la vie francaise

"The periodical press has been, as is its nature to be, only an instrument of disorder and sedition. . . . The press has thus disseminated disorder into the most upright minds, shaken the firmest convictions, and produced in the midst of society, a confusion of principles that yields to the most sinister attempts. Thus by anarchy of doctrines, it prepares anarchy in the state." – Report to the King, July 25, 1830, from Spectacular Realities : Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-siècle Paris by Vanessa Schwartz..

The story in Bel Ami is pretty simple. It is another story about a man rising to social success using the instruments of capitalism. This story, in an English novel, would be about the ‘natural’ rise of this man, through either a death (an inheritance) or sex (a marriage). In France, death and sex are wrenched from their natural poles – they are manipulated in one way or another. The English illusion that the peculiar stratifications of class respond to a natural order is, in France, a form of nostalgia for an époque when that was true. This is not to say that the rentier has no place in French literature. However, the great French novelists do not take a ceremonial authorial attitude towards the rentier, as the English novelists do. If I were to go about this in a Hegelian way, I’d probably posit Henry James’ work as the great synthesis of the two attitudes…

But I digress. In Bel Ami, an ex colonial soldier named Georges Duroy rises through the ranks of a newspaper, La Vie Francaise, on the way to becoming the tres rich husband of Suzanne Walter, the boss’ daughter. Duroy’s rise as a journalist is remarkable insofar as Maupassant portrays him as barely literate. But it turns out that, just as today, with its Novaks and Barnes and TV pundits, illiteracy is no bar to the ambitious man who doesn’t mind having his articles ghostwritten for him, and who realizes that the power of the pen is virtual – the menace disguised in the ability to disseminate “news,” - rather than actual, the virtuosity of the exercise. To the right character, a vista of profitable entries unscrolls before the rolling eye. That journalism is related, on the one side, to literature, and on the other side, to blackmail, has been abundantly revealed by the Plame scandal, even as it is unconsciously sensed by your average householder.

It isn’t only Duroy who uses his blackmailing propensities to get ahead: the owner of La Vie Francaise has set himself up in order to tout certain speculations and dowse others. The growth of news gathering around this central premise is a happy accident.

As the quote at the head of this post indicates, the very idea of a free press was a liberal idea in the nineteenth century. Bel-Ami was published in 1885, four years after the press laws were radically liberalized, allowing the “penny press.” The association between liberalism and the press was forged in the same process that brought about the extension of suffrage, the growth of unions, and the basic plan of what we’ve grown used to as the liberal state. This, of course, includes growth in the state’s military. Duroy’s original entry into LVF stems from his having served in Algeria. The imperialist effect appears at this moment, and not by some coincidence. Comically, the account of his adventures in Algeria is put together by Madame Forestier. After the party at which Duroy’sa stories about Algeria had attracted the attention of the proprietor of LVF, “M. Walter, Deputy, Financier, a man of money and affairs, a Jew from Southern France,” Duroy spends days trying to write an account of his experience – all in vain. He takes the task to be the same as the writing of an exposition in high school. It isn’t, of course. As Maupassant realized, the narrative of the news story calls upon the same narrative intelligence that flows into novels.

Duroy’s real talent is the manipulation of his dick. While Maupassant doesn’t go into the apocalyptic bedroom details, Duroy’s travels from the bed of one rich woman to another is carried on at the same time that he is wrestling with the finer points of journalistic ethics. Eventually, the two story lines converge in Duroy’s marriage to the attractive, mysterious Madam Forestier.

Monsieur Forestier is the editor of La Vie Francaise, and Duroy is inducted into the service of the newspaper by the whim of Forestier inviting him to the party at which he met the publisher. This is another modern note – for haven’t we seen editors and publishers lavish their care on some of the more dubious specimens of the newsgathering trade, recently? In Judy Miller’s case, there is even a slight scent of the boudoir that follows her from story to story – much as in the case of Duroy.

LI has, of course, been having some fun playing with parallels. But, more seriously, the existence of both the fictional LVF and the more factual NYT and WAPO both depends, essentially, on a particular act of consumption: being read. So if we take Singh, et al.’s nodes seriously, we should be looking at hierarchies of readership. Singh thinks of these as marketing relationships. I like the idea that these are reading constituencies. Still, what we have with the LVF, as with any newspaper, is:
1. The readership who subscribe to or buy the paper.
2. Institutional agencies that act as "guardians" of the marketplace, or censors.
3. Advertisers and others with financial stake in the paper.
4. And finally, the “noncommercial intermediaries that act as independent gatekeepers” – these are the readers of power, so to speak. The operate both as the subset of the readers (1) and as the readers to whom the papers producers go before the news appears. In terms of court societies, such as D.C., readers 4 become enmeshed in the news in a peculiar way, one which separates the image of the newspaper from its reality more and more as the newspaper becomes more and more powerful.

The ghost of these readers haunts every news story. One of the things Maupassant saw very well is that the act of writing is not, in the newspaper, independent of the readership constituencies. This is not the worry about whether a particular piece would sell or not. That worry is but one of a set. Right at the root of writing is a grand division of the seemingly indivisible writer – the text that eventually appears, with his byline, its production, its processing through the editorial system, its placement on the page, and the feedback it gets are all parts of a system that displaces the writer from the defining act – the writer is the one who writes – and turns it into another act – the writer is the one who ends up with the byline. This radically subverts the image of the writer as the hermit of the highest form of art. Maupassant knew all about that hermit – after all, he was related to Flaubert and an intimate of his circle.

That the news is, actually, an act of belief rather than of fact – “newness” being a judgment rather than an observation – disseminated by writers who aren’t writers makes the press a very strange locus of anxieties about what is and what isn’t authentic in liberal culture. Even odder, though, is the fact that freedom of the press, which emerges as part of the liberal program, so quickly develops tools that are seized by the right. In fact, the radical right in the twentieth century habitually used the media to achieve political goals, while the “liberal” media has been driven, in its quest for authenticity, to deny its essential liberalism.

Notes

At the moment, in the street outside my window actors are strolling around, clothed in what looks like some vintage 70s gear. The trucks showed up Saturday. The dressing truck, I suppose. A truck from which wires extend. A house up the street has black paper tacked up on the front, and cameras in the yard. In the back yard, this morning, there was a picnic atmosphere.

As far as I can tell, there are no name stars – although I might have just missed them or not recognized them in the cruel natural sunlight. Moviemaking seems to consist largely of people wandering up and down with cell phones held to their ears, making self conscious dialogue. The best thing I’ve heard so far was a young woman saying they have to be naked in this scene. Both of them.

I’m not sure what I dislike more: the businessman’s approach to cell phones, which is basically to carry on in public spaces by an astonishing immersion into the mechanics of private conversation – yelling, a lot of “fuck” this and that, and an imperious tone – or the actor’s more self-conscious use of the cell phone as a theatrical prop. I am pretty sure that the cell phone is not my kind of technological advance. In the old days, you could pretty much bet that a man yelling to himself in the street was off his med pac. Now, you can pretty much bet he has one of those hard to spot cell phone gadgets. The pod people aspect of wires coming out of people’s ears also rather scares me. But I am sure that these aren’t pod people…

I’m pretty sure…

If they were pod people, there’d be weird things happening in the land. Cities would flood, and nobody would respond, or they would respond like zombies after valium overdose. Nations would be invaded for reasons nobody could tell. Governments would unilaterally claim the right to eavesdrop on you, spy on your computer use, and pry into your correspondence. All of these would be symptoms of a pod person invasion, right?

Never happen.

…

Anyway, I asked a good looking blonde gaffer (I imagine she was a gaffer, which I’ve always thought was Hollywood for go-fer) what this movie was about. She told me it was about a man who is on the skids. Wow, and they are filming it in my neighborhood. Makes me feel very South Bronxish.

more fun ...

I’m going to do something different …

I planned to pick through the recent controversies at the WAPO over the ombudsman’s remarks about Abramoff, and the response to those remarks by readers and blogs, and the rather astonishing response in turn by various WAPO appartchiks. But then I thought, that’s no fun.

The point is to try to get a half nelson on the growth of media criticism as a form of politics. LI wanted to use the article by Singh, et al, to complicate, complexify, lye and dye the matter of media, where at one time we made our bread and where, even now, we keep the sly hand in – today, for instance, we should have something in the Austin Statesman. Or is that going to be next week? And something in the Raleigh News and Observer.

But that seems all so boring. Instead, why not segregate out that stuff from Singh et al (and yes, we do like writing Singh et al – it’s a Here Comes Everybody moment) about the constituencies and then apply it to a paper we know more about than WAPO – La vie francaise, the fictional paper in Maupassant’s Bel-Ami. While Maupassant, who worked for Gil Blas and a number of papers, backed away from claiming that La vie francaise represented any particular paper – it was, instead, he wrote, an “agency for political cheats and stock market skimmers” – we think that the paper, with its portraits, its strong editorial positions creating the framework in which stories appear, its lazy, crooked, arrogant journalists paying off concierge to get tips about celebrities – we think that it is exactly the type of thing that is hidden under the ultramodern Teflon sheathing of contemporary journalism, with – in WAPO’s case – the role of Madame Forestier, the wife of the editor of the VF, being played by Sally Quinn, the wife of the former editor of WAPO, Ben Bradlee. And just as Madame Forestier is smart enough to ghostwrite the articles glorifying the French colonial effort, Quinn was smart enough and slimy enough to glorify Chalabi and thereby put him into play as our kind of crook, our kind of ruthless subaltern that would steal his nation blind and send the proceeds to the US, in the corridors of D.C. power.

Next post … or the next after that – will continue this theme.

Enron, the Washington Post, Oprah

“On August 27, 2002, the LAUSD board voted unanimously to ban the sale of soft drinks on its campuses, which included 677 schools with 748,000 students.” Which is the center of a case study on trust done by Jagdip Singh, Jean E. Kilgore, Rama Jayanti, Kokil Agarwal and Ramadesikan Gandarvakottai and published in the Journal of Public Policy and Marketing.

