jean jacques juge par tout le monde

This week’s philosophical spat is about a spat between philosophers. At least in the U.K., there were reviews in all the major venues of Rousseau’s Dog, a book about Hume and Rousseau by the team that is doing all the quarrels of all the philosophers (Popper vs. Wittgenstein, Bullwinkle vs. Rocky), David Edmonds and John Eidinow. Ophelia Benson, over at Butterflies and Wheels, is naturally taking the Humean side. The review in the Sunday Times is a sad commentary on the currently low wattage of the conservative intelligentsia. The reviewer ropes the book together with one on Voltaire’s mistress, says various astonishing things about how boring and unread Voltaire is (the more astonishing as he seems to think Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas is just the antidote for the tedium of Candide – although one suspects that Rasselas is a distant memory, given the reviewer’s general state of incredible barbarism), and then repents a bit – it turns out Voltaire, like Donald Trump, made money, so he is a good guy all the way around. In the Spectator the reviewer concentrates much bile on poor old David Hume, accusing him of wanting to burn all books that didn’t contain mathematics – surely a reading of Hume that underemphasizes the irony.

The Guardian takes a chapter from the book. Unfortunately, if this passage is representative, we are not about to read the whole thing. Here’s the intro to Rousseau as the Johnny Depp character from the Pirates of the Caribbean:

“The year was 1766 and Rousseau had just cause to fear for his life. For more than three years he had been a refugee, forced to move on several times. His radical tract, The Social Contract , with its famous opening salvo, "Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains", had been violently condemned. Even more threatening to the French Catholic church was Emile , in which Rousseau advocated denying the clergy a role in the education of the young. An arrest warrant was issued in Paris and his books were publicly burned.

In The Confessions , a literary landmark described as the first modern autobiography, Rousseau spoke of "the cry of unparalleled fury" that went up across Europe. "I was an infidel, an atheist, a lunatic, a madman, a wild beast, a wolf . . ."

Fleeing France, he had found safe haven in a remote village in his native Switzerland. But soon the local priest began to whip up hatred against him, charging him with being a heretic. The atmosphere turned ugly. Rousseau was abused in the street. Some believed this lean, dark man whose eyes were full of fire was possessed by the devil.”

Notice the remarkable profusion of the passive tense in the first paragraph. The Social Contract was condemned, an arrest warrant was issued. The invisible hand is everywhere. And then, dropping or drooping down to the second, we meet the ‘described as’ of the Confessions… No reference, nor any standing up and simply ‘describing’ it oneself. This is the kind of thing that I cordially hate – or that I can be described as cordially hating.

As for the intro to Hume – it is, if anything, worse, since it takes one of Hume’s great phrases – that the Treatise of Human Nature fell “stillborn from the press” – and squashes it into a gummy muddle:

“Today, Hume is known above all for his philosophy, but then he was renowned for being an historian. His first philosophical work, The Treatise of Human Nature , had been, if not exactly ignored, then certainly not acclaimed as the sublime work of genius it is.” This isn’t writing – this is a species of cribbing.

Since Popper and Wittgenstein, the last in the series of battling philosophes, represent genuinely different philosophical positions, it is tempting to pit Hume against Rousseau as similar champions. The Spectator turns them into factotums of that dismal perennial, the Analytics vs. the Continentals.

This is how Edmonds and Eidenow sum the two men up:

“In hindsight, it seems unlikely that they were ever going to get along, personally or intellectually. Hume was a combination of reason, doubt and scepticism. Rousseau was a creature of feeling, alienation, imagination and certainty. While Hume's outlook was unadventurous and temperate, Rousseau was by instinct rebellious; Hume was an optimist, Rousseau a pessimist; Hume gregarious, Rousseau a loner. Hume was disposed to compromise, Rousseau to confrontation. In style, Rousseau revelled in paradox; Hume revered clarity. Rousseau's language was pyrotechnical and emotional, Hume's straightforward and dispassionate. JYT Greig wrote in his 1931 biography of Hume, "The annals of literature seldom furnish us with two contemporary writers of the first rank, both called philosophers, who cancel one another out with almost mathematical precision."

While they may be described now as thinkers in "the Age of Enlightenment", how far "Enlightenment" covers a common national experience or meaning is a matter of vigorous dispute. A particular reading of French history tends to shape the general idea of "the Enlightenment" as, broadly, the French philosophes ' belief that the application of critical reason to received traditions and structures would bring human advancement. The dominating Enlightenment narrative becomes a small and easily identifiable group of brilliant people, a central activity, the Encyclopedie ; the sweetness of the salons balanced by the risk of imprisonment, the focus on reason, and the whole enterprise terminating in the guillotine.”

The chain of opposing characteristics loops about itself a bit – rebellious, certain, pessimistic, paradoxical – and Hume revering clarity is a bit of a twist – in fact, it is a bit of a twist to oppose the clear and the paradoxical, given the way empiricism proceeded by ‘problems’ like the Molyneaux cube.

Hume’s little brochure on the matter can be found here.

And this is from Hume’s correspondence:

“You will see that the only possible alleviation of this man's crime is that he is entirely mad; and even then he will be allowed a dangerous and pernicious madman, and of the blackest and most atrocious mind. The King and Queen of England expressed a strong desire to see these papers, and I was obliged to put them into their hand. They read them with avidity, and entertain the same sentiments that must strike every one. The king's opinion confirms me in the resolution not to give them to the public, unless I be forced to it by some attack on the side of my adversary, which it will therefore be wisdom in him to avoid.' Private Corres. p. 210.
Rousseau to Lord Marischal.
'[Wooton] 7 Septembre. Il [Hume] a marché jusqu'ici dans les ténèbres, il s'est caché, mais maintenant il se montre à découvert. Il a rempli l'Angleterre, la France, les gazettes, l'Europe entière, de cris auxquels je ne sais que répondre, et d'injures dont je me croirais digne si je daignais les repousser.' Œuvres de Rousseau xxiv. 393.
Up until now, he has advanced in the shadows, hiding himself, but now he walks uncovered. He has filled England, France, the newspapers, and all of Europe with cries to which I can’t help but respond, and insults of which, if I deigned to push back against them, I would think myself justified.
And here’s Voltaire:
Voltaire to Damilaville.
'[Ferney] 15 Octobre. Il [Hume] prouve que Jean-Jacques est un maître fou, et un ingrat pétri d'un sot orgueil; mais je ne crois pas que ces vérités méritent d'etre publiées; il faut que les choses soient ou bien plaisantes, ou bien intéressantes pour que la presse s'en mêle…. Je pense que la publicité de cette querelle ne servirait qu'à faire tort à la philosophie. J'aurais donné une partie de mon bien pour que Rousseau eût été un homme sage; mais cela n'est pas dans sa nature; il n'y a pas moyen de faire un aigle d'un papillon: c'est assez, ce me semble, que tous les gens de lettres lui rendent justice, et d'ailleurs sa plus grande punition est d'être oublié.'

“He proves that Jean Jacques is a master fool, and an ingrate kneaded by the stupidest vanity; but I don’t think these are the kind of truths that need to be published; things have to be either more amusing or interesting than this for them to be mixed up in the newspapers. … I think that the news of this quarrel will only serve to make philosophy look bad. I would have given a good part of my property to have made Rousseau a wise man; but it isn’t in his nature; you can’t make an eagle out of butterfly. It is enough, I think, that all the gens de letters think that Hume is right. Besides, Rousseau’s greatest punishment will be to be forgotten.”

bellarchy

These are the times that try a Painite’s soul – especially with the terrible threat, looming just off the horizon, of a book on Tom Paine coming out from C. Hitchens. Perhaps (oh, thin hope) Hitchens will find some way out of the corner his prose has painted him into – the grafting of Bungalow Bill hectoring upon the petrified mendacities of your average Fred Hiatt editorial. The style of Hitchens premiere jeunesse worked because it infused the sham Augustinianism one usually associates with Tories with a lefty attitude. Contrast, sometimes, is all. Although to be fair, there was also a carefulness in going about making a point, and a distinct negative capability, especially when he was writing about literature. Well, negative C. has been long trashed, and the spiral downwards has been encrusted with a variety of platitudinous insults launched at the left that Hitchens seems to have picked up for a song at some John Birch fire sale. The precipitous descent can be measured by comparing, for instance, the glorious demolition of Isaiah Berlin – what was that, around 1990? – with the beef and choler prosecution of Joseph Wilson, a sad soliloquy in the best Captain Bligh manner.

To be fair, the insults that have been returned, from the academic left, have been fixated upon Hitchens drunkenness. This, too, is sad – all too often the academic left, like your average parole officer, is foursquare against smoking, drinking, doing drugs or shooting firearms. To which LI can only say: fuck you. (Although, less self righteously, LI might have indulged in a few drinking comments ourselves in 2003. But then we stopped.)

Now is the time to pre-empt the capturing of Tom Paine and the dragging him about as the great grand Godfather of neo-conservatism in some shabby triumph through the pages of the Weekly Standard. This isn’t to deny that there are traces, in Paine’s life, of an interventionist mindset. At one point, he did advise Napoleon to invade England. It was the same craziness that made Karl Marx, latter, criticize the historical views of German nationalists for hailing resistance to Napoleon instead of seeing in that resistance the reactionary impulses of which it was composed. Paine, in other words, sometimes thought conquest, in the service of liberty, was a good thing. But the deeper strain in the writing is against it. Paine was well aware of the contradiction between Republicanism and war. One simply has to fish the dialectic out of the supposedly now obsolete polemic against monarchy and inherited privilege. To paraphrase Randolph Bourne, Paine saw that war was the health of the monarchy.

Unfortunately, political philosophers rarely seem to understand war as an institution. Rather, it is looked upon as an accident, at best a derivative of other state interests. The state, after all, in classical theory, is the opposite of war – the essential curb on it. Thus it seems dialectically out of the question that war might become part of the state, colonize the state’s DNA, as it were, determine its political form (a possibility materialized in the way a state taxes and distributes money, in the way a governing elite gets its hands on the state, in the very culture of belligerence that the busy little state spreads among a population).It is as if, among possible state forms, one is missing. Democracy, monarchy, oligarchy, anarchy – all of them are there except for… bellarchy.

Bellarchy, in premodern times, impressed itself on the core of the state in terms of conquest, plunder, and glory. It, of course, existed – from the Assyrians to the colonizing West – but these things seem alien to the state in any of its modern guises. In modern times, it was Hitler who codified the arms race and perpetual readiness for war into the state’s answer to the numerous problems posed by the treadmill of production. After World War II, this was Hitler’s legacy to the two great superpowers, the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. So, for instance, the U.S. was able, in the Cold war, to do what it had been unable to do for almost one hundred years – develop the South, using the military to distribute aid to that underdeveloped part of the country, just as it also did to the West. And that structure has had cultural effects we have seen to this day. A constituency for war has been created such that war unleashes, without any questioning, the massive resources of the state.

