old fashioned family values

LI is a pro-drugs site. It is a pro-sex site. It is a pro-hedonism site. We stand upon the principle that you should be able to put whatever chemicals get you high in your bloodstream once you reach the age of maturity; and that you should be able to sell said chemicals, under the kind of regulations common to such commodities, without fear of arrest. No ifs, ands or buts.

The history of drug bans goes back to the temperance and progressive movements in the 1900s in the U.S. – the country that drove the whole international prohibition movement. Certainly the Brits and the French, with their lucrative opium businesses, were not enthusiasts for the regime of coercive sobriety that enthused the Yankees. Recently, we’ve been reading a very entertaining history of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (remembered, if at all, for whipping up the reefer madness hysteria). The Strength of the Wolf by Douglas Valentine, is a gold mine of the old weird America – the legendary weave of national security thugs, narcs, drug dealers, Mafioso, and politicians which conspiracy groupies love to ponder, the world within a world of the Lee Harvey Oswald character in Libra, the fascoid underbelly of the American Dream, if your version of the American Dream is the Black Dahlia.

Valentine makes us realize that the government and business derived two advantages from the banning of narcotics. One was realized early on: black money could be used to support surreptitious foreign policy. As early as the twenties, the U.S. government was cooperating with the Nationalist Chinese government to import opium into the U.S., washing the money back to our anti-communist friends among the Nationalist fascists. If Mao Zedong had failed to unseat the Nationalists, we would look back on Chiang Kai Shek as one of the great mass murderers of the twentieth century, behind Hitler and Stalin. Unfortunately for China, his millions are cast into the shadow by Mao’s more millions. Typically, the tension between the American policy of supporting the Nationalists and supporting prohibition created a structurally disastrous system of corruption that ultimately helped destroy the Nationalists, but not before it had spread the network of abetting narcotics and banning them all over Southeast Asia. Poison tutti frutti. The U.S. has pretty much gone with the same model ever since: the Mafia in Sicily in WWII, the Laotian warlord/opium dealers, the Contra coke-runners, Afghani poppy farmers – it is all a golden braid.
LI naively thought that the other advantage was mere coincidence – the proliferation of true dope by way of “legitimate” pharmaceutical companies. Apparently this wasn’t just an unexpected synergy – the FBN cultivated its contacts with big pharma. Every dope head tells some story about how driving out marijuana and letting in tranquillizers is a sort of master plan. This is not a myth – or not only a myth – but a dim memory, much as the memories that collected around barrows over the cliffs near the Bosphorus sorted themselves out in a tale of gods and heroes. In an age in which big pharma routinely reaches down to the elementary school level (in schools that put up signs with the wonderfully brazen lie, Drug Free Zone, under which the dispense colorful attention and mood alterers like M and Ms to the six year old to twelve year old set), I suppose it is naïve to suppose this has all been a big coincidence. Still, it is a bit shocking to realize that Anslinger, the head of the FBN, was instrumental in revising the League of Nation’s accords on pharmaceuticals to open up the international market. There is nothing like knowing that yesterday’s narc was moonlighting for yesterday’s makers of prototype barbs and diet pills to make the paranoia and night sweat of someone like Burroughs seem like the most naturalistic and reasonable response to the historic circumstances.

PS – the counter-recruitment folks out there shouldn’t be too worried by this Washington Post story that the Army met its recruitment goals in June. It met them by cutting down the goals to meet them. From an earlier WP story:

"The Army will make a "monumental effort" to bring in the average 10,000 recruits a month required this summer, said Maj. Gen. Michael D. Rochelle, head of the Army's recruiting command. An additional 500 active-duty recruiters will be added in the next two months -- on top of an increase of 1,000 earlier this year."

If the 10,000 mark is used, the Army fell short by about 4,000.

Starving the beast is a long journey, but step by step will stop the flow of WMD to Bush and his criminal gang.

be like Bush!

Although LI thinks William Saletan is mostly a (what is the polite word here?)… an idiot, he has written the only sensible article about Bush’s speech. Basically, Saletan gets it:

“We're "helping Iraqis rebuild their nation's infrastructure and economy," Bush said tonight. "Rebuilding a country after three decades of tyranny is hard, and rebuilding while at war is even harder. ... We're improving roads and schools and health clinics. We're working to improve basic services like sanitation, electricity, and water. And together with our allies, we'll help the new Iraqi government deliver a better life for its citizens."

Deliver a better life for its citizens. Is it any mystery why polls have turned against the occupation? The people being polled are Americans. The people deriving a "better life" are Iraqis. Bush spent half the speech obscuring this gap. He equated Iraqi terrorists with the 9/11 hijackers and kept insisting that we're fighting for "our" freedom and security. But that spin lost its force long ago, when Saddam's weapons of mass destruction failed to materialize, forcing Bush to reframe the war as a democracy-spreading project. It's a noble war, but it's noble because it's altruistic. And people get tired of altruism.”

Now, LI thinks that it is an imperialist war, not an altruistic one, an ignoble piece of political grandstanding in ocean’s of other people’s blood enacted by a pampered, preening crowd of D.C. eggheads and carnivores – but the main point stands. The U.S. has absolutely no reason to be delivering a better life for Iraq’s citizens. Any old time conservative who has read Hayek could tell you that the U.S. is unlikely ever to deliver a better life for Iraq’s citizens – that Iraq can do that much better. In fact, under Saddam Hussein, Iraq recovered from a much more devastating war with Iran quicker than it is recovering today. This isn’t because the Ba’athist command and control regime was more efficient, but because it was more embedded – it could capture Iraq’s tacit knowledge, which is the way systems work.

When LI is in a generous mood and not viewing the leadership of the Democratic party with the disgust we usually reserve for those bizarre species of parasites that life cycle through pigeons and mosquitoes, we realize that the Dem paralysis stems, partly, from a kneejerk reaction to Bush’s old fashioned liberalism in Iraq – it gets the old New Deal juices flowing. LI is a fan of the New Deal too. We are strong believers, around here, in the Keynesian economic model. We think the libertarian dream of a stateless economy has been shredded by history – in the same way that the socialist dream of a command and control economy has been shredded by history. But New Deals can only be carried out by the natives – be they American, German or Japanese.

The Downing Street memo should have made it plain to all by now. In 2001, the Bush administration decided to spend any amount on an adventure in Iraq. That amount will probably be around half a trillion dollars, if not more. Why the Dems don’t simply run on this fact is an astonishment and a proof of their terminal condition, an institutional tabes dorsalis. Why any taxpayer in Missouri should devote a goodly chunk of their salary to the installation of an electric generating plant in a place that could easily borrow the funds to do so itself (having one of the great oil reserves on earth) is beyond comprehension. At the same time, of course, we are being told that we can’t afford social security, and that the government that borrowed from the Social Security fund, i.e. the U.S. government under George Bush, just might not pay it back.

As we wrote yesterday, we are going to try to remember to advertise the counter-enlistment program in every post. Here’s the link to Counter Recruitment.net. Remember, just advise people who are thinking about enlisting to listen to what the President had to say about Vietnam: “The thing about the Vietnam War that troubles me as I look back was it was a political war. We had politicians making military decisions…” George Bush was right about that. Use your President as a role model and DO NOT enlist for this war.

After all, Bush's successful career shows that if you put raw and rancid self interest over sentimental patriotism in your life, you too, can become president of the greatest country in the world, and help to systematically destroy it.

the just say no resistance

If you want to know why the Democrats will most likely blow the best chance they’ve had in a decade in 2006, read the Kerry op ed in the NYT. It is of his special “I voted for it before I voted against it” brand of politics – one that so delights the D.C. power pointers. Basically, Kerry is taking the position of supporting everything Bush stands for, in Iraq, behind pseudo-tough talk about the Bush mistakes. As for a timetable to leave the country – like in the next six months – forget it. The Kerry plan is an infinite process plan, a perpetual filibuster filled with Iraqi and American corpses.

However, much more interesting is the op ed by Lucian Truscott about the coming apart of the military’s middle ranks. Truscott wrote a memoir of his West Point training, which occurred just as Nixon’s ‘secret plan’ for Vietnam was in its Cheney-esque “last throes.” Truscott’s idea is that West Point is special because of the code to which officer trainees must swear:

“But the honor code was not just a way to fight a better war. In the Army, soldiers are given few rights, grave responsibilities, and lots and lots of power. The honor code serves as the Bill of Rights of the Army, protecting soldiers from betraying one another and the rest of us from their terrifying power to destroy. It is all that stands between an army and tyranny.

However, the honor code broke down before our eyes as staff and faculty jobs at West Point began filling with officers returning from Vietnam. Some had covered their uniforms with bogus medals and made their careers with lies - inflating body counts, ignoring drug abuse, turning a blind eye to racial discrimination, and worst of all, telling everyone above them in the chain of command that we were winning a war they knew we were losing. The lies became embedded in the curriculum of the academy, and finally in its moral DNA.”

And this is what he thinks is happening all over again:

“The mistake the Army made then is the same mistake it is making now: how can you educate a group of handpicked students at one of the best universities in the world and then treat them as if they are too stupid to know when they have been told a lie?

I've seen the results firsthand. I have met many lieutenants who have served in Bosnia, Afghanistan and Iraq, practically back to back. While everyone in a combat zone is risking his or her life, these junior officers are the ones leading foot patrols and convoys several times a day. Recruiting enough privates for the endless combat rotations is a problem the Army may gamble its way out of with enough money and a struggling economy. But nothing can compensate for losing the combat-hardened junior officers.”

Resistance by way of the established parties is futile. There isn’t enough courage in the whole of the House and Senate to fuel the revolution of an oiled wheel in a gerbil cage. Tearful apologies about offending the chickehawk crowd are more in order. Remember, the best resistance is simply not to go along. Here, again – perhaps LI should make this our sign off line – is the counter-recruitment site: Youth and the Military.
To paraphrase the VP, "We have other priorities in the '00s than military service." Remember, joining the army is simply another opportunity for hawks at home to get ahead: they will take your jobs, your education, and your comfortable life. They will leave you with bitterness, medical bills, and recurring trauma. It isn’t worth it. Friends don't let friends sign up.

ps -- LI wrote that post and then went to Slate, where we had the pleasure of seeing this site's resident scarecrow and jack of all popinjays, C. Hitchens, has written a nice little column that should be entitled, "let the servants fight the war while I drink with Bungalow Paul W. in Georgetown." Totally funny. It is almost an anti-recruitment ad in itself.