Actually, there are two case studies described in “What Goes Around Comes Around: Understanding Trust--Value Dilemmas of Market Relationships,” but the Coke case is more fascinating to me, simply because Coke’s struggle to retain its “pouring rights” in schools was a sorta typical 'we want to own your soul" corporate ploy. As the authors put it:

“Although Coke attracts a wide variety of consumer segments, our focus is the youth segment, especially school-going children. Children ages 5-14 spend $35 billion each year and influence the spending of approximately $200 billion annually (Harvey 2000; Rosenberg 2001). In an aggressive effort to reach school-going children, Coke entered into exclusive 5-10 year contracts that involved large, up-front, and distributed payments to school districts over the contract period. In return, the schools stocked their vending machines exclusively with the company's products and guaranteed exposure to the company's advertising in schools. Referred to as "pouring rights," these contracts include a comprehensive strategy to attract children with logos on school equipment, Channel One, and the Internet, as well as advertising, contests, free samples, and coupons (Nestle 2002, p. 202). As Coke's spokesperson noted, "Our strategy is to put soft drinks within arm's reach of desire and schools are one channel we want to make them available in" (Pear 1994, p. A15).”

In order that the arm’s reach of desire would be just in dollar distance of the third grade math class, Coke would grant school districts money – and in fact set up very cute programs to get the school districts (who were, in the nineties, busy putting up signs that read “drug free zone”) to actually push the stuff on the kiddies.

“A particularly troublesome aspect of pouring-rights contracts for parents and consumer advocates was the bonus incentives tied to soda sales (Kaufmann 2001). For example, Coke offered the schools a commission of 30% for each soft drink can sold compared with 15% for each noncarbonated drink sold (Day 2003). Higher commissions for soft drink sales coupled with bonus incentives for exceeding quotas resulted in many schools' initiating their own aggressive efforts to boost soft drink consumption on school premises. For example, in 1999, a widely publicized memo from a Colorado school administrator who signed himself "The Coke Dude" admonished the school district for not doing its fair share to attract more funds and offered prizes of $3,000, $15,000, and $25,000, respectively, to his elementary, middle, and high school principals. His memo read:
We must sell 70,000 cases of product … at least once during the first three years of the contract. If we reach this goal, your school allotments will be guaranteed for the next seven years…. If 35,439 staff and students buy one Coke product every other day for a school year, we will double the required quota. Here is how we can do it…. Allow students to purchase and consume vended products throughout the day…. I know this is "just one more thing from downtown," but the long-term benefits are worth it. (Bushey 1999, p. 1)”

Well, with Coke dudes in various districts, everything seemed to be working when the Gov'mint, and parents looking down at their children growing fat as pigs and insulin deficient, started coming around. What Singh, et al. were trying to trace is the network of trust nodes, as they call them, that activated as Coke was shoved out of the neighborhood of some lucrative little desiring units.

“… we approach a firm's diverse market relationships through a lens of simultaneity and interactivity. Specifically, we draw on the work of Drumwright (1996), Hutt, Mokwa, and Shapiro (1986), Menon and Menon (1997), and Wilkie and Moore (1999) and focus on four nodes of a firm's key market relationships: (1) consumers who are, have been, or will be end users and/or buyers of a firm's products/services; (2) regulatory and institutional agencies that are entrusted by society to act as "guardians" of the marketplace; (3) commercial intermediaries that participate in vertical arrangements with the firm to create time and place value for the latter's products/services; and (4) noncommercial intermediaries that act as independent gatekeepers and/or activists and thus influence access (e.g., parents of schoolchildren, media, scientific community) and/or provide value through information (e.g., consumerist agencies, activist organizations) to end users and buyers. A distinctive aspect of our study is that we extend previous research by examining explicitly how a firm's market relationships across the preceding four nodes intersect and interact.”

I like the authors’ model, even if it does lead to pretty complex mappings of the ‘diverse market relationships…” They trace the various factors that went into the LA school districts decision using the lens of trust, and in particular the way the sugar lobbyists and their allies in the food industry tried to filibuster legislation that would ban or regulate Coke and other sweets from being sold in schools. Coke, in 2001, began to realize it had a huge problem on its hands, and so was backpedaling from exclusive pouring rights contracts – but its bottlers were angry in turn, since they made a lot from those school venues in a market that had long reached saturation.

….
All of which brings us to the issue of media trust. LI has long maintained that the media fallout from the great media depression of 2001-2004 has concentrated way too much on a simple quantitative explanation: it was all an advertising shortfall, the result of the Net crash. We think that is bs. In fact, the pumping strategies that had fed the market in the late nineties was assiduously abetted by the media. I was looking back to newspaper and magazine articles about Enron, thinking of putting up a couple of where are they now posts for the likes of Rebecca Marks, and I was amazed, again, to be reminded about what was being published back in the nineties. For instance, I found something called Success Magazine – I haven’t checked to see if it is still around – and it published an article in Success magazine 1998 extolling “Visionaries. (profiles of five innovative business leaders) (includes related article on eight visionary entrepreneurs)” Of the five visionaries Stephen Rebello was awestruck by, one has now gone to jail and one, Bernie Ebbers, is almost certainly going to jail. And of course, where would visionaries be in the 90s without Ken Lay and Jeff S?

“Kenneth Lay CEO, Enron Corp. Houston, Tex. Number of employees: 14,000 worldwide Revenue: More than $13 billion yearly Lesson: One good idea can break the stranglehold of a monopoly
Most of us grew up with this impression: Flick on a light switch or fire up the furnace, and you're trafficking with a friendly monopoly -- the local utilities company, regulated by the fed. After all, what were our alternatives? A battery pack and a cache of firewood?
Kenneth Lay wanted to rearrange all that. In 1985 the former deputy undersecretary for energy of the U.S. Department of Interior helped forge Enron Corp. from two gas-pipeline firms. In short order, Lay pushed Enron to became something bigger -- a gas-marketing company that, by the '90s, was servicing Argentina, India, and the Philippines. With deregulation fervor brewing, Lay envisaged expanding to exploit an even bigger potential gold mine: freemarket electricity.
Open to competition the nation's $215 billion retail-electricity market? Sell electricity directly to homeowners, businesses, and industrial users? Sounds like a great idea -- unless, of course, you're a deeply entrenched utilities supplier.
"We simply made a commitment to providing consumer choice and competition for retail natural gas and electricity, much like what we've seen in the telecommunications industry," asserts Lay, who manages to sound like an underdog David tackling a monopolistic Goliath despite his power company's output's recently having jumped by 286 percent in one quarter alone.
What took him, md others, so long? "The electricity utilities, which, by the nature of their business, are very skilled at working the political regulatory process," he fires back, like a born zealot. "Few of the larger electricity facilities are pushing for consumer choice and competition."
Okay, so the gloves are off for a fight to die finish, but once the dust settles, how will die services provided by Lay and other free-market suppliers be any different?
The differences between a market and a monopoly will finally mean innovation," he explains, with contagious enthusiasm. "Consumers are going to save $60 million to $80 billion a year, more than $200 million a day. We won't use antiquated analog meters, and there'll be no more guys jumping over fences and fighting dogs to read meters. Digital meters and instantaneous readings will mean that consumers can start making choices as to when to turn on the washing machine or die dishwasher, taking advantage of lower rates that can save them 40, 50 percent."
I’m sure the people of California appreciated that.
But it wasn’t just fly by nights like Success. Fortune, in 1996, published perhaps one of the unintentionally funniest tongue baths of all Lay’s pleasure centers. It begins with that hoary but always good profile grabber, the CRISIS. In this one, our intrepid Lay is on the ski slopes when disaster seems to threaten:
“Kenneth Lay skied down Ajax Mountain in Aspen, Colorado, on a cold dark afternoon last December, blissfully unaware that the stock of his Houston-based energy conglomerate was taking an even steeper plunge. The Enron chairman returned to his vacation home on Roaring Fork River to find an urgent message from President and Chief Operating Officer Richard Kinder: "We've got a major problem, and we've got to talk."
That afternoon, Enron's stock had lost 2 7/8 points, or roughly $750 million in market capital, amid rumors that the company's natural gas marketing arm, Enron Capital & Trade Resources, was shorting the market even as the January futures contracts expired and a pre-Christmas cold snap was sending prices up the chimney. The crisis of confidence was compounded by rumors that Jeffrey Skilling, the 42-year-old wunderkind chairman of Enron Capital & Trade, had been led off the company trading floor in handcuffs.”

Imagine that. And of course the crisis, here, is all about stock prices. Which it might have behoved the author of the article to ponder.

These and a zillion other articles not only got things wrong – they actually got in the way of getting things right. They obstructed rationality and made skepticism into a “contrarian” stance – when of course skepticism is just the way one should approach a narrative involving a lot of money and people with an interest in skewing your perception of the narrative in a certain way.

The business press articles percolated through the four nodes of Singh, et al.'s article in peculiar and depressing ways…

About which, more tomorrow.

the pre-game report

On the eve of the Enron trial, LI watched the Smartest Guys in the Room yesterday. And we scanned the Economist tout sheet of the prosecuted and the let off. Of course, as we know, corporate law is designed, basically, to allow the governing class to rob people without the expense and fuss that comes from having to buy pistols and wave them in various strangers faces. That the prosecution has to prove an epistemological point to the jury – viz, that Skilling and Lay knew they were committing a crime by signing off on various deals to conceal Enron’s debt while pumping its stock, thus making it a crime – is funny in itself, like one of Zeno’s paradoxes – how can you prove someone knowingly committed a crime when the crime depends on knowingly committing it?