If Paine never quite foresaw this system, he certainly knew of and derided the connection between war and monarchy – or, if you will, the executive branch. Here he is still very much the prophet – meaning that his words are still not taken seriously. Only when prophecy is safely defunct is the prophet honored, which is why we dread the honor about to be done to his scattered bones by enlisting him to fight in the mock war against Islamofascism, that counterfeit ideology. In the next post, we will outline Paine’s thoughts about war.

PS -- The war state suns itself every day in the newspapers, so there is no need to say here it is or here it is. Nevertheless, readers are urged to look at this story in the NYT in which the Department of War, as is its habit, urges the acquisition of an unnecessary weapon to augment America's 'pre-emptive' capability:

"The program to develop a conventional version of the Trident II missile was foreshadowed in the Nuclear Posture Review, a classified study the Pentagon carried out in 2001. The study urged that nonnuclear systems be added to the existing triad of long-range nuclear air, land and sea forces — a concept that the military nicknamed "Global Strike."

The Strategic Command, which oversees the long-range nuclear weapons in the United States arsenal, was given the responsibility to figure out a way to develop such a capability. In 2004, General Cartwright, a Marine officer, was appointed to head the command.

In looking for a new weapon, General Cartwright said, his goal was a nonnuclear system that could respond to a threat in no more than an hour, including the time that would be needed to secure the president's authorization to attack."

See, we only, only ever, really, respond to threats. Like the world's largest paranoiac, we would be peaceful as pie, we would sit still in our chairs like the guy at the end of Psycho, we wouldn't hurt a fly, if we didn't have to respond to all these threats. They keep coming in. They fill the air. They buzz around. We just have to respond to them! again and again, tearing aside the shower curtain, striking out with our nonnuclear tips, again and again and again, to the background music provided by Bernard Herrmann.

fiction, fact, and seediness

Ah, the Bush administration, always in lockstep with the most villainous forces in America. Today’s NYT story relates a typical Bush caper, half Penguin from Batman, half Satan from Revelations. In the face of global warming, the Bushies are pushing to increase dramatically the amount of greenhouse gases Americans release into the atmosphere – by burning coal. The back to coal movement, and back to the dirtiest methods of mining it and using it, gives us some startling grafs:

“While Peabody supports some coal gasification projects, it remains skeptical about departing from traditional coal-burning methods to produce electricity.
The pulverized coal plants it wants to build, which grind coal into a dust before burning it to make electricity, currently cost about $2 billion each, or 15 percent to 20 percent less to build than the cleaner "integrated gasification combined cycle," or I.G.C.C., plants, which convert coal into a gas.

The hope among scientists is that I.G.C.C. plants could be relatively quickly fitted with systems to sequester deep underground the carbon dioxide created from making electricity. Without such controls, the new coal plants under development worldwide could pump as much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere over their lifetimes as all the coal burned in the last 250 years, according to Jeff Goodell, who has written on coal for several publications, including The New York Times, and is author of a new book on the coal industry.”

The leader of the coal industry is the villain in that old John Prine song, the Peabody Coal company:

"But while sooty smokestacks are no longer a big problem in modern coal-burning power plants, the increase in global warming gases is. A typical 500-megawatt coal-fired electricity plant, supplying enough power to run roughly 500,000 homes, alone produces as much in emissions annually as about 750,000 cars, according to estimates from Royal Dutch Shell.

"Coal has perhaps no stronger evangelist than Mr. Boyce, [President of Peabody] who grew up on Long Island, the son of a mining executive, and studied engineering in Arizona. He argues that a way to reduce carbon dioxide emissions can be found without having to switch from the existing cheaper coal-burning technology.
Much in the way that Exxon Mobil influences discussion of climate issues from the petroleum industry, Peabody is a backer of industry-supported organizations that seek to prevent mandatory reductions in global warming emissions and promote demand for coal.

Peabody's executives are also by far the coal industry's largest political contributors to federal candidates and parties, giving $641,059 in the 2004 election cycle, with 93 percent of that amount going to Republicans, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, an independent research group in Washington that tracks money in politics. “

So, to recapitulate: the Bush administration's response to global warming is to encourage, in its own modest way, putting more Greenhouse gases into the atmosphere with less government regulation. The problem here, as so often in the past six years, is that the very scale and audacity of this obviously wrongheaded, vile, corrupt and anti-human attitude leaves its opponents gasping for negative superlatives, for some verbal equivalent to the punches continually given to common sense and honesty. The immediate need for an insult is not a position that allows for critical thinking. In truth, the Bush presidency isn't the most wicked or the worst to ever grace these here states -- surely that position belongs to Eisenhower, a president who repeatedly and carelessly risked nuclear war. But it is by far the seediest. Our present discontents, in which vanity projects become war and cronyism becomes an energy policy, reminds me of this passage in Marina Warner's fine essay, 'Angels and Engines' on Revelations in last Fall's Raritan:

"The wars of our time, represented in highly popular story cycles, are not easy to keep apart in the mind's eye from the wars conducted in reality and on news channels, and this is not just because The Lord ofthe Rings, Star Wars, the Chronicles of Namia,and the Harry Potter series are modern allegories. A recent poll
found that a terrifying number of people in the United Kingdom thought Hitler was a figment and that the ores' defeat at Helms Deep in The Two Towers actually took place (not to mention the headline interest of newspapers in the last episode of Friends). The reasons for this confusion lie deep: language and imagination govern ways of thinking, and from that work of cognition issue ways of doing. Brilliant techniques of illusion propel fantasies into reality. Film fictions have weirdly fiipped over and, in so doing, fulfilled aspects of apocalyptic prophecy at its most obscurantist. In some ways those informants who thought the battle of Helms Deep took place were right: it did take place—in the filming of the movie."

skepticism and science

- From the American Scientist. Click on image to zoom it.

To continue with LI’s anti-military rant from yesterday – Harper’s this month has a fine article on nuclear testing in Nevada by David Samuels. Rumsfeld, who is a monster from outer space, wants to resume underground testing of nuclear bombs. Here are a few grafs from Samuels piece:

“Over the life of the American nuclear-design program, the scientists at Los Alamos and Livermore designed 71 different warheads for 116 nuclear-weapons systems, at a total cost of nearly $800 billion. This year, the Department of Energy will spend $6.5 billion on nuclear weapons, and it plans to spend a total of $35 billion over the following four years, an amount that in real dollars equals what Ronald Reagan spent in eight years on nuclear weapons at the height of the Cold War.
…
"The last time we did a test there was nothing over fifteen stories in Las Vegas," he reflects. But with the revitalized plutonium-pit production scheduled for 2007, a multibillion-dollar tritium-production program funded by Congress, deliveries of refurbished nuclear weapons scheduled for 2006, and billions of dollars earmarked for the computers and visualization theaters at Livermore and Los Alamos, it is impossible to ignore what's in the offing. Both Stephen Younger, the former associate director of the weapons program at Los Alamos, and C. Paul Robinson, the current director of Sandia, have publicly advocated the development of a new generation of strategic nukes. As the Defense Department's Nuclear Posture Review explained to Congress at the beginning of 2002, "While the United States is making every effort to maintain the stockpile without additional nuclear testing, this may not be possible for the indefinite future."”

LI often gets irritated at the peasant stubbornness or pig ignorance of people who doubt that global warming is happening, or doubt evolutionary theory, etc., etc. We shouldn’t – there are good reasons for the average person to think for him or herself about the pronouncements of the scientists. A great example of scientists, en masse, lying, is given to us by the above ground nuclear testing that went on for decades in Nevada.

In David Thompson’s book, “In Nevada: The Land, The People, God, and Chance," there’s a movie anecdote – which you would expect, since Thompson is a movie critic and the one man author of a movie encyclopedia – about The Conqueror, a John Wayne flick financed by Howard Hughes and shot in St. George, Utah in 1955. St. George happened to be in the alley through which mucho radioactivity from those above ground tests passed. Hughes had soil dug up form the site to be used later for in studio productionAnd the crew, cast, director and others were thus exposed to the substances unleashed by the department of War and blessed by the scientists hired by the department of war, who have, since the dropping of Big Boy, spent seventy years downplaying the dangers of radiation. Thompson points out that, out of the 221 people working on the film, 91 got cancer. This isn’t that surprising. In St. George, deformed babies became known as sacrifice babies – sacrificed to national defense. The leukemia rate was 2.5 times higher than the national average – but cancers were only one of the kind of low grade, life sucking maladies that afflicted the community, and that atomic energy scientists are quick to label psychosomatic – as in the recent WHO/AEIC report on Chernobyl. During a period from the late 40s to the late 70s, the War Department’s scientific community was both experimenting with weapons designed to kill millions and denying that the weapons produced anything that would harm Americans living around the places where those weapons were exploded. Sometimes, just to check, populations were exposed to radiation on purpose – the Defense Department in 1991 admitted that it had done about 4,000 experiments exposing humans to radioactivity between 1944 to 1974, according to Eduardo Goncalves article on the ‘secret nuclear war’ in the Ecologist in 2001. Carole Gallagher, in her photo book about the victims of the bomb tests, quotes a great AEC memo about communities in the path of fallout – they were labeled the “low use segment of the population.” The Conqueror was the more unfortunate in that it mixed low use people with valuable people, including John Wayne – who of course died of cancer. As any scientist would be quick to point out, John Wayne smoked. In any population in the fifties, there are going to be people who die of cancer anyway, statistically. It isn’t science to hide behind that fact, it is politics. But the War Department’s scientists hid behind that fact for fifty years. In Goncalves article, he quotes an Army medic, Van Brandon, who said that the army routinely kept two sets of records of radioactive readings in the fallout paths, one set to show that nobody received an elevated level of radiation, the other set to show how high that elevated level actually was. “That set was brought in a locked briefcase every morning.”

