Krugman gives us a nice summary of one of the more rancid D.C. scandals currently scheduled for page A-10 in your local paper:

“Mr. Abramoff was indicted last month on charges of fraud relating to his purchase of SunCruz, a casino boat operation. Mr. Ney inserted comments in the Congressional Record attacking SunCruz's original owner, Konstantinos ''Gus'' Boulis, placing pressure on him to sell to Mr. Abramoff and his partner, Adam Kidan, and praised Mr. Kidan's character.
…
“Last week three men were arrested in connection with the gangland-style murder of Mr. Boulis. SunCruz, after it was controlled by Mr. Kidan and Mr. Abramoff, paid a company controlled by one of the men arrested, Anthony ''Big Tony'' Moscatiello, and his daughter $145,000 for catering and other work. In court documents, questions are raised about whether food and drink were ever provided. SunCruz paid $95,000 to a company in which one of the other men arrested, Anthony ''Little Tony'' Ferrari, is a principal.”

But Krugman’s facts need to be put into a certain atmosphere that has one abiding characteristic: the assumption of immunity. The violence perpetrated by any mafia type group must be exemplary. It must not only happen, but give the appearance that there are no constraints on its happening. This is why we recommend the MSNBC column about Tom Delay’s upcoming trial, written by one of Delay’s friends, Rick Scarborough, for its title: Guilty or not, DeLay will walk. Scarborough writes a column that he calls “Regular Joe.” He means the regular guy who gives his wife a bruiser if she gets out of line, whacks off at the local strip joint and rails against pornography, tosses a brick through the window of the gay couple down the street and ponders the mysteries of that merciful deity who triumphed over the grave through his mastery of the seven habits of highly successful people. Delay’s putative ability to bull his way out of a money laundering charge is celebrated by regular Joe Scarborough, who should surely have begun his article with that key Good Fellas phrase, “ever since I can remember I’ve wanted to be a gangster.”

Or, as Scarborough puts it, admiration seeping through his acids and cancers:

“Why could DeLay survive a prosecution that would destroy most other politicians? Because above all else, he is a political fighter.”

Shades of Nixon. The Bush culture gravitates to the protection racket as its natural form of governance, the wet dream of big government conservatism. We are, after all, headed by a man whose signal accomplishment, as a businessman, was to fatten on the creamy situations into which he was shoehorned by Daddy's friends. When the parasites get to the top of the food chain, the wonders that ensue delights the hearts of Scarborough's regular Joes everywhere, especially if they have had the good business sense to put a little in the Republican kitty.

PS – since we are commenting on the headlines today, we should note that the supposed “freedom of the press” issues involved in Judy Miller’s jailing are more and more absurd to invoke since Miller has mysteriously decided to knuckle under. This was not about freedom of the press, this was all about obscure maneuvers under the surface of the D.C. Court society that brought us the disastrous war. Meanwhile, neither the Washington Post nor the New York Times has bothered to headline, investigate, or even wink at a more deadly violation of freedom of the press, the U.S. decision to deny Independent’s reporter Robert Fisk entry into the country. Ah, but at least one powerhouse U.S. newspaper noticed this violation of our liberties: the New Mexican, in Santa Fe.

The delicate sensibilities at the NYT who could swallow a camel and strain at a gnat – or to be less Biblical, who could fire a reporter for filing a description of a news conference he didn’t attend but feel no compulsion to fire a woman whose stories about WMD in Iraq make Laurie Mylroie's fantasies seem serious by comparison -- haven’t yet felt that Fisk’s banning requires the kind of heated indignation that Judy’s plight inspired. Why am I not surprised?

underground

LI has been thinking about the “reality effect” since reading Underground, Haruki Murakami’s account of Aum Shinrikyo’s poison gas attack on the Tokyo Subways. Murakami’s book is divided into two sections, which were published as two separate books in Japan. In one section, he interviews victims of the attack. Some of these victims have recovered, at least physiologically, and some still deal with various degrees of injury, up to and including being permanently on life maintaining systems at a hospital. The other, smaller section is a group of interviews with Aum members. Some of the members have moved away from the group, some remain with it.

Although I’m not sure that this was Murakami’s purpose, one of the results of the book is to contrast two kinds of “reality” effect. It was, perhaps, unconsciously one of the reasons that Aum targeted a subway system, insofar as subways represent almost pure routine, that part of life in which everything exists under the sign of the minus. By which I mean that the experience is oriented exclusively to getting somewhere, and thus is ‘subtracted’ from real experience. Very few autobiographies concentrate on the phenomenology of taking a subway train to work. If one did, undoubtedly it would be one subway ride – the general subway ride, which absorbs into its general features the features shared by all particular subway rides, and is thus not a description of a specific subway ride at all. It is hard to imagine an “On the Road” devoted to riding the subway. This is why subway rides are routine –routines are experiences under the minus sign. The feel of their collective reality is unimportant. This is, I think, partly what Santayana means when he claims that we experience essences. It might be that Santayana's claim confuses description with experience, but the problem with sending a philosophical probe into experience to find out what it is in itself, beyond description, is that this restricts description to a narrow and specific verbal activity. But description is much more mixed up in experience than this, as you can tell from accounts of almost any disaster. Those accounts are full of people instructing themselves to respond to things. These instructions imply, in fact, a stream of descriptive activity that is implicated in the very stream of experience. And one effect of the mingling of those supposedly different planes, description and experience, is that experience is oriented towards the general features of a situation -- maps the present with its expectations about the present. The present, in other words, is experienced as the description of the present in many more cases than the philosopher likes to admit.

This negation of the value of the feel of reality (and yes, that’s a lot of “of” – ofs are the subway train rides of grammar) is precisely what the interviewees in the Aum section abhor. The victims all begin their accounts like “ On March 20th I wasn’t especially busy at work, but it being the end of the fiscal year there was plenty to do.” Or ‘March 20 coincides with our spring fashion sales peak, which keeps us pretty busy.” Or “So there I was, going back to work that day, after my absence, which is why I wanted to get to the office a little early, to make up for lost time.” The subways exist in the realm of busyness – the schedules are about down time between home and “plenty to do,” “making up for lost time”, etc. Busyness, of course, is both absorbing and fills the place of the feeling of reality.

The Aum people begin differently. Of course, this is partly because Murakami is not trying to pin them down to a particular day, or sequence of events. He is after what it felt like to be in the group, in a way that he is not after what it felt like to be on a subway train day after day. The closest he comes to treating the subway experience as a salient and complete thing in itself, an object for understanding, is when he interviews the subway employees. For them, the subway exists under the sign of busyness – that is, it is fully real. But the Aum people begin by saying things like “I had some sort of philosophical struggle going on in me, a period of great discontent.” Or “When I finished high school I felt like I would either renounce the world or die…” Or “I never felt any major frustration or difficulty in my life, really. It was more like something was missing.”

The disturbing thing about the Aum accounts, of course, is that the reality of life in Aum was also full of busyness. Certain people were busy being given drugs and shut in boxes. Certain people were busy building vats to hold poisonous chemicals. And, in the most astonishing account of all, to me, one of the Aum interviewees was given electroshock after she committed some trespass, and has no memory of two years of her life. The astonishing thing is not so much the electroshock as the fact that it and the vanished two years are so completely assimilated to what is normal to her:

“I underwent electroshock. I still have the scars from the electricity right here. (Raises her hair to show her neck, where a line of white scars remain). I remember things up to the time I entered the Dubbing Division [a division of the Aum Shinryko “Ministry of Communications”], but after that it is a blank. I have no idea at what point, and for what reason, my memory was erased. I asked people around me but no one would tell me. All they’d say was, “It seems you and a certain somebody were getting to a dangerous point.”

And, after another question:

“Anyway, my memory was erased, and when I came to myself it was already the beginning of the year of the gas attack [1995] I’d gone into the Dubbing Division in 1993, and the two years after that are an absolute blank. Except I suddenly got a flashback of me working in the Aum-run supermarket in Kyoto. All of a sudden this scene came back to me. It’s summer, I’m wearing a t-shirt and I’m sticking price tags on packets of ramen.”

A routine sticking price tags on packets of ramen is just the sort of objective that the subway system serves. It is interesting that the negation of this woman’s experience, the memory loss, is interesting, dramatic, frightening because of the surrounding narrative – in the same way that the subway ride on the morning of March 20, 1995, suddenly glows, suddenly reverses the minus sign above it, because of the attack. The subway ride on the morning of March 23, 1995, for example, has fallen into nothingness. It could have been erased by electroshock, for all the impression it makes upon us.

I am bringing these things up because lately, I have vowed to work more on my novel. The writing life is much like being a member of Aum, actually. It is full of what is missing in life, full of “training,” and – inevitably – full of busyness. But to continue to do this, I have to have a sense about what a novel does, or what I would like one to do. And the problem is in achieving the kind of intensity throughout that is of the same substance – that has the same attitude towards reality – as the day the woman in Aum “woke up” from her blank two years.

The woman, by the way, woke up in a sealed room, three feet by six feet, without even a peephole through the door. Aum leaders had a habit of punishing the wayward by locking them in such holes. The woman is not completely cool with being shut in a box, it turns out.

party party party

LI’s post that compared factions in Constantinople with the two parties that now bicker within D.C. court society was picked up and disseminated by Chris Floyd’s Empire Burlesque, for which we’d like to give a big shout out. Floyd is a journalist for the Moscow Times with a bigger readership than LI will ever have. And while certain of LI’s manias – for instance, about Balzac – are really… what’s the word? eccentric, the politics of movements as opposed to the politics of parties is something about which we have something to say that might be less eccentric.