If I decide to knock somebody down, steal their credit cards, and use them, the police don’t have to bother convincing the jury that I knew I was committing a crime. But the more money one has, the more murky the line between the criminal and the legal becomes. Law is where class issues can no longer be latent. If they could, the governing class would simply have two sets of laws, one for them and one for the rest of us. That has practically been achieved by Congress and your state legislature, anyway, but they put both those laws together in one lawbook.

Of course, far be it from LI to discourage entrepreneurship. We surely don’t want to do that.

In LI’s opinion, Lay’s defense, here, should be watched carefully by the employee and investors he ripped off, since the defense is basically that he collected his total what, 400 million from his time at the company by doing one of the most pisspoor jobs ever concocted by a timeserving CEO supermensch. Useful info to have at the civil trial – although it is funny, corporate shills complain all of the time of useless due diligence laws and corporate greenmail by greedy lawyers, but outrageous fraud never seems to fall under these laws.

This, of course, was one of the things Enron, the movie, chose not to concentrate on, which is too bad, although understandable. They made the decision to be serious and not to juice up their account with the effects of unearned wealth on Enron’s bright lights. But … iIt wasn’t that the sex and money story line was peripheral to what happened at Enron – it was central. Rich Kinder, whose resignation moved Skilling into the top spot at Enron, resigned because he was having an affair with Ken Lay’s secretary – and Lay didn’t like it, although of course his second wife was his previous secretary, with whom he’d had an affair until he divorced his first and married her. They actually interviewed Amanda Martin for much of the Smartest Guys in the Room without ever explaining that she had a pretty well publicized affair with Ken Rice, one of the great looters at Enron – a dealmaker whose time as the head of the Enron Broadband division was one of the great jokes of the company. He spent more time, by all accounts, worrying about getting ever new motorcycles on Enron expense accounts “for” the division than he did about anything so mundane as the business itself, and what did he carry away from those grueling, three hour days? 53 million, more or less. It is very hard making decisions about which motorcycle your divison will use as its motorcycle symbol, as we all know. That is why we have to pay our upper management so well. They are so, well, smart.

Skilling actually is going to face the hottest time about the Broadband scam, which was a more than usually egregious goldbricking effort – a scheme that depended the synergy between Enron’s pipes and optical fiber, don’tcha know, and how all those easements and that infrastructure put Enron in the primo position to wire every household in America and pump in the videos.

And we are also all going to OZ on my balloon…

According to Elkind and Bethany McClean's must-read (if you care about Enron, you have to accept that tired cliché in the case of two reporters who became central to the Enron unwinding) in this week’s Fortune, Rice and Causey are going to lighten the prosecutorial task as they have made deals to keep them from spening too much time away from the various millions that were left over from the fines. In the case of white collar law, unlike, say, bank robbery, you get to keep a considerable portion of your loot. We will see, although the preliminaries don't look good -- the government should combat completely the idea that this case is too complicated. Any housewife or bowling alley attendent knows how earmarked money works. The prosecutors should look to seed the jury with the divorced, because what Enron did is, on a grand scale, what many a husband seeks to do in divorce cases -- hide assets. In this case, negative assets. Lay, unlike HealthSouth’s Scrushy, is not a personable man – he is an arrogant prick, and is seemingly even unaware that he is an arrogant prick. He is the same man who used the Enron corporate jet to shuttle his kids to the French Riviera like it was a taxi-cab, all of course on the company ticket. Well, you have to do things like that, as any economist can tell you, to align the interests of the truly brilliant management with the company. Economists in the middle ages made the same kind of arguments for droit de seigneur. Economists exist to excuse the inexcusable – theologians of the pathomarkets.

ps – there are couple of warnings to take to Smartest Guys in the Room One is that there is a gaping hole in the political story told in the movie. The hole is the hand in glove relationship of Enron and the Clinton administration. The Hollywood affection for the Elvis president makes this kind of thing, apparently, hard to see. Simply put, the waiver by Wendy Gramm that allowed Enron to operate in the energy market largely without regulation was continued in the Clinton years even as it became obvious that that Enron was operating as a bank. The India deal became an issue between the U.S and India, as Clinton’s Commerce department, under Ron Brown, put pressure on India to cooperate with Enron, even as it became apparent that Enron had built the equivalent, in energy terms, of the Spruce Goose in India. The neo-liberals at Treasury and Commerce made it very hard for Latin American governments to resist privatizing water, for instance, which was another large Enron project – under Rebecca Mark, Enron ended up owning Buenos Aires Water. And to treat Gray Davis as the martyr of the brownouts is to understand nothing of the (legally) peculating Dem administration which put through the deregulatory program. Alas, in a discourse in which the only sides allowable are Clinton and Bush, how a company like Enron operates is essentially hidden. Maybe that is the reason for the pseudo-division? That energy should have been privatized in the first place, or deregulated, was unquestioned, even though the reasons for it were clearly either untrue or unproven. Almost all energy deregulation feathered in large, sometimes absurdly large, provisions for energy companies that had crippled themselves building unnecessary, expensive nuclear power plants – another boondoggle that went by the name of synergy and that energy execs love to foist off on gullible populations, and not only Iranian ones.

The second is more puzzling. While the film explains mark to market accounting, it doesn't really explain why it didn't work at Enron. While it is true that the way Enron used it was not good, mark to market accounting does have some good effects in theory -- for instance, it smooths out turbulence markets in goods, like natural gas, in which turbulence can act as a bar to use. The problems that can come with mark to market accounting -- massaging the numbers -- were aggravated not by the accounting itself, but by the parallel set up of the "incentive" structure. Dealers at Enron gained bonuses not on real profits, but on book profits. Enron basically screwed itself out of the advantage it could take from mark to market accounting by distributing benefits, asymmetrically, to the management. This is why Rebecca Mark, who, conservatively, cost the company 1 to 2 billion dollars with the massive losses in India and from the water purchases, could cash out with 84 million dollars, and Ken Rice could run the broadband division, that lost 30 million, and gain options worth 30 million. In essence, the company set up an incentive structure in which the incentive was to cheat the company.

And of course the dealers proceeded to bleed Enron. Something like 1.3 billion was taken out of it by execs in the last two or three years, according to Robert Bryce.

Continuing from yesterday…

Wilson finds few direct criticisms of road building. But she does find one, and she contrasts it with the standard argument:

“Few outright critiques of road building can be found. One that stands out
is Fairhead’s (1992) analysis of the destructive effects of road-building in Eastern Zaire. There, he argues, roads represent ‘paths of authority’ and need to be understood as qualitatively different from the flow of goods and people that take place along local pathways. ‘From colonial times, roads were associated with the exercise of power by the state or the chiefs; forced labour was recruited to build them, personal movement along them was taxed and controlled and indigenous land near them was expropriated for plantations and mission stations’ (Fairhead, 1992: 21). In the current phase of roadbuilding financed by the World Bank, relations of power and violence have not changed; indeed, Fairhead claims, roads have further depleted and impoverished a region already suffering acute economic decline. This argument drawing on political economy has strong resonance in the Andes. But more common in the literature are analyses drawing an opposite conclusion. Porter (2002), in a study of off-road villages in sub-
Saharan Africa, emphasizes the human costs of isolation and difficulties faced by women and men who live ‘in a walking world’, unable to access services available at rural centres or make their voices heard in local politics. And at a regional level, as Bebbington (1999: 2022) notes, when seeking to account for instances of agricultural intensification and other forms of livelihood transition, ‘access becomes perhaps the most critical resource of all if people are to build sustainable, poverty alleviating rural livelihoods’.
Clearly, when rural producers must compete in domestic and export markets they are penalized when transport costs are excessively high.”

In these cases, the question of the penetrative power of the road, and who benefits from the “opening up” of territory performed by the road, doesn’t really distinguish road types from one another. They flow from some central, translocal authority, and are considered from the point of view of that authority. But there is another way in which roads operate as tools to close off territory. In Austin, you see this in the way a interstate highway, I-35, provides a barrier between East Austin – dangerous, black and Hispanic – and central and west Austin – which, since the African-American neighborhood in Tarrytown was pretty much liquidated in the sixties, is generally white and middle to upper class. This kind of barrier is made possible by the relative lack of transportation on the east side – the lesser number of motor vehicle owners, the greater number of bus riders, etc.

But Wilson is more concerned with what you might call the functional economy of roads – what not having and having roads can mean to a community. The community she studied, in Peru, from 1994 onwards, is a sad case of road lucklessness. In the eighties, as she gathered from memories of people in the hamlet of Cayesh, the world was defined like this:

“No roads connect the hamlets to the world outside; cayashinos must walk some 50km to 60 km south to reach the paved road to Tarma, or 25 km to 30 km north to reach a dirt road leading up the Ulcumayo valley to the high mining centres.”

The six hundred some inhabitants used pack animals to take their produce to Tarma. But the more well to do also began to desire schooling for their kids, and – operating just as a liberal like me would hope that they would operate – they took their kids to Tarma, too, to be educated. The road to Tarma had opened up the place to the world.

But that doesn’t mean that the world was kind. The Cayashinos were considered second rate, savage Indians. They learned enough to know what this meant. And they learned about resistance. They came back and formed the support groups around which Sendero Luminoso centered.

“Following the invasion of some 200 militants, municipal and community authorities were disbanded, the population prohibited from moving without authorization, and documents of identification confiscated. Several comuneros were killed and the few families who managed to slip away forfeited their lands, livestock and household goods that were distributed amongst the poor. Militants took over as authorities and organized frequent political meetings where they preached that the aristocratic state had deliberately neglected to attend to community needs; the state had treated them with disdain and transformed them into las comunidades mas olvidadas (‘the most forgotten communities’).”

After a year, disaster struck, in the form of an army attack that scattered the Cayeshinos, many of whom emigrated to the city. And it wasn’t until the mid nineties that the hamlet’s population started coming back. They came back to find that most of their land had been claimed by another hamlet. They came back to a shattered system of exchanges. And again, in response to this, they did something hearteningly liberal – they decided they really needed a road.