In the 50s, to be fair, not a lot was known about chronic illness. It certainly wasn’t known that one could be infected with a disease that would only appear thirty years later. Now it is fifty years later, and there is a lot of information that is not going to be showing up in any newspaper headlines any time soon – after all, the congressional investigations about the nuclear testing ‘accidents’ were concluded in the 80s. News and disease have a different time frame. So we haven’t seen a lot of publicity given to this report by Steven L. Simon, Andre Bouville and Charles E. Land in this January’s American Scientist, "Fallout from Nuclear Weapons Tests and Cancer Risks." Yet there should be, not only for what it says but for what it doesn't say. The report goes the partial hang-out route, to quote Nixon, diminishing by segregating -- for instance, by concentrating on cancer, the authors can ignore the immune system breakdowns associated with radioactivity, and never ask if there is any meshing between these two results of radiation poisoning. It bases its statistics on reports of radioactive readings after the tests without even a note to say that some of those readings are, to say the least, disputed – and that we know the Department of War has changed its story about certain of the most notorious tests -- for instance the one on July 5, 1957, in which, in the immediate aftermath of the test, some 2,000 soldiers were ordered into ground zero – while the becqueral count was off the Geiger counter - and this was after these soldiers were exposed, as was standard practice, by being put in trenches some mile from the explosion. Afterwards, soldiers reported that they could do things you only see in horror movies – like pull their teeth from their mouth. All of which reports would get them trundled into the psych wards are VA hospitals. And none of which is reflected in the notes in the American Scientist, which are enlivened by some maps I'd like to figure out how to post.

This is from the article:

"The cancer risks are, of course, the most publicized of the spectrum of ills resulting from scientific carelessness about exploding big dangerous toys to see what would happen. The less publicized of those ills is immune deficiencies of various kinds.

“In 1997, NCI conducted a detailed evaluation of dose to the thyroid glands of U,S, residents from 1-131 in fallout from tests in Nevada. In a related activity, we evaluated the risks of thyroid cancer from that exposure and estimated that about 49,000 fallout-related cases might occur in the United States,
almost all of them among persons who were under age 20 at some time during the period 1951-57, with 95-percent uncertainty limits of 11,300 and 212,000. The estimated risk may be compared with some 400,000 lifetime thyroid cancers expected in the same population in the absence of any fallout exposure.

Accounting for thyroid exposure from global fallout, which was distributed fairly uniformly over the entire United States, might increase the estimated excess by 10 percent, from 49,000 to 54,000. Fallout-related risks for thyroid cancer are likely to exceed those for any other cancer simply because those risks
are predominantly ascribable to the thyroid dose from internal radiatition, which is unmatched in other organs.”

The ever helpful government has set up a website, by the way, if you want to estimate your risk of thyroid cancer from fallout. It is at this link

However, can you believe the gov? LI is going with this editorial from the St. Georges Newspaper from May 13, 2006:

“Another part of the report states that breathing or swallowing radioactive iodine originating in contaminated milk was the most significant pathway to radioactive exposure.

Yet a third part of the report concludes that there are "substantial gaps in existing data and other factors" related to the research.

In summary, however, the NAS report recommends that the number of diseases compensated by the federal government should not be expanded beyond the current 18, but that the Centers for Disease Control and the National Cancer Institute should complete national dose estimates for all fallout radioactivity, not just Iodine 131, that fell, according to the report, on every county in the nation.

The NCI has already determined that there are as many as 212,000 cases of thyroid cancer that could have been caused by fallout exposure. No number is pegged to the 17 other types of cancer that currently qualify for compensation, although the NCI also recently released a study about the number and types of cancer found in the Marshall Islands where 66 nuclear weapons were detonated from 1946-1958. According to the NCI, 530 different cancers were caused by that fallout.

And although the U.S. Senate, when it approved the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act in 1990, concluded that such radionuclides as Cesium 137 and Strontium 90 are responsible for some of the illnesses, the report failed to offer any significant information regarding the effects of those elements.

The recent NAS report was issued, coincidentally, on the same day that the White House reasserted its commitment to research on a new generation of nuclear weapons - the so-called bunker buster bombs - and one day after the National Research Council concluded that these new weapons would not be any safer than the current nuclear arsenal and expose millions to radiation.

In essence, what the NAS report does is buy time for the government and time is not a commodity the people who call themselves downwinders - those who suffered illness as a result of nuclear fallout - have.

The longer the government takes to determine the effects of spraying countless Americans with poisonous fallout, the fewer survivors there will be to compensate for their sacrifice.

The longer the government can stall on offering more information about the effects of radiation poisoning, the farther along the research and testing of this needless next generation of nukes is allowed to progress.

The NAS report is nothing more than a smokescreen to cover the tracks of the government for killing thousands of innocent victims and paving the way for more of the same in the future.

It's time for the people of this country to stand up and demand some answers before it's too late.”

Let’s end this uber depressing post with a quote from an Oak Ridge Physician famous for fighting against the government habit of poisoning the population, Karl Z. Morgan, who testified in the Silkwood case.

This attitude [for radiation safety] did not prevail, apparently, at some other places [other than Oak Ridge.] Certainly it did not at Three Mile Island. Since I left the faculty at Georgia Tech, I've testified in over a hundred-fifty cases, trying to help people that have allegedly been injured by radiation. We won the Karen Silkwood case and Crumbeck case, and I was a sole witness [for the plaintiff when] we won in the Three Mile Island class-action suit.

But in most other cases, the AEC and DOE [have] called—[what was] then the Department of Justice [(DOJ)]; let me call it the "Department of Injustice" [to make false claims about radiation exposure] under some of the people there. They [(the DOJ employees)] actually bragged about the fact that they set up courses to train health physicists and lawyers on how to keep injured parties, injured from radiation, from getting any benefits! One of these was even held in Washington. I didn't attend it, but I can point to some people that attended the lecture that [Don] Jose from the Justice Department gave. Imagine: the Department of Justice—which is supposed, according to our Constitution, to provide justice to the citizen—training lawyers and health physicists how to cheat the public! How to allow people to be used as guinea pigs rather than be a hindrance to some nuclear or military program!”

those chains aren't dissolving fast enough

When I look into history and see the multitudes of men, otherwise virtuous, who have died, and their families been ruined, in the defence of knaves and fools, and which they would not have done, had they reasoned at all upon the system; I do not know a greater good that an individual can render to mankind, than to endeavour to break the chains of political superstition. Those chains are now dissolving fast, and proclamations and persecutions will serve but to hasten that dissolution. – Thomas Paine


The AEI is a national treasure. As some will remember, it was the AEI who sent the eagle eyed Ken Zinsmeister to Iraq in April of 2005, and his results were summed up in the title of the article he wrote: The War is Over, and We Won.

It is this uncanny ability to find the story that others miss, and to make the hard, hard proposals that makes AEI a factory of opeds for places like the Washington Post. As is well known, editor Fred Hiatt is fatally attracted to the movers and shakers of the terrifyingly brainy inner court around our very own Good Leaker, POTUS extraordinaire, with their high idealism about putting freedom first around the world -- for which cause they are willing to sacrifice any amount of freedom in these here States.

Which is why this counter-intuitive, excellent op ed by Dan Blumenthal should get the ball rolling. Having won the war in Iraq, and making this economy sing, we need level headed people to patrol the precincts of paradise and run back to us screaming, Danger, Danger when they see Danger. And Blumenthal fills that task by spotting one of America’s biggest problems: we are not spending enough on the military.

It is scandalous. It turns out we are seriously underfunding the forces we will need to bomb China to fuck. Little tears, red white and blue ones, leaked from LI’s peepers as we read:

“The latest Quadrennial Defense Review states that China "has the greatest potential to compete militarily with the United States." The Pentagon seeks to "shape [China's] strategic choices" and to "dissuade any military competitor from developing disruptive or other capabilities that could enable regional hegemony." The Bush administration has taken some concrete action toward these ends. An upgraded alliance with Japan will improve our deterrent posture. The opening of a strategic relationship with India reflects in part an American desire to ensure that China does not gain hegemony over South or Central Asia. An increase in the size of the U.S. Navy's attack submarine fleet in Guam also brings more American capability into the Pacific. A nascent defense relationship with Vietnam may over time provide the American military with what it needs most in Asia -- more bases.

But our China policy leaves us a day late and a dollar short when it comes to the challenge posed by the speed of Beijing's military buildup. We still have restrictions on relations with Taiwan dating to the Carter era that make the island more difficult to defend. A stronger commitment by the Pentagon to developing long-range surveillance and strike capabilities would make Beijing less confident that it could use its vast territory as a sanctuary for its missile and other "disruptive" forces. Upgrading our undersea warfare capabilities will improve our regional freedom of action.”

LI has a few disagreements. For instance, we think we should gut the Department of War, destroy all of our missiles, shrink our navy by half, and take that money that doesn’t go to support Veterans benefits and devote it to investment into greening our infrastructure. We should simply give up on trying to be the world’s supreme military power. Completely. And we should pay no attention to China’s military whatsoever, but ask ourselves about using our own territory as a sanctuary for disruptive forces. We should downgrade our undersea warfare capability so radically that future generations will marvel that we ever spent money launching the useless, rusting flotillas we can, perhaps, display in various seaside parks.

Not that we do not appreciate the AEI’s absolute vigilance, putting the interest of Defense Industries before everything else on the planet. The A stands, for those in the know, for Alien. And special thanks from LI to WAPO for its endless willingness to make its editorial pages a soapbox for the rants of any and every two penny hawk to come down the pike. If you froth at the mouth, if you want to nuke Iran, if you consider Chavez a dictator and Iraq the free-est country in the Middle East, come on down – the WAPO editorial page has kept open a special place for you.

After you’ve treated yourself to the Blumenthal op ed, the second funniest piece on the web, at the moment – via Crooked Timber – is the Squirrel Leadership Council page, which declares the Euston Manifesto a hopeful sign that the European left is moving away from knee jerk Anti-Americanism. Surely the best thing about the piece is this sentence. Can self parody get any richer?

“It is, of course, an article of faith among Europe's lefties that America is a cultural and intellectual wasteland. But this, too, is beginning to change. A stream of Europeans passing through Washington this spring expressed surprise at the quality and variety of the debate in the city's dynamic think tanks.”

The land of dynamic think tanks. This is the true voice of a court society so sunk in the narcissistic stupor of admiring its face in the mirror that surely, as in all fairy tales, the time is coming when that mirror will tell the truth -- the dyanmic think tanks aren't the fairest in the land. They stink up the city. They are a pest and a menace, compounded out of an ambitious, unscrupulous lot of pecksniffs whose collective advice leads invariably to public disaster and the aggrandizement of their own private interests, giving them a relationship to this country much like the one between plasmodium falciparum and the anopheles moquitoes.

turns 2

When the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen came out, a few years ago, I did not know that – as the man who raised me from a pup, David, told me when I was talking to him about this the other day – ‘everybody knew that movie was rank. Where were you – wanking off?’ Somehow I missed the supreme judgment of the masses. Somehow, I missed the whole movie. But, as I stumbled upon it in my innocence last week and saw an hour of it, which makes me an expert about the wretched thing. And … more than that … I have seen other action films. LI’s analysis of the hunter narrative in the Turns post is supposed to set this here post up, so I am going to pretend my reader has read it.

