the poet as cold fish: Paul Valery

 

“He painfully wrote  Jeune Parque, pulling it out little by little from a world of erasures, and then the following poems with a large enough facility.” – Thibaudet

On beach 72, between Carnon and La Grande-Motte, I stood on the beach and let the ripples die between my toes and looked out at the Mediterranean and I thought of you, Paul  Valéry.

Valéry is, to me, the least sympathetic of the “great poets”. In Thibaudet’s book on Valéry, he distinguishes between those poets “who know how to make verses because they are poets … and those who are poets because they know how to make verses.” The first are guided by some inner vocation – some inner fun, I think – and the latter are guided by their sense of forms – some exterior fun, or at least business. Valéry he puts in the latter camp. Myself, I think these two types struggle within the soul of every poet, but it is true that Valéry did everything to make himself seem like the coldblooded trap-maker of poetry. His great lines of verse are so evidently intended, so evidently erased enough before they came together.

The seashore to which the small fishing towns, such as Sète, cling – a seashore totally transformed by the State in the postwar era, when leisure for the masses was being invented – is in Valéry’s cold blood. The breeze that comes up from it rustles the trees over the sailor’s cemetery in his most famous poem, which considers the death of the supreme egotist, with all the dead sailors around as an appropriate décor – that breeze comes from out there. In Valéry’s time the sailors in the fishing fleet were subject to tragic turns of event – of e-vent, of the wind.

In 1910, for instance, the Sète newspaper reported  that “a bark belonging to a family of fishers of the pointe du Barou went to a funeral service in Pomerols, and sank in the etang of Thau as the result of an unlucky wind. The bodies of the poor souls were found and a subscription was raised for the benefit of six children, orphaned by that catastrophe.”

Yet in contemplating the “gulf” from the sailor’s cemetery, Valéry does not extend his imagination to the sailor’s lot, which is why I say that the cemetery serves as décor for the more pressing matter of the death of the ego. “O my silence!” – that is the subject of the poem. Not for Valéry the working out, in some opium fever dream, the mariner’s fate. I suppose this is where I feel something subtly repulsive in the poem that, contra Thibaudet, I do not feel in Mallarme.

You can get used to the cold. Swimming about in the water of the Mediterranean here in the morning, I certainly got my share of that. But living in that cold – oh my silence! – well, it isn’t for me.

 

 

Notes for a book I'll never write

 

Was ist „obstinat“? — Der kürzeste Weg ist nicht der

möglichst gerade, sondern der, bei welchem die günstigsten

Winde unsere Segel schwellen: so sagt die Lehre der Schifffahrer.

Ihr nicht zu folgen heisst obstinat sein: die Festigkeit des

Charakters ist da durch Dummheit verunreinigt.

 

 

First, the title: Character under Capitalism: some notes

The first section: character

The second: homo oeconomicus

The third: Marx’s buried notion of circulation

Eliminate: The fourth: Simmel’s sociology – the encircling institutions of modernity

The fifth: the clerks of literature

The sixth: simultaneity – the new and the end of the future

The seventh: the non-totality of totality, or the exchange matrix

 

Chapter 5

 

[In the clerks, I want to explore the aesthetic dimension, or effect, of the circulation sphere – how it shaped a certain style of alienation, of writing, and of living. The clerks are, as it were, at the very nerve ends of a social turn towards utility. The reaction to this turn is complex, but it does create a counter-literature in which existence is presented as precisely that which is not useful, and cannot be used. Yet that refusal of use and being used is bound within an economic sphere in which exchange value is the pre-eminent concern. This produces a double nostalgia –on the one hand, for production as a virtue, and on the other hand, for nature as a way out of the bind of utility.

 

However, clerk literature finds itself engaged with other systems of literature as well – below the ‘genres”, we find the typical literary situations of production and reception. And thus we find the media and education as the literary situations that differ from and have both competitive and collaborative relations with the clerical type.]

