Blake's sweet bird

LI’s friend and neverfailing antipode, Paul Craddick, recently threw himself into a defense of Nietzsche on the Maverick Philosopher site. While Paul and Mr. MP disagreed, they both exhibited a dislike for perspectivism. At least, Paul seems to think that emphasizing perspectivism in the body of Nietzsche’s work exaggerates a feature of it:

“I'm sure we'll have occasion to clash again when you write on "perspectivism," because I'm not convinced that the weight of N's work supports the radically perspectival interpretation; or, at least, I'm not sure if one can make an ultimately satisfying case for him definitively holding to either perspectivism or some perspective-centric realism.”

Here at LI, we are ardent perspectivists. So we thought we’d wile away a Saturday post making a few comments.

….

We aren’t going to make an exhaustive survey of perspectivisms past and present. Leibniz is, famously, the inventor of the most ingenious reconciliation of rationalism and perspectivism, in the course of which he invented a sort of modal philosophy. However, this is perspectivism at the baroque end of the Christian apologetic – proving, at least, that there is nothing inherently revolutionary about all varieties of perspectivism. Or even nihilistic.

Enlightenment thinkers were almost all, by an instinctive bias, relativists. Montesquieu’s emphasis on the differences geography and climate make to fundamental features of subjectivity – and the sort of playdo subject favored by the Empiricists – were all derived from the Enlightenment project of reconciling the system of the world as they supposed it conceived by Newton with the political project of justifying the organization of liberties in the commonwealth. It was an immense straddle. One can look at its liberating effects insofar as it created, in Europe, a tolerant sensibility and a lively bourgeois public sphere – or one can look at how easily that relativism could generate apologies for slaveholding, and the attendant and ultimately poisonous pseudo-sciences of race that Lichtenberg percipiently mocked in his letter on physiognomy, when he attacks Lavater’s claim that a Newton could never be born among the “hideous” looking blacks and Moors: "What! exclaims the Physiognomist--could the soul of Newton inhabit the skull of a Negro? an angelic mind dwell in a hideous form?-Unmeaning jargon! the declamation of a child.” Interestingly, the 'science' of race tended towards an absolute pole, abjuring the materialist inclination to relativism that gave it birth. From Lavater there is only a small step towards Gobineau’s remark that the white European is “objectively” the most beautiful racial subgroup. Gobineau, like any editor of the Weekly Standard, then pours scorn on the relativists who claim that there is no objective standard of beauty.

So much for background. LI’s perspectivism is a descendent of the line that goes from Blake to Nietzsche.

In the age of Bush, the Christian right is busy trying to keep Darwin out of the hot little hands of the youth. They should, instead, concentrate on Blake’s “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.” Once your fourteen year old reads that, he is gone – soon he’s wearing leather pants and learning to play an electric guitar. As for the abstinence pledge – forget it.

No discussion of perspectivism should neglect Blakes’ couplet:

“How do you know but ev'ry Bird that cuts the airy way,
Is an immense World of Delight, clos'd by your senses five?”

We already know that Delight is a special word for Blake. In The Voice of the Devil section, Blake writes:

“All Bibles or sacred codes have been the causes of the following Errors:--
1. That Man has two real existing principles, viz. a Body and a Soul.
2. That Energy, call'd Evil, is alone from the Body; and that Reason, call'd Good, is alone from the Soul.
3. That God will torment Man in Eternity for following his Energies.
But the following Contraries to these are True:--
1. Man has no Body distinct from his Soul; for that call'd Body is a portion of Soul discern'd by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age.
2. Energy is the only life, and is from the Body; and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy.
3. Energy is Eternal Delight.”

Reason, in Blake’s terms, has a positional essence – it is a formal thing, rather as it is in Kant -- although Kant comes to that formalism much more reluctantly. As the bound of energy, or eternal delight, Reason both participates in and negates life. This, at least, in its proper place. But in the Bibles or sacred codes, Reason is set up as something more than a bound – it is set up as a separate essence, independent of energy. This is the great fiction of oppression – that Reason is life. Since it is, in fact, the bound set on energy, according to Blake, the Life of Reason is death in life, and the God that torments those who follow their energies is the God that lives off death.

Blake, of course, did not see this as the opposite of Jesus’ teachings – quite the opposite. The great renewal, the life more abundant, the life without the law (that fulfilled the law), was what Jesus was striving for. And of course, before his eyes he saw the Kingdom of Heaven in full revolt -- he saw Jesus' successors in the Jacobins, and the dance around the liberty tree.

This is the vocabulary in which Blake’s couplet is couched.

Let’s not extend this post for pages about Blake. LI wants to cite one other passage – this from the preface to Beyond Good and Evil – and then, tomorrow, we will construct our sense of perspectivism.

Nietzsche’s work, since Nehamas’s book in the eighties, has been viewed as the great exemplar of perspectival thinking. That sense of Nietzsche makes its stand on passages like the following:

Let’s not be ungrateful to them [Platonism and the Vedanta philosophy], even as it must also certainly be confessed, that the worst, most boring and dangerous of all mistakes up to now has been a Dogmatic mistake, namely, Plato’s invention of the pure mind [Geiste] and of the good in itself. But now, where it has been overcome, where Europe breathes out from this nightmare and at least enjoys a healthier … sleep – here we are, whose task is the awaking itself, the inheritance of all the force which the struggle against this error has bred [grossgezüchtet]. This meant standing Truth on its head and denying the perspectival, the fundamental condition of all life, in order to speak of minds and of the good as Plato has done; yes, one might ask, as a doctor would, how did this disease attack the most gorgeous animal [Gewächse] of antiquity, Plato? was he really corrupted by the evil Socrates? Was Socrates, in fact, a corruptor of the youth? and did he deserve his hemlock? But the struggle against Plato, or, in order to say it more intelligibly, and vulgarly, the struggle against the force of the Christian-churchly for millennia – because Christianity is Platonism for the people – has created in Europe a splendid tension of the intellect [Spannung des Geistes] as there has never before been on Earth; with such a taut bow, one can now shoot the furthest goal.”

Gratitude and struggle are the things we will be picking out of that quotation, in order to show that the mistake often made by critics of perspectivism is to presuppose that the perspective is stable, that it is pre-given, that it is perfectly defined. In fact, quantifying over perspectives is tremendously difficult – it is the same kind of difficulty encountered when quantifying over events. In our opinion, the mistake is shared by those who claim to be perspectivists, when they come out with the moral rule that one cannot judge another perspective or -- perspective's stand in - culture. They take that rule right out of their ... non-thinking quarters. It shows a fundamental misunderstanding of what Blake's bird knows.

But more on this tomorrow. It is time to get to work around here.

Good news

Notes to our readers.

First, this was up almost all day before LI noticed that Blogger had done it again. Lately, every time we put a text in Blogger, it rumbles it around like a demonic washing machine and puts holes in it. It will take out a sentence there, a paragraph elsewhere, and leave the impression, among our readers, that LI has a serious drinking problem.

Well, we do have a serious drinking problem. But not that serious.

So, this incomprehensible post was supposed to be, one, about Mexico, and two, about the ivory billed woodpecker. Let's go to two first. Here's the story in the nyt science section:

"The ivory-billed woodpecker, a magnificent bird long given up for extinct, has been sighted in the cypress and tupelo swamp of the Cache River National Wildlife Refuge here in Arkansas, scientists announced Thursday.
Bird experts, government agencies and conservation organizations involved kept the discovery secret for more than a year, while they worked to confirm the discovery and protect the bird's territory. Their announcement on Thursday brought rejoicing among birdwatchers, for whom the ivory bill has long been a holy grail - a creature that has been called the Lord God bird, apparently because that is what people exclaimed when they saw it."

That I would live to see this day. LI, Jr. -- if you can imagine such a beast -- used to dream over reproductions of Audobon prints the way Keats dreamed over Chapman's Homer. Now we are holding our breath for the Carolina Parakeet.

In other news:

Our correspondent in Mexico City, who can’t stand Vicente Fox (and reminded us, in her last email, that we consistently misspell his name as ‘Vincente’), was nevertheless impressed with the TV address in which Fox, for all intents and purposes, backed down, firing his Attorney General. Fox may well have been astonished by the controversy that ensued when he organized the desafuerta of Lopez Obrador. On the regional level, PAN-PRI cooperation to block the PRD is standard operating procedure. Fox’s own idea of democracy might well have so accepted that parameter as to feel wounded and astonished when his own support for democracy was questioned in the aftermath of implementing it on a national level. We will see how events unfold.

Okay. If blogger mangles this, I'll have somebody's guts for garters.

Gulliver's Double

There’s a tradition in the literature about Gulliver’s Travel that extracts the Lockean Gull in Gulliver. The argument goes back to a very fine essay by W. B. Carnochan entitled, Gulliver’s Travels: An Essay on the Human Understanding?

Carnochan’s argument is straightforward: “Lemuel Gulliver, like the mad projector of the Modest Proposal, appears to be a version of the Lockean man.” Carnochan is probably on solid ground in thinking that the perceptual changes on which Swift plays like a jazz xylophonist are suggested by Locke’s theory that the human mind is shaped by sensation – ideas themselves being the end product of an experience that begins
externally (mysterious as that beginning may be) with the encounter of a sense instrument and an object. As is well known, this theory leads elsewhere in the empirical tradition – that moment of non-experience hardening into a thing that can’t be, logically, experienced, meaning that the perceived object must be usurped by the philosopher and put in the mind – some mind. Berkeley suggested God’s. This is a theory that a writer like Swift is bound to squeeze all the absurdities out of. Which is why Denis Donoghue takes the Lockean suggestion one step further,
and claims that what we are seeing, in Gulliver’s Travels, is how easily the Lockean subject falls prey to the Stockholm syndrome. He is continually captured, and continually acclimated so to the point of view of his captors that he begins to adopt it. Historically, there's also warrant for this -
Swift lived in a time when English men and women were always getting captured, by Moors, Indians and other heathen, and were continually shocking their countrymen by converting to pagan or Islamic ways.
In other words, Gulliver’s typical peripeteia is that of a man who goes from one ‘brainwashing” to another – and he gets to it by going through funk, animal fear, and his own tradesman’s capacity for fawning, with the power of the mind, here, being wholly in the power of the powers that be.

Donoghue’s thesis seems to explain a larger pattern in Gulliver’s Travels, until one notices that Gulliver seems much too aware of his brainwashing to be merely one of the brainwashed. At least in the Lilliput section, where Gulliver is critical enough of thread dancing and the like. He is not, however, critical of titles – and no matter how small the Liliputians are, the emperor carries a title as big as Louis XIV’s.

To my mind, the way to get a-hold of Gulliver is to see him as the double of M.B. Drapier.

