Don't let it get you down, it's only castles burning...

Like all good Americans – and Russians, come to that – LI harbors apocalyptic fantasies and eagerly looks for the promised horror in the flotsam and jetsam of bad news in the newspapers. In The Idiot, you’ll remember, Lebedev is a buffoon/parasite of the Rameau type who insinuates himself into Salon society with his interpretations of the Book of Revelations. At one point, somebody accuses him of interpreting the star Wormwood as the railroads spreading through Europe. Actually, an excellent interpretation – it was, after all, the contention of the more sober historian, AJP Taylor, that the schedule of those same railroads was the driver for the mobilizations that led to WWI.

So – in spite of my worry about my brother’s investments – I got that certain vertigo from the 400 point stock market drop yesterday – although I in no way believe that indicates a permanent trend. And it made me think of posting a little story about the end of Carthage written as one of the Imaginary Dialogues by the always bizarre late romantic, Walter Savage Landor. Landor, of course, is now off the map as far as the canon is concerned, but remember – he was held in the highest esteem by Emerson, Swinburne, and other assorted literati in the 19th century.

The dialogue is imagined to take place between Scipio Africanus, Polybius, and Panaetius – ah, the air of mustiness is already collecting around your muzzle, lecteur! – but don’t worry, this isn’t some Victorian re-enactment of Roman virtues. Like Flaubert, Landor has a view of Carthage that is full of sexual imagery and violence. Scipio describes the razing of the city – shades of Fallujah – with a cynical view of the meaning of it all. Far from honor and dignity, it is a matter of business – Carthage offers a competitive advantage to Rome that can’t be tolerated. Then Polybius tells a story. He and a patrol enter the half destroyed city. They hear cries issuing unexpectedly from a part of it, and make their way through ash clogged streets until “two old men throw themselves on the ground” at his feet. The men are Carthage’s judges. One of the judges says, ‘the laws are yours, o Romans, and nobody judges treason and parricide more harshly.’ With that sentence, the old men led the patrol around the next corner. Here, I’ll let Landor take over:

‘We entered a small square: it had been a market-place: the roofs of the stalls were demolished, and the stones of several columns, (thrown down to extract the cramsp of iron and the lead that fastened them) served for the spectators, male and female, to mount on. Five men were nailed on crosses; two others were nailed against a wall, from scarcity (as we were told) of wood.

“Can seven men have murdered their parents in the same year?” I cried.
“No, nor has any of the seven,” replied the first who had spoken. “But when heavy impositions were laid upon those who where backward in voluntary contributions, these men, among the richest in our city, protested by the gods that they had no gold or silver left. They protested truly.”

“And they die for this! Inhuman, insatiable, inexorable wretch!”

“Their books,” added he, unmoved at my reproaches, ‘were seized by public authority and examined. It was discovered that, instead of employing their riches in external or internal commerce, or in manufactories, or in agriculture, instead of reserving it for the embellishment of the city, or the utility of the citizens, instead of lending it on interest to the industrious and needy, they had lent it to foreign kings and tyrants, some of whom were waging unjust wars by these very means, and others were enslaving their own country. For so heinous a crime the laws had appointed no specific punishment. On such occasions the people and elders vote in what manner the delinquent shall be prosecuted, lest any offender should escape with impunity, from their humanity or improvidence. Some voted that these wretches should be cast amid the panthers; the majority decreed them (I think wisely) a more lingering and more ignominious death.”

The men upon the crosses held down their heads, whether from shame or pain or feebleness. The sunbeams were striking them fiercely; sweat ran from them, liquefying the blood that had blackened and hardened on their hands and feet. A soldier stood by the side of each, lowering the point of his spear to the ground; but no one of them gave it up to us. A centurian asked the nearest of them how he dared to stand armed before him.

‘Because the city is in ruins, and the laws still live,” said he. “At the first order of the conqueror of the elders, I will surrender my spear.”

“What is your pleasure, O commander?” asked the elder.

“That an act of justice be the last public act performed by the citizens of Carthage and that the sufferings of these wretches not be abridged.”

Such was my reply. The soldiers piled their spears, for the points of which the hearts of the crucified men thirsted; and the people hailed us as they would have hailed deliverers.”

sources of disinformation: iran

The anonymous claptrap which, herded through the NYT, WAPO, LAT and the tv news helped Bush and his merry men lead this country into a most satisfying circle jerk of war in 2003, is happening all over again with Iran. But to get the full affect of the war aphrodisiac, you need a chosen set of experts to interpret the wisdom of anonymity.

None is better than a man in uniform – and we know how much the media loves a man in uniform – and so who better to push to the front for yesterday’s bogus story about a weapons cache “found in a palm grove just north of the Iraqi capital” than Maj. Marty Weber, who plumbed his infinite wisdom about Iran’s weaponry to explain that this cache, consisting of weapons easy to make in Iraq (and easy to buy, given the money flooding in from the Saudis for Sunni militias) had the high sulfur and brimstone smell of Iranian goods.

Yet then there was this: “But while the find gave experts much more information on the makings of the E.F.P.’s, which the American military has repeatedly argued must originate in Iran, the cache also included items that appeared to cloud the issue.

Among the confusing elements were cardboard boxes of the gray plastic PVC tubes used to make the canisters. The boxes appeared to contain shipments of tubes directly from factories in the Middle East, none of them in Iran. One box said in English that the tubes inside had been made in the United Arab Emirates and another said, in Arabic, “plastic made in Haditha,” a restive Sunni town on the Euphrates River in Iraq.”

Marty Webb first appeared as our Iranian weapons expert yesterday, in a story about another weapons cache found in Hilla. In that story:

“Major Weber said he doubted that Hezbollah — the group that the Mahdi militia leader Moktada al-Sadr has used as a model for his political movement — would have provided the material and technology to the Mahdi militia or to other Shiite fighters in Iraq. “It is possible, but based upon my experience we have not seen Hezbollah share information or technology on anything until they have been told to,” he said.”

That Major Weber – apparently he is on Hezbollah’s “Look what those crazy mullahs want us to do now” email list.
…
But the other Iranian experts and analysts are the dealmakers, not one overworked, weapons cache rushing Major. This is why LI was so pleased to discover the Right Web site – which we have included on our blogroll – it is the link entitled, DIRECTORY OF THE PSYCHOPATHS WHO RULE US - SMELL THE INSANITY. It is proving very useful. For instance – take an article like this thumbsucker from the Christian Science Monitor, “Iran's pursuit of nuclear power raises alarms ; Does access to fuel ease nations toward nuclear weapons? Rising demand has nonproliferation experts unsettled.” Four Iranian ‘experts” are quoted – although why we call them experts is left in the shadows. They sort out in classic thumbsucker fashion. Two are foreign policy moderates, lukewarm imperialists: a Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association in Washington, and a Joseph Cirincione, a nonproliferation expert at the Center for America Progress. Cirincione even goes so far as to gingerly reference reality:

“A problem for the international community is that many developing countries, no matter what they may think of the Iranian regime, perceive that Iran has a point when it speaks of developed-world favoritism, says the Arms Control Association's Mr. Kimball. Other analysts agree.

"Whether we like it or not, Iran is tapping into this issue of fairness and equality," says Joseph Cirincione, a nonproliferation expert at the Center for America Progress and author of a new book, "Bomb Scare," on the future of nuclear weapons.”

That the U.S., which has used nuclear weapons in the past, is pushing an ABM defense aggressively at the present, and is stocked full of lunatics like our Vice President, intent on restarting bomb testing, does have that quality of begging the question of fairness and equality. Oh, and then there are the hundred or so bombs stockpiled by Israel, and the U.S.’s gladhanding of the Indian nuclear program. So I suppose the questioning of the fairness and equality, here, is rather like the questioning of the fairness and equality of Jim Crow laws in the South. A shocking eruption of common sense.

Balanced against the lukewarm imperialists are the running dogs: Henry Sokolski, executive director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center in Washington and a former Pentagon nonproliferation official, and Ilan Berman, vice president of the American Foreign Policy Council and an Iran expert. This is where the righweb directory comes in handy. You can look up Sokolski and find out, among other entertaining things, that he signed a letter from Project for the New American Century on September 21, 2001, which said: “Even if evidence does not link Iraq directly to the [9/11] attack, any strategy aiming at the eradication of terrorism and its sponsors must include a determined effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq. Failure to undertake such an effort will constitute an early and perhaps decisive surrender in the war on international terrorism.” This non-sequitor has, of course, become the principle to which the U.S. has sacrificed 200-400 thousand Iraqi lives. And Sokolski is all over the place, at the moment, pushing the proposal that Iran has no right to enrich nuclear fuel at all – for it turns out that the U.S. is the only country that has the right to unilaterally withdraw from its treaty obligations, viz the limitations placed on the country by past ABM treaties. It is an asymmetric world for these people. As for Ilan Berman, you can learn that he is a freedom fighter. Yes indeed. This is what he has said about Iran: “A frequent invitee to congressional sessions covering Middle East and terrorism issues, Berman consistently advocates expansive U.S. intervention in the Middle East. At an October 2005 briefing for the House Subcommittee on the Middle East and Central Asia, Berman argued:

The fundamental problem facing the United States is that Iran's ‘nuclear clock' is ticking much faster than its ‘regime change clock.' Altering that equation—both through initiatives that delay and derail Iran's nuclear ambitions and through those that empower opposition forces inside and outside of the Islamic Republic—should be the starting point for any serious American strategy.

So, for those reading the papers, keep that invaluable link to the rightweb in mind. We will. As well as Berman’s comment, which pretty much sums up the wishful thinking of the Bush Administration. It would be funny if it weren’t so sad. The starting point for any serious American strategy should be – throw away Berman’s advice, recognize Iran, let NGOs engage with Iranian dissidents, do business, grow up, realize that American power has shrunk in the Middle East, and realize that we aren’t in World War IV, there is no long long long war, we are on the edge of economic and environmental problems that will require resources that we are massively wasting, etc., etc. You know the words and the tune.