After five years of intense campaigning, a road plan for Cayash was approved in 1998 by the Ministry of Transport in Lima and a three year construction programme began. The state undertook to contribute technical assistance and heavy machinery while local government provided fuel and Cayash unskilled labour. The project document’s preamble made the political orientation clear. The road would: (i) allow the substitution of traditional systems by new modern techniques of cultivation and livestock raising;
(ii) provide access to credit; (iii) allow greater control by entities of the state; (iv) offer capitalists access to known reserves ofmineral wealth; (v) facilitate an intensive training of peasant producers; (vi) allow an increase in productive infrastructure; and (vii) make possible the establishing of a new socioeconomic structure in the region. What is presented here is a familiar picture of colonization directed from outside, a vision far removed from the social justice and recuperation that the struggling Cayash authorities had in mind. By 2001, with 15 kmof the 50 kmcompleted, the road works stopped. Funds had run out, charges of embezzlement circulated and following the ignominious fall of
Fujimori, the Ministry of Transport refused to be bound by any moral obligation
to finish what the earlier corrupt administration had started.”

This is not a happy story on any level. Theoretically, the road that was supposed to make the territory legible to the state, that was supposed to give control, even oppressive control, to the combination of corporate and political interests, had gone so haywire that Wilson ends her study with this graf:

“One might have assumed that the end of violent conflict would have been marked by a greater presence of state forces of law and order, and a more concerted attempt by the central state to make Andean provinces legible by road-building, but this does not seem to be happening. In the case of Tarma, although the intelligence service survives, police presence has been greatly reduced. Here on the eastern slopes of the Andes, adjacent to the blurred borderlands of the lowland zone, state authority is still under dispute, and
roads are no potent symbols of state-ness. On the contrary, roads are known places of ambush and assault, frequented by delinquents, terrorists, smugglers, drug-dealers; they are the place where deals are done with bad cops. Roads on the fringes of the state are themselves war-zones, a reminder of the fragility of sovereignty and emptiness of the central state’s claim to territoriality. In Peru, the ‘security’ of marginal regions seen from a national perspective remains in doubt; so does the future response of the state.”

The road, here, is Artaud’s alchemical theater, where trade is transfigured into the vehicle of the plague, and where the basic sign of control is really the scene of multiple and shifting anarchies. Not the path of authority after all.

seeing like a biker

“All these cities were connected with each other, and with the capital, by the public highways, which issuing from the Forum of Rome, traversed Italy, pervaded the provinces, and were terminated only by the frontiers of the empire. If we carefully trace the distance from the wall of Antoninus to Rome, and from thence to Jerusalem, it will be found that the great chain of communication, from the north-west to the south-east point of the empire, was drawn out to the length of four thousand and eighty Roman miles. (85) The public roads were accurately divided by mile-stones, and ran in a direct line from one city to another, with very little respect for the obstacles either of nature or private property. Mountains were perforated, and bold arches thrown over the broadest and most rapid streams. (86) The middle part of the road was raised into a terrace which commanded the adjacent country, consisted of several strata of sand, gravel, and cement, and was paved with large stones, or in some places, near the capital, with granite. (87) Such was the solid construction of the Roman highways, whose firmness has not entirely yielded to the effort of fifteen centuries. – Edward Gibbon, Book One, the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

Last month, on Christmas in fact, I penned a negative review of Rodney Stark’s book, The Victory of Reason for the Austin Statesman. Stark has long been arguing that religion is a neglected factor in sorting out the rise of the West and its triumph, and in this book he distilled his argument in more popular terms. I thought his treatment of the mix of factors that gave rise to liberty, progress and capitalism distorted the place of the Church by treating it, so to speak, undialectically – that is, as a unilateral and autonomous force -- and I thought his method of “proving” that the Church was responsible, for instance, for the notion of “progress’ was surprisingly unscientific – cherrypicking quotes from the church fathers is not a method, and it certainly isn’t intellectual history, either.

One of Stark’s hobbyhorses was the respect we accord the damn Romans and Greeks, so he spent some time attacking the ancients. To attack the Romans, he dissed their roads. Oh sure, the Romans had these great roads, but – Stark insisted – the roads were pisspoor for transport because they were too narrow, as opposed to good, Christian early medieval roads. It was pretty obvious on the road issue that Stark was unacquainted with Raymond Chevallier, the greatest scholar on the subject, and that he was confounding all roads with “viae militares.” However, the symbolic equation between road and civilization is powerful, and Stark chose his target for its maximum symbolic value. My quote from Gibbon, with that endnote like the flourish of trumpets (“Such was the solid construction of the Roman highways, whose firmness has not entirely yielded to the effort of fifteen centuries”) is typical of the admiration roads draw out in us.

All of which brings me to Fiona Wilson’s article in Autumn, 2004’s Development and Change, “Towards a Political Economy of Roads: Experiences from Peru.” Wilson proposes in this article to ask a simple question; who benefits from roads?

Wilson takes James Scott’s position, in Seeing Like a State, that roads make territories “legible” to state power. She notes that road building seems to be the one non-controversial infrastructural project that has remained constant in the development paradigm from the sixties, where development was all about building up import substituting industry, to the Washington Consensus, where development was all about privatization and export.

And she notes the human scale of the road, from the point of view of development geography:

“it would be presumptuous, not to say patronizing, to suggest that village people are misguided in their desire for greater accessibility. Most understandably, they wish to be relieved of the drudgery and isolation of living in a walking world (Porter, 2002), to stand a better chance of gaining and interweaving livelihoods
(Bebbington, 1999), to qualify for a higher level of service provision, especially in education and health, and to feel themselves incorporated as citizens in national life.

My concern in this article is not to question the legitimacy of this demand but to discuss the considerations that lie behind it and ask whether greater accessibility can always be assumed to bring lower transaction costs, greater prosperity and an easier, more secure, way of life for rural people. The current privileging of
accessibility partly reflects the unproblematic way that infrastructure is addressed in development planning literature where rural or feeder roads tend to be considered as socially and politically neutral, or as a technological fix. But as Samoff (1996) argues, there is a wide gulf between the literature that simplifies
and adopts a facade of precision in order to draw policy recommendations and the literature that remains wedded to the importance of understanding messy reality, power relations and the uncertainty and unpredictability of outcomes in everyday life.”

This grabbed me. I live, if not in the walking world, at least in the bicycling world. That world is sometimes difficult to embed in the world of cars. It is a fact unnoticed, in fact, by your average car driver that a road can make access more difficult, rather than less, depending on your vehicle. A biker has to get around the highway system, and the variations in traffic flow to which certain main roads are subject. In a place like Austin, where there is a heavy sport biking population but no consideration, otherwise, of biking as a real form of traffic, this leads to innumerable itinerary compromises. For instance: I once had a job as a phonemarketer with a EMR software company that was located on Capital of Texas Highway. To get there on my bike took twenty minutes, not bad really – it was about seven miles from where I live. I actually liked the scenery I took in biking there, since I had to back route myself by way of Mount Bonnel on roads that have the steepest grade, I believe, in the city. The last fifth of my journey, however, required a dog leg up Capital of Texas Highway, and that was always a little hairy. Yet the “world” that I had to navigate had been created to accelerate transportation, and I do not think it occurred to any of the engineers planning the roads to question, even once, their P.O.V. – this, even though there is a whole world of children and teenage transport that comes out of the very houses that the roads are integrated with. In my (off the cuff and screwball) opinion, surely one of the great factors in the rise of children’s obesity is not the food we eat, which is probably much healthier than the prepackaged foods of the sixties, but the blind shutting out of children’s transportaition – i.e. bike world – that has occurred since the sixties.

But to get back to Wilson’s essay. Wilson poses a simple question:

“From the perspective of rural populations, road building may lead not to benefits but to an undermining
of fragile livelihoods and dispossession of resources. There may be considerable advantages to be gained from holding on to spatial ‘autonomy’ notwithstanding the costs — a concept having a far more positive ring than ‘inaccessibility’ or ‘isolation’. For the sake of ‘autonomy’, can a case be made for making do with tracks and trails instead of building roads?”

I’ll take up Wilson’s responses to this question tomorrow.

liar, accessory, nullity

LI has grown tired of punching the President. It is like punching one of those blow up punching bags that were popular when LI was a kid – the bag just wobbles and comes back up, the cartoon figure imprinted on it bearing the same goofy, factory made smile.

So, knowing that this is the man who left the country vulnerable to the 9/11 attack to fulfill the Bush mandate – to take as many vacations as possible – it comes as no surprise that the man who said, three days after Katrina, that nobody expected the levees to break, was warned three days before Katrina that everybody expected the levees to break.



“In the 48 hours before Hurricane Katrina hit, the White House received detailed warnings about the storm's likely impact, including eerily prescient predictions of breached levees, massive flooding, and major losses of life and property, documents show.
A 41-page assessment by the Department of Homeland Security's National Infrastructure Simulation and Analysis Center (NISAC), was delivered by e-mail to the White House's "situation room," the nerve center where crises are handled, at 1:47 a.m. on Aug. 29, the day the storm hit, according to an e-mail cover sheet accompanying the document.
The NISAC paper warned that a storm of Katrina's size would "likely lead to severe flooding and/or levee breaching" and specifically noted the potential for levee failures along Lake Pontchartrain. It predicted economic losses in the tens of billions of dollars, including damage to public utilities and industry that would take years to fully repair. Initial response and rescue operations would be hampered by disruption of telecommunications networks and the loss of power to fire, police and emergency workers, it said.”