In the first Drapier letter, the narrator (who is, after all, a fiction) says this:

“I will therefore first tell you the plain story of the fact; and then I will lay before you how you ought to act in common prudence, and according to the laws of your country.”

This is in the clear as water style of Gulliver himself. And yet, Drapier’s
letters are all warnings, and the satire runs to that point. Whereas what is
Gulliver writing for? In the letter from Captain Gulliver that prefaces the
book, he does claim that the book is intended as a warning:

“I do in the next Place complain of my own great Want of Judgment, in being prevailed upon by the Intreaties and false Reasonings of you and some others, very much against mine own Opinion, to suffer my Travels to be published.

Pray bring to your Mind how often I desired you to consider, when you
insisted on the Motive of publick good; that the Yahoos were a species
of Animals utterly incapable of Amendment by Precepts or Examples: And so it hath proved; for instead of seeing a full Stop put to all Abuses and
Corruptions, at least in this little Island, as I had Reason to expect:
Behold, after above six Months Warning, I cannot learn that my Book hath
produced one single Effect according to mine Intentions: I desired you
would let me know by a Letter, when Party and Faction were extinguished;
Judges learned and upright; Pleaders honest and modest, with some Tincture of common Sense; and Smithfield blazing with Pyramids of Law-Books; the young Nobility's Education entirely changed; the Physicians banished; the female Yahoos abounding in Virtue, Honour, Truth and good Sense; Courts and Levees of great Ministers thoroughly weeded and swept; Wit, Merit and Learning rewarded; all Disgracers of the Press in Prose and Verse condemned to eat nothing but their own Cotten, and quench their Thirst with their own Ink. These, and a Thousand other Reformations, I firmly counted upon by your Encouragement; as indeed they were plainly deducible from the Precepts delivered in my Book.”

This is a mixture of the satirist’s targets since Aristophanes and Swift’s
fictitious creatures, the Yahoos and the Houyhnhnms, who are very close to making any system of virtue and vice absurd by embodying it in impossible extremities of the disgusting and ... well, it is hard to find one term to describe the Houyhnhnms, although the idea of these equine stoics is both alarming and funny. It is like the most impossibly inbred English aristocracy. And Swift adds a sentence that seems pointed at his own self: “And, it must be owned that seven Months were a sufficient Time to correct every Vice and Folly to which Yahoos are subject, if their Natures had been capable of the least Disposition to Virtue or Wisdom.”

Is this Gulliver sticking out his tongue at Mr. Drapier?
And is Mr. Drapier Jonathan Swift as tradesman?

The satirist needs a preliminary sketch, acquaintance with the primogenitive caricature. And that caricature happens to be the self.

But Mr. Drapier, too, exists – in fact, his fictiveness is oddly blurred by his entrance into the all too real exploitation of Ireland, which is forever locked in Swift’s unwavering field of vision, a thing to see, a raree show of instituted vice. He feels about it … well, as LI feels about Bush’s America. Bush’s America degrades my mockery by casting itself into forms of such pitiful tastelessness, hypocrisies that have been exposed for so long that the exposures are growing moss, bluster that wouldn’t frighten a sheep, that mockery has to seek restraint – has to seek other tangents to make indignation feel-able. If not to reform the Yahoos, at least to relieve the writer's own spleen.


Mr. Drapier’s way is simply to tell the plain story of fact.
The meta-story is that the British Prime Minister, out of every venal motive, conspires to allow William Wood the right to coin money for use
in Ireland. The contract costs Wood money, and he proposes to make up
that money and make a profit by chiseling on the composition of the coin
– in other words, creating half pence on the cheap, which could be exchanged for good coin. This was at a time when the matter of the coin
was important – a penny should contain a penny’s worth of metal. A gold coin should contain an amount of gold equal to the worth of the coin.
Of course, the coins were routinely shaved, by everybody. But to coin them
pre-shaved, so to speak, was to go one step beyond. The intro to the edition of the Drapier’s Letters on the Gutenberg site says this:

“The patent was really granted to the King's mistress, the Duchess of Kendal, who sold it to William Wood for the sum of £10,000, and (as it was reported with, probably, much truth) for a share in the profits of the coining. The job was alluded to by Swift when he wrote:

"When late a feminine magician,
Join'd with a brazen politician,
Expos'd, to blind a nation's eyes,
A parchment of prodigious size."

Coxe [a Swift commentator] endeavors to exonerate Walpole from the disgrace attached to this business, by expatiating on Carteret's opposition to Walpole, an opposition which went so far as to attempt to injure the financial minister's reputation by fomenting jealousies and using the Wood patent agitation to arouse against him the popular indignation; but this does not explain away the fact itself. He lays some blame for the agitation on Wood's indiscretion in flaunting his rights and publicly boasting of what the great minister would do for him. At the same time he takes care to censure the government for its misconduct in not consulting with the Lord Lieutenant and his Privy Council before granting the patent. His censure, however, is founded on the consideration that this want of attention was injudicious and was the cause of the spread of exaggerated rumours of the patent's evil tendency. He has nothing to say of the rights and liberties of a people which had thereby been infringed and ignored.”

One is reminded of Bush’s recent trip to West Virginia, where he flaunted
the unreliability of the notes given by Congress to Social Security in exchange for borrowing FICA money. Since the money was borrowed because Bush wanted to siphon a trillion dollar to the upper ten percent income bracket in the U.S., this is much like John Dillinger mocking the manufacturer of a safe for using cheap metal. Even Roman emperors, even
Caligula, to my knowledge, never went that supererogatory step in evil and
not only stole public funds, but then used the theft to urge even greater theft. But Bush, of course, is a conscienceless automaton, a diseased Texas
weasel who was weaned on fraud, and we know that there is nothing, not a
tumbleweed, behind the twinkle in his eye and the Jesus in his heart. In a
more rational world, or one that had a better sense of humor, he’d be featured on some real crime show, right after the serial bigamist and
the mysterious ten year old unsolved murder.

If you have not read the Drapier’s letter, go to the intro to get some
sense of the controversy, and then go to the fourth letter. That’s the hair-raising letter – a blow against the colonial system, a cry against the infamy, a rush at the system that’s truly in rare company. I suppose Martin Luther King’s Letter from the Birmingham Jail is the American counterpart, except that King is never bitter. Swift’s letter begins like this:

“Having already written three letters upon so disagreeable a subject as
Mr. Wood and his halfpence; I conceived my task was at an end: But I
find, that cordials must be frequently applied to weak constitutions,
political as well as natural. A people long used to hardships, lose by
degrees the very notions of liberty, they look upon themselves as
creatures at mercy, and that all impositions laid on them by a stronger
hand, are, in the phrase of the Report, legal and obligatory. Hence
proceeds that poverty and lowness of spirit, to which a kingdom may
be subject as well as a particular person. And when Esau came fainting from the field at the point to die, it is no wonder that he sold his
birthright for a mess of pottage.”

Every blow in this letter lands. Gulliver’s Travels – with its Gull for a
mockery – plays a double game with its moral points, making them and denying them in the same gesture. One remembers that the point is the wholesale reformation of Yahoo nature in seven months time. This is Jonah waiting for the fire to consume Ninevah, and being bitterly disappointed that it never comes. Or rather, this is taking that spirit of Jonah and both inhabiting the prophet’s disgust and taking up a position outside it to observe with clinical precision the prophet’s vanity. But Drapier is a character who has been transported beyond vanity. In a passage that was considered treasonable, Swift considers that Ireland is no ‘depending kingdom’ with England, but equal in its freedoms. This casts doubt on the charnel foundation of colonialism, which is currently being implemented in Iraq on just the ground that the Iraqis are incorrigible children and the Americans are paragons to be mimicked. Ireland, after all, was the template for all English colonial ventures to follow. This is the Drapier at his most intense. One wants to say that this is the crescendo of the letter, but the rhythm, here, disallows crescendos:

“For in reason, all government without the consent of the governed is the
very definition of slavery: But in fact, eleven men well armed will certainly
subdue one single man in his shirt. But I have done. For those who have used power to cramp liberty have gone so far as to resent even the liberty
of complaining, although a man upon the rack was never known to be refused the liberty of roaring as loud as he thought fit.”

The Washington Post pities the collaborators

Anne Applebaum’s column in the Washington Post is mostly ditzy foreign policy neo-conservatism. Sometimes, however, she hits new lows. The protest against commemorating the end of the war against the Nazis is the lowest of her lows.

Here’s Applebaum’s assessment of May, 1945:

“Not every European country will be represented, however, because not everybody feels quite the same way about this particular date. In the Baltic states, for example, May 1945 marked the end of the war but also the beginning of nearly a half-century of Soviet occupation, during which one in 10 Balts were murdered or deported to concentration camps and exile villages. The thought of applauding the same Red Army veterans who helped "pacify" their countries after 1945 was too much for the Estonian and Lithuanian presidents, who have refused to attend. Although the Latvian president will attend the Moscow festivities, she's had to declare that she will use her trip to talk about the Soviet occupation. The president of Poland also has spent much of the past month justifying his decision to celebrate this particular anniversary in Moscow. By May 1945, after all, the leaders of what had been the Polish anti-Nazi resistance were already imprisoned in the Lubyanka, the KGB's most notorious Moscow prison.”

Gee, those poor Baltic states – funny that Applebaum doesn’t mention what they commemorate about the war won, apparently, by the wrong side. For instance, take poor Latvia. In September 2003, in keeping with the Applebaum spirit, the Latvian Defense Ministry helped celebrate Latvia’s contribution to the war – the Latvian SS.

“The SS memorial was unveiled in the Latvian town of Lestene. The event was attended by the country’s government, religious and military officials. Three military orchestras of the Latvian Defense Ministry provided musical background for commemorating 'accomplishments and sacrifices' of the SS and its Latvian division in the name of Führer and Fatherland.”

You might think Latvia’s SS was a mere speck, but no – they managed a nice mass killing, 25,000 Jews, in the Rumbula Forest in 1942, for instance. Applebaum, who does remember the Katyn Forest, doesn’t seem to remember this negligible act of the brave Baltic state. Although we do know what the state thinks of it now, officially. The Latvian government has set up a memorial to the victims of the slaughter of the Riga ghetto, just to placate those pesky Western powers, but its heart belongs to the black shirts

Ah, Applebaum really missed her chance to expatiate on Latvia’s peculiar contribution to the great war for Lebensraum. I wonder why she missed telling the world that Latvia contributed 150,000 SS volunteers to the war effort, more than any other nation occupied by Germany? Surely she could have spared a word for the the wonders performed by Latvians in the cleansing of the Riga ghetto?