Okay? Remember my brilliant and never to be forgotten point about the hunter as the hero of methodological individualism? Are you ready for an insight that will surely blow you out of your shoes?

Methodological individualism is deader than a dodo. Or, rather, the myth marches on, but the country of individualism, these here states, where the myth’s pedal met the metal, has long gone past the form of capitalism in which the individual made a plausible hero. This is a stockholder, stakeholder country, an absentee ownership country, a guarantor country. And, even as the guarantor structures buckles under the weight of the succession of monsters that fill up the places in the governing class and mistake their infinitely coddled trajectories for the ruggedest blazing through the meritocratic jungle, little Indiana Joneses every one, we have created (and it is a we – action movies negate and take a big dump on the very notion of auteur) the action movie in which our template hunter is degraded into a mere employee, a hired gun, while the only entrepreneur in the landscape, the last individual embodying methodological individualism, is… the bad guy. The bad guy, one notices, actually does things like manufacture the explosives he uses. Goes out and kidnaps some scientists. And, in a moment that is both sweetly anachronistic and always undoes him, actually participates in the work of the organization. And so it is with the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Our bad guy is named the Phantom, although he should have named himself One eyed Metal Mask, since he is anything but phantomic and he does wear a one eyed metal mask. The time is vaguely 1900-ish, and the premise is that this phantom is using modern weapons, such as haven’t been invented yet – like the tank – to create havoc and ultimately bring the nations of Europe into conflict with each other – with the aim of selling them the weapons. But though the man with the one eyed metal mask is supposed to be on the cutting edge and over, he is actually behind the curve in almost every scene in the movie. Instead of dispatching his troops to shoot up the league of e.g. – a group of action figures from literature who are supposed to prevent him from setting Europe at loggerheads with itself – he actually goes out to watch them. This, however, was the Golden age of Morgan, of trusts, of the retirement of all the old captains of industry, of the wonderful idea that ownership of an enterprise resides in certificates you buy in a market. That's why bad guys seem so Industrial revolutionish.

Meanwhile, we have our hunter – or hunters, in this case. The hunters, going back to those early James Bond flicks, are supremely taken care of. They are showered with things, and rarely threaten to go on strike for more pay. In fact, pay and a pension don’t enter into it, even as, in the serial, we watch them being replaced, one actor for another. And in this, Hollywood has dreamed a little dream for us – this is the dream of the Guarantor society, where the state, or the giant corporation, pays the bills. In fact, surely it is from the movies and this atmosphere of magic entitlement that the Lays, the Welches, the Scroochys got the idea that a company should not only pay you a salary fit for a conquering Moghul but also pay for your car fare, get you tickets to a ball game, and in general treat you like it was your own personal tooth fairy. In this atmosphere, the hunter’s whole ethos is bound to rapidly rot. And so it proves.

The symbol of that decay, I think, is the explosion. And, in general, the whole logic of aiming in the action movie. Here, the League of E.G. is typical. When we meet the hero, Alan Quartermain – Sean Connery – he is at a hunting club in Africa. He is attacked by a detachment of bad guys (miraculously unsupervised by the boss). They wield machine guns. Now, I used to think that the moral logic that was substituted for gravity in action movies – the miraculous ways bullets were continually fired at the hero, and he was continually destined to end happily – was all that this was about. And indeed, a man from five feet away shoots at the old Connery, who barely bends to evade the speeding projectiles – but one must remember that this movie sucks partly because it seems like a bad simulation of an action movie. It is this extra bit of contrivance that lets us watch it as though it were something naked, an anatomical model of action movies. Later in the movie, we see Connery himself practice shooting – he is quite the sharpshooter. But the movie shows his talent, and makes a parody of the danger posed to him by the shots of his enemies, merely to undermine the whole idea of aiming. The one thing that the hunter carries into the wilderness that is unique is that hand eye combination. It is unique because it is tailored to the instrument, which, in the days before uniform mass production, could have severe variances. So, yes, there is a moral subsystem directing the bullets, but more than that there is the abolition of the need for aiming both in the parody of who the bullets hit and in the gross enslavement to the higher explosive.

Action movies and action movie fans love explosives. Love cars that go boom, and buildings that are mined, and digital recreations of cities that are bombed. Why? Well, the enthusiasm on the part of the audience I am going to bracket, for the nonce. But the larger narrative meaning of the bomb is that here we have something which abolishes even the appearance of independence on the part of the hero. The larger the bomb, the more complex the delivery system, the more dependent the hero and the larger the swathe of destruction. That makes a mockery of the hand-eye system – it dialectically trumps it. To hit your prey with one shot is a sort of ethical gesture in the hunter narrative; to blow up a random assortment of things among which happens to be your prey is its opposite in the hunter narrative gone rotten. Usually, the anxiety about so radically destroying the very premises of the individualist hero is so intense that the bombing is attributed to the bad guy. And yet, in that shift, the bad guy still ends up as the last real capitalist hero – for unlike the hero/hunter, dependent on the guarantor state, the bad guy often actually fashions the bombs, or at least invests in the stock and personnel to manufacture them.

The narrative elements of the hunter story are in free fall in the action movie. The old dialectical moves turn into gags, and the heroes turn into stunt men accessories to the only thing that is left – the forest of f/x. But in this forest, one never feels the absence of the nymphs, of the spirit who has just departed before you – to use Ortega y Gasset’s thought. The nymphs were never here. The forest of f/x is a wormwood forest – irradiated, sterile, dying.

another hero

LI is desperately trying to make money this week -- if any LI readers know of anyone who wants editing, send them to us, please! so we might not be so garrulous on this site.
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Those who want to read something that gets to the heart of the heart of the court mindset in D.C. should really check out this Stuart Rothenberg post. Rothenberg is a professional political person -- it is his job, by analysing, consulting and advising, to help politicians sit on the collective face of America. But the Coonnecticut Democratic convention that allowed Lieberman to be challenged by Ned Lamont has disturbed him greatly. The people have a function, and that function, which defines them, is to overwhelmingly re-elect the Politburo. When the people violate their function, are they even people at all? It is the great cry of the rulers throughout the ages: Are there no workhouses, no prisons, in which to store these wretches? If this is what democracy is, perhaps we should have a system where the loser in an election – if he has the Right Stuff – should be proclaimed the Winner. It worked in 2000, didn’t it?


The passion in this post is moving. It would take a reader with a heart of stone not to shed copious tears for Joe Lieberman-as-Galileo-Bruno-n-John Brown:

“Lieberman’s crime is that he hasn’t always toed the party line. He’s decided for himself what’s right and wrong, even — and here is the most shocking thing — used his own values, judgment and intellect to decide where he stands on issues and how he’ll vote.

Lamont’s criticism has resonated with some Democrats around the state and online. The war is unpopular with Democrats in Connecticut, as it is elsewhere, and many voters are unhappy with Lieberman’s general support of President Bush’s Iraq policy.

It doesn’t seem to matter to those angry Democrats, or to Lamont, that Lieberman is widely respected for his thoughtfulness, integrity, civility and intellect. Or his overall voting record.”

My god. That respect, which echoes from Georgetown to K street, has been all over Fox News, and dances like sugarplums in the heads of the great thinkers at the Pentagon, is being trampled by a buncha fucking mugwumps in Connecticut who somehow got past the guards. Rothenberg's instincts -- as a father, a patriot, and a bouncer -- are charged:

“It isn’t just that Lieberman is a centrist, however, that makes the primary challenge to him unseemly. Not all centrists deserve to be re-elected any more than all liberals or all conservatives do. Rather, it’s the Connecticut Democrat’s stature and character that, in another day, would make a primary challenge to him by a former Greenwich selectman laughable.”

Yes, it isn't a belief system -- Rothenberg is so right. A belief system is to be trotted out only during the short time when one has to appear before the peasants and get their applause. Then, centrist, rightist and leftists can like down with the corporate lambs, with the wise old heads in foreign policy, with journalists who have established reputations, probity, and decide to do what is good for the country. Into this company wander a pinhead from Greenwich? Laughable - or disgusting. Why can’t we change the law the teensiest bit so these flies and maggots can’t challenge the stature and character, the deep, deep thinking of such as Senator – or shall I say Senator for Life? Joe Lieberman.

Rothenberg - a hero of democracy in our time.

turns

Because it seems to me that the things in Cooper that make one so savage, when one compares them with actuality, are perhaps, when one considers them as presentations of a deep subjective desire, real in their way, and almost prophetic. – D.H. Lawrence

Lawrence was right to pick out the killer motif in his book on Classic American Literature right to find some deep subjective desire there. It is the hunter plot – hunting deer, hunting the great white whale, hunting bear, hunting, above all, Indians – that has such large and prophetic effects on the American imago that Americans are still enthralled by the elements of that primitive story. However, it is LI’s contention that the story is now in its decadence – and that its decadence is part of the larger debauching of the narrative intelligence in these here states – and that the site of its decadence is the action movie. All of these thoughts derive from a trivial and stupid occasion – as some long suffering readers know, LI is trying to put together a graphic novel. To that end, we’ve not only been reading them, we’ve been watching movies made from them. Which is how we explain wasting an hour and ten minutes on The League of Extraordinary Gentleman.

Lawrence doesn’t mention Robinson Crusoe in the context of the American hunter, but – borrowing from Marx’s notion of Crusoe as the legitimating myth of the classical economists – surely Natty Bumppo, or Daniel Boone, play the same role in the American climate, are the heroes of methodological individualism American style. As always, of course, history discretely precedes pre-history – these self-made hunters use weapons that represent the cutting edge of the factory and distribution system. Even in the deepest woods of the Six Nations, they are parasitic, in a crucial sense, on the world economy – going in with the gun, coming out with the pelts, or the scalps – whatever sells. And, as Olson points out about Moby Dick, hunting and the factory system combine in the whaling ship. By taking the ship and making it into the vessel of his own vengeance, Ahab departs from the hunter’s program, the telos of the pelt or whale oil that is brought back, and this is a mark of his madness. There’s a nice story about this parasitical situation in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. An expriest tells the kid a story about the Judge over the scalphunters fire one evening. In the story, the expriest and a band of other hunter/desperados are being chased by savages into the malpais, the great salt and quartz wastelands in Sonora or southern Arizona. The band has run out of gunpowder. And then they come upon the judge – just like that. The judge scales flakes of silicon and sulphur from the rocks about with his knife, and mixes it up, and then has the whole company piss on it (“He’d took out his pizzle and he was pissin into the mixture, pissin with a great vengeance”) and kneads the mixture and lets it dry, and the band uses that powder to fight off the surprised savages. This is self-sufficiency, but it is also a parody of gunpowder manufacture, a reminder of the factories and mines behind the Daniel Boones. But even if the hero of methodological individualism ends up pissing into a pile of mineral flakes to survive, you can’t entirely take the aura away from Daniel Boone. Literature happens because myths don’t hold – and so it is with Ahab and, much later, with the boy in Faulkner’s The Bear – but the myths are also fight back.