 

The scribe and the title

 

Almost all the titles are lost. That is, almost all the titles of the ancient Egyptian texts that we now possess are lost. “The title of the book, a summary of its contents, or the opening words, were at times written on the reverse side or at the outside of the scroll’s beginning, with the name of the author (“made by”) immediately after it. As scrolls generally lost their edges first, few titles have comedown to us. Fewer authors were identified..Sometimes, however, lists of titltes were written on the walls of temples or pyramids,though the books themselves have not survived. Small deeds and other documents at times were provided with titles. Onne book of the dead was entitled “Book of the Coming into the Day of Osiris Gathesehen, daughter of Mekheperre.” Long texts were sometimes divided by the chapter numbers, marked by ht, “house”.” (Leila Avrin, 91)

 

It has been a long time since Jacques Derrida published the chapters of On Grammatology concerning Rousseau and writing in Critique. Since that time, the phonocentric, logocentric paradigm in anthropology and archaeology has definitely shifted. The latest researchers on ancient Mesopotamia refer to a “cuneiform culture”, in which, contrary to the older school that saw writing as a tool captured by a scribal elite, literacy spread. Or a form of literacy, for  literacy as a uniform thing, a single kind of learned capacity, has been well and truly debunked, as archaeologists have made sense of the data they possess that show multiple forms of script and signs within script ‘domains’; they have also come to terms with such discoveries as that of Nippur and Isin, where the majority of houses so far excavated have turned up texts. Furthermore, archaeologists are now more interested in the evolution of  script types that went along with the evolution of materials on which the script could be impressed, scratched or painted, as cursive, a select number of syllobograms, and lighter materials that were easier to correct led to the invention of the personal  and business letter.

 

In the sixties and seventies, the Mesopotamian evidence suggested to some researchers, like Walter Ong and Jack Goody, that the invention of writing operated to change the very cognitive style of human beings. Goody’s essay on the list is The Domestication of the Savage Mind is still a tour de force survey of the effects of the text, although as he admits, his earlier notion of the text was too tied into the phonetic alphabet, which is seen as “easier” and more flexible to use, thus leading to the ability to “write down one’s thoughts.” This may actually be a property of the material one writes them down on and what one writes with – at least, the archaeologists coming after Goody have found that qualities he attributes to alphabetical writing are certainly present in pictographic or logographic systems.  

 

Here is the central claim, I think, Goody makes about lists:

“My concern here is to show that these written forms were not simply by-products of the interaction between writing and, say, the economy, filling some hitherto hidden “need”, but that they represented a significant change not only in the nature of transactions, but also in the ‘modes  of thought’ that accompanied them, at least if we interpret ‘modes of thought’in terms of the formal, cognitive and linguistic operations which this new technology of the intellect opened up.”

 

The idea, here, is not that writing itself changes modes of thought, but that writing devises do – hence, the importance of the list, or the written number. Marc Bloch, the most prominent opponent of Goody’s, has used his fieldwork in Madagascar to construct a case in which literacy, and in particular listing texts (for instance, genealogies) do not organize cultural “modes of thought”, but exist as regions within a largely oral culture. Bloch, in turn, has been attacked for the way he has elevated certain observations into generalities – that is, the way he has evolved what Clifford Geertz calls the “deep text.”

 

The title, I think, has not yet been enough looked at in this context – or Babel, depending on how you come down on the importance of ecriture. Certainly in oral contexts there are titles, but they seem, at least in my experience, to be very loose things. A typical titling episode would be x telling y to “tell that story about x” – with the title here being the “story about”. And in as much as this stimulus does hook onto a story, it does one of the works of calling a name – you call a name and the named thing comes. So too does the story. Interestingly, though, the “story about”, while it can tend towards a stereotypic norm (the story about the priest, the story about Mavis X, etc.) often varies in its composition. Similarly, titles can occur in oral speech that announce what is coming – not what has already been circulated. So, for instance, a person can be called into the office of his or her superior and the latter can say, I’ve called you in to talk about your tardiness (an example taken from my own life!). The monologue or dialogue that ensues has, vaguely, the title, “about X’s inability to get to work on time”. 