Die bungy cord jumping. Die drinking and driving. Die in a drug deal gone bad. But don't die for this filthy crowd. They aren't worth a hangnail.

the bush culture version of free enterprise

This Sunday, the Austin Statesman’s A section (which should be called, 'the scrapbook of two day old news from the Washington Post, the NYT, and Knight Rider' section, since there is very little original reporting in it) did have a nice big story about Buda’s new attraction: a Cabela’s.

Buda is a country town maybe a fifteen minute drive from Austin, in Hays County. Cabela’s is an outfitter store – but it bills itself as more than a store. It is a store experience, with aquariums, an in the store mini-mountain, and the like. The story is a good example of what the Bush culture means by free enterprise. Enterprise should free itself of costs by putting them on third parties – notably, the state.

With admirable lobbying skill, Cabela has received both positive payment from the state – in cash -- and negative inkind benefits from tax breaks. Plus, there are the agreements to extend Loop 4 for access to Cabela. Plus the various complicated clauses having to do with land use ceded to Cabela by Buda on which Cabela has the option to buy. It has been, all around, a beautiful deal.
One could put together the pieces from the Statesman article, and admire the jigsaw puzzle of corporationism, cronyism and boomerism coming together in one trifecta. First, of course, the state has to convince itself that it needs to give a corporation money. And to do that it needs a study. A study it got. This study said that Cabela’s in Buda would become the second biggest tourist attraction in Texas. That we are supposed to believe that an outfitter store in Buda will become a Disneyland like magnet, given that Texas is now starting to crawl with outfitter stores, is one of the ways that business is like poetry: the suspension of our disbelief is strongly advised.

Now, if I make a study that shows I’m going to make a heap of money and attract millions of customers to my store, according to Economics 101, I ought to be able to get money on the private markets and go ahead with my gangbuster plans. This is why Economics 101 is about useless as a map to modern capitalism. Instead, such studies are the wonderful excuse needed by state lobbyfed legislators to take the money that they can’t find for, say, healthcare and shovel it into a profitable enterprise. So Cabela’s gets a little Texas sugar right off the bat: $600,000 from the state. Just to show our appreciation. But the study implies that Cabela’s has magic powers. Anywhere a Cabela’s lands, apparently, people flock to it and how. So the Buda location has to compete. Can’t get those sweet sites without a little more sugar.

There's something a little disconcerting about this. Surely San Antonio could drum up its own outfitter destination store for half the price. And how deep, exactly, is Cabela's magic spell, given that it is setting up competition for itself all over the Southwest? In fact, this seems to be Cabela's business plan. It is the kind of business plan that could have been designed by an old fashioned leech (Hirudo medicinalis). Cabela’s, it appears, while magically attractive, does have an odd view of where its money comes from, according to SEC filings published by the Texas Observer:

“In SEC filings, the company admits that it counts on government at both the state and municipal level for “free land,” “monetary grants,” and economic development bonds for the “recapture of incremental sales, property or other taxes.” So reliant is Cabela’s on generous government handouts and tax breaks that “the failure to obtain similar economic development packages … would have an adverse impact on our cash flows and on the return on investment in these stores.”

Hays country is using an instrument called tax increment financing in order to put Cabela’s on the welfare train. This allows a local government to publicly fund “needed structural improvements.” Ah, and if those needed structural improvements happen to be a parking lot for the millions of happy tourists flocking into this destination store, so be it. There is nothing odd about any of this. The state is ordinarily used by private enterprises to amplify their profit margins, or to achieve a competitive advantage over their rivals, etc., etc. Positive externalities like this only become controversial when the state wants payback – when, for instance, the state regulates pollution. At this point, the libertarians and conservatives come pouring out of the woodwork, talking about private enterprise and state tyranny. After all, aren't all those fortune 500 ceos self-made men?

Unfortunately, Texas hasn’t yet financed a state tourist destination dedicated to its own hypocrisy. It should. It would attract millions of visitors.

Starve the beast

Starve the beast

There’s a nice interview with a counter-recruitment activist, Clint Coppernoll, at Counterpunch. LI has been behind the curve – we are adding a link to youthandthemilitary which lists counter-recruitment organizations . We were happy to see two groups in Austin, but ... it is frustrating that there are none in Houston, Dallas, S.A. or El Paso. Texas is a big generator of military personnel, and it would be nice to shut down the tap.

Coppernoll is admirably dismissive about the anti-war movement, which has been a vacuum and a comedy, a sort of reductio absurdam of what has been lost as left movements have been institutionalized or annexed by the Democratic party. The results are comparable to what would happen if the Mafia annexed Gamblers Anonymous.

Coppernoll makes an interesting point:

“Dealing with Delayed Enlistment: Most young people enter the military through the Delayed Enlistment Program (sometimes called the Delayed Entry Program). This program allows youth to sign up with a military recruiter for one of the service branches, but receive a report date for basic training for up to a year later. When entering the Delayed Enlistment Program (DEP), youth sign an enlistment agreement and take an oath of enlistment.

It is very common for young people to change their minds after enlistment in the DEP. A young person may re-evaluate their decision. It is important to realize that up until a young person actually reports for basic training, they can be released from any military obligation.

The official way to gain release is to write a letter to the commanding officer of the recruiting station, explaining one's decision not to report to basic training.”

So, if you know someone who has already enlisted, clue them in: they don’t have to go. The vanity project in Iraq is on its last hundred billion dollar legs. Don’t throw yourself on the funeral pyre. Follow the President's example. He didn't allow a false sense of patriotism to lure him to Vietnam. Sensibly enough, he realized it was a snafu, and he could better spend his time birddogging babes and doing some mild drugs. What better advice could you give to the young people of America today?

indignatio continued

The tumblers were falling into place in 420 B.C. At least, according to Laurence Lampert’s excellent analysis of the dialogue known as Hippias Minor in the Spring 2002 Review of Politics. The Review definitely has a Straussian tinge, but sometimes LI likes the odd faith that close reading of ancient texts will give us political redemption.

In the Lesser Hippias, Socrates’ antagonist is Hippias, an Elian sophist and politician. He has come to Athens to participate in the ninetieth Olympiad, in which the Elians were managers of the game. Lampert emphasizes a Thucydidian aspect of Hippias’ presence in Athens:

“More important, however, than the coming Olympics for the Lesser Hippias is the diplomatic conference for which Elis presumably sent Hippias to Athens. That conference had been arranged by the rising new force in Athenian politics, Alcibiades, the young Athenian to whom Socrates had devoted such close attention more than a decade earlier.(n7) Alcibiades had arranged the congress of 420 to implement his bold new strategy; altering the Periclean strategy Athens had followed since the beginning of the war eleven years earlier. Alcibiades' policy required that maritime Athens win Peloponnesian allies for a decisive hoplite battle against Sparta. Thucydides chose this critical moment as the fitting occasion to introduce to his narrative the flamboyant and fateful figure who would come to dominate it as he came to dominate Athenian politics.(n8) Alcibiades appears for the first time in Thucydides as a young strategist and diplomat of great ambition and talent who achieves a striking victory in the first endeavor Thucydides chose to report about him: Alcibiades won the diplomatic battle in 420 by perpetrating an outrageous trick on the Spartan ambassadors, persuading them to lie to the Athenian assembly about their power to finalize a treaty. Unscrupulous Alcibiades then immediately denounced them to the assembly as unscrupulous liars, inciting the assembly into a frenzy of outrage against the Spartans and turning it toward his own policy of alliance with the Argives, Mantineans, and Elians. An earthquake occurred at that inopportune moment and the assembly lost its chance to approve Alcibiades' policy immediately. They approved it some weeks later, however, after Nicias's attempt to negotiate a treaty with the Spartans failed. Alcibiades's diplomatic success further required that he persuade the ambassadors from Argos, Mantinea, and Elis to sign a treaty of alliance with the Athenians. The diplomacy was successful but the hoplite battle two years later would be lost, partly due to Athenian failure to implement Alcibiades' plan and send a full complement of Athenians in a timely manner to the decisive battle near Mantinea in 418.”

For those who like their nudge nudging to be more explicit – we think there is a striking parallel between Alcibiades trick and some recent deception that has been going down. Maybe our faithful readers can guess?..

As we know from the Symposium, Socrates has been close to Alcibiades. The contest staged in the Lesser Hippias between Hippias and Socrates turns on the question of who is better, Achilles or Odysseus? And in what respect? The later question is, abstractly, about the nature of virtue, and, practically, about Homer’s presentation of the two heros. Hippias takes the position that Achilles is the greater man, and the Iliad is the greater poem. His position is pretty straightforward, turning on the scene in the Iliad in which Odysseus pleads with Achilles to return to the Achaian force. The Andrew Lang translation on Gutenberg gives us this unfortunate Victorian translation of Achilles’ reply:

“And Achilles fleet of foot answered and said unto him: "Heaven-sprungson of Laertes, Odysseus of many wiles, in openness must I now declareunto you my saying, even as I am minded and as the fulfilment thereofshall be, that ye may not sit before me and coax this way and that. Forhateful to me even as the gates of hell is he that hideth one thing inhis heart and uttereth another: but I will speak what meseemeth best.”