Locke vs. the Witch

This is a typical story from Edward Wingfield's Discourse of Virginia. Wingfield, one of John Smith's men, is talking about another expedition of starving, quarreling gentlemen up another hopeless river in a country seemingly infinite in expanse and strangeness. He and Smith meet a kyng of an Indian nation, named Pawatah. The Englishmen presented him with a hatchet.

“Monday he came to the water side, and we went a shore to him agayne. He tolde us that our hott Drynckes he thought caused his greefe, but that he was well agayne, and we were very welcome. He sent for another Deere which was roasted and after sodd for us (as before). Our Captayne caused his Dynner to be Dressed a shore also. Thus we satt banqueting all the forenoone, some of his people led us to their houses, shewed us the growing of their Corne and the maner of setting it, gave us Tobacco, wallnutes, mulberyes, strawberryes, and Respises. One sheewed us the herbe called in their tongue wisacan, which they say heales poisoned wounds, it is like lyverwort or bloudwort. One gaue me a Roote wherewith they poison their Arrows. they would shew us any thing we Demaunded, and laboured very much by signes to make us understand their Languadge.”

LI thinks there are fascinating things in the early stories of the colonists – (and reminds you to be on the watch for Matthew Sharpe’s Jamestown). We are bringing up this account of gifts to contrast it with a recent post on Crooked Timber by John Quiggen, which is about a recent survey of happiness and how one should interpret the results of it . This is a truly ponderable matter, although economists are only moved to spasmodically engage with empirical evidence about happiness once in a blue moon, as a sort of homage to Bentham.

Well, the post, and the assumptions, have made me ponder about the emphasis on the happiness parameter, and the neglect of others – among which, most strikingly, is generosity. And on this neglect hangs a tale of Weltanshauungs.

It really does make perfect sense for economists to be worried about happiness, just as it made sense, so long ago, for the Jamestown colonists to look at all those gifts and plan on seizing them – or just as it makes sense that one of the enduring American myths is of the “purchase” of Manhattan for a deal of beads. For here, the avant garde of the Early Modern Era, Lockians avant le lettre, encountered an ethos they had already overthrown in Southern England. They met it, too, in the Scots highland, and the wild country in Ireland. They met it and invariably they killed it. For this was the deal – the Lockian view was that liberty, that amazing invention of the Dutch and the English, consisted of the disposing of property. Freedom and owning property were synonymous. Whereas the Kynge Pawatah, the highland clans, the cattle raiding Irish, all saw liberty – not that they conceptualized it as such – as generosity. To be powerful was to give. Account after account of the first settlements tell us that the colonists, always seeming to be a miserable lot, survived, crucially, on the generosity of the salvages. The learning of planting techniques, the seeds, the food for the winter, the banqueting – it was all accepted without question by the settlers, who responded with maps, surveys, claims, and treaties. Of course, we are not talking of an unmixed capitalist ethos – these seventeenth century bravos were still too close to the older ways to be completely comfortable with the triumph of property. But so it went – the fall of one definition of freedom – transmuted into today’s terms, it is the freedom from the iron laws of economics, the remorseless gameplaying for profit – versus another: freedom of contract. While, from the Lockean viewpoint, generosity is nothing more than irresponsibility, a parasitic relationship to the production machine.

Poor Marx. He was born too late. If only he’d been there, at John Smith’s side.

Now, the thing about conservatives is that, no matter how they might go on about Aristotle and natural law, in the end, they are always going to come back to Locke. The Aristotelian virtue of generosity is absolutely foreign to the ethos of property based liberty. Try to imagine Americans, now, looking out at strangelooking, foreign tongued peoples straggling down their streets, and going out and – showing them all their wealth. Treating them to the best food. Giving them medicine. This is not going to happen.

The thing about liberals is this: we are nostalgic for the ethos of generosity, but aware of the amazing wealth created by the freedom of contract. Our idea is that eventually, the wealth will be so much that society will evolve, peacefully, into a thing more generous – generous beyond the belief of those Indians.

This is to tacitly ignore what “evolution” is all about. Marxists, of course, think that they can skip and seize, banking on a revolution that comes from outside history. And LI, ex-lefty, misfit liberal, only figured out, last year, that Red Riding Hood going up the path of pins is not the same as Red Riding Hood going back down the path of pins. That there are irreversible paths, and that the negation of the negation is best embodied in that moment in which the witch says the Lord’s Prayer backwards. Little Red Riding Hood can get eaten by the wolf, or have the wolf killed, or – back back back down that path – worship the wolf.

I imagine that, on the parameter of generosity, this country would show up as characteristically schizophrenic. If I close one crow’s eye and gaze at these here states, I see an astonishingly selfish place. Foreign aid has radically declined since the sixties, even as the country has become much, much richer. This is a country that calmly looked on in the nineties, watched Africa fight an AIDS epidemic that was, in its scope, like the Black Death, and moved only to make sure that the intellectual property rights of the drug companies were properly respected. This is a country that abolishes welfare, and substitutes the system of jails – jails being a two-fer – you can both enforce apartheid and sink the poor into such straits that they become absolutely demoralized. In these days of the long long war, World War IV, don’t you know, what country is taking in the million plus refugees from the Iraq war? Syria and Jordan – where the average income is, maybe, a tenth what it is in the U.S. The U.S. – the major cause of the death of the two to four hundred thousand Iraqis, and the flight of the million plus – will take in – 7.000 this year. Ideally. This is typical, however. Unless you are white, coming to the U.S. is always a fraught enterprise – from the coast card turning back starving Haitians all the way back to the policy of slamming the door in the face of the Jews in the 30s.

However, closing that eye and opening my other crows eye, I see evidences of generosity in another form. A restlessness and energy in the culture that is all about giving everything up. About second chances. The bold forging of new sexual relationships. A lot of things that I find incredibly moving, but would have trouble materializing it into questions on a generosity questionnaire.

I am finishing up a project that has powderized the marrow from my bones and snuffed it up its big fat nose. So, no big post today, no flapping of my dusty moth wings against the infamies of empire. No rousing and pointless charges at my usual tilts. Instead, go to this link, which is about something capitalism is getting right for a change: the google book project! I have a tragic and total love for the google book project. Gots to testify, here, friend, neighbors, mooks and gibberers! As a editor and researcher for hire, this project has certainly revolutionized my life and given me a stiff neck from hours of searching for hire. I haven’t used this blog to advertise myself, lately, or shill for buckos, but let’s just say LI is an early adapter, and well worth the pittance if you are in need of a research scout for that paper.

good news (again) in Iraq

As LI has said before, there is something curiously hollow about the Bush administration’s policy stated aim of victory in Iraq. On the one hand, we already won – you will remember the Saddam Hussein hanging. On the other hand, we are still there, fighting for something. Often, that something is simply conflated with “defeating Al Qaeda.” It is an interesting policy – one perhaps stemming from Jesus’ Good Samaritan parable - that seeks to protect the Iraqis from Al Qaeda while allowing Al Qaeda to regroup and party in Pakistan. Is this due to the saintliness of our president? Bravely trying to wrestle the control of the White House plane away from the pilot on 9/11/2001 so he could go mano a mano with the terrorist fiends, did Bush’s thoughts drift to the potential danger to the Iraqis – in Kirkuk, Mosul, Basra, Baghdad and all of those cities he had difficulty finding on a map – from an Al Qaeda that didn’t exactly exist in Iraq, but could, if America didn’t challenge them by inviting them in and then fighting them interminably.

Well, that’s our president. Even when he was knee high to a grasshopper, he was always in a sweat about Iraqis. Were they happy? Was their burning yearning for liberty being satisfied? Were there enough of them happily vacationing (in that funny way Iraqis vacation – they bring all their money, as many possessions as they can, and their families) in Jordan and Syria? Even then, he knew that when he grew up, he would protect them against the terrorists that he invited into their country and win a big victory and go down in history as one of our great presidents, like George Washington – except with better teeth.

Now that the British have started to withdraw from Basra, our Vice President has remarked that this is good news. This is all about success in Iraq. So now, at least, we can catch a glimpse of what victory means – what the Iraq of our dreams is going to look like. That’s why readers should go to Patrick Cockburn’s report in the Independent. It is a heady thing, victory, and this is what we are fighting for:

The British forces had a lesson in the dangers of provoking the heavily armed local population when six British military police were killed in Majar al-Kabir on 24 June 2003. During the uprising of Mehdi Army militia of Muqtada al-Sadr in 2004, British units were victorious in several bloody clashes in Amara, the capital of Maysan province.

But in the elections in January 2005, lauded by Mr Blair this week, Sciri became the largest party in Basra followed by Fadhila, followers of the Mohammed Sadiq al-Sadr, the father of Muqtada al-Sadr. The lat-ter’s supporters became the largest party in Maysan.
Mr Cordesman says the British suffered political defeat in the provincial elections of 2005, and lost at the military level in autumn of the same year when increased attacks meant they they could operate only through armoured patrols. Much-lauded military operations, such as “Corrode” in May 2006, did not alter the balance of forces.

Mr Cordesman’s gloomy conclusions about British defeat are confirmed by a study called “The Calm before the Storm: The British Experience in Southern Iraq” by Michael Knights and Ed Williams, published by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
Comparing the original British ambitions with present reality the paper concludes that “instead of a stable, united, law-abiding region with a representative government and police primacy, the deep south is unstable, factionalised, lawless, ruled as a kleptocracy and subject to militia primacy”.

Local militias are often not only out of control of the Iraqi government, but of their supposed leaders in Baghdad. The big money earner for local factions is the diversion of oil and oil products, with the profits a continual source of rivalry and a cause of armed clashes. Mr Knights and Mr Williams say that control in the south is with a “well-armed political-criminal Mafiosi [who] have locked both the central government and the people out of power”.