Then there is the woods themselves – and the ocean and the malpais, other forms of wilderness, easily transformed, by metaphor, into a woods, and vice versa. When the Boy goes into the woods for the first time in Faulkner’s story, the sensation of moving among the immensity of trees is compared to a sensation the boy has much later – the first time he goes onto an ocean going ship. The woods, though, are European as well. After all, Dante as well as Daniel Boone found himself in a forest, and Ortega y Gasset begins the Meditation on Quixote with an essay on the forest. In America, the hunter maps the woods, and the map kills the hunter – for of course he is followed by the world system, the farms and manufactures. In Europe, Ortega y Gasset’s forest is also inhabited by what used to be there: “When we arrive at a small clearing in the verdure, it seems as if a man had been sitting there on a stone, with his elbows on his knees, his hands on his temples, and that just as we were arriving he got up and left…. The forest is always a little beyond where we are. It has just gone away from where we are and all that remains is its still fresh traces. The ancients, who projected their emotions into corporeal and living forms, peopled the forests with fugitive nymphs.” In America, of course, the man was there when the Americans got there – and he was gone by the second, the third, the fourth generation, ‘vanished’ – as it used to be said in the old educational films of my sixth grade. The ‘vanishing’ American Indian. The ‘vanishing’ buffalo. In truth, the hunter’s last real moment in American culture was in the 1870s, when factory, hunting, and ethnic cleansing were put together as the army contracted out the extinction of the buffalo. Here, the peculiar genius of General Sherman showed itself:

“In a letter on May 10, 1868, Sherman mentioned a sardonic method of resolving the conflict, writing to Sheridan that "I think it would be wise to invite all the sportsmen of England & America there this fall for a Grand Buffalo hunt, and make one grand sweep of them all. Until the Buffaloes & consequent(ly) the Indians are out from between the Roads we will have collisions & trouble." On June 17, 1868, Sherman wrote his brother John about the buffalo and the railroad: "The commission for present peace had to concede a right to hunt buffaloes as long as they last, and they may lead to collisions, but it will not be long before all the buffaloes are extinct near and between the railroads, after which the Indians will have no reason to approach either railroad..." (Sherman, 1894, p. 320)”

This was the end of the hunter as the classic American hero, the myth inside methodological individualism. It was the end, too, of the hunter’s forest – the American forests of turns, where hunter and prey could switch places. The hunter as a hand is the cowboy -- an entirely different figure.

All of which is a pretty heavy intro to a few remarks about watching a shitty movie. But hey, LI paid 3.50 to rent it, and we do want to get some value for our money. So, next post will be about the action movie.

ps - I was reading last night in Fintan O'Tooles biography of Richard Sheridan, The Traitor's Kiss, and came across this marvelous anecdote:

"On March 6, 1786, the American Company's production of Robinson Crusoe or Helequin Friday was performed in New York 'For the entertainment of the Indian Chiefs of the Oneida nation, now in this city." Probably devised by Elizabeth Sheridan with assistance from her husband, this pantomime seems, from surving accounts, to have been itself a strange fantasy of meetings between European travellers and New World natives. The first half follows the outline of Daniel Defoe's novel. But in the secnd, set in Spain, Crusoe disappears back to England, leaving the black man Friday - played by one of the first black face performers to appear on the American stage - in the arms a white Columbine. The lovers are rescued from various distresses by a black magician and transported back to the island, where "the Piece concludes with a Grand dance of Savages."

And so Robinson Crusoe and the Prospero myth are unfurled before the Indian nation that will provide Cooper with his enemy/models for Natty Bumppo. Oh, how our symbols turn into events and our events turn into symbols in this strange new world! And -- strange little LI world, for those who have read some of our more bizarre posts -- Crusoe was played, in the London debut of the pantomime, by Joe Grimaldi's father. The forest of turns possesses all travelers who enter into it.

kammist hijinks

Oliver Kamm is a joke, but I like to read him to find out what bad faith is doing today. His post about Chavez, however, is beyond his usual stunning work. The disinformation conveyed by every lovely sentence (this is a man who loves the plummy sound of his own pomposity) is a work of neo-con kitsch that even Hitchens would have a hard time matching. I'm talking about golden age Hitchens, the one defending Chalabi, not the bare ruined choirs of the unreadable recent screeds in Slate. For instance, here is what Kamm says about Venezuela at the time that Chavez instigated a coup attempt, in 1992. This is in response to Johann Hari’s positive Independence interview with Chavez:

"Another point undermining Johann's morality tale is that the structural reforms, so far from being the acts of a despised regime, steadily gained support. Javier Corrales, in Presidents Without Parties: The Politics of Economic Reform in Argentina and Venezuela in the 1990s (2002, p. 55) notes that from the first quarter of 1989 (when the riots took place) to the first quarter of 1991, the number of people who wished the government to persevere with the reforms rose from 29 per cent to 45 per cent, while the economy performed strongly (a growth rate of 9.7 per cent in 1991 and a rise in investment of 81 per cent). The number of labour disputes rose in that period, but the number of actual strikes (authorised and unauthorised) declined. Mass opposition to the government's reform programme, so far from driving Chavez's failed coup attempt, was in fact driven by it. Chavez shattered a fragile consensus by showing the potential for a different form of politics, namely populist demagoguery and violence (nearly 100 people were killed in his failed coup attempt, the great majority of them civilians)."

Well, is this the same Javier Corrales who writes, in the Political Science Quarterly, 1997, comparing the Argentine and Venezuelan responses to economic crisis:

"These points will be demonstrated by referring to some cases where reforms have been implemented, successfully and otherwise. Special reference is made to the cases of Argentina (1989-1994) and Venezuela (1989-1994), which constitute clear-cut dichotomies of divergent outcomes in processes of economic reforms. After launching similar programs of economic reforms, these countries undertook different political paths. In Argentina, both the reforms and the reformers acquired unimaginable political momentum and prestige. In Venezuela, they became amply repudiated by society in general.”

Huh, Kamm does seem to have a bit of a problem with his specs, reading “amply repudiated by society in general” as “was widely acclaimed like Mickey Mouse at Disneyland.”

And here’s how Corrales describes the period in general:

“[In 1991] Venezuela plunged into its most serious political crisis since the 1960s: uncontained civic protests, two military coup attempts in 1992, intense cabinet changes, interruption of most ESSA reforms, presidential impeachment in 1993, urban terrorism, and a devastating financial crack at the end of 1993.”

Now, the heart of the deception in Kamm's little post stems from a man he, oddly, doesn't mention. Just who was that president who was impeached in 1993? Why, it seems to be a man well known for having stolen a quantity of money, Carlos A. Perez – although, as Kamm might put it, to call it stealing money is demagogic, since it was a part of a structural reform implementing a “put Venezuela’s money in Perez’s Swiss bank account” that was surely only unpopular because it was so misunderstood, Perez instituting an ultramodern CEO system of payment for Venezuela’s spanking brand new leadership. And of course his mistress, Cecilia Matos, also received a couple of million here and there, as was only right and fair. All part of a sort of New Labour before New Labour kind of thing, which Kamm so rightly beams upon. The 13 million in the Swiss bank account was all an incentive scheme..

In any case, Kamm's odd statistics for support of reform seem to be contradicted by the fact that Perez was elected on a statist platform -- and once elected, turned about and repudiated the very economic policies he represented in his campaign. Here's a May 2, 1988 Wall Street Journal article reporting on a typical Perez speech:

"Of 15 candidates standing for the December 4 election, the two front-runners are former President Carlos Andres Perez, the 65-year-old candidate of the ruling Democratic Action party, and Eduardo Fernandez, 47, who leads the main opposition party.

Both of them have pledged to fight to soften the terms for repayment of Venezuela's 30 billion dollar foreign debt, the fifth biggest in the developing world.

The country has one of the best repayment records in Latin America, repaying more principal on its debt than any other, but the leading candidates have vowed to change this.

In a newspaper interview published on Monday, Perez said Venezuela should repay its debt at a rate of around 20 per cent of its export earnings. Last year, it paid 46.5 per cent.

"We can not pay under the conditions imposed by the industrialised world," Perez, Venezuela's president from 1974 to 1979, told El Nacional. "The situation is becoming intolerable."

On the basis of such rodomontade, the man was elected, only to impose every condition asked by the 'industrialized world' and then some. Surprise surprise. It is as if George Bush had run on a platform of smaller government, only to balloon the size of the government... Oh, bad example. Well, it is as if Tony Blair had assured the British people that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction in spite of knowning that the intelligence was iffy or non-existent... Oops, another bad example. Well, it is as if the Venezuelan people are supposed to swallow the lies and bad faith of their elected leaders without complaint, as they do in the U.S. and the U.K. There, that's better.

Anyway, the comedy of Kamm writing propaganda for the regime of a ex-crook who was put under house arrest twice for his crimes (and protected from worse by his buddies on the Venezuelan Supreme Court) is pretty good. One looks forward to his defense of the Salinas family next. But there is still more from this one little post. Two points, actually. One has to do with the figures that Kamm quotes, pointing to them as if the early nineties was a time of sound economic policies. Now, the background here is important, This is how Corrales puts it:

“Nevertheless, comparing numbers alone tends to ignore issues of diachronic relativity. Venezuela in January 1989 was in the midst of its most severe economic crisis since the 1930s. Venezuela's GNP was expanding but only as a result of deficit spending, growing indebtedness, and reserve burning. Artificial aggregate-demand boosting was a deliberate state strategy to hide the severity of the economic crisis for electoral purposes. But the severity of the crisis was real--very high and accelerating inflation for the first time ever, large trade and budget deficits, declining revenues, severe foreign reserve shortage (unusual for oil exporters), consumer goods scarcity, and growing social unrest. And yet, this was only the tip of the iceberg of a chronic, decade-old economic deterioration. Since the 1970s, Venezuela's economic competitiveness and living standards declined steadily. Despite the growth of GNP between 1984 and 1988, there is little evidence of any trickle-down effect. (See Table 1.) After peaking in 1982 at US $4,980, the GNP per capita declined to US $3,190 in 1988, roughly the same level as in 1977. Few countries experience such a dramatic (35 percent) decline in such a short period of time. Argentina certainly did not: its GDP per capita actually increased 32.9 percent during this period.[25] Venezuelan real wages between 1980 and 1988 also exhibit a dismal record (34 percent decline compared to 2.7 percent for Argentina). In 1988 alone, real wages declined 11.3 percent compared to 5.5 percent in Argentina.”