Applebaum must be pleased that the pro-stalinist left, who don’t understand the necessity of ridding Latvia of its subversive fifth column, are at least getting theirs. Protestors at Lestene have been arrested, and a Latvian court is considering fining them $14,000. While Applebaum might consider that such scum, seeking to blot the bright history of Latvia, deserve jail time, at least she can take some satisfaction in Latvia’s prompt protection of its historic sites.

tears, gentle tears

The tears that were shed over the elections in the Ukraine, do you remember? The NPR tears, PBS tears, NYT tears. Nothing, nothing was more important than the striving of the Ukranian people to put one of two corrupt dinosaurs in office. It emerged on the front pages and we were all, here in America, holding our breath for the good, pro-American, democratic side to assume its rightful place. It was just like when Tinkerbell died in the fifties and all the kids in America wished her back into life.

And then there have been the recent Rice tears shed over the unjust jailing of a billionaire Mafioso in Russia. Here the tears might be a little more sincere – the Bush administration is pained by the fall of a single hair on a billionaire head as much or more than God is pained by the falling away of a single sinner. And then our intrepid Rice went to Belarus and spread the word about democracy to the benighted people there.

But somehow, we haven’t yet had to bring out the mops to wipe up the NPR, PBS, NYT, and Bush administration tears about Mexico. In fact, probably few American readers of this post will even know that perhaps the largest demonstration in Mexican history took place Sunday. Our man in Mexico, Fox, hid in his little presidential Fox house. Whereas the man that Fox has conspired to kick out of the upcoming presidential race for the very good and democratic reason that he has a fair chance of winning it, Lopez Obrador, made a thunderous speech which, if translated into Ukranian and given in Kiev by a man backed by dirty capitalist money, might actually have garnered some press attention.

… What am I saying? It wouldn’t, even then, since the speech dared to mention protecting the welfare of the poor. If you aren’t willing, as a democrat, to shit on the poor, America is not going to cry for you. As we all know, the poor need shock therapy and more shock therapy. They need ever freer markets in which their ever falling wages can buy ever less in order to be really, really free. Because, as Rice said, immortally, in Moscow, people just want to be free to choose things for their kids – for instance, what infested mudhole to wash their kids clothes in, or what absolutely unsafe American owned factory to send their kids to to make a whole dollar a day.

A friend who was in the demo writes:
Now,as far as the march goes, if a few words can sum it up -- it was HUGE, about 10 times bigger than the govt would admit. The official count is 120,000... now thaT's really a joke, a slap in the face, bullshit. The demonstration was about 1 million +... I was there. I now how many people it takes to fill up the zocalo and then have about 10 km worth of people backed up on Reforma... it was, by less biased calculations the biggest march in Mexican history. It will be written about in history books. And yet, most newspapers are trying to play it down by insisting Lopez Obrador has summoned his batallions... which is not true... there were lots of people there who are not exactly pro-Lopez Obrador... but they are for democracy, for being able to have a vote. The other thing that would sum it up is that it was extremely civil and witty. As you might know, it was a silent march, no shouting, chanting, screaming... which made for interesting slogans and word plays and whole architectural endeavours as means of expression. Some people made a huge Trojan horse out of crates... others dressed in red-stained white sheets, there were funny posters, etc... an abundance of Fox and Salinas masks, etc. It was very exciting and it was an amazing thing to be there surrounded by that mass of people."

the adventures of Herbert O. Yardley

At the end of Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyers hears out Huck’s plan to free Jim. Huck's plan is plain. It is a routine escape plan. It will probably work. Huck asks if the plan wouldn’t work. This is what Tom says:

"WORK? Why, cert'nly it would work, like rats a-fighting. But it's too blame' simple; there ain't nothing TO it. What's the good of a plan that ain't no more trouble than that? It's as mild as goose-milk. Why, Huck, it wouldn't make no more talk than breaking into a soap factory."

I never said nothing, because I warn't expecting nothing different; but I knowed mighty well that whenever he got HIS plan ready it wouldn't have none of them objections to it. And it didn't. He told me what it was, and I see in a minute it wasworth fifteen of mine for style, and would make Jim just as free a man as mine would, and maybe get us all killed besides. So I was satisfied, and said we would waltz in on it. I needn't tell what it was here, because I knowed it wouldn't stay the way, it was. I knowed he would be changing it around every which way as we went along, and heaving in new bullinesses wherever he got a chance. And that is what he done.”

That about encapsulates the spirit of the CIA. It is an organization of Tom Sawyers, Tom Sawyer writ large, Tom Sawyer with a salary and pension plan.

The way a country spies says deep, deep things about the country's cultural values. One reason to keep an eye on spies. Another reason is, of course, that they are ridiculously melodramatic.

Anybody who is truly interested in the art of spying is aware of The Codebreakers. This is the decrypter’s Ars Magna – David Kahn’s masterpiece, one part encyclopedia, one part Poe. Kahn has now written another book. This one is a biography of Herbert O. Yardley. Thomas Powers (the author of one of the great 70s CIA books, Richard Helms: The Man who kept the secrets) reviews it in the NYRB. Here’s a graf:

“Yardley is one of the remarkable men in American history. He is known primarily for his summary dismissal in 1929 by incoming Secretary of State Henry Stimson, a patrician Wall Street lawyer who closed down the Ci-pher Bureau with the casual observation that "gentlemen do not read each other's mail"—a remark, interestingly, which is the only thing remembered about either man. It is often cited as marking the high-water mark of American starched-collar idealism before the downhill slide into great-power realism. But what made Yardley famous is not the thing that makes him interesting. The son of a railroad telegrapher, a man with a lively Jazz Age interest in money, good-looking women, and drinks at five, Yardley not only taught his country how to read other people's mail but wrote two of the enduring American books—the best single intelligence memoir, The American Black Chamber (1931), and perhaps the greatest book in any language on playing cards for money, The Education of a Poker Player (1957).”

The fakery about shrinking big government begins, probably, with spying – which elicits supportive hardons from the same people who don’t want big government poking its nose into, say, worker safety issues (say, there is enough poking in that sentence to create a mini-Freudian meltdown. But let us soldier on…)

Yardley is one of those impossible men who should have been fictitious – a character in a radio series, or Li’l Orphan Annie:

“But Yardley remains the great figure of American codebreaking and it was probably inevitable that David Kahn, the great historian of American codebreaking, would set out to write his biography. From the outset he was challenged by the second major barrier to writing Yardley's life—lack of materials. When Yardley speaks in his books—there is a third covering his adventures in China in the 1930s—all is illuminated, but where the books stop the life grows dim. At his death, Yardley left no papers—odd for a writer—but when intelligence figures die it is not uncommon for personable men to arrive promptly at the widow's door with an offer to help. Typically the visit ends with every scrap of paper going out the door before the sun goes down. Kahn offers no guess about the fate of Yardley's missing papers, and repaired the deficiency in the only way—by scouring every plausible archive, talking to the bare handful of survivors, and trusting to luck. His big finds were the files of Yardley's literary agent, George Bye, preserved in the library of Columbia University, and the letters Yardley sent home from China during the year and a half he worked for the legendary chief of Kuomintang intelligence, Dai Li.
The man who emerges in Kahn's briskly paced portrait is gifted, complex, resourceful, and often disappointed. Yardley's life included more periods of drinking than not, some interesting women, and many spurned efforts to resume the work he knew and liked best. He bounced back from the loss of his codebreaking job with The American Black Chamber, hung around Hollywood long enough to earn $10,000 for doing nothing, wrote some forgettable novels, did some radio work, dabbled in real estate, and finally got back into the great game, attacking Japanese codes for officials in China. During after-hours in the Chungking Hostel he taught the young reporter Theodore White two useful survival arts—how to play poker and how to ride out an air raid…”

As for my own after-hours time at the Chungking Hostel… well, that’s another story for another time.

wring the necks of the dying swans

The Washington Post published an almost perfect parody of the upper class voice in Mexico today. Rossana Fuentes Berain writes about Lopez Obrador as she would about an errant maid who had misplaced her best undies. Truly, this is undying dying prose:

“Where a Lopez Obrador presidency could really be a problem is in the matter of unfinished structural reforms -- in energy, labor and fiscal affairs. His political shortsightedness could stall long-overdue action in these areas, with unfortunate effects on Mexico's competitiveness with China and other countries.

"In a perfect world, this and Lopez Obrador's disregard for the law, as shown in the current case against him, would be enough for the electorate to reject him. In the real world, where there is deep discontent in many parts of the population, he must be regarded as a serious candidate. These are difficult times. We need to weather them and to keep our eyes on the main prize: a long-term North American compact.”

The “current case against him” is a PAN meme that will be kept upfront for the American audience, which is uninterested in, say, the work of the Mexican congress last week in granting immunity to a member who was accused of siphoning millions from PEMEX for the PRI electoral campaign, or the never dealt with accusations that Vincente Fox benefited from massive illegal contributions to his presidential run in 2000.

However, it is the utter contempt for the betail – you know, the campesinos and their stupid little hovels – that rings through these two sentences: “In a perfect world, this and Lopez Obrador's disregard for the law, as shown in the current case against him, would be enough for the electorate to reject him. In the real world, where there is deep discontent in many parts of the population, he must be regarded as a serious candidate.”

There is a world in those sentences. It was in that world that every counter-insurgency in the twentieth century in Latin American proceeded by slaughtering peasants. It is in that world that the rich in Venezuela, in the 1980s and 1990s, succeeded in looting a perfectly fine economy and nearly sinking it. In that world, Pinochet’s use of stadiums, while unfortunate, reflect the less than perfect world we live in. In that world, the ‘reforms’ of Menem in Argentina (the massive looting of public infrastructure by private investors) are necessary to ‘emerge’ into the first world – an emergence signaled by trips to LA and NYC, to Las Vegas and Washington D.C., for clothing, apartments, cars, yachts and such. In that world, Salinas’ economic “reforms” were long overdue, and the consequence of them was an unlucky accident. In that world, spending billions of public dollars to support the malfeasance of Mexican billionaires who looted their own banks is just good business. In that world, no questions should be asked about the provenance of the money that is used to buy the telephone company, or the cement plant, or the ranch. It comes from… well, somewhere. In that world, no need to worry about the fact that Mexico’s top businesses are now firmly in the hands of non-Mexican businesses. No need to worrry about the dinosaur tread of the PRI, coming to a border town near you. No need to worry about what the Fox regime seems to have been -- a clumsy interlude sponsored, towards the end, by the right wing of the PRI.

the soldiers in the trenches

The anti-Japanese riots in China – however they might have been instigated by the government for its own purposes – demonstrate the attraction of historical traumas. Attraction, that is, as a site for ceremonies of memory, for obsession, for re-enactment, for anxiety, and for that element of forgetting that goes into what one chooses, at any particular moment, to imbue with the energy of recollection. Memory has an opportunity cost.