 

All of which is merely to say that oral speech does have self-labeling moments. Thus, when texts get titled, we are not speaking of a completely different communicative form from that which occurs in the oral quotidian. But I want to argue that the title is “freed” by the text, by ecriture. While it fulfills certain labeling functions, it also proceeds towards something as new, something resembling the name of a person, rather than the label of a person. When John Stuart Mill claimed that the proper name was a description, he was conflating label and name. And there is some warrant for that in names: the smith gets name Smith. But what Mill ignores, as a philosopher, is what is obvious to the sociologist: the name is enmeshed in what it means to be familiar with, to know, to love, to hate, etc. The name is not just used to label. Before children learn to use pronominal shifters, they often self-label – or so I have been assured by numerous mothers. Robert says, that chocolate is Robert’s, rather than that chocolate is mine,  because “Robert” is taken by the child to be an extension of himself in a way that “mine” – that code that refers to its message, to the tie between the individual word and the language system in which it is located – is not. “Mine” seems to be a communal dish which anyone can grab between their fingers and bite into  – “Robert’s” is a special snack reserved for Robert.

 

Textual devises don’t seem to have that same self-reflexivity. They seem to be labeling all the way down, so to speak. And yet if this is so, the title would simply be a label.

 

We know that this isn’t so. I would call this, the (en)titling instance, the moment in which the scribe enters into literature, in the broadest sense (visual, aural, scripted). The tradition that ascribes to the scribe a monopoly of power over the written meets, in this moment arising thieflike from within the devise itself, an inner movement that structurally breaks the monopoly.

 

The sign, the text and the title formed a devise so powerful that its counterpart, in the end, seemed to be the world itself. At first the physical world and the heavens, for the cuneiform cultures, were defined by the boundaries marked out by the gods – there was a world for the humans and a world for the gods,  the latter ruing the former. But both worlds came into focus as the counterparts of the text. From a very early point in the history of writing, written signs were compared to the world’s objects: the stars in the sky to the words on a writing surface, for instance.

 

So when we speak of the book of the world, we are speaking of the text’s relation to an object that is defined in relation to some magical first text. In Genesis 1:14, the relation between the world and the text is, as it were, sealed in the very act of creation: “And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years.” What is created to be a sign is already on the way to being the book of the world. There is a long scholarly tradition in Germany, going from Curtius to Hans Blumenberg,  which has excavated the metaphor of this book, showing how it arose in the various worlds of the Mediterranean.  The metaphor has not only a great and irresistible charm for the scribes  – who copy and scribble - but possesses the baroque virtue that it inscribes itself within itself – for the book of the world holds the book in which the metaphor does its transformative work, which in turn holds the world, or at least the point of view that we, the scribes, have dubbed the world.  

 

The signs are there, as well, in the early modern era, where there is a question of the type of sign: is the book of the world composed of an alphabet (Francis Bacon’s favorite metaphor), or of hieroglyphs (John Dee’s preference) or of mathematical symbols (Galileo’s choice)? Galileo makes perhaps the most interesting use of the book of the world metaphor, incorporating it into the weave of natural philosophy just as the signs were incorporated into the creation story in Genesis, but with a certain twist: “I truly believe the book of philosophy to be that which stands perpetually open before our eyes, though since it is written in characters different from those of our alphabit it cannot be read by everyone; and the characters of such a book are triangles, squares, circles, spheres, cones, pyramids and other mathematical figures, most apt for such reading.”

 

Most apt indeed – so much so that the problem of why mathematics gives us such a model of the universe took a long time to present itself in the physics community. Eugen Wigner in 1960 finally gave definitive form to the problem of why mathematics is “most apt for such reading” in the physics community. Perhaps a lesser noted problem is the role that this metaphor played in making possible the presentation of the logic of substitution, which is unthinkable in a world that wasn’t considered “readable”.

 

The scribe, the merchant, the natural philosopher – these meet in the sort of triple fold in the early modern era, when an accounting mentality, a sense of nature as an alphabet, and the idea of research itself – experiment - met together, forming a character that floats into and out of various institutions: the church, the college, the countinghouse, the government agency, the courthouse.

 

The legibility of the world

 

There is another tradition that has taken up the theme of the book of the world from the other side – that is, ways of making the world more like a book, ways of making the human and natural landscape “legible”. The history of literacy also displays this two-sideness, as, historically, learning to read does not equal learning – a complication that has bedeviled historians since the sixties. But before I get to that long, intricate wallow in models, I’m goint to turn to writing the book of the world. It is a story – like so many of our folktales – of invisible hands. In this case, the hand of God is replaced by the hand of the engineer, the administrator, the bureaucrat.

