Thank you, Senator Hagel

Our relationship with Israel is a special and historic one," Hagel said. "But it need not and cannot be at the expense of our Arab and Muslim relationships. That is an irresponsible and dangerous false choice."

"How do we realistically believe," Hagel said, "that a continuation of the systematic destruction of an American friend, the country and people of Lebanon, is going to enhance America's image and give us the trust and credibility to lead a lasting and sustained peace effort in the Middle East?"

He called the showdown in Lebanon between Israel and the Iran-backed Hezbollah guerrillas "sickening slaughter on both sides."

"President Bush must call for an immediate cease-fire," Hagel said. "This madness must stop." - Dow Jones News Service.

One should note that the media approved word about the Middle East is 'solution'. An old, conservative tradition says: there are no solutions in human affairs. LI doesn't think that is completely right, but certainly one should use the word with caution. There is no solution in the Middle East. There are better and worse states of affairs, there. The worst was the eighties. Bush, in his insanity, presumption and ignorance is doing all he can to top that bloody decade.

I am still opposed to impeaching the man -- I want him scorched into the memory of this country, this representative of the low and the cretinous. I want Bush branded on Uncle Sam's behind. But I am beginning to think, hmm, maybe the world can't afford two more years of Bush. Maybe he will have to be impeached, for gross incompetence.

LI's adventures in the world

The writers LI admires most are scourgers of mankind – Swift, Marx in his political mode, Nietzsche, Kraus, etc., etc. Alas, though we nourish misanthropy in our bosom, hoping to become like them, when we are released into a crowd situation we become as unselectively friendly as a beagle.

So, I went and moderated this panel last night at the Bob Bullock museum. The crowd was sparse, unfortunately. But I loved it that anybody came out at all.

It has been a while since I addressed a number of people, and I was a little nervous. That soon passed. I will not bore you with the play by play of the three panelists and me. One of the panelists, Jim Haley, the historian, is an acquaintance.

The unexpected part of the whole thing, for me, was Ms. Denise McVea. She’s written a controversial book (if you are a Texan) about Emily West de Zavala. E.W.d.Z was the wife of the first vice president of the Texas Republic. Her slave, according to legend, amorously dallied with Santa Ana on the morning of the battle of San Jacinto, thus giving our Texas boys a fatal advantage as we routed the Mex. Our Delilah. McVea’s thesis is that this story is an distorted version of a suppressed fact – that Mrs Zavala was herself black, and possibly had been employed, before she met de Zavala, as a courtisan. This thesis has created a small storm – the Republic of Texas still has a space in the hearts of some of the men and women throughout the state who have never taken kindly to miscegenation, integration, and uppityness. I wish to God that I was caricaturing. I’m not. Denise turned out to be such an absolute doll, and in the Q and A she displayed no countering scorn for her detractors, who are the type to sling all kinds of your usual blog comment insults. Instead, she was the height of … well, dignity is an insufficient word. There is a sort of solemnity that accrues around a person who has a scholarly object that has absorbed her world, and when that solemnity is exposed to the light of the public response, it has a disarmed smile. It is a smile that continues even as the response to one’s researches seem, for mysterious reasons, to have provoked every jerkwater idiot within reach of a keypad to pen some dull and insulting opinion that goes straight for the genitalia or skin color. The serenity of the smile of reason in the storm of unreason stands out, like some broken marble column from a better age, around which spreads the ragged ass tents of a barbarian encampment. So Denise said that she found the response … interesting. Shockingly interesting. Such perfect poise – I was blown away.

Then it was out with a friend to get a couple of drinks on sixth street. Apparently, some convention of largeheaded bald men was happening in the city. A bouncer convention or something, since men with huge shaven heads were parading up and down the street. It looked like a loopy MTV video. And so, as Pepys would say, with some margaritas swimming in my belly, to bed.

thanks!

LI is such a putz sometimes. We meant to put this in post form yesterday. We want to give a big shout out of thanks to the Anonymous donor who helped us pay the electric bill. This is a bottom of our heart thank you. You don't know how hair thin our escapes have been this summer.

And so... onward towards the Writers' Braggin' panel tonight! Wish me luck.

Bela Tarr

Taking advice from our reader, Amie, LI went out and rented Damnation, the Bela Tarr film, the other day. We’ve watched it twice. …

I’m a reviewer of books, not film. I don’t know how to approach the medium. But let’s say something about Damnation anyway. Or one sequence. The sequence begins in a torrential rain – the rain beats down upon the coal mining city where the film is located, with few let ups, all through the film. You see the lights – this is a b&w film -- announcing the Titanik Bar. A car pulls up. A man gets out of it. We see all this from a camera that is mounted just behind the back of another man’s head, which looms in the shadows of the foreground. The camera is watching the bar at approximately his angle. Then the camera goes into the bar. In Goodfellas and Mean Streets, Scorcese made going into a bar or club a virtuoso fugue for camera, fluidly moving into the Copacabana (I think it was, in Goodfellas) through the kitchen and out into the show area with the faces of the people in the kitchen, first, and then the lit tables in the dark all turning to greet Henry and his date, and Henry greeting or stuffing money into the pockets of waiters and busboys. It was a perfect reflection of the giddiness of Henry’s date, but in its uninterrupted flow it stitches that giddiness into a larger glamour - Scorcese's camera seems to be making a liquid dive into the 'night' part of the nightclub, Peggy Lee's night, downtown. Tarr is so different. His camera is infinitely slow, and it will advance by millimeters on some completely trivial detail. There is a sequence, a really great sequence, later on, when the camera just shows a concrete wall sluiced by rainwater for almost two minutes. Going into the Titanik, we slowly go around, examining the patrons, who are often in odd angles and seemingly stunned. The camera has an ancient slowness – it is like an old man carefully examining his surroundings. The patrons and the bus people are like Brueghel’s peasants after the Industrial revolution and two world wars – they work in filth and rain, and outside of work they search for oblivion, escape from all thought, sprawled in stupor in chairs in the corners. We see them, at various moments, throughout the film, until we reach a sequence at the end of the film showing a dance that becomes a collective, linked arm dance, in which the stupor is completely cast off. A man – probably the lover, a man we have seen at the beginning of the film – has his hands over his face. And then the music begins. A deathly slow camera approach to the singer, a blonde woman with a big face, who holds the mike with one hand and holds a cigarette in the other – against which she is also leaning her head. She wears a cheap, crumpled black vinyl raincoat, and her big eyes with the big fake eyelashes are closed. She croons a love song that repeats variations on “its over/there’s no end, no end now.” At one point she does open her eyes, the song goes into a sort of small speaking chant – “he has the upper hand/without him life is barren” – then closes her eyes, and finishes the song. Not only her lover is gone, but he has taken her life. She really does seem to be at the lowest point, that point at which a person realizes that there actually is no lowest point, and that hell is simply an accurate representation of the human nervous system, with its infinite capacity for new and different shades of pain and its limited, even stunted, capacity for pleasure. Bottomless hells, sentimental heavens. The singers thin, exquisite voice – only exquisite in this one sequence, otherwise we only hear her harsh voice, talking, or her angry screams, in future sequences – seems to be trying to strip off not only the tatters of a superficial individual dignity which, offered to her lover, is weighed by him and found wanting, (as though it were the fatal law of the economy of love that the gift offered by the lover loses, in the moment of its surrender, the only value it ever had, which is precisely that it would never be offered) but the tattered dignity of the whole system, the filthy bars, eternal coal mine, the cheap clothes, the wretched faces that have been pounded by the years and years of futile labor.

Now, I am a huge fan of torch singing in movies. Obviously Tarr’s reference point is not Scorcese, but the Blue Angel. Just as that movie ends with Lola’s (Marlene Dietrich’s) lover doing an imitation of a cock crowing, Damnation ends with the lover doing an imitation of a dog. Everything is prefigured in the sequence that shows the song. The Barthesian question is: why do I want to see this sequence over and over?

the tora bora conspiracy

"Osama bin Laden turned Blackwater into what it is today," Clark said. – Virginia Pilot, series on Blackwater, the mercenary company, July 24, 2006

In one of his weirder essays, “Secret Societies,” De Quincey claimed that at the age of seven (an important age for de Quincey – the age when his father died, and the age when he started dreaming vividly), he was introduced to the literature on secret societies – specifically, the dreaded Illuminati – by a thirty four year old woman. She loaned him Abbe Barruel’s Memoires pour servir a l’histoire du Jamcobinisme, a book that recounted the “dark associations” of a vast society organized to over throw Christianity. De Quincey was particularly – or perhaps morbidly – fascinated by Barruel’s use of a disease metaphor that has perennially clung to the conspiracy discourse

“I had already Latin enough to know that cancer meant a crab; and that the disease so appalling to a child’s imagination, which in English we call a cancer, asoon as it has passed beyond the state of an indolent scirrhous tumour, drew its name from the horrid claws, or spurs, or roots, by which it connected itself with distant points running underground, as it were, baffling detection, and defying radical extirpation.”

De Quincey, at seven, asks the right questions: ‘Then, also, when wickedness was so easy, why did people take all this trouble to be wicked? The how and the why were alike incomprehensible to me.”

“The mysteriousness to me of men becoming partners (and by no means sleeping partners) in a society of which they had never heard, - or, again, of one fellow standing at the beginning of a century, and stretching out his hand as an accomplice towards another fellow standing at the end of it, without either having known of the other’s existence, -- all that did but sharpen the interest of wonder that gathered about the general economy of Secret Societies. Tertullian’s profession of believing things, not in spite of being impossible, but simply because they were impossible, is not the extravagance that most people suppose it. There is a deep truth in it. Many are the things which, in proportion as they attract the highest modes of belief, discover a tendency to repel belief on that part of the scale which is governed by the lower understanding. And here, as so often elsewhere, the axiom with respect to extremes meeting manifests its subtle presence. The highest form of the incredible is sometimes the initial form of the credible.”