There’s a review, in History and Theory (Winter, 2005) of UNDERSTANDING THE GREAT WAR, by Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau and Annette Becker. According to the author of the review, Ann Louis Shapiro, who teaches at the New School, Audoin-Rouzeau and Becker have taken it upon themselves to “demolish” the historiography of World War I. Underneath the rhetorical heat, that means two things: a., expanding the focus of the war to the civilian populations that were entrained in it – not as spectators but as participants; and b., understanding how the soldier in the trench became the ‘protagonist’ of the war.

According to Shapiro:

The architecture of this narrative, with its iconic anecdotes and mythologized references, was laid in place early in the postwar period. In part, the rapid embrace of a relatively codified narrative was the result of the popularity and authority of war novels that provided canonical understanding of chaotic and unprecedented, even unassimilable, events. In France, Le Feu by Henri Barbusse, published in 1916, and Les Croix de bois by Roland Dorgelès, published in 1918, provided templates for interpreting the war for soldiers and civilians alike. Le Feu was read aloud in military hospitals and in the trenches (apparently even
among German soldiers), and soldiers wrote to Barbusse to tell him that his book had helped them “to see anew and feel more clearly their own memories,” noting that it was the novel that allowed them to see the war fully,3 while a mother whose sons were at the front wrote to say that “it seemed as if her child’s very
life had been made to pass before her eyes.”4 Perhaps most telling, the military doctor/novelist Georges Duhamel noted in 1933 that “if his former patients were to read today their own stories, they would rarely recognize them,” having deliberately adapted their memories to conform to the version presented by Duhamel in his war fiction: “If one is offered a good mirror,” wrote Duhamel, “one will not refuse.”5 Such war novels, including Remarque’s classic All Quiet on the Western Front, were, in effect, fiction/memoirs, testimonies of former soldiers that served both as personal exorcisms and documents that ostensibly might provide a corrective to discredited official accounts. They reflect, collectively, a pervasive belief that only eyewitnesses could apprehend and convey the reality of a war that was, in its details, ineffable and beyond words—a reality that emerged exclusively from “that great confessional” of the trenches.”

Of course, there is something a little confused about a process that is labeled postwar and that begins in 1916 – which is midwar. On the other hand, there is no doubt that the image of the “mirror” does have a distorting effect upon memory – a mirror registers images, while memory seeks to grasp sequences. Or at least sequences are given to memory to grasp. That the sequences have no particular pre-determined aspect is what must be overthrown by art and politics and societal norm, which all reject that degree of freedom.

What is interesting, here, is what one discovers if the soldier in the trench isn’t the protagonist – if he is a part of a larger collective that is not primally divided between soldier and civilian. This is where the war was experienced as “the matrix event of the twentieth century”, to quote Audoin-Rouzeau and Becker. So far, so good. However, we wonder whether we really require a demolition job to achieve this end. We especially find the introduction of dubious categories from therapy suspicious:

“Because of what was effectively a “hyperamnesia” with regard to the trench soldiers and a “general amnesia” with regard to everyone else, Audoin-Rouzeau and Becker argue, historians have been unable to move past persistent blind spots that have occluded understanding of the causes of the war, its duration, and its cultural/historical consequences.”

This sounds all to much like repressed memory syndrome, about which the best one can say is that it gave various therapists a chance to release their own nightmares upon the already scribbled upon tabula of their various unfortunate patients.

We are on firmer ground when, dispensing with the amnesia vocabulary, we get to the positive acts and excitements of the war:

“The approach of Audoin-Rouzeau and Becker is synthetic, drawing upon research mostly from the past ten years, organizing and reassembling it so as to demonstrate the consequences of the particular kind of warfare that emerged in the Great War. More specifically, they argue that the most significant effects of
the war are revealed when the experiences of civilians are fully restored to the narrative in all their detail. By examining the varied experiences of civilian populations, they seek to draw new meanings from a familiar history and reassess the ways in which the war bled in to the history of succeeding decades. They
divide their study into three sections—violence, crusade, mourning—the topics most notably underexamined in the dominant narrative of soldiering. Foregrounding these themes, they draw several large conclusions: that the radical extension of violence to civilians and others—in short the brutalization of behavior during the war—set the template for succeeding totalitarian regimes; that soldiers
and civilians shared, with religious fervor, a culture of war that presaged its outbreak and caused whole populations to acquiesce for years in a pointless slaughter; and that the scale of death and suffering produced a pervasive but unacknowledged experience of “interminable mourning” that was transmitted
across generations, with (only vaguely specified) effects into the postwar period, especially among the defeated nations.”

This schema (save the interminable mourning, a controvertible unit of analysis) could very well be extended to modern Chinese history. The imbrication of civilian and soldier was institutionalized in China, via the Communist party, to a degree that was matched only by Nazi Germany. But in the case of China, the war with Japan was never, psychologically, dealt with – it was merely abruptly replaced by a devouring class war, and Mao’s ferocious attempt to preserve a peasant-socialist autarky.

Jesus’ politics.

As the few who have actually read the Gospels know, Jesus said relatively little about sex. For him, it was a thing that occurred in the structure of families. Jesus didn’t much like families. He was only half joking when he said that he had no patience for him who didn’t hate his mother. He thought if you entered into a marriage, that was the end of it – no divorce for you. Of course, marriage, back in Jesus' day, wasn't the love match it is today, but an exchange between parents and clans in which the individuals exchanged had little say. So this is a hard saying to understand -- was it a way of warning men not to desert their wives and children?

In any case, he looked upon the marriage and family racket as hopelessly perverting -- there'd be no giving and taking of wives and husbands in the Kingdom of Heaven.

On the other hand, Jesus had numerous opinions about wealth. He unequivocally thought that the wealthy would not be in the kingdom of heaven. He thought that they were scanty in their sacrifices, and pushy in their lives, and in general a diabolical nuisance. Just getting wealthy, Jesus thought, probably entailed doing things that would send you to Hell. He had no hesitation about saying so. When a rich man came to him who had sacrificed much of his wealth, Jesus famously said that it was harder for the rich to get to heaven than for the camel to get through the eye of a needle. This saying is one that the most literal American fundamentalist suddenly gets all liberal about. But the meaning is made clear by what Jesus did before he made that comment – he clearly thought that the rich man hadn’t given enough. He hadn’t really destroyed his wealth.

While there is, currently, a great deal of kowtowing to a bunch of pissants who call themselves Christian in contemporary American culture, one can be confident that, if Jesus is within the ballpark of being right, most of the Christian right, from George Bush to Pat Robertson, are going straight to hell. It isn’t really even a close call. All are wealthy. All retain their wealth in the face of a world in which masses starve. All have let these people starve during the whole course of their lives. Some, such as Pat Robertson, have acquired their wealth through such bloody associations that they are obviously immoral. But Jesus really didn’t make a lot of distinctions here. Gays are never condemned by Jesus. The wealthy are, time and time again. As for the clergy that coddles the wealthy and themselves become rich, they are what Jesus called Whited Sepulcres, filthy on the inside. Among the certainly and for sure damned, one can spot some easy prey: the creators of the Left Behind series (sin against the holy ghost, wealth), Dr. James Dobson (wealth, refusal to visit those in prison, definitely on the left side of the Son when he judges the quick and the dead), Newt Gingrich (are you kidding me) and many others who are going to go where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth. It is, of course, Limited Inc’s burden that, as an atheist, we are probably ending up spending the afterlife with a bunch of yahoo evangelical leaders. Just our luck. Many of these men are under the misapprehension that Jesus gives his unconditional approval to heterosexuality, confusing viagra with virtue. Jesus made know his contempt for the family whenever he got a chance; his contempt for the mere industriousness that leads to wealth (behold the lilies of the field), his contempt for profiteers on the poor (you have made my father’s house into a den of thieves), etc. As for the collectivity of Congress, they have as little chance of making it to heaven as a vampire bat has of winning best in show at your local kennel club. If there is one crowd that has beast written on their foreheads, it is this one. Hopeless, from the divine point of view.

However, as George Bernard Shaw pointed out long ago, hardly anybody believes Jesus anymore, especially Christians. Shaw said that Christians are, almost to a man, followers of Barabbas: worshippers of ostentatious power, self-pitying about their cruelties, absolutely unable to sympathize with those lower than them if they aren’t allowed, at the same time, to strip those lower than them of all dignity – in other words, cannibals and freaks and the usual good booboisie you see buying steaks in the grocery store. Shaw thought certain of Jesus’ communistic ideas might work in today’s society. We don’t. That is, as a majoritarian stance, what Jesus taught leads to chaos and cruelty. The Grand Inquisitor is right about that. But as a minority stance, here and there, it is an experiment well worth doing.

Sympathy for a bitter old man

The pope crap keeps on coming. The media are intent on thrusting the doings of the Vatican in our faces for … forever, it seems. Or at least as long as it took to get O.J. to get out of that white car he was in. Remember, in the long ago, the golden days of Good King Clinton?

In any case, it struck me that, aside from the general vileness of the new Pope’s principles, he might be one of the sadder people in public life. To reach out one’s arthritic, clawlike fingers and snatch the office one wanted – one earned, one deserved! – at a much younger age – now, now when the juice has been squeezed out of the grape, it seems so pitiful. And it isn’t like Ratzinger has had a life. Your ordinary churchman can chuck it all and get a beer and talk with buddies if he wants – he’s living, after all, in some urban crush, the bishop of someplace like New York or Chicago or the like. He can have some female companionship, even if he doesn’t make it sexual. He can go to the movies.

But Ratzinger has spent the finer hours of his life in the Vatican hothouse. Ixnay on the female companionship – or even on having lunch with your favorite Mafia don. It is all brushing surplices with flocks of the inbred Vatican-ites, a bunch of pious poodles who are barely house trained. And in the meanwhile, years of brownnosing the boss. The backlog of resentment must be hard to bear. And then to go on, when the old man finally dies, and make him out to be a saint – when of course you were there for the acidic mood changes, and for all the body betraying the guy with its smells and bruises, you were there to see how he fucked up majorly in this or that way, how you could have done better, how he never resigned and gave you a chance when you were still young enough to enjoy things, how you had to hear years of his praises, his great intellectual capacity, his loving qualities, when how about yours, no, you didn't have a showy philosophy but your grades were generally excellent and it isn't like rising up to judge the faith of the faithful is some job anybody can do, and sure it is easy to display loving qualities when you have your Beria, your Himmler by your side to do the dirty work, sure, you were always there, the convenient dump, the excuse, the man not in the popemobile, and the desire for it rots but it doesn't go away, it is like the fruit of knowledge lodged within you that infinitely browns and wrinkles and ferments but never dissolves, somehow, until all you have is that fruit – it has to create a massive internal corrosion of one’s very capacity to pity, it has to reach out and soil every part of one's life, one can't take a shit without being shrouded in the ceaseless bitterness. All this to get an office in an organization ostensibly dedicated to the God of Love. When they put the funny hat on the guy, he can look around at all the faces and see not one that loves him – mother and father long dead, and no doubt – if he has grandnieces and nephews – those long alien to him. It wouldn’t surprise me if he was the embarrassment in the family, he makes good and they might even drop his name now, a celebrity, and as a connection, something one can brag about in a business so that you make deals that you wouldn't otherwise have the chance to, sure, he's of some use, but funny uncle Benny, as they will have to call him now, and trust him to take a name as ungainly and dumb as that one. One imagines it to be one of those Thomas Bernhard Austrian families – ossified neurotics, museum quality ignoramuses, such as are displayed and splayed and spayed in Bernhard’s Ausloeschung. If you want to understand the level of cretinism, and its breathless spiritual vacuums now on display in the Vatican, go to that novel.