Our point was not that the Democratic party is dead. Our point was, instead, that ideologies and parties are joined contingently, not organically. The Democratic party was much more conservative on social issues than the Republican party in, say, 1904. arguably the Democratic party, under Grover Cleveland, did more to shape the peculiar absence of a real leftist force in the U.S. by breaking a national strike than anything done by Harding, Coolidge or Hoover in the twenties. The Democratic party prolonged Jim Crow in the South for as long as it could. Conversely, the Republican party created anti-trust legislation, and civil service reform, and, under Hoover, greatly expanded the economic aggressiveness of the national government.

Since the sixties, the ideological character of the parties has hardened. Or, I should say, the public persona of the parties has taken on a more definite ideological cast, with Democrats being more or less identified as liberals, and the Republicans as conservatives. For anybody who is liberal, this is incredibly frustrating. Myself, in the nineties, I got into numerous arguments with friends who, about the time of the presidential elections, would be mysteriously moved to a passionate and, I felt, undeserved regard for the Democratic candidate. I would be moved, too, to different positions. In 1996, I truly felt that voting was a waste of time. But I was shamed into registering, and voted, of course, for Nader. In 2000, I felt more excited, and again voted for Nader. But I never really had a grasp of what parties are and what they do. I floundered. I thought, for a long while, that the Green party was going to do… something.

Waiting for the Green party to do something is like waiting for homeopathy to cure lung cancer. It’s going to be a long wait.

Over the last four years of shock at the Bush culture, I’ve tried to re-think, from the most rational point of view, the whole party thing. So far, I’ve come to two conclusions.

One is that passionate like or dislike of a party is the neuroses that is at the bottom of the mysterious passions that seem to move people during presidential election years. One way this plays out, on the liberal side, is a passionate contempt for the Democratic party. However, the odd thing about this contempt is that it is kept unconsciously in the magic circle around the Democratic party. The idea is that the party is conformist, that it is weak, that it accedes to the Republicans, that it isn’t liberal, or liberal enough. That idea is derived from, I think, a false notion of the history of the parties in America, one that the parties have learned to exploit.

Another way it plays out on the liberal side is the stereotypical use of Republican to mean conservative. Again, this ignores a great deal of Republican history. This stereotype is more helpful to conservatives than it is to liberals, since it predetermines the absence of any progressive politicking on the G.O.P. side, and thus makes liberals ever more dependent on Democrats. Conservatives, on the other hand, are not at all averse to politicking on the Democratic side. Astonishingly, they are then lauded by liberals for doing so – hence, the persistence of the meme of moderate Democrat so beloved of TNR, and (come presidential election time) of the Nation, etc. I can’t really remember the Nation, for instance, ever getting excited about a G.O.P. candidate. The very suggestion would, of course, cause bellylaughs at the editorial board, but it shouldn’t. Demonizing the Republicans is just the flip side of ceding a vital political struggle to certain Republicans – those of the Bush stripe. It is a defeat, and we are all paying for the consequences of the destruction of the Eastern liberal line in the Republican party.

The second thing is that neuroses don’t have “solutions.” Rather, one tries to get over them, create an emotional distance from the compulsions that pullulate within them, sublimate them, etc. To my mind, the start of that process begins by viewing the parties as dead machinery. Not as ideologically colored, but as primarily vehicles to achieve political power by politicians. Now, just as we know that goth lead singers are going to be morbid, we know that politicians and those in the inner circle of politics are mostly going to be disgusting. I mean that special level of disgusting, that level on which every act of niceness, of goodness, is actually aimed at some incredibly narrow self-interested end. Politics collects manipulators. Furthermore, it is impossible to view politicians merely in terms of their political careers. In the age of big national governments, politicians long ago learned that this is a very good way to channel upwards and make money – with an elective office merely the junket that prepares one for the bucks of lobbying, corporate board membership, or the thousand and one ways to milk the cow that have developed since 1940 in D.C. Cheney simply puts into starker terms the reality of D.C. politics – it is all about making it in the “private sector,” which is actually as connected to the public sector as the function of the dryer is connected to the function of the washer. For a liberal like me, keeping my eyes on this primary fact – thinking, for instance, that it is as important in the career of Madeleine Albright that she lobbies for the Kuwaiti government as it is that she used to work for the Clinton administration – that the switches, here, are seamless -- is one way to get out of the magic circle cast by the reputation of the Democratic and Republican parties. For more politically important people than myself – people who govern NGOs like the Sierra club, or Moveon, etc. – this is a crucial step, although somehow I doubt they will ever take it. Eventually, they all plug into D.C. court society. But if they did, if just once they freed themselves from viewing the parties as being attitudinally committed to one or another ideology, they would be on the road to figuring out how best to use them. That step, inverting the master/slave relationship between party and political action, is going to be difficult as long as the end result of political action is cast in terms of electing politicians. Something businesses have long known is that political action is about dealing with politicians. Electing them is secondary. Election is actually their vulnerability.

All of this might be self-evident to more sophisticated political operatives. But it has never been self-evident to me. If the last five years have been a disaster, they’ve also been, as kindergarten teachers like to say about particularly incorrigible brats, a learning experience.

Uriah heep's party

“Consider a person who had every reason to be happy but who saw continually enacted before him tragedies full of disastrous events, and who spent all his time in consideration of sad and pitiful things. Let us suppose that he knew they are imaginary fables so that though they drew tears from his eyes and moved his imagination they did not touch his intellect at all. I think that this alone would be enough to gradually close up his heart and to make him sigh in such a way that the circulation of his blood would be delayed and slowed down…”

Thus Descartes, quoted in Stephen Gaukroger’s marvelous Descartes: an intellectual biography. Descartes imaginary person is in much the same situation as LI – we have our eyes full of the newspapers, we understand that the tragical events depicted in them are such as to be skewed almost to the point of sheer fiction, and yet they draw tears from our eyes. Surely a headline like this one can only delay and slow down the circulation of your blood – a sure cause of melancholia:

Blair in secret Saudi mission

Expulsions link to £40bn arms deal

We must distinguish between passions raised by the president of the U.S. and the prime minister of the U.K. The former arouses contempt, but how can the latter not arouse something worse? This newspaper fable, this Uriah Heep voice full of the most ludicrously hypocritical sentiments attached to a bloody, dead end war full of atrocity and powerlust really is something out of Dickens. Let’s collate the fables, shall we? This is from the report of Blair’s speech today:

“Today, of course, we face a new challenge: global terrorism. Let us state one thing: these terrorists do not, never have and never will represent the decent, humane and principled faith of Islam.Muslims, like all of us, abhor terrorism; like all of us, are its victims. It is, as ever, only fringe fanatics we face.”

This is from the article:

“Tony Blair and John Reid, the defence secretary, have been holding secret talks with Saudi Arabia in pursuit of a huge arms deal worth up to £40bn, according to diplomatic sources.

Mr Blair went to Riyadh on July 2, en route to Singapore, where Britain was bidding for the 2012 Olympics. Three weeks later, Mr Reid made a two-day visit, when he sought to persuade Prince Sultan, the crown prince, to re-equip his air force with the Typhoon, the European fighter plane of which the British arms company BAE has the lion's share of manufacturing.”

This is from the speech:

“But we need to make it clear: when people come to our country they have and should have the full rights we believe in. There should be no second-class citizens in Britain. But citizenship comes with a duty: to give loyalty to our nation, its values and our way of life.”

This is from the article:

“Defence, diplomatic and legal sources say negotiations are stalling because the Saudis are demanding three favours. These are that Britain should expel two anti-Saudi dissidents, Saad al-Faqih and Mohammed al-Masari; that British Airways should resume flights to Riyadh, currently cancelled through terrorism fears; and that a corruption investigation implicating the Saudi ruling family and BAE should be dropped. Crown prince Sultan's son-in-law, Prince Turki bin Nasr, is at the centre of a "slush fund" investigation by the Serious Fraud Office.”

This is from the speech:

“This is a global struggle. Today it is at its fiercest in Iraq. It has allied itself there with every reactionary element in the Middle East. Their aim: to wreck this December's first ever direct election for the government of Iraq.”

This is from the article:

“The Typhoon, currently entering service with the RAF, has a price of more than £45m a plane. Saudi Arabia previously bought a fleet of its predecessor Tornados from Britain in the Al Yamamah arms deal. Mike Turner, the chief executive of BAE, Britain's biggest arms company, was quoted in Flight International magazine on June 21, just before Mr Blair's Riyadh trip, saying: "The objective is to get the Typhoon into Saudi Arabia. We've had £43bn from Al Yamamah over the last 20 years and there could be another £40bn."

This is from the speech:

“And the way to stop the innocent dying is not to retreat, to withdraw, to hand these people over to the mercy of religious fanatics or relics of Saddam, but to stand up for their right to decide their government in the same democratic way the British people do.”

And this from the article:

“There is concern within the Foreign Office at the apparent partiality of No 10 to BAE's commercial interests. Jonathan Powell, Mr Blair's chief of staff, and his brother Charles, Lady Thatcher's former adviser and now a BAE consultant, are believed to be in favour of the deal.”

rwg communications

I received some feedback from readers on the RWG Communications letter that I am sending out. However, editing jobs have stopped. You know what this means, gentle readers – I will have to go out and try to get reviewing jobs. And that means nervous breakdown and starvation. In fact, at the moment I have agreed to write entries for a reader’s guide to novels for ten dollars an entry – which is desperation indeed. You try describing The Man Who Loved Children in one hundred words or less…

Anyway, every week I am going to include, in one of my posts, my solicitation letter. Floating it out into cyberspace, who knows? It might reach someone who needs editing, ghostwriting, proofreading or translating – my four strengths. As I’ve been going through academic journals, sending off to editors, I’ve also been collecting paragraphs of bad English culled from the articles in said journals. I have an impulse to use this material somehow. For instance, to append examples of wildly incorrect grammar or of disorganized discursive prose to my solicitation letter in order to hammer home my point: you need my service, or some editing service. But I’m not sure this won’t simply offend my potential clients. Readers, tell me what you think.

