Yes, Yoo worked in the White House on normalizing torture. What was that phrase about little Eichmanns that is being bandied about? Here are some choice bits from the New Yorker story:
“The Bush Administration’s redefinition of the standards of interrogation took place almost entirely out of public view. One of the first officials to offer hints of the shift in approach was Cofer Black, who was then in charge of counter-terrorism at the C.I.A. On September 26, 2002, he addressed the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, and stated that the arrest and detention of terrorists was “a very highly classified area.” He added, “All you need to know is that there was a ‘before 9/11’ and there was an ‘after 9/11.’ After 9/11, the gloves came off.”
Laying the foundation for this shift was a now famous set of internal legal memos—some were leaked, others were made public by groups such as the N.Y.U. Center for Law and National Security. Most of these documents were generated by a small, hawkish group of politically appointed lawyers in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel and in the office of Alberto Gonzales, the White House counsel. Chief among the authors was John C. Yoo, the deputy assistant attorney general at the time. (A Yale Law School graduate and a former clerk to Justice Clarence Thomas, Yoo now teaches law at Berkeley.) Taken together, the memos advised the President that he had almost unfettered latitude in his prosecution of the war on terror. For many years, Yoo was a member of the Federalist Society, a fellowship of conservative intellectuals who view international law with skepticism, and September 11th offered an opportunity for him and others in the Administration to put their political ideas into practice. ...
Soon after September 11th, Yoo and other Administration lawyers began advising President Bush that he did not have to comply with the Geneva Conventions in handling detainees in the war on terror...
"The State Department, determined to uphold the Geneva Conventions, fought against Bush’s lawyers and lost. In a forty-page memo to Yoo, dated January 11, 2002 (which has not been publicly released), William Taft IV, the State Department legal adviser, argued that Yoo’s analysis was “seriously flawed.” Taft told Yoo that his contention that the President could disregard the Geneva Conventions was “untenable,” “incorrect,” and “confused.” Taft disputed Yoo’s argument that Afghanistan, as a “failed state,” was not covered by the Conventions. “The official United States position before, during, and after the emergence of the Taliban was that Afghanistan constituted a state,” he wrote. Taft also warned Yoo that if the U.S. took the war on terrorism outside the Geneva Conventions, not only could U.S. soldiers be denied the protections of the Conventions—and therefore be prosecuted for crimes, including murder—but President Bush could be accused of a “grave breach” by other countries, and be prosecuted for war crimes. Taft sent a copy of his memo to Gonzales, hoping that his dissent would reach the President. Within days, Yoo sent Taft a lengthy rebuttal.”
So, here’s a question: why is a man of such an odious moral character teaching at the University of California in Berkeley? Why isn’t this man properly shunned and ostracized? Where is CT, so eager to string up academics for immoral comments they make at rallies that are meaningless, when it comes to Yoo, whose freedom of speech had much more effect -- ask the detainees at Guantanamo Bay, or the people the U.S. outsourced to our torturing anti-democratic allies. Are the good folks at Berkeley going to hire some generals from Argentina next? Political science 101: getting rid of your opponents?
Here’s another tasty quote from the ever disgusting Comrade Yoo:
“Yoo also argued that the Constitution granted the President plenary powers to override the U.N. Convention Against Torture when he is acting in the nation’s defense—a position that has drawn dissent from many scholars. As Yoo saw it, Congress doesn’t have the power to “tie the President’s hands in regard to torture as an interrogation technique.” He continued, “It’s the core of the Commander-in-Chief function. They can’t prevent the President from ordering torture.” If the President were to abuse his powers as Commander-in-Chief, Yoo said, the constitutional remedy was impeachment. He went on to suggest that President Bush’s victory in the 2004 election, along with the relatively mild challenge to Gonzales mounted by the Democrats in Congress, was “proof that the debate is over.” He said, “The issue is dying out. The public has had its referendum.”
Thus spake the dregs.
My friend, M., has been teaching a class in twentieth century history this winter. She is teaching a session on Lenin and the Russian Revolution this week.
This made LI daydream about how we’d teach Lenin.
LI thinks that we’d turn to Chekhov’s novella, The Duel, as a sort of exegetical parable to illuminate the cultural conditions that made Lenin possible. History, of course, tells us that Lenin was strictly inevitable, meaning that he is part of the core of fact through which history courses, and which makes its bed out of destroyed alternatives. The constitutive element of alternative histories is that they were destroyed by actual histories – to try to get around that is to revert to a revolting form of childishness, which is why philosophers who take possible worlds too seriously always exude a slight air of the idiot savant: Kripke and Lewis spring to mind.
There’s an article (Whom did the Devil Tempt, and Why?) in the Russian Social Science Review, by Vladimir Kantor, that revives the old Cold War notion that Dostoevsky mapped out the spirit of Bolshevism before it was actualized in fact. This reading sees Bolshevism and Marxism in general as a monstrous extension of Nechaev’s personality. That personality, in turn, arose out of the decay introduced by liberalism into the certainties of Christian civilization. When competition, instead of salvation, becomes a society’s master-trope, what happens? The American conservative answer is that salvation and competition can be reconciled, as the Lion lies down with the lamb, a la Edward Hicks “Peaceable Kingdom.” The conservative Russian answer is much grimmer.
We don’t dismiss either of these theses entirely, although we do think the bizarre nature of postwar American conservatism comes from the fact that both were held simultaneously by the core conservative intellectuals.
Kantor’s essay is strictly about The Brothers Karamazov. He wants to make two points:
1. “A close reading of The Brothers Karamazov will give us no difficulty in understanding that its nerve center, its basic motive force, is the endless temptations that all the novel’s characters experience—each on his own level, of course. Grushenka—the “temptress,” the “infernal” being,
as she is called in the novel—tempts old man Karamazov and Mitya and even Alyosha, when she sits on his knee (after the death of the Elder Zosima). Temptation comes to the Elder Zosima’s mysterious visitor and to Zosima himself (the duel). Mitya is tempted by Smerdyakov and Fyodor Pavlovitch to commit murder (Smerdyakov’s report of Grushenka’s visit to the old man, and the father’s insults to the memory of Mitya’s dead mother and the withholding of Mitya’s maternal inheritance). Ivan tempts
Alyosha with stories of suffering children, causing him to make the radically uncharacteristic statement that the perpetrator should be shot. Smerdyakov tempts the young Ilyusha, by persuading him to kill the dog Zhuchka. Grushenka is tempted by her love for her former lover. Katerina Ivanovna experiences a diabolical temptation, when, with the intention of saving Ivan, she destroys Mitya. Smerdyakov is tempted to use stolen money to open up a business in Petersburg. Finally, the one most beset by temptation is Ivan Karamazov, who is first tempted by the disorder in the world (working on the assumption that “this world” belongs to God, not to the Devil) and then is
directly tempted by Smerdyakov (who seeks his permission to commit patricide) and is treated to a personal visit from the Devil—the very same who, by the latter’s own admission, tempted believers with the odor of corruption that emanated from the corpse of the Elder Zosima. It is in Ivan’s poem that the Grand Inquisitor recalls how “the wise and mighty spirit in the wilderness” tempted Christ on three separate occasions. In fact, Christ’s three temptations create a kind of backdrop for the novel’s entire philosophical problem set.