The people

LI’s friend, H., writes from Teheran to congratulate us. Apparently, this blog is being blocked on some Iranian servers. As H. rightly says, what does it say about a state that is afraid of LI? There’s a little pinch in that remark – H. knows how vain we are – but it is also true that LI does not exactly aim to get people out in the streets throwing bombs, or even pies. We aim for more, shall we say, multi-dimensional refusals, little glitches in the smooth operation of society here and there, question marks proliferating, comic strip fashion, above the head, punk rips in the veil of Maya.
…

Texas is much on our minds, recently, because our novel, which is meant to suck in the juices that make this state work, is starting to hum along. Any reader of this thing who is interested in being a guinea pig reader for this thing should drop us an email. In our quest for the genuine Texas, we’ve been reading T.R. Fehrenbach’s marvelous Comanches: Destruction of a People.

Fehrenbach is a columnist for the San Antonio paper. From what I have gathered about him on the Net, he seems to be a sort of Texas version of a Walker Percy character – educated up North, at Princeton, enormously versed in the unfashionable great books, and a ranger outside the walls of academe. His Comanche history bears the impress of both the virtues of education plus disdain for the merely pedagogical and the vices. Chief of those vices is lack of footnotes The reader must make due with the sources listed in the back, and guess from what source sprang, for instance, this paragraph:

‘They did not harm the children further. But the two adult women were stripped naked and subjected to more torture. Hoever, this torment was not so much sadistic as part of a rite of total humiliation, which was important to the Amerindians. The two women were not seriously injured, for the warriors had no intention of killing them. They were to be slaves. Captive women who were frightened with torture and threats of torture made less trouble and quiclkly learned to perform on command. In the final act, both women were raped through the night in full view of the bound children.’

This is about one of the most famous hostage stories in Texas history, the taking of Elizabeth Kellog and Rachel Plummer from the raid on Parker’s fort.

Fehrenbach pulls no punches on the racial or sexual violence that was woven into the frontier story, and censored out of it when it became a myth for children. He is a little less satisfying about the rapes of Indian women committed by the Rangers – although this was not a sanctioned, or ritualized part of Indian warfare, it is a good bet that it occurred pretty frequently. But he does make this comment, which casts an ironic spanner into any attempt to make the American culture somehow superior to the Comanche one on the moral level.

Rachel Plummer was eventually ransomed from the Comanches:

"The position of a returned female captive, however, was always anomalous on the nineteenth century American frontier. The frontier’s puritanical views and rigid racial and sexual shibboleths made it impossible for such unfortunate women to be accepted gracefully back into their communities. They were objects of sincere pity, but they were also considered dirty and disgraced, for they had been the playthings of creatures the Americans regarded as animals. They were embarrassments to their families. Some husbands would not receive them or live with them again. Ironically, most returned women suffered more real shame and huiliation among their own people than among the Comanches. If they came back with half-breed children, their position, and that of the unhappy children, was even more unfortunate… Rachel Plummer died within less than a year after her ransom and return to civilization.”

LI has been fascinated by the Nermernuh, the People, for some time. One of the great passages in American literature is Cormac McCarthy’s account of a Comanche attack in Blood Meridian. We first read that sitting on a porch in Pecos, New Mexico, facing the fading eastern sky and the Pecos River – which ran by the land we were renting – and in that setting, it was awfully scary. And it should be. As Fehrenbach points out, the Comanches, for about a hundred years, pretty much ruled the area east of Santa Fe and west of San Antonio. the Kiowa, who were accepted among them and accompanied them on raids into Mexico, went as far as the Yucatan. The towns and rancherias of northern Mexico were simply devastated by Comanche raids, and the first white Anglo settlers were repeatedly struck by them – and if they hadn’t been supplied by a superior technological force in their rear, viz, Eastern liberal makers of Colts and such, the white Anglo settlers would have been wiped out. Establishing the parasitic relationship between Texas and the Northeast that has endured ever since – Texans despising the North even as they have been unable to create an economy viable enough to stand on its own (as witness the march of money down South to support Texas in the late eighties) or a culture of any innovation beyond the making of colorful new knots in the ropes used to lasso steers.

For the last week, LI has been bothered by phone calls from Rome offering us the popeship. You’ve probably received the same phone call on your recorder: a voice says, Frankly, we’re surprised you haven’t called us back. You can now get credit card rates as low as 6 percent, as well as become the pontiff of the Holy Catholic Church, with a world wide congregation of over one billion, if you act now. If you aren’t a woman, have no problem condemning the use of condoms in AIDs infected areas of Africa, and have low credit or even no credit, you can still qualify for our program.”

Unfortunately, we don’t have a credit card.

In other news… Kenneth Emmond notes further gross abuses of the law by Fox’s PAN, as well as, of course, the PRI, even as the American press continues to report, without context, Fox’s contention that no man is above the law in Mexico.

“A recent example of a successful application of the fuero is that of Morelos Governor Sergio Estrada Cajigal. Congress voted in favour of a desafuero, based on evidence suggesting he colluded with narco-criminals in his state, but the Supreme Court overturned it on a technicality and he remains governor.”

Emmond further notes the quid pro quo around the case of “PRI Senator Ricardo Aldana, who is a suspect in the billion-peso Pemexgate scandal.” Oh, and the journalist who was murdered last week was one who was reporting on a local oil smuggling scandal.

Iraq. We haven’t written anything in this space for a while about Iraq. The refusal of the newly cobbled together government to take up the issue of the timetable for the American withdrawal continues to be a stake in the heart of democracy – this is, after all, what they were elected to do: end the occupation. Sadr’s move, as we predicted, will be to squat on this issue until it squeaks. The American media has decided that the narrative is about things getting better in Iraq. It is about Iraqis liking us. And so hotel room bound reporters collate voices from their stringers that are pro-American, and push them through the pipeline.

It would truly be piling tragedy on farce if Sadr ends up as the most respectable voice of Iraqi nationalism, but such is the direction of the situational slope. The hibernating American conscience only wakes up when the American casualty total spikes for a day. Occupation watch published a piece by Jim McGovern (Congressman from Massachusetts) that ends:

Johnson

LI readers should immediately stop reading this fumbling attempt at a post and go to the TLS review (by Thomas Keymor) of Henry Hitchings book on Dr. Johnson’s dictionary. Johnson is, along with Hazlett and Orwell, every freelancer’s hero. But the Dictionary sets him apart, in that space reserved for the more inscrutable sons of God, mysterious in their energies and inimitable in their successes:

“The body of the Dictionary performs the troubled themes of the preface with striking virtuosity. This great work does its primary job as a standard dictionary with constant assurance, and of course part of Johnson’s achievement is to have produced, in less than a decade and with only routine assistance from six amanuenses, a feat that would not be superseded until the OED at last came to fruition in 1928, after the labours of huge teams over seventy-one years.”

It is as if one man built one of the cathedrals. Keymor emphasizes Johnson’s shifting sense of the object of the dictionary – at the beginning, it was to fix the pronunciation and meanings of words in English, but it evolved into a record of the meanings and pronunciations, with an enlarged sense of the sheer ephemerality of the inside of a language – the multitudinous and contingent transformations of its units – that, by some miracle, did not effect the outward unity of the language. Keymor again:

"Johnson’s reputation is that of a bossy prescriptivist, and these are the terms in which his enterprise began. In The Plan of a Dictionary of the English Language, issued in 1747 to drum up patronage and subscriptions, he writes serenely of the language as an entity amenable to scientific description, and thus, by extension, regulation. His work in progress is one “by which the pronunciation of our language may be fixed . . . by which its purity may be preserved, its use ascertained, and its duration lengthened”. Yet even in this inaugural document there lurks a countervailing sense of language as recalcitrant and wild, or as human and fallen, the work “of a being from whom permanence and stability cannot be derived”. The overall confidence of the Plan has much to do with the predispositions of the person to whom it was addressed, Lord Chesterfield, whom Hitchings rightly calls a “linguistic conservative”, and whose casual exploitation of Johnson’s efforts led in time to one of the Dictionary’s most famously perverse definitions. Here a patron is “a wretch who supports with insolence”, and Johnson sharpened the barb in a personal letter: “Is not a Patron, My Lord, one who looks with unconcern on a Man struggling for Life in the water and when he has reached ground encumbers him with help?”. In the preface to the Dictionary, written on the eve of publication, Johnson’s pose is that of the sadder and wiser man. As Hitchings makes clear, practical difficulties of implementation had conditioned his now jaundiced, indeed tragic, sense of the inherent limits of his endeavour, but one should not underestimate the artful ironic patterning at work in the path he traces from innocence to experience. As the Plan quietly intimates, he had always sensed the blocks and binds that he now comprehends to the full, and in the preface he articulates this sense with the piercing lucidity of a mind honed by years of struggle with fine distinctions of meaning. Language is boundless, disorderly, perplexed, uncertain and, above all, “variable by the caprice of every one that speaks it”. No feature of language can be rendered marmoreal, and in this sense even the most extensive and rigorous effort of lexicography can get no further than heroic defeat – a perception beautifully crystallized when Johnson writes (reworking his verse account, from The Vanity of Human Wishes, of the helpless rage of Xerxes at the Hellespont) that “to enchain syllables, and to lash the wind, are equally the undertakings of pride, unwilling to measure its desires by its strengths”. The lexicographer reverts to poetry here, for the most part with grim insistence on corruption and decadence, but not without a counterstrain of relish, a sense that instability can equally be imagined as cornucopian energy and teeming life. When he adds that “no dictionary of a living tongue ever can be perfect, since while it is hastening to publication, some words are budding, and some falling away”, the sense of rising sap is no less important than the autumnal decay. Amidst the unflinching gloom, one of Johnson’s favourite terms for language and meaning is “exuberant”: “growing with superfluous shoots; overabundant; superfluously plenteous; luxuriant”.