Albert Pionke, in Plots of Opportunity, his study of conspiracy literature in Victorian England, highlights the notion of a general economy of secret societies – the phrase being marked, for the literatus, by Bataille’s notion of general economy. But LI loves those last two sentences – English eccentricity finding its metaphysics.

Myself, I take a literary interest in conspiracies. I’ve noticed, however, much talk about conspiracy theory lately on the blogs, including a post on Charlotte Street contrasting conspiracy theory and incompetence. I think Mark Kaplan is responding to the conspiracy theories that still revolve around 9/11. In fact, there are nothing but conspiracy theories that revolve around 9/11. The orthodox view, which I share, is that the 9/11 attack was the result of a conspiracy devised by the leadership of Al Qaeda. Other theories finger other devisers of the attack – none of those theories seem to me to be convincing on any level. De Quincey’s question to the woman who gave him Barruel’s book was, why are the illuminati conspiring to overthrow Christianity? Her response was that then they could commit all kinds of wickedness, to which the wise child replied, but they could commit all kinds of wickedness anyway.

On the other hand, I have nursed my own conspiracy theory about another incident in the “war on terror … ttt-terrorism… ttt-terrorists.” In fact, I am very surprised that this incident has attracted so little attention. Perhaps it is because the Lefty side that opposes Bush has such ambiguous feelings about the Afghanistan war that it doesn't want to investigate what it means to leave a terrorist group on tap. I’m talking, of course, about the battle of Tora Bora, and the escape of Bin Laden into Pakistan.

Here is an instance, I think, when incompetence and conspiracy are two faces of the same coin. What really happened at Tora Bora has been reported, as most of the fuck-ups of the non-war have been reported, long after it really happened. To disarm the news, simply delay it for enough years that people don’t care any more – that does seem to be the strategy of the Big Fix in D.C., and it certainly works on the journalists. None of them, so far, have taken the hint from Suskind about Bush’s meeting with the CIA in August, 2001 and deepened it, so we still don’t know have a complete sense of our unpreparedness due, almost uniquely, to the apathy of the reigning potentate.

Anyway, I recently came across Army Times reporter Sean Naylor’s account of the battle. According to Naylor, the incompetence factor (although he doesn’t put it so bluntly) can be laid at the feet of General “Kick me in the ass” Franks, who operated in our heroic Afghanistan war as a conduit for the senilities of Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld, of course, didn’t want the Afghanistan war to involve regular troops, on the theory that that is where the Russians went wrong. No, we’d used bombing and our super duper special forces – initial decisions that we are paying for today. Anyway, the American force that approached Tora Bora at the end of November, 2001 was extremely small, and depended on Afghan allies that were busy feuding with each other. According to Naylor, as the siege proceeded, the Air Force flew over the twenty mile passage between Tora Bora and Pakistan and recorded “hot spots” on their heat sensing equipment. Now, CENTCOM, unbelievably, had never considered the possibility that Al Qaeda’s forces could escape from Tora Bora – thus, there were no guards on the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. But the hot spot data did provoke some consultation:

“The Generals in Kuwait recommend[ed] bombing the positions as soon as possible. But Franks [who, you will recall, bravely lead our heroic troops from a boat in Florida] and his staff did not see it like that. “They might be shepherds,” was Control Command’s attitude, according to two officers who sat in on the video-teleconferences in which the matter was discussed. At CFLCC that theory didn’t wash. The idea that scores of shepherds were tending to their flocks at 10,000 feet in the middle of winter was implausible.”

Implausible is a kindly word. Let’s recall what was happening back at the scene in Tora Bora. This is from the NYT Magazine’s rather thorough article about it in 2005:

“The American bombardment of Tora Bora, which had been going on for a month, yielded to saturation airstrikes on Nov. 30 in anticipation of the ground war. Hundreds of civilians died that weekend, along with a number of Afghan fighters, according to Hajji Zaman, who had already dispatched tribal elders from the region to plead with bin Laden's commanders to abandon Tora Bora.” – Mary Ann Weaver, NYT, 9/11/05

Recall, also, that at the time Franks was displaying this untoward shepherdophilia, the U.S. was accepting payment from the Northern alliance in captives gathered at random – the camel driver, the Avon salesman, the cab driver – and subjecting them to the waterboarding, beatings, and sometimes murder that they obviously richly deserved.

So if it wasn’t kindness that drove Franks, what could it be? Well, LI’s search for a theory would begin by asking who would gain an advantage by a stripped down force of Al Qaeda escaping to Pakistan. Hmm. Well, they would provide a ready reminder of “terror” if there were people in the military and in the White House who intended to use the 9/11 attack to provoke, for purely political reasons, further wars that would aggrandize their shaky political position and – oh joy – unleash the fruits of the war culture, giving the government an excuse to spend hundreds of billions of dollars, especially in the Red States, and sweetening the retirement of every general who went along.

The problem with this theory is that it implies that the White House is full of cretinous, treasonous creatures who would flush the interests of the country down the toilet if it gave them an extra meal or two at Signatures restaurant.

Hmmm.

In any case, how nice and thoughtful of OBL to be around, and popping out whenever needed, at the small cost of a few collateral deaths in Casablanca, London, and Madrid.

One of the very grateful people should be the founder of Blackwater, the mercenary company. The Virginia Pilot’s JOANNE KIMBERLIN AND BILL SIZEMORE have written a six piece series on that company. Here are highlights from different articles in the series.

“Blackwater wants all doors open. The company says it has more than two dozen projects under way, an almost dizzying pursuit of new frontiers.

“Among them:

-- In addition to its ongoing assignments guarding American officials and facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan, Blackwater has won contracts to combat the booming opium trade in Afghanistan and to support a SEAL-like maritime commando force in Azerbaijan, an oil-rich former Soviet republic.

-- On the home front, Hurricane Katrina's $73 million purse has persuaded Blackwater officials to position themselves as the go-to guys for natural disasters. Operating licenses are being applied for in every coastal state of the country. Governors are being given the pitch, including California's Arnold Schwarzenegger, whom a Blackwater official recently visited to discuss earthquake response.

"We want to make sure they're aware of who we are and what we can bring to the table," said Seamus Flatley, deputy director of Blackwater's new domestic operations division. "We want to get out ahead of it."

-- Last year, the company opened offices in Baghdad and Amman, Jordan. More recent expansion plans call for a Blackwater West in Southern California and a jungle training facility at the former Subic Bay naval base in the Philippines.”

From the first article:

“The company had spent its first three years struggling for an identity, paying staff with an executive's credit card and begging for customers.

"But in 2000, in the fallout from the terrorist attack on the destroyer Cole, Blackwater found its future: providing security in an increasingly insecure world.

"There is nothing humble about the company today. In March, Fast Company business magazine, under the heading "Private Army," named Blackwater President Gary Jackson No. 11 in its annual "Fast 50" list of leaders who are "writing the history of the next 10 years." It made special note of the company's estimated 600 percent revenue growth between 2002 and 2005.

Blackwater has rocketed from obscurity to the big time in less than a decade. Peter Singer, author of "Corporate Warriors" and a scholar at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank, says that although Blackwater might not be the biggest player in the private military industry, "they've certainly gained the biggest profile."”

“While the company had struggled early on, its timing was excellent. Several forces had created a perfect storm for the rise of the private military industry.

"Instead of peace, the end of the Cold War created a power vacuum and a chaotic world order, putting millions of former soldiers out on the market. At the same time, there was a growing trend toward privatization of government functions. The result: a $100 billion-a-year global business.”

Ah, all the disgusting details. Definitely check out these articles at the Virginia Pilot’s site. Yes, who did benefit from OBL’s escape? Hint – it wasn’t shepherds.

stuff about lebanon, israel, and why the washington post editorial page is to laugh

LI must confess that we haven’t been doing the rounds of the blogs lately. We go to the news, and wonder how to make comments that are at all equal to the task – watching the rightwing in Israel, which has grown in tandem with the right wing in the U.S., commit the kind of crimes and blunders that are so characteristic of the Bush era, is painful to watch – more painful, I imagine, if you are watching from under the burning wheels of a van struck by an Israeli bomb, after the kindly dropping of pamphlets to tell you that Israel is going to violate the sovereignty of Lebanon and destroy all you possess, so flee down the road. Then we go to our new secret vice, the Google Book search. We look at Walter Savage Landor, or Ruskin’s Praeterita, instead of looking at Atrios, or Crooked Timber.

So: the best opinion piece about Israel/America’s war against Lebanon is, surprisingly, an op ed on the NYT: The Tribes of War by Abbas El Zein. He does a coldly angry rundown of Israel’s last war with Lebanon – the dead, which number more than the richly valued, much reported Israeli dead over the past fifty years – the Israeli insouciance about national boundaries, about proportional force, etc., etc.

El Zein begins with a faux pas – the story of how Israeli planes murdered his grandmother. Please, we can hear the letters now, how about the suicide bomber who blew up my aunt? Those are the polite ones. The others will be of the LGF/Washington Post editorial kind, where the blood is never washed out of the mouth. Even though, curiously, it is proxy blood – no rightwing yahoo in his right mind is going to be fighting in this war, or any other, but some will make brave little tourist trips, like Michael Totten, to assure the lobotomized at home that democracy is our cause, and the people are with us! Except the 90 some percent, the extermination fodder. Of course, the exterminated, nowadays, have something to say about their extermination. Ambushes and nuclear weaponry seem to be on the rise. Globalization, you know. First you get the mcdonalds, then you get the nuclear tipped missile.