Kantor’s second point (2) is to complicate the tradition, running through the Russian conservative tradition, which sees Ivan as the spiritual double of Smerdyakov. In this tradition, Ivan is the endpoint of the intellectual collapse into nihilism that produced Lenin. But Kantor builds another case, built upon the meaning of temptation itself. He quotes the dialogue of Ivan and the Devil:
“So the only ones who can be tempted are the righteous, the seekers after a higher, spiritual, moral life. Even the Devil expatiates on this subject. Ivan asks his uninvited nocturnal guest: “Fool! did you ever tempt those holy men who ate locusts and prayed seventeen years in the wilderness till they were overgrown with moss?” And he receives this reply: “My dear fellow, I’ve done nothing else. One forgets the whole world and all the worlds, and sticks to one such saint, because he is a very precious diamond. One such soul, you know, is sometimes worth a whole constellation. We have our system of reckoning, you know. The conquest is priceless! And some of them, on my word, are [no less developed than you], though you won’t believe it. They can contemplate such depths of belief and disbelief at the same moment that sometimes it really seems that they are within a hair-breadth of being ‘turned upside down,’”
Kantor wants to complicate Ivan in order to complicate the picture of a decadent intelligentsia that has become conventional wisdom in the conservative response to Bolshevism. This image was taken over, wholesale, by the American right, where it happily merged with the right’s paranoid style.
We will say more about this, and The Duel, in our next post.
PS -- As our link to the review of Kantor's book shows, deviations from the Cold War image of Dostoevsky are treated summarily as Marxist -- as though any form of "socialism" immediately reduces to Marxism. So much for the triumph of the merger of salvation and competition in the American mindset.
This made LI daydream about how we’d teach Lenin.
LI thinks that we’d turn to Chekhov’s novella, The Duel, as a sort of exegetical parable to illuminate the cultural conditions that made Lenin possible. History, of course, tells us that Lenin was strictly inevitable, meaning that he is part of the core of fact through which history courses, and which makes its bed out of destroyed alternatives. The constitutive element of alternative histories is that they were destroyed by actual histories – to try to get around that is to revert to a revolting form of childishness, which is why philosophers who take possible worlds too seriously always exude a slight air of the idiot savant: Kripke and Lewis spring to mind.
There’s an article (Whom did the Devil Tempt, and Why?) in the Russian Social Science Review, by Vladimir Kantor, that revives the old Cold War notion that Dostoevsky mapped out the spirit of Bolshevism before it was actualized in fact. This reading sees Bolshevism and Marxism in general as a monstrous extension of Nechaev’s personality. That personality, in turn, arose out of the decay introduced by liberalism into the certainties of Christian civilization. When competition, instead of salvation, becomes a society’s master-trope, what happens? The American conservative answer is that salvation and competition can be reconciled, as the Lion lies down with the lamb, a la Edward Hicks “Peaceable Kingdom.” The conservative Russian answer is much grimmer.
We don’t dismiss either of these theses entirely, although we do think the bizarre nature of postwar American conservatism comes from the fact that both were held simultaneously by the core conservative intellectuals.
Kantor’s essay is strictly about The Brothers Karamazov. He wants to make two points:
1. “A close reading of The Brothers Karamazov will give us no difficulty in understanding that its nerve center, its basic motive force, is the endless temptations that all the novel’s characters experience—each on his own level, of course. Grushenka—the “temptress,” the “infernal” being,
as she is called in the novel—tempts old man Karamazov and Mitya and even Alyosha, when she sits on his knee (after the death of the Elder Zosima). Temptation comes to the Elder Zosima’s mysterious visitor and to Zosima himself (the duel). Mitya is tempted by Smerdyakov and Fyodor Pavlovitch to commit murder (Smerdyakov’s report of Grushenka’s visit to the old man, and the father’s insults to the memory of Mitya’s dead mother and the withholding of Mitya’s maternal inheritance). Ivan tempts
Alyosha with stories of suffering children, causing him to make the radically uncharacteristic statement that the perpetrator should be shot. Smerdyakov tempts the young Ilyusha, by persuading him to kill the dog Zhuchka. Grushenka is tempted by her love for her former lover. Katerina Ivanovna experiences a diabolical temptation, when, with the intention of saving Ivan, she destroys Mitya. Smerdyakov is tempted to use stolen money to open up a business in Petersburg. Finally, the one most beset by temptation is Ivan Karamazov, who is first tempted by the disorder in the world (working on the assumption that “this world” belongs to God, not to the Devil) and then is
directly tempted by Smerdyakov (who seeks his permission to commit patricide) and is treated to a personal visit from the Devil—the very same who, by the latter’s own admission, tempted believers with the odor of corruption that emanated from the corpse of the Elder Zosima. It is in Ivan’s poem that the Grand Inquisitor recalls how “the wise and mighty spirit in the wilderness” tempted Christ on three separate occasions. In fact, Christ’s three temptations create a kind of backdrop for the novel’s entire philosophical problem set.
Kantor’s second point (2) is to complicate the tradition, running through the Russian conservative tradition, which sees Ivan as the spiritual double of Smerdyakov. In this tradition, Ivan is the endpoint of the intellectual collapse into nihilism that produced Lenin. But Kantor builds another case, built upon the meaning of temptation itself. He quotes the dialogue of Ivan and the Devil:
“So the only ones who can be tempted are the righteous, the seekers after a higher, spiritual, moral life. Even the Devil expatiates on this subject. Ivan asks his uninvited nocturnal guest: “Fool! did you ever tempt those holy men who ate locusts and prayed seventeen years in the wilderness till they were overgrown with moss?” And he receives this reply: “My dear fellow, I’ve done nothing else. One forgets the whole world and all the worlds, and sticks to one such saint, because he is a very precious diamond. One such soul, you know, is sometimes worth a whole constellation. We have our system of reckoning, you know. The conquest is priceless! And some of them, on my word, are [no less developed than you], though you won’t believe it. They can contemplate such depths of belief and disbelief at the same moment that sometimes it really seems that they are within a hair-breadth of being ‘turned upside down,’”
Kantor wants to complicate Ivan in order to complicate the picture of a decadent intelligentsia that has become conventional wisdom in the conservative response to Bolshevism. This image was taken over, wholesale, by the American right, where it happily merged with the right’s paranoid style.