“President Bush, in a televised interview three days after Katrina hit, suggested that the scale of the flooding in New Orleans was unexpected. "I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees. They did anticipate a serious storm," Bush said in a Sept. 1 interview on ABC's "Good Morning America."”
A liar, murderer and nullity – and the crème rises to the top in the America! Or as Fred Barnes might put it, the Rebel in Chief – our national cheerleader - rides again.

lifeless life

When W.G. Sebald, in a famous essay, asked why no German literary response to the massive bombing of Germany ever developed, he had to make a partial exception for Hans Erich Nossack Der Untergang, an account of the firebombing of Hamburg written in 1943 and published, I believe, after the war was over. There is a trove of Nossack material at this site. One autobiographical essay, Lifeless life, is not, I believe, well known in the English speaking world. In fact, I’m not sure that it has been translated. Anyway, it is a partial account of normal life in Nazi Germany by a man who did, actually, oppose the Nazis before they took power, was harassed by them, but never joined a resistance movement – in other words, your normal liberal German. I include the latter not to blame Nossack, but to give you the circumstances that make Lifeless life a peculiarly interesting vision of living in a Western country in which the presuppositions of the liberal society are visibly crushed, and a highly intelligent man’s reaction to that.

"The fearful illusion rests on the fact that there is no private life, no individual existence, no really independent though under a totalitarian regime. Everything is infected with the bacillus of the epidemic; even the opponent, who believes he has made himself immune, stands under its law. The ideology of the powerful are deposited over everything like steam in a bell jar and takes away the reality of all human action. Recordings from this time give the effect of being spoken in a sleep, or under the influence of a nightmare. All photos collectively seem to be under-lighted, or to be irreproducible negatives. That was what I was? one asks incredulously. Clearly, the official registrar’s facts are all in order, but the bureau of birth, marriage and death certificates only register the lifeless life. Here must lie the real reasons why the national socialistic everyday escapes representation. It isn’t a question of someone wanting to forget a process or a breakdown, and thus it isn’t about the unmastered past – the moral, psychological and punitive issues of the past may be allowed to be filled in. It is more of a question of a lack of the past, of a hole in the existence of the individual, as though it were some ultimate physical weakness. One remembers the last words of the surgeon and the nurse before anaesthetic is applied, and afterwards the strength it required to return to consciousness. But what was in between? Time advanced, that can be confirmed by the clock. But where was I when that was going on?

I don’t think that I could make precise statements even if my journals and letters out of those years had not been burned in the air attack. I have a suspicion that the means with which I sought to preserve my self-respect would seem childish and shadowy to me. That we did not put out flags once, when it was ordered, that we never once used the greeting Heil Hitler, that we never gave a penny to the Winter Aid drive, and various other drives, that we vanished into a building or an alley whenever we came across a procession with music and officials – all of these were laughable pokings of a needle of an unarmed opponent. Otherwise such negligences were reported on the index cards of the block warden, perhaps he reported in order to make himself important in some predetermined place further up the chain and that went still further up the chain. The secret police could thus produce a picture of the mood of the public and direct the organs of propoganda accordingly. Nobody would have taken these prickings of the needle too seriously. The Regime didn’t really care about the money collected in the drives, and maybe they had a few banners left over. Money can easily be printed. Everything had only one goal, which was to keep the mass of prisoners continuously occupied and breathless, in order to delude them over their situation and to blind them to their fate. And, in fact, even the small number of opponents were breathless. Foreigners asked us after the war, why did you let this happen and put up no resistance? Whoever poses that question has obviously never lain on an operation table or lived under the conditions of an epidemic.”

erotica

Philosophers ask absurd questions. Jonathan Bennett, in The name of Events, poses the following question: suppose I take a walk around the garden every day. Some day when I am indisposed for some reason, can someone else take my walk? The question is absurd because we live in a world where events – walkings and such – are subordinate to substances – the walkers. Someone can take my bicycle, but my walk is “owned” in quite a different way. I do it, I don’t have it. Yet, what if the walk does me? What tells us that the world’s order is so immutable that the first shall always be first, the last shall always be last, and substance shall always reign over events?

I am thinking about this because of two things I recently read.

V.S. Ramachandran’s book, Phantoms of the Brain, describes Ramachandran’s study of the phantom limb puzzle. Phantom limbs usually occur when an arm or a leg is amputated, and the amputee feels an arm or a leg still there. Ramachandran found that sometimes the phenomenon occurs even among people who are born without arms or legs. Phantom limbs can “grow” on these people.

The world of phantom limbs is an interesting one. A third of all phantom limbs are paralyzed, often in the highly awkward or painful postures they’d assumed right before the limb was injured. And phantom limbs are also locales of pain. Often, phantom arms are afflicted with a nervous syndrome in which the phantom hand cramps into a fist, digging its nails into the phantom flesh. Ramachandran did som amazing experiments to help people with these problems. For instance, he devised a box to “cure” phantom arm victims of certain problems. The box had no top, and had a vertical mirror placed in it, and two holes cut in the front. He tells of one victim whose arm was paralyzed, and who was being extremely irritated by it. He directed her to put her arms – the right real one and the left phantom one – through the holes in the box.

“Since the mirror is in the middle of the box, the right hand is now on the right side of the mirror and the phantom on the left. The patient is asked to view the reflection of her normal hand in the mirror and to move it around slightly until the reflection appears to be superimposed on the felt reflection of her phantom hand. She has thus created the illusion of observing two hands.”

Ramachandran then directed her to move her hands, doing things like imitating an orchestra conductor. The woman immediately started feeling her phantom limb move.

When she withdrew her arms, the phantom limb was again paralyzed. Yet after a few weeks of practice, it could move – it could gesture like mobile phantom limbs do. In fact, in one case a man who suffered severe pain in his phantom elbow “lost” his phantom limb using the mirror box – the first recorded case of phantom limb amputation.

Ramachandran has a neurological theory about the conflict between the seeing of the hand and the neural area feeling the arm that he claims explains these phenomena. But I would rather pass on to my second book, Herman Broch’s “The Sleepwalkers.”

Broch is, to my mind, the most erotic author I’ve ever read. Reflecting on events and phantom limbs, I think I understand why: Broch has an uncanny ability to tap into the world given to us by erotica, and in this world the last do come first. Substance, here, is secondary, while events ride mankind.

In the Sleepwalkers, an officer, Joachim von Passenow, finds himself unwillingly drawn to a Czech girl, Ruzena, a café prostitute. The description of the first day they spend together is too long to quote in its gorgeous entirety, but one feature of it may be enough. As they are out walking on this rainy Berlin day, Joachim dressed in khaki, Rozena stops him and, instead of kissing him on the lips, “bent over his hand, where it lay in hers, and kissed it before he could stop her.” They go to a park, the rain is drizzling down into the river there, and then they go out of the rain into an inn. Again, they don’t kiss at the table. ‘Whenever the landlady left the room, Rozena set down her cup, took his out of his hand, and seizing his head drew it quite close to hers, so close – and they had not yet kissed – that their glances melted together, and the tension was quite unendurable in its sweetness.” They leave the inn, they hail a droschke and enter into its shadowy interior as the drizzle continues to come down and then “… seeing nothing of the world save the coachman’s cape and two gray wet stripes of roadway through the opening on either side, and soon not even seeing that, then their faces bowed to each other, met, and melted together, dreaming and flowing like the river, lost irrecoverably, and ever found again, and again sank timelessly. It was a kiss that lasted for an hour and fourteen minutes.”

And this, I think, is why the erotic is daemonic, and why so few people can or really want to distinguish it from pornography, which is only superficially about cocks, pussies, and assholes, but is much more organized around the retaining of the order of things in which there are cocks, pussies and assholes as substances of humans doing things. Erotica is a matter of events, of a fundamental inversion of that order, and that is why it scares the shit out of me. Pornography is just part of the dominant spectrum, which includes the Disney parents kissing after “honey, I’m home.” The erotic is the moment when honey I’m home seizes the now anonymous couple in its talons and “coming home” is separated from the returning husband and the greeting wife and it subordinates them to its iron law, which makes a mockery of individuation and quantity; and one sees now how reluctantly, as if coming out of a dream that could be – for who knows the character of its edges? – death itself, Joachim and Ruzena become substance once again, and hour and fourteen minutes after they began their kiss.

the shame of the press

Imagine that the entertainment sections of the NYT, the Washington Post, and the LA Times had all devoted most of their coverage to the choice of Jessica Simpson as best actress in the run up to the Oscars. Suppose that they did this in spite of the fact that there was abundant evidence that Jessica Simpson was not considered even an outlying candidate for best actress by insiders. Suppose that she got not a single vote.

If this had happened, it would be a major media scandal. There would be questions about the honesty of the critics involved, and whether there had been some kind of quid pro quo with Simpson’s PR people, or some studio. Certainly there would be, at least, some comment to explain the bizarre behavior of the critics.

Now consider the Iraqi elections. Again. The results are now, semi-officially, in. In the run up to the election, did we have American papers running big profiles of, say, Abdul Aziz Hakim? He is the head of SCIRI. Or how about Ibrahim Jaafari? The head of Dawa. No. As has been the case for three years, the overwhelming amount of media in this country went to … Ahmed Chalabi. A man whose party did not earn enough votes to even give him a seat in the Iraqi parliament. Enter Chalabi’s name in the Factiva database, and you get 27, 925 entries. Enter Hakim’s name in the database, you get 1232 entries. The 27 to 1 disproportion between the man who couldn’t even gain a seat with the votes of the exiles and the man who the Washington Post calls “the most powerful Shiite politician” is an accurate reflection of the delusiveness of the media, which not only bought the Bush administration’s illusions and lies at the beginning of the war but has added to it their own so that Americans trying to understand what is happening in Iraq have as much chance of getting good information from, say, the U.S. Defense department – which is, remember, run by the worst and most mendacious Secretary of Defense in our history, and staffed with his appointees -- as from the NYT.