El Zein:
“When the civil war in Lebanon ended, in 1990, we took a while to believe it. It could restart at any time, an inner voice told us. A few years later, peace became the norm. Everyone believed in it and belief made it more real. We never suspected that, years later, our original skepticism would be cruelly validated, and the fragility of collective sanity in the Middle East would be exposed once again.
The estimated death toll from the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon was 18,000, about 0.5 percent of the population. Twenty-four years later, I have yet to hear any sign of remorse emanating from Israeli society. Nor were there any reparations for the carnage wrought by the Israeli Army. When the Israeli press, politicians and intellectuals speak with regret about the ''Lebanon War,'' it is usually to say the cost to Israel was too high or to point out that the invasion failed to achieve its objectives. The Lebanese fatalities are rarely discussed.
A joke went around during the civil war that it was safer to be a target of the Israeli warplanes than to be exposed to the ineffectual anti-aircraft fire directed against them. Lebanese bullets seemed certain to hit you if you fled, whereas if you stayed put, the Israeli missiles would probably land in your neighbor's house, not yours.
Since then, air strikes have grown more precise and the Israeli Air Force appears to have expanded its range: planes now target your neighbor's house and your own. Recent images from Lebanon are chillingly familiar -- fathers watching their children die, mothers expiring in children's laps. Dozens of stories like my grandmother's are being re-enacted. Dozens of new graves are being dug.”

I would contrast this with something from the WAPO editorial page, but I don’t have the proxy poxy heart at the moment. The Washington Post has been a good crusader for years, and the El Zein’s of the world aren’t worth a good Georgetown chuckle – how could the plaints of the barbarians even be heard when you are a D.C. mover and shaker, privileged perhaps, to lunch with Charles Krauthammer himself on oysters, martinis and rabies medicine?

For laughs, however, I recommend reading Peter Baker’s analysis, a GOP sob story written as though by a high school YAF member about Bush’s bounce and why the third coming of the Crawford messiah has been delayed. A shame too, for, as Baker observes often in the piece, the President needs to rally the world – for instance, against Iran. The president has successfully created rallies in many parts of the world, at least that part is true. But Baker, being a dimwit (imagine a writer who makes Adam Nagourney look like A.J. Liebling), is in many ways a good reporter to read – the childish superhero motif isn’t hidden in his prose, but comes right to the surface. These people think like ten year old boys. Alas, they are equipped with real thermonuclear weapons.

rwg communications

He was a shiftless person, roving and magotieheaded, and sometimes little better than crased. – Anthony a Woods on John Aubrey.

LI is jonesing due to lack of customers for his ‘umble writing services. Unlike Tom Taylor the Water Poet, who liked to take trips without carrying a single pence in his pocket and see who’d put him up for the betterment of all mankind and the sweet English language, LI has so far not convinced Austin power to contribute to the deathless tradition of literature. So, we’re going to advertise two things today. One is the writing service, about which we’ve written a new flyer. And the other is this gig we are doing Sunday.

First the gig, for which this is the official flyer:





PRESS RELEASE

July 26, 2006
Contact: Robert Hicks (512) 936-4600,
robert.hicks@TheStoryofTexas.com

TEXAS AUTHORS SHARE THEIR PASSIONS AT
WRITER'S BRAGGIN' RIGHTS AT
THE BOB BULLOCK TEXAS STATE HISTORY MUSEUM
ON SUNDAY, JULY 30


What: Writer's Braggin' Rights
When: Sunday July 30, 7 - 9 pm
Where: Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum, Texas Spirit Theater
Admission: Free; reservations required
Public Contact: (512) 936-4649 for reservations

Austin, TX -- Visitors to the Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum will find that there's no lack of braggin' when it comes to writing about the Lone Star State. On Sunday July 30th from 7-9 pm in the Texas Spirit Theater, visitors are invited to a free program called Writer's Braggin' Rights where Texas authors will share their stories supporting the exhibit themes of Perseverance, Pride and Vision found in the special exhibition It STILL Ain't Braggin' If It's True.

The program will be moderated by Roger Gathman, an independent writer, translator and editor, and will feature three diverse writers. Texas novelist and historian James L. Haley will present his new book Passionate Nation: The Epic History of Texas; author of Sonnets and Salsa, Carmen Tafolla will discuss her work as a screenwriter and poet; and award-winning journalist Denise McVea will present her new book Making Myth of Emily: Emily West de Zavala and the Yellow Rose of Texas. The authors will be available to sign books and a reception will follow the presentation. Call (512) 936-4649 for reservations.

The Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum is located at 1800 N. Congress Avenue at the corner of Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. For more information call 512-936-8746 or visit us on-line at www.TheStoryofTexas.com.


The second advertisement is for the writing service. This is my latest advertising/annoying letter.

I am writing to inform you of a writing service especially designed to suit the needs of college students, academics and professionals.

You need my editing services if you are:
· creating texts to meet the highest academic standard
· having trouble achieving the degree of clarity you desire for your work
· writing to meet the particular stylistic requirements of either an academic publication or a dissertation
· or needing help in shaping texts to reach a general audience.

Rates are negotiable, depending on the specifics of the project. I charge per page -- not per hour or per word. Minimum charge is $25.00. If you are working with a tight budget, I can negotiate a lower fee for you. Student fees for papers start at $4.00 per page, with higher cost depending on research required, deadlines, and extent of editing needed. Otherwise, per page cost is from $6.00 on up, depending on complexity, deadline, and amount of research work involved. Independent writers involved in larger projects -- for instance, books - can negotiate aggregated fees outside of my usual per page charges. For instance, if you have a 300 page manuscript, I will charge a total fee, rather than per page. The same offer holds for larger academic projects, like dissertations. Graduate students are often advised to receive researching and editorial help on the literature review section of dissertations. Some chose to extend that help to the whole dissertation. In all such cases, the total fee is lower.

You can go to the following RWG Communications link for further information on our past projects and company philosophy

http://www.geocities.com/rogergathman/writing.html

If this is of interest to someone you know, can you send that person a copy of this letter? 10% off for those clients who mention limitedinc. Thank you.

Yours sincerely,
Roger Gathman
rgathman@netzero.net

if the blind lead the blind...

“Let them alone: they be blind leaders of the blind. And if the
blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch.” – Matthew, 15:14.


The phrase comes out of a society and historic period in which the sight of the sighted leading the blind must have been no uncommon thing, just as glaucoma, the effect of parasites, the wear and tear of age, and the clinamen of the genetic arc must have sprinkled the blind and nearsighted over the landscape pretty abundantly. Jesus’ saying has a characteristic starkness – it is in the decisiveness of his inversions and metaphors that one feels the messianic impulse, the making of the first last and the last first. Brueghel’s painting, which multiplies the number of the blind into a small band, much like the bands of beggars one would encounter in the war ravaged low country during the long Dutch revolt against the Spanish, thrusts upon the observer the utter violence of Jesus' phrase. Yet the observer is himself in a peculiar position: he is at the point where, in effect, he is catching the stumbling leader of the pack -- putting him, the observer, the one outside the picture, in the ditch.

But here's what Jesus didn't imagine. Jesus didn’t imagine was that the blind would demand to be lead by the blind, and only the blind. This is an American refinement on stupidity. LI is its prophet.

For an entertaining glimpse into the blind demanding blind leaders and deeper ditches, LI suggests reading the WAPO Q and A with Thomas Ricks, the author of two WAPO articles criticizing the American military strategy in Iraq for being… oh, I suppose the term is disastrous. The articles are derived from Ricks’ book, Fiasco. Here’s the first question:

“Scottsdale, Ariz.: I have not yet read your book. However, just from the titles of your articles, the tone is negative, negative, negative. What has the US and its military done RIGHT..not just tactical activities but strategic decisions and events? In the profession of journalism today, can a journalist be positive and not be viewed by their peers as a cheerleader, or must all critical reviews be critical?”

That is indeed what we need to know. We need more blindness, deeper darkness, another level of hell. And Ricks is well aware of this. Far be it from him to act the part of the sighted. He rushes here, as throughout the Q and A session, to assure all and sundry that far from being gifted with 20/20 vision, he is loyally, absolutely stone blind, blinder than most:

Tom Ricks: “To turn to the first question, from Scottsdale. I think this is a good way to start. Why write a book called "FIASCO" about Iraq.
The short answer is: because I want to win in Iraq. I don't know a lot of officers who think the current posture is sustainable, especially as the chaos continues in Baghdad. But I still think it is possible to win in Iraq, if we get better at recognizing mistakes and adjust better and faster.”
Of course. He wants to win. Win win win. America is about winning. We’re winning all the time. Not losing. Not a debt ridden, addled empire with a load of half educated barbarians, led by a corrupt oil man and his crony, a perpetually adolescent ignoramus who is in it for the superman suit (or the Mission Accomplished suit) that he always imagines himself wearing.
So Ricks wants us to win. So reassuring. Except … questioner no. 2, you are on line:
“Washington, D.C.: Your first answer (..because I want to win in Iraq) illustrates the problem that has plaqued this war from the outset, i.e. what constitutes "winning", and how has whatever was originally intended as constituting winning, changed over time?
Tom Ricks: Thanks. You put your finger on an important question.
I think we could win in the sense of prevailing. But it would not look like victories in some other wars. In this war, for example, it would be a victory if, say, a leading insurgent agreed to put down his weapon and become, say, minister of agriculture.”
So that is what winning is about. It isn’t winning, it is prevailing. And it isn’t prevailing, it is about getting an insurgent to become, say, minister of agriculture. So, uh, what is the cost of this marvelous victory that we must achieve, come hell or high water?
“Salina, Kan.: You did a great job on "Meet the Press." In your opinion, how much longer will our troops be in Iraq?
Tom Ricks: I would bet a loooong time. Maybe 10 to 15 years.”
So, our amazing victory, our win win proposition here, is that we spend between 2 to 3 trillion dollars and lose around 20,000 soldiers, and (sorry to even mention it, it is so unimportant) participate in killing around 300,000 Iraqis so that we can get an insurgent to put down his gun to become, say, minister of agriculture.
Is this wonderful news or what? Ricks is right, this wouldn’t look like victories in other wars – it would look exactly like the worst defeat ever suffered by the U.S. Even worse than Vietnam, being a magnitude more senseless. In fact, the win win policy and the lose everything policy pleasingly converge in one policy – the policy of feeding the War Culture. Thus, the governing class moves from triumph to triumph, or ditch to ditch if you will, each ditch getting bloodier and more expensive, as the jerkwater crowd out there, Bush’s base (a word that, translated into Arabic, comes out – al qaeda) lynches those who can see, rooting them out wherever they are. Remember though – their kids, the children of WAPO writers, their think tank and lobbyist cronies, all the meritocratic idiots, will go to great colleges and get the great jobs they so richly deserve, whereas your kids – well, sorry about that, but if they are patriots they will throw themselves headfirst in the meat grinder. So that we can win!
But what I think is that sometimes, when the blind form an occupying army in, say, D.C., with blind paramilitaries in the hinterlands, that it is alright to resist them. For I come not to bring peace, but the sword – as somebody once said. These people will not be voted out, for these people are on both sides, Blind party one vs. Blind party two. It is other decisions at the grassroots level – talking to friends about Iraq, pointing out the uselessness of fighting there, supporting anti-recruitment efforts, seeing if there are anti-recruiters in your town, etc., etc. – that will knock the block of this vile contingent.

dogs, considered philosophically

I usually comment on Long Sunday symposiums, but a symposium on democracy is a little bit too much like high school civics class book reports for me. I think those guys are, at the moment, symposiumed out.