I'm also trying to figure out how to contact business consultants. This summer, I worked with a consultant and realized, these people need ghostwriters. Any suggestions about this will be really, really appreciated.

Here’s the letter.

Dear X,

I am writing to inform you of an editorial service especially designed for the needs of faculty and graduate students.

I have talked to editors of academic journals and have been told that many journals do not have off site editors to whom to refer authors of those papers that are in need of revision. At the same time, the rate of submissions is increasing. Editors and readers at journals are straining to keep up. As a consequence, the likelihood of mistakes in grammar and organization in published papers has gone up dramatically. My service addresses this problem.

I charge a competitive rate for editing. I specialize in humanities and social sciences. In the past year, RWG Communications projects have included:

substantive editing of an article on macroeconomics;
substantive editing of a book on process ontology;
substantive editing of a monograph on migration in Argentina;
substantive editing of an article on Paul Ricoeur;
substantive editing of an article on nominalism in mathematical philosophy;
substantive editing of a conference paper on scientific realism;
substantive editing of a book on supply chain management;
a partial translation from the German of a turn of the century Austrian linguist whose work on speech errors was used by Freud.


I translate from German and French into English. I have developed successful relationships with Swiss, Danish and German academics, as well as graduate students requiring translation work for their various research projects and advice about their papers. Scholars for whom English is a second language are urged to consider my editorial service. RWG Communications delivers ASAP for those on short deadlines for conference papers, articles, or chapters. You can find the link to the RWG Communications site here.

Look for our new site, under construction, at rwgcom.net.


If this sounds of interest to your book series and/or department, I hope that you will post this announcement and keep these email addresses in mind for your future needs.

Yours sincerely,

Roger Gathman
RWG Communications

rwg communications

I received some feedback from readers on the RWG Communications letter that I am sending out. However, editing jobs have stopped. You know what this means, gentle readers – I will have to go out and try to get reviewing jobs. And that means nervous breakdown and starvation. In fact, at the moment I have agreed to write entries for a reader’s guide to novels for ten dollars an entry – which is desperation indeed. You try describing The Man Who Loved Children in one hundred words or less…

Anyway, every week I am going to include, in one of my posts, my solicitation letter. Floating it out into cyberspace, who knows? It might reach someone who needs editing, ghostwriting, proofreading or translating – my four strengths. As I’ve been going through academic journals, sending off to editors, I’ve also been collecting paragraphs of bad English culled from the articles in said journals. I have an impulse to use this material somehow. For instance, to append examples of wildly incorrect grammar or of disorganized discursive prose to my solicitation letter in order to hammer home my point: you need my service, or some editing service. But I’m not sure this won’t simply offend my potential clients. Readers, tell me what you think.

I'm also trying to figure out how to contact business consultants. This summer, I worked with a consultant and realized, these people need ghostwriters. Any suggestions about this will be really, really appreciated.

Here’s the letter.

Dear X,

I am writing to inform you of an editorial service especially designed for the needs of faculty and graduate students.

I have talked to editors of academic journals and have been told that many journals do not have off site editors to whom to refer authors of those papers that are in need of revision. At the same time, the rate of submissions is increasing. Editors and readers at journals are straining to keep up. As a consequence, the likelihood of mistakes in grammar and organization in published papers has gone up dramatically. My service addresses this problem.

I charge a competitive rate for editing. I specialize in humanities and social sciences. In the past year, RWG Communications projects have included:

substantive editing of an article on macroeconomics;
substantive editing of a book on process ontology;
substantive editing of a monograph on migration in Argentina;
substantive editing of an article on Paul Ricoeur;
substantive editing of an article on nominalism in mathematical philosophy;
substantive editing of a conference paper on scientific realism;
substantive editing of a book on supply chain management;
a partial translation from the German of a turn of the century Austrian linguist whose work on speech errors was used by Freud.


I translate from German and French into English. I have developed successful relationships with Swiss, Danish and German academics, as well as graduate students requiring translation work for their various research projects and advice about their papers. Scholars for whom English is a second language are urged to consider my editorial service. RWG Communications delivers ASAP for those on short deadlines for conference papers, articles, or chapters. You can find the link to the RWG Communications site here:

http://www.geocities.com/rogerwgathman/roger_gathman.html. Look for our new site, under construction, at http://www.rwgcom.net.


If this sounds of interest to your book series and/or department, I hope that you will post this announcement and keep these email addresses in mind for your future needs.

Yours sincerely,

Roger Gathman
RWG Communications

after the withdrawal

Sometimes counting beads can be a comfort. Sometimes, returning to facts can also be a comfort. One of the facts about the current government in Iraq seems to me to be consistently underplayed. That fact is that one of the parties with which we are now allied, Daawa, or the Call, once had a much more tolerant view of suicide bombers. In fact, on December 12, 1983, Daawa’s tolerance went so far that members of the group exploded truck bombs in front of the American embassy in Kuwait. At that point, Daawa was linked to the groups that had previously done a pretty thorough demolition job on the American embassy in Beirut, earlier in the year.

The U.S. turnaround on terrorism, here, is both amazing and a sign that there is a way out of the present impasse in the Middle East. It is one of the multiple inversions covered by the “war on terrorism” – a war that is constituted by scrupulously avoiding warring on terrorists per se, in order to war on the big picture. Thus, one allows OBL to devise little explosions here and there, while American soldiers in Afghanistan guard highways to make sure that opium can get on the world market. Hence the invasion in Iraq, and hence the current paradox that American soldiers are dying so that a man implicated in the suicide bombings of Americans can safely sleep at night.

The impasse, here, has been created by a situation over the last two years that has made the U.S. both much too heavily present in Iraq and irrelevant to the real history that is being made in the region. This is dangerous for all parties. LI would like to see an immediate U.S. withdrawal of troops, but we realize that, given U.S. power and interests, there is no way to keep the Americans out of the Middle East forever.

To us, this means that the U.S. has to reconcile itself with the real configuration of power in the Middle East – meaning the rise of the swathe of Shi’a states. The first step towards doing this, after the withdrawal of the troops, is simple: détente with Iran. In the murky discussions about the steps leading up to the invasion of Iraq, there has been a surprisingly blind acceptance of the constraint that made that invasion at least plausible to the D.C. cliques, for without cooperation with Iran, it proved impossible to support the successful removal of Saddam Hussein by the Iraqis. The policy of dual containment was the embodiment of foreign policy neuroses. It was senseless, it was ideologically driven, and it fed on every problem that came near its horizon.

Détente with Iran doesn’t mean approval of the horrible Iranian human rights record – and nor does it mean, on Iran’s side, approval of the horrible American human rights record. It does mean that improvement in human rights is going to occur under the real forms of governance that are in place today, rather than their violent replacement via American invasion. Nor should the democracy deficit that put in place a president who did not win the election in 2000 in the U.S. instill a false confidence in the Iranian government that the U.S. will somehow assimilate that coup and return to normal.

As a practical matter, the Americans have already tacitly conceded Iraq to the Iranian sphere of influence. In fact, the American eagerness to disarm Iraq and to keep it disarmed – for notwithstanding the pledge to “Iraqify” the war in Iraq, the Americans have so far shown a consistent reluctance to really create a modern, well equipped Iraqi army, relying instead on second hand weapons, corrupt Defense department officials, and paramilitaries – has, as its objective correlate, this subordination of Iraq to its more powerful neighbor. We don’t believe this was the intention. The intention was a one two step, with the first one being weakening Iraq, and the second one being a weak Iraq accepting a permanent system of U.S. bases. That, of course, didn’t work. Eventually, Iraq will not accept subordination to Iran, either.

All of which should drive the nations involved to some kind of cooperative framework of coexistence.

part two

Flaubert said that the artist in the work was like God – everywhere and nowhere. For the novelist around 1900, this phrase was rather like the gate to the Law in Kafka’s The Trial. It was a phrase to sit before, while one waited for it to open. Surely the God in question was the Jansenist god, the deus absconditus, the god who elaborately creates the conditions that seal his vanishing act, and not the god of the prophets, who communicates angry messages and speaks in a still small voice in the wind. A novel, if Flaubert was right, was not a confession. Even a confession wasn’t a confession. Art was made out of stuff, descriptions, and not of sentiments. So you couldn’t understand a novel or a poem – to confine this to verbal art – better by knowing about the artist. That seemed like the conclusion to which Flaubert’s phrase moved you. Sitting before the sentence, it seemed to reveal a great and obscure truth. But if you considered it more telescopically – if you looked at what novels have done over the centuries – the phrase didn’t seem wholly credible. The division between matter and sentiment, for instance, couldn’t be right. Even the story that is built on an obvious attempt to arouse pity and terror on a low scale has to use matter, and even a novel that is built on an attempt to trace the foundations of modern stupidity, like Bouvard et Pechucet, uses the sentiments released by description to legitimize its sequence of events. It was much more credible to think that Flaubert had put himself into Madame Bovary, as he said himself. It was much more satisfying.

The heirs of this dilemma, the new critics of the fifties, resolved it by making it a rule that, in a novel or poem, the author who speaks can never be identified with the living person who wrote the novel or poem. This Gordian judgment has become the basis for teaching literature and composition as though texts derived, ultimately, from axioms. The problem with the great concordant, teased out in the sixties by Derrida and his school, has not been resolved. It has merely gelled into an orthodoxy. This orthodoxy separates readings outside the classroom – Oprah readings, you could call them – that are curious about authors, that look for sentiment, that think of a text as an annex to that much more interesting thing, the life experience of a celebrity, and look for lessons to be derived therefrom, from those inside the classroom, where the author’s godlike disappearance has produced the miracle that we still group together novels in terms of authors names: here are the novels of James, here are the novels of Joyce, etc.