LI thinks we will do another post on Johnson, just for the hell of it.

our vices, their crimes

There is an essay on trust and the Mafia by a sociologist, Diego Gambetta, that includes an interesting quote by Tocqueville. Before he travelled in America, Tocqueville went to Sicily. Not much of the manuscript he wrote about this visit survives. But Gambetta quotes this sentence from an imaginary dialogue between a Sicilian and a Neapolitan in which Tocqueville presents viewpoints on corruption. The Neapolitan has been scolding the Sicilian for being ruled by criminal gangs -- mafia. The Sicilian replies: ‘dénaturée par l’oppression, 1’énergie cachée de notre caractère national ne se révèle plus que par des crimes; pour vous, vous n’avez que des vices.

Somehow, that sentence illuminates the relationship between the United States and Mexico. As long as the black market in drugs and labor is a greater churner of revenue than any licit market in Mexico, the political structure is going to be chronically undermined; and as long as the U.S. refuses to accept the market consequences of the vices to which the American people are addicted -- that is, the inevitability of a drugs and illegal labor market -- but tries to "stem" these markets with a regime of punishments, the black market in Mexico will continue to be one of the great, rational roads to riches. Decriminalizing drugs in the U.S. would have beneficial effects not only in the US, but elsewhere.


On another, related note: LI has found a blog devoted to the present situation of Mexican politics run by Michelle Dion, who is currently the visiting Fulbright-Garcia Robles professor at the Centro de Invstigacion y Docencia Economicas, which impresses the hell out of us. We learned, for instance, via Dr. Dion, of an incident in the Congress yesterday that involved a PAN legislator spitting in the face of a PRI legislator.

Unsurprising, actually. In spite of the American press’ presentation of PAN as a harmless, democracy loving party, PAN was started as an openly fascistic party in the thirties.

It often goes unremarked that the roots of fascism are not simply described by the love of force. The most successful anti-mafia program in Italy’s history was implemented by Mussolini. The petit bourgeois distaste for corruption is genuine. Remember, it was, of all people, Jesse Helms who was most vociferous about the corrupt ties between the S&Ls and the Senate in the early nineties – Helms was the prosecutor of the Keating Seven. This isn’t to say that the ultra-right will always, itself, be above corruption – the chance of a legislator being corrupt depends more on the ability of that legislator to accrue a vendible power than on any ideological slant. LI assumes that personal integrity, here, is a very minor variable, and not one that is usually part of the make up of those who become politicians. Institutions forge character, and character accumulates in institutions to press the limits of institutional possibility to ever greater extremes.

However, the appearance of non-corruption is a very important fascistic draw. Since the left sees all too clearly the similarity between gangster organizations and ultra right organizations – Brecht made this the whole basis for dramatizing Nazism – it interprets struggles between fascists and organized crime as a struggle between two equally criminal groups. However, this use of “criminal” extracts the word from its pragmatic context, and so blurs the everyday way people look on such struggles. This is a topic LI will someday return to.

sympathy for marat

First: my source for the rumor about the NYT reporter in Mexico tells me that the reporter in question has gone back to the States. So the curious non-participation of the Times in this story has nothing to do with lack of Spanish. Second, to get a bead on the culture of our governing class – always an excursion into the farther reaches of psychopathology – LI urges our readers to scan the Daily Telegraph’s interview with Jack Welch. It is a marvel: unintentional black humor competes with mouth-aching sucking up to create the perfect caricature of the way we live: reactionary politics teetering on the edge of the unimaginable in the age of Bush. If this article were published in some socialist journal, it would be dissed as an unrealistic Marxist caricature of the uberrich. Ah, but those caricatures are, unfortunately for the rest of us, real, and they ride mankind. Here’s how the thing starts: “Jack Welch is calling for his housekeeper. ``Maria! Maria!'' he cries, until she appears at the kitchen door. ``Maria, can you describe, without giving away any of the details, what we did in there last night?'' he says, pointing towards the dining room of his Boston mansion.
``Last night,'' says Maria, a little nervously, ``I had an evaluation. And, er, it was very nice.''
Welch, arguably the world's greatest corporate leader, is telling me how to get the most out of one's domestic staff. The method is to write a point-by-point memo and talk them through it carefully. ``Everyone who worked for me at GE got one of those. Boom, boom, boom,'' he says. ``Just do it.''

LI immediately got down to it and called our domestic staff (Maria, Snoopy Dogg Dogg, and Tatiana) on the carpet, and boom boom boom we proceded with the strip search and the video (which we will put up later, only $19.95). But to continue...

Having been wrongfooted by this Ruling Class intro, Melissa Whitworth, the interviewer (who seems more familiar with “one’s domestic staff” than with anything so banal as business – she apparently believes that when Welch took charge of GE it was an “ailing US corporation”) digs a lot of fascinating fascism at the micro level out of old Neutron Jackypoo, as he encourages Maria to call him on her off hours:
`This book is not bulls--t,'' he says bluntly. ``It is not about work/life balance in the language of the company brochure: `We'll allow you so many flexi-days, this and that' '' - Welch blows a raspberry - ``It's about real life, and that's what I'm talking about.''
The trick, Welch explains, to managing your cleaner or au pair is to master the communication skills a successful manager would use in the workplace. Just last night, he and his wife went through a written work appraisal with their own staff: Maria and the Welches' driver, Vincente, sat down together and talked things through. ``We wrote down what we really love about them and we said some things that we thought they could improve,'' says Welch. ``But we always start with all the things they do right.''
There are those who claim that capitalism reflects merit – the best rise to the top. How, then, do you explain the porcine nature of Wentworth’s interviewee? I prefer Acton’s explanation – power corrupts, and absolute power over one’s domestic staff corrupts absolutely. The article actually gave us hope that revolution isn’t dead – after reading about Welch’s power point personality, the idea of putting the heads of a few CEOs on pikestaffs takes on a strangely attractive quality.
Excuse us, now, as we explain to Tatiana the finer points of getting down on her knees and scrubbing the kitchen floor.

rumors

The rumor in Mexico, right now, is that they are going to lock Lopez Obrador up in some very remote place – remote, at least, from his political base. Like somewhere along the border – a place where inconvenient politicians and journalists have a habit of getting whacked.

Meanwhile, the great vials of American indignation about the foreclosure of democracy in Mexico remain capped. Harold Meyerson’s op ed piece, in the WP, is great. But where is the attention that was mobilized in the case of the Ukraine or Lebanon, for instance? This is a rhetorical question about a rhetorical problem. The U.S. does not have, never did have, and probably never will have a policy of implanting democracy in foreign places -- unless that democracy can be controlled by the U.S. A cursory glance at U.S. history – from the fixing of Italian elections in 1949, via the CIA’s Jim Angleton (at that time, an O.S.S. officer in Rome) all the way up to the narrowing of options in Afghanistan and Iraq last year and this winter. Another story in the LA Times makes up for the LAT editorial dismissal of the “backwards looking” mayor of Mexico City. Another rumor LI has heard – heard while in Mexico – might explain why the New York Times is more industriously playing the parish weekly (“Alien meets with Saint John Paul in Heaven!”) than reporting the news in Mexico. The NYT’s former reporters, Julia Preston and Samuel Dillon, while pro-Fox to the gills, knew their way around the language and the cultcha. I believe they still live there, in the ritzy Chapultepec Heights area. Supposedly, NYT’s main man in Mexico City has a sophomore’s knowledge of Spanish.

Note: In the February, 2005 issue of the Latin American Review, there’s an interesting article by Jonathan Hiskey entitled (snoringly) THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF SUBNATIONAL ECONOMIC RECOVERY
IN MEXICO. It is, however, not a sleep inducing piece. Hiskey promotes the study of subregions within developing countries, thinking to find some correlation between recovery from economic setbacks in developing economies and the transparency and legitimacy of electoral-based local institutions. We were struck by this passage:

“Furthermore, the paths followed by the two principal opposition parties in the early years of Mexico's long transition were quite distinct, with
the Partido de la Revolucion Democratica's (PRD) marred by conflict with the PRI, and the Partido Accion Nacional's (PAN) characterized by
cooperation with the ruling party (Bruhn 1996; Bruhn and Yanner 1995;
Guillen Lopez 1995; Lujambio 2001). The very distinct relations between these two opposition parties and the PRI in turn resulted in markedly different transition experiences across Mexico's thirty-one states, depending on the dominant opposition force in a state. In PRD-opposition states,the transition was one where town hall takeovers, street protests, election boycotts, and violent clashes between PRI and PRD supporters followed electoral outcomes that rarely went uncontested by one side or the other. These disputes often lingered long past election day and in many ways undermined the governing legitimacy of whichever party ultimately gained office. In PAN-leaning states, conversely, acceptance
of electoral outcomes and alternation in power at the state and local levels
relatively quickly and painlessly became the norm.

These distinct paths taken by the two major opposition parties were products of both intemal party strategies conceming relations with the ruling party and a conscious effort on the part of the PRI to target what it viewed as its biggest threat: the PRD. As Victor Alejandro Valle remarked,
"There can be little doubt that this 'selective democracy' [was] the result of the ruling party's calculated generosity toward the PAN, a strategy designed to undermine the threat from the Left" (1999,78). Jorge Alcocer (1994) summarizes the very different approaches to the PAN
and PRD pursued by the PRI in the early 1990s:

The government has followed a two-pronged approach in dealing with its opponents. With the PAN it has maintained cordial relations (even open alliance), and it has either recognized the PAN's legitimate victories or taken drastic actions to remedy grievances, as in the cases of Guanajuato and San Luis Potosi.

With the PRD the government's position has been one of aggression: slander campaigns orchestrated by the president's press office; tolerance of continued fraud against the PRD; indifference toward the physical abuse and murder perpetrated by regional caciques. The litany of injuries is long (152-53).

What happened last week in Mexico was the product of this systematic, historically entrenched, but – until now - well disguised, process.

Additional, Montesquieu-ian note: the currently fashionable thesis about the need for legitimate electoral institutions in developing economies is better than the old thesis about the difference between totalitarian and authoritarian governments. However, ourselves, we think that there must be the (theoretic) possibility of curbing such institutions by means of an autonomous judiciary, one that is not an instrument of the executive branch. Unfortunately, such curbing often gets done, in the end, by the military -- a perversion that arises from a legitimate lacuna in governance.

The rule of law in Mexico

The editor of a paper located in a petro town on the Gulf was murdered yesterday. He'd been investigating contraband diversions of oil. This is from the LA Times:

“Mexico is among the more hazardous places in the world for journalists to ply their trade, said Carlos Lauria, coordinator of the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists. It ranks 11th among countries in the number of journalists slain over the last decade, with nine killed. Iraq, Algeria and Colombia top the list.”