Since these are the dog days of summer, the time when, traditionally, LI’s financial life passes before our eyes – summer is Motha Hubbard bare indeed around here – we are more interested in the philosophical topic of the dog. As in – when you walk a dog, whose free will is exercised, yours or the pooch’s? And does this depend on the size of the dog? We’ve been reading Roger Grenier’s The Difficulty of Being a Dog (we have a sideline interest in the literature devoted to dogs, from Cervantes Colloquy to Ackerley’s My Dog Tulip). Grenier’s first essay, enigma, begins with a nice anecdote about Paul Valery. It seems that when people would come to see Paul Valery’s grave, the man who ran the cemetery would tell his dog, “Paul Valery,” and the dog would guide them to the sacred spot. The Ministry of culture caught wind of this, and finally decided (no doubt after several meetings and memos), that the man would have to cut it out. Grenier, who knew Valery, says that in all probability Valery would have liked his grave stone being tour guided by a dog. And after all, in all probability, the dog knew as much about Valery’s poems as the man did.

My own experience has not been with genius dogs, but I’ve known some bright ones. Bliss, my friend S’s dog, is a personable mongrel bitch who can cast the slyest glances, so that it is impossible not to wonder what she is thinking. In fact, thinking is the question monomaniac philosophers always put to the animal kind – can you think? However, dogs make you wonder, instead: what are you thinking about? What, for instance, does a dog plan to do when it gets up in the morning? What, in fact, is a morning to a dog? I have a feeling their divisions of time aren't like ours -- where I see day and night, I imagine the dog sees other divisions of the natural flow. However, I do know that, like me, Bliss’ first thought is to pee. The arrangements that lead to relief, for Bliss, are a bit more complex than my matitudinal stagger towards the toilet. A ritual has evolved. S. must find the leash. She has to find the poop bags. Bliss helpfully either points to the door, or sometimes goes down to nose it.

Now, once the walk has begun, if it is a nice day, surely the dog plans to not only take care of her natural functions, but make the round of her favorite places. Dogs get bored, but they are also compulsive creatures, always wanting the same thing. Also, she looks for messages in the dirt and grass, odors left by other dogs, or humans, or cats. There’s an itinerary. So the plan is to go through with the itinerary, then back to the house. But some would say that dogs don’t plan at all, even though they are clearly leading on the leash. But then, these same people would probably bridle at saying dogs improvise. So in general, I don’t pay attention to those people. It is recommended that they content themselves, if they feel the need for pets, with guppies. Goldfish. A few bottom feeders. Generally, this kind of backbiter and sceptic is sniffed out by dogs straightaway, and barked down the street when they pass. Unhappy sods.

Grenier writes: When I’m in the prescence of a dog, I always ask myself a lot of questions. I may be naïve, but I’m in good company, for Paul Valery himself shared my naivete: “The animal, that inevitable enigma, is the opposite of us in its very likeness.”

And he further writes:

“How can such an understanding exist between two species? I t seems more miraculous, more precious to me than any relationship among humans. At the same time, what could be easier? You come across a dog. A word, a caress, and it responds with no further ado. It is the mystery of these exchanges that led me to write this book. But I know it will resolve nothing and that dogs will never cease to amaze me.”

I must recommend the University of Chicago Press cover of the book – the dog on it looks amazingly like Bliss.

our bright and shining lie in Iraq - or, stabbing this war in the back, let me count the ways

First, a beggin’ preface: anyone who has been thinking about supporting LI should do it in these dog months. Keep us up with the phone and electric bills, and we will keep writing the bad trip prose that makes reading this site as pleasurable as a visit to a cold fingered proctologist! Check out the pay pal button.

Now, onto today’s s…s…s…schmatter – which is this WAPO article by Thomas Ricks, analyzing the American military failure in Iraq. Ricks details the chronicle of errors, shadowing, all unconsciously, the LI storyline. We are happy to report that he actually captures a few home truths. Unfortunately, at the moment he’s screwed himself to the sticking point, he… unscrews himself. He can’t quite get past the one big conventional D.C. lie, the motherlode of American misadventure. In the end, he stays tamely within the precincts laid down by D.C.’s court society. Like the court society of many a past declining empire, it has crystallized around a few gross misconceptions about the world that it cannot, without dissolving itself, surrender – and which, consequently, lead it to repeat the same disaster over and over again.

What Ricks gets right is that the occupation of Iraq, enacted in spasmodic, blind bursts of violence by the occupiers, was badly designed from the get go, using maximum force when maximum finesse was required. The proconsuls never understood that the advantage, in a state where a certain language is spoken and certain cultural norms adhere, is to the native. Especially when the natives can manufacture IEDs with ease, the world having been flooded for fifty years by the American and European weapons makers to the extent that it is more likely some ravaged area of the planet will run out of food than out of automatic rifles. Plus, having major stockpiles of weapons that the occupying force is too stretched to really guard allows for stop n go resupply.

The specific, personal root of the American malfunction was in the Pentagon. Rumsfeld and General Tommy Franks, between the two of them, have been the worst duo to hit the military since McLellan and Edwin Stanton managed to bungle a simple advance with overwhelming force through the Virginia countryside in the spring of 1862. Franks makes Westmoreland’s tenure as chief of the Joint Chiefs of Staff look like the Golden Age. Franks is the General who couldn’t fight. Luckily for Franks, America spends a trillion dollars every four years – and now, every two – on creating a monster battle machine. A three year old couldn’t go wrong, in classic battle field conditions, with that thing. Unfortunately, if he isn’t facing ducks all lined up in a row, as in a cheap carnee tent, Franks is nonplussed. Which is why he only acts in one way: to do more of what he has been doing. More is the alpha and omega of his military strategy. Bomb more. Use more white phosphorus. Knock down more doors. Imprison more Iraqis. Say, all the military aged men in a village.

Oh, but there is one limit – no more troops, of course. Ass licking Rumsfeld on the troops issue is the first bullet point on the Chief of the JCS job description.

As for Rumsfeld, by now we know the old story. Rumsfeld is insane.

So Ricks rehearses the mistakes made by the occupiers as though it were a clinical study in classical compulsive disorder – which it is. They overreact and retreat. An insufficient force using its technological advantage to, basically, stir up shit.

“"When you're facing a counterinsurgency war, if you get the strategy right, you can get the tactics wrong, and eventually you'll get the tactics right," said retired Army Col. Robert Killebrew, a veteran of Special Forces in the Vietnam War. "If you get the strategy wrong and the tactics right at the start, you can refine the tactics forever, but you still lose the war. That's basically what we did in Vietnam."

"For the first 20 months or more of the American occupation in Iraq, it was what the U.S. military would do there, as well.

""What you are seeing here is an unconventional war fought conventionally," a Special Forces lieutenant colonel remarked gloomily one day in Baghdad as the violence intensified. The tactics that the regular troops used, he added, sometimes subverted American goals.”

B..bb…but just as you think Ricks is creeping up on the unwritten truth of the matter, the heart of what has gone wrong in Iraq, (a symptom of the political compromise between a metastasizing war culture and the credit card lifestyle in Uncle Sam’s green and pleasant land), he bogles it.

"“The U.S. military took a different approach in Iraq. It wasn't indiscriminate in its use of firepower, but it tended to look upon it as good, especially during the big counteroffensive in the fall of 2003, and in the two battles in Fallujah the following year.

"One reason for that different approach was the muddled strategy of U.S. commanders in Iraq. As civil affairs officers found to their dismay, Army leaders tended to see the Iraqi people as the playing field on which a contest was played against insurgents. In Galula's view [Galula wrote a counterinsurgency handbook], the people are the prize.

""The population . . . becomes the objective for the counterinsurgent as it was for his enemy," he wrote.

"From that observation flows an entirely different way of dealing with civilians in the midst of a guerrilla war. "Since antagonizing the population will not help, it is imperative that hardships for it and rash actions on the part of the forces be kept to a minimum," Galula wrote.

"Cumulatively, the American ignorance of long-held precepts of counterinsurgency warfare impeded the U.S. military during 2003 and part of 2004. Combined with a personnel policy that pulled out all the seasoned forces early in 2004 and replaced them with green troops, it isn't surprising that the U.S. effort often resembled that of Sisyphus, the king in Greek legend who was condemned to perpetually roll a boulder up a hill, only to have it roll back down as he neared the top.”

This misses the bloody crux, the structure, the very moral economy of the American way of warfare. If forces are kept to a minimum and if force is proportioned to some threshold point beyond which you antagonize the population, you will, inevitably, suffer much higher casualties. If American soldiers winnow through a village, looking only for insurgents, they are much likely to be injured or killed than if they plow through the village in the balls out, mega-American way. And the soldiers know that. The American soldier has been trained to think that the preservation of his life is the prime objective. He has been raised in the spirit of McLellan, and advances with the firepower of Grant, which is why America always wins the wars that it loses. This is why the American soldier is good in a battlefield situation such as presented itself in WWII, or in the First Gulf War, and entirely sucks at counterinsurgency. And will always suck. Because the higher risk brings with it the question: what am I doing here? Since American interests have nothing to do with the Iraq war – it was commenced and continued solely to serve the vanity of a small D.C. clique – the only way to keep waging it as what it is in reality – the usurpation of American forces for mercenary purposes on the part of a power mad executive – is to wage it with as few American deaths as possible. The Bush doctrine converges with the Powell doctrine – overwhelming force = lucrative contracts to war contractors + lack of visible sacrifice to the Bush base.