 

…der Verstand ist nicht nur einseitig, sondern es ist sein wesentliches Geschäft, die Welt einseitig zu machen, eine große und bewunderungswürdige Arbeit, denn nur die Einseitigkeit formiert und reißt das Besondere aus dem unorganischen Schleim des Ganzen. – Marx

“…Understanding is not only one-sided, but it is its essential business to make the world one-sided, a great and marvelous labor, because only one-sidedness forms and rips the particular out of the inorganic slime of the whole.”

James C. Scott begins Seeing Like the State with an emblematic story, a parable of one-sidedness, concerning the rise of scientific forestry. That rise occurred in the late eighteenth century, when the Prussian state intervened in the assessment, preservation, and reproduction of forest properties, all in order to create a more efficient natural resource. The German forestry service cleared out many features of the ‘old’ chaotic forests – the ‘weed’ species, the unnecessary ground cover, the poaching birds, animals and humans. Fire, too, is a poacher, and must be prevented. Even age forests – much more useful for lumber, much less volatile in terms of calculating yield – were groomed in their place. The description of the forest consisting of the same species, standing in disciplined ranks, row on row of trees, is eerily like the disciplined classroom or jail described in Foucault’s Surveiller et Punir. However, Scott considers this not so much a regime of the vision as the reading eye – the eyeball attached to understanding. This, in Scott’s terms, is what it means to make the woods – that place of darkness and gloom in which Little Red Riding Hoods encounter deceitful wolves – into a place of legibility. The book of the world is not only a matter of reading what God has written, but a matter of writing what the businessman and the bureaucrat want to read.

 

“The production forests usually consists off one monoculture of a tree, followed by another monoculture from another tree species. Mixed planting in one area you will almost never see, except perhaps in the "picnic" forests.

The reason for this is simple. It's cheaper to first plant one tree species, then followed by another tree species somewhere else. As every forest has to be maintained and thinned from time to time, it's also cheaper to have the thinnings when all of the trees are of the same size. That's another good reason to keep trees from every species together, and not miles apart. Otherwise the foresters would have to thin a few trees in this area and then move onto the next area to thin a couple more. This is too time consuming and therefore too expensive.

If you visit a forest in your area, you will undoubtedly see (for example) a forest of Pine, followed by a forest of Oak and then a forest with Beech. These are all planted forests and many are planted so that they can be harvested for timber later on.

Since we at Robinia Invest are not in the business of making a nature reserve or planting trees so that people can have a nice picnic, sitting amongst the trees, we plant monocultures of Robinia and Paulownia. This way we can do the maintenance most effectively and at the lowest cost. All the trees are planted at the same time, so we can easily see when we have to start the thinning and when we can harvest the entire area.” – Robina invest web site

The great monocultured forests that “we can easily see”  produced row upon row of vulnerable, sickly trees. After the first, healthy generation had used up the ‘accumulated capital’ of soil nutrients laid down by hundreds of years of undisciplined forest growth and death, the next generation of trees were excessively prone to insect and fungal infestation, wind damage, and starved, splintery and miserable growth – at least in human terms, where it was all dollar signs and lumber. However, the corporate mind set has never gone back on the reading lesson, and is now developing a monoculture that penetrates into the very heart of the tree, using genetic modification to produce trees ready for one brand of insecticide (sold, conveniently enough, by the engineer of the trees), and with a modified lignin content. Trees need lignin to live out their whole lifespans; it operates as the connective tissue keeping the tree together. But in the onesided world of capitalism, lignin presents a cost to paper manufacturing. In a neat leap from the metaphor of legibility to the making of legible substances, paper companies want to harvest trees with less lignin, and have done the R and D to produce them. Since the tree no longer exists within the rhythm of the seed and the soil, but rather exists in the rhythm of the lab and the mill, the monoculture now reaches down into the genetic heart of the tree.

In the nineteenth century, the German forest service had been seen as a model, and was adopted by the forestry service in the U.S. and the British service in India. The British even imported a German forester to make sense of India’s tree growth. To chase Mowgli out of the jungle, and put the stamp of the one-sided on what grew and creeped there. Who wrote the book of the world? In part, the Agricultural and Interior Department did, in the West. Even now, that ominous poacher, the forest fire, is stalking the drought stricken forests of the Pacific and Southwestern states – as the boring beetle whose larva now survive the winters in the Rockies, thanks to the fact that the winter have not been as cold for the past thirty years, has been killing the great conifer forests all the way up to British Columbia. One side is flipping to the other side.