But how about the good times to which Kamm refers -- that strong 9 percent growth? How about those the privatizations, the austerity, the price liberalization, all of the stuff “promoting sound economic policies through so-called structural adjustment programmes.” Well, here we must leave Coralles, who has a soft spot for the Washington concensus, and ask about the way the neo-liberal policies in Venezuela, and Mexico, and Argentina go round and round in the same cycle of boom and bust, with the busts being those times when the government kindly extends itself to the neediest -- owners of banks and telephone companies and such --and bails them out.

In 1996, the Economist gave a soft focus view of what happened:

"During Venezuela's most recent boom, in the early 1990s, its banks grew like topsy. Lax supervision allowed lenders to run wild, and there were too many soft loans to bank insiders. The boom ended in January 1994 when Banco Latino, then the second-largest bank, was taken over by the government. As panicked depositors pulled out their money, seven other banks also failed. Standard & Poor's, a credit-rating agency, reckons the bank bailout has cost 1.8 trillion bolivars ($12 billion), equal to 22% of GDP in 1994. The crisis helped drive the inflation rate above 60%. That led to a sharp devaluation of the bolivar. In 1993, 106 bolivars could buy one American dollar. Today, it takes 474.

Officials see privatisation as one way to recover some of the costs of the continuing bank bail-out. Two other banks now in government hands, Banco Republica and Banco Latino, will go on the block early next year. Esther de Margulis, head of Fogade, the deposit-guarantee agency, expects to receive over $1 billion from the sale of banks and related assets."

The typical cycle -- tax money bails out banks that fail due to the lax regulation that is ignored by "structural adjustments" that encourage privatization. Using the state as a piggy bank, the banks are nursed back to health and sold, often to the same people who bankrupted them in the first place or their friends. To really get a sense of what happened in Venezuela, read the Funny Money chapter in The Blood Bankers by Henry S. James. Kamm's notion that the structural adjustments were sound is as bogus as is his careful non-disclosure of what happened, economically, after the reforms were put into place.

The other point, on which we will take Corrales' word, is that, far from Chavez destabilizing Perez, Corrales claims his own party did:

"In Venezuela, the ruling party virtually rebelled against the executive and his reforms at the end of 1991." And here:

"AD [Accion Democratica] felt increasingly threatened. It soon began to attack the reforms and reformers, disparaging most economic initiatives and belittling every economic accomplishment. Never in Venezuela's democratic history were executive-ruling party relations so distant and discordant. A vicious cycle developed: the party grew increasingly resentful, in turn, further persuading the executive of the need to supersede the party.

By 1991, AD was in a virtual state of war against the executive, even though this was the "best" economic year of the reforms in terms of macroeconomic indicators. This war culminated in AD's internal elections of September-October 1991 in which the orthodox sectors captured the top positions in the party. From this moment on, the balance in executive-ruling party relations shifted toward the party, now under the control of the most recalcitrant critics of the reforms."

Finally, a word about Corrales. Three years after the 1997 article, the much praised Argentine economy, which Corrales regards as a model of instituting sound economic policies, collapsed. By coincidence (I guess I should put heh here) the reformist Argentinian president, Menem, was accused of massive corruption himself. The neo-cons do love their leader/swindlers.

There are days when Kamm is just an average punter, and then there are days when he is absolutely golden – attaining scores that are almost near the legendary Melanie Phillips. This post was one of the latter.

PS: – for Bush corruption -‘n-incompetence junkies who just can’t get enough, this article in the NYT is the place to go. The usual complaints about the “good news from Iraq’ being a pack of lies served up by right wing talking heads and relayed dutifully by a cowed press doesn’t really get to the function of the lies. If you are going to pick a country apart, if you are going to pursue unilateral power in the Middle East, and if you are going to disgorge tax money to your campaign contributor – all at the same time - you need to operate like cartoon villains in Sin City, you need a bunch of zombies constantly relaying ‘good news’ and you need to baptize the whole thing with an inspiring name. Democracy, freedom, the rest of it. And that is what 2003 and 2004 were all about.

freedom

O, my America, my Newfoundland,
My kingdom, safest when with one man mann'd,
My mine of precious stones, my empery ;
How am I blest in thus discovering thee !

And the news about the one man manning our America is that he has appointed a court spy jester who, we are told in tones of syncophant’s awe, will – well, like the WAPO headline say it all: “Nominee Has Ability To Bear Bad News”.

In the town of the wealthy think tanker, where Kissing Ass is the major growth industry, this is like a major thing. The WAPO knew to headline it, since as we all know, it is rare to find a really good babysitter. So often the babysitters just sit around playing poker with pimps! Which, to tell the truth, is what I would like my CIA head to be doing. But no – Hayden, this marvel, we are told, while changing the royal diapers and rubbing vaseline onto the royal bottom, will be able to say things like, this excellent war that you, destroyer of worlds, most Christian of all Christians, the only anointed one, the cock of cocks and cocaine of cocaine, holy and sacred and better than Daddy, initiated out of your great and good mind, is grinding people into small little pieces for no discernable reason, your highness, except of course that they really really appreciate it, the freedom and the liberty and the light that you have shown upon them, but there are these tiny, tiny problems. And then give baby a playful spank.

“Will Hayden convey the agency's deep concern about Iraq to Bush? "Yes, I think he will," said a senior CIA official who has seen Hayden in high-level meetings. "I think he'll be professional about it, though. He won't jump on the table. But he'll make the point."

In the past year, the CIA station in Baghdad has told headquarters that the situation in Iraq is deteriorating dangerously, according to a senior CIA official familiar with the station's view and with Hayden. The assessment has only gotten worse, the official said.”

Deep concern - wow. Those are such grave words that they are topped with moussed gray hair. Oh, this kind of thing will surely get a two thumbs up in the WAPO editorial even now being metastasized in Fred Hiatt's head.

Typical of the media badmouthing of our great and good war, isn’t it? For instance, the news that people are moving to Baghdad, supposedly in such a shambles, should be suitably cherrypicked and played over the instaborg for all to see, I think:

“Although the killings of foreign and Iraqi journalists in Basra have limited coverage in the city, residents describe political violence that leaves corpses on the streets daily. Iraqi newspapers this week reported Basra residents fleeing to comparative safety abroad or even in Baghdad.

The governor of Basra province, a member of the Islamic Virtue Party, last week demanded the removal of Basra's police chief and local military leader, accusing them of failing to rein in political and sectarian killings. Since then, the unrest has included an attack on a police station; burning of offices of Iraq's most powerful Shiite party, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq; and marches Wednesday that drew thousands of participants.”

It is the Pottery Barn principle: once you break it, then break dozens of it, break it all, burn the place down, blow it up and sprinkle the ground with salt and call it: Freedom.

low toppers, anyone?

The political talking heads may be right – it might be that this year’s elections will be all about Iraq and Iran. LI, however, thinks this discounts what might well be on the minds of voters in November – the series of storms that are going to be rolling across the Gulf like huge bowling balls this hurricane season.

Of course, there are always variables that could kick in. There is no certainty that we have so fucked with the Gulf and the weather that the one two combination is going to be hammering at our door this year. There is a certainty that, if it isn’t this year, it will be next, or next. For five years we have done nothing but pour more shit into the ocean and more CO2 into the atmosphere, and in between driving the forty miles daily in the SUV, watched scintillating specials on PBS entitled Cheating Housewives on Shrinking Glaciers, or whatever.

It is funny how the news item that beeped a few weeks ago – the one about the extent of damage to the Gulf oil extraction biz from last year’s storm – went into the memory hole. In fact, the U.S. depends on offshore Gulf fields that are right in the storm path – and it isn’t as if it is even possible to build offshore rigs that will resist the kind of damage the Katrinas dish up.

All of which is a roundabout way of getting to today’s topic. LI has a suspicion of those who indulge in flamboyant apocalypses, when apocalypse is a household thing, a matter of humble accidents accumulating before our eyes. The peak oil people have always struck us as way too fevered, but – doing our duty – we have been reading The Empty Tank, by Jeremy Leggett, who is a peak oil person – or as he calls it, a Low Topper, which has a nice erotic ring about it. Of course, we are reading The Empty Tank in intervals between the account of Edmond Dantés imprisonment on the Chateau D’If. The latter is much more riveting.

Still, Leggett’s book does give both a history of the Low Topper movement and the sources of its concern. Basically, the Low and High Toppers aren’t that far apart. The former think that the world’s cheap oil supply will top out this decade, and the latter think it will be in 2030. Leggett makes a good case for mistrusting the BP’s review of oil reserves – the foundation of the orthodoxy – by pointing out that the figures BP is relying on have been mysteriously tweaked by the big oil suppliers – the Saudis, the Kuwaitis – who have upped their estimate of their oil reserves without presenting a lot of evidence that the new, inflated numbers are correct. Leggett’s notion is that we are going to experience the first wave of panic over the low topping point in the next two years, and that this is going to drive some very bad things – including pressure to use coal much more extensively. Coal is a real CO2 menace. In Leggett’s opinion, the hype about using, say, shale oil or tar sands ignores the startling costs of extraction – starting with the enormous energy costs, and including the water use.

The nightmare scenario is that we start to look for really deep sea deposits. The reason this is a nightmare scenario is that we one of the sure ways to end life on this planet is to release enormous volumes of methane underseas – what he calls methane hydrate destabilization. The USGS estimates that there is more than 10,000 billion metric tons of carbon in methane hydrate deposits. And the USGS actually and insanely is optimistic about mining the stuff. As Leggett says: “This despite knowing, presumably, that methane is many times more powerful than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas, molecule for molecule, and that much methane would escape into the atmosphere during any mining process...’ Which is a rather calm way of saying that mining would turn Earth into Venus.

On the other hand, it is unlikely that any company is going to start trying to draw up the methane hydrate, since the expense would simply be too great. Otherwise, of course, the buzzards would be busy doing it.