The war’s supporters, of course, have reason to feel smug. Our long nightmare is over. As a people, Americans – rich and poor, black and white – have, for over a decade, been clamoring for an Iraq ruled by Sciri and Sadr. It is all that we talk about. Sometimes we entertain ourselves with a few celebrity deaths or haircuts, but here in the States – I’m writing this down so that readers overseas get a feel for the American reality – conversations about money, sex, jobs invariably drift to that dreamy moment when your average American says, I don’t care how much money it takes or how much blood, I want to see an Shi’a fundamentalism take control in Mesopotamia – it is a long held childhood dream, actually! Then Americans get all misty eyed, thinking about how they can die happy if only things go the right way in Kirkuk.

One thing you have to say about this country – we are willing to sacrifice any amount of Iraqi blood to make our dreams come true. It is the way we are. Morally superior to the rest of the world. Which is why GOD has promised us victory, damn it, and we are going to reach for it!

fightin' al qaeda at abu ghraib

“I beg you, let us establish from the start as the solid bases of any such system,” said Verneuil, that in the intentions of nature there is necessarily one class of individuals essentially subordinate to the other by weakness and by birth: given this, if the subject sacrificed by the individual who gives himself up to his passions belongs to this weak and deficient class, then the sacrificer has no more done anything evil than the owner of a farm who kills his pig.” – D.A.F. de Sade, quoted in Luc Boltanski’s Distant Suffering.

Boltanski’s book has a section devoted to the pure spectator. He uses painting and its placement to illustrate the evolution of the spectator, and his erasure from the painting. In Florence, the paintings that depicted the tortures of the damned were placed in chambers of justice where the tortures of the living – the criminals – were enacted. “The works analysed by Edgerton which represent the Last Judgment (or, in the upper part a Last Judgement and, in the lower part, a trial and execution) are not directed at a spectator who contemplates them for pleasure. These pictures, which are sometimes displayed in the rooms where the tribunals are held or in the chapels of places of detention (like the Bargello in Florence), place the prisoner before the sufferings awaiting him in the hereafter and also – the demonic cruelties reproducing farily exactly the procedures of interrogation and execution in force in Renaissance Italian towns – before those due to him and soon to be inflicted on him in the world below. They have meaning only in an active relationship with the culprit who, exposed to what they illustrate, must find the way to contrition.”

This, of course, reminds LI of the dialogue between Mr. Shiftlet and the old lady in The Life you Save May be Your Own:

“"I told you you could hang around and work for food," she said, "if you don't mind sleeping in that car yonder."
"Why listen, Lady," he said with a grin of delight, "the monks of old slept in their coffins!"
"They wasn't as advanced as we are," the old woman said.”

How advanced we are comes home to this reader from Alessandra Stanley’s review, more in sadness than in anger, of “The Ghosts of Abu Ghraib.” The sadness, of course, is for the lack of good old American know-how:

“The problem with the Fox thriller “24” is not that it justifies torture but that it fosters the illusion that the American government is good at it.

The practices of Abu Ghraib suggest the opposite. The mystery of that shameful episode was not the cruelty of American troops assigned there. After the initial disbelief over the obscene snapshots, their smile-for-the-camera barbarity turned out to be another painful reminder that the banality of evil has no borders.
The real puzzle is why the administration, which argued that the war against terror required extreme interrogation techniques — the kind critics call torture — would then entrust such measures to untrained amateurs.”

Now, of course, it is rather banal to condemn torture. But Stanley’s idea of spiffying up the tired subject by taking a “we can surely torture better than this” approach to Abu Ghraib does have a way of revealin’ just how fuckin’ advanced this great, this moral, this benign superpower has become. From Stanley’s tone, one can tell that if she was at Abu Ghraib, why she would have been producing memos about better torture techniques left and right. Why, just the introduction of some of those lovely power tools you can purchase at home depot for those basement repairs would come in handy! But no, it strikes her that her country is letting her down in the torture department.

But the raw material never ceases to shock. How is it that a government that took such bold steps to reinterpret the Geneva Conventions and update the rules of combat did not pay closer attention to how its policy changes were carried out on the ground?

The Pentagon didn’t even manage to shield the worst excesses from public view.

The power of photography was yet another forgotten lesson of Vietnam, one relatively easy for the military to have remembered. If school principals can ban cellphones from the classroom, it seems strange — or reckless — that generals did not apply the same common sense and forbid cameras inside top-security cellblocks.”

The future Stanley guide to the subject (7 highly efficient tortures for highly efficient soldiers!) will certainly advise against those cameras!

“If there were no photographs, there would be no Abu Ghraib, no investigation,” says Javal Davis, an M.P. interviewed on camera who was court-martialed and sentenced to six months in prison on charges of prisoner abuse. “It would have been, ‘O.K., whatever, everybody go home.’ ”

However, though Stanley’s concern that the torturing business in the U.S. needs a definite overhaul – dental drills, front and center! – we beg to differ on the picture issue. For what signals total domination more than being able to take a picture, any time any where, of a subject? Here the world surely closes in. The Florentines, it turns out, just wasn’t advanced like we are, digital cameras in hand. If Boltanski is right to connect the evaporation of the spectator from within the picture to the pure spectatorship of the bourgeois era, starting in the 18th century – a cooler relationship that prefigures tv – the Abu Ghraib pics might just figure the foreclosing of the possibility that Iraqis could be spectators – our form of subjectivity in these here states, gimme the channel changer would ya, honey – and that, in turn, would be perfectly consonant with their erasure from the Iraq story as it is reported, day after day, in the newspapers. I notice that the NYT published, today, on the same day as Ms. Stanley gets depressed about America’s torture deficit, an op ed about the withdrawal of British troops from Iraq that goes on and on as if the occupiers were just the most popular things with the Iraqis since clay bricks. That even the Pentagon’s polls have shown, for years, that a majority of Iraqis approve of attacks on the coalition troops, that they overwhelmingly support withdrawal, is one of those cutting room sequences. There is a buncha those piled up on the floor, from what the Iraqi government thinks of Iran’s interference in Iraq (they are trying to get more of it, as every Iraqi politician who has traveled to Teheran has been saying for three years) to the popularity of free enterprise reform in Iraq (overwhelmingly rejected by the population).

So, as we blissfully ignore what the Iraqis say, we torture them to give us Intelligence. Not that we could fuckin' understand it if they gave it. The motherfuckers insist on speaking Arabic.

But let’s let Ms. Stanley, valiantly getting bi-partisan about the torture issue (some are for it, some agin – but us advanced folk are willing to look on both sides) have the last word:

““Ghosts of Abu Ghraib” will appall and sadden viewers worried about human rights and international law. But it will be just as discouraging for those who believe that the danger posed by Al Qaeda trumps even those humanitarian concerns.

Abu Ghraib wasn’t just a moral failure, it was a strategic setback in the war against terror.”

“That danger from Al Qaeda” – yes, that is just just jjjjust why we are in Iraq! It is simply bliss to be alive at a time of such record levels of cretinism. I’m going to die of being so tickled every day.

check out lumpenprofessoriat on the love boat to mesopotamia

A friend of mine has started a blog, and has a nice, rabble rousing post up for today. Check out lumpenprofessoriat! LP argues that we can see the outpouring of love, love, love in the wreck and murder of Iraq: “Love of country, love of freedom, love of the troops, and love for the victims of 9/11 becomes transformed into the injustice and evil of shock and awe, of Abu Ghraib, and of the hundreds of thousands dead in Iraq. This seems to fit well with both the experience and rhetoric of the war to date where noble sentiments and endless shit have marched hand in hand.”

a post that bristles with references like a porcupine bristles with spikes

“Let’s be clear. There is simple ass kissing, and there is metaphorical ass kissing.” –Rameau.

The dialogue between Diderot and Rameau’s nephew seems, like a normal conversation, to touch on one thing and then another. The theme of it, though, keeps returning to Rameau – how he lives, and how he lives with himself. Rameau is a flatterer, a backbiter, a crook (escroc), a go-between, a lover of good food and riches. But he is also endowed with good taste, or at least steady, classical taste – he doesn’t delude himself about the quality of Voltaire’s work, but he does comfort himself with the badness of the worst of Voltaire's moral character. To illustrate his world, he tells several anecdotes. Now,the curious thing about these anecdotes is that they operate as a test. It gradually becomes clear that there is a competition, a game, going on between Diderot, the moi in the dialogue, and Rameau, the lui.

What is this game?

It is a test we all go through as kids: the test of disgust. The test, as it happens on the playground, consists of being told something disgusting, or being the witness of something disgusting, and not giving vent to any sentiment, any shrinking, any shame. LI is not, by the way, trying to disparage this particular sequence of our common education. There is something that pisses me off about people who are too particular, too grossed out about blood and shit and the whole general stink of life – the full diaper, the squashed cockroach.

So let's not load the dice. I have zigzagged against the buffoon, but this swerve should be seen within a dialectical history of the disappearance of the sage. Look at this as a plea for the counterbalance, as well as an indictment for social murder.