“The metaphorical value of this brief account of scientific production forestry is that it illustrates the dangers of dismembering an exceptionally complex and poorly understood set of relations and processes in order to isolate a single element of instrumental value. The instrument, the knife, that carved out the new, rudimentary forest was the razorsharp interest in the production of a single commodity. Everything that interfered with the efficient production of the key commodity was implacably eliminated. Everything that seemed unrelated to efficient production was ignored. Having come to see the forest as a commodity, scientific forestry set about refashioning it as a commodity machine. Utilitarian simplification in the forest was an effective way of maximizing wood production in the short and intermediate term. Ultimately, however, its emphasis on yield and paper profits, its relatively short time horizon, and, above all, the vast array of consequences it had resolutely bracketed came back to haunt it.”

 

The Christian and secular books of the world stand in stark contrast to the Dao, as it is articulated in the classic Daoist texts.  There is no more radical reflection on uselessness than is found in Daoism. The notion of that being comes from nothingness and is secondary to it was one that the Daoists shared with Buddhists. But in the Buddhist system, the consequence of insight into nothing is compassion for all creatures and a teaching designed to produce an absolute liberation from the bonds of being. This is the opposite of the Daoist doctrine of inaction. The insight into the way does not lead us to compassion, but a certain type of perfection: perfect uselessness. This is the theme pounded over and over in the Chuang Tzu.

 

In the chapter entitled Heaven and Earth, Tzu-kung and his disciples encounter a farmer laboriously lugging pitchers of water to his field from a well. Stopping, Tzu-kung offers some friendly advice about a machine the farmer could use to do this work.

 

"It's a contraption made by shaping a piece of wood. The back end is heavy and the front end light and it raises the water as though it were pouring it out, so fast that it seems to boil right over! It's called a well sweep."

 

So far, we could be reading a story about a Yankee peddler. We could be reading any story about modernity.

 

“The gardener flushed with anger and then said with a laugh, "I've heard my teacher say, where there are machines, there are bound to be machine worries; where there are machine worries, there are bound to be machine hearts. With a machine heart in your breast, you've spoiled what was pure and simple; and without the pure and simple, the life of the spirit knows no rest. Where the life of the spirit knows no rest, the Way will cease to buoy you up. It's not that I don't know about your machine - I would be ashamed to use it!"

 

Here, too, as we know from hundreds of records of “savages” resisting civilization, we could also be reading a leave from a field report in development economics. But this is not development economics. It is a text that begins in praise of uselessness. Instead of taking the farmer’s words as evidence of his backwardness,  Tzu-kung takes them as a response pointing out,clearly, Tzu-kung’s own lack of enlightenment.

 

However, the reader is also involved in this text. He who has ears, let him hear – this is the fourth wall of the parable. The reader, then, seems to have gained his lesson in enlightenment rather cheaply in this staging of the sage and the peasant. So that the end of the story reaffirms the uncertainty of the lesson:

 

“When Tzu-kung got back to Lu, he reported the incident to Confucius. Confucius said, "He is one of those bogus practitioners of the arts of Mr. Chaos." He knows the first thing but doesn't understand the second. He looks after what is on the inside but doesn't look after what is on the outside. A man of true brightness and purity who can enter into simplicity, who can return to the primitive through inaction, give body to his inborn nature, and embrace his spirit, and in this way wander through the everyday world - if you had met one like that, you would have had real cause for astonishment.14 As for the arts of Mr. Chaos, you and I need not bother to find out about them."

 

The self-erasing dialectic of the useless, here, infects the very lesson in which it is taught. I will set this as a portal through which to view the formation of the “useful” character in Western capitalism.

 

A second and more famous story applies the paradox to the tree.