At the back of any discussion of the depletion of a natural resource is the bet between Paul Ehrlich and Julian Simon, which has become a economists’ myth, to be trotted out whenever an economists meets an environmentalist. Wired, which in the 90s became athe Johnny Appleseed of the techno cargo cult still popular on the right published a pretty good portrait of Simon. This is the wager:

“The battle lines now drawn, it was not long before Ehrlich and Simon met for a duel in the sun. The face-off occurred in the pages of Social Science Quarterly, where Simon challenged Ehrlich to put his money where his mouth was. In response to Ehrlich's published claim that "If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000" - a proposition Simon regarded as too silly to bother with - Simon countered with "a public offer to stake US$10,000 ... on my belief that the cost of non-government-controlled raw materials (including grain and oil) will not rise in the long run."

You could name your own terms: select any raw material you wanted - copper, tin, whatever - and select any date in the future, "any date more than a year away," and Simon would bet that the commodity's price on that date would be lower than what it was at the time of the wager.

"How about it, doomsayers and catastrophists? First come, first served."

In California, Paul Ehrlich stepped right up - and why not? He'd been repeating the Malthusian argument for years; he was sure that things were running out, that resources were getting scarcer - "nearing depletion," as he'd said - and therefore would have to become more expensive. A public wager would be the chance to demonstrate the shrewdness of his forecasts, draw attention to the catastrophic state of the world situation, and, not least, force this Julian Simon character to eat his words. So he jumped at the chance: "I and my colleagues, John P. Holdren (University of California, Berkeley) and John Harte (Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory), jointly accept Simon's astonishing offer before other greedy people jump in."

Ehrlich and his colleagues picked five metals that they thought would undergo big price rises: chromium, copper, nickel, tin, and tungsten. Then, on paper, they bought $200 worth of each, for a total bet of $1,000, using the prices on September 29, 1980, as an index. They designated September 29, 1990, 10 years hence, as the payoff date. If the inflation-adjusted prices of the various metals rose in the interim, Simon would pay Ehrlich the combined difference; if the prices fell, Ehrlich et alia would pay Simon.”

Simon, of course, triumphed. All of those metals went down in price – as did oil. In the 80s and 90s, the boom times were on the back of a primary product glut. Ehrlich reportedly refused to bet again in 1990. Too bad. If he had set the terms at twelve years, he would have cleaned up. And if Simon and Ehrlich were old Dean (k)yK and Qfwfq, it is good money that Qfwfq (Ehrlich) would lose at first and then win. The Simonian libertarians are betting on the bell curve never having a down side. It was Simon’s ghost in 2004 assuring us that the future’s market in petroleum had it wrong – a rare bout of irrationality in the market.

Still, the Simon-Ehrlich bet’s larger story is that one shouldn’t dismiss three hundred years of history like it was yesterday’s garbage. The triumph of technology over scarcity that is the essence of the treadmill of production is not something you can understand the way a biologist can understand, say, the population density of some fish having only its ability to reproduce standing between it and environmental accidents.

dear ayatollah k, we both like sweets...

LI has read many commentaries on the loopy letter sent by Iran’s president, Ahmadinejad. But oddly enough, the last exchange of letters, this time from the American side, is hardly referred to at all. I am talking, of course, of the incomparable mission, undertaken by Bud McFarlane and Oliver North, in May, 1986, to Teheran. Our oh so sane president at the time, Reagan, sent a signed copy of the Bible (sometimes, as we know, Reagan suffered from hallucinations – the Bible signing resulted from the hallucination that he was really Charleton Heston, who, as we know, wrote the Bible) and a cake. I don’t know if Nancy baked the cake. I have a feeling that is one of the things that Nancy didn’t do. Before the trip, North had been advised by Casey to take along some poison pills. You never know, they might not like German Chocolate.

Actually, according to the times, it was a kosher cake:

“On May 25, Mr. McFarlane and his group brought a kosher chocolate cake from Israel for the Iranians in Teheran. In a report back to the White House from Teheran, he interrupted his narrative to describe a watermelon break. At another point, Mr. McFarlane said he distinctly remembered telling President Reagan in the hospital about the arms shipments ''because the President was wearing pajamas.''

And this is the NYT article from January 30, 1987, which should make us all breathe easier about how, well, sane American leaders are compared to those clownish Iranians:

“The White House confirmed today that President Reagan had sent a signed Bible to Iranian leaders.

The confirmation came in remarks by Larry Speakes, the White House spokesman, three months after Iran first disclosed the Bible's existence.
The book, with a signed inscription by Mr. Reagan, was displayed Wednesday at a news conference in Teheran by Iran's Speaker of Parliament, Hojatolislam Hashemi Rafsanjani.

Today Mr. Speakes said the Bible, with Mr. Reagan's signature and the date of Oct. 3, 1986, under a handwritten quotation, had been given by American emissaries to an intermediary in Frankfurt to be passed on to Iranian leaders.

''It was a gesture to indicate that those who were there were truly representing the President, and that the President, too, was a man of God,'' he said.
On Wednesday, after the Teheran news conference, Mr. Speakes said that he knew nothing about the matter and would not ask Mr. Reagan about it.
The existence of the Bible was first disclosed by Hojatolislam Rafsanjani in November. At that time, the Iranian leader said the United States had sent the Bible and a cake shaped like a key, reportedly in an allusion to the possible opening of relations.

The Iranian leader spoke after a Beirut magazine had revealed the secret sale of arms to Iran by reporting a trip to Teheran by Robert C. McFarlane, former national security adviser.

After the disclosure, Mr. Reagan said on television on Nov. 13, ''Don't believe all these wild stories.''

Today Mr. Speakes said the handwritten passage in the Bible, from Galatians, had been suggested to Mr. Reagan by Vice Adm. John M. Poindexter, then the national security adviser.
The White House spokesman said details about the Bible had been uncovered in a review of documents left by Admiral Poindexter and his aide, Lieut. Col. Oliver L. North. Mr. Speakes said that Colonel North was almost certainly the emissary at the Frankfurt meeting, which occurred a few days after Mr. Reagan had signed the Bible. Mr. Speakes said he did not know the identity of the Iranian intermediary.
According to Mr. Speakes, the sending of a signed Bible had been suggested by Colonel North ''because there had been discussions about the common religious heritage that existed between Moslem and Christian and Jewish religions.''
The handwritten quotation read: ''And the Scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, preached the gospel beforehand to Abraham, saying, 'All the nations shall be blessed in you.' Galatians 3:8. Ronald Reagan. Oct 3, 1986.''
When Mr. Speakes was asked why he had not acknowledged the Bible episode in the first place, he said the White House wanted to be sure of its facts.”

hot air and circumstances

Harper’s has a review of some recent Churchill books. Churchill has become the bloated Macy’s balloon of the neo-con legions. In some ways that is appropriate: the neo-cons are invariably attracted to frauds and swindlers (re the Chalabi romance) and Churchill was often fraudulent. The funniest thing about the review is the raking over of Churchill’s sham Augustan prose – as Evelyn Waugh labeled it. In the fifties, Churchill’s history of the Second World War was received with awe – one reviewer speaks of the hush of greatness – but in actuality, this was committee work on a scale that would have embarrassed Dumas:

“In fact, Churchill had long used ghostwriters. He was paid enormous sums by newspapers and there was nothing he wouldn't stoop to if the money was right, in a way that a professional journalist must find endearing. At one point in the 1930s, he wrote a series of "Great Stories of the World Retold," potted versions of everything from The Count of Monte Cristo to Uncle Tom's Cabin-except that "wrote" meant he would farm out the actual work to someone like Sir Edward Marsh, his sometime private secretary and a fastidious man of letters, who would be paid rather less than 10 percent of Churchill's fee. Since Churchill collected the modern equivalent of $17,500 for each piece and Marsh received $1,300, everyone was happy.

With The Second World War, this principle operated on a far larger scale. The Syndicate, as Churchill's team of researchers and writers was called, was headed by William Deakin, an Oxford don who had been Churchill's wartime emissary to Tito (Deakin died in great old age in January of last year), and Sir Henry Pownall, a former senior army officer. They would draft whole chapters, using the first person, to which Churchill would then apply his finishing touches, some in that shamAugustan prose, some inimitable-whether it's the laconic ending that marks the departure from London in 1938 of the German ambassador, "This was the last time I saw Herr von Ribbentrop before he was hanged," or the delightful admission, "All I wanted was compliance with my wishes after a reasonable period of discussion." No member of the Syndicate could have written those.

Nor would they have contributed the tendentious slant. ... many more pages are devoted to the North African campaign than to the Eastern Front, where the Germans had about fifty times as many divisions engaged and where the war against the Third Reich was in reality decided. The treatment of the other great and historically decisive conflict of 1941-45, between the United States and Japan, is just as cursory, and secondhand at that.

This also led to a most embarrassing charge of plagiarism. The cursory account of the Pacific war was cobbled together by the Syndicate; Churchill scarcely looked at it. When the eminent American historian Samuel Eliot Morison, who had written the classic History of United States Naval Operations in World War II, read these chapters he felt "a keen sense of déjà vu and then mounting indignation" at the wholesale purloining of his work. But he did not want to be seen taking the great hero to court, and the matter was smoothed over with the addition of a fulsome tribute to Morison's work.”

Geoffrey Wheatcroft, the reviewer, also quotes a moving tribute to Neville Chamberlain, who – in the cartoon version of history beloved by conservatives – gets to play to appeasing wimp compared to Churchill’s Cato like warnings about Nazi Germany (although, alas, I don’t think such warnings were supposed to allow Britain to intervene on the Republican side in Spain. That, after all, would be premature anti-Fascism). Appeasement, we are meant to think, is always the same – it is always a Hitler being appeased. Hitlers are, in reality, extremely rare. Most nations that have suffered losses in the millions in a war are not eager to start new ones. Stalin, as much of a murdering tyrant as Hitler ever was, tried to keep the Soviet Union out of any major war -- and failed. He tried to keep the Soviet Union out of a major war because he remembered vividly World War I. At the end of which, as you will recall, Russia's supreme leader, the Czar, was shot in a basement. In fact, the implausibility of the here a Hitler, there a Hitler stance of the pro-war party in this country would be funny, if it weren't so utterly successful as a propaganda ploy. Here’s what Churchill said at Chamberlain’s funeral:
“It is not given to human beings, happily for them for otherwise life would be intolerable, to foresee or to predict to any large extent the unfolding course of events. In one phase men seem to have been right, in another they seem to have been wrong. Then again, a few years later, when the perspective of time has lengthened, all stands in a different setting. There is a new proportion. There is another scale of values. History with its flickering lamp stumbles along the trail of the past, trying to reconstruct its scenes, to revive its echoes, and kindle with pale gleams the passions of former days.