Perhaps there is something in this playground test that is particularly male – although I’m cautious about this kind of gender generalization. In William Miller’s anatomy of disgust, he quotes the case of the wild boy of Aveyron, reported by Doctor Itard: ‘The well documented early nineteenth century wild boy of Aveyron had no sense of pure and impure, was extraordinarily filthy, was not “toilet trained”, and clearly disgusted Jean Itard, the doctor who supervised him and to whom we owe our knowledge of the case. Itard’s evidence, however, is not without some problems. Although the boy would sniff like an animal at everything no matter how malodorous, he would not eat everything. “A dead canary was given him, and in an instant he stripped off its feathers, great and small, tore it open with his nails, smelt it, and threw it away” The boy was not exactly omnivorous. He was initially willing to eat a canary, but this particular canary had an unappetizing odor. Certain odors might indeed have disgusted him, although his aversion might have been more simply constituted, that is, it might have given rise to no thoughts of contamination and pollution. We would surely like to know how he felt about his hands after discarding the bird.” Contamination [Ansteckung] is, in fact, the word Hegel uses to speak of one moment in the struggle of Enlightenment – borne by an intelligence that is founded on universal principles, and yet confronts, as an individual, the belief of the masses – as it carries out its social strategy of stripping belief from its supports: “The communication of the pure intelligence [Einsicht – understanding] is thus comparable to that of a scent in an unresisting atmosphere. It is a penetrating contamination, which does nothing at first to call attention to itself against the indifferent element, in which it insinuates itself, and thus cannot be guarded against. Only when the contamination has spread is it something for the consciousness, that had carelessly permitted it.”

Thus, in one sense the Nephew of Rameau recapitulates a primal, playground scene, the moment in which shame and shamelessness engage in a ritual contest. However, there are limits to a test that is so structured that victory must go to the shameless. These limits are embodied in the moment that the surrounding silence, the spectatorial silence, the silence of accommodation, is broken. The ‘consciousness’ – which in this passage in Hegel is embodied in the institutions of the state, the church, and the third power of the bourgeoisie – finally reacts. In so reacting, they claim dominion over shame itself. But the Café de la Regence lies, for a moment, outside of those institutions. While the pure intelligence of chess (a use of virtuosity about which Diderot was doubtful) is being played around our pair, the game of shamelessness procedes without witnesses, so to speak, allowing Rameau to bare not only himself, but the shamemaking institutions themselves, and the political strategy they have taken against the ‘contamination’ of the enlightenment philosophes. This is the beginning of a wobble – that wobble which, in the history of the pairing of the buffoon and the sage, will eventually turn the buffoon against the sage and, at the same time, seem to ordain the sage’s place for the buffoon. Diderot represents both himself as the philosophe, being half jokingly led through this trial (and getting in his own strokes as well) and the common sense, the massed, silent witness, which is the aftermath that supposedly belongs to the writer – although the trajectory of the manuscript of the Nephew of Rameau provides an ironic commentary on that writerly certainty. As Jacques D. once wrote, in an essay on Poe’s Purloined Letter, another story about the competition between shame and shamelessness – about provocation as an instrument of power - "a letter can always not arrive at its destination".

the true victims of the Iraq war - some of them not wearing underwear

Here’s an article that probes that American concern, anguish really, about war, peace, and freedom, and the death of half a million Iraqis, and the flight of at least two million so far. And - impressively - it turns out that the big victims here, the real victims, are Americans. The stories of going to Europe and being victimized are just heartbreaking. People, good people, are being treated meanly! In Europe!

An excerpt:

“Jacqie Venable, a 40-year-old music producer, was wearing a beret and jeans. She said she wasn’t wearing underwear.

She said the war in Iraq was meant to happen “karmically.”

“In my spiritual picture, it has to do with karma,” she said. “Everything that happens in life, to each of us, is what we call into our space. Everything comes full circle. So right now, it’s going to work out to whatever it works out to be. It might be happy for me and not happy for you.

“The people who are there fighting—it’s their journey. This is our journey,” she continued. “People are dying all around the world. Forget Iraq—they’re dying in this country. And their parents are suffering with them, and our parents suffer for us because we’re at Bungalow. There is no separation in the trauma.”

The guy who wrote it, incidentally, George Gurley, also did the drooling piece over Ann Coulter in the Obs.

Zigzag

This is from Ashton’s The History of Gambling in England. It is what Ivan Karamazov would call an allegory. Yes, for LI, there is something about this story of drunken hanging that reminds me of the paired destiny of the buffoon and the sage, this thread that I have been following – into my own asshole, certain cruel readers might say. No – into even drier gulches of history than that.

"The Annual Register about this time supplies us with several gambling anecdotes, the following being almost incredible: 15th April, 1812 – “On Wednesday evening an extraordinary investigation took place at Bow Street. Croker, the officer, was passing along the Haampstead road, when he observed, at a short distance before him, two men on a wall, and , directly after, saw the tallest of them, a stout man, about six feet high, hanging by his neck, from a lamp post attached to the wall, being that instant tied up and turned off by the short man. This unexpected and extraordinary sight astonished the officer; he made up to the spot with all speed; and, just after he arrived there the tall man, who had been hanged, fell to the ground, the handkechief, with which he had been suspended, having given way. Croker produced his staff, said he was an officer, and demanded to know of the other man the cause of such conduct. In the meantime, the man who had been hanged recovered, got up, and, on Croker’s interfering, gave him a violent blow on the nose, which nearly knocked him backwards. The short man was endeavouring to make offl however, the officer procured assistance, and both were brout to the office, when the account they gave was that they worked on the canals. They had been together on Wednesday afternoon, tossed up for money, and afterwards for clothes; the tall man who was hanged,won the other’s jacket, trousers and shoes; they then tossed up which should hang the other, and the short one won the toss. They got upon the wall, the one to submit, and the other to hang him on the lamp iron. They both agreed to this statement. The tall one, who would have been hanged, said, if he had won the toss, he would have hanged the other. He said he then felt the effects of his hanging in the neck, and his eyes were so much swelled he saw double. The magistrates expressed their horror and disgust, and ordered the man who had been hanged to find bail for the violent and unjustifiable assault on the officer, and the short one for hanging the other. Not having bail, they were committed to Bridewell for trial.”

If the short man and the tall man weren’t named Estragon and Vladimir, fate missed a trick.

Surely it is odd that LI is railing, in these posts, against the buffoon, when this is the same LI that claims to be lead, as if by supernatural light of the muse of ludicrousness, through the shadow of the valley of the moronic inferno I call my own country, my life and times. However, what I want to know is why, of the sage and the buffoon, the moi and the lui of Rameau’s nephew, only the buffoon made it into the present – and how it came about that the sage has been so utterly throttled by circumstances. What was the toss about? What were the stakes? How did they meet (illmet) and how did they part (one alone)? So, these are the questions, which I’m laying out like a deck of cards in this game of solitaire.

The key to the conversation of Rameau’s nephew is shamelessness – that most dialectical of attitudes. Shamelessness not only assumes shame, but it also assumes innocence – but only as a supreme lie. The lie of innocence is embodied in the peculiar way in which Rameau’s nephew not only speaks, but pantomimes – as if word and act were indivisible, which is indeed how a child has to learn to speak. It is later that we ignore the act of the tongue. Yet the charm of the pantomime is fully intended – Rameau’s nephew is nothing if not intentional in all things, even as he is described as being self-contradictory and a ball of contradictions. Shamelessness has become his strategy – just as it is the strategy of Sade’s fuckers. Shamelessness, vanity and flattery are the circuit of acts and attitudes in which Rameau has his existence, and they collectively have a political value. One that is fairly new. The ideology of the old right, the legitimist or the Tory, is about tradition and order – but the new right, that represented by Rameau, is about provocation. What takes shape here is a foretaste of the system that dominates us now, the mixture of shamelessness and outrage by which we drift over the hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis and howl at, say, the nasty language of bloggers. To use the U.S. for one example – but the same thing happens in Italy, in France, in the U.K.

A couple more posts on this and then I have done.

two trillion dollars - where is that pesky wabbit?

As LI has written again and again and again, there is no war on terrorism, and President Backbone is its prophet. Nothing changed, for the White House, on 9/11. Not a damned thing. Garbage in has meant garbage, oh so much of it, out. So much movement around so much stasis. This lovely article from the NYT gives us an exciting glimpse into the future that was decided when the U.S. “allowed” Osama Who to escape in 2001. Now, let’s see. In the past six years, conservatively, the U.S. has spent two trillion dollars are “defense”, and Mr. Who has spent maybe a cool million or two becoming a video star. And the end result of that is, as anybody would have expected from the unparalleled criminality of our Little Caesars in D.C. – that Osama is becoming the Toyota of terrorists. Moving up fast!

As recently as 2005, American intelligence assessments described senior leaders of Al Qaeda as cut off from their foot soldiers and able only to provide inspiration for future attacks. But more recent intelligence describes the organization’s hierarchy as intact and strengthening.
“The chain of command has been re-established,” said one American government official, who said that the Qaeda “leadership command and control is robust.”
American officials and analysts said a variety of factors in Pakistan had come together to allow “core Al Qaeda” — a reference to Mr. bin Laden and his immediate circle — to regain some of its strength. The emergence of a relative haven in North Waziristan and the surrounding area has helped senior operatives communicate more effectively with the outside world via courier and the Internet.
The investigation into last summer’s failed plot to bomb airliners in London has led counterterrorism officials to what they say are “clear linkages” between the plotters and core Qaeda operatives in Pakistan. American analysts point out that the trials of terrorism suspects in Britain revealed that some of the defendants had been trained in Pakistan.