And this is from the Washington Post, last week, concerning the recent vote in the Mexican congress to strip Lopez Obrador, mayor of Mexico City, of his immunity:

“President Vicente Fox has said the case shows that the rule of law is working in Mexico and that anyone who breaks the law, no matter how popular or powerful, will be prosecuted. Fox, who was traveling Thursday to Rome to attend the funeral of Pope John Paul II, had no immediate comment about the vote in Congress.

Interior Minister Santiago Creel, the leading presidential candidate from Fox's National Action Party, acknowledged Thursday night that there had been many critics of the process but said it was worth the effort. "Mexico is at peace," he said. "It is a country of institutions and laws."

As is well known, a firm hand is required to make sure a country has the institutions and laws – or law enforcement – it needs. We are pleased that Fox and his interior minister are on the case. In furtherance of which, we thought we’d make a quick web survey of mayoral behavior in Mexico. Obrador’s crime was, apparently, disobeying a court order (which there is no proof he even knew about) blocking the completion of a road to a hospital in Mexico City, which is of a nature so serious that the congress had to investigate.

This, apparently, is a jail time crime. Here’s a more fun crime.

Meet Jorge Hank Rhon, the man who is Tijuana’s PRI mayor. While running, last year, the San Diego paper worked up a little profile of him. Deep in the profile were a few things that, were Hank to be running in, say, San Diego, might have been fronted to the first grafs:

“The most persistent accusation involves the 1988 killing of Héctor Félix Miranda, an editor for the Tijuana weekly Zeta; the newspaper has since devoted a page in each edition to accusing Hank of being the mastermind.
With last month's assassination of another Zeta editor, Franciso Ortíz Franco, Zeta is again pointing the finger at Hank as a possible suspect, as Ortíz had been delving into the state's investigation of Félix Miranda's murder on behalf of the Inter American Press Association.

Hank denies any role in either killing and says he does not believe that two of his bodyguards who were convicted in the Félix Miranda case were involved in that assassination. A spokesman for the Baja California attorney general's office said "any political motives that might be linked to Jorge Hank Rhon have not been ruled out," but Hank has not been called in for questioning.”

Hank comes from one of the great PRI families. One that happens to have been investigated, during the Clinton administration, for its ties to narco millionaires. As is not well known (although it should be), the Clintonistas treated the Mexican government with the policy of two eyes shut that it also applied to Yeltsin. Thus, it was an embarrassment when a unit of the Justice department, under Janet Reno, issued a report about the Hank family that put into government sponsored print what everybody already knew. Drug politics -- you can go to jail for selling or smoking marijuana in this country, but the Federal government reserves a large leaway of helping supply Americans with that marijuana if they feel it serves the interest of our allies, whoever they may be. Thus the famed Cocaine Coup in Bolivia under Reagan, and thus the stifled curiosity about who was on the narco payroll in the Zedillo government under Clinton.

This attitude spills over into the American press. That Jorge’s bodyguards got a little over-enthusiastic about shutting up journalists (which might be the logical extension of the Hank family habit of suing journalists in the U.S. for defamation every time the bothersome narco accusation came up) should have been fronted in the SD article about the man -- but a little matter of a corpse here and there was shunted way down to like the tenth graf.

Ah, but in the land of laws and institutions, under the benign rule of Fox, threatening journalists, or killing them, is definitely secondary to those crucial due process hearings that Lopez Obrador so criminally ignored. There are priorities, after all.

This is from the IPI’s review of press freedom in Mexico

“It was a bleak year for Mexico's journalists, who continued to suffer harassment, death threats and violent attacks. In particular, journalists investigating drug trafficking and official corruption in the northern states bordering the U.S. were targeted by those seeking to prevent the media from exposing their activities.

Four journalists were murdered in 2004.

On 19 March, Roberto Javier Mora García, editorial director of the daily newspaper El Mañana, was stabbed at least 20 times by an unidentified attacker outside his home in the border city of Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas state. El Mañana is known for its reporting on the Golfo drug cartel and the alleged involvement of local police in drug trafficking activities. None of Mora's belongings were taken, ruling out theft as a motive, police said. On 28 March, police arrested two of Mora's neighbours, Mario Medina Vázquez and his partner Hiram Olivero Ortiz. Police said Medina, a U.S. citizen, confessed to killing Mora in a crime of passion, but Medina later said he confessed under torture. On 13 May, he was killed by a fellow prisoner in Cereso Prison in Nuevo Laredo.

Francisco Javier Ortiz Franco, co-founder and senior editor of the weekly news magazine Zeta, was killed on 22 June by unidentified gunmen in the border city of Tijuana, Baja California state. He was driving his car through the city's Marrón district when masked gunmen in a pickup truck pulled up to his car and shot him four times with an AK-47 automatic rifle, police said. His children, who were also in the car, were unharmed. Federal prosecutors linked the murder to the Arellano Félix drug cartel in Tijuana.
Zeta's coverage of drug trafficking and official corruption has made its editors frequent targets of violent attacks. In 1987, the weekly's plant was sprayed with machine-gun fire. Zeta editor and columnist, Héctor Félix Miranda, was murdered in 1988. In 1997, Zeta's publisher, J. Jesús Blancornelas, narrowly escaped assassination when he was severely injured in an attack that left his bodyguard and friend, Luis Valero, dead.

On 31 August, Francisco Arratia Saldierna, a hard-hitting columnist for El Imparcial, El Regional, Mercurio and El Cinco, among other regional publications, was killed in the city of Matamoros, Tamaulipas state. Saldierna, who had been beaten and tortured, was found outside the local offices of the Red Cross and brought to a nearby hospital, where he died of a heart attack later that day. On 24 September, police arrested Raúl Castelán Cruz, a member of the Golfo drug cartel, who confessed to participating in Arratia's killing.

On 27 November, Gregorio Rodriguez Hernández, a photographer for the daily newspaper El Debate, was gunned down in Escuinapa, Sinaloa state. Rodriguez was dining with his wife and children at a restaurant when unidentified gunmen shot him at least five times. One arrest was made in December, but the motive for his killing remained unclear.

Irene Medrano Villanueva, a journalist for the daily newspaper El Sol de Sinaloa in Culiacán, Sinaloa state, reported receiving several deaths threats via telephone, beginning in December 2003. Medrano believed the threats were linked to a series of articles she published about child prostitution in Culiacán that criticised local authorities for not taking sufficient action against the abuses. On 8 December 2003, Medrano found the word "death" had been painted on her car. Three weeks later, while driving to work, she tried to stop at a stop sign, but her car's brakes did not work and she crashed into a taxi. A mechanic at an auto repair shop told her that the brakes had been tampered with.

On 16 January, after officials from the Sinaloa Public Prosecutor's Office traced the threatening telephone calls to the Office of Mayor Jesús Enrique Hernández Chávez, Medrano publicly denounced the threats in a press conference. The mayor called for a thorough investigation into the matter and for those responsible for the threats to be punished, but refused to speculate who the perpetrators might be.”

Medrano’s work is reviewed more specifically in this letter, sent by the Committee to Protect Journalists.


”The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), a New York­based independent, nonprofit organization that works to safeguard press freedom worldwide, is deeply concerned about Mexican journalist Irene Medrano Villanueva, who has been threatened and harassed during the last two months in connection with her journalistic work.Medrano, a reporter with the daily El Sol de Sinaloa, based in the state capital of Culiacán, in the northwestern state of Sinaloa, received several death threats after she wrote a series of reports on the proliferation of child prostitution in Culiacán.From August to October 2003, Medrano wrote a series of reports alleging that some local brothels and massage parlors were employing minors and criticizing local municipal authorities for not going after brothels and massage parlors that employ minors.On December 6, 2003, Medrano published the series’ last report, claiming that minors were being recruited in public and private schools to work as prostitutes. Her stories contained testimony from the victims and information from the National System for the Integral Development of Families, the government agency for the protection of minors and families, which also criticized local authorities for not taking action against the abuses. The same day the last report was published, the threats began. An anonymous caller phoned the newspaper and told a security guard that Medrano was going to die. Later that evening, an anonymous man called the journalist at her home and told her that she had signed "her death sentence." On December 8, 2003, after finding that the word "death" had been painted on her car, Medrano filed a complaint with the Sinaloa Public Prosecutor’s Office (PGJE). That evening, an anonymous caller phoned the journalist at home and told her that she was an informer who had caused her own death sentence. The PGJE then assigned Medrano a police agent to escort and protect her for five days.On December 13, 2003, while Medrano was driving to work in the company of the police agent, a car without license plates came from behind, hit her car three times, and fled. On December 14, after discovering that her car’s windshield had been smashed, she called the state police, who inspected her car the next day to search for evidence. Medrano was again assigned a police agent.Feeling pressured, Medrano told CPJ, she then took a few days off from work. While she was driving to return to work on December 28, 2003, Medrano tried to stop in front of a stop sign, but her brakes did not respond and, as a result, she crashed into a taxi. She then took her car to an auto shop, where a mechanic told her that her car’s brake lines had been tampered with.In early January 2004, the threatening phone calls intensified. On January 8, PGJE agents installed caller ID and a recording device on her home phone to trace the threatening calls. On January 12, after an initial call from a public telephone, another threatening phone call was registered. According to Medrano, PGJE agents told her that the calls came from the office of Jesús Enrique Hernández Chávez, the mayor of Culiacán. Because the investigation into the threats is still in its preliminary inquiry phase, the PGJE is not allowed to disclose any information except to the parties involved.On January 16, Medrano denounced the threats in a press conference she held with the support of Sinaloa’s two main journalists’ associations. According to the Mexico City daily El Universal, on January 19 Hernández Chávez came to the PGJE offices in Culiacán to deliver his testimony in writing regarding the threatening phone calls made from his office. The mayor is not a suspect in the investigation, but officials have questioned him since the calls originated from his office, according to local news reports. The Sinaloa newspaper Noroeste reported that Mayor Hernández Chávez has called for a thorough investigation and for those responsible for the threats to be punished. He has also expressed his support for Medrano’s work, according to Noroeste, but has not made any statement to the press regarding the incident, saying he refuses to speculate.”

Fox, however, is unmoved by such irritations on the body politic – he is a straightshooter who goes for the heart of the matter. A little prosty solicitation among fifth graders in Sinaloa? Peanuts. A little journalist killing in Tijuana? Ho hum. Mexico is, after all, a nation of laws and institutions. The interior minister himself, a Pan-ista and future presidential candidate, has assured us of this. We all feel so much better.