We will say more about this, and The Duel, in our next post.
PS -- As our link to the review of Kantor's book shows, deviations from the Cold War image of Dostoevsky are treated summarily as Marxist -- as though any form of "socialism" immediately reduces to Marxism. So much for the triumph of the merger of salvation and competition in the American mindset.
Saturday, February 12, 2005
Metaphysical absence
Lately, the star blogs we usually visit – mostly political/cultural ones – have been seriously mired in the dog days. CT has taken to two irritating habits. One is bullying Ward Churchill, who owes his entire leftist celebrity to the rabidity of the right and who has therefore been taken as a token target by the soft left – condemn this man and you are “serious” – even though, really, our only stake here is to express our distaste for lynch mobs. The second CT habit is responding in outrage to the Instaborg. Here, the who cares widens into an abyss of yawns – the number of discursive objects greater than that of being outraged by the Instaborg is surely one of those Greek letter constants that signifies the number of molecules in the universe times the number of possible moves a player could make in a chess game.
Then there is the outbreak of demystifying some faux journalist/GOP activist who operated as a ringer in the White House press corps – a funny idea in itself. A ringer among that collection of saps and duds? Haven’t they plentifully demonstrated the ability to self-ring over the past four years? Who can forget the fake press conference in which Bush, with a frat boy arrogance, “slipped” by saying that the questions were fixed in advance? Surely some GOP operative is putting icing on a sugar cube.
As for the newspapers – they have struck us as rather uninteresting lately, too. We expected the Narrative to start up about Iraq. It hasn’t, partly because the Narrative is so far from reality that even the Washington Post, which has always taken a Pravda like tone of shrill approval to any adventure the White House sees fit to throw lives away on, has had a hard time fitting a jingo attitude of approval to the coming Islamic state. It is rather like forking into a slice of chocolate cake and striking a bone. The etiquette book doesn’t have an entry for such moments. The new conservative mantra – that we should be pleased as punch to have started a civil war in Iraq – is a little too raw, as yet, for the WP editorial board – the search for a less intrusively honest vocabulary is ongoing.
So – is LI just going through a Mallarme moment (La chair est triste, hélas ! et j’ai lu tous les livres.)? Perhaps. Still, we think that there truly is something flat in the atmosphere right now.
Turn instead to an article by Paul De Palma entitled “why you can’t understand your computer” in the Winter American Scholar.
The first two grafs tell you: this is going to be a good essay. We like that assured feeling, the being grabbed and held, even if it isn't by the trembling hand of the Ancient Mariner but by the Old Scout in the bar, the veteran of business wars.
“On a bright winter morning in Philadelphia, in 1986, my downtown office is bathed in sunlight. I am the lead programmer for a software system that my firm intends to sell to the largest companies in the country, but like so many systems, mine will never make it to market. This will not surprise me. If the chief architect of the office tower on whose twenty-sixth floor I am sitting designed his structure with the seat-of-the-pants cleverness that I am using to design my system, prudence would advise that I pack my business-issue briefcase, put on my business-issue overcoat, say good-bye to all that sunlight, and head for the front door before the building crumbles like a Turkish high-rise in an earthquake.
But I am not prudent; nor am I paid to be. Just the opposite. My body, on automatic pilot, deflects nearly all external stimuli. I can carry on a rudimentary conversation, but my mind is somewhere else altogether. In a book-length profile of Ted Taylor, a nuclear-weapons designer, that John McPhee wrote for The New Yorker, Dr. Taylor's wife tells McPhee a wonderful story about her husband. Mrs. Taylor's sister visits for the weekend. Taylor dines with her, passes her in the hall, converses. He asks his wife on Monday morning--her sister having left the day before--when she expects her sister to arrive. Mrs. Taylor calls this state "metaphysical absence." You don't have to build sophisticated weaponry to experience it. When my daughter was younger, she used to mimic an old John Prine song. "Oh my stars," she sang, "Daddy's gone to Mars." As you will see, we workaday programmers have more in common with weapons designers than mere metaphysical absence.”
.....................................................................................
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-- substantive editing of a book on process ontology;
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-- substantive editing of an article on Paul Ricoeur;
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..................................................................................……………………………………..
So far, so good. Since we recently wrestled with an MSoftquake – anybody with a PC is living on a fault line composed entirely of cheap, sloppy coding brought to you by Bill Gates company, and our Windows was briefly destroyed by a minor rumble a few weeks ago -- we are vitally interested in de Palma’s topic. Plus, the literature of the programmer is growing, and there are some pretty good things in it: Mark Costello’s “If” of a few years back, and Ellen Ullman’s The Bug (anything by Ellen Ullman) are two that we particularly like to press on people.
De Palma quotes an IBM study that goes to the heart of his subject:
“People often claim that one of every three large-scale software systems gets canceled midproject. Of those that do make it out the door, three-quarters are never implemented: some do not work as intended; others are just shelved. Matters grow even more serious with large systems whose functions spread over several computers--the very systems that advances in networking technology have made possible in the past decade. A few years ago, an IBM consulting group determined that of twenty-four companies surveyed, 55 percent built systems that were over budget; 68 percent built systems that were behind schedule; and 88 percent of the completed systems had to be redesigned. Try to imagine the same kind of gloomy numbers for civil engineering: three-quarters of all bridges carrying loads below specification; almost nine of ten sewage treatment plants, once completed, in need of redesign; one-third of highway projects canceled because technical problems have grown beyond the capacity of engineers to solve them. Silly? Yes. Programming has miles to go before it earns the title "software engineering."
But are we going to give away De Palma’s explanation for these depressing stats? No. This is one of those pointer posts. Get the American Scholar. We like the journal in spite of the fact that the one review we did for them was, apparently, so despised by the current editor that we have a snowball’s chance in hell of writing for her again. So it goes.
Lately, the star blogs we usually visit – mostly political/cultural ones – have been seriously mired in the dog days. CT has taken to two irritating habits. One is bullying Ward Churchill, who owes his entire leftist celebrity to the rabidity of the right and who has therefore been taken as a token target by the soft left – condemn this man and you are “serious” – even though, really, our only stake here is to express our distaste for lynch mobs. The second CT habit is responding in outrage to the Instaborg. Here, the who cares widens into an abyss of yawns – the number of discursive objects greater than that of being outraged by the Instaborg is surely one of those Greek letter constants that signifies the number of molecules in the universe times the number of possible moves a player could make in a chess game.