When Proust set out to write a series of essays that would become a sort of novel, his theme was to elaborate on Flaubert’s notion, in a way. He aimed at Sainte-Beuve, the critic. He aimed at debunking Sainte-Beuve’s notion that the judgment of the personality of the artist is what the art leads us to. What it is for. On this principle, Sainte-Beuve could allow himself to expatiate more on some wretched book penned by some countess than on all of the works of Stendhal. Sainte-Beuve’s principle is the same principle that lies behind Vanity Fair magazine and the like. Everything is about getting a glamorous name and a confession. Everything is about the agony and the ecstasy of a certain class in beautiful poses.

Perhaps Sainte-Beuve so irritated Proust because Proust recognized his own weakness for countesses. In any case, when he came to write about Sainte-Beuve and Balzac, he came to repair an injustice. The injustice was not only Sainte-Beuve’s patronizing and in the end dismissive view of Balzac, but the echo of that view since – the notion that Balzac wrote before the God of the prophets became the God of the philosophers. Instead of being everywhere and nowhere, he was simply everywhere. He was simply busy.

Proust wrote his defense of Balzac as though he were talking, in fact, to a countess. That is why he begins with a “tu” – a you. “Tu fronces le sourcil. Je sais que tu ne l'aimes pas.” (You make a face. I know that you don’t love him) immediately interjects the fictional into the essay – just as in Wilde’s The Decay of Lying. But the “I” here does not possess the degree of alienation Wilde threw into his essay. The I does stand, until further notice, for Proust.

The sticking point with Balzac – why a true princess makes a face at his name – is his vulgarity. As Proust writes,

“It isn’t only that at the age when Rastignac debuts, he gave for the goal in life the satisfaction of the grossest ambitions, or, at least, the most noble so mixed up with the base that it is impossible to separate them.”

I am not going to go through Proust’s essay sentence by sentence – I urge LI’s readers to do so, either in translation or here http://www.tierslivre.net/litt/Proust_Balzac.html -- but I do want to draw attention to the twists of the argument. Proust quickly throws up Flaubert as a counter-instance to Balzac.

You have sometimes found Flaubert, revealed in certain aspects of his correspondence, vulgar. But of him at least there was one thing completely free from vulgarity, his understanding that the goal of the live of the writer is in his work, and that the remnant only exists “to be used as one more illusion to describe.” Balzac totally puts the triumphs of life and of literature on the same plane.”

Having built this dichotomy, Proust goes on to show that Balzac embodies a principle of truth that, to return to Wilde and Zola, can only be denied by one who is vulgar enough to find the vices and virtues of tedious people tedious – which may well be Vivian’s fault, in The Decay of Lying, the shadow that crosses between Vivian and Wilde.

“There is nothing here to separate his [Balzac’s] letters from his novels. If we have heard perhaps too much that his characters were real for him, and that he seriously discussed if such and such a move was better for Mlle de Grandlieu, for Eugénie Grandet, one can say that his life was a novel that he constructed in absolutely the same manner. There is no line of demarcation between the real life (that which is in fact not so real in our opinion) and the life of his novels (the only true one for the writer).”

The exchange between the realities of experience and the realities encoded in art has been one way out of the conundrum expressed in Flaubert dictum. Surely the god that is everywhere and nowhere in the novel might be, by the same logic, everywhere and nowhere in the life.

Well, we are not going to keep developing this chain of reasoning, because we want to get to the point: Proust’s mention of Wilde’s opinion of Lucien de Rubempre. This occurs near the end of his essay, when he is examining Balzac’s style, which he considers strikingly explicative in the large and in the small. This brings him to consider Balzac’s treatment of p.o.v. – how does one make the explicative, which depends on the generalization, into an illustration of a perspective, which depends on the singularities of the personality? And from this topic he turns to Vautrin, whose point of view is a sort of raw parody of Balzac’s own ambition, ambition running in a world in which all values tend towards zero. This is where Wilde comes in. I’ll give you the French, and then the English:

." Et de fait, Vautrin n'a pas été seul à aimer Lucien de Rubempré. Oscar Wilde, à qui la vie devait hélas apprendre plus tard qu'il est de plus poignantes douleurs que celles que nous donnent les livres, disait dans sa première époque (à l'époque où il disait: "Ce n'est que depuis l'école des lakistes qu'il y a des brouillards sur la Tamise"): "Le plus grand chagrin de ma vie? La mort de Lucien de Rubempré dans Splendeurs et Misères des Courtisanes." Il y a d'ailleurs quelque chose de particulièrement dramatique dans cette prédilection et cet attendrissement d'Oscar Wilde, au temps de sa vie brillante, pour la mort de Lucien de Rubempré. Sans doute, il s'attendrissait sur elle, comme tous les lecteurs, en se plaçant au point de vue de Vautrin, qui est le point de vue de Balzac. Et à ce point de vue d'ailleurs, il était un lecteur particulièrement choisi et élu pour adopter ce point de vue plus complètement que la plupart des lecteurs. Mais on ne peut s'empêcher de penser que, quelques années plus tard, il devait être Lucien de Rubempré lui-même. Et la fin de Lucien de Rubempré à la Conciergerie, voyant toute sa brillante existence mondaine écroulée sur la preuve qui est faite qu'il vivait dans l'intimité d'un forçat, n'était que l'anticipation - inconnue encore de Wilde, il est vrai - de ce qui devait précisément arriver à Wilde.

“And in fact Vautrin is not the only one to love Lucien de Rubempré. Oscar Wilde, to whom life was to teach later, alas, that there are more poignant griefs than are given by books, said in his first epoch (that epoch in which he remarked, it is only since the school of the lake poets that there have been fogs on the Thames): the greatest sorrow of my life? The death of Lucien de Rubempré in Splendeurs et Misères des Courtisanes." There is something particularly dramatic in this predilection and tenderness of Oscar Wilde, at the brilliant period of his life, for death of Lucien de Rubempré. Without a doubt, he was moved by it, like all readers, by putting himself in the point of view of Vautrin, which is the point of view of Balzac. And from this point of view, besides, he was a reader particularly selected and elected to adopt this point of view, more than most readers. But it is hard to repress the impression that, a few years later, he had to become Lucien de Rubempré himself. And the final hours of Lucien de Rubempré at the Conciergerie, seeing all his brilliant, worldly existence flowing away with the proof of the fact that he lived in the intimacy of a convict, was only an intimation – still unknown to Wilde, it is true, of what must happen precisely to Wilde.”

The importance of being Vivian

In 1889, Oscar Wilde published the Decay of Lying, a dialogue between Cyril and Vivian. Cyril is given the earnest lines, like the cutout in a Socratic dialogue, and Vivian is given the witty and visionary ones. The theme of the dialogue attaches, at points, to the very old theme of mimesis in art. Is an art to be judged on how well it copies reality? And what would it mean for a fiction to copy reality? Vivian explores the problems of mimesis from an angle taken from everyday life: the lie. The lie, after all, is a lie insofar as it doesn’t copy reality. However, it works as a lie insofar as it seems to copy reality. Thus, in the successful lie there must reside some special genius, and for that genius to work, we must look at another standard than that of truth or falsity. We must shift to the field defined by intensity:

“One of the chief causes that can be assigned for the curiously commonplace character of most of the literature of our age is undoubtedly the decay of Lying as an art, a science, and a social pleasure. The ancient historians gave us delightful fiction in the form of fact; the modem novelist presents us with dull facts under the guise of fiction.”

There is one modern novelist whose dull facts particularly get under Vivian’s skin: Zola. At first glance, one would have thought that Zola would be on Vivian’s side, or at least on Wilde’s side. Zola was, after all, a scandal and a stumbling block to Victorian proprieties. Since Wilde aspired to be a scandal himself, one looks for some solidarity. Instead, Vivian remarks:

“M. Zola, true to the lofty principle that he lays down in one of his pronunciamientos on literature, "L'homme de genie n'a jamais d'esprit," is determined to show that, if he has
not got genius, he can at least be dull. And how well he succeeds! He is not without power. Indeed at times, as in Germinal, there is something almost epic in his work. But his work is entirely wrong from beginning to end, and wrong not on the ground of morals, but on the ground of art. From any ethical standpoint it is just what it should be. The author is perfectly truthful, and describes things exactly as they happen. What more can any moralist desire? We have no sympathy at all with the moral indignation of our time against M. Zola. It is simply the indignation of Tartuffe on being exposed. But from the standpoint of art, what can be said in favour of the author of L'Assommoir, Nana and Pot-Bouille? Nothing. Mr. Ruskin once described the characters in George Eliot's novels as being like the sweepings of a Pentonville omnibus, but M. Zola's characters are much worse. They have their dreary vices, and their drearier virtues. The record of their lives is absolutely without interest.”

This rings changes on an old trick in the game of scandal – one trumps the shock of scandal by being resolutely unshocked. In this way, one denies the initial, visceral moment that scandal depends on. The double movement of Vivian’s rhetoric conforms to an old routine: first comes the denigration of the shocked. Thus Zola’s work exposes the Tartuffe, and by implication the Tartuffe are the shocked. Second comes the denigration of the shock. Zola’s characters are dreary in their vices and their virtues. It is dreariness, not purity, that we must judge by. Wrenching the standard by which the copy is judged from the frame defined by veracity to the frame defined by intensity, Vivian finds a new angle from which to disarm Zola’s shock. Since one end of the mimetic spectrum is about sexual arousal, a continually deferred moment that defines art against its erotic use, its pornographic potential, this is a particularly good routine to top Zola. And once Zola is separated from his shock, we see -- or Vivian sees -- that he is without interest.