eine kleine Hegelmusik

In the Phenomenology, Hegel introduces some of the dialogue from Rameau’s nephew in the section on the “self alienated spirit”. Here, the social conditions that frame the dialectical image embodied, eventually, in the “myself” and “him” of the dialogue are State Power and Wealth. They inevitably impinge upon “Bildung” – education, the development of the intelligence (Einsicht) – and there is no resigning from them, or turning away from them. Since State Power and Wealth are, indeed, the spirits that preside over our current miseries, the current sad state of American culture, American aggression, American cluelessness – the whole D.C. daisy chain – the dialogue between the sage and the buffoon takes on a whole new relevance. One has only to read, say, in the Friday Washington Post a profile of Michelle Malkin by Howard Kurz entitled Hard Right Punch to see how the transaction between decency (o decency), the false transparency of the media, and buffoonery plays out in these dire days of the mock apocalypse, how we are invited to suffer, and do suffer, as comments galore demonstrate, for the victimization of the wealthy. In the course of the article, a homespun little piece in the genre of here's looking at you kid, it is reported that “after a few liberal sites posted her home address and phone numbers last year, Malkin received a wave of harassing calls. She responded with a defiant post, headlined "I AM NOT AFRAID OF YOU." Malkin and her family have moved elsewhere in Maryland” jostles, without comment, next to this description of Malkin’s rise to notoriety: (“Malkin's detractors -- whom she derides as "moonbats" -- were further riled by her book "In Defense of Internment," in which she said the confining of Japanese Americans during World War II was justified, and backed racial profiling as a vital tool against terrorism”) The opinion is driven by, with the aplomb of a person who knows that he will never have to give up his house because of his race - ah, that wonderful superiority of it all. Of course, moving Japanese families out of their homes and behind barbed wire is a question that is up in the air – was it a good thing? a bad thing? and what is the ideological slant of those who are “riled” by the defense of it?. This is neutrality pleased at its own shamelessness, the view from nowhere that just happens to look exactly like the view from the cancer zone of the status quo, with its mortgages up the asshole and its soldier f/x on tv - this is the voice of the sage, except that the dividing line, the wall, has been lost that separates it from the voice of the buffoon. Or rather, the sage has become completely vacuous, found no relation to wealth and state power that would preserve its own in-itselfness, the potential to become a beggar in a brothel - no, rather the buffoon multiplies and becomes both the sage and the interviewee, the reporter and the provacateur, the producer and the propagandist, the politician and his campaign consultant. The orgy of the minimal self, armed with the orgy of the maximal weapon - such is the environment in which the sage has vanished.

Hegel sets the stage for the entrance of the buffoon – as I am calling this figure – by giving us a history of the relationship between the state and the noble spirit, which is the spirit of “heroic” service: (this is the J.N. Findley translation).

“State-power has, therefore, still at this stage no will to oppose the advice, and does not decide between the different opinions as to what is universally the best. It is not yet governmental control, and on that account is in truth not yet real state-power. Individual self-existence, the possession of an individual will that is not yet qua will surrendered, is the inner secretly reserved spiritual principle of the various classes and stations, a spirit which keeps for its own behoof what suits itself best, in spite of its words about the universal best, and tends to make this clap-trap about what is universally the best a substitute for action bringing it about. The sacrifice of existence, which takes place in the case of service, is indeed complete when it goes so far as death. But the endurance of the danger of death which the individual survives, leaves him still a specific kind of existence, and hence a particular self-reference; and this makes the counsel imparted in the interests of the universally best ambiguous and open to suspicion; it really means, in point of fact, retaining the claim to a private opinion of his own, and a separate individual will as against the power of the state. Its relation to the latter is, therefore, still one of discordance; and it possesses the characteristic found in the case of the base type of consciousness — it is ever at the point of breaking out into rebellion.”

In our case, us in these here states, the individual, at least the individual as interviewee, both promotes the risk society and survives it pretty well - as indeed do the soldiers who are privileged to fight for the interviewee. In fact, the win win only breaks down on the margines, with the fought-for - the terrorized/terrorist masses. They are, however, not interviewees, and so have an ambiguous status. Heroic service has become properly commoditized, and thus a new form of reconciliation between state power and the noble spirit becomes possible: state power pretends to be two things, a self-abnegating force that only wants to diminish itself into small government with all its heart and soul, and a universal abstraction representing liberty that requires being able to build enough missiles and host enough armed servicemen to destroy vast tracts of the world – while nobility becomes a mere position filled in by a meritocracy that embodies clap-trap (Geschwätze), which has found a way to make every sacrifice turns into profit in its hands – a miracle much more impressive than the loaves and the fishes.

Hegel supposes that the noble self, defining itself by a mortal sacrifice and thereby preserving itself, is genealogically precedent to the alienation of the self that is the condition of the rise of state power:

“It comes thereby to be actually what it is implicitly — the identical unity of self with its opposed self. In this way, by the inner withdrawn and secret spiritual principle, the self as such, coming forward and abrogating itself, the state-power becomes ipso facto raised into a proper self of its own; without this estrangement of self the deeds of honour, the actions of the noble type of consciousness, and the counsels which its insight reveals, would continue to maintain the ambiguous character which, as we saw, kept that secret reserve of private intention and self-will, in spite of its overt pretensions.” In this way we come to language in the age of the self-divided self – and to Rameau’s nephew. Which we will return to at some future post.

the setting

“No matter if the weather is fair or foul, it is my habit to talk a walk, at five in the evening, to the Palais-Royal.” This is how Diderot begins Rameau’s Nephew. With a walk.

For the sage, the regular walk is important. Kant, that indefatigable commenter on all things under the sun, noted the importance of the walk to the scholar in The Conflict of the Faculties under the heading: “On Pathological Feelings that Come from Thinking at Unsuitable Times”. “Thinking – whether in the form of study (reading books) or reflection (meditation and discovery) is a scholar’s food: and when he is wide awake and alone, he cannot live without it. But if he taxes his energy by occupying himself with a specific thought when he is eating or walking, he inflicts two tasks on himself at the same time – on the head and the stomach or on the head and the feet; and in the first place this brings on hypochondria, in the second, vertigo.” In a note, Kant distinguishes (Kant indefatiguably distinguishes – this guy is the very Prince of distinguishers) thinking from what should be occurring in the head of our non-multi-tasker during the walk: ‘When a man of studious habits goes for a walk alone, it is hard for him to refrain from entertaining himself with his own reflections. But if he engages in strenuous thinking during his walk, he will soon be exhausted, whereas if he gives himself over to the free play of imagination, the motion will refresh him – the reports of others whom I asked about this confirm my own experience. If in addition to thinking he also engages in conversation while he is walking, he will be even more fatigues, so that he will soon have to sit down to continue with his play of thought. The purpose of walking in the open air is precisely to keep one’s attention moving from one object to another and so to keep it from becoming fixed on any one object.” The Man in the Crowd might disagree with the prospect of health Kant holds out here, for it is precisely the habit of not becoming fixed on any one object, but on one after another, on the crowd itself, on a multiplication of objects, that has brought the man in Poe’s story down in the world – made him into a human fiend.

Diderot, on the other hand, is going off to the Palais-Royal, a section of Paris built up by the Regent, the Duc D’Orleans, containing shops, restaurants, and a garden. The theater of the Comedie Francaise was there – recently, Palissot’s play, Les Philosophes, which mocked, among others, Diderot, had been put on there – and Café de la Régence was located in the garden. There was a cannon in the garden, too, that was fired by means of the light focused by a large magnifying glass, to announce the hours – the kind of clever toy that delighted the enlightened soul. Mercier, in the Tableau of Paris, devotes a chapter to the Palais-Royal, which he claims is “precisely the spot which Plato would have assigned the captive, in order to retain him without a jailer, and without violence, by the voluntary chains of pleasure…” – which I believe is a distant reference to the myth of the cave. Mercier bemoans the fact that people walk in the Palais Royal when they could have much more philosophical walks in gardens of the Palace of Luxemberg – “Whilst the Palais Royal is crowded with courtesans and libertines, the Luxemburg presents a quiet philosophic walk, and is only frequented by honest citizens with their decent families.” No doubt, the Luxemburg would have been preferred by Kant – but this is the difference between Kant and the French philosophes.

The Café de la Régence, which is where Diderot ends up, meeting by chance the nephew of the famous musician, Rameau, was a famous spot for chess players. The greatest chess player of the time, Philador, played there. Paul Metzner, in his book, Crescendo of the Virtuoso: Spectacle, Skill and Self Promotion in Paris during the age of revolution devotes a chapter to the chess players of the Café de la Regence. The place was owned by a chess amateur, M. de Kermur, sire de Légal: “For countless years he sat in the same chair and wore the same green coat, taking large quantities of snuff and attracting a crowd with his equally brilliant conversation and combinations. He had already established his reputation as the best in France when Philidor first walked into the Regence in 1740, and he continued playing into the 1780s, his own eighties, without ever having to acknowledge a superior, although he lost at least one match.” Philidor learned how to play blindfold matches from Legal, although the latter did not often do this himself.

Well, now we have a setting for the dialogue.

sage and buffoon

I’ve been lining up sages, as you might have noticed. This is because I have a hunch that the sage and the buffoon share a destiny. I’m interested in the sage since I am at an age - middle age - a lying description because tomorrow, surely, or the next day, biking along, my backbone will be suddenly crushed in a blinding moment by a speeding truck driven by a hit and run drunk, I will see blackness, and then go down to the house of shades – when the sage should become important to me. And yet, to aspire to be a sage is such an obsolete and pathetic wish, the placeholder of that figure is so null and void in this culture, so completely disregarded, so much a joke moniker for some greyhaired keeper of baseball statistics or some fat brownnosing pundit oozing conventional wisdom and cancer, that it can only be a punch line ambition. (Well, so much for this culture, to which I give my middle finger). To my mind, the absence of the sage is not some natural event, but is all about that path through politics and history which the sage and the buffoon shared.

And having this obsession, I am naturally draw to Rameau’s nephew. For there the sage – moi – and the buffoon – lui – truly did meet. There are some odd and sinister things in that dialogue.

But this post will be about the backstory, the strange history of this text. While Diderot seems to have started it in the early 1760s, and polished it intermittently up until the mid 1770s, there is no mention of this text in the correspondence. That isn’t like Mr. D. The first we hear about it is after Diderot’s death. Schiller has a copy of the ms., which he gives to Goethe to translate. Goethe translates the ms., and then carelessly tosses it away. How did Schiller get it? Rumor has it that it was given to him by a German officer who came into possession of it in St. Petersburgh. Meanwhile, there is no published French version. Finally one comes out, published by a press run by “Le Vicomte de Saur” and “Le Compte de Saint-Geniès”, who seem to have been like Huckleberry Finn’s Duke and Dauphin. Their version, which they claimed came from an original manuscript, obviously was translated from Goethe. A rival publisher, one Brière, decides to publish a real version, so he applies to Diderot’s daughter, who gives him a manuscript. He publishes it, and in the process loses the ms. There is a flurry of charges and countercharges between the two publishers, but in the end, it looks like we will have to settle for the Brière version – when one Georges Monval, apparently looking for spicy books, comes upon it in the box of a bookseller in 1891. Always remember that, for most people, Diderot is still the author of one of the great fuckbooks, Les Bijoux Indiscrets, about a magic ring that could make a woman’s pussy talk. Anyway, this is the official Rameau we now all read.