The word for wiles, in Greek, is polytropoi. Lampert sees this as a key word. Hippias’ view is that Achilles is rebuking guile from the morally more unassailable position of straightforwardness. Lampert gives a quite adequate summary of the “plot” of the dialogue (which, I should add, is one of Plato’s smaller dialogues):

“Achilles' words initiate the first argument of the dialogue, an argument about lying, for Hippias interprets Achilles' words as a denunciation of lying and an attack on lying Odysseus. This first argument (365c-371e) begins with a view on the liar that Socrates suggests Homer held: "that the truthful man was one sort and the liar another, and that they are not the same" (365c). Hippias's conviction--"It would be terrible (deinon) if it were not so"--governs his reactions to Socrates' reasoning and leads ultimately to the conclusion of Odysseus's superiority (371e). At the end of the first argument, when Hippias hears this conclusion and the conclusion on which it is based (that the voluntary liar is better than the involuntary liar), he expresses his moral outrage and expands the topic dramatically: "And how, Socrates, can those who are voluntarily unjust, who have voluntarily plotted and done evil, be better than those who do so involuntarily?" (372a, emphasis added) This outburst initiates the second argument (372a-375d), an argument about justice and wrong-doing that in its way repeats the reasoning of the first argument. Hippias expresses the same conviction at the end of the second argument: "It would, however, be terrible, Socrates, if those doing injustice voluntarily are to be better than those doing so involuntarily" (375d). This response initiates the third and final argument (375d-376b) at the end of which "terrible" appears one final time, but this time it states Socrates' judgment on what would be terrible (376c), a judgment that ends the dialogue.”

Socrates’ position in this dialogue is rather startling, especially if you come to it presupposing a certain conventional image of Socrates. That conventional image, taken from the Apology, is of a man who will not lie, a man who seeks definitions, a man who believes, as he says in the Gorgias, that the virtuous man is so far from merely the powerful man that the virtuous man would allow himself to be put to death in defense of virtue. These are all, indeed, sides of Socrates. But there is also the friend of Alcibiades, the ironist who initiates the philosophical quest as one that searches for definition only to upend it by making clear the perpetual inadequacy of that quest (or, if you will, the strange space in which that quest is pursued, in which the end of the movement lands one at the beginning again), the man whose daimon is a sort of spirit of negativity. This Socrates contends for a viewpoint that seems paradoxical: the man who does voluntary injustice is better than the man who does involuntary injustice. The reason? Behind the windings of the dialogue, Socrates reason is strangely similar to Gorgias’ viewpoint: the man who does injustice voluntarily has a greater capacity, both for justice and injustice, than the man who does injustice involuntarily. In other words, being polytropic, wily, guileful, is not a mark of weakness – it is the feint of a higher capacity.

“Under Socrates' questioning Hippias seems eager to state that the liar is capable, prudent, knowing, and wise (365d-366a): his eagerness suggests that he is as outraged at the polytropic man as Achilles was at Odysseus. Outrage makes Hippias far less willing to agree with Socrates' argument that it is the true expert in an art who is both the liar and the truth-teller and that the same man is a liar and truthful about the things of that art (367c-d). Socrates selects arts in which Hippias claims special expertise (calculating, geometry; astronomy) and when he generalizes from these arts to all arts and sciences, he again uses Hippias as his example, the Hippias whom Socrates heard boasting in the market place beside the money tables that he is the wisest of all human beings in the greatest number of arts (368b). Socrates' argument shows that the same man is liar and truth-teller but Hippias's response shows that capable Hippias is not that man; something in addition to the capacity of a Hippias seems necessary for the polytropic man.”

This post is the successor of my last post. My complaint in that one is that politics in America is stuck in the rhetorical mode of indignatio – shame-making. Myself, I think opposition to the current regime (and I am not, here, talking simply about the left – I include even conservative opposition to the war and the lack of stewardship) would be better served by the polytropic. The weakness of, say, Kerry as a politician was not that he was all things to all people, but that he was not convincingly anything to anybody.

But is Socrates right? Does the capacity to lie or to tell the truth – does an elevation above shame – make for the better leader?

the politics of apologize

Cato wrote a book entitled Indignatio. Typical of him. I’m with Robert Graves about Cato: he was a complete Roman prick. His nightmarish obsession with exterminating Carthage was quoted for almost two millennia as the model of patriotism, which just shows you that there is a lot of psychosis at the heart of Western civilization. The authoritarian personality was obviously alive and well in the ancient world. Such a mean, limited spirit would naturally be attracted to the rhetorical mode in which resentment is most at home.

Indignatio has always been particularly dear to American political types. Liberals get goosebumps thinking of Joseph Welch asking Joseph McCarthy if, at long last, he has no shame. Nice shot, but since McCarthy had pretty much succeeded in exterminating the impulse to form labor or socialist parties in the U.S. – parties that were once as much a part of our culture as the Republican or Democratic party – I’d give the points to McCarthy. Indigatio, at best, is the loser’s victory. For instance, look at the last week: Dick Durbin’s speech about torture arouses the Republicans to such thunderclaps of offence that it drives Durbin to make a tearful apology on the Senate floor. Now Democrats are about to mount a campaign of mock anger about the speech Karl Rove made to some GOP carnivore fest. rove implied that liberals and Democrats were the enablers that made 9/11 possible – soft traitors, if you will. Is anybody really surprised that Rove thinks the Democrats are soft traitors? Yet the point is to find the offending moment in order to be offended by it. The most politically aware groups in America, on the web, seem to spend most of their time surfing for offenses, seeking out scandals to their (by this time abraded) sensibilities, like pigs rooting up poison truffles.

LI has done a share of this ourselves.

In saner moments we know, however, that the politics of apologize is not a winner. What is odd is that the left side of the spectrum, with so much to rail against, spends so much of its time demanding that such as Karl Rove say they are sorry. This is a strategy that is discarded even by sullen adolescents, after a certain point. It is so evidently pointless.

This level of counterfeit politics, however, does fit the larger strategies of the D.C. elites. Yesterday, Senator Clinton sternly read out bits of Rove and asked various administration officials whether this was the kind of stuff they approved of. This got the pack behind her, baying up a storm. Let’s write our congressmen! I imagine there was movement on the emails. Maybe the WP will have a story. Meanwhile, Clinton’s own collaboration with the administration in every false, mad, and simply stupid move that generated this war even as it preserved Osama bin Laden as an ontap terrorist; her support for every creepy move that has guided American conduct during the course of this war; it all falls away as gentle as short term amnesia.

It isn’t that I am surprised or offended that the Roves, Limbaughs, O’Reilly’s, and on and on think I am a traitor. I could care less. I happen to think they are cretins, mouthpieces for the vulpine D.C. eggheads who have an unblemished record of failure.

So why has our politics been captured in the dumb show of fake shock, indignatio as hollow drama, the theater of the ridiculous Kabuki? And why has the left been especially vulnerable to it, given the feast of real daily shocks that are provided by the D.C. masters of war?

Well, in typically weasel fashion, I’m going to turn to another, related question in my next post: why did Socrates, in the Lesser Hippias, hold that Odysseus was a better man than Achilles? I think, at least, that it is a related question.

Ah, the smell of the new order in the morning

In 1948 my Daddy came to the city
Told the people that they'd won the war
Maybe they'd heard it, maybe not
Probably they'd heard it and just forgot'
Cause they built him a platform there in Jackson Square
And the people came to hear him from everywhere
They started to party and they partied some more
'Cause New Orleans had won the war
(We knew we'd do it, we done whipped the Yankees)
--Randy Newman

LI has spent a lot of time in apparently silly mooning over American and Iraqi casualties. We are assured, today, by the Secretary of War that the pie is getting bigger in Iraq. Happily, Rumsfeld’s remarks simply amplify those of this year’s winner of the Lincoln Steffens Award. Steffens was the man who went to Stalin’s Russia, I believe in the year of the first terror famine, and came back to the U.S. to proclaim, “I have seen the future and it works.” Karl Zinsmeister, a much less distinguished journalist – indeed, his obscurity is entirely proportionate to his merit, and his little bit of fame only comes from being pointed to by the more rancid warbloggers – has come back from Iraq to tell us, The War is over and we won.”

So, getting down to brass tacks – money, a much more valuable thing than a mere Marine’s life – what does the new age of Bush conservatism (big government is good, state’s rights are bad, the moral monopoly of the state should be extended by a magnitude that would astonish the old Fabians – that kind of new, stand on your head conservatism) tell us about how to spend our tax dollars? Apparently, the sky is the limit for democracy. 400 billion and counting in Iraq. Let’s see. Surely, a mere 200 billion for democracy in Nigeria would be just the ticket. And, because Bush is the environment president, he might want to kick in 200 to 300 billion dollars to save the Amazon. How about a nice 400 billion for democracy in Central Asian “republics” – that would be sweet. Pakistan – so far a paltry 3 billion. Time to put taxpayer’s money in the collection plate – that’s at least worth 200 billion.

Of course, this being the new, improved conservative age, we can put this on the credit card. Along with the two trillion borrowed for those private accounts, why don’t we just add a trillion and a half for the Freedom lovin,’ fun lovin’ eggheads in D.C. Whereever they cast their mighty glances at the map, we should certainly spring out with the billions.

Now, before you protest -- this is nothing like the nasty sixties liberals, who spent taxpayer money in this country like water. Imagine the selfishness! Spending money on poor americans -- what a joke! Everybody knows the government can't eliminate poverty. It can only implement American-style democracy in Mesopotamia, change 500 years of culture in unknown places, and make other minor top down changes. Plus, remember -- those billions aren’t really going to the unworthy inhabitants of any of those countries, but can be nicely shuffled into the pockets of the War industry honchos. There is, in the new conservatism, nothing more inspiring entrepreneurial site than a government parasite having a two martini lunch with a congressman. It inspires the kind of awe that also comes from reading The Wealth of Nations on speed.

It is the decent thing to do for retired and totally incompetent generals, and the riffraff that follows Tom Delay around and hoses him down when he gets too sweaty.

Another change in the DNA structure of conservatism which is startling, but fresh, is the new attitude towards communism. The old attitude would view with suspicion all that Chinese buying of T notes. It would take with a grain of salt the idea that China just wants to keep floating the American consumer market. That market would be there whether China supported the Iraq war or not. However, if you are a second rate military power and you want a window of advancement AND your rival is willing to break its army in a pointless ten year war, you might want to advance the money to promote that endeavor. Or at least, such would be the nasty thinking of the old commie conspiracy people. The new Bush conservatism is all about rolling up our sleeves and paying no attention to such ravings. Would such a thing escape the eagle eye of the great Wolfowitz? The man has training. He can tell a Chablis from Bud lite. And his ideals are sterling pure. Oh, and the war is won. We won the war! We knew we'd do it! Now, where is that extra hundred billion…

Dick Durbin is the Democratic Senator and toy balloon from Illinois. Last week, it was toy balloon day in the Senate. All the Democratic Toy balloons could “squeak up” – as the phrase is on the construction paper placards tacked to the corkboard in the Toy Balloon caucus. They could say that they wanted to stay the course, to reform social security, to support the patriot act, and to make this a more Christian country too – but say it in a moderate way. This way, the toy balloons can show they have new ideas. New ideas are so cool.