Let’s take a look, for comedy’s sake, at Dexter Filkins, the NYT’s Iraq reporter who is bad enough to surely merit some kindly nickname by our prez. Here, before the elections, is a typical Filkins lede. On December 12, 2005, under the headline, Boys of Baghdad College Vie for Prime Minister, Filkins wrote:

“The three Iraqi political leaders considered most likely to end up as prime minister after nationwide elections this week -- Ayad Allawi, Ahmad Chalabi and Adel Abdul Mahdi -- were schoolmates at the all-boys English-language school in the late 1950's, fortunate members of the Baghdad elite that governed Iraq until successive waves of revolution and terror swept it away.”

Imagine someone including, in a story about the three most likely Democratic presidential candidates, the name Dennis Kucenich. You get the picture. Filkins is the clown prince of the Iraqi reporting team for the NYT. Edward Wong is a better reporter – one doesn’t feel like he takes massive doses of acid before he files his stories. But his story before the election, with the headline Iraq’s Powerful Shiite Coalition shows Signs of Stress before the Election (9 December) goes on for ten grafs before we get the inevitable:

“This time, though, the rivalries have grown more heated and the potential for an irreparable split is greater, Iraqi and Western officials say. Many coalition members have broken away and started their own parties, and there has been a palpable drop in support among moderate voters and the leading ayatollahs, who are disenchanted with the performance of the current Shiite government.

“A fracturing of the conservative coalition could set the conditions for a realignment of Iraq's political spectrum, creating an opening for a more secular Shiite candidate like the former prime minister, Ayad Allawi, or even Ahmad Chalabi, the former Pentagon favorite, to assemble enough allies to claim the top spot in the new government.”

On November 30, 2005, ABC’s Nightline did its duty to inform its audience of the impending election in Iraq by doing a whole show entitled: “THE POWER BROKER A LOOK AT AHMED CHALABI.” Of course, the advantage of this is you don’t have to hire a translator – translating is so boring on TV, and it might give the viewing audience the idea that Iraqis don’t normally speak English.

Here is a typical snippet from that show:
“CYNTHIA MCFADDEN (ABC NEWS)
(OC) Terry, you've been spending lots of time with one of the more controversial and powerful figures in Iraq. And you have his story tonight.
TERRY MORAN (ABC NEWS)
(OC) Ahmed Chalabi, Cynthia. He is quite a character. He was in exile from this country for more than 40 years. Saddam Hussein's archenemy. He's now a candidate. It is election season here. You sense it in the air. People talk about it in cafes. There's posters and banners. And Chalabi wants to run the country he left for 40 years. No matter what you think of him, he's a man to be reckoned with.
TERRY MORAN (ABC NEWS)
(VO) There is no one else in Iraq like him. And that may be a good thing. Ahmed Chalabi is the canniest, wiliest, most effective, most elusive political player in the new Iraq. And he just might be the man best-positioned to help the US achieve its goal of a stable, secular, democratic government here. Or maybe not. You never know what Ahmed Chalabi could do next.”

Actually, to give a little credit where credit is due, John Burns, the pro-war NYT correspondent, did appear and say reasonable things on the Charlie Rose show – things that were entirely unreflected in the coverage of the election by his paper:

“CHARLIE ROSE: How does the election look today, and how do you measure that this new parliament or assembly, whatever they`re going to call it, might elect Chalabi?
JOHN BURNS: No, I don`t think. Personally, I don`t think that there`s the remotest chance of that. Mr. Chalabi`s party, I would think, would be lucky to get two seats.
What he will do with those two seats and with his own good self after that I don`t know. He envisages himself as a compromise candidate for prime minister. I think that`s probably beyond the reach of even so canny a politician as Mr. Chalabi.
I think that this election is likely to produce an unsurprising result. I think we`ve seen it before.”

The Washington Post, meanwhile, focused on an unlikely pro-Israel candidate running in Basra (wow, how about that for giving us a feeling about the country) and unleashed their no. 1 Iraqi expert and all around Middle Eastern savant – I am talking, of course, about the ever repugnant Sally Quinn – to do a 2000+ word profile of Chalabi on November 17, 2005. Quinn famously did a profile of Chalabi in 2003 in which he the varieties of his silky genius were highlighted, and contrasted, comically, with the boobish Iraqi pols that he brought with them – many didn’t speak English or possess table manners! And the grease in their hair! My how we laughed. 30-50, 000 Iraqi deaths later, we return to this always risible subject.

This is Quinn, speaking with the collective wisdom of D.C.:

“Spending time with Ahmed Chalabi is like disappearing down the rabbit hole. People are either throwing him tea parties or crying "off with his head."

Normally in Washington, people ask not to be identified when they have something negative to say about a person in the news. With Chalabi, it's the opposite. On the heels of his week-long visit to the United States, few want to be quoted by name saying anything positive. Yet suddenly many have positive things to say.
It was only a year and a half ago that his Baghdad office and home were raided and trashed by U.S. and Iraqi forces. He had gone from being the darling of the neo-cons to a pariah. Many thought he was dead politically.

But today he is a strong contender for prime minister in next month's elections, and highly placed sources say he has become the choice of many U.S. officials to lead the country. He has managed to resurrect himself because he is seen as the one person who can get U.S. troops out of Iraq, and Washington is pragmatic enough to recognize that.”

Can one love enough that last sentence? I don’t think so. Quinn is a rare human being: she is the local genius of the Washington Post, the very distillation of its editorial and journalistic attitude. Shameless, hubristic, triumphantly bigoted, privileged, and convinced that insider knowledge = real knowledge. Of course, insider knowledge is really a pack of the delusions and panics that make the governing class at this particular point in time a thing for the angels to both weep and laugh over.

Now, here’s LI’s bet. Our bet is that not once, not once in the next week or month will there be any discussion whatsoever of the curiously distorted coverage of the Iraqi election going into it, and the more than curious inflation of stories about a man whose main achievement seems to be to have gotten to know American journalists. Nobody will ask, why is it that there are not 2,000 word portraits of Hakim in the WP style section? Why isn’t there a series in the NYT, the men who run Iraq? The obvious answer is that the American public can’t bear too much reality – at least, that is what our guardians think. So much better to make up the country of Iraq lock stock and barrel and present it, a steaming pile of horseshit, to the American citizenry – just so we don’t get too worried about what we are sending Americans to die for, or to be head injured for, or to be legless for, or to have their spines broken for, or to be permanently traumatized for.

PS -- LI's correspondent, Mr. T, wrote a note about the above graf:



"I sense from your post that you already read this, but a few free-styled comments:

'Corporal Poole has no memory of the explosion or even the days before it, although he has a recurring dream of being in Iraq and seeing the sky suddenly turn red.'

"He is not competitively employable."

'...people with a brain injury have increased odds of sustaining another one'

I remember a weekend afternoon in late 2003 sitting around drinking with a friend of mine and his brother-in-law - the bro-in-law, F., is a fine guy and very talented doctor who was (still is?) working at a VA hospital as a part of "paying-off" his loans for med school. I flippantly asked how he was doing taking care of our men in uniforms; he quietly said only "So many head injuries." Immediately I felt a vacuous fool; I apologized for my ignorant bluster and asked him what he meant. He meant exactly what he said, elaborating only that he was somewhat troubled (when he had a chance to think about it) by his capacity to retain somatic life: were all of the elaborate and sophisticated capacities that he and his peers had at their disposal really worth it?

We then, with a few more cups in us, started to talk about how lives are lived longer, soldiers who "should" be dead try to live their lives after extreme trauma, manipulation of the genome......this good doctor said this: with every dead patient he feels a failure, but he knows that the ways to die are incalculable; his fear is that he might "interfere" with death at the wrong time."

the press corps on the couch

I had lunch with an editing client yesterday – yes, I’m still editing, so remember that, reader! – and we started talking about gender and the reporting of conversations. I brought up one of the things that struck me as remarkable about the transcripts released by Ken Starr back in the impeachment days – the way in which Monica Lewinsky’s telephone conversations with Linda Tripp often included, as a helpful stage direction, the sigh. The whole bizarreness of the Starr crusade was summed up for me in the sighs of Monica. Sighs were never included, that I could see, in the Watergate transcripts. Sighs weren’t part of the Iran-Contra controversy. But sighs, for a person like Starr, go with women. Women sigh. Women don’t like sex. Women are forced to have sex when they have sex – unless of course they are really, really in love. And so on.

The sexual subtext of what comes out of D.C. in reporting for the last six years has been quite comic, and quite unremarked. I wrote something a few weeks ago – did I post it? – about Jon Anderson’s New Yorker profile of the American ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad . There was a lie in that piece that struck me, since I don’t think it is the usual kind of lying that is pointed to when we criticize the press. Anderson describes Khalilzad as having the lope of a basketball player – or ex basketball player. Now, that is obviously not true. From his description, Khalilzad never played basketball, particularly – and he is described as wearing expensive suits and presumably expensive shoes, and his ecological niche involves much footing over hard marble flooring down many a corridor. And he is in his mid fifties. There is no way he has that lope.

But the lie was part of the lie that the press is partly there to produce and preserve. As we all know, powerful men evoke powerful homoerotic feelings from the people who cover them. The male D.C. reporters are continually trying to get us to feel how powerful the men they are reporting on actually are. Now, LI is a sex friendly site – we are totally happy with homoeroticism. But as is well known, homo-eroticism in a homophobic atmosphere generally turns ugly.

In the U.S., the upper class, Ivy league educated male has one ideal form in which to sublimate his homo-eroticism: fandom. Fans are, as is well known, always on the sexual edge with regard to the heroes they admire, those tough men with the taut pecs. There is a problem, however, with powerful execs, politicians, etc. They aren’t tough at all. How could they be? They might exercise, but generally they don’t’ have time for the sportif. So the lie that the presscorps sets itself is to convey their own infatuation. Thus, the overwhelming reference to sports when one reads profiles of CEOS. One always feels that with a little more prodding we’d get a description of the big fat cocks they possess – they must possess. God forbid that some CEO isn’t ballsy. Doesn’t have a full foot.