...It fell to Neville Chamberlain in one of the supreme crises of the world to be contradicted by events, to be disappointed in his hopes, and to be deceived and cheated by a wicked man. But what were these hopes in which he was disappointed? What were these wishes in which he was frustrated? What was the faith that was abused? They were surely among the most noble and benevolent instincts of the human heart-the love of peace, the toil for peace, the strife for peace, the pursuit of peace, even at great peril and certainly to the utter disdain of popularity or clamour.”

The sham Augustan is certainly there, but Churchill’s judgment of the Chamberlain’s motives is surely just. And the idea that the most highly armed and dangerous nation in the world, the U.S., which spends a trillion dollars on the military every three or four years, is in any danger of falling into appeasing anybody (instead of finding outlets for its addiction to the political economy of war) is one of the funnier delusions of our time.

Louisiana is us

Looking back over LI’s life (smoking opium and sitting in my cork lined room), there is one political book that stands out for us, still. A book that forever changed the way we thought about politics. The book is Cadillac Desert. Marc Reisner abjured parts of the book before he died, but this piece in 2000 drastically condenses the case against the way in which the treadmill of production has changed the environmental interaction between water and the land in the last century. It includes this passage:

“The socio-economic benefits of water development are undeniable. Even environmentalists acknowledge them. The problems created by water development are still under-valued, and they will get worse. Here, in a nutshell, are some of the big ones:
• the sedimentation of reservoirs on which millions of people have come to depend;
• the ruin, through salt build-up, of millions of acres of once-fertile soil;
• the creation of cities in deserts where they arguably shouldn't exist, and then their vulnerability to earthquakes, which can destroy aqueducts and cause dams to collapse;
• the stoppage of river-borne sediment and the erosion of river deltas and ocean shorelines;
• the disappearance of world treasures like the Aral Sea in Russia and Tulare Lake in California, as the rivers that fed them are diverted elsewhere;
• the collapse of great fish habitats, like the Caspian Sea's sturgeon and the Great Lakes' lake trout;
• the insidious bio-accumulation of methylated mercury in water, fish, and ultimately humans;
• the displacement of millions of people from fertile river valleys;
• the rampant deforestation that accompanies most dam projects in rainforest zones.

Solving a problem as complex, immense, and expensive as this will be difficult. We cannot do so without sealing up the oil corridor channels, taking down the Missouri River dams, and breaching the levees — at least south of New Orleans. The economic and social repercussions would be awesome. But the economic and social repercussions of doing nothing are also awesome. For the next three or four decades, until the Gulf of Mexico is at New Orleans' door and the tidal surge from a Category 5 hurricane threatens to put that city twenty feet under water, we can shove this dilemma onto our children and grandchildren.”

‘Our,’ there, is an honorific, and as we have seen in New Orleans, our grandchildren get the tender attentions of government financed private companies restoring and rebuilding, while their children, all that their, are displaced, harried, intentionally dispirited, and made into prison fodder to serve the patho-industries that give so generously to the government, and have that eternal source of free advertising, the evening news, to keep processing all that theirness -- a distant, profitable offshoot of the slave trade.

However, segmenting the class and race issues here from the environmental issues blinds us to the essentially connectedness of all these issues. The dying of the Louisiana coast -- and the probability that hurricanes will be striking there again, hard – would seem to have been raised by Katrina – but to raise issues like this, which strike at the dysfunction of the system, is to get uncomfortably close to a true apocalypse, when false apocalypses are much more entertaining. That is why, after all, the latter exist.

Michael Greenwald’s article in the Post Sunday section is a long, depressing read – and funny enough, it too goes back to 2000. LI – as we have smugly noted before – also wrote an article about the Mississippi system and the disaster that was coming in 2000. Our article was about this odd gap in the presidential race – neither Gore, nor Bush, nor Nader seemed to care about a very predictable natural disaster that was looming, and that was aggravated by the limits on engineering a river – a limit that is now entering, I imagine, its final testing stage. There is no one central problem with the Mississippi and the Gulf interaction, but many of the problems do radiate out from the fact that, if it were not for fifty years of engineering, the Mississippi would by now have turned into the bed of the Atchafalaya River.

However, let’s not go there. The Greenwald piece slams the Corps of Engineers. And it raises the question: why is the Corps of Engineers unsinkable?
“In 2000, when I was writing a 50,000-word Washington Post series about dysfunction at the Army Corps of Engineers, I highlighted a $65 million flood-control project in Missouri as Exhibit A. Corps documents showed that the project would drain more acres of wetlands than all U.S. developers do in a typical year, but wouldn't stop flooding in the town it was meant to protect. FEMA's director called it "a crazy idea"; the Fish and Wildlife Service's regional director called it "absolutely ridiculous."
Six years later, the project hasn't changed -- except for its cost, which has soared to $112 million. Larry Prather, chief of legislative management for the Corps, privately described it in a 2002 e-mail as an "economic dud with huge environmental consequences." Another Corps official called it "a bad project. Period." But the Corps still wants to build it.”
The Corps, as Reisner shows in great detail, has never been stopped by a bad project. In fact, due to changes made by Reagan in the way the Corps operates, the Corps can’t even tell a bad project from a good one – it is hemmed in by law from studying the safety effect of its projects on people, or from considering environmental impacts. Reagan had good reason to like the Corps – while the story of the 1980 election is all about how conservatives won, in actual fact, Reagan’s wins in the West came from his opposition to Carter’s retrenchment of government water projects. Conservatism did not, at some golden period, mean smaller government – it meant, and it will always mean, government-business interactions to exploit the working class. Period. If politics were a gemstone, that is the facet that the jeweler would carve too – only clumsy jewelers think that politics is about big or small government. In the same way that Reagan’s anti-communism certainly accommodated ending grain embargoes on the Soviets, his small government ethos was mitigated by his knowledge that agribusinesses weren’t going to be shoveling money into his campaign if he really left the land and water to self-organize.

But this is simply to cavil at Greenwald’s claim that all presidents have tried to control the Corps.

The bulk of the article is about the Corps systematic, and encouraged, hydrological malfeasance around New Orleans:

“After Hurricane Betsy in 1965, the Corps also began building levees to protect the city from the Gulf of Mexico, but its misguided plan led to even more destruction during Katrina. The Corps put most of its levees around undeveloped and highly vulnerable floodplains instead of focusing on protection for existing developments -- partly because Corps cost-benefit analyses did not consider the cost of human life or environmental degradation, and partly because powerful developers owned swampland in those vulnerable floodplains. Katrina destroyed many of the houses built on those former swamplands.

The Louisiana delegation and the Corps also deserve blame for the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, an alternative shipping route to the Port of New Orleans. The outlet was always popular with port officials and a few shipping executives, but it destroyed more than 20,000 acres of wetlands, created a "hurricane superhighway" into the city and never attracted much traffic. Now computer models suggest it amplified Katrina's surge by two feet.

And the outlet was only the most destructive of the pork projects the Corps has been building in Louisiana when it should have been upgrading levees and pursuing its plan to restore the state's coastal wetlands. In 2000, I described how the Corps had spent $2 billion wrestling the wild Red River into a slack-water barge channel that wasn't being used by any barges; four of its dams had been named for Louisiana members of Congress, and the entire channel had been named for former Louisiana senator J. Bennett Johnston (D). The Corps was also spending $750 million to build a lock that was supposedly needed to accommodate increasing barge traffic on the New Orleans Industrial Canal -- even though barge traffic was steadily decreasing. The Corps spent $1.9 billion in Louisiana in the five years before Katrina, more than it spent in any other state. But all that money didn't keep New Orleans dry.”

Having lived on both the Red River (Shreveport) and the Mississippi (New Orleans), I find this more than usually interesting. There are a number of converging factors here that aren’t mentioned by Greenwald, however. One is that the channeling of the Mississippi naturally increases the force of its flow. Plus, the Corps is dedicated to desilting the river. The result is that it has been tunneling its riverbead as it goes below New Orleans. This, in turn, has an effect on one of the peculiarities of the Louisiana coast. The coast is made up of what are, in effects, huge blocks of mud. There are heated debates about the blockiness – is this natural, or is it the result of the numberless channels cut and never backfilled by the petro companies? In any case, for shipping purposes, the river is being kept from its delta creating function. And if delta isn’t created, land starts slipping into the Gulf. But this isn’t the only factor. One that I have no scientific backup for – an LI speculative special – has to do with the dead zones created in the Gulf by the delivery of massive amounts of fertilizer, pesticides and other pollutants by the river. It has become a sort of pipeline delivering these things to the Gulf, and the Gulf, in turn, develops huge areas of hypoxia. Oxygenless water, in which living things like fish die. It is the kind of thing that has turned the Black Sea into a gigantic, mostly lifeless area. The Gulf is more than due for a prolonged period in which hypoxia simply becomes permanent:

“Instead of getting better, the Gulf's dead zone could quickly get a lot worse, says Scavia. "There comes a time when the fisheries collapse," he says. Not only will commercial harvests plummet, but fish and shrimp reproduction will also drop off. In some cases, a commercially popular fish might completely disappear.
Unfortunately, he says, no one knows how close the Gulf is to that point. It might take a year, or it could take 2 decades. The problem, Scavia notes, is that once a hypoxia-fostered collapse starts, "it happens fast" and can be devilishly hard to reverse.”

Here's the speculative part. The dead zone is interesting insofar as its seems to correlate with another fact about the Gulf – although whether there is a mutually causative relationship is not for LI to determine: the water surface temperatures in the Gulf are rising. And that rise in the surface temperature feeds the storm cycle.
All of which is to point out that the treadmill of production is paralleled by another interconnected system – a geographic and planetary one. To keep the former going, in Louisiana, means trying to differ the consequences on the ecological system. This is where the Corps becomes the pointmen for our blindness about these processes. Their job is to extend that blindness a little more. Build more levies on the Mississippi, concentrating the water flow even more. Keep dredging the silt, which causes more land to salinate and flood. Keep the irrigation system going that delivers the pollutants to the river, from which they can be deposited into the Gulf, where they can enlarge the killing zones.

To paraphrase Martin Niemoller -- first they came for the crabs, but I figured, fuck em. Then they came for the rivers, and I figured, fuck em again. Then they hunted the life out of the oceans and made them into toilets, and I figured, fuck em again if they can't take a joke. And then the seas and the winds rose and the dead zone became human. And a little voice in the wind said: fuck em.