Durbin was so filled with the hot air that lifts little toy balloons up that he stumbled onto a truth: that the U.S. is routinely using torture. He compared this to another truth – in big bad countries, the names of which are even known by U.S. citizens who’ve had most of the past cleared out of their minds by taking history classes in high school, they also used torture. Nazi Germany, Stalin’s Russia.

Toy balloon Durbin certainly should have hushed his valve. The bad boys with the needles came after him. As a Democratic toy balloon, Durbin knows that mostly he is to be seen and not heard. And he has been a good toy balloon, too, but now this happened. So after sorrowfully pondering what a mean thing he’d said about torture – the victims of American torture prefer American torture over other forms of torture 100 percent, and especially the ones who are beat up by CIA thugs and die of heart attacks in interrogation centers – they just love it! – he tearfully repented last night. All the other toy balloons are so happy. As they say, loose squeaks can make people think you aren’t a toy balloon! Because they are the party of toy balloons, damn it. And filled with pride in the courage of people like their former toy balloon candidate, they want the voters to know that they have the amazing ability to be shaped into the form of any animal or vegetable that the balloon blowers choose. Such funny toy balloons! Look, look.

Now we can get back to torturing those people in Guantanamo from a centrist perspective.

Why have I never read T. E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars before?
This is obviously the summer to read it. It isn’t written in cinemascope, and Peter O’Toole doesn’t star in it. Actually, it is more like the English equivalent of the advice from the guerilla war experts to come – Giap or Mao. Lawrence thinks through the way to fight an organized state enemy in the desert on behalf of a non-organized entity, vaguely given the title of the “Arab Revolt.” I am sure his thought processes have gone through the minds of the insurgents in Iraq, unconscious as they no doubt are of the precedent. Lawrence figures out how to make a strength out of weakness – out of the inability to give battle. ‘We were to contain the enemy by the silent threat of the vast unknown desert, not disclosing ourselves till we attacked. The attack might be nominal, directed not against him, but against his stuff; so it would not seek either his strength or his weakness, but his most accessible material.” For Lawrence, railroads. In Iraq, oil pipelines. And this: “Battles in Arabia were a mistake, since we profited from them only by the ammunition the enemy shot off.”
But setting aside the excellence of the remarks on the landscape of struggle, there are also amazing passages of pure writing. I think that Lawrence’s account of the consequences of the murder of one of his men should be much better known – although perhaps I simply mean that I should have known it earlier. I was talking with my friend A.C. about this last week. He definitely knew the book, and he glommed onto the part about the murder in such a way that I thought, well, this must be a locus classicus.
Anyway – for those of you who haven’t read the book, what happens is this. Lawrence is suffering from a fever. He is out on an expedition with a pared down force. One of the men, Hamed, gets into an argument with another man and shoots him dead. There is a bustle in the camp as the victims relatives rush about, trying to find the killer:
“As I lay there I heard a rustle, and opened my eyes slowly upon Hamed's back as he stooped over his saddle-bags, which lay just beyond my rock. I covered him with a pistol and then spoke. He had put down his rifle to lift the gear; and was at my mercy till the others came. We held a court at once; and after a while Hamed confessed that, he and Salem having had words, he had seen red and shot him suddenly. Our inquiry ended. The Ageyl, as relatives of the dead man, demanded blood for blood. The others supported them; and I tried vainly to talk the gentle Ali round. My head was aching with fever and I could not think; but hardly even in health, with all eloquence, could I have begged Hamed off; for Salem had been a friendly fellow and his sudden murder a wanton crime.
Then rose up the horror which would make civilized man shun justice like a plague if he had not the needy to serve him as hangmen for wages. There were other Moroccans in our army; and to let the Ageyl kill one in feud meant reprisals by which our unity would have been endangered. It must be a formal execution, and at last, desperately, I told Hamed that he must die for punishment, and laid the burden of his killing on myself. Perhaps they would count me not qualified for feud. At least no revenge could lie against my followers; for I was a stranger and kinless.
I made him enter a narrow gully of the spur, a dank twilight place overgrown with weeds. Its sandy bed had been pitted by trickles of water down the cliffs in the late rain. At the end it shrank to a crack a few inches wide. The walls were vertical. I stood in the entrance and gave him a few moments' delay which he spent crying on the ground. Then I made him rise and shot him through the chest. He fell down on the weeds shrieking, with the blood coming out in spurts over his clothes, and jerked about till he rolled nearly to where I was. I fired again, but was shaking so that I only broke his wrist. He went on calling out, less loudly, now lying on his back with his feet towards me, and I leant forward and shot him for the last time in the thick of his neck under the jaw. His body shivered a little, and I called the Ageyl, who buried him in the gully where he was. Afterwards the wakeful night dragged over me, till, hours before dawn, I had the men up and made them load, in my longing to be set free of Wadi Kitan. They had to lift me into the saddle.

bolivia and the dirty dream

There is the American dream and there is the dirty American dream. The latter has been generally maintained by subaltern torturers and Fort Benning alumni in Central and Latin America. So we find it entirely appropriate that Rumsfeld is considering moving General Ricardo Sanchez to the command of the American army’s Latin division. Sanchez’s wonderfully innovative practices in the fields of German Shepherd unleashing, heart attack induction, and forced orgies has, after all, made Abu Ghraib a byword of America’s solidarity with the freedom lovin people of Iraq. And the Bush administration’s management strategy of promoting those who’ve done the most damage to America’s interests and prestige to ever higher posts made it Sanchez’s promotion almost inevitable.

Latin America has been stirring beneath the American dirty dream. This must worry the Bush people – this is a white house staffed, after all, with men and women who, in the eighties, rubbed epaulets with Ollie North and various contra drug dealers in the crusade against New World Communism. Others from that crusade – the editorial writers at the Washington Post, for example – have been openly fretting about Bolivia. The blood-in- our-mouth editorial in the WP today, with its distinct threat that the U.S. should support the separation of the Eastern province in Bolivia (where the gas is) if the Indians there get too uppity, and its casting of Evo Morales as the next Latin American matinee terrorist, after Chavez, is evidence that the old and vile boys on the Potomac are wondering what is up with Bush’s hardliners – too distracted by Iraq to manipulate a few Bolivian generals into whipping up a corrective massacre or two, it looks like.

Isaac Biggio’s analysis of the current events in Bolivia is well worth reading. He is particularly interested in the autonomy movement in Bolivia’s Santa Cruz department – a department that is much wealthier than the Indian cities, like El Alto. After exploiting the Indians for four centuries and using the U.S. to siphon massive amounts from Latin America into the international financial market, Bolivia’s elite sees the possibility of failure looming – and is responding by making separatist noises that Biggio thinks could echo throughout Latin America, where more and more countries are deviating from the Dirty Dream.

‘The separatism of the rich regions could also have consequences well beyond Bolivia’s borders. In Ecuador, for example, the idea that the territories most inclined to free enterprise could separate themselves from the mountainous, hostile Indian zones could induce a piecemeal nationalism.”

So -- after the Bush failure to put a little trojan horse in the OAS to justify some further coup attempt in Venezuala, the talk about General Sanchez should send a signal to the Dirty Dream's benifiaries in Latin America -- don't worry, help is coming. If it requires tactics a little more extreme than Abu Ghraib -- the dirty war in Argentina, prompted in part by Kissinger, comes to mind -- so be it. Freedom lovin' is hard work.

PS – Some Bolivian blogs:

MAPP’s Bolivian blog leans towards the moderate. It is a good source of Bolivian news:

A more lefty view is presented on this blog.

The Narconews, as always, provides gringos with the best periscope to peer into the region. The story of the Gas War so far is presented here.


Barrio Flores is a thoughtful Bolivian American who asks good questions about the nationalization issue. Tourists of the revolution -- and this includes LI - would do well to ask some questions, too. It needs to be said: no LDC has yet discovered how to leverage a dominant primary product export into the foundation of growth economy and a just society. If nationalisation arrives in Bolivia as an instrument of justice, instead of as the best thought out plan for getting the best deal in the marketplace, it will fail to deliver.

the metaphysical roots of the Bush culture part 2

To take up the threads from our last post – Simmel writes about the benefits that arise from an apparent weakness of the tertium figure. The weakness is the inability to preserve the aura of sentiment around a idea. Nietzsche might well call this the leveling effect of the mediating figure – the ignobility that comes from the economic moment, the transformation of an idea into a unit of exchange, rather than an indescribable moment of power. The power, the “mana”, the Ur-generosity, is systematically sapped from the inspiration. It is disgraced – that is, it no longer is in the order of grace, but of reason; and by and by gives rise to a system of substitutes that refers, always, to some primitive leader or utterance. The inspiration is delegated, but not completely lost. Such delegative structures often generate myths of return – the return of Jesus Christ, the return of the literal Constitution, the return of pure socialism, the return of family values.

The third party becomes the image of objectivity through the paradoxical force of the indifference that undermines him as a partisan, a potential part of a dyad. Tertiary prestige depends on breaking the prisonhouse of the couple, the emotional bonds of contending parties, not by an act of violence but by an incapacity for the sentiment of violence. There is, of course, something very inhuman about that, insofar as humans consist of those fuzzy sets of the individuals and aggregated couples described within Simmel’s taxonomy. And when objectivity finds its spokesmen in human beings – as must necessarily be the case in this sublunar world – the latent feeling of repulsion accumulates until it gives birth to another feeling: suspicion that an agenda is being advanced under a mask; that the third party is a manipulator tracing a secret path to power. Such is Iago, such is Shylock.