To Vivian’s remarks, Cyril responds by noting that that Vivian’s two favorite novelists Meredith and Balzac, have reputations for being realists.

Vivian replies by making two epigrams. About Meredith he says,

“Somebody in Shakespeare - Touchstone, I think – talks about a man who is always breaking his shins over his own wit, and it seems to me that this might serve as the basis for a criticism of Meredith's method.”

But it is about Balzac that the more famous phrases are leveled.

“A steady course of Balzac reduces our living friends to shadows, and our acquaintances to the shadows of shades. His characters have a kind of fervent fiery-coloured existence. They dominate us, and defy scepticism. One of the greatest tragedies of my life is the death of Lucien de Rubempre. It is a grief from which I have never been able completely to rid myself. It haunts me in my moments of pleasure. I remember it when I laugh.”

This post is about that phrase – or rather, it follows the history of the reputation of that phrase in the footsteps of A.S. Byatt’s brilliant essay about Splendeurs et miseres de Courtisanes – the Balzac novel in which Lucien de Rubempre’s suicide gets played out – in the Winter 2005 Kenyon. Which we urge all LI’s readers to read – it is well worth the price of the magazine.

LI wouldn’t be LI if we didn’t throw in some deconstructive cautions now and then, so we should preface what follows with a little disclaimer. The reputation of these remarks depends on collapsing the distinction between Wilde and Vivian. That Wilde put these remarks in the mouth of a character who is defending a thesis before another character is obliterated in the rush to make these Wilde’s remarks – a rush that is not repeated in, say, making Cyril’s remarks Wilde’s remarks. A philosopher might say that we know, intuitively, that Vivian represents Wilde and Cyril doesn’t. But a philosopher who had read The Importance of Being Earnest would be wise to treat the theme of pseudonyms with some respect. After all the play revolves around Jack Worthing’s habit of assuming the name Earnest in the city and Jack in the country. This becomes evident when Algernon – who we also instinctively identify with Wilde because his opinions are like those of Vivian, who we have assumed represents Wilde – finds Earnest’s cigarette case with a note addressed to Jack:


Algernon. … Besides, your name isn't Jack at all; it is Ernest.

Jack. It isn't Ernest; it's Jack.

Algernon. You have always told me it was Ernest. I have introduced you to every one as Ernest. You answer to the name of Ernest. You look as if your name was Ernest. You are the most earnest-looking person I ever saw in my life. It is perfectly absurd your saying that your name isn't Ernest. It's on your cards. Here is one of them. [Taking it from case.] 'Mr. Ernest Worthing, B. 4, The Albany.' I'll keep this as a proof that your name is Ernest if ever you attempt to deny it to me, or to Gwendolen, or to any one else.
[Puts the card in his pocket.]

Jack. Well, my name is Ernest in town and Jack in the country, and the cigarette case was given to me in the country.”

Bertrand Russell’s example for the description theory of names, you’ll remember, was the identity between Walter Scott and the Author of Waverly – an identity that could not substitute in all instances. If Russell had wanted to, he could have used the Importance of Being Earnest as the artistic working out of the consequences of his theory. Pity he didn’t. In any case, the deconstructive point is that the chain of instinct that leads us to believe that Vivian is Wilde depends upon substitutions that themselves depend upon our instinct that Wilde is Vivian. So note, before we set off on our chase, that the conditions of the hunt are dodgy to begin with.

The next post will be about Proust.

LI hearts hindsight

Every once in a while, one should engage in the bitterest hindsight. Hindsight is always something that the powers that be disparage, since the critical analysis of the past lays bare the lineaments of present oppressions.

In the week that the President of Afghanistan, Karzai, called for radical American troop retrenchment, that Sheehan’s caravan is stopping in D.C. for an anti-war protest that the mainstream media will ignore and distort in various tired ways, that Basra is revealing the extent to which the “peacefully” occupied areas are peaceful in the sense that Afghanistan in 2000 was peaceful – it might be a good idea to ask about what alternative there was to this particular occupation.

This question is, of course, bound up with the question of the reasons for invasion itself, but there is only one strand of that question that will concern me here: the lack of any counter-force to the Americans in the invading “coalition.”

That lack was designed by the Department of War. It allowed unilateral American control. The Americans, of course, have turned out to be corrupt, on the one hand, and incapable of even achieving their minimal colonialist goals, on the other hand. There’s a nice editorial in Azzaman this week about the billion plus stolen under Allawi:

“As the authorities prepare to issue an arrest warrant against a former defense minister for the alleged theft of $1 billion, the parliament is reported to have been debating embezzlement issues that surpass that figure.

Instead of basking in prosperity, Iraqis are now sunk in an abyss of poverty, organized theft and crime under the banner of an ‘elected’ and ‘legitimate’ system of government.

The theft of public money on such unprecedented scale puts the onus for the suffering of Iraqi people in the shortages of electricity and other amenities squarely on government officials who instead of serving the impoverished country chose to plunder it.”

The writer, Fatih Abdulsalam, makes an important point about the timing of the recent revelations:

“Whenever conditions worsen in the country, those in power and authority report scandals that took place in eras other than their own.”

Money has an attractive quality for hindsight: tracing us give us a good sense of the past's secret patterns.

What did Iraq need after the invasion? Two things were necessary: to confront the political legacy of Saddam, and to confront the economic legacy of Saddam. The former task consisted in reconfiguring the country in such a way that the mechanisms of Ba’athist tyranny would be permanently disabled. The latter task consisted, quite simply, in gaining a moratorium on the debt Saddam had piled up.

The former task could only be achieved by the Iraqis themselves, not the Americans. The latter task did require American cooperation. The tasks were coupled: a legitimate political establishment in Iraq needed to be unencumbered by Saddam’s debt in order to borrow money on Iraq’s vast potential wealth. In essence, this task was no different than the task of any other Middle Eastern nation – for instance, Kuwait at the end of the first Gulf War.

The tasks are such that the withdrawal of American troops should have been accomplished, max, by the end of 2003.

From the American anti-war perspective, that would have been unpleasant, since it would have generated the image of a successful intervention/invasion. But however unpleasant the invasion might have been as a precedent, there was, realistically, no need for the occupation and the American intervention in Iraq’s sovereign affairs whatsoever, beyond that minimal framework.

There are a lot of ironies here. Given the successful attainment of that framework, the Bush administration might well have gone on to their second goal, war with Iran. In this very unfunny sense, the occupation has had the funny effect of making that goal almost unimaginable. It was hard to see this in 2003, because it was hard to see that the Bush people were exactly the warmongering criminals the left made them out to be. Caricature has been vindicated by history. However, the Iraqis have borne the burden of averting the real disaster of a U.S.-Iran war. Lately, the media has decided to respond to the fact that the war is unpopular in this country (and will be extremely hard to finance, come the next supplemental) by posing the rhetorical question, don’t we have the moral responsibility to remain in Iraq? This is a sort of cruel joke question. It is as if Cortes were to justify the conquest of Mexico by saying, don’t we have a responsibility to the Aztecs to remain in Mexico? The answer to the media’s new concern with our moral obligation is that an occupying force that makes promiscuous use of air power on its occupied territory, razes cities Grozny style, and establishes interlocking groups with organized kleptocrats to pump money out of the occupied territory seems to have somehow misread the story of the Good Samaritan. I don’t know how much more American charity Iraq can take.

In hindsight, the most important thing was to give the Iraqi government back control over Iraq’s wealth. To do that required immediate elections, and the progressive withdrawal of American ‘supervision’ so that Iraq, in the summer of 2003, would essentially be in the same position of ownership it was pre-Saddam. Another irony is that if the Americans hadn’t been so greedy, they might actually have achieved one of their goals: Iraqi oil might be on the market today, sending oil prices down. As Michael Klare points out on Tomdispatch, the pooch is being screwed every day in the Iraqi oilfields as the Americans discover that the one reason that they are there requires more manpower than they will ever have. Klare points to the pre-war euphoria about Iraqi oil:

“This sense of optimism about Iraq's future oil output was palpable in Washington in the months leading up to the invasion. In its periodic reports on Iraqi petroleum, the Department of Energy (DoE), for example, confidently reported in late 2002 that, with sufficient outside investment, Iraq could quickly double its production from the then-daily level of 2.5 million barrels to 5 million barrels or more. At the State Department, the Future of Iraq Project set up a Working Group on Oil and Energy to plan the privatization of Iraqi oil assets and the rapid introduction of Western capital and expertise into the local industry. Meanwhile, Iraqi exile Ahmed Chalabi -- then the Pentagon's favored candidate to replace Saddam Hussein as suzerain of Iraq (and now Iraq's Deputy Prime Minister in charge of energy infrastructure) -- met with top executives of the major U.S. oil companies and promised them a significant role in developing Iraq's vast petroleum reserves. "American companies will have a big shot at Iraqi oil," he insisted in September 2002.”

Klare runs down the stats. Presently, Iraq is generating about 1.9 billion barrels. Moreover, the oil infrastructure has taken some 250 attacks. And there is the pervasive kleptocracy, which is stealing billions of dollars from the infrastructure. No doubt there are American firms that are profiting hugely from these thefts. But more interesting is that the current American urge to pump oil in spite of these problems is nursing future problems:

“The corruption and mismanagement has had another serious consequence for Iraq's long-term oil potential: in order to maximize output now, and thereby keep the dollars rolling in, Iraqi oil executives are employing faulty pumping methods, thus risking permanent damage to underground reservoirs. For example, managers are continuing to pump oil from Iraq's main Rumailia oilfield, one of the world's largest, even though water injection systems (used to maintain underground pressure) have failed; in so doing, they are thought by experts to be causing irreversible damage to the field. "The problem is that [underground] pressure problems could lead to a permanent decline in production," observed one European buyer of Iraqi oil quoted in the Financial Times last June. Even if U.S. companies later were to gain access to Iraqi fields, therefore, they might find yields to be disappointing.”