Then there is the outbreak of demystifying some faux journalist/GOP activist who operated as a ringer in the White House press corps – a funny idea in itself. A ringer among that collection of saps and duds? Haven’t they plentifully demonstrated the ability to self-ring over the past four years? Who can forget the fake press conference in which Bush, with a frat boy arrogance, “slipped” by saying that the questions were fixed in advance? Surely some GOP operative is putting icing on a sugar cube.
As for the newspapers – they have struck us as rather uninteresting lately, too. We expected the Narrative to start up about Iraq. It hasn’t, partly because the Narrative is so far from reality that even the Washington Post, which has always taken a Pravda like tone of shrill approval to any adventure the White House sees fit to throw lives away on, has had a hard time fitting a jingo attitude of approval to the coming Islamic state. It is rather like forking into a slice of chocolate cake and striking a bone. The etiquette book doesn’t have an entry for such moments. The new conservative mantra – that we should be pleased as punch to have started a civil war in Iraq – is a little too raw, as yet, for the WP editorial board – the search for a less intrusively honest vocabulary is ongoing.
So – is LI just going through a Mallarme moment (La chair est triste, hélas ! et j’ai lu tous les livres.)? Perhaps. Still, we think that there truly is something flat in the atmosphere right now.
Turn instead to an article by Paul De Palma entitled “why you can’t understand your computer” in the Winter American Scholar.
The first two grafs tell you: this is going to be a good essay. We like that assured feeling, the being grabbed and held, even if it isn't by the trembling hand of the Ancient Mariner but by the Old Scout in the bar, the veteran of business wars.
“On a bright winter morning in Philadelphia, in 1986, my downtown office is bathed in sunlight. I am the lead programmer for a software system that my firm intends to sell to the largest companies in the country, but like so many systems, mine will never make it to market. This will not surprise me. If the chief architect of the office tower on whose twenty-sixth floor I am sitting designed his structure with the seat-of-the-pants cleverness that I am using to design my system, prudence would advise that I pack my business-issue briefcase, put on my business-issue overcoat, say good-bye to all that sunlight, and head for the front door before the building crumbles like a Turkish high-rise in an earthquake.
But I am not prudent; nor am I paid to be. Just the opposite. My body, on automatic pilot, deflects nearly all external stimuli. I can carry on a rudimentary conversation, but my mind is somewhere else altogether. In a book-length profile of Ted Taylor, a nuclear-weapons designer, that John McPhee wrote for The New Yorker, Dr. Taylor's wife tells McPhee a wonderful story about her husband. Mrs. Taylor's sister visits for the weekend. Taylor dines with her, passes her in the hall, converses. He asks his wife on Monday morning--her sister having left the day before--when she expects her sister to arrive. Mrs. Taylor calls this state "metaphysical absence." You don't have to build sophisticated weaponry to experience it. When my daughter was younger, she used to mimic an old John Prine song. "Oh my stars," she sang, "Daddy's gone to Mars." As you will see, we workaday programmers have more in common with weapons designers than mere metaphysical absence.”
.....................................................................................
Advertisement
Check out RWG Communications.
We charge a competitive rate for content and copy editing, proofing, indexing, and translating. We specialize in humanities and the social sciences. We have, in the past four months, completed a diverse array of projects including:
-- substantive editing of a book on process ontology;
-- substantive editing of a monograph on migration in Argentina;
-- substantive editing of an article on Paul Ricoeur;
-- substantive editing of an article on nominalism in mathematical philosophy;
-- substantive editing of a conference paper on scientific realism; and
-- translation of a turn of the century Austrian linguist whose work on speech errors was used by Freud.
We translate from German and French into English. We have developed successful relationships with Swiss, Danish and German academics. Scholars for whom English is a second language are urged to consider our services. We deliver ASAP for those on short deadlines for conference papers, articles, or chapters.
Write rgathman@netzero.net for details.
End Advertisement
..................................................................................……………………………………..
So far, so good. Since we recently wrestled with an MSoftquake – anybody with a PC is living on a fault line composed entirely of cheap, sloppy coding brought to you by Bill Gates company, and our Windows was briefly destroyed by a minor rumble a few weeks ago -- we are vitally interested in de Palma’s topic. Plus, the literature of the programmer is growing, and there are some pretty good things in it: Mark Costello’s “If” of a few years back, and Ellen Ullman’s The Bug (anything by Ellen Ullman) are two that we particularly like to press on people.
De Palma quotes an IBM study that goes to the heart of his subject:
“People often claim that one of every three large-scale software systems gets canceled midproject. Of those that do make it out the door, three-quarters are never implemented: some do not work as intended; others are just shelved. Matters grow even more serious with large systems whose functions spread over several computers--the very systems that advances in networking technology have made possible in the past decade. A few years ago, an IBM consulting group determined that of twenty-four companies surveyed, 55 percent built systems that were over budget; 68 percent built systems that were behind schedule; and 88 percent of the completed systems had to be redesigned. Try to imagine the same kind of gloomy numbers for civil engineering: three-quarters of all bridges carrying loads below specification; almost nine of ten sewage treatment plants, once completed, in need of redesign; one-third of highway projects canceled because technical problems have grown beyond the capacity of engineers to solve them. Silly? Yes. Programming has miles to go before it earns the title "software engineering."
But are we going to give away De Palma’s explanation for these depressing stats? No. This is one of those pointer posts. Get the American Scholar. We like the journal in spite of the fact that the one review we did for them was, apparently, so despised by the current editor that we have a snowball’s chance in hell of writing for her again. So it goes.
Friday, February 11, 2005
Before the law
I’ve been having great fun, lately, reading The House by the Medlar Tree – as Verga’s I Malvoglio is translated. Verga, like most European novelists of the late nineteenth century, seemed to have received Zola as a total shock to the system. In England, Zola didn’t have quite the same effect – the English merely thought he was dirty. Dreiser, in America, did take hints from Zola, but Dreiser probably read him in English. In other countries, though – in Portugal, Spain and Italy – the Zola effect was pervasive. It would be fair to say, I think, that there was only one other novelist in the nineteenth century who exerted a similar international attraction – Walter Scott.
.....................................................................................