Such, too, were the excisemen of England, or at least as Tom Paine saw them. In last spring’s Social Epistemology, William J. Ashworth poses a question: what cultural motives would lead to valuing objectivity? His partial answer is in his essay, “Practical Objectivity: The Excise, State, and Production in Eighteenth Century England.” It is a nice stab at giving us an unnoticed locus for the rise of objectivity as a value: the tax system. This is the kind of thing to give you Randians out there the fantods.

As Ashworth points out, the success of the English tax system was the primary condition for the success of English imperialism. Other systems in other empires – Spain, France – by privatizing the extractive institution of taxing, while retaining state prerogative over allocutive institutions, made themselves vulnerable in competition with a state that could successfully monopolize taxation (which is not quite Ashworth’s point, I should point out, but LI’s addendum.) And a state that could do the latter would have an incentive for tolerating or encouraging private enterprise.

So, how did taxing encourage objectivity?

“To assist in its attempt to define and levy the production of home produced goods, theexcise, in particular, turned to quantification, and a particular notion of accuracy thattried to advertise claims to objectivity and equity in its gauging activities.3 The constitution and stages of a taxed manufacture had to be defined and made clearly accessible to the excise method. As well as defining what ingredients manufactures could use, it also dictated what times they could begin production and what shape the site of manufacture should be.

As well as needing technical ability a prospective excise officer required patronage from someone of recognised social authority. Thereafter his career was, at least in theory, subject to merit. Training and a degree of worth rather than mere connection were novel features in eighteenth-century England. So too was the tool of anonymity. The excise officer was deliberately plucked from areas suitably distant from his round to ensure his face was unknown in his place of business. In other words, his relationship with the local community, at least to begin with, was not based on familiarity but on anonymity. To ensure this process was sustained, after a specified period the officer was duly removed to serve in another district. This is in contrast, for instance, to the collection of the land tax, which was collected by local respected figures. Thus, if, as Steve Shapin maintains, ‘Premodern society looked truth in the face’, it was the case at the excise that so-called truth was coming face to face with strict bookkeeping, internal checking, instrumentation and anonymity.”

Indeed, Ashworth’s account of the difficulties shaping the administration of the excise, and the incentives that drove it to greater accuracy and objectivity, display the logic Simmel discerned in the creation of the third party.

There is, firstly, weakness:

“To ease the volatile relationship between the producer and the excise required the development of new techniques of collection. The general unpopularity of the excise made it vulnerable, and this was perhaps one factor in its drive towards its particular bureaucratic structure and practices—in the words of Theodore Porter, ‘the drive to supplant personal judgement by quantitative rules reflects weakness and vulnerability’”

There is, then, the benefit that accrues from this vulnerability. The uniformity of a standard leads to “regularisation across the country,” leading to that odd seemingly contradictory social fact: a society that is both more strongly identified with the state and more individualistic. Ashworth gives some instances of accuracy in various manufactures – of paper, glass, and beer – that are expressed, in the exciseman’s regulating gaze, oddly like the description of manufactures in the Encyclopedie, Taxes give us an “objective” textbook of technology, and become an unwitting vehicle of technological selection.

Ashworth points out that the excise taxes were placed upon the masses, representing the “first time the masses had been seriously taxed, and, secondly, [demanding] a great deal of contact time at the source or target of the tax.” So accuracy and objectivity spread among the population who had, previously, associated the tertiary power with the ascetic.

The delusion inherent in the thought that civilization progresses is to think that different, early stages in the civilizing process are overcome. This is the Whig’s neurosis, or the liberal’s. Disciplining a population to accept and even value objectivity is hard work, and there is always a current of resentment that can break either to the right or to the left. What we see, in Bush culture meritocracy, is a compromise formation – expertise is guaranteed by position, not accuracy, or various modes of separating knowledge from performance, like the testing in the school system. And within different modules, success becomes a matter purely of persuasion – so that the unpersuaded are marked down not as people with, perhaps, a different take on facts, but people who impede the whole flow of the organization. Wreckers, in short. This penetrates even into the source of information, which becomes contentious. To get a certain piece of information from an unsanctioned source – to operate as though the third had its own will – is to defy the rules of the meritocracy, which then proceeds to either ignore or ridicule the bearer of that information.

LI has been thinking that the third figure, the third who is always with you, the resented tertium quid, has a myth. Remember Bellerophon? Bellerophon was a nice, handsome Greek noble who repelled the advances of the wife of the king. The wife went to the king and told him that Bellerophon had tried to rape her. [First instance of Simmel's third, the couple and the child]. The king, believing her but afraid of Belleropon, sent him on to the King of Lydia as an emissary, with a sealed letter. [Second instance -- the letter as the third's emotional disengagement] The letter read: kill the bearer of this letter. The king, reading the letter, decided to do away with Bellerophon by having him kill a monster ravishing the district, the Chimera. [Third instance -- the resentment of the couple, visited on the third, by way of a substitute for the couple]

Bellerophon is the image of the tertium quid. His indifference is his menace, and he carries his death sentence in a sealed envelope. But that sentence is infinitely differed, as his supposed weakness shows itself, in the end, to be latent power. After all, he did slay the Chimera.

In the Bush culture, the figures of objectivity are all being given secret death sentences -- except the death they are supposed to receive is a purely social death. A death of inattention, of never making it into the mainstream, of being extremists, of being labeled by the labelers as "not serious." We'll see who survives this struggle.

The Metaphysical Roots of the Bush culture

An article by Joseph Nocera in the NYT profiles the very deserved fall of Morgan Stanley’s CEO, Philip Purcell, as a case study in the image deflation of the tough CEO. The first graf of the thing caught LI’s eye:

“BACK in the 1980's, Fortune published a feature called "America's Toughest Bosses." Donald H. Rumsfeld made the list one year (he was running G. D. Searle). So did legendarily crusty executives like Robert Crandall of American Airlines ("has a towering temper and swears a lot"), Frank Lorenzo of Texas Air ("not trusted inside or outside the organization") and Harry E. Figgie Jr., chairman of the manufacturer Figgie International ("really abusive - the Steinbrenner of industry").”

This mention of Rumsfeld got us thinking about the divorce between competence and success that is an often noted aspect of the Bush administration and can be extended to the whole Bush culture. By this, we mean the media, the official opposition, Wall Street, etc., -- the pseudo-meritocracy that has descended on this country like the star Wormwood falling upon the freshwater of the world.

The current contretemps around the Downing Street Memo(s) gives us a nice little snapshot of this historic moment. Here we have the great panjandrums of the print press – the Washington Post, the New York Times – who crafted the shoddiest of fictions leading up to and into the war (think, for instance, of the headline story about a captured Iraqi scientist significantly pointing to spots of sand – proof positive of a fiendish WMD program in the best tradition of Spiderman villains) – stirring in their dinosaur juices to denounce the very idea that there is anything newsworthy about the memos, or John Conyers attempt to get Congress to address them. The Michael Kinsley op ed piece in the Post last week was perhaps the nadir of this meme: a man who works for a newspaper that headlined the Michael Jackson acquittal as though Jesus had once again cast aside the cerements, in the midst of a news frenzy about a blonde kidnapped on the island of Aruba, in the season of the Runaway Bride, is suddenly making the distinction between the “popularity” of a story and the news proper. Just because people are interested in the Downing Street memo(s) – he mentions receiving hundreds of emails per day about them – is no reason that the LA Times should stoop to reporting about them. Heavens! The news media has standards way too elevated to pick news stories on the basis of popularity alone. And now, this just in about Tom Cruise...

And so the NYT retains Judith Miller. And the Bush administration retains every official who predicted that the war would be a cakewalk, that the oil would pay for it, that the number of troops occupying the country was immaterial, etc. It punishes every official who made correct predictions – from the Generals who told the truth about the manpower cost of the occupation to the poor putz who tried to tell Congress that Bush’s drug pill industry welfare bill would cost one hundred billion more than the Administration said it would. And so the internal standard that would make certain failures punishable is broken. But at the same time, the exterior face of the administration is of maximal toughness. These are the elite. These are the ones who’ve passed the tests of the meritocracy.

Looking at the description of Morgan Stanley under Purcell, these are the features that stare out at one:

1.The insistence on loyalty.
2.The unscrupulous dealing with any perceived enemy.
3.The gradual corruption of all monitoring functions.
4.The gradual reduction of co-ordination to conspiracy.
5.The outstanding and persistent failure of the tough guy leadership to meet the minimal metrics of objective success, as measured by the market place.

Thinking about this, we turned to Georg Simmel’s notion of the triad.

Simmel was fascinated by secrets, by the slippage between coordinating activity and conspiracy, by the positive alienation effected by money. He divides the investigation of socialization into three areas: the individual, the aggregation of individuals (the group), and the conflict that may occur on both levels – individual against individual, group against group.

To our eyes, this may look like an imitation of Boltzmann’s statistical mechanics (the pop science ideas of thermodynamics were in circulation in Simmel’s day, and turn up diversely in Freud and in Henry Adams, as well – and I could no doubt extend that list). However, Simmel’s notion of the dyad and the triad has been undergoing something of a rediscovery in social network theory for the past ten years or so. We are going to translate a bit about the triad, and then, in our next post, delve a bit into the roots of the social resentment of objectivity, or the notion of the Judge-enemy.

The passage from Simmel comes after he gives examples of triads and their sometimes unexpected effects – for instance, the triad formed by the child and the parents. He then points to the disputes between laborers and capital in England are often settled before a non-partisan board:

“When the non-partisan holds up the claims and the reason of the one party before the other, they lose the tone of subjective passion that they usually draw out from the other side.

Here we see something function in a healthy way that is so often considered to be suspect: that a mental content [seelischen Inhalt]’s air of feeling within its primary bearer, usually weakens significantly within a second bearer to whom this content is transferred.
Thus sensations and arguments, that must first transit through many mediating person, are so often without effect, even if their objective content arrives wholly undistorted in the decisive instance; for there is, in the transference, a loss of emotional imponderabilia, which not only fill out insufficient material reasons, but even endow sufficient ones with the drive to practical realization.

This highly significant fact, at least for the development of purely mental influences, brings it about, in the simple case of a socially mediating third element, that the feeling-intonations that accompany some demand fall away from the content, suddenly, and just because it is being formulated by a third party and represented to another; and so the vicious circle can be avoided as the affair becomes intelligible to all: that circle which occurs when the emotional emphasis of the one calls out emotional emphasis in the other, which then reacts again on the first one, and so on, until there is no more limit.”