 

In the Human World chapter of the Chuang Tzu, there's a story upon which I've often reflected:

Carpenter Shih went to Ch'i and, when he got to Crooked Shaft, he saw a serrate oak standing by the village shrine. It was broad enough to shelter several thousand oxen and measured a hundred spans around, towering above the hills. The lowest branches were eighty feet from the ground, and a dozen or so of them could have been made into boats. There were so many sightseers that the place looked like a fair, but the carpenter didn't even glance around and went on his way without stopping. His apprentice stood staring for a long time and then ran after Carpenter Shih and said, "Since I first took up my ax and followed you, Master, I have never seen timber as beautiful as this. But you don't even bother to look, and go right on without stopping. Why is that?"
"Forget it - say no more!" said the carpenter. "It's a worthless tree! Make boats out of it and they'd sink; make coffins and they'd rot in no time; make vessels and they'd break at once. Use it for doors and it would sweat sap like pine; use it for posts and the worms would eat them up. It's not a timber tree - there's nothing it can be used for. That's how it got to be that old!"

After Carpenter Shih had returned home, the oak tree appeared to him in a dream and said, "What are you comparing me with? Are you comparing me with those useful trees? The cherry apple, the pear, the orange, the citron, the rest of those fructiferous trees and shrubs - as soon as their fruit is ripe, they are torn apart and subjected to abuse. Their big limbs are broken off, their little limbs are yanked around. Their utility makes life miserable for them, and so they don't get to finish out the years Heaven gave them, but are cut off in mid-journey. They bring it on themselves - the pulling and tearing of the common mob. And it's the same way with all other things.
"As for me, I've been trying a long time to be of no use, and though I almost died, I've finally got it. This is of great use to me. If I had been of some use, would I ever have grown this large? Moreover you and I are both of us things. What's the point of this - things condemning things? You, a worthless man about to die-how do you know I'm a worthless tree?"

When Carpenter Shih woke up, he reported his dream. His apprentice said, "If it's so intent on being of no use, what's it doing there at the village shrine?" 15

"Shhh! Say no more! It's only resting there. If we carp and criticize, it will merely conclude that we don't understand it. Even if it weren't at the shrine, do you suppose it would be cut down? It protects itself in a different way from ordinary people. If you try to judge it by conventional standards, you'll be way off!"

Again, the assistant lends the needed needling to the larger point. To achieve uselessness, one must find a way of leaping over the larger point. And that leap is the extra-ordinary.

 

That the parable is in the human world is, of course, a conjunction that should suggest an idea – or at least the approaching ghost of an idea. An idea is perhaps too poor a thing, too head-bound, for a Daoist.

Every kind of paper is purchased by the "waste-men." One of these dealers said to me: "I've often in my time 'cleared out' a lawyer's office. I've bought old briefs, and other law papers, and 'forms' that weren't the regular forms then, and any d——d thing they had in my line. You'll excuse me, sir, but I couldn't help thinking what a lot of misery was caused, perhaps, by the cwts. of waste I've bought at such places. If my father hadn't got mixed up with law he wouldn't have been ruined, and his children wouldn't have had such a hard fight of it; so I hate law. All that happened when I was a child, and I never understood the rights or the wrongs of it, and don't like to think of people that's so foolish. I gave 1 1/2 d. a pound for all I bought at the lawyers, and done pretty well with it, but very likely that's the only good turn such paper ever did any one—unless it were the lawyers themselves." –Henry Mayhew, Of the street buyers of waste (paper), London Labour

Men no sooner discovered the discovered the admirable art of communicating their ideas by way of figures than it was necessary to chose the material for defining those characters. – Encyclopedie, entry under Papeterie

From the grammatological point of view, few sentences could sum up the logocentric ideology better than this one from Diderot’s  Encyclopedie. It is a history in two steps:  in one of which the “figures” are discovered, and in the other of which they find a substrate, a material upon which they could assume their secondary, visible existence. In this story, the material is already substituted –its existence is laid out under the sign of substitution - or of supplementation, or of sublimation. The true mark, the idea, exists before its fall into the world of paper – or papyrus, or clay tables, or vellum. 

In a Sumerian story, the invention of writing and the material for defining the characters are put in a closer narrative proximity – one in which that matter exists in a series of symbolically important materials that form the basis of what Jean Jacques Glassner calls a “duel”. The ur-form of the story is a competition between two magicians, one of whom transforms common objects into living beings, the other one of whom transforms common objects into superior living beings that eat the first magicians tricks – a stone becomes a snake, for instance, while the leaf of a tree becomes an eagle that eats the snake. A similar story of the duel of matter is told of Enmerkar, the ruler of a powerful state, and the Lord of Aratta, a distant state that Enmerkar wishes to gain tribute. Enmerkar sends messangers threatening Arrata. The first messenger threatens to have the goddess Inanna drown the city. The Lord of Aratta sent back a refusal, and a challenge: could Enmerkar send grain to the city in nets rather than sacks? Enmerkar does so, sending grains that sprout and provide a layer over the holes in the nets. The second time, Enmerkar sends his scepter, and the third time a garment. The forth time Enmerkar does something completely new, and without consulting the gods: he takes a lump of clay and he wrote upon it. The duel, here, comes to an end with the Lord of Aratta having to take hold of the clay tablet in order to read it. As in a children’s game, by touching the object, the Lord of Aratta signals his submission.