In that transit, Rameau had come to the attention of Hegel. Hegel does a good job of pissing around the work in the Phenomenology. As we know, Hegel was a world champion pisser – he marked, with his gargantuan pizzle, all of world history, for instance. We have all dutifully followed him into the pissoir of the system, but we will never quite manipulate an instrument like the Man’s – and nobody else will, either.

We’ll start with Hegel when, in another post, we return to this subject.

among barbarians, do what is proper among barbarians

Li Zhi was a Chinese scholar of the Ming period, a contemporary of Yuan Hongdao, (about whom see LI’s Valentine’s Day post). He grew skeptical of the official Confucian doctrine of the day, and wrote books with titles like “A book for burning” – a title that prophesized the book’s fate. Chronologically, his life roughly parallels Giordano Bruno’s. This is from one of his letters:

“When most people write they strive to enter their subject by pushing into it from the outside; hereas I am already in there and make sorties to the outside, carrying the battle under the walls of the enemy, rummaging in his supplies, turning his own men and horses against him.”

Li is famous for, among other things, an essay entitled “Childlike Mind”. Here’s a quote from that essay:

Once people’s minds have been given over to received opinions and moral principles, what they have ot say is all about these things, and not what would naturally come from their childlike minds. No matter how clever the words, what have they to do with oneself? What else can there be but phony men speaking phony words, doing phony things, writing phony writings? Once the men become phonies, everything becomes phony. Thereafter, if one speaks phony talk to the phonies, the phonies are pleased; if one does phony things as the phonies do, the phonies are pleased; and if one discourses with the phonies through phony writings, the phonies are pleased. Everything is phony, and everyone is pleased.

Further, he writes: “… the best in literature always came from the childlike mind, and if the childlike mind continued to exist in this way, moral principles would not be practiced, received impressions would not stand up, and the writing of any age, any man, any form, any style, and any language would all be accepted as literature.”

It shouldn’t be surprising that a man who looks forward to the spontaneous society was considered a dangerous man. In fact, after putting away his wife and children – the usual cutting off of family ties of the male Chinese sage – Li published many pamphlets and essays that steadily cut into Confucian doctrine. In the Confucian system, the primary relationship was the parent-child relationship. For Li, the primary relationship was the husband-wife relationship. As his commentator, Theodore de Barry, from whose account of Li in Learning for Oneself: Essays on the Individual in Neo-Confucian thought, I've taken my quotes, says: … on the basis of the irreducibility of the male and female principles represented by yin and yang, Li denies the existence of any first principle at all.” Li’s notions made him object to the whole patriarchal structure of Chinese society. Even though he believed in the traditional gender stereotypes – the female principle being intuitive, the male rational – he wrote in his letters that the distribution of these principles in actual people was indifferent to sex – men and women, in his view, were intellectually equal. However, of all relationships, the one that counted most for Li was friendship – and even that, he believed, was not going to hold out until the end. This threw Li back on loneliness as an object of his supreme meditations – which is, paradoxically, the endpoint that awaits a number of related philosophic doctrines: the epicurian-materialist-libertine line in particular. You can see it in the Greek pre-socratics, in Sade, in Nietzsche – this movement to a solitude in which the self falls ill. The illness is a necessary metaphysical illness, a leaching into the bone of that colorless, odorless gas, thought thinking thought. This is, of course, the whole point – the point is to test the self against the greatest degree of loneliness, and see what happens. In Li’s case, apparently, he combined the hedonism of the libertines (he was by no means a celibate monk) with the idea of going further until, in 1600, in response to his revisionist history of China, a mob gathered and burned his house. Being a man with a witty sense of the title, he had called his history ‘A book to be hidden away.” In 1602, the government acted. The court ordered his books to be burnt. Li was put in prison, and committed suicide by cutting his throat.

“ The noble man accords with his station in life and does not desire to go beyond it.

In a position of wealth and honor he does what is proper to a position of wealth and honor. In a poor and low position, he does what is proper to a poor and low position. Situated among barbarians, he does what is proper among barbarians. In a situation of sorrow and difficulty, he does what is proper in sorrow and difficulty. The noble man can find himself in no situation in which he is not himself.”

Neither science nor art

What is journalism, anyway? Is it an art? A science? A mixture?

LI has had an overwhelmed feeling – the heart thrashing around in the socks feeling – for the last week about the fucking awful coverage of the Bush administration charges against Iran. That the charges were made by anonymous sources so that they could be echoed by the President is obvious to any sentient being. This is how the White House operates – like a peckerwood junta planning a small town lynching. However, LI is naïve enough to be truly grieved that the Washington Post and the New York Times would cooperate in this business, again.

The form of the newspaper developed in the eighteenth century, which was the high water mark of Baconian science. Jevons, the nineteenth century economist, did not think highly of Bacon, and made an attack on Baconian science in The Principles of Science that damaged Bacon’s reputation for a generation. It is striking that the case against Bacon, as Jevons puts it, is so similar to the case against journalism. In Jevon’s view, Baconian science a., mischaracterizes experiments (‘I take the extreme view of holding that Francis Bacon, although he correctly insisted upon constant reference to experience, had no correct notions as to the logical method by which from particular facts we educe laws of nature), and b., had no sense of pattern – that is, he advocated the indiscriminate accumulation of facts, out of which he supposed we could induce a pattern (“Bacon’s method, as far as we can gather the meaning of the main portions of his writings, would correspond to the process of empirically collecting facts and exhaustively classifying them, to which I alluded. The value of this method may be estimated historically by the fact that it has not been followed by any of the great masters of science.”) Now, LI is not as much of a positivist about the inductive method as Jevons, but we do think that Jevons has hit on the image and practice of science in the eighteenth century in the main. Its sole continuation is in the newspaper. Jevon’s notion of Bacon’s method is, almost literally, what you will read in newspapermen who deal with the meta issue – people like Howard Kurz. The notion of “bias” – of a journalist being liberal or conservative – corresponds to the deeper, Baconian fear of hypothesis. The facts, in news parlance, are supposed to speak for themselves.

Given this fear of bias, journalists by and large are easily driven into being the sewer pipe for whatever nonsense the ruling class dreams up. The trick, the childish but apparently neverfailing trick, is the pretence that the ruling class wetdream is actually the height and depth of centrism. Centrism is the vague substitute for hypothesis for the journalist. And centrism is a felt quality – you feel it when you are: white; male; and make above 100,000 dollars per year. You don’t have to possess any of those three qualities, but if you don’t possess them, you have to mime them.

So: looking at the truly awful reporting about Iran in the last seven days, one is struck by how easy it is, given the Baconian presuppositions of the journalist, to go forward into pure fiction. Take the example of the supposed arms acquired, somehow, by the militias from Iran, and then acquired, somehow, by anonymous army officers. To understand this fact within a pattern, one should ask, firstly, more general questions about the acquisition of arms on all sides. This simple question, however, isn’t asked at all. It is one thing that (granting the truth of the dubious evidence for a moment), Iran is sending weapons into Iraq, and it is another thing if Iran as well as Saudi Arabia and other Sunni gulf states is sending weapons into Iraq. If our own little democratic, freedom lovin’ ally, Saudi Arabia is doing it (the same Saudi Arabia whose sandy hindquarters were recently licked, so copiously and deliciously, by Tony Blair, the poodle Tartuffe), we have a different sense of arms flow into Iraq. We have a larger pattern. Similarly, there is the problem that the Iraqi government, which is, or at least which we pretend to think is, sovereign in Iraq is allied to the Iranian government. Now, even from a Baconian point of view, these two parameters should be included in the reporting about Iran’s arms. They aren’t. They are, in fact, rigidly excluded. Thus, not only do we have newspapers operating with an antiquated scientific methodology, but even by the terms of that methodology, they are failing.

There are many reasons that newspapers are struggling nowadays, but one of them, surely, is the unconscious perception that newspapers simply don’t have a methodology to do what they do. They don’t have a sense of pattern, they don’t have a sense of hypothesis, they don’t have a sense of experiment, they don’t see the connection between questions, they don’t construct coherent and cohesive scenes of inquiry, and they serve as the most abject and servile means of power in its grossest and most malignant incarnation, all the while claiming an innocence at some distance from the swollen recompense accorded its most unscrupulous representatives.

This isn’t good.

LI's five fold valentine's day wish to you all

Yuan Hongdao was a district magistrate in Wu County, with a rank near 7b, in the reign of the Wanli Emperor, at about the same time that Shakespeare was writing his plays. He was intimately involved with the examination process. The exams concentrated on the classics. I came across a citation from Yuan Hongdao on a French blog, Le Lorgnon mélancolique which made me curious about him:

Everything that touches on literature is very difficult to understand.

Those who do not have the talent don’t understand it; those who do understand exactly as little. Those who have culture don’t understand it; those who do have culture understand exactly as little. Those who have talent and culture, but a superficial character and a narrow chest, don’t understand it either.