Unexpected consequences fascinate us here at LI. Last year, we pondered whether the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq would actually free the administration to engage elsewhere on its patented path to maximum criminal activity. Well, LI worried in vain. We were not counting on the pure incompetence of the Bush people. Rumsfeld has squandered the army the way Bush squandered the budget surplus. The result is that the army is breaking. The real question is whether the U.S. is going to be in the odd position of spending half a trillion dollars per on the War Department while fielding an army consisting of 100 fatigued frag victims.

While the anti-war movement in this country has either hibernated as a wholly owned subsidiary of the Democratic Party, suffering the curious death from asphyxiation that befalls mammals who spend too much time with their heads up their assholes – or rallied its invite only, vegan lefty undergrad troops to acts of high, symbolic impotence – the real antiwar movement has been beautifully self organizing in the burbs and the highlands. It consists of parents who don’t want to sacrifice their children for the mad vanity project of a bunch of D.C. eggheads. Ah, every once in a while LI does feel the distant intimation of … well, let’s admit it, patriotism … when we witness such things as the undeclared general strike against the project that was imposed on us by the Weekly Standard crowd and their Pentagon companeros. While the Rubicon that divides the noble lie from the pathological one is so easily jumped in D.C. that the noble liars don’t even give it a second thought, the consequences outside of D.C. – the abasement of American prestige, the skewing of American self interest into a dead end filled with alien corpses, the impoverishment of American culture, the elevation to power of the greatest single collection of educated morons since Mcnamara started flowsheeting kill-to-hill ratios in the War room – is nevertheless felt, as it were, in the very air and water.

Now, there has always been a puzzle about the neocons. The puzzle is in two parts, only one of which gets publicized. The publicized part is: how could they have been so incredibly unprepared for occupying Iraq? The less publicized part is: how could they have been so incredibly arrogant as to think that they could take various democracies for a joy ride without any domestic blowback? One of the consequences of the leadership of a government embarking on an unpopular war is the disenchantment of the people with the leadership. This is a no brainer. It could be missed by the D.C. wizards only because their vaunted expertise consists solely in a sort of gaseous moralism. They had, as we have found out, no real knowledge at all about Iraq. They have no real knowledge, as in knowledge of language and history and culture, about most places in the world. They even have no real knowledge of the history and culture of the countries they live in, i.e. the U.S. and the U.K. It is astonishing how little the Wolfowitz crowd and their journalistic acolytes – the Hitchens, the Krauthammer, the Hoagland, etc., etc. – really know. Besides the piss elegance of being able to allude to Plato and Leo Strauss over the sherry, these people apparently have gone through life with the motto, everything I learned I learned at expensive Georgetown restaurants. Because they have broken canapés with the thrilling Mr. Chalabi, they were all Iraq experts. One is reminded of that astute political scientist, Jeremiah. What he said of Jerusalem could well be said of Bush War D.C.: “all that honored her despise her, because they have seen her nakedness: yea, she sigheth, and turneth backward. Her filthiness is in her skirts she remembereth not her last end; therefore she came down wonderfully: she had no comforter.”

All of which is by way of guiding the reader to today’s extra special reading: Max Boot’s column in the L.A. Times. Boot has become quite deranged, always harping on ‘staying the course’ – not a good idea when you are in the wrong lane on the interstate. His proposal is, to give you the shortened version, this: to overcome the general strike against the Bush war, the Pentagon should be given the power to hire foreigners – basically, to compose an army of mercenaries, which can then be put at the pleasure of the executive. Boot points out that this worked well for the Roman Empire. He doesn’t point out that it spelled the doom for the Republic. Not that this would particularly bother him and his ilk – self-described meritocrats deserve, after all, to live in a meritocracy protected by Condottieri. It’s the brave new gated community world! As usual, a neocon boldly walks up to the plate and calmly dismisses the whole structure of American conservative thought, built up over two hundred years, to the applause of the right. Who knew that the ultimate victims of the neo-Peronist Bushies would be the American tories?

So tell me again – how did these people get within a mile of the levers of power?

nothing too cognitive today, people

In an article on Iranian bloggers in der Spiegel, my friend, the Brooding Persian, got almost a whole paragraph. Congratulations! I told him I’d translate the graf and insert a link

"The tone is of absolute earnestness. A blogger who goes under the melancholic moniker of the Brooding Persion writes, commenting on Iran’s nuclear plans, “a country that can’t even keep its public toilets clean shouldn’t be laying a finger on nuclear technology.” The “brooding persian” is stupifyingly learned. He debates the political philosophy of Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss and writes clear sighted columns about the spiritual kinship of Iranian and American neo-conservatives. His blog, written in elegant English, burgeons with social-critique. Iranian weblogs give us a unique instance of the human soul under religious dictatorship. Young people who pursue the struggle against the bigotry of the rulers on the internet, speaking of a hollowed out life, are beyond anger. They don’t want to be seen as victims. Their regard is directed at the hairline fractures in the system. “A great blessing of the Islamic Republic consists in how it has made us impatient with piety,” writes one blogger, Omila. “The Shah never succeeded in doing what the Ayatollahs have finally achieved. The youth of today, ruled by the representatives of God on Earth, now even put the existence of God into question.”"

LI must say, we have heard Iranians make the latter claim all the way back in 1985. It has become a cliché among intellectual Iranians. Anyway, the B.P. was right, it turns out, and I was wrong. I kept telling him not to keep writing about Schmitt and Strauss. Well, he thereby attracted the attention of Spiegel – another of the endless proofs that you should take my advice with the caution that my instincts are almost always wrong.
….

Yesterday night I went to see Louis XIV play at Stubbs. Perhaps because I have been contemplating rent seeking lately, I began to think about how the line is an emblem of the market in privilege. One’s place in the line is purely a matter of who preceded you to your place – just as birth order determines monarchy or title. Going to see a concert at a club has other interesting features. Unlike standing in line to get a movie ticket, there is less of a sense that the line is being processed with capitalist rationality. In fact, the line simply stood there for a while. When this happen, the line becomes a different shape, as little “courts’ form – friends break the back to back physiognomy of the thing to face each other, lending an increasing bumpiness to the line -- blurring the distinction, in fact, between a line and a crowd. One observes a certain anxiety as you go back through the line, and suddenly ‘explorers” will appear – people detaching from their place in the line and going up to check out the head of it. And then the linekeepers will appear. Music clubs invariably hire linekeepers who have zip sense of organization. They are always as goofy as the assistants that are sent from the Castle to “aid” K. in Kafka’s novel. So eventually the line keepers get us into two lines. Apparently, there is a secret society of privilege in the line we are all in – those who have already paid for their tickets. Or are on some mysterious list. This, too, represents a reality about privilege. Although order of precedence is the apparent organizing principle, in reality there are the privileged among the privileged. This makes it hard to apply the concept of a unifying class interest to explain every instance in the life of the line – but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a general unifying interest in preserving precedent as the line’s principle. Those who criticize the class notions of the Marxists often point to disturbances in the structure of interest to claim that class isn’t the final determining instance in capitalist social formations.

… but then the ticket guys said it was time to sell the tickets for real, and I came out of my little analytic day dream. The concert, by the way, was disappointing. Louis XIV has a nice sound on a few songs, and they have a nice sense of stage, but the ultimate r n r jism wasn’t with the boys last night.

Get thee behind me, Mr. N.

I said – or perhaps threatened – that I had two more posts on Nietzsche, having felt a fiery call to deliver my message to the unheeding heathen. He who has ears can get his hat – there is probably some raree blog controversy much more interesting elsewhere. So, without further ado, and taking up where we left off last time:

The influence of Nietzsche on the concepts or tactics of fascism is, I think, nill. Tactically, Nazism employed tactics that have spontaneously occured to your average ten year old bully for millenia, amplified by modern technology and enriched with all the bile and acids of ethnic hatred and the bodyslamming effect of the business cycle. Conceptually, even Nietzsche’s most ardent Nazi followers admitted that he was anti-antisemitic, anti-nationalist, and anti-state. These are constants in his work from the post Wagner period to the very end. Nietzsche's closest experience with fascist art and rhetoric -- in the Wagner circle -- made him very unhappy.

In attempting to annex Nietzsche, his fascist interpreters made three interrelated claims. They claimed that the will to power gives us a guide to the immutable social categories of the strong and the weak, no matter that they are, on the surface, contingent and changeable; that the will to power is the central concept that makes all of the rest of Nietzsche’s work intelligible; and that the systematic summa is to be found in the Will To Power.

We, on the other hand, claim that the idea of a central illuminating concept in Nietzsche’s work is a will of the wisp – except if you believe, as Nietzsche came to, that it is the Eternal Return of the Same; that Nietzsche alternates between treating the categories of the strong and the weak as immutable ahistorical concepts and as very mutable ones, in line with his criticism of any of the truth claims of immutable, transcendent categories deduced from philosophic principles; and that the Will to Power was brokered into existence by Elisabeth, Nietzsche’s sister, who took various jottings Nietzsche made about future masterworks (jottings that every writer makes) too seriously, and who created her Nietzsche book out of a basic and deep ignorance of Nietzsche’s principle of composition. Elizabeth’s idea, which is common today, is that Nietzsche scattered a bunch of insights – aphorisms – about in no particular order, responding to no particular textual strategy. If he contradicted himself, he contradicted himself, a la Whitman. Myself, I find Nietzsche’s notebooks always fascinating. But they do not make a book. However, Elisabeth and even poor Peter Gast, the friend of Nietzsche’s she suborned to do the project, mistook the episodic for the chaotic. This isn’t surprising. Elisabeth was looking for money and prestige; she was never known as a fine reader or critic. So here was the goal: get together a schoolboy version of a philosophy book by bundling together thoughts under different topic headings, and there you have it.