Advertisement
We charge a competitive rate for content and copy editing, proofing, indexing, and translating. We specialize in humanities and the social sciences. We have, in the past four months, completed a diverse array of projects including:
-- substantive editing of a book on process ontology;
-- substantive editing of a monograph on migration in Argentina;
-- substantive editing of an article on Paul Ricoeur;
-- substantive editing of an article on nominalism in mathematical philosophy;
-- substantive editing of a conference paper on scientific realism; and
-- translation of a turn of the century Austrian linguist whose work on speech errors was used by Freud.
We translate from German and French into English. We have developed successful relationships with Swiss, Danish and German academics. Scholars for whom English is a second language are urged to consider our services. We deliver ASAP for those on short deadlines for conference papers, articles, or chapters.
write rgathman@netzero.net
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....................................................................................
According to Giovanni Cecchetti, who wrote the introduction to the edition I’m reading, there’s a clear divide between Verga’s early works – which Cecchetti implies are so much milquetoast – and the Sicilian novels, or which The House by the Medlar Tree is, I think, the most famous. In his preface, Verga wrote:
“This story is the sincere and dispassionate study of how the first anxious desires for material well-being must probably originate and develop in the humblest social conditions, and of the perturbations caused to a family, which had until then lived in relative happiness.”
Well, that immediately attracts a reader such as myself, whose days and ways are filled with the anxieties occasioned by the desire for material well being. It is the hopeless war of the flies caught in the webs of the spiders against the spiders intent on eating the flies. The spiders, we know, will win – we know it inside and outside the book.
In this case, the Malvoglio family, fishermen who own their own boat, make a fatal decision. The head of the household, Master ‘Ntoni, decides to buy a boatload of lupins and sell them in a larger town, where they would be shipped to Trieste. He gets the lupins on credit extended by the town’s moneylender. The lupins – a bean I have never tasted – are half rotten, it turns out. But they must be shipped. Unfortunately, the Malvoglio boat, which is being run by one of the sons and a hired man, goes down. And so begins the tale. As I’ve pointed out in other posts, many of the great European novels use money as a form of time. This is time as urgency – time as worry. This gives a particular coloring to the standard three-fold temporal modalities (past-present-future ) in that it sets agents and objects in a ‘race’ against each other. In the case of the Malvoglios, the rhythm that they are used to, which is seasonal, is peculiarly unsuited to the rhythm of their debt, which is legal. The comic-tragic part of the story is that, essentially, the Malvoglios don’t understand their debt. They don’t understand either its temporality or its extent. The legal extent of the debt is delimited by the fact that the two asset the Malvoglio’s hold – their house – are under dotal mortgage – that is, they are legally secured to the daughter, who has them as the major parts of her dowry. So the moneylender, in a sense, should be the ultimate loser.
However, the moneylender, “Uncle” Crocifisso, keeps insisting to old man Malvoglio that he will take the house. In order to increase the pressure, the moneylender pretends to sell the debt to Piedipappera, a village notable. Malivoglio, assaulted by both the moneylender and the apparent holder of the debt, goes to a lawyer with his whole family.
This is a wonderful scene. The lawyer looks at Malvoglio’s paperwork.
‘At last, after he’d read the papers and managed to understand something from the muddled answers which he had to pull out of Master ‘Ntoni with a pair of tongs while the others sat on the edge of their chairs, not daring to open their mouths, the lawyer began laughing heartily and they all laughed with him, without knowing why, just to ease their anguish. “Nothing,’ said the lawyer. “Nothing, that’s what you must do.” And since Master ‘Ntoni repeated that the bailiff had come, the lawyer said: “let the bailiff come even once a day. If he does, the creditor will soon tire of paying for the expenses. They won’t be able to take anything away from you, because the house is dotal…Your daughter-in-law had nothing to do with the purchase of the lupins.”
The lawyer went on talking for more than twenty-five lire’s worth, without even stopping to spit or scratch his head, so that Mater ‘Ntoni and his grandsons suddenly itched to speak too, to blurt out their whole beautiful defense which they could feel swelling in their heads; and they felt dazed, overwhelmed by all those arguments which they now possessed, and all the way home they went over and over the lawyer’s speech, gestures and all.”
So they get home, and explain to Maruzza (Master Ntoni’s daughter-in-law) that they owe nothing.
‘We won’t pay Uncle Crocifisso anything,” added ‘Ntoni [Master ‘Ntoni’s son] recklessly. “Because he can’t take the house of the Provvidenza… We don’t owe him anything.”
‘And the lupins?”
“That’s true. What about the lupins?” repeated Master Ntoni.
‘The lupins… We didn’t eat his lupins, we don’t have them in our pockets, and so Uncle Crocifisso can’t take a thing from us, the lawyer said so, he’ll just lose his money for the expenses.”
At this there was a long moment of silence; but Maruzza didn’t seem convinced.
“So he said not to pay>”
‘Ntoni scratched his head, and his grandfather said: “that’s true, he did give us the lupins, and we must pay for them.”
There was nothing to say to that. Now that the lawyer was no longer there, they had to pay for the lupins.”
I love this scene partly because it is an exact description of the encounter between the various forms of discourse that have been invented within the legal and economic matrix and the popular discourse of property, which is primitively moral and superstitious. In fact, having worked for lawyers, I’ve witnessed the effect of legal speech: the initial hope of the client, the leaning forward, the repetition of various words, and the almost visible evaporation of understanding that occurs when “the lawyer was no longer there.” One of the great tools of governance, actually, is the ability to couch the desires of the governors in a language of purposive inscrutability so that it produces this sequence: an immediate, simulacrum effect of understanding, followed by a consequent evaporation of it.
.
I’ve been having great fun, lately, reading The House by the Medlar Tree – as Verga’s I Malvoglio is translated. Verga, like most European novelists of the late nineteenth century, seemed to have received Zola as a total shock to the system. In England, Zola didn’t have quite the same effect – the English merely thought he was dirty. Dreiser, in America, did take hints from Zola, but Dreiser probably read him in English. In other countries, though – in Portugal, Spain and Italy – the Zola effect was pervasive. It would be fair to say, I think, that there was only one other novelist in the nineteenth century who exerted a similar international attraction – Walter Scott.
.....................................................................................
Advertisement
We charge a competitive rate for content and copy editing, proofing, indexing, and translating. We specialize in humanities and the social sciences. We have, in the past four months, completed a diverse array of projects including:
-- substantive editing of a book on process ontology;
-- substantive editing of a monograph on migration in Argentina;
-- substantive editing of an article on Paul Ricoeur;
-- substantive editing of an article on nominalism in mathematical philosophy;
-- substantive editing of a conference paper on scientific realism; and
-- translation of a turn of the century Austrian linguist whose work on speech errors was used by Freud.