The logic here is inexorable. Either a greater number of Americans die, or a greater number of Iraqis die. Americans have decided to pretend that the greater the number of Iraqi deaths, the more the Americans are winning. That, of course, is bullshit. Which is why the argument that the U.S. troops should stay in for humanitarian reasons is bullshit – the logic of American strategy will continue to maximize the number of Iraqi deaths, or it will have to face the repulsion of American public opinion as American deaths go racheting up. It won’t do the latter. The rulers actually fear the American population in their nasty, prolonged wars. Fear that the population doesn't want to fight. This is their worry. This is what they work at. Both parties, it goes without saying. This is what all the bogus talk about "will" is about.

They are afraid of us. Doesn't that imply that they have something to be afraid about?

Stab this war in the back.

PS - Re taking the power back -- a heartening story, in the NYT, about First Lt. Ehren K. Watada. Lt. Watada volunteered for the army after 9/11. LI has no problem with that -- quite the contrary. Unfortunately, the army that is supposed to be defending America is defending no such thing, and has ended up being illegally planted in Iraq, mainly for the purpose of providing a photogenic war for the Rebel in Chief. This came to truly bug Lt. Watada, so much so that he has refused to deploy to Iraq, risking court martial. The NYT goes to one of the usual talking heads to give the Fix's view of the case:

"“Certainly it’s far from unusual in the annals of war for this to happen,” said Michael E. O’Hanlon, a senior fellow in military affairs at the Brookings Institution. “But it is pretty obscure since the draft ended.”

Mr. O’Hanlon said that if other officers followed suit, it would be nearly impossible to run the military. “The idea that any individual officer can decide which war to fight doesn’t really pass the common-sense test,” he said."

O'Hanlon has been no mean promoter of the Iraq war, of course. And for the Fix, that government by clique and egghead which sits on our face, it passes the common sense test to get a loser like O'Hanlon to give us his two cents about this case. In the 'meritocracy,' you never have to apologize for being wrong 100 percent of the time. No pain, a lotta gain -- that's the think tank motto. Now, O'Hanlon has consistently displayed the reasoning powers of an old baggie filled with decaying lunch meat over at the Brookings institute -- he particularly likes gathering together dubious numbers to promote the idea that Iraq is a boomin' country, full of happ happ happy participants in Bush's experiment in free enterprise. Being a war mongering pin head has won him bipartisan respect, which reason he will no doubt be happily moving into some position of responsibility in the next Democratic administration. A Beinart Democrat, a patriot, a easy chair killer.

LI, of course, stands totally behind Lt. Watada. A real hero

petition congress and the president

While it is little enough, and I can't vouch for the organization, please sign this petition calling on the American government to call for a ceasefire in Lebanon: Democracy in Action.

American papers, ranging from mildly pro-Israel to loony tones WAPO editorial types, have presented an odd picture of the Arab world supporting Israel against Hezbollah. This is so absurd it does rival the “good news from Iraq” meme, that sturdy craft of lies and bullshit, that has been afloat these last three years.

The Financial Times, more shrewdly, notes: “events in Lebanon have served as a reminder of how quickly Washington can drop an Arab ally - in this case the Siniora-led government in Beirut - when Israel's "right to self-defence" is at play.”
In fact, beyond the war crime committed by bombing a civilian population and targeting Lebanese infrastructure – beyond the fact, staring anyone in the face, that Israel has chosen a small provocation to launch a war against Lebanon - Israel’s attempt to destroy its neighbor and Bush’s nursing of the Israeli enterprise is going to bring grief down on both the U.S. and Israel. As Israel goes into next week, massacring Shiites in Lebanon, U.S. soldiers are going to be sitting ducks in Iraq. And to expect Arab allies of the U.S. to weather this, an event tailor made to showcase Iranian strength and Gulf monarchy weakness, is just the kind of non-calculation – just the kind of blind stupidity that the Bush administration will long be known for, in story and song.

“Jordan and Egypt, the only Arab states formally at peace with Israel, have both issued measured criticism of Israel's devastation of Lebanon, but it was only yesterday that two Arab governments delivered stronger condemnations. Iraqi prime minister Nuri al-Maliki described the Israeli offensive as "operations of mass destruction" while the Saudi defence minister, Prince Sultan bin Abdul-Aziz, said: "We cannot tolerate that Israel plays with the lives of citizens, civilians, women, old people and children."

“What has been new is that along with Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt also blamed Hizbollah, and indirectly its Syrian and Iranian backers, for stirring a tiger with destabilising consequences for all.”

Israel is also going to lose in the U.S. Israel is generally a popular country for Americans. But the photogenic, mad bombing, and the fact that the bombed, this time, sometimes speak English into the tv set and are wearing shorts and ties and business suits, is going to make this different. Killing black robed hadji in Iraq doesn’t bother the Yankees, but killing people who look like Yankees does. This is obvious from the greatest poem to come from the Iraq war so far, the immortal Hadji girl:

“Her brother and her father shouted…
Dirka Dirka Mohammed Jihad
Sherpa Sherpa Bak Allah
They pulled out their AKs so I could see
... So I grabbed her little sister and pulled her in front of me.
As the bullets began to fly
The blood sprayed from between her eyes
And then I laughed maniacally
Then I hid behind the TV
And I locked and loaded my M-16
And I blew those little fuckers to eternity.
And I said…
Dirka Dirka Mohammed Jihad
Sherpa Sherpa Bak Allah
They should have known they were fucking with a Marine.”

A song that says it all.

But the little sisters who are getting blasted in Tyre and Beirut sometimes are wearing shorts and flip flops, and that is sure to reach even into the damaged humanity of the zombie hordes of the Bush culture.

Calasso's perpetual war

Continuing the line of thought from our last post….

There’s an essay by Arthur Machen about a spiritualist who surprises himself by successfully conjuring up a dead spirit. Looking at the vision he has been pursuing, the spiritualist feels a hand go through him, which does not press his physical organs so much as it squeezes something unknown – his very soul. This contact proves to be so overwhelming that the spiritualist never again tries to conjure up a spirit.

Well, LI can’t claim to have experienced anything that grotesquely metaphysical when we read Roberto Calasso’s essay, Perpetual War, but we did feel contacted. The essay is about Kraus’ “The Last Days of Mankind.” This is a five hundred page play, an epic theater event never, actually, staged. Kraus wrote it during World War I, and read from it in lecture halls. Elias Canetti, among others, has described the fevered atmosphere that surrounded Kraus in the twenties at those readings.

Calasso’s essay does a number of brilliant things. For instance, Calasso shows how a modern version of stupidity intersects with the modern project of building an all encompassing war culture. Bêtise was the obsession of three modern authors in particular – its anti-evangelists: Flaubert, Leon Bloy, and Kraus. Readers of LI will recognize these as the patron saints of this site, although we maintain a more extensive hagiology – we throw in Peguy, the Shaw of the prefaces, Nietzsche, Marx and Engels (in their political journalism). In particular, Engels phrase, “the official legend,” which I find so much more useful than the term “ideology” to talk about the system of modern unintelligence. The official legend is where the marriage of betise and war is officially sealed. While it is official in the sense that the same picked over phrases from it occur over and over in the mouths of officials, pundits, soldiers, clerks, farmers, etc., it is never codified in one place or another. It isn’t a constitution or a law. The official legend not only brings about and justifies wars, but it tells us how to think about them, and how to pretend that our peaces are different from wars. According to the official legend, wars are subordinate to states, and derived from them. You have a state, which is a separate, substantial thing – emblematically, a human body. A leviathan, or a behemoth. And then you have war, which is something that may afflict a state, the way a fever or the measles afflicts the human body. Randolph Bourne’s phrase, which plays with this idea, actually leads us out of the nets of the official legend: war is the health of the state. Health is not derived from the body – it describes the normal state of the body. The normal state of the modern state is war.

Of the three grand inquisitors of modern betise, Kraus was the one who saw most systematically, and attacked with language St. John of Patmos might have whistled at. This is how Calasso puts it: “The epiphany that dazzled Kraus is the same one tht made Flaubert’s last years compulsive and feverish: the prodigious eruption of la betise as the beginning of a new era, an era paved and cemented with it once any kind of alkahest or universal solvent had disappeared. This appalling event, from whose light most people averted their eyes, was obsessively followed and properly recorded primarily by three writers: Flaubert, Kraus, and Leon Bloy. To them we gratefully turn as pioneers of a new science, the only one where we can follow the treacherous waverings of that uninterrupted experiment-without-experimenter that is world history.”

Calasso doesn’t strictly date the West’s official legend – it is not something of which you can say, now it is here, or now it is there. But it has symbols you can date. Calasso choses the symbol of the “blood tax” – the draft – suggested in the French revolution and fully operational in the Napoleonic wars. The draft indicates what the new state will be composed of: ‘human materials,’ as Napoleon’s strategists called them. The AEC, in the plutonium experiments it performed on patients in hospitals in Rochester and Chicago, labelled them “human products.” And, in a memo of great philosophic acuity, speaking of the downwinders, the inhabitants of towns in Utah and Nevada that were sprinkled continually with radioactive fallout from the above ground bomb tests, the AEC called them a “low use population.” The low use population, that atomized mass of human product, are known, on official occasions when the lights in the sky are the results of fireworks rather than beta particle emissions, as We the people – and such sweet people too! If you read interviews with the downwinders, interspersed with the usual stories – the tongue cancer, the boy born with extruded organs and no legs, the cancer that goes from house to house in places like St. George, Utah, and systematically eliminates the young – leukemia – and the old (like, forty to fifty years old) with variously sited cancers, and produces immune deficiency and diabetes 1 and muscular disorders and sterility and the oddly born lambs and foals, you will find inhabitants who might be nursing their last tumors saying things like, we had to do the tests because the Russians did the tests. Sinking on the good ship cancer, the human product gave heartfelt thanks to the captain. Or, to speed the film up to today’s exiting news, 37% gave President Bush good or excellent marks on his presidency.