This won’t do. What Nietzsche got from Plato was a deep dialogical tact. What that means is that you have a sense for how a point a view can inspire a response, which then touches a spring in the original point of view that moves it in such a way that in explaining itself, it becomes something else again. Doxa are mercurial or they are dead. In the later case, they can be stuffed into almanachs, dictionaries, encyclopedias and tests. They retain a use value for memory; they lose, however, their real, discursive life.
At this point I am going to do something so extremely boring nobody will read the next bit – but such are the sacrifices I make for art. I’m going to apply a certain theory of reference, developed by Francis Jacques, to Nietzsche’s work – in particular, his notion of retro-reference. Jacques developed this in contrast to the prevailing Anglo school which constructed a theory of indexicals that responded to the demands of formal language – which, in Jacques’ opinion, distorts the role of indexicals by artificially bracketing their dialogic instances; or perhaps I should say his is a theory which operates as an adjunct to that school. I’ll write a little about this in my next Nietzsche post, drag in the Nietzschian “I,” expatiate on Nietzsche’s gogolian fascination with doubles, and finish up this series, to everybody’s relief.

Why we love this country

As we all know, the Bush administration has been so innovative in the field of corrupt practices, misprision, and fraud, that it is no longer possible to tell the government apart from a RICO target. So we were amused by the latest incident of malfeasance with the intent to defraud the taxpayer. Also, a few lesser lives without the law, i.e., innocent Iraqi lives, were sacrificed -- but on the plus side, another GOP lobbyist has been rewarded for his inherent love of freedom. Freedom is a good thing. Freedom to mark up your invoices for undelivered goods 400 percent is an even better thing. And having friends in high places in Rumsfeld’s Pentagon is the best thing of all.

A nice little rundown on Custer Battles in Business Week includes the following fun to know and tell facts:

a. Custer Battles is formed in 2002 by “former Army Rangers Mike Battles and Scott Custer … before the Iraq invasion to seek rebuilding contracts. Battles, a GOP campaign contributor and a former CIA case worker, ran unsuccessfully for Congress in 2002 as a Rhode Island Republican.”

b.While a more timid government might be afraid to entrust the lives of soldiers in an occupied territory that is filled with arms dumps and hostile forces to a contractor with approximately six months of experience, the Bush White house is anything but timid. Rather, enriching anything connected to the GOP, especially if it is slightly paramilitary and smells of Soldier of Fortune magazine is jut the thing the Bush White House loves best. So in the ‘bring em on’ fashion so beloved of the American electorate, Custer Battles and its fifteen subsidiaries harvest the bounty of war.
c. In a war that is, to all intents and purposes, an incompetent pirate raid on some of the richest oil fields in the world, it is hard to enforce a sense of integrity among the help. So Custer Battles operates much as if it were a division of Haliburton:

“By itself, Custer Battles is already in a great deal of trouble. It is under investigation by the Pentagon for allegedly cheating the U.S. government out of tens of millions during the chaotic months following the Iraq invasion. In September 2004, the military banned Custer Battles and 15 of its subsidiaries and officials, including Morris, from obtaining government contracts while the criminal probe proceeds.

Custer Battles employees have also been accused of firing on unarmed Iraqi civilians, of using fake offshore companies to pad invoices by as much as 400 percent, and of using forgery and fraud to bilk the American government. Two former associates have filed a federal whistle-blower suit, accusing top managers of swindling at least $50 million.”

d. Failing onward and upward is what the American upper class is all about. So the fun guys at Custer Battles, after being formally banned by the Pentagon, operate out of the Custer Battles hq, but under different nomenclature. Clever, eh? “Rob Roy Trumble, who previously was operations chief for Custer Battles,” resuits up a few operations that are just so necessary to our ongoing effort to spread liberty across the plains of Mesopotamia that the Pentagon has to throw money at the guy again. Flowers give pollen to bees, the male peacock spreads its irresistible tail before the weak kneed female, and GOP businessmen make proposals to the War Department. It’s a nature thing.

e. But so clever, so clever, this Custer Battles company! Here’s what they did. They re-baptized themselves as two other companies, Emergent Business Service and Tarheels Training. They affiliate themselves with a Romanian company which seems to be subsidiary of a killers for hire company out of Britain. And the fleet foots at the Pentagon allow them to bid, once more, on contracts. Astonishing, isn’t it.

America. Ruled by the worst. Elected by the ignorant. Plucked like a dead chicken.

More on Nietzsche, oh my

LI is tempted, at this point, to go ballistically Germanistic and talk about the circle around Stefan George. Lehmann, after dismissing the early wave of Nietzsche interpreters as bunglers who missed the great man’s message, believes that here, finally, with the Aryan brotherhood around George, the proper ecclesia of Nietzsche interpretation finds its footing. Of course, the five hundred thousand printing of Thus Spake Zarathustra, distributed to the troops at the front, planted the seed. One imagines that Elisabeth Nietzsche, finally wealthy, got her revenge in attending the Bayreuth festival in style in the postwar years.

Lehmann divides the rightwing school into three divisions, with a cursory glance at what he calls the “inauthentic” school of Nietzsche interpretation, which includes Max Scheler, Ortega y Gasset, Graf Keyslering and Oswald Spengler. About the George circle, the best philosopher in his view was Ludwig Klages. Actually, we have read a little of Klages ourselves. Lehmann’s overview complains that Klages doesn’t quite make the connections that light up the master theme of Nietzsche’s work, the Will to Power. But at least Klages grasps that the Will to Power, and not the dilettantish perspectivism, is the key to Nietzsche. But since, for Klages, a Schopenhauerian, the Will to Power is negative – not the heightening of life but the black spot, the invisible plague – Nietzsche’s work ultimately collapses in self contradiction, of which only some gigantic ruins – the notion of resentment, for instance – remain to be used by the philosopher. With the smug confidence of a man who thinks he has chosen the winning side of history, Lehmann tells us that with [such] an alien metric is the lifework of a thinker measured, whose authentic contemporary meaning has emerged with ever greater clarity.”

Then there is the case of the existentialist interpretation of Nietzsche, and his comparison with Kierkegaard. Who could doubt that Nietzsche’s interpretation of the world comes from his own personal existence, rather than a striving for some cold objectivity? Interestingly – it tells us how low Heidegger’s bid to be the Nazi’s premier philosopher – Lehmann covers the existential/catholic interpretation of Nietzsche with never a word about the master from the Black Forest, instead concentrating on Jaspers.

But finally we come to the authentic interpretation of Nietzsche, the one which places him in the grand vista that leads from the concept of the Ubermensch to the Fuhrer himself. This is how Lehmann makes the rhetorical transition:

“The necessary experience to which the Nietzsche Renaissance of the present owes its origin, the world war, that as a historic experience has not ended in the year 1918, but continues in the midst of our most immediate turns of events – it not only spans the powers of negation, but also the ties of the new order that were forged in struggle. And the philosophy that overlooks that –isn’t it blind before the sheer present? Doesn’t it miss out on our existential situation (existenzielle Situation)?”

("Ein Mann wohnt im Haus der spielt mit den Schlangen der schreibt/
der schreibt wenn es dunkelt nach Deutschland dein goldenes Haar Margarete")

Springtime (for Nietzsche and Germany), in Lehmann’s view, comes about because of Alfred Bäumler, who makes the connection between the Will to Power – again, the backbone of Nietzsche’s thought in the rightwing view – and the “great politics” – what I am translating rather capriciously as macropolitics.

What Bäumler does is give us a very political Nietzsche, the midpoint of whose work was the struggle to counter Bismarck’s politics. Bismarck’s mistake was to found the state on equality, when the state is naturally founded on inequality – those inequalities that are found in the natural order. But “Bismarck’s ears were deaf to philosophy.” Nietzsche’s great counter-political moves were received with indifference. Only by taking account of the fact that Nietzsche, in the period of waiting for the hero to lead his country, do we understand how that impatience at the Bismarckian order led to the part of Nietzsche that might be difficult for a Nazi to accept:

But it made Nietzsche’s judgments over Germany ambiguous: these are not ‘objective’ expressions, but judgments that will attack, sort out, wound, bring attention to. And they encompass not only the decayed characteristics of the German essence: German innerlichkeit, flatness, banality, spiritlessness, but also the counter-images and counter-concepts: the roman culture and French culture (in opposition to German barbarism), the good European (in oppostion to the nationalist), the Renaissance (in opposition to the German reformation), and much else, to which we can add Nietzsche’s prejudice against anti-semitism and his occasional praises of the Jewish race and intelligence. Whoever takes that seriously will completely overlook the point at which Nietzsche is completely serious, the political intention of these very intentional constructions. He will not comprehend, why Nietzsche, in this political situation, had to attack this way and in no other; and even more, why these scenarios, understood correctly, as Nietzsche wished them to be understood, do not stand in contradiction with his fundamental political knowledge.”

Lehmann’s solution to the Nietzsche problem is, we must admit, formally similar to many philosophical interpretations of Nietzsche – one chooses where Nietzsche is serious and where he is polemical, and builds up from the serious. The Nietzsche that asked if there was room for laughter in science is subordinated to the spirit behind the most violent rhetoric in the Nietzsche canon. And the critical element in Nietzsche, the link to, for instance, the German enlightenment – a link that Nietzsche signaled by dedicating his first book, away from the Wagner circle, to Voltaire – becomes a necessary instrument in his attack on Bismarck. The necessity, here, is a little strained – how, exactly, does it promote a nationalistic, anti-semitic regime to attack nationalism and anti-Semitism? But German philosophers have long learned that the invocation of necessity clears us of many logical sins of omission – especially those having to do with the connecting middle terms.

Lehmann’s next two paragraphs make a sustained case for Nietzsche as a fascist. I’ll translate them, and then, tomorrow or tomorrow or tomorrow, I will return with the third episode in our philosophical cliffhanger, who’s screwing Nietzsche? (and by the way, translating the next two paragraphs – translating all of the Lehmann so far – is like watching someone suffocate my brother. It gives me an excruciating pain.)