We translate from German and French into English. We have developed successful relationships with Swiss, Danish and German academics. Scholars for whom English is a second language are urged to consider our services. We deliver ASAP for those on short deadlines for conference papers, articles, or chapters.
write rgathman@netzero.net
End Advertisement
....................................................................................
According to Giovanni Cecchetti, who wrote the introduction to the edition I’m reading, there’s a clear divide between Verga’s early works – which Cecchetti implies are so much milquetoast – and the Sicilian novels, or which The House by the Medlar Tree is, I think, the most famous. In his preface, Verga wrote:
“This story is the sincere and dispassionate study of how the first anxious desires for material well-being must probably originate and develop in the humblest social conditions, and of the perturbations caused to a family, which had until then lived in relative happiness.”
Well, that immediately attracts a reader such as myself, whose days and ways are filled with the anxieties occasioned by the desire for material well being. It is the hopeless war of the flies caught in the webs of the spiders against the spiders intent on eating the flies. The spiders, we know, will win – we know it inside and outside the book.
In this case, the Malvoglio family, fishermen who own their own boat, make a fatal decision. The head of the household, Master ‘Ntoni, decides to buy a boatload of lupins and sell them in a larger town, where they would be shipped to Trieste. He gets the lupins on credit extended by the town’s moneylender. The lupins – a bean I have never tasted – are half rotten, it turns out. But they must be shipped. Unfortunately, the Malvoglio boat, which is being run by one of the sons and a hired man, goes down. And so begins the tale. As I’ve pointed out in other posts, many of the great European novels use money as a form of time. This is time as urgency – time as worry. This gives a particular coloring to the standard three-fold temporal modalities (past-present-future ) in that it sets agents and objects in a ‘race’ against each other. In the case of the Malvoglios, the rhythm that they are used to, which is seasonal, is peculiarly unsuited to the rhythm of their debt, which is legal. The comic-tragic part of the story is that, essentially, the Malvoglios don’t understand their debt. They don’t understand either its temporality or its extent. The legal extent of the debt is delimited by the fact that the two asset the Malvoglio’s hold – their house – are under dotal mortgage – that is, they are legally secured to the daughter, who has them as the major parts of her dowry. So the moneylender, in a sense, should be the ultimate loser.
However, the moneylender, “Uncle” Crocifisso, keeps insisting to old man Malvoglio that he will take the house. In order to increase the pressure, the moneylender pretends to sell the debt to Piedipappera, a village notable. Malivoglio, assaulted by both the moneylender and the apparent holder of the debt, goes to a lawyer with his whole family.
This is a wonderful scene. The lawyer looks at Malvoglio’s paperwork.
‘At last, after he’d read the papers and managed to understand something from the muddled answers which he had to pull out of Master ‘Ntoni with a pair of tongs while the others sat on the edge of their chairs, not daring to open their mouths, the lawyer began laughing heartily and they all laughed with him, without knowing why, just to ease their anguish. “Nothing,’ said the lawyer. “Nothing, that’s what you must do.” And since Master ‘Ntoni repeated that the bailiff had come, the lawyer said: “let the bailiff come even once a day. If he does, the creditor will soon tire of paying for the expenses. They won’t be able to take anything away from you, because the house is dotal…Your daughter-in-law had nothing to do with the purchase of the lupins.”
The lawyer went on talking for more than twenty-five lire’s worth, without even stopping to spit or scratch his head, so that Mater ‘Ntoni and his grandsons suddenly itched to speak too, to blurt out their whole beautiful defense which they could feel swelling in their heads; and they felt dazed, overwhelmed by all those arguments which they now possessed, and all the way home they went over and over the lawyer’s speech, gestures and all.”
So they get home, and explain to Maruzza (Master Ntoni’s daughter-in-law) that they owe nothing.
‘We won’t pay Uncle Crocifisso anything,” added ‘Ntoni [Master ‘Ntoni’s son] recklessly. “Because he can’t take the house of the Provvidenza… We don’t owe him anything.”
‘And the lupins?”
“That’s true. What about the lupins?” repeated Master Ntoni.
‘The lupins… We didn’t eat his lupins, we don’t have them in our pockets, and so Uncle Crocifisso can’t take a thing from us, the lawyer said so, he’ll just lose his money for the expenses.”
At this there was a long moment of silence; but Maruzza didn’t seem convinced.
“So he said not to pay>”
‘Ntoni scratched his head, and his grandfather said: “that’s true, he did give us the lupins, and we must pay for them.”
There was nothing to say to that. Now that the lawyer was no longer there, they had to pay for the lupins.”
I love this scene partly because it is an exact description of the encounter between the various forms of discourse that have been invented within the legal and economic matrix and the popular discourse of property, which is primitively moral and superstitious. In fact, having worked for lawyers, I’ve witnessed the effect of legal speech: the initial hope of the client, the leaning forward, the repetition of various words, and the almost visible evaporation of understanding that occurs when “the lawyer was no longer there.” One of the great tools of governance, actually, is the ability to couch the desires of the governors in a language of purposive inscrutability so that it produces this sequence: an immediate, simulacrum effect of understanding, followed by a consequent evaporation of it.
.
Thursday, February 10, 2005
“They’ve put a knife in my hand, but it is a knife with only a handle; others are holding the blade.” – Mehdi Bazargan, interview with Oriana Fallaci, 1979
LI’s friend Mr. Craddick implied a bit of an objection to LI’s use of booboisie in yesterday’s post. Indeed, LI, recently, has tended towards the sarcastic – or, as our brother likes to say, ‘sour-castic.’
But it would tax a saint to read stories such as this one, by NYT’s fan of all things occupation, Dexter Filkins, without feeling the sullen throb of dark humors.
.....................................................................................
Advertisement
We charge a competitive rate for content and copy editing, proofing, indexing, and translating. We specialize in humanities and the social sciences. We have, in the past four months, completed a diverse array of projects including:
-- substantive editing of a book on process ontology;
-- substantive editing of a monograph on migration in Argentina;
-- substantive editing of an article on Paul Ricoeur;
-- substantive editing of an article on nominalism in mathematical philosophy;
-- substantive editing of a conference paper on scientific realism; and
-- translation of a turn of the century Austrian linguist whose work on speech errors was used by Freud.
We translate from German and French into English. We have developed successful relationships with Swiss, Danish and German academics. Scholars for whom English is a second language are urged to consider our services. We deliver ASAP for those on short deadlines for conference papers, articles, or chapters.
write rgathman@netzero.net
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....................................................................................