Human product or human materials, the names have an effect. Just as God’s real name is supposedly part of the essence and power of divinity, the low use population’s real name is part of the essence and power of its anti-divinity – its essence, which is shit. But do not underestimate shit! It can be drafted, taxed, and driven to the polling booth to enthusiastically vote for its own demise. As Calasso points out, the most menacing phrase in the Last Days of Mankind is “Clusters form.”

“These two little words discretely accompany us in the stage directions from the very first page, the second line to bew exact. They swell like poisonous clouds for hundreds of pages and strike us at the end… when they are spoken by the Faultfinder [Noergler, Kraus’s stand-in] to designate the throng of bystanders who want to have their pictures taken alongside the corpse of the hanged Battisti, while the jovial hangman looks on. Groups are not expressions of democratic spontaneity. Their origin is much older. Groups always form around a corpse. When there is no corpse, that place always evokes the many corpses that have been there and the many yet to appear.”

It is evidence of Kraus’ prophetic sensibility that he could have foreseen those pictures that flooded Nazi Germany during the first, good part of the war – soldiers sending home pics of rabbis used as ponies, little Jewish kids strung up in a wood, the hustle of warmly coated German soldiers under them, protecting the Reich, all of the news from the front. And, indeed, news from the front in Iraq follows this pattern – but no in real time video, with a sound track from Elvis, mercenaries having fun shooting through the windows of Iraqi cars and such, with the official law between the provisional government of Iraq and the Liberating Powers such that no force in Iraq could touch the Pentagon’s contractors.

In the official legend, circa 2006, virtue and vice depend on an exact matching of the ideal corpse-set to the dictatorship and Islamofascism, and, on the other side, to liberation – with the difference being that the corpses produced by liberatory activity, when alive, ardently desired their own splattering, evisceration, or simple bullet through the head termination. The liberation’s corpses are much like the cartoon animals you see on billboards for restaurants in Texas – smiling chickens and pigs, chuckling broadly about their stun gun and chain saw futures. They are not only aware of their own sweet and delicious meat – they want to be eaten.

To get Jenseits der Bloedsinn is no easy thing. The method adopted by the inquisitors is that of extensive quotation. As Calasso points out, perhaps half of The Last Days of Mankind consists simply of quotes. To put the written or spoken in quotation marks was Kraus’ way of damning it. In the passage that analyzes this, Calasso, to my mind, reaches a point of true sublimity. I’ll end this gloomy post with this amazing passage:

“But at the same time, since his name is hidden behind the figure of a comic character (the Faultfinder), his words are a voice that no longer belongs to him and that guarantees the life of this nonstop spectacle. Their function is like that of the blade used by Chuang-tzu’s perfect butcher, who for nineteen years used the same knife to quarter thousands of oxen. The blade never lost its edge because “I let it go through only where it can” – in the imperceptible empty interstices. And Prince Wen-hui answers the butcher: Thank you, you have taught me how to prolong one’s life, by using it only for what does not consume it.”

American stupidity -- let me count the ways

GOP lawmakers, meanwhile, appear to be lining up closely with the president on foreign policy. It has not helped the neoconservative case, perhaps, that the occupation of Iraq has not gone as smoothly as some had predicted. – Charles Babbington, Washington Post, Conservative Anger Grows Over Bush's Foreign Policy

“The American energy secretary, Samuel W. Bodman, who met with Iraq’s oil and electricity ministers in Baghdad, had a rosy view of progress here since his last visit in 2003.

“The situation seems far more stable than when I was here two or three years ago,” he said in an interview in the fortified Green Zone. “The security seems better, people are more relaxed. There is an optimism, at least among the people I talked to.””
...
“United Nations officials said Tuesday that the number of violent deaths had climbed steadily since at least last summer. During the first six months of this year, the civilian death toll jumped more than 77 percent, from 1,778 in January to 3,149 in June, the organization said.”
- Quotations from the same article, “About 20 Sunnis Are Kidnapped in Baghdad”-

How does one face the enormity of an intelligence that has the scope of a housefly’s stuffed into a colossus the size of a continent? Hows does one grasp something that is as awesome, as hideous, as farcical as American stupidity –the right and real stuff, the strategy behind the atom bomb and the Hummer, the third, impossible division of the American brain - neither left nor right, but an as yet undiscovered dimension, somewhere between Miracle Whip and the world’s biggest human turd?

Here’s what Robert Calasso said about Karl Kraus:

"Kraus’ fundamental experience was acoustic, and it was constantly repeated. Like Hildegarde von Bingen, Angela da Foligno, and many anonymous schizophrenics, he heard voices, but the voices were all the more alarming since they had bodies, circulated in the streets of Vienna, seated themselves in cafes and even put on affable smiles. The inflections beat on him like waves; their deadly horde provided the most faithful company for his “threefold solitude: that of the coffeehouse, where he is alone with his enemy, of the nocturnal room where he is alone with his demon, of the lecture hall where he is alone with his work.”

LI has his own threefold solitude. The enemy is met not in the coffeehouse but on a cheap dialup internet connection, blinking ads; the demon is poverty and a sarcasm that has long gone to the dark side and become pathological, a real heart condition, - a speeding up of the heartbeat, a spread of heat across the chest, the signs and symptoms of demonic possession; as for the work – well, where is the work? An impossibly cheap blog, cluttered with typos, clogged with yesterday’s annulled news, various and sundry highly forgettable reviews, failed projects that have left behind snowdrifts of paper and (wait for it, Prufrock) a graphic novel, of all things.

I’ve chosen to personalize the affront given to intelligence by American stupidity, which is rather like trying to personalize entering the Empire State Building, or entering your local shopping mall. It is doomed to failure – for if it succeeded even once, it would transform that stupidity into something else. The housefly thinks, cogito, ergo Musca domestica sum. But no, the default settings for stupidity are such that the bland language, or language substitute, used by our Energy secretary, and the formulas of WAPO’s ace reporter, Charles Babbington, are all the same thing – they have no external referent, but go on in a dark vacuum forever. They would hardly be real at all – but here we must concede that experiment has shown them to be real. The experiment of, for instance, the three thousand dead in Iraq. And it is LI who is unreal, LI with the ardent wish that tonight and every night, the throngs of those dead crowd about President Bush’s bed and freeze the blood of that pissant lowlife, who has found the dead level of his own incompetence in a clueless and ever more syncophantic court society. Freeze it tonight, and tomorrow night, and tomorrow night. Freeze it eternally.

no goodies from this war

In the Man without Qualities, Ulrich – the man himself – staying at his father’s house after his father’s death, sits down and solves a mathematical problem that he has been working on for years. He has taken up other work, and takes up the problem as a way of passing the time. He thinks about what this means. If he publishes this, perhaps his career as a mathematician will take off, perhaps he will find a place in academia. And suddenly he thinks: I’m too old for that. For the first time, he has decided that some bold move in his life is barred by age. He is thirty five, I believe.

Myself, I think that about acid. While I enjoyed it in my twenties on rare occasions, and took it once past that equinoctal age, thirty, I’m too old for that now. Pot, alcohol, cocaine I can still take. But acid is now off the menu. So, probably, is heroin – a drug I’ve never tried, and always wanted to try.

The big biography of Timothy Leary by Robert Greenfield was released this spring. I was happy to see Louis Menand review it for the New Yorker. I’ve seen a few hippyish sites on the web comment on the bio, mainly to condemn Leary. In the end, he had so relentless sold out every member of every niche that had once formed his audience that he is regarded, pretty much, with universal disgust. Myself, I can’t get over him being a snitch. On the other hand, the legendary early years fascinate me, partly for what they say about the intersection of the Cold War culture and academia, partly because who does not dream of nibbling on mushrooms in Cuernavaca in 1962? What total fun. Exploitative, check. Probably the kind of thing that not everybody should do, check. But I envy certain moods of intoxication, certain highs: Malcolm Lowry in the same town in the thirties, for instance.

Part of the war culture was the flowering of psychology. With the country being blanketed with fallout from insane bomb tests, and scientists covering up what was wrong with that, or – alternatively – proclaiming, as Edward Teller amazingly did, that the mutations that might result from radiation would be steps on man’s evolution ever onward, it is no wonder so many people felt crazy, and ended up going to psychologists in the 50s:

“There was no more opportune moment to become a psychologist. Psychology in the nineteen-fifties played the role for many people that genetics does today. "It's all in your head" has the same appeal as "It's all in the genes": an explanation for the way things are that does not threaten the way things are. Why should someone feel unhappy or engage in antisocial behavior when that person is living in the freest and most prosperous nation on earth? It can't be the system! There must be a flaw in the wiring somewhere. So the postwar years were a slack time for political activism and a boom time for psychiatry. The National Institute of Mental Health, founded in 1946, became the fastest-growing of the seven divisions of the National Institutes of Health, awarding psychologists grants to study problems like alcoholism, juvenile delinquency, and television violence. Ego psychology, a therapy aimed at helping people adapt and adjust, was the dominant school in American psychoanalysis. By 1955, half of the hospital beds in the United States were occupied by patients diagnosed as mentally ill.”