Coup? What coup?

saint sartre

The ultrachic grad student who writes Infinite Thought has been writing some nice things about Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason – which is the world’s greatest monument to speed (runner up is Dylan’s Blond on Blond).

We are happy about that. Last week there was one of those thought infections that hit the big blogs. There was a David Brooks column about the difference between the left and right in the good old U.S.A. Brooks made the point that the lefties no longer have a philosopher – he called up some lefty think tanker and asked him, hey, who is your philosopher, and the think tanker evidently couldn’t think of anybody. This got commented upon all over the place. Matt Yglesias wrote a post claiming that liberals are all about policy, nowadays, and have dispensed with the superstitious retention of philosophical mascots.

Now the standard Crooked Timber reaction to Brooks challenge is to reach for “A theory of justice.” Rawls, it is true, does codify a certain dimension of liberal thinking. But if there were one thinker who encoded the fundamental difference between classical and contemporary liberalism, that thinker has to be Sartre.

Sartre? Mr. Cockeyed French supporter of the soviet invasion of Hungary? Yeah, that guy. Contemporary liberalism – post New Deal liberalism – depends on a philosophic anthropology that departs radically from the old contractual myth of the relation of the individual to society. For the classical liberal, the contract – whether construed by Locke or by Rousseau – was the warrant for a political order founded on individual liberty that still maintained a hierarchical order. For the contemporary liberal, however, freedom has another dimension – a dimension of human identity – from which the contract is distantly derived. If, that is, one wants to continue to think in terms of that hoary myth. The dimension of human identity is revealed by human situations. The philosopher who put this all together – sloppily, with massive misreadings of Heidegger thrown in to add some spice, and those bennies to keep him awake at night – is Sartre. Like Freud, whose vocabulary so permeates the way we talk about consciousness that even his critics talk blandly about “repression” and the “unconscious,” that freedom is defined by action, and that it is a measure of situations preceding any economic measure – the Sartrean contention – has become part of folk anthropology. The triad at the end of Being and Nothingness – to have, to do, to be – is the basic triad of contemporary liberalism. This is why the separation of politics and culture is conceptually impossible for contemporary liberalism – that separation reflects the older, contractual view of the individual. Situations cut across the segregated zones of the socius, ultimately putting in question the justification of those segregations. In this, of course, Sartrean existentialism joins the classical Marxist critique of ideology – but without endorsing class struggle as the motor of those segregations and their uses.

The engrossment of such as Yglesias in policy issues, at the moment, reflects the dearth of movement politics on the left side of the ledger, and the dominance of a class of political parasites – the party apparatchik. The party – Labor in the U.K., the Socialists in France, the Democrats in the U.S. – are a sort of institutionalized death drive, sucking out the libidinal energies of the true left and turning them into terms of office for white male non-entities with expensive hair or hair transplants. It isn't that these people aren't going to be there, regardless. The point is to have some gun to point at their heads -- a variety of movements that push them.

Unfortunately, the direction of momentum is backasswards. The mark of this is the way in which the defense of liberal issues is now conducted entirely in terms of economic cost benefit – ultimately, a very silly and defeatist way of looking at the issues involved. The larger demands should be put in terms of a larger definition of freedom – the iron rule of necessity has long been lifted in the West, and its continued effect is wholly the result of preserving, like some saint’s relic, an absurdly archaic slaveholding structure, with the wealthy holding down the role of our Simon Legrees, and the natural producers of wealth being alloted an insanely small portion of it.

Remember -- no slave revolt has ever succeeded by pennypushing.

The congregated roar of corruption

How exhausting it is, the Sunday paper, after the pious filler that has rendered American newspapers almost unreadable for a whole week. What is there to say after the Pope, the Pope's will, the mourners, the Pope's successor, the greatness of the Pope, his gallant struggle against communism, the Pope as a good man, the Pope as a great humanitarian, the Pope salad, the Pope's favorite daytime tv show, the Pope's dressing tips? What is there to say? The Tom Delaying of America (a land of bigotry and superstition, with DDT for all) goes on apace. Other news stories have shyly peeped out from the bottom of A-7: a 300,000 person demonstration in Baghdad, here, a riot in Beijing there. What rivets us is the sad spectacle of the Gringo’s favorite democrat, Vincente Fox, operating just like it is 1988 – that magic time for power in Mexico when the presidential election was resolved by an open fraud, instead of recourse to the usual methods of covert suppressions, bribes, and threats, all of which made up the tissue of the PRI’s electoral power. This has provoked some sighing in Yankee editorial departments. The LA Times writes:


“Once merely disappointing, the state of Mexico's democracy in the era of Vicente Fox has become alarming. It's hard to believe that only five years after the long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party's inspiring defeat at the polls, the PRI and Fox's National Action Party are conspiring to bar a popular leftist candidate — Mexico City Mayor Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador — from the ballot in next year's presidential election. It's a foolish move that is tarnishing the credibility of the political system and is bound to backfire, enhancing Lopez Obrador's popularity.”

The editorial drenches itself in perfumed empathy for the struggling masses, yearning to be free (as in, free enterprisers). The Mexican poor, according to the orthodox North American interpretation of the law and the profits, have merely to be surrounded by the monuments of privatization to break out of their hovels and start singing If I were a Rich Man in Spanish:

“We should hasten to add that Lopez Obrador, who leads in the polls, is not a particularly appealing candidate for the presidency. Capitalizing on widespread disenchantment with Mexico's experiment with freer markets, Lopez Obrador threatens to take Mexico on a journey back in time, to a more socialist orientation that would seal the fate of his low-income supporters. He offers a great deal of messianic rhetoric backed by ill-advised policy prescriptions, including adamant opposition to privatizing Mexico's oil and electricity sectors, which are in dire need of outside investment. More worrisome is Lopez Obrador's penchant for incendiary demagoguery that seems to echo the likes of Venezuela's Hugo Chavez. He also has surrounded himself with pols entangled in corruption scandals.”

Ah, that little word, “outside”, is such an interesting word. If one takes it away, you have: “in dire need of investment.” Money can actually come from a lot of places. The state itself could do the investing, n’est-ce pas? They certainly came up with the bucks for the banking billionaires, with Fox’s compassionate support – 62 billion, in fact, to float them after the collapse of their schemes at the end of the nineties. It is in these little, teeny words that creep and creep in, little scratches and noise on the logical surface, that you can hear, if you are a backwards looking socialist, the distant underground sound of class warfare.

The congregated roar of the Mexican congress has upheld the rule of law, at least as it applies to a third of a mile of road. A golden future beckons – in a century or so, the rule of law might even apply to the massive bribes that went to the PRI and the PAN in the past, or the rampant corruption of police departments in the North that allow both for the serial killing of poor women and long term cooperative ventures with the narco-rich. One wonders how the honorable dino-legislatures from Tijuana voted, and who they had dinner with afterwards. Since the LA Times is so sure that a little foreign investment will just hit the spot to help “unseal” the fates of the poor, we wondered how the Mexican poor were doing under the liberty loving rule of neo-liberalism. Here’s a nice summary from an article, in February of this year, by El Universal.

Two stories that raised questions about Mexico's economic sovereignty made headlines here last week. One was a corporate control story about bankers; the other was more of a human interest story about migrant workers. At bottom, the stories were both about global financial flows and they told us much the same thing. The bankers: A few days ago, the directors of the Spanish bank Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria (BBVA), owners of 60 percent of Mexico's largest bank, Bancomer, let it be known they would spend US4.1 billion to buy out the mostly Mexican shareholders who owned the remaining 40 percent. The buyout would leave BBVA as the bank's sole owner, removing Bancomer shares from public trading on the Bolsa Mexicana de Valores (BVM). BBVA's move would leave foreign capital in control of some 90 percent of the Mexican banking system: Currently, the major players are the Spanish bank Santander Central Hispano, the British Hong Kong Shanghai Bank Corporation (HSBC), the California-based Bank of America and the New York-based Citibank, sole owner of the country's second-largest bank, Banamex. But Bancomer is the giant; it owns some US50 billion dollars worth of assets, about 25 percent of the value of all banking assets in Mexico. The workers: A few days before BBVA's intentions were publicized, the Bank of Mexico announced that remittances from Mexican workers abroad, money sent home by Mexicans working in foreign countries, mostly the United States, had reached a record US13.3 billion dollars in 2003. This 13.3 billion earned outside the country by mostly low-paid workers exceeded by some two billion dollars all the direct foreign investment received by Mexico in 2003 and amounted to some two percent of the country's 2003 GDP. Above all, the stories about the bankers and the workers both aroused the ever-present uneasy feeling in Mexico that the economy is being kept afloat by flows of investment, wages and entrepreneurial activity that originate elsewhere. There is a nagging worry that a broad based entrepreneurial class neither exists nor is coming into existence in Mexico. Beyond that tiny sliver of the population that controls the powerful holding companies and travels with bodyguards, one is hard pressed to identify a significant part of the population that has the ability to invest in the country, provide jobs and spur development. This worry is not alleviated by the fact that the number of firms listed on the BMV has been steadily declining. In 1998 there were 195 non-financial companies listed on the Mexican bolsa; today there are 170. Aside from the state firms Pemex and Federal Electricity Commission (CFE), the Mexican economy is now dominated by foreign companies. The country's largest private-sector company is General Motors. The next four (ranked by sales) are Telmex (Mexico), Wal-Mart (USA), Daimler-Chrysler (Germany) and Delphi Automotive (USA). Of Mexico's 25 largest private, non-financial firms, the corporate headquarters of only nine are in Mexico; eleven are in the United States, two each are in Japan and Germany and one is in Korea. And beyond the oligopolies, the country's stillprofitable maquila sector is virtually wholly owned by nonMexicans who repatriate profits to their home countries. Many in Mexico rightly worry that the Mexican economy is fast becoming a subsidiary of foreign, mostly transnational companies, companies with no particular commitment to the recovery of the country's domestic economy, much less to the movement of large numbers of people out of poverty. And now the southward flow of corn from Kansas and Iowa can be added to those financial flows we spoke of earlier as a source and symbol of the loss of sovereignty. Mexico's campesinos are being gradually displaced by industrialized agriculture, much of it based outside the country, and the broader Mexican economy has thus far been unable to absorb them. As the Mexican campo slowly collapses as a source of livelihood, many campesinos have joined the army, eight to 10 million strong, of Mexicans who are seeking work in the United States. The U.S. economy, it turns out, can happily absorb minimum-wage labor. The Secretariat of Work and Social Forecasting (StyPS) reports that Mexico's formal economy generated only 1,817 jobs last year.”

Wow, 1800 jobs. Talk about the capitalist wave of the future. Talk about those backwards lookin’ socialists. It is hard to understand why the populace would embrace those demagogic populist types when the wave of the future is so clear it knocks you off your feet, isn’t it?