So I looked up Yuan Hongdao and found this nice article about him. Just as I suspected, he was one of the clerks of literature, a Pessoa of the Late Ming period. He cultivated the art of perspective – that watch for the beautiful moment – but the burdens of his job, his routines, not only dulled his sensibilities but made him question the very existence of the beautiful moment. Yuan Hongdao is known to us from his letters. Even more than poems, letters are in a direct relation to both the beautiful moment and its terrible erosion, and erosion the aesthete can feel undermining him, but seems helpless to arrest. Campbell, the author of the article, is sometimes impatient with his subject, quoting this typical weary sigh, sent to his brother:

“ I passed through the area around [Mt. Heng] whilst inspecting flood damage and had time merely to ascend the heights, with no leisure to appreciate the beauty of the place. Alas, the green paddy fields of yesterday have become the white crested waves of today, and bemoaning the situation with the local elders, how could I find the time to doff my magistrate’s robes and act out the affairs of the true man of taste (zuo renjian fengya shi klmnop)? This occasion alone is enough to reveal the real suffering of the common minor official!” Not a word here about the plight of the common people whose livelihood had been destroyed and whose well-being Yuan Hongdao was responsible for!”

In 1597, Yuan was reprieved of his duties, at his requests. He packed up his wives and concubines, confiding them to a friend, and set out upon a sentimental journey:

Accompanied by his friend Tao Wangling, then back in Shanyin
on leave from his post in the Hanlin Academy, Yuan Hongdao visited West Lake, the sacred site par excellence, for the first time, to sit drinking in Lake Heart Pavilion as the autumnal rains washed the lake red with peach blossoms. He paid calls upon the celebrated monk Zhuhong ¥_ (1535-1615) at his Cloud Perch Monastery. In Wuxi, he sat for hours in the evenings, wearied by a day with his books or out on some excursion or another, listening to Old Storyteller Zhu recite episodes from the Shuihu zhuan [Water Margin]. In Guiji he sought out the “ true” site of the famed Orchid Pavilion where, more than a thousand years earlier, in 353, Wang Xizhi (307-65), the greatest of all calligraphers, had brushed his immortal “ Preface to the Orchid Pavilion Collection” .He boated upon Mirror Lake, tasted the famed watermellow of Lake Xiang, and climbed Yellow Mountain. Sitting one evening in his friend Tao Wangling’s study in Shanyin he came across a tattered edition of the poetry of the eccentric poet and playwright Xu Wei ¦§ (1521-93); he later immortalised this moment in a biography of this man that served as something of a literary manifesto.

LI could get lost in this itinerary! Anyway, I will end this post with the Yuan Hongdao’s vision of earthly paradise – which, of course, is my valentine wish to you, my readers. This is from a letter to his maternal uncle:

Your way of life, my revered sir, is a rich and satisfying one, for you lack nothing it appears and your days and years pass by with all the splendour of a flower. What joys you can speak of. To my mind, however, the true joys of the world are but fivefold, and of this you must be aware. To see withone’s eyes all the most sensuous sights of the world, to hear with one’s ears all its most beauteous sounds, to taste all the world’s greatest delicacies and to join in all the most interesting conversations; this is the first of the true joys afforded us.

Within one’s hall, to have food-laden vessels arrayed in the front and music being played in the background; to have one’s tables crowded with guests and the shoes of men and women scattered everywhere; for the smoke of the lanterns to rise to the heavens and for jewellery to be strewn across the floor; when one’s money is exhausted one sells off one’s fields; this is the second joy.

To have secreted in one’s book trunks ten thousand volumes, all of
which are rare and precious; to have a studio built besides one’s residence and to invite into this studio a dozen or so true friends and to appoint as master ofthem someone with the extraordinary insight of a Sima Qian, a Luo Guanzhong or a Guan Hanqing;40 to then divide them into groups and to have each group compose a book , the prose of which will be far removed from the faults perpetrated by those pedantic Confucian scholars of the Tang and Song dynasties and to have recently completed some masterpiece of the age; this is the third joy.

To buy a junk worth a thousand taels; to invite on to this junk a musical troupe along with a courtesan and a concubine or two and a couple of idle travellers; to have a floating home and mansions afloat; to be able to forget the approach of old age; this is the fourth joy.

If one were to indulge oneself in this manner and to this degree, however, before a decade had passed by one would find one’s money exhausted and one’s fields sold. But then, in a state of total penury and living hand to mouth, to ply the brothels with one’s begging bowl in hand, to share one’s meals with the orphaned and the infirm, to live off the favour of one’s friends and relatives, all without the slightest pang of shame; this is the fifth great joy."

Freud reads the NYT, then uses it to wipe his ass

In one of Hitchens’ recent apologias for warmongering in Slate magazine ( badly written pieces displaying the inglorious dream logic of a cartoon bully, Popeye’s Brutus, a surface incoherence governed by a deeper, unifying desire – which makes them all the more useful in indicting the belligerent mentality for its sham moral posturing and its real sadism), he wrote: “In many … people's minds, too, there is the unspoken assumption that what the United States does in Iraq is a fully determined action, whereas what other people do is simply a consequence of that action, with no independent or autonomous "agency" of its own.”

This is, actually, not just in many “people’s minds” – this is the structure of the imperialist, racist and class based framework within which the reporting on President Backbone’s vanity war has been presented. This weekend, devoted to upping the ante on confronting Iran, is typical. The anonymous briefing given to reporters about the weapons flowing in from Iran to Iraq was so amateur that it received the deadest of bounces among the American public – and of course, in the rest of the world, there was no gasp of horror, just polite titters at the peckerwood hijinks of those running this here hyperpower. I exclude of course Blair’s perpetual, shameful Echo, as who pays attention to Blair?

However, the astonishing thing about the reports is that not one of the conduits of White House misinformation – the newspaper reporters, the editors, the recyclers of news for tv, etc. – has felt any need to ask what the Iraqis think about Iran’s weapons, or about Iran in general. It isn’t that the Iraqis are victims, “without agency” – they simply don’t exist as anything but props for the Americans, and that goes all the way down.

This is from the BBC Middle Eastern monitoring service:

“London, Al-Sharq al-Awsat - The Iraqi Government has stated that there is a clear US stand towards Iran and this stand does not necessarily agree with the Iraqi Government's view and stand. Maryam al-Rayyis, the prime minister's adviser for foreign relations, said the Iraqi Government and people have deep respect for neighbouring countries, among them Iran.

Speaking to "Al-Sharq al-Awsat" by telephone to comment on the US accusations against Iran, Al-Rayyis said: "We should separate between the Iraqi Government's stand towards Iran and the American one. The Iraqi Government does not want to be a party in the conflict between this and that country." She added that the Iraqi constitution was clear about this through articles stipulating that Iraq would not be a door or an arena to conflicts between other countries. She noted however that the new security plan "is one for imposing the law" that stipulated "there will be no party exempted from this plan, including neighbouring countries, if any of these countries proves to be involved in the Iraqi affair and undermining its security." The prime minister's adviser then said she was expecting the Iraqi Government's comment on the American statements to be issued later.”

This is about the only statement I can find on Factiva concerning the Iraqi government response to America’s masked accusations. But the Irish Times at least notes that, yes, there is an actual reality in Iraq apart from American fantasy. This is what it looks like:

“Two of the three main Shia fundamentalist factions, Mr Maliki's Dawa party and the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), are closely tied to Tehran.

As anonymous US officials made their allegations about Iranian involvement with Iraqi insurgents, Mr Maliki's predecessor and Dawa party chief, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, was in Tehran for celebrations of the anniversary of the 1979 Iranian revolution.

Following a meeting with Iran's foreign minister Manouchehr Mottaki, Dr Jaafari expressed regret over the arrest of Iranian diplomats and military officers by US forces. Two envoys were detained last December, one of them in the SCIRI compound in Baghdad, and five in the Kurdish city of Irbil in January.

SCIRI was founded by Tehran and its Badr Corps militia was recruited, trained and armed by Iranian Revolutionary Guards.

The Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, headed by Jalal Talabani, Iraq's president, has also had longstanding ties with Tehran. Dr Jaafari said the Iraqi government is trying to secure the release of the Iranians.

Nassar al-Rubaie, a spokesman for the third and largest Shia faction, the movement headed by independent cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, declared that the Sadrists have never received backing from Tehran. The Sadrists are, in fact, rivals of Iran's partners, Dawa and SCIRI, and adopt an anti-Iranian stance.”

The failure of the Americans in the Middle East was as predictable as the failure of Xerxes to tame the sea - it was the pitting of barefaced imbecility against reality, with reality sweeping the floor, three out of three falls, 3100 American dead, 300-600 thousand Iraqi dead, four million Iraqi refugees. Even in dream logic, you cannot wish for two mutually negating things at once. As Freud shows, the unconscious gets around simple negation by conflating desires - and Freud's thesis is still the best guideline for reading an American newspaper, as every day presents another uplifting story of wealth founded on exploitation dreams its own moral election. America is the land of calvinists at the Playboy Mansion. But American foreign policy under President Backbone has been infantile even by these standards in its contradictory presuppositions, confident that an American public that periodically throws itself into panics about UFO abductions and Satanic cults would follow along, the children behind the pied piper.