Hindsight should tell us this: Iraq was able, two years ago, to stand on its own two feet. The American occupation has been aimed at preventing an independent Iraq, not at creating one. The idea of indefinite occupation, ie colonizing Iraq, depended, however, on two factors: that Iraq would eventually be a cash cow, and that the American population would go along with Bush’s plan. The first pillar of the Bush plan has collapsed. The second is collapsing. Iraq is in the hands of Iran’s allies. The cost of continuing the war is unsustainable. Moreover (although the Americans still don’t know this), American has become irrelevant to the ultimate outcome in Iraq. Under the shadow of the American shock troops, the real political fight has been happening, in which the American side is represented by a Kurdish faction – and even that faction is becoming impatient with their ally.

Give me more hindsight is the LI slogan. Let's shed as much light as possible on the the monsters who rule us.

a rule for reading newspapers

David Mamet’s convoluted op ed in the LA Times makes the valid point that the Democratic Party is not only cowardly, but unlikely to benefit from its cowardice. But I think that the point is undermined by the assumption that, given different circumstances, we would have a different Democratic party, boldly bringing us peace and universal health care.

In LI’s opinion, this confusion of the Democratic Party with liberalism has no warrant. A far better way of examining both the Democratic and Republican parties is to view them as two factions of one Court – Court in the royal, Byzantine sense. To quote Warren Treadgold about factions in Constantinople:

“This lack of ideology has long been hard for modern scholars to grasp. For instance, most have looked for an ideological significance in the Byzantines' two factions, the Blues and the Greens, whose official function was to organize sports and theatrical events, mainly chariot races and performances in which women took off their clothes. The Blues and Greens also cheered on their own performers and teams, and sometimes fought each other in the stands or rioted in the streets. Persistent modern efforts to define the Blues and Greens as representatives of political, social, or religious groups have so conspicuously failed that they seem to have been abandoned. Now, however, without trying to distinguish Blues from Greens, Peter Brown has depicted their spectacles as solemn patriotic ceremonies. Yet such a generalization seems indefensible after Alan Cameron has shown in two meticulous and persuasive books, Porphyrius the Charioteer (1973) and Circus Factions (1976), that the Blues and Greens were interested primarily in sports and shows, secondarily in hooliganism, and not at all in ideology.”

The last sentence pretty much sums up the Republican and Democratic parties. They are parts of one thing, which I would call D.C. D.C. is concerned, above all other things, to service the industrial/service network through which politicians wash. That network has done well from the war, protects the caste system of health care in this country as one of the bigger moneymakers of all times, and is only really vivified by the idea of taking away some freedom from the average citizen in the name of morality or good nutrition. And we all know that steroids as used by ball players are much more interesting to Congress than who failed to help poor folks during Katrina.

Mamet’s notion that the Dems were all secretly against the Iraq war has to be the explanation for the persistent faith of anti-war proggish people in such party luminaries as Wesley Clark, whose doddering notions about remaining in Iraq until we are truly defeated there in 2020 are somehow read as withering critiques of the War. If you are really looking for a military general to get us out of Iraq, go for Colin Powell. If Hilary Clinton, by some quirk of fate, had been elected president in 2000, I am not confident that we wouldn’t be occupying Iraq right now. If Powell had been elected, I am pretty confident we would not be occupying Iraq right now. This isn’t to argue that Powell is a progressive. One has merely to look at his son’s rule at the F.C.C. to see what the father is about – Michael Powell’s rightwing deregulatory agenda was the most radical thing to be put in place in the D.C. sphere since, say, Clinton’s Commerce department was in town. Colin Powell is merely on that end of the D.C. Supreme Soviet that is more cautious about committing American troops.

The best metaphor for the Democratic party’s political behavior, to my mind, comes from the relation between the law and a corrupt policeman. The policeman’s perks depend upon a law that he is not enforcing – and to make the price of those perks higher, as well as to disguise his activity, the policeman will, sometimes, defend the law. In the same way, the Democrats, in order to get higher prices in the Lobby and Military industrial market for themselves and their friends and associates sometimes represent the generally progressive bent of their constituency. The effect of this is generally to put a premium on the two purposes that form legislative intention in D.C. – direct legalized bribery (coming in multitudinous forms, from the board seats scooped up by politicos after retirement or defeat to lobbying jobs, etc., etc.) to corruption (coming in the form of benefits for the associates of politicos).

Interestingly, the media has a name for legislative acts promoting bribery and corruption: they call it reform. If one remembers that simple rule, it makes it much easier to read newspapers.

ps
PS – For a hilarious dose of DC-Thought, read today’s Washington Post editorial about flood insurance.

“LIKE A RICKETY house that was already falling down, the federal flood insurance program has been destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. The theory of the program is that people who choose to live in areas prone to flooding should pay for that risk by buying insurance; they should not expect taxpayers around the country to rescue them from their own recklessness. But the truth is that, after a disaster like Katrina, the federal government will bail everybody out whether they are insured or not; it's humanly and politically unthinkable to do otherwise. Because the likelihood of a federal rescue is so strong, there never was much incentive to buy insurance. The huge federal effort after Katrina will undermine the program further.”

This is from a paper located in a town that has diverted literally hundreds of billions of dollars to a useless and pernicious military industrial complex – a town that is a swollen parasite of federal money at every level – a town whose booms correspond on a one to one basis with federal spending levels. It is like Simon Legree lecturing about the evils of slavery. Only a clique as vainglorious as that represented on the Washington Post editorial page year after year would have the balls to lecture the rest of the country on sucking up federal dollars. Perhaps the editors should take a peak in the paper’s tech section, sometime, to see where Federal tax money is really going.

Although somehow I have my doubts that the irony will penetrate heads this fat.

notes on the continuing atrocity

There are so many reasons to be horrified at what is happening in Iraq that it shows a certain mad myopia to focus on last weeks Galloway/Hitchens debate. It rather irritates me to read so many blogs about the debate, since, in my opinion, the space taken up by commentary about the debate is space stolen from rational discussion about the war. That kind of burglary serves the pro-war forces.

That these two old troopers managed to network up a posse of publicity from their friends for the thing is depressing, in one way – the debate has the effect of giving us a very cockeyed view of the pro- and anti-war stakes – and in another way it quietly illuminates the irreality that infests discussion about the war in this country. Galloway, trailing a dubious past as a political jester who will say anything to make a name for himself, is disreputable and plain dumb enough that he seemingly can’t question Hitchens about his real role in the war. Since Galloway, on some accounts, was under the delusion that Saddam Hussein was a progressive, this shouldn't surprise anybody.

The Hitchens-ish role could start a real debate, since Hitchens, as a part of the D.C. media machine, has actively worked to delegitimate the opportunity for democratic secular rule in Iraq. How? When you put the faces of thieves and murderers on the supposedly “democratic secular” party, you delegitimate it. When you support ethnic cleansing and war crimes as they have been committed by the occupiers to the advantage of theocrats and puppets, you delegitimate secular democrats. This is pretty obvious stuff. In the same way, when you act as a conduit to lie brazenly to the public about the reasons for the war, you crack the facade of democratic governance at home, which depends on a maximum of good information. And when you work as an operative in the publicity machine that aimed at keeping a real coalition from forming (one of the great Bush-ite goals before the war being to appear to be trying to create a coalition while insuring that the invasion would be under unchallenged American supervision) by contributing to the mass hate sessions against old Europe, then you have an indisputable function in the war machine. Ironic how the success of the Bush people in destroying a real coalition has lead to the failure of the American enterprise in Iraq. Surely the French and the Germans would have blocked some of the more insane American ideas, like disbanding the Iraqi army without controling the Iraqi army.

Alas, the debate about that function will never be held. Just as nobody seems to want to investigate why, exactly, Chalabi came to hold the position he held in D.C. The G/H debate, instead, gave us a perfectly distorted perspective on the realities of the war, depressingly abetted by Democracy Now. Oh well.

…

The Independent’s story, Sunday, by Patrick Cockburn is starting the slow, slow movement across the Atlantic. Cockburn reported that a billion some dollars was stolen from Iraq under Bremer’s watch. It was siphoned off through the Iraq War Ministry – which is called, in conformity with the American Orwellism, the Ministry of Defense.

The billion in Cockburn’s story is turned into hundreds of millions in the Washington Post version – which isn’t an independent report, but a report on the Independent’s report.
“This story has been building for months. The Independent of London reported yesterday that U.S.-appointed officials in the country’s Ministry of Defense squandered hundreds of millions of dollars in Iraqi money on overpriced and outdated military equipment after the Bush administration transferred sovereignty to an Iraqi government in June 2004.

Patrick Cockburn’s dispatch adds some detail to the arms corruption scandal first reported in August by the Arab cable news site Aljazeera.net and the American newspaper chain Knight Ridder. Estimates of how much money has been wasted vary widely, but named sources in all three stories agree the amount was huge.
The reports underscore the continuing costs of the Bush administration’s failure to anticipate security problems after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003.”

The last sentence is a beautiful example of DC thinking. The reports underscore the corrupt nature of Bremer’s occupation, period. But no – Americans don’t do corruption, do we? Who could ever suspect the crew around Bremer or the Iraqis he associated with of wanting to profit off the Iraqis – especially when we have legalized so much corruption that DC is drowning in it? However, as soon as the for profit nature of the occupation arises, the American press has two responses. On the business page, they are all about eagerly making a killing on making a killing. On the editorial page, they are all about human rights. It is a nice, compartmentalized reflex, and it is meant to induce a nice, compartmentalized reflex.