Then what are these political insights [Erkenntnisse]? – That life is neither a vale of tears or an hedonistic playground for Nietzsche, but struggle and domination – a domination of those who are naturally, as the Greeks might say, mightier (who first control themselves and can rid themselves of God – “spirit, strictness of the head, independence and hardness, decisiveness, no whining”). As the state rests not on equality, but inequality, so does the culture, being a power-will and a bound (Bändigung), self-control: not an affair for the many, and not an affair of consumers, of happiness, of satisfaction. Nietzsche’s macro-politics is directed against the democratic “ideals”: against the ideology of liberalism, against the socialism of the masses, against bourgeois society and the ‘industrial culture’ – against the increasing assimilation, averaging and shrinking of the European man” (Bauemler). Nietzsche’s political will is the will to the type, to breeding and discipline, to the soldierly leadership, to strong races and healthy bodies. These are Germanic-northern and greek values, that determine even his “anti-stateism, his dislike of the machine state, the state as the goal in itself and as “ethical organism”.

In all of this is Nietzsche a predecessor of National Socialism.”

So – this is the strongest case for Nietzsche’s macropolitics leading directly to National Socialism. In my next post about Nietzsche, I’ll ask about the interpretative moves that are applied here, to Nietzsche’s work; ask whether the left Nietzschians don’t similarly carve out their own Nietzsche; and make the case for a reading of Nietzsche that respects the internal clues in Nietzsche’s work – instead of looking for a master theme – that complies with what he writes in The Case of Wagner:


“What is the characteristic sign of every literary decadence? This: that life no longer lives in the whole. The word becomes sovereign and leaps out of the sentence, the sentence usurps and darkens the sense of the page, the page gains live at the expense of the whole – the whole is no longer a whole. But that is the likeness for every style of decadence: every time an anarchy of atoms, disaggregation of the will, “freedom of the individual”, morally speaking – expanded to a political theory, the “same right for all.” Life, the equal liveliness, the vibration and exuberance of live compressed in the smallest images; the remnant poor on life. Overall: paralysis, weariness, stiffening or hostility and chaos: both leaping to the eye ever more insistently the higher one climbs in the forms of the organization. The whole no longer lives in general: it is all pieced together, calculated, artificial, an artifact.”

Or maybe I won't. That sounds like an awful lot of work.

Some links. Klages, who ended up writing the world's longest defense of the philosophy of graphology, is the prophet without honor at this site.

Elisabeth Nietzsche was a case. I can't help but find her life and triumph, as the "heir" of her helpless brother, screamingly funny. This essay by Jenny Diska is nice. Also, I'd recommend John Gimlette's book about Paraguay, At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig. Among other things, he pokes around in the memories left of Elisabeth and her hubby's attempt to found an Aryan utopia in Paraguay. Elisabeth and her husband eventually fleeced the anti-semitic gulls and left them to the tropical heat -- never were criminal and victim so evenly matched.

nine American soldiers dead since Tuesday

I read an old column of Alexander Cockburn’s yesterday, from 1999. The substance of the column was that the left in the U.S. was a joke, led by phonies like Jesse Jackson and Michael Moore, and the only progressive political energy was, bizarrely, on the right, where there was a healthy hatred of the government.

Now, as is the case with many Cockburn columns, this was too clever by half. But lopping off the too clever half, he had a point – the only people who were truly, actively against U.S. intervention in Kosovo were rightwingers like Jack Kemp.

Given that politics is mostly positioning, that opposition to war has melted on the right with the Republicans in power. But I do think it could come back. In fact, I think it has, among the grassroots. Save for those who are swayed by the logic of Suttee, which posits that sacrifice demands, in itself, further blind sacrifice (thus the soldiers killed in Iraq are not killed in vain if further soldiers are killed in Iraq), the American will to continue the madness there is crumbling. There is, unfortunately, a lot of anger on the left about this with no forum – the Democrats have long been a coalition of the cowardly, and the irritant of their presence on the scene is mitigated only by their almost total irrelevance and impotence. What LI thinks should be happening is some reaching out to the paleoconservatives. The paleos are really hostile to the wasting of American lives in the service of the great Moloch, Washington D.C. And the wasting of these lives is becoming, increasingly, a vanity project, as the courtiers around King George refuse to confront him about his madness. What one would like to see is an alliance of convenience. The recent discussion about Harry’s Place in LI’s comments was interesting insofar as the writers of that blog present themselves as leftists. So do many who support the mad war. Unfortunately, anti-war people have not yet exploited the opening given by the left-symp war supporters.

These kinds of people – their lifestyles, their vocabulary, their gestures -- evoke blind rage among rightwingers, even as they grudgingly rally to them. It would seem an eminently fair step, in terms of propaganda, to exploit that rage – to present the war as what it is, a faux Leninist project. LI has always thought that the most consistent anti-war position is derived from Burkean conservatism. Yet the antiwar left continually drives away their allies by pulling in extraneous domestic matters. Allies don’t have to be converts – in fact, every ally, in strategic terms, is a potential enemy. The fact that the left doesn’t use the enormous, pent up hostility to D.C. is a historic relic from the time that the liberals controlled D.C. That time is gone, and the D.C. centric gesture ossifies a self defeating politics.

Nietzsche, again

LI received a letter the other day wishing us good luck on our Nietzsche postings, but warning us that we were probably on a fool’s errand. Maybe so. Still, it does seem to us that the controversy about Nietzsche and fascism makes a strange detour around the arguments of the fascists themselves, and this is something we’d like to correct. And we’d like to correct it using one of Nietzsche’s own habitual methods: the question, for us, is what problems faced a philosopher who wanted to make Nietzsche into a proto-Nazi? And, a companion question, what benefit did Nietzsche bring to Nazism?

In Lehmann’s intro, one of the problems that has to be dealt with is that Nietzsche happens to have been multiply claimed between 1890 and 1933. Here’s the way Lehnmann states the problem:

It is not the year 1900, the year of Nietzsche’s death, that is decisive in bringing to a close the mental reality that we call the 19th century. It was only 1914 that decisively pushed that reality into the past. And if we say that we are closest to Nietzsche not only of all his contemporaries, but among all German thinkers of the past, we meant that his will and his greatness only became visible through the experience of the first world war.

This is how we understand the curious fact that more than a quarter century of Nietzsche scholarship has not succeeded in bringing the philosophy of this thinker out into the open. A writer of such wonderful clarity and transparency of language, who has spoken so often and so extensively about his intentions and tasks – does it require a particular interpretation and the instrument of interpretation, “philology”, in order to grasp his fundamental concepts? Just this, that each person who reads Nietzsche thinks that he is the master of his thought, was the cause of the misunderstanding of his philosophy.”

What is behind Lehmann’s time scheme?

We are all familiar with the pictures and trivia – the picture of Hitler at Nietzsche’s house, posing with a simpering, aged Elizabeth; Hitler sending Nietzsche’s collected works to Mussolini as a present sealing the Axis pact; etc., etc. Those scenes, and their precedent in the work of people like Lehmann, succeeded in one crucial aspect: they pretty much sealed the relation between Nietzsche and fascism, driving out rival claims. But it gives us a very skewed picture of Nietzsche’s reception to think that only the fascists claimed Nietzsche at this time. In fact, the Goethe-kultur of the German speaking countries had absorbed Nietzsche as the last German classic long before then. We know about the effect Nietzsche had on the modernist generation between 1890 and 1914 (which Lehmann denigrates, following, in this, Nazi policy): the influence on Gide, on Svevo, on Shaw, on Barres, on Hamsum, on Hesse, on Mann, on Musil – it is hard to find a writer from that time who hadn’t some opinion of Nietzsche. Or several, over the course of a lifetime – Musil and Mann are notable in this respect. There was also the influence on Jewish culture – in this period, Nietzsche was considered, as Otto Weiniger puts it somewhere, a “philo-Semite.” Martin Buber translated Zarathustra into Polish. The greatest Jewish philosopher, perhaps, of the twentieth century, Franz Rosenzweig, built Der Stern der Erloesung partly out of his struggle with N. But less noted is the political claiming of Nietzsche. The liberal-social democratic party in Germany was particularly attracted to Nietzsche. The German politician who first declared himself Nietzsche’s follower was not Hitler, but Hitler’s antithesis, Walter Rathenau, who was assassinated in 1922, after Rapello. In Nazi eyes, Rathenau was an ideal devil: a rich, liberal, Jewish industrialist associated with that government party that surrendered in 1918 – which is surely not the effect Lehmann wants to emphasize. In a polemic with Sloterdjik over Nietzsche, (the Right Nietzsche in the belly of a left Trojan Horse) Detlef Hartman claims that Nietzsche work was the “most radical driver’ behind the Taylor-Fordist regime advocated by Rathenau, Weber and Schumpeter – that indeed, the idea of ‘creative destruction” has a Nietzschian geneology.

Tucholsky made fun of the overuse of Nietzsche, in this period. Like a lot of the Vienna spirits, Tucholsky went from admiring Nietzsche to comparing him, unfavorably, with Schopenhauer:

“Tell me what you need, and I will find a Nietzsche quote for you. With Schopenhauer, this isn’t so easy. With Nietzsche? Pro Germany and anti-German. For peace and against peace. For literature and against literature. Whatever you like.”

In that atmosphere, the first and most successful Nazi move was to clear out rivals.

I am not, by the way, making an exculpatory argument – or not yet. There is a newspaper logic that goes like this: x says that the world is round, and y says that the world is flat. So the truth must be in the middle – the world is shaped like a Frisbee. That’s the very definition, to me, of what Nietzsche called herd thinking. Because many sides claimed Nietzsche doesn’t mean one side was not correct. While I think Nietzsche’s thinking contains a good many themes that allow one to see the belligerance, nationalism, and worship of power of the fascists as symptoms of nihilism, I also think there are plenty of footholds in Nietzsche lending themselves to a rightwing reading. There is a line of thought that says, the Nazis misunderstood Nietzsche – and fundamentally I agree with that. But they also understood things about Nietzsche. The hagiographic approach to Nietzsche, criticized by T.V., is all about avoiding those things. So the question is, pace Tucholsky, – did the Nazi editing of Nietzsche have internal textual and conceptual support from the man who wrote, in the Antichrist: ‘The weak and misbegotten shall be driven to extinction. This is the first law of our love of humanity. And one should give them a helping hand”? A sentence over which, as Nietzsche might have put it, a Verhaengniss hangs.

More, hopefully, tomorrow.