To write about Leary, for someone like Menand, is an easy opportunity to grind out great paragraphs – and luckily, he gives into the temptation:

“Leary spent the first part of his career doing normative psychology, the work of assessment, measurement, and control; he spent the second as one of the leading proselytizers of alternative psychology, the pop psychology of consciousness expansion and nonconformity. But one enterprise was the flip side of the other, and Greenfield's conclusion, somewhat sorrowfully reached, is that Leary was never serious about either. The only things Leary was serious about were pleasure and renown. He underwent no fundamental transformation when he left the academic world for the counterculture. He liked women, he liked being the center of attention, and he liked to get high. He simply changed the means of intoxication. Like many people in those days, he started out on Burgundy but soon hit the harder stuff .“

The old war culture. Peter Beinart is doing his best to make the new war culture into the equivalent of the Cold War. This is laughable on many dimensions, not least of which is the lack of drugs:

“LSD was also administered to alcoholics, drug addicts, and patients with emotional blockages. The most famous of these patients was Cary Grant, who took LSD under the supervision of a psychiatrist. "All my life, I've been searching for peace of mind," Grant said. "Nothing really seemed to give me what I wanted until this treatment." Allen Ginsberg was introduced to LSD at the Mental Research Institute in Palo Alto, in 1959, where his responses were measured by a team of doctors as part of a federally funded research program. Ginsberg eventually became one of the chief publicists for LSD, along with Ken Kesey, who first used it at the Veterans Hospital in Menlo Park, in 1960, where, in another federally funded program, he was paid seventy-five dollars a day to ingest hallucinogens.”

That is more money than I make, for sure. All the good jobs are gone and taken!

Menand doesn't deeply understand drugs -- that is evident in his dismissive last paragraphs, which display a vulgar economic determinism that tells us little about why cocaine should have succeeded acid. But the essay does place Leary -- who is the kind of character Menand understands - very well.

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"Life goes on"

This is a dark week. LI is trying to find what inspiration we can. So imagine our joy when we came across a story in the WSJ today about a class that we sometimes too carelessly insult – I’m talking about the upper management of Fortune 500 corporations.

The story, “Executive Pay: The 9/11 Factor, by Charles Forelle, James Bandler and Mark Maremont” is about the sheer patriotism of that group – its belief in America, even when times are down. Take 9/11. Stocks plummeted in the wake of 9/11. But… well, here’s the inspiring story:

“ON SEPT. 21, 2001, rescuers dug through the smoldering remains of the World Trade Center. Across town, families buried two firefighters found a week earlier. At Fort Drum, on the edge of New York's Adirondacks, soldiers readied for deployment halfway across the world.

"Boards of directors of scores of American companies were also busy that day. They handed out millions of bargain-priced stock options to their top executives.
The terrorist attack shut the U.S. stock market for days. When it reopened Sept. 17, stocks skidded more than 14% over five days, in the worst full week for the Dow Jones Industrial Average since Germany invaded France in May 1940. But for recipients of options, the lower their company's stock price when options are awarded the better, since the options grant a right to buy shares at that price for years to come. The grants set recipients up for millions of dollars in profit if the shares recovered.

"A Wall Street Journal analysis shows how some companies rushed, amid the post-9/11 stock-market decline, to give executives especially valuable options. A review of Standard & Poor's ExecuComp data for 1,800 leading companies indicates that from Sept. 17, 2001, through the end of the month, 511 top executives at 186 of these companies got stock-option grants. The number who received grants was 2.6 times as many as in the same stretch of September in 2000, and more than twice as many as in the like period in any other year between 1999 and 2003.

"Ninety-one companies that didn't regularly grant stock options in September did so in the first two weeks of trading after the terror attack. Their grants were concentrated around Sept. 21, when the market reached its post-attack low. They were worth about $325 million when granted, based on a standard method of valuing stock options. “

Faith in America – and faith in gouging Americans. They go together like chocolate and peanut butter, or Halliburton and Cheney. Even as they were weeping for compatriots lost, these company boards knew that a smash and grab opportunity like this doesn’t come around twice in a lifetime. There is a saying about the amoral opportunist that he would dance on his grandmother’s grave – but what a waste of grandmother that is! Especially when you can rent her dead body out to necrophiles and make a little of the ready.

Ah, this is a true story of the people Bush calls his base. And base, oh so base, they are, the most debased mob of knaves and thieves ever to have afflicted this country. A white collar riot, in which the rioters aren’t going to be taking cheesy tv sets and shit – that is so below par when you can rack up the extra million here and there and you are guaranteed tax advantages by a president who came in via coup. Sweet! Robber barons did many things, but one thing they did supremely: build. In contrast, this is the crowd that has utterly reduced the American manufacturing base and stands in the way of creating a green economy, in spite of the overwhelming long range necessity of it. The are a parasitical crew of pirates, more than willing to sink this country for a dime and a percentage point. And they are winning, every day. Can't you feel it, reader, in your shoulders and neck?

“The 91 companies included such corporate icons as Home Depot Inc., Black & Decker Corp. and UnitedHealth Group Inc. It included two companies directly touched by the tragedy. Merrill Lynch & Co., across the street from the Twin Towers, lost three employees. On Sept. 24, Merrill granted its president options to buy more than 750,000 shares, at a price 15% below the pre-attack level. At Teradyne Inc. in Boston, an employee delayed a business trip until Sept. 11 to attend a son's soccer game and died on American Flight 11. Teradyne that month gave its CEO more than 600,000 options at a price enabling him to buy stock at 24% below its pre-attack level.

At Stryker Corp., a Michigan maker of orthopedic products, onetime stock-option-committee member John Lillard said he didn't regret the decision to award options nine days after the attack. "If you believe the company is going to do well, and here is an external event that is affecting the market and you've made a decision to reward executives, you go ahead with it," Mr. Lillard said. "Life goes on."”

the agendas: Israel vs. Hezbollah or how the mouse trap caught the cat

Yesterday’s Kagan op ed, it appears, is only the first in a flood of wargasm rhetoric in the WAPO – with today’s op ed page hosting Krauthammer and a fellow at a conservative think tank in Jerusalem, Michael Oren, as well as David Ignatius (a man for whom LI has some residual personal respect – we interviewed him, years ago, and formed a favorable judgment about him in spite of his pro-war beliefs).

LI doesn’t fully understand the motives behind Israel’s decision to go full tilt, lately, into Gaza and now into Lebanon, in response to Hamas and Hezbollah. We suspect that Michael Oren’s op ed reflects the thinking of Israel’s government:

“By eliminating the terrorist leaderships in Gaza and southern Lebanon and deterring Syria and Iran from prodding their proxies to war, Israel can restore a reasonable level of security to its citizens. Such measures will also be implicitly welcomed by Israel's Jordanian and Egyptian neighbors, who are similarly threatened by these same terrorist groups. Only by establishing a new and more stable status quo along Israel's borders can Prime Minister Ehud Olmert proceed with his plan of redrawing those borders permanently, either unilaterally or in cooperation with a nonviolent Palestinian partner.”

This is magic thinking, however. Israel has never “eliminated” terrorist leadership anywhere (and let’s not be distracted by the word ‘terrorist’ into a long detour about who is really the terrorist – LI doesn’t really care). In fact, the restoration of a “reasonable level of security” for Israel’s citizens is a curious goal, given that the insecurity they suffer from stems from Israel’s attempt to impose – unilaterally – a plan for redrawing boundaries.

By discarding graduated response, Israel is putting the U.S. in a very awkward position. After all, Hezbollah and the Dawa party running Iraq are joined by a long history of common bonds. Ignatius and Oren and Robert Fiske and other Middle Eastern reporters have developed a shorthand for talking about the Middle East in which there are the main players and the proxies. Hezbollah, for instance, is a client of Iran, or operates as Syria’s proxy. But this is very misleading. Because one party in a situation is weaker economically and politically doesn’t mean that the flow of power is unilateral from the stronger to the weaker. Israel is weaker than the U.S. by far, and has built itself up with massive amounts of U.S. aid. But it is not just a U.S. proxy. Discard the so often invoked idea of the head and the tail – the image of the beast is just that – an image.

In LI’s uninformed opinion, Hezbollah, in the late nineties, was an instrument used by reactionary forces in Iran to work against the moderates in Teheran. And the relationship between Israel and Iran, which seems to be the latent cause of Israel’s new found aggressiveness, has been determined by elements quite different from opposition to Islamic ‘radicalism.’ Trita Parsi, in an article in the June, 2005 Iranian Studies journal, “Israel-Iranian Relations Assessed: Strategic Competition from the Power Cycle Perspective”, showed that Israel supported Khomenei in the most radical phase of the Iranian revolution, operating to supply Iran with arms in its war with Iraq and only shifting to an anti-Iranian posture after the first Gulf war. If Israel were simply responding to Hezbollah’s threats, this is a curious pattern of engagement and disengagement. Parsi, however, contents that Israel is playing for dominance in the region. It is not responding to threats so much as responding from an ideology that simply sees Israel as permanently threatened as long as it does not dominate in the Middle East. In a footnote to that article, there’s a very interesting comment from a high ranking Israeli military man:

“Interview with Israeli ministry of defense official, Tel Aviv, October 18, 2004. “There is definitely a tendency in Israel [to think the worst]. . .. Today, the prevailing culture or I would say the mindset of the intelligence industry is to attribute to the enemy almost infinite power and completely underestimate what our strength means to them.”

Parsi sums up the change in Israeli policy by looking at what Rabin and Peres were saying and doing in the 80s and then in the 90s:

“The two Israeli leaders that in the early 1990s initiated a very aggressive Iran
policy pursued a diametrically opposite policy only a few years earlier. In 1987, Yitzhak Rabin argued that Iran remained an ally geo-politically.40 Shimon Peres, who sought a “broader strategic relationship with Iran,” urged President Reagan to seek a dialogue with Tehran.

"This was at the center of the “Iran-Contra” affair, in which Israel pressured the
U.S. to improve relations with Iran and sell advanced American arms to the Khomeini
regime.42 The affair was initiated by Amiram Nir, a close aid to Shimon Peres, who floated the idea of selling arms to Iran in Washington in the mid- 1980s. The idea was rejected by the State Department and the Pentagon, but it found support in National Security Council operatives Oliver North and Michael Ledeen.43 (Ledeen, a personal acquaintance of Peres, was convinced by
the Israelis to pursue a U.S. opening to Iran.44 Today, he is one of the most vocal opponents of U.S.-Iran talks and advocates a policy of regime-change in Tehran on the grounds that Iran opposes Israel’s right to exist.) Israel’s key argument was that Iran would once again become an explicit ally of the two if moderate elements in Tehran were strengthened.