The hilarious thing about the lie with the Bush administration is that here, we have a man who we all know was sportif in a certain way. He was a cheerleader. Nothing wrong with that. In fact, if Hillary Clinton had been a cheerleader, there would be a mention of it almost every week. But with GWB, cheerleader is a hole. Nobody credits him with being a good cheerleader, or mentions the word. No, he is bold. He is a cowboy. He is sooooo fit. He is Mr. Mission Accomplished.

The homo-erotic subtext controls the way in which our leaders will be leaders. They will be bold. Even though anybody watching Bush knows that he is spastic, not bold, that is something that has to be suppressed, like cheerleading. Sometimes this is riotously funny. Slate’ Political correspondent, at the moment, is a stooge named John Dickerson. His takedown of Fred Barnes' new bio of Bush -- his ‘love letter” to the President -- is a little scene of homoerotic transformations and rivalries. Dickerson is disturbed that Barnes gushes too much over this manly, this bold, this commanding figure. Dickerson begins by defending the professional sycophants, the White house press corps, from the charge that they have been unfair to the President.

“The White House press corps has flaws: a herd mentality, a fixation on who's ahead politically, and difficulty engaging deeply with policy issues. I know, I was one of them. But Barnes has his boot on the scale, inflating the foolishness of the press to make Bush look better. Perhaps with so many books offering cartoon images of Bush as dumb and evil, the shelves need to be balanced out by one that errs in the opposite direction. But Rebel-in-Chief is such a love note that it fails to counteract the negative myths.”

The love note fails! This is heartbreaking for a guy like Dickerson. Maybe his own love notes will be more successful.

I should note that the homoerotic impulse functions in the lefty discourse too, where much time is spent making up images of fellatio and anal sex as signs of submission -- the press being on its knees, or in some indelicate way bending over, etc., etc. Again, this is also a lie – the lie being that one has overcome our homophobic culture while borrowing homophobic tropes. It is what makes comments so often unpleasant from both sides, as if the struggle, the deeper struggle, were about what male body was the most desirable.

That's a question I want to decide for myself.

plausible vs. miracle counterfactuals

Richard Lebow has written with Philip Tetlock, whose new book on what is wrong with experts we have referred to in LI before, and he wrote this wonderfully clarifying piece – a real Draino of a scholarly article – for World Politics. What’s so different about a counterfactual is a review of the use of counterfactuals in political science and history, with Lebow’s target being Niall Ferguson. Frankly, we aren’t convinced that all of Lebow’s objections to The Pity of War are valid. But we are convinced that Lebow does everybody a service by clearly laying out the protocols of counterfactual use.

What does this mean? For one thing, it demystifies the prediction business. It also helps us understand the blind use of analogies and patterns to explain historical instances – one remembers the nutty use of the occupation of Japan as a template for the occupation of Iraq, which targeted occupation as if all occupations are alike. Perhaps, to paraphrase Tolstoy, all happy occupations are alike, and all unhappy ones are different.

Lebow summarizes his goals in his paper like this:

“I begin my essay with the proposition that the difference between so-called factual and counterfactual arguments is greatly exaggerated; it is one of degree, not of kind. I go on to discuss three generic uses of counterfactual arguments and thought experiments. In the process, I distinguish between “miracle” and “plausible” world counterfactuals and identify the uses to which each is suited. I critique two recent historical works that make extensive use of counterfactuals and contend that they are seriously deficient in method and argument. I then review the criteria for counterfactual experimentation proposed by social scientists who
have addressed this problem and find many of their criteria unrealistic and overly restrictive. The methods of counterfactual experimentation need to be commensurate with the purposes for which they are used,and I conclude by proposing eight criteria I believe appropriate to plausible-world counterfactuals.

Counterfactuals are “what if” statements, usually about the past. Counterfactual experiments vary attributes of context or the presence or value of variables and analyze how these changes would have affected outcomes. In history and political science these outcomes are always
uncertain because we can neither predict the future nor rerun the tape of history.”


As an example of counterfactual use in policy-making, he uses an example beloved by conservatives: the notion that the appeasement of Hitler taught us all a lesson about the proper use of force in foreign policy:

“The controversy surrounding the strategy of deterrence provides an example of the use of counterfactuals in international relations. One of the principal policy lessons of the 1930s was that appeasement whets the appetites of dictators while military capability and resolve restrains them. The failure of Anglo-French efforts to appease Hitler is well established, but the putative efficacy of deterrence rests on the counterfactual that Hitler could have been restrained if France and Britain had demonstrated willingness to go to war in defense of the European territorial status quo. German documents make this an eminently researchable question, and historians have used these documents to try to determine at what point Hitler could no longer be deterred.”

As Lebow points out later, the appeasement model played a large role in Kennedy’s decision-making process concerning Soviet missiles in Cuba. Kennedy felt like Khruschev was encouraged to try that gamble because Kennedy had been too weak at the Bay of Pigs and in Berlin. But, as Lebow points out, “Evidence from Soviet and American archives and interviews with former officials make it possible to explore the validity of most of these counterfactuals and thus to evaluate the choices of Soviet and American leaders and the
subsequent scholarly analyses of the crisis.” The evidence points to the fact that Khruschev’s play was motivated not by the perception of Kennedy’s weakness, but by fear of American aggression:

“After Cuba, former Kennedy administration officials and many scholars maintained that
Khrushchev would not have deployed missiles in Cuba if Kennedy had been more decisive at the Bay of Pigs, at the Vienna summit, and in Berlin. There was no evidence to support this interpretation, but it became the conventional wisdom and helped to shape a host of subsequent policy decisions, including the disastrous intervention in Vietnam. The evidence that came to light in the Gorbachev era suggested, to the contrary, that Khrushchev decided to send missiles se cretly to Cuba because he overestimated Kennedy’s resolve. He feared
that Kennedy, preparing to invade Cuba, would send the American navy to stop any ships carrying missiles to Cuba to deter that invasion.”

If there is a lesson in counterfactuals, here, for the current situation with Iran, it might be that the U.S. should make public its lack of interest in acting aggressively against Iran. After all, the nuclear power program has been going on for thirty years in Iran, but it became a priority only after Bush, favoring the usual clueless adolescent phrase that thrills his followers and endangers the rest of us, labeled Iran part of the axis of evil. So much for Iran’s help during the Afghanistan war.

But to return to affairs sub specie aeternitatus. Lebow’s examination of counterfactuals covers not only the logic of their use by would-be policy-makers and historians, but the beliefs about counterfactual that animate policymakers. One should always remember that the average brilliant D.C. thinktanker is usually as ignorant as a drunk on a moonless night when it comes to having any feeling about the nations he advises on and worse than ignorant about counterfactuals. In other words, you could get better advice from a machine into which he slotted quarters than you can from your Wolfowitz types, who are harmless when put in well paying cages in, say, Johns Hopkins, but are armed and should be considered dangerous when appointed to any position of responsibility. Given that simple rule makes parsing what comes out of the Wizard of Oz voices in the media much easier – it will mostly be bullshit leavened with a heaping helping of psychosis.

Here is Lebow, with his much less aggressive summary of the case:

“International relations theorists seek to understand the driving forces behind events; they usually do so after the fact, when the outcome is known. The process of backward reasoning tends to privilege theories that rely on a few key variables to account for the forces allegedly responsible for the outcomes in question. For the sake of theoretical parsimony, the discipline generally favors independent variables that are structural in nature (for example, balance of power, state structure, size and nature of a coalition). The theory-building endeavor has a strong bias toward deterministic explanations and on the whole downplays understandings of outcomes as the products of complex, conjunctional causality.
19
A recent survey of international relations specialists revealed that those scholars who were most inclined to accept the validity of theories (for example, power transition, nuclear deterrence) and theory building as a scholarly goal were the most emphatically dismissive of
plausible-world counterfactuals. They were also most likely to invoke second-order counterfactuals to get developments diverted by counterfactuals back on the track.
20
In retrospect, almost any outcome can be squared with any theory unless the theory is rigorously specified. The latter requirement is rarely met in the field of international relations, and its deleterious effect is readily observed in the ongoing debate over the end of the cold war. Various scholars, none of whose theories predicted a peaceful end to that conflict, now assert that this was a nearly inevitable corollary of their respective theories.”

The smooth workings of vanity fingered in the last graf can be seen among the liberal hawks today, who are re-engineering their support so that, of course, they had simply not factored in George Bush. My, if Al or Hillary had been in power, how wonderfully our occupation would have gone! Just like occupations and wars supervised by Democrats in the past…

And so the examples pile up. But this is the part I really wanted to quote: Lebow’s theory of counterfactual benchmarks.

Lebow divides his theory of counterfactual use between plausible and miracle counterfactuals, each of which has its uses. Plausible counterfactuals must be embedded in what is possible in the circumstances in which it is inserted. So, for instance, one can’t simply make the analogy from the occupation of Spain by Napoleon to the occupation of Iraq by the Americans (a favorite LI example) without taking into account the lesser level of military technology in 1809, for example, or the information flow that goes both ways, immediately, in the Iraq war. What Lebow calls “miracle” counterfactuals posit something that would require a miracle – for instance, Napoleon returning from St. Helena in 1850 – when he was long dead. Hitler returning from Brazil, to which he never fled to in the first place. ”Miracle counterfactuals are particularly useful in evaluating existing interpretations,” as Lebow points out. They aren’t so much planning or prediction devices as ways to shake out hidden assumptions in a narrative.

Then there is this second benchmark: “Plausible counterfactuals must meet a second test: they must have a real probability of leading to the outcome the researcher intends to bring about.” This, again, allows us to sort through the steps that lead from one thing to another in the counterfactual. Which brings us to the common problems of counterfactuals, the awareness of which could constitute another benchmark.