Shiite Offers Secular Vision of Iraq Future
By DEXTER FILKINS
Published: February 10, 2005
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Feb. 9 - Adel Abdul Mahdi, one of the leading candidates to become the new Iraqi prime minister, recalled the day last year when he and other Iraqi leaders were summoned to the holy city of Najaf by the country's senior Shiite clerics.
The topic was the role of Islam in the new Iraqi state. Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the country's most powerful Shiite leader, questioned whether Mr. Mahdi and the others, members of the American-appointed Iraqi Governing Council, had the legitimacy to draft an interim constitution.
"You were not elected," Ayatollah Sistani told the group.
Mr. Mahdi says he did not hesitate to answer.
"You were not elected," he told the ayatollah.
With that, Mr. Mahdi and the others returned to the capital and drafted an interim constitution intended to govern Iraqi for the next year, naming Islam as a source, but not the only source, of legislation.”
Uh, this story is so inane that it is hard to know where to start. It takes a man with a truly petrified sense of humor to praise the Governing Council for their independence. And to brag about bandying words with Sistani, without whom Mahdi's party would be plugging a distant fifth for dogcatcher in Kamchatka is hilarious, a bubble gum anecdote for the consumption of American reporters. However, it is perfectly tailored for the Narrative. This is what it will be, at least until events crumble it irretrievably.
Via Matt Yglesias’ site, yestersay, we went to Brad Plumer’s site. We liked the site. Plumer makes a nice series of comparisons between the constitutional order that emerged in Iran after 1979 and the order emerging in Iraq. Here is what Plumer has to say:
“First, some context. When we say Iran is ruled by clerics, let's not kid ourselves, this doesn't mean that a few middling clerics are placed in powerful positions and have access to key security forces. There's that, sure, but the government really is explicitly set up as a clerical-run affair from start to finish. Originally the Supreme Leader was to be a high-ranking cleric, but Khomeini downgraded this requirement when he could find no acceptable successor save for the poorly-qualified Ali Khamene'i, who is currently Supreme Leader. But it's clerics everywhere else.”
The contrast is, of course, with Sistani’s repeated statement that he doesn’t seek political office, and the submerging of the clerics in the United Iraqi Alliance. So far, so good. But since Plumer is interpreting the power to govern according to the ostensible rules about governance, his view, in our opinion, of the history of struggle that produces the power to govern is distorted. In other words, LI believes that an essential dialectical step is missing from Plumer’s account – and it is that missing step which distorts the reporting of Dexter Filkins as well. The rules, here, don’t precede the rulers. This is what is characteristic of a revolutionary moment.
If we make a comparison between Khomenei’s rhetoric, in 78 and 79, to the rhetoric emanating from the UIA, there is a rather eerie similarity.
We looked up an old article from Foreign Affairs by a French correspondent, Eric Rouleau, about “the peculiar sort of political blindness” that afflicted the West with regard to Iran during the revolution. Rouleau astutely points out that the power of the clerics in Shi’a culture seems to exist in direct proportion to the advances of foreign power upon that culture:
Thus by the beginning of the 19th century, Shi’ism emerged as a kind of early anti-imperialism movement. In 1826, the ulemas declaired a holy war against Russia. Three years later they had the members of the official delegation from St. Petersburg assassinated. They brought about the cancellation of the incredible monopoly for the exploitation of mines, forests, railroads, banks, customs and telegraphic communications granted to BARON Julius de Reuter in 1872. Their 1891 prohibition on tobacco consumption – largely observed by the population – led to the withdrawal of the tobacco monopoly accorded the previous year to a certain Mr. Talbot. Part of the clery actively participated in the 1906 revolution aimed at establishing a constitutional regime. They did so not in the name of democracy –a Western notion they abhorred even then – but to better control a Royal power which favored Euuropean penetration.”
If we look at Sistani’s role during the occupation, he seems to have been very much in this tradition, with the substituting of a constraint on American power for European penetration. This isn’t to say that what happened in Iran in 1979 is analogous to what is happening in Iraq, simply that there are some similar elements, and a similar rhetoric – in particular, the elevation of secular and Western acceptable political figures by the UIA is pretty close to the strategy of Khomeini, who explicitly said that clerics shouldn’t run for office, before he returned to Iran, and who set himself up as an advisor away from the capital city in the same way Sistani has set himself up as an advisor away from the capital city.
In Iran, there was a succession of secular figures who derived their support from factors independent of Khomeini. Bani-Sadr, before being elected president, had this to say about the division between the clerics and the state:
Bani-Sadr has clearly taken a stand for the separation of powers and the non-interferenceof the clergy in affairs of state, to the point of deriding “the Richelieus and Mazarins who crowd theIranian political scne.” Just after his election ot the presidency, he told the writer that he owed his “victory to the people,’ before adding that he thanked “the lower clergy for its support.” the higher clergy, for him, is that which supports the Islamic Republic Party of Ayatollah Beheshti, his bitter enemy.
On the morrow of his election, Bani-Sadr proclaimed Ayatollah Beheshti “politically dead.’ His optimism did not seem unfounded at the time. Ayatollah Beheshti had just suffered three important setbacks: he had wanted to be a candidate in the presidential elections, but Imam Khomeini had forbidden religious leaders to seek this office…”
Indeed, Mahdi seems to be setting himself up as a Bani-Sadr -- arrogance being the vice of secularism.
This history is cautionary, rather than predictive. However, there is no caution in the American press, and no room for any narrative but the one which puts American pre-suppositions at the center of history. If there is one thing LI takes for granted, it is that the I is not at the center of the Other’s history. In this, we are, perhaps, un-American.
We were reading George Santayana yesterday and came across a passage that describes, exactly, the waking life of the American “booboisie” upon which LI has, pettily, poured the vials of our sour-casm:
“… we may try aesthetic categoris and allow our reproductive imagination – by which memory is fed – to bring under the unity of apperception only what can fall within it harmoniously, completely, and delightfully. Such an understanding, impervious to anything but the beautiful, might be a fine thing in itself, but would not chronicle the fortunes of that organism to which it was attached. It would yield an experience – doubtless a highly interesting and elaborate experience – but one which could never serve as an index of successful action. It would totally fail to represent its conditions, and consequently would imply nothing about its continued existence. It would be an experience irrelevant to conduct, no part, therefore, of a Life of Reason, but a kind of vapid music or parasitic dream.”
Ah, what an exact description of the state of mind of the governing classes in the U.S.A., circa 2005.
LI’s friend Mr. Craddick implied a bit of an objection to LI’s use of booboisie in yesterday’s post. Indeed, LI, recently, has tended towards the sarcastic – or, as our brother likes to say, ‘sour-castic.’