I think the children are tired, now.

art and provocation

LI has strong and stubborn ideas concerning certain subjects of which, in reality, we are abysmally ignorant. One of those subjects is tv. LI has always thought that the influence of tv is vastly exaggerated. But even so, this article by Jane Kramer about “24” was a bit of a shock. Apparently, “24” is a Fox show centering on a fictitious Homeland security unit, and the gimmick is that it occurs in real time:

“The show’s appeal, however, lies less in its violence than in its giddily literal rendering of a classic thriller trope: the “ticking time bomb” plot. Each hour-long episode represents an hour in the life of the characters, and every minute that passes onscreen brings the United States a minute closer to doomsday. (Surnow came up with this concept, which he calls the show’s “trick.”) As many as half a dozen interlocking stories unfold simultaneously—frequently on a split screen—and a digital clock appears before and after every commercial break, marking each second with an ominous clang. The result is a riveting sensation of narrative velocity.
Bob Cochran, who created the show with Surnow, admitted, “Most terrorism experts will tell you that the ‘ticking time bomb’ situation never occurs in real life, or very rarely. But on our show it happens every week.” According to Darius Rejali, a professor of political science at Reed College and the author of the forthcoming book “Torture and Democracy,” the conceit of the ticking time bomb first appeared in Jean Lartéguy’s 1960 novel “Les Centurions,” written during the brutal French occupation of Algeria. The book’s hero, after beating a female Arab dissident into submission, uncovers an imminent plot to explode bombs all over Algeria and must race against the clock to stop it. Rejali, who has examined the available records of the conflict, told me that the story has no basis in fact. In his view, the story line of “Les Centurions” provided French liberals a more palatable rationale for torture than the racist explanations supplied by others (such as the notion that the Algerians, inherently simpleminded, understood only brute force). Lartéguy’s scenario exploited an insecurity shared by many liberal societies—that their enlightened legal systems had made them vulnerable to security threats.”

Well, no, the insecurity is that liberal societies are historically founded on sheer racism. Of course, while Kramer’s article does raise the hysteria level for a liberal like me, the description of what the show does is reassuringly ridiculous:

“The show’s villains usually inflict the more gruesome tortures: their victims are hung on hooks, like carcasses in a butcher shop; poked with smoking-hot scalpels; or abraded with sanding machines. In many episodes, however, heroic American officials act as tormentors, even though torture is illegal under U.S. law. (The United Nations Convention Against Torture, which took on the force of federal law when it was ratified by the Senate in 1994, specifies that “no exceptional circumstances, whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.”) In one episode, a fictional President commands a member of his Secret Service to torture a suspected traitor: his national-security adviser. The victim is jolted with defibrillator paddles while his feet are submerged in a tub filled with water. As the voltage is turned up, the President, who is depicted as a scrupulous leader, watches the suspect suffer on a video feed. The viewer, who knows that the adviser is guilty and harbors secrets, becomes complicit in hoping that the torture works. A few minutes before the suspect gives in, the President utters the show’s credo, “Everyone breaks eventually.” (Virtually the sole exception to this rule is Jack Bauer. The current season begins with Bauer being released from a Chinese prison, after two years of ceaseless torture; his back is scarred and his hands are burnt, but a Communist official who transfers Bauer to U.S. custody says that he “never broke his silence.”)”

The show, of course, gets the onlooker wrong – it should make our torture voyeur the Vice President. The whole family of the odious shithead who presently fills that office are, apparently, big fans of the show. Does this fuckin surprise anybody?

The collaboration between the reactionary state and the resentful artist has a long and fatal history. It is the history of provocation. Oddly, I don’t think there is a history of this concept – although there should be. Although the elements of it go way back to the Egyptians, no doubt, I’d nominate Les Philosophes, a play by a man named Palissot that debuted in 1760, as the first modern provocation.

LI has been trying to trace the career of the Philosopher buffoon from Bruno to Rameau’s nephew to some figures in Dostoevsky. Reading Rameau’s nephew again, I came up, again, against that curious figure, the now forgotten Charles Palissot de Montenoy. The philosopher buffoon is not, after all, simply a hero, but a literary figure which, like all literary figures, finds unpredictable niches in the epigenetic media landscape. Shit, did I just write that? Well, leave it, and let somebody else figure out what that means.

Satire, of course, has always had a deep anti-intellectual bias. Burke must have given some thought to Swift’s Island of Laputa when he wrote his Reflexions on the French Revolution, given the way he displays a Swiftian contempt for the “theorists” who would try to re-engineer society. But Palissot’s genius was of the type that we can recognize in the up and coming muscular liberal or neo-con in D.C. First, attach yourself to a powerful patron with a complete lack of pride, bootlicking enthusiastically (see Fred Barnes vis a vis the Bush administration). Then, employ the arts of the class clown to make a name for yourself. Kick the weak, recycling old and tired clichés, launch various coy slanders, and – when all else fails – attack someone’s lack of patriotism.

Palissot must have seemed like a divine instrument to the forces of reaction back in the day. He was precocious, defending a thesis on theology at the age of 13. He was envious. He had an extraordinary regard for bigwigs – in his memoirs, he is obviously enraptured by the praise given to his comedy, Les Philosophes, by Frederick the Great – a king no less!

Palissot was obviously a man who needed a patron, and he found one in the Duc de Choiseul, France’s foreign minister. He first made a name for himself, after several mediocre pieces, with a play entitled the Circle, commissioned especially (oh heaven) for a party given to honor Stanislas, King of Poland in Nancy. This was the first time Palissot attempted to imitate Moliere. Having the usual heavyhanded taste of the reactionary humorist, Palissot thought the occasion was just right for making fun of Voltaire’s mistress, Mme du Chatelet, who had recently died. Mme du Chatelet was one of France’s premier mathematicians too – a learned woman! Just the thing to bark at. Alas, the play was considered to be in extremely bad taste – even royalty didn’t like it. Palissot went to the extent of writing a defense of the play to the king – and to the police chief of Nancy. The defense consisted of the fact that the elite, in Moliere’s time, were not offended by Moliere's plays. This is, of course, the alpha and omega of right wing humor – do not offend the powerful. That is, unless you have a patron you can rely on.

Then came Les Philosophes. “No play between Tartuffe and Figaro excited such passionate joy and such malicious pleasure,” according to the theatre historian Charles Lenient. There is an story Palissot told one of Napoleon’s officers – Palissot lived through the revolution and through Napoleon’s reign – that the only reward he got for his play was a smile, a mere smile, from Madame de Pompidour. Such are the rewards of the bootlickers.

The machinations behind getting the play put on by such a major troupe as a Comedie Francaise signaled that the play was not an ordinary play – it was a state sponsored provocation. The use of the arts to send political messages, persecute dissidents, punish factions – it is here in a nutshell, and it will be used again, in Stalin’s Russia, in Mao’s China, and in the U.S., where the tv network, Fox, that puts on “24”, now has put provocation into the media cycle, where it will quickly devalue.

Palissot outlived all the philosophes; in the age of Napoleon, he began to view himself as an illustrious enlightenment sage himself, and a protector of all things 18th century. The sports of the Napoleonic era didn’t quite know what to make of the crazy old coot. LI finds this latter part of Palissot’s life a sort of parody on the recent craze, among the warmongering set, for the Enlightenment. At least some more educated warmongers, like Gertrude Himmelfarb, has actually read, with mounting horror, what those philosophes wrote, which is why she wrote a book disputing the French pre-eminence in the Enlightenment (her argument isn’t so much revisionist as petulant). From romantic third world-ism to attacks on family, church and the war, Enlightenment writing is just the sort of stuff so richly denounced by the New Criterion, National Review, and Weekly Standard, issue after issue.

The Iran scarecrow

LI's readers should check out Jonathan Schwarz's putdown of the insane Michael Gordon article in the NYT yesterday. Schwarz applies himself, as Gordon's editor should have, to the sources that Gordon is quoting, since Gordon is making a little two thousand year regression to a time when citing an oracle was the height of the scientific method. Since then, we got us some of that civilization - except sometimes, as in warmongering articles from the NYT.

And - to give us spirit for the long long long long war - do read Nicholas Hoffman's bracing column in the NY Observer. Like many journalists of good will, Hoffman has seen the sheer, well, you can only call it bravery of the American public as we face this truly terrifying threat of terrorist just walzing in, carting their four hundred pound suitcases full of nuclear material that any tom, dick or harry with a copy of the Encyclopedia Brittanica, a screwdriver and an old Playboy can turn into a ticking bomb that you'd really have to torture a terrorist suspect within an inch of his life to find. But we have answered President Backbone's call to glory with a stoicism that will go down in the history books:

George W. Bush says he won’t raise taxes to pay for his war. “I strongly oppose that. If that’s the kind of sacrifice people are talking about, I’m not for it because raising taxes will hurt this growing economy,” he explained. “And one thing we want during this war on terror is for people to feel like their life’s moving on, that they’re able to make a living and send their kids to
college and put more money on the table.”

By those standards, Mr. Bush’s war has been a success for some New Yorkers. E. Stanley O’Neal, Merrill Lynch’s chief executive, did his best, in conformity with the President’s wishes, to put more money on the table by having been paid $48 million last year, up from $37 million the year before, a sum so small it
might have caused the President distress.

Another man who will be able to report to the President that he has been able to make enough of a living to put more money on the table and pay any college tuition which might be owing is Lloyd C. Blankfein of the Goldman Sachs Group, who brought home $53 million last year. All together, Wall Street’s five
biggest outfits were able to relieve President Bush’s mind by telling him that their top people were paid $60 billion in 2006. Doubtless the President, as soon as he was apprised of the news, flashed the joyful tidings to the troops in Afghanistan and Iraq. No piece of news could be better calculated to stimulate
our soldiers and Marines to fight harder and make greater sacrifices for the cause for which they and Messrs. O’Neal and Blankfein, each in their own way, struggle in common.

In accordance with Mr. Bush’s wish that most of us move on from the war and give it as little thought as possible, even as a few of us fight it, a man named Stephen A. Schwarzman will celebrate his 60th birthday on Feb. 13. Mr. Schwarzman is a billionaire who, in deference to the President’s urgings, has
been spending the years since the two airplanes were driven into the World Trade Center making money hand over fist. If you are going to sacrifice for your country, there are few more deeply satisfying ways of doing it.

To mark his six lucrative decades on earth, Mr. Schwarzman is renting the Park Avenue society armory, where he and some 1,500 guests will do what rich people do on such occasions. The featured entertainer performing for the occasion will, it is said, be paid $1 million for his night’s work. If the other expenditures are commensurate, Mr. Schwarzman will have laid out $15 million before his head hits the pillow that night, content that, as his President wishes, his “life’s moving on”—and right nicely, one cannot forbear to add.