3. The second benchmark naturally leads to criteria for real possibilities. “There is no consensus about what constitutes a good counterfactual, but there is a common recognition that it is extraordinarily difficult to construct a robust counterfactual—one whose antecedent we can assert with confidence could have led to the hypothesized consequent.There are three reasons for this well-warranted pessimism: the statistical improbability of multistep counterfactuals, the intercon- nectedness of events, and the unpredictable effects of second-order counterfactuals.”

It is extraordinary how often these problems are simply ignored. The pisspoor planning for the war in Iraq – a war the end of which the planners, apparently, falsely conceptualized – came about partly from ignoring these three reasons. Lebow provides an exemplary explanation of this:

“The probability of a consequent is a multiple of the probability of each counterfactual linking the hypothesized antecedent to it. Suppose I contend that neither world war nor the Holocaust would have occurred if Mozart had lived to the age of sixty-five.

Having pushed classical form as far as it could go in the Jupiter Symphony, his last three operas,and the requiem, Mozart’s next dramatic works would have been the precursors of a new, “postclassicist” style. He would have created a viable alternative to romanticism that would have been widely imitated by composers, writers, and artists. Postclassicism would have kept the political ideas of the Enlightenment alive and held romanticism in check. Nationalism would have been more restrained, and thus Austria-Hungary and Germany would have undergone very different political evolution. This alternative and vastly preferable world has at least five counterfactual steps linking antecedent to consequent: Mozart must survive to old age and develop a new style of artistic expression;subsequent composers, artists, and writers must imitate and elaborate it; romanticism must become to some degree marginalized; and artistic developments must have important political ramifications. This last counterfactual presupposes numerous other enabling counterfactuals
about the nature of the political changes that will lead to the hypothesized consequent (for example, internal reforms that resolve or reduce the threat of internal dissolution of Austria-Hungary, German unification under different terms, or at least a Germany satisfied with the status quo, no First World War, no Hitler and no Holocaust without Germany’s defeat in World War I). Even if every one of this long string of counterfactuals had a probability of at least 50 percent, the overall probability of the consequent would be a mere .03 for five steps and a frighteningly low .003 for eight steps. This particular counterfactual may appear far-fetched, but most interesting counterfactuals are no less improbable statistically. They may start with a tiny and plausible alteration of the real world but then infer numerous follow-on developments to end up with a major change in reality.”

As Lebow points out, scholars often cheat by simply assuming one change in a historial scenario and preserving the facts as we know them in the rest of the scenario. To solve the problem – that is, to keep from looking like total idiots – scholars have proposed various ways of restricting counterfactual use:

Recognition that counterfactual arguments often have indeterminate consequences has prompted scholars to impose restrictive criteria on their use. Fearon proposes a proximity criterion. We should consider only those counterfactuals in which the antecedent appears likely to bring about the intended consequent and little else. Counterfactuals, he suggests, must be limited to cases where “the proposed causes are temporally and, in some sense, spatially quite close to the consequents.” However, this seems to me mere wishful thinking, the wish being that events line up in a linear way in history. But it is easy to see how small changes could cause big ones. If a particular rifle company had manufactured rifles with a defect in them in 1960 and if one gunman had had his gun blow up in his hand in 1963, history would certainly have been different in many and unpredictable ways.

Another problem is, of course, that theories which test themselves against counterfactuals often only consider confirming counterfactuals.

“Based on an examination of the American literature on Iran, Herrmann and Fischerkeller conclude that “too often in world politics what is taken as a base rate for a generalization about the motives of another country is too much an ideological conviction and too
little a product of deductive and empirical behavioral science.”

Lebow and Stein have documented the same phenomenon with respect to deterrence; data sets used to test the strategy of deterrence were patently ideological in the cases they recognized as deterrence encounters and coded as successes for the West.”

A good example of this is the curious American idea that bombing or other forms of violence that are inflicted against Americans will justly cause a hostile response – but inflicted by Americans against other peoples, will cause the other peoples to fall in love with Americans, just as Krazy Kat would heart Ignatz after he bopped her with a brick. The mistake of thinking that the love foreigners hold for Americans only deepens when we kill their children derives, perhaps, from the post-war occupations of Japan and Germany. It rather ignores the circumstance that made those occupations possible: fear of the Soviet Union.

This brief survey of Lebow’s remarkable article doesn’t do it justice, but I hope it puts in perspective any “predictions” LI makes. We are going to be wrong about quite a bit, but some things we will be right about just because we are aware of the counterfactual traps.

Imagine that Clinton, fearing what Bush’s presidency might bring, shipped all American ICBMs to China. That might raise a few hackles, don’t you think?

Which brings LI to the weirdest story we have read in some time. It is stories like these that explain why the left is winning in Latin America. The right is composed, to be plain, of people who will betray their country for a box of Wheaties – and the assurance that the U.S. Military will always love them.
“The outgoing interim president, Eduardo Rodriguez, said he had accepted the resignation of Defense Minister Gonzalo Mendez, and fired Gen. Marcelo Antezana over apparent irregularities in the destruction in the United States of a batch of Chinese-made missiles in October.

"I have relieved the commander of the army of his duties and accepted the defense minister's resignation," Rodriguez told reporters after a cabinet meeting Tuesday.

At the height of campaigning for last month's presidential elections, Morales denounced the destruction of the 28 to 30 Chinese HN-5 shoulder-fired missiles, the only arms of their kind in the military's arsenal.
Antezana, the army chief, told reporters that Washington initiated the drive to destroy the missiles because it feared Morales would win the presidency of the South American country.”

Wow. Vote for the right, and let the U.S. take over your country. Sounds like a great deal.

Well, that explains the fifty percent Morales got.

when I predict an event, it stays predicted

Henry Maine starts out his classic anti-democracy treatise, Popular Government (one of the great books in the Burkean tradition) by considering the predictability of the French Revolution:

“THE blindness of the privileged classes in France to the Revolution which was about to overwhelm them furnishes 'some of the' best-worn commonplaces of modern history. There was no doubt much in it to surprise us. What King, Noble, and Priest could not see, had been easily visible to the foreign observer. ‘In short," runs the famous passage in Chesterfield's letter of December 25,1753, “all the symptoms which I ever met with in history previous to great changes and revolutions in government now exist and daily increase in France." A large number of writers of our day, manifesting the wisdom which comes after the event, have pointed out that the sips of a terrible time ought not to have been mistaken. The Court,
the Aristocracy, and the Clergy should have understood that, in face of the irreligion which was daily becoming more fashionable, the belief in privilege conferred by birth could not be long maintained.”

Yet, as Maine points out, the backward glance that sees all the signs pointing to the Revolution ignores the fact that the natives of that time were, after all, as well or even better informed than we are, and many of the most brilliant of them did not see the signs – in fact, quite the reverse. David Hume, “a careful observer of France,” and indisputably a more brilliant man than Chesterfield, wrote in 1742 that France was the most perfect model of monarchy, about which he wrote: “But though all kinds of government be improved in modern times, yet monarchical government seems to have made the greatest advances towards perfection. It may now be affirmed of civilized monarchies, what was formerly said in praise of republics alone, that they are a government of Laws, not of Men. They are found susceptible of order, method, and constancy, to a surprizing degree. Property is there secure; industry encouraged; the arts flourish; and the prince lives secure among his subjects, like a father among his children.”

Prediction, upon which the scientist and the fortune-teller both pride themselves, presents a demonic temptation to the pundit, or to anyone pronouncing on public affairs. Public affairs are so multifarious, so crammed with events and their ghosts, that predicting the future is much like a man at the back of a crowd trying to guess the face of a man in the front of a crowd. Even if you can fill in the broad features with happy guesses – skin color and sex, for instance – the particulars are probably going to be much different. Recent comments by Paul and Patrick to a post of mine about Iran – a post in which I deliver, with the kind of suitable modesty that makes for later denials, my own predictions about the upcoming war, or lack of it, between Iran and the U.S. – made me think of one particular hazard of soothsaying – ignorance about the very nature of counterfactuals.

The source of the discussion between Paul and me arises, partly, from our differing judgments about Niall Ferguson’s article in the Telegraph – and, happily, Niall Ferguson is an entirely appropriate figure to haunt any post about counterfactuals, since Ferguson is well known for believing that historians have a duty to introduce them into their histories. Ferguson’s article in the Telegraph isn’t a history, of course – it uses his reputation as a historian to present a florid and alarmist picture of Iran and Israel starting a nuclear war that quickly spreads throughout the world. Given Ferguson’s prominence in the field of alternative histories, the neo-con vision he unrolls is recognizably the heir of his more professional concerns, which have in turn been treated pretty severely by a school of thought that I tend to, by temperament: the more nominalistically inclined school of limited counterfactual use. The latter tends towards a Hayekian suspicion of the human ability to calculate future events according to their probabilities with any great accuracy. In other words, this school takes seriously the work of ‘economic psychologists’ such as Tversky and Kahneman. As readers of Limited Inc know, the probability turn is one I am crazy about, since it overturns our intuition about how right our intuitions are. Among this schools leaders is Richard Lebow, who just happened to write one of the best papers on counterfactuals and history (What’s so different about a counterfactual) – a review essay, as it happens, of Ferguson’s The Pity of War and Alternative Histories. This is a paper that every person who sets himself up, Humpty Dumpty like, to pronounce upon public affairs should read, at one time or another. In fact, in the short list, this public spirited H.D. should also read Gigerenzer and some of Tversky and Kahneman's output.

Which paper I will discuss tomorrow.

ps -- for the best commentary on the Iranian "crisis" and real steps to defuse it, read this article in the Huffington Post by Shirin Ebadi and Muhammad Sahimi. The bulk of what they say LI agrees with. And if there is really a hawkish move to attack Iran, the points they suggest should be the center of the counter-movement -- unlike the anti-war movement before the invasion, lets home the anti war with Iran movement thinks about alternatives.