The interesting politics in the story have to be inferred. An Allawi seems uncharacteristically voluble about the corrupt deal – the finance minister, Ali Allawi, Iyad’s cousin. When an Allawi is pointing fingers, it means something is up with his enemy, Chalabi. Much depends on an obscure man, Ziyad Cattan:
“Aljazeera.net, the Independent and Knight Ridder all reported that the auditors had found the dubious arms deals were arranged by the ministry's procurement chief, Ziyad Cattan. The three reports said he was fired in May.”

According to the Post report, Chalabi is vindicated by the current charges:

“The corruption reports, ironically, serve as a measure of vindication of Ahmed Chalabi, a onetime ally of the Bush administration who has faced corruption accusations himself. Last January, Chalabi invoked Shaalan’s ire by charging that the interim government had sent a plane laden with $300 million in U.S. currency to Lebanon to buy arms.

"Where did the money go? What was it used for? Who was it given to?" We don't know," Chalabi said in an interview with the New York Times.

Shalaan responded by announcing Chalabi would be arrested on corruption charges. But the arrest never happened.”

In the Independent today, Cockburn has further details about the corruption charges. Here’s an interesting tidbit:

“A further $600-800 million is also missing from the ministries of transport, electricity, interior and other ministries said Mr Allawi. In the case of the Electricity Ministry, which has notably failed to increase power supply to Baghdad, there has been heavy criticism of the way in which four or five contracts for power stations agreed under Saddam Hussein were cancelled. A new set of more costly contracts for natural gas or diesel powered stations were agreed. Unfortunately Iraq does not have adequate supplies of natural gas or diesel so this has to be bought at great expense from abroad. The new power plants have also been very slow to come on stream.

Laith Kubba, the spokesman for Ibrahim al-Jaafari, the prime minister, told The Independent that under the previous Iraqi government the special committee on contracts at the Electricity Ministry refused to sign off on the contract for one $750 million power station because it said information on the deal was inadequate. The committee was promptly dissolved by the minister and another one appointed which proved more willing to agree to the contract.”

Liberation has so many, many dimensions.

Now, we do wonder whether any American paper whatsoever will try to interview Bremer to find out what he knew, when he knew it, and who around him, if anyone, benefited. … Ah, let’s not kid ourselves. We know that no American paper will touch this scandal with a ten foot pole.

request

Readers of LI:

I've been sending out the following sheet to academic journals, advertising my editorial services. Anybody who knows a journal, a list serve, or a person that I should send this (or a modified version of this) to should please drop me an email at rgathman@netzero.net.
Thanks
r.g.

...

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The German election

It isn’t often that I agree with Anatole Kaletsky, the Thatcherite economist. But his column about the election in Germany is the best analysis I’ve seen so far.

As we have often said around here, the change in conservative doctrine post Thatcher is that it has merged with the radically Keynesian project of pumping up demand by all means possible. This means, in effect, liquidating savings to the extent that this is possible. The old fashioned Tories would be appalled to see what the new fangled Tories are up to.

In Germany, this hasn’t happened. The CDU has adopted those portions of the Thatcherite program that are straight out class warfare – making the template for all legislation the penalizing the poor and the rewarding the rich. However, while it is true that the Anglo-American rightwing penalizes the bottom economic percentile, the story is more complex as consumer power increases. Shifting the responsibility for welfare to the individual, that longterm, invisible project, would be roundly rejected if it wasn’t coupled with increasing the money supply and easing up credit markets – which directly effect even the lower middle income families. In the short term, then, the appearance of prosperity far down the line can be engineered, even as wealth shifts towards the top wealth percentiles. Health care, transportation and the rest of it can be put on the credit card; there are easy terms for buying houses; and while wages stagnate, two wage households disguise the real deflationary pressure on wages.

Kaletsky makes this point in another way:

“The whole eurozone, in fact, is in denial about one of the clearest lessons of modern economic experience, which is that tough structural reforms of the kind promoted by Germany’s new government will work only amid rapidly expanding demand. This was the lesson of the Thatcher and Reagan eras, when tough labour market policy began to be successful — and politically acceptable — only from 1985 onwards, when interest rates collapsed, the pound and dollar were devalued and economic growth and consumer spending moved from bust to boom.
However, the link between expansionary monetary management and structural reform was not just an isolated experience of the 1980s, as demonstrated by a fascinating study published in the summer by the OECD (The Effects of EMU on Structural Reforms, OECD Economics Department Working Paper No 438, July 2005). This study looked at more than 100 episodes of major economic reforms in OECD countries and tried to assess the interaction between reform processes and constraints on monetary policy independence. Although the econometric research could not, by its nature, be definitive, the balance of evidence suggested a clear conclusion: “The absence of monetary autonomy seems to be associated with lower reform activity.”
Writing from the perspective given by this mixture of an economic war against the working class and easy money policy, Kaletsky bemoans the economic proposals the CDU brought into the election and has a nicer view of the Lafontaine’s party than any other ‘respectable’ press commentator:
“Looking at the realistic options for political realignment, Germany’s economic performance seems bound to get worse, not better, in the year ahead. This is because the policies that all Germany’s establishment politicians seem most firmly to believe in are the ones that will do the greatest damage to economic activity, employment and consumer demand. The worst of these policies is the 2 per cent rise in VAT identified by Angela Merkel as her top economic priority. In a country suffering from the world’s slowest consumption growth, this is almost literally an insane proposal, hardly mitigated by the plan to spend half the proceeds on cuts in employers’ social security contributions, which are designed to lower labour costs. These social security reductions may be desirable in principle, but their first-round effect simply will be to increase already very ample profits and they will contribute nothing at all to the growth of demand.”

And this is what Kaletsky has to say about the Left party:
“Meanwhile, the outcasts of German politics, the post-communist Left Party, had a broadly sensible policy to boost the economy’s demand-side, but none at all to improve supply.”
Kaletsky is an enemy I respect.

the Ampel election

PS -- The following was written before the results started coming in. Astonishing: the CDU actually managed to lower its percentage of the vote. We will see how the CDU godfathers treat Merkel; conservatives in Germany, as in the U.S. in 2000, are coming into power as the minority.

LI wanted to have its say on the Ampel [stoplight] election in Germany. The consensus view is that the worst thing of all would be a grand coalition between the CDU and the SPD. We think that, of all the grim options, it would be the best thing. In this, we disagree with figures we usually trust, like Claudia Roth, the Green candidate in Bavaria. Roth is a shrewd commentator. She is correct, we think, that Lafotaine’s supposed Linksopposition party is disturbingly reactionary. Her comment that “Lafontaine is operating on the lines of a graceless Right Populism” is essentially correct. And her concern about a coalition also makes sense. In Roth’s words:

“We remain by our clear position that the party of social coldness and of ecological madness is no partner for us. Therefore we are not going to cooperate in a stoplight coalition.”

Unfortunately, the Greens are a para-party – they have never had to confront the macro-economic issues, since they have grown up in the shadow of the SPD. This has encouraged their self-limiting tendencies.

In our opinion, the best thing would be a grand coalition. Drift is better, at the moment, then the loss of worker’s rights that are supposed to be traded for a supposed resurgence of entrepreneurial activity. Entrepreneurial activity, here, means a predators ball of mergers and acquisitions and hedge funds and the like, with only a small amount of that activity really going to the working class, and the large amount swallowed up by the already bloated upper class.

We are afraid of the chute effect from what we read in the press about the election. The Anglo-American press would dearly love to dump a mooing Germany down the free market chute, and watch the state strip workers of their rights while rewarding the parasitic upper ten percent class. You can feel that raw hunger – that contemporary entitled sensibility which combines the work of the butcher and the gourmand - in everything that is written about the German election in the NYT, or in, of all places, the Guardian (see James Meek’s incredibly stupid article ), or in the Times of London. As the Guardian leader put it, in the butter won’t melt in our mouth tones so beloved of the Blairites:

“There is little doubt that Mrs Merkel is better placed to bring about the kind of radical structural changes that Germany needs.”

Radical structural changes and reform are the words to watch out for whenever the governing class knocks you down and picks your pocket. You can see exactly the acids that stir in the guts of the mainstream press, which has been an important part of the machinery that has worked to make sure that the most prosperous time in history has mainly benefited a class that is now placed as far above the average worker as the great landholders in Roman times were above their agricultural slaves. The slaves had a bit more social mobility – lucky ones acquired more power and influence than any of the downtrodden in the 9th Ward are likely to get. According to the unanimous opinion of the bien pensants, we cannot afford a social welfare system in this most competitive of all worlds. And in the style section, we cannot afford to do without, say, the latest pair of 2,000 dollar shoes. It is odd, this social poverty on the global scale and the gilded age regilded on the private scale. It is odd that we can afford any number of wars and trillions of dollars of mortgages, but we can’t afford retirement. And to those who point to something out of wack, here, it is easy to write them off as anachronisms from another age. As though the other age were a richer one, instead of, as it really was, a vastly poorer one. Which is the paradox that the press is going to keep firmly mum about: the richer we are, the poorer we are.

However, an American sidelight has more to do with what should be, and is not, at stake in Germany than the sick “reformist” fantasies of Britain’s premier labour paper. There is an article about the new way to wealth for the old grabbers of semi-wrecked companies. These entrepreneurs are wringing wealth out of old steel companies, and old car parts manufacturing companies. And they are doing it not by the old fashioned way of productivity, or cutting upper management salaries, or anything stupid like that, but by the new and improved way of radical structural reform. They simply reform away the pension plan. Neat, isn’t it? You take a company like Bethlehem steel, and you take the contractually guaranteed pensions of the retired workers of Bethlehem steel, and you throw those benefits out – let the government take care of it! Is this reform at its most needed or what?