This stands in stark contrast to Israel’s policy after 1992, driven again by Peres and Rabin, in which Tel Aviv rejected the very concept of “Iranian moderates” and opposed any rapprochement between the Unites States and Iran.46 Indeed, one of the questions that arose from the Iran-Contra affair was Israel’s seemingly paradoxical role in strengthening a regime that opposed Israel’s existence and Iran’s collaboration with a state that it officially sought to destroy.”

Parellel with Israel’s underground alliance with Iran, Hezbollah seems to have been in contact with Al Qaeda in the 90s, in spite of the fact that Al Qaeda acted as an occasional Einsatzgruppe against Shiites in Afghanistan and Pakistan in the same period, organizing and participating in anti-Shi’a pograms that prefigure those going on in Iraq today. LI puts the “seems” in, since all information about Hezbollah and al Qaeda has to be finely sifted, as the amount of sheer propaganda written about Al qaeda in the last five years makes it hard to get any hard facts. Still, I trust Douglas Farah’s reporting on this issue, in spite of Farah’s biases. Unfortunately, the agenda-blind never explain seeming contradictions. How could Hezbollah cooperate with al qaeda, for instance, at the same time that al qaeda was the guest of a government that massacred Shiites in Mazar-e-Sharif in 1998, in the Shamali region around 1999, around Taloquan in 2000, and in Bamiyan in 2001 – regions of Afghanistan that were of great concern to Iran, supposedly Hezbollah’s patron, all during this time? Farah, as far as I know, never discusses these facts -- which is where his Maronite sympathies betray him. On the other hand, how could the U.S. be sponsoring an Iraqi government headed by the party with the close ties to Hezbollah, too?

The LA Times has the one dissenting analysis of Hezbollah’s actions in the past week – the rest of the press is towing the Bush line, as per usual.

kagan/sade

LI was pleased to see that the Washington Post is doing something about an issue that effects us all – the erotic dreamlife of neo-cons. Rather than let daydreams of violence, torture, and death end up as the private incentives towards some covert ejaculation, the WAPO has manfully published Robert Kagan’s wet dream on its op ed page.

It begins with a “Let’s imagine,” and ends with “It’s just a theory,”- clueing us into the daydreaming nature of the column. In between there is a rich and colorful mix of those puzzling features that make up the neo-con underlife – the homo-erotic fascination with George Bush, of all people, as Superman; the ardent desire to burn brown skin, which one sees in old postcards of lynchings, and of which Kagan is the heavy breathing inheritor; and judgments about the Clinton administration that are so absurd as to be more than mildly deranged – they are definitely symptoms of the erotic role played by Clinton in the neo-con mind.

Erotic daydreaming is heavily ritualized. One returns again and again to a formula. Sade actually made the ritualization itself pornographic, in the 120 days of Sodom:

“Singulièrement mécontents de la maladresse de toutes ces petites filles dans l'art de la masturbation, impatientés de ce qu'on avait éprouvé sur cela la veille, Durcet proposa d'établir une heure dans la matinée où on leur donnerait des leçons sur cet objet, et que tour à tour un d'eux se lèverait une heure plus matin, ce moment d'exercice étant établi depuis neuf jusqu'à dix, se lèverait, dis-je, à neuf heures pour aller se prêter à cet exercice. On décida que celui qui remplirait cette fonction s'assiérait tranquillement au milieu du sérail, dans un fauteuil, et que chaque petite fille, conduite et guidée par la Duclos, la meilleure branleuse que le château renfermât, viendrait s'essayer sur lui, que la Duclos dirigerait leur main, leur mouvement, qu'elle leur apprendrait le plus ou le moins de vitesse qu'il fallait donner à leurs secousses en raison de l'état du patient, qu'elle prescrirait leurs attitudes, leurs postures pendant l'opération, et qu'on établirait des punitions réglées pour celle qui, au bout de la première quinzaine, ne réussirait point parfaitement dans cet art sans avoir plus besoin de leçons.”

Kagan, discontented by the supposed maladresse of a President who has refused to use even a petite tactical nuclear weapon on Iran, comforts himself first by recalling the dark days – yes, the Clinton days:

“Let's imagine, and this is purely hypothetical, that President Bush has already decided that he will not leave office in January 2009 without a satisfactory resolution of the Iranian nuclear problem. Let's imagine that he has already determined that if he cannot obtain Iran's agreement to dismantle its nuclear weapons program voluntarily and verifiably, then he will order some form of military action to destroy as much of that program as possible before he leaves. Let's imagine that he has resolved not to end his two terms in office the way Bill Clinton ended his, by leaving every major international crisis -- from Iraq to Iran to North Korea to al-Qaeda -- for his successor.”

The erotic lives of others are easy to laugh at. Of course, the idea that Bush, who has started an unwinnable war and has said, publicly, that he is leaving that war for his successor, won’t be like Clinton – who left Bush with a number of officials who explained Al Qaeda to him, even as Bush was eager to do some cedar choppin’ on his ranch – is obviously an erotic pretext. The famous remark about not being part of the reality based community was all about the mixture of sexual disposition and policy at the D.C. court. To succeed dans cet art, combining the right amount of friction and mental picturing, requires that one return again and again to some primal, vulnerable scene. This is the tableau of the baby and the mean mother.

Having set himself up in this way, Kagan can then imagine the seduction. The powerful, powerful rebel in chief, in this episode, is operating in a curiously non-muscular way. Is superman really a drag queen? Or is this, oh bliss, is this really superman in a new role – a man/woman, a seducer? Surely it is the latter! This is the cross dressing tableau.

“Bush would be sincere, and convincingly so. For his ideal outcome really would be a diplomatic solution in which Iran voluntarily and verifiably abandoned its program. He would know that such an outcome, in addition to benefiting the world, could completely reshape his image and ensure his legacy as a successful leader. He would also know that the military solution is fraught with danger and, indeed, could end badly. He would genuinely like to avoid it if at all possible. It really would be a last resort, to be used only when diplomacy failed. Therefore, Bush would send his diplomats out and want them to succeed. He would not be bothered by press reports that he had abandoned "cowboy diplomacy" and given in to the "realists" at the State Department.”

Superman is like that, sometimes. His member, as iron strong as always, is disguised – and not just disguised but mocked! But it is a mistake to take this as a moment of erotic depression. Rather, in the routine, this is as highly charged a moment as any other. Here one is the victim, one is beaten, one experiences the peculiar delight of a masochism that will end in mastery. As Sade knew, seduction is in and of itself a reason for discharge:

"Il y avait eu quelques changements dans la maison de Mme Guérin, [the keeper of a brothel] ... Deux très jolies filles venaient de trouver des dupes qui les entretinrent et qu'elles trompèrent comme nous faisons toutes. Pour remplacer cette perte, notre chère maman avait jeté les yeux sur la fille d'un cabaretier de la rue Saint-Denis, âgée de treize ans et l'une des plus jolies créatures qu'il fût possible de voir. Mais la petite personne, aussi sage que pieuse, résistait à toutes ses séductions, lorsque la Guérin, après s'être servie d'un moyen très adroit pour l'attirer un jour chez elle, la mit aussitôt entre les mains du personnage singulier dont je vais vous décrire la manie. C'était un ecclésiastique de cinquante-cinq à cinquante-six ans, mais frais et vigoureux et auquel on n'en aurait pas donné quarante. Aucun être dans 1e monde n'avait un talent plus singulier que cet homme pour entraîner des jeunes filles dans le vice, et comme c'était son art le plus sublime, il en fait aussi son seul et son unique plaisir. Toute sa volupté consistait à déraciner les préjugés de l'enfance, à faire mépriser la vertu et à parer le vice des plus belles couleurs. Rien n'y était négligé: tableaux séduisants, promesses f1atteuses, exemples délicieux, tout était mis en oeuvre, tout était adroitement ménagé, tout artistement proportionné à l'âge, à l'espèce d'esprit de l'enfant, et jamais il ne manquait son coup. En deux seules heures de conversation, il était sûr de faire une putain de la petite fille la plus sage et la plus raisonnable, et depuis trente ans qu'il exerçait ce métier-là dans Paris, il avait avoué à Mme Guérin, l'une de ses meilleures amies, qu'il avait sur son catalogue plus de dix mille jeunes filles séduites et jetées par lui dans le libertinage.”

The power to seduce is the power to debase. The powerful, in Kagan’s mind, are in fact defined by the debasement that they can effect. Thus the cowboy Bush is being maligned, pushed around by the press, told that his vit is no longer gonflé. He’s a girl, he’s a girlie-man. The persecutors must be punished for this. And what better punishment than to deposit just the most precious little Bush turd on the constitution! Yes, let the president defy law itself – let him use his strong, strong penis to press the buttons and make his supermen squad of bombers discharge on Iran, burning, beautifully burning into a nice crisp those frightening brown skins, and at the same time wipe his ass with the constitution, thus fulfilling the Sadean trajectory that goes from seduction to blasphemy. And in this way we get to the high point of Kagan’s dream. It is, actually, as a high point, rather pedestrian – the usual Clancy fantasy of bombs killing and killing and killing, ripping off the skins of brown men, making sure they suffer. Brown women too, of course. The absence of napalm in the current war is obviously a deep wound to the erotic charge it could have for the neo-cons. Torture has made up for it, in the various prisons, but still, bombing Iran – that would be special, that would make up for everything.

As I said, this is garden variety porn. What is special is that WAPO is where neo-con porno seems to find its natural venue.

“The likely failure of diplomacy would not deter Bush from pursuing it, however. If and when it failed, he would be able to choose the military course, and no fair person could accuse him of not having tried to bring the world along to do what had to be done. At least he would know in his own mind that he had sincerely given diplomacy a chance. And when he ordered the strike on Iran, he would know that, whatever else could be said about him, he would not go down in history as the man who let the mullahs have the bomb.

It's just a theory.”