But it would tax a saint to read stories such as this one, by NYT’s fan of all things occupation, Dexter Filkins, without feeling the sullen throb of dark humors.
.....................................................................................
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Shiite Offers Secular Vision of Iraq Future
By DEXTER FILKINS
Published: February 10, 2005
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Feb. 9 - Adel Abdul Mahdi, one of the leading candidates to become the new Iraqi prime minister, recalled the day last year when he and other Iraqi leaders were summoned to the holy city of Najaf by the country's senior Shiite clerics.
The topic was the role of Islam in the new Iraqi state. Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the country's most powerful Shiite leader, questioned whether Mr. Mahdi and the others, members of the American-appointed Iraqi Governing Council, had the legitimacy to draft an interim constitution.
"You were not elected," Ayatollah Sistani told the group.
Mr. Mahdi says he did not hesitate to answer.
"You were not elected," he told the ayatollah.
With that, Mr. Mahdi and the others returned to the capital and drafted an interim constitution intended to govern Iraqi for the next year, naming Islam as a source, but not the only source, of legislation.”
Uh, this story is so inane that it is hard to know where to start. It takes a man with a truly petrified sense of humor to praise the Governing Council for their independence. And to brag about bandying words with Sistani, without whom Mahdi's party would be plugging a distant fifth for dogcatcher in Kamchatka is hilarious, a bubble gum anecdote for the consumption of American reporters. However, it is perfectly tailored for the Narrative. This is what it will be, at least until events crumble it irretrievably.
Via Matt Yglesias’ site, yestersay, we went to Brad Plumer’s site. We liked the site. Plumer makes a nice series of comparisons between the constitutional order that emerged in Iran after 1979 and the order emerging in Iraq. Here is what Plumer has to say:
“First, some context. When we say Iran is ruled by clerics, let's not kid ourselves, this doesn't mean that a few middling clerics are placed in powerful positions and have access to key security forces. There's that, sure, but the government really is explicitly set up as a clerical-run affair from start to finish. Originally the Supreme Leader was to be a high-ranking cleric, but Khomeini downgraded this requirement when he could find no acceptable successor save for the poorly-qualified Ali Khamene'i, who is currently Supreme Leader. But it's clerics everywhere else.”
The contrast is, of course, with Sistani’s repeated statement that he doesn’t seek political office, and the submerging of the clerics in the United Iraqi Alliance. So far, so good. But since Plumer is interpreting the power to govern according to the ostensible rules about governance, his view, in our opinion, of the history of struggle that produces the power to govern is distorted. In other words, LI believes that an essential dialectical step is missing from Plumer’s account – and it is that missing step which distorts the reporting of Dexter Filkins as well. The rules, here, don’t precede the rulers. This is what is characteristic of a revolutionary moment.
If we make a comparison between Khomenei’s rhetoric, in 78 and 79, to the rhetoric emanating from the UIA, there is a rather eerie similarity.
We looked up an old article from Foreign Affairs by a French correspondent, Eric Rouleau, about “the peculiar sort of political blindness” that afflicted the West with regard to Iran during the revolution. Rouleau astutely points out that the power of the clerics in Shi’a culture seems to exist in direct proportion to the advances of foreign power upon that culture:
Thus by the beginning of the 19th century, Shi’ism emerged as a kind of early anti-imperialism movement. In 1826, the ulemas declaired a holy war against Russia. Three years later they had the members of the official delegation from St. Petersburg assassinated. They brought about the cancellation of the incredible monopoly for the exploitation of mines, forests, railroads, banks, customs and telegraphic communications granted to BARON Julius de Reuter in 1872. Their 1891 prohibition on tobacco consumption – largely observed by the population – led to the withdrawal of the tobacco monopoly accorded the previous year to a certain Mr. Talbot. Part of the clery actively participated in the 1906 revolution aimed at establishing a constitutional regime. They did so not in the name of democracy –a Western notion they abhorred even then – but to better control a Royal power which favored Euuropean penetration.”
If we look at Sistani’s role during the occupation, he seems to have been very much in this tradition, with the substituting of a constraint on American power for European penetration. This isn’t to say that what happened in Iran in 1979 is analogous to what is happening in Iraq, simply that there are some similar elements, and a similar rhetoric – in particular, the elevation of secular and Western acceptable political figures by the UIA is pretty close to the strategy of Khomeini, who explicitly said that clerics shouldn’t run for office, before he returned to Iran, and who set himself up as an advisor away from the capital city in the same way Sistani has set himself up as an advisor away from the capital city.
In Iran, there was a succession of secular figures who derived their support from factors independent of Khomeini. Bani-Sadr, before being elected president, had this to say about the division between the clerics and the state:
Bani-Sadr has clearly taken a stand for the separation of powers and the non-interferenceof the clergy in affairs of state, to the point of deriding “the Richelieus and Mazarins who crowd theIranian political scne.” Just after his election ot the presidency, he told the writer that he owed his “victory to the people,’ before adding that he thanked “the lower clergy for its support.” the higher clergy, for him, is that which supports the Islamic Republic Party of Ayatollah Beheshti, his bitter enemy.
On the morrow of his election, Bani-Sadr proclaimed Ayatollah Beheshti “politically dead.’ His optimism did not seem unfounded at the time. Ayatollah Beheshti had just suffered three important setbacks: he had wanted to be a candidate in the presidential elections, but Imam Khomeini had forbidden religious leaders to seek this office…”
Indeed, Mahdi seems to be setting himself up as a Bani-Sadr -- arrogance being the vice of secularism.
This history is cautionary, rather than predictive. However, there is no caution in the American press, and no room for any narrative but the one which puts American pre-suppositions at the center of history. If there is one thing LI takes for granted, it is that the I is not at the center of the Other’s history. In this, we are, perhaps, un-American.
We were reading George Santayana yesterday and came across a passage that describes, exactly, the waking life of the American “booboisie” upon which LI has, pettily, poured the vials of our sour-casm:
“… we may try aesthetic categoris and allow our reproductive imagination – by which memory is fed – to bring under the unity of apperception only what can fall within it harmoniously, completely, and delightfully. Such an understanding, impervious to anything but the beautiful, might be a fine thing in itself, but would not chronicle the fortunes of that organism to which it was attached. It would yield an experience – doubtless a highly interesting and elaborate experience – but one which could never serve as an index of successful action. It would totally fail to represent its conditions, and consequently would imply nothing about its continued existence. It would be an experience irrelevant to conduct, no part, therefore, of a Life of Reason, but a kind of vapid music or parasitic dream.”
Ah, what an exact description of the state of mind of the governing classes in the U.S.A., circa 2005.
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