“ROBERT S. MILLER is a turnaround artist with a Dickensian twist. He unlocks hidden value in floundering Rust Belt companies by jettisoning their pension plans. His approach, copied by executives at airlines and other troubled companies, can make the people who rely on him very rich. But it may be creating a multibillion-dollar mess for taxpayers later.

As chief executive of Bethlehem Steel in 2002, Mr. Miller shut down the pension plan, leaving a federal program to meet the company's $3.7 billion in unfunded obligations to retirees. That turned the moribund company into a prime acquisition target. Wilbur L. Ross, a so-called vulture investor, snapped it up, combined it with four other dying steel makers he bought at about the same time, and sold the resulting company for $4.5 billion - a return of more than 1,000 percent in just three years on the $400 million he paid for all five companies.

Two years later, as the chief executive of Federal-Mogul, an auto parts maker in Southfield, Mich., Mr. Miller worked on winding up a pension plan for some 37,000 employees in England. The British authorities balked at the idea, fearing that such a move would swamp the pension insurance fund that Britain was creating; it began operations only last April. But the investor Carl C. Icahn has placed a big bet that Federal-Mogul will pay off after the pension plan is gone; he has bought its bonds at less than 20 cents on the dollar and is offering money to help the insurance fund. He, too, stands to make millions.”

As the Guardian noted about Schroeder:

“Schroeder has failed to bring down unemployment, now almost five million, and struggled to liberalise a social model that, like France's, seems a relic of an earlier time.”

Those relics of earlier times – why they are so dusty, so dirty, so full of, well, frankly people who you just can’t have a stimulating conversation with about democratization in the Middle East while forking up the camembert. What you have to do with relics is sell them off – and isn’t Mr. Miller doing a very fine job of that! You have to look at this model and ask: how could any nation resist?

As for the brave New World ahead of us, in which family togetherness is boldly encouraged, Grandpa having the choice of sleeping in the streets or being taken in by his entrepreneuring children living the two wage earner life style we all just love, it is all prepared for us from the relics of the ancient, bad times:

“James A. Wooten, a pension-law historian who is a professor at the University at Buffalo Law School, said that Congress knew it was creating an imperfect system when it established the pension corporation in 1974, and that it expected to make improvements later. The bill was highly contentious, and Congressional leaders struggled mightily to achieve compromise in the last chaotic months of the Nixon presidency, with the Watergate scandal roaring around them.

In the beginning, they set pension insurance premiums at a token $1 per employee. Today, the basic premium is up to $19 a head, but Congress has found it hard to raise the rates even remotely enough to cover growing claims. Some companies have warned that if they have to pay more for their pension insurance, they will stop offering pensions.

"They took cautious steps, and those cautious steps weren't enough to prevent the abuse of the insurance program," Mr. Wooten said. "Once there's insurance, you have an incentive to run up liabilities to get more out of the insurance."

MR. MILLER'S arrival at Delphi in July, and the intense labor negotiations that have followed, are signals that the auto parts industry may be in for a long cycle of bankruptcies and restructurings, like those that reshaped steelmakers and are beginning to transform airlines.”

Luckily the government’s spending now – which is, surprisingly, about the same amount of the GDP as it ever was – is being put to good use. Instead of those terrible social insurance guarantees, it is the ownership society that we are pouring our money into – or at least as much of it as we can borrow.

continuation on Goldstein

In my last post on Goldstein’s book, Incompleteness, I said that Goldstein tried to present Goedel’s two theorems from the perspective of Goedel’s own sense of what these theorems ultimately proved. That is, what they proved meta-mathematically. Goldstein is interested in the divergence between the popular image of what Goedel was up to and the fact that Goedle’s incompleteness proof, by insinuating a moment of absolute uncertainty into any formalization of arithmetic, seems to point to the insufficiency of conventionalism, not to affirm it.

The uncertainty, you will remember, goes like this: in any formally consistent language adequate for number theory, a., there will be one proposition that one can generate from the axioms of the system the truth or falsity of which can’t be decided by those rules, and b., that the consistency of the system can’t be proved within the system.

Now, Goldstein’s major point is to show why Goedel might take his theorems as evidence that there are real ideal objects. In other words, that at least one proposition in number theory must be either true or false without the system being able to determine its truth or falsity with its own resources begs the question of what the truthmaker, here, is.

However, Goldstein subverts her point a bit by admitting that Goedel’s view of the meaning of his work was conflicted. In public, he liked to claim that the theorems pointed to the reality of mathematical ideal objects, insofar as we associate reality with what makes a proposition true. But in private, Goedel was less certain. Here is what Goedel said to his student, Hao Wang:

“Either the human mind surpasses all machines (to be precise it can decide more number theoretical questions than any machine) or else there exist number theoretical questions undecidable for the human mind.”

Goldstein asks herself what the second part of this disjunct means, and gives us a … well, a postmodern answer. That is, one that refers the conceptual question to the personality quirks of its inventor.

“I think that what he is considering here is the possibility that we are indeed machines – that is, that all of our thinking is mechanical, determined by hard-wired rules – but that we are under the delusion that we have access to unformalizable mathematical truth.”

As she says a few paragraphs later:
“This possibility – its being precisely the possibility that gave Goedel pause – is particularly interesting when we consider an aspect of Goedel’s opaque inner life that we have touched upon before: his own serious delusions.”

Well, I want to tickle Goldstein a bit here, but I’m not really interested in pursuing the path of delusion. Rather, I want to pursue the path of the excluded middle, which is of course the framing assumption here. There is, I believe, a term of art in Zen, “mu”. “Mu” is neither yes nor no. It is, in a sense, the bifurcating moment itself, Deleuze’s “inclusive disjunct.” Perhaps all Goedel’s theorems are about is that we don’t have a formal grasp of the logic of “mu”.

Unfortunately, this post has sailed away from the point I originally started out to make. That is, I wanted to point out one peculiarity, from the formalist p.o.v., about Goedel’s proof – and that is that it depends on the possibility of constructing Goedel numbers, which is, in turn, the most extreme expression of formalism, and the most resolutely anti-Platonist “moment” in a theorem that Goedel thinks shows us the Platonist structure of number theoretical truths. Should I go into this? Hmm, perhaps not.

Two essays you might want to check out on the Web. Paul Bernays essay on Platonism in Mathematics is here. Putnam’s defense of Wittgenstein’s comments about Goedel are here.

The Big 'S'

LI used to write for a business mag. So naturally we like ‘synergy’ when we see it, and boy, did we see it in the NYT today. There is the President on the first page, photo opping in a New Orleans that has been cleared of the kind of people that would make his entrance there unsafe, promising to treat the Gulf Coast like he has treated Iraq – from the appointment of a Bremer like figure to screw things up (Karl Rove is going to be the Gulf czar) to another load of borrowing from the Chinese and Japanese central banks to stuff into the pockets of the croney-network – the engineering/petroleum/war industries outlined in Robert Bryce’s book, “Cronies.”

The organ Bush refers to most – his heart -- was enthroned last year by the simplest of all strategies – bribery, in the shape of tax cuts for people who are looking for some influx of money to substitute for their fallen wages (after all, the private sector is more than ever a first come first serve proposition, with the first comers being the “investor class”) combined with entertainment – in 2004, that function being taken care of by the verbal lynching of gays, to be followed by discrete private actions, no doubt, in your own subdivision or village.

And then, on the Business page, is Bushism in action: NBC is promoting a new show, "Three Wishes," hosted by an evangelical entertainer, Amy Grant, who will “[travel] to a different town each week in an effort to fulfill the heart's desire of needy families and community groups.” In other words, she will arrive to douse some poor suck in a little surplus value to amplify that compassionate glow in the tv audience. Giving away money on tv is the low rent road to ratings and votes, especially if it can be fairydusted with faith:

“In advance of the new prime-time television season, NBC sent more than 7,000 DVD's of the show's first episode to ministers and other clergy members, along with a recorded message to their congregants from Ms. Grant. ("At its core, 'Three Wishes' is faith in action," she tells them.) The network has also booked Ms. Grant - a pop singer who vaulted to fame singing Christian songs, crossed over to mainstream radio and recently released an album of hymns titled "Rock of Ages" - for interviews on Christian radio and taken out advertising in small-town newspapers.

And, perhaps most seductively, NBC has been stuffing cash registers at stores here like Goody's and others in or around Nashville, Salt Lake City, Des Moines and Milwaukee with tens of thousands of $1 bills used for groceries and other basics. The dollars are affixed with yellow stickers (removable, consistent with Treasury Department guidelines) that ask, "What's your wish?," and implore people to watch the show. All told, the network expects to give away 150,000 of those dollar bills in 15 cities and towns.”

Rest assured that those 1 dollar bills won’t be used for six packs of Pabst, at least on compassionate tv -- more’s the pity. The chintziness of the charity, the cheapness of the faith, and the underlying contempt for the yokel set – 150 thou is definitely not going to buy your way into the Houston Petroleum club – makes this show an electric match for the show just put on by the Prez. Rove missed it – wouldn’t it have been nice to see Ms. Grant handing out some of those one dollar bills to scrubbed evacuees at the end of the plea to put billions more in the pockets of those people who need it most, the CEOs of Brown and Root, of Halliburton, of Exxon Mobile, and of all the rest of the neediest in this fine country of ours?

If this isn’t the voice of Bush culture, I don’t know Arkansas, as the Duke says in Huckleberry Finn:
“The cash register at Goody's clothing store here flashed $106.01 - for a dress shirt and three pairs of Levi's - but as Lori Smith reached for her credit card, a nearby voice brought the transaction to a halt.

"Tell you what, why don't you let me take care of it?" said Scott Evans, his delivery as smooth as a car salesman's as he directed Ms. Smith to a partner brandishing stacks of $1 bills.”