But this moment is less the conclusion of a magical  duel than the first unintended result of the letter – for Enmerkar was not originally intending to send a letter. Here’s how the passage is translated by Fabienne Huber Vulliet:

“His speech was substantial,and its contents extensive. The messenger, whose mouth was heavy, was not able to repeat it. Because the messenger, whose mouth was tired,was not able to repeat it, the lord of Kulaba patted some clay and wrote the message as if on a tablet. Formerly, the writing of messages on clay was not established. Now, under the sun and on that day, it was indeed so. The lord of Kulaba inscribed the massage like a tablet. It was just like that.”

The message and the clay, here, come together in a narrative about tricky objects – about metamorphosis – that is enfolded in another narrative about imperial power. From the point of view of the author of the lord of Kulaba, the signs and the tablet are two sides of one dated event (Now, under the sun and on that day…). There is a triangle here between the figures, the tablet, and the time – for that day is, in a sense, signed and becomes that day, the object of an act of deixis.

The heavy mouth, the portable clay – it is here that I want to plant land, survey, plant some stakes.

Poem by Karen Chamisso

 

Not to have been born at all

Was never on the menu,

Oedipus. As you may recall

A little patience, a little tenue

 

Maybe waiving the right of way

And you would have stubbed

Through your day

Just fine. But you flubbed

 

Your road rage, buddy.

Not Jocasta’s error.

The queen could have studied

Her newborn’s terror

 

screaming down the shadowed halls,

then landed a knife in her hubby’s neck –

but here you are without eyeballs

waiting for the check

 

with your greatest hits behind you.

No regrets. Even in my brief

untidy life, I too

may come to taste similar grief.

 

 

 

 

 

the ductus of the zeitgeist: we are all fucked here

 the ductus of the zeitgeist

Every social order depends on a social mystery. The conservative wants to preserve that mystery. The liberal wants to palpate it a bit, but will go on long detours never to get to the root of it. The Marxist wants to expose it.

The mystery in our current social order that we knock our heads against at every corner is this: although Western economies are getting wealthier and wealthier, in comparison to, say, the economies of the 1950s, we are constantly told that we are too poor to maintain even the social welfare programs that we once took for granted, much less add new ones. If for instance you tweet something like, we should have free higher public education, you are bound to get a responding tweet that reads, how are we going to pay for it. In vain one points out that actually, we used to have a practically free higher public education system. State universities and colleges in the postwar period were almost tuition free. At the same time, the taxes charged the middle class – the working blue collar and white collar class – were less. How could this be? But you will never find out who killed Colonel Mustard if the board game clue is being played by hired shills of the murderer. To put this in other words: according to the figures, our total wealth is immensely more than it was when the public universities were founded, but somehow we have become collectively poorer and poorer so that we can’t afford what our great grandparents had. Now, one doesn’t even have to be an ardent Marxist to question this story. Instead, one might ponder how we expect to maintain a social system in which the multiple of greater wealth taken home by upper management versus the average worker has zoomed from 12 times to about 200 times in Fortune 500 Corporations. The increase in collective poverty is, of course, relative, and it must be broken down by way of class. In the seventies, the top 1 percent took in 8- 9 percent of the nation’s income. They now take in 22 percent. https://inequality.org/facts/income-inequality/

The response to this effect of class warfare on the liberal-left spectrum is to call for higher taxes on the wealthy. This is a sensible suggestion, but it certainly doesn’t address what has been happening to the system since, for convenience sake, 1980. It doesn’t address, in other words, the deregulation, the attack on organized labor, the financialization of the economy, the enormous increase in IP law, or the particulars of globalization, which has fed into the fortunes of an astonishingly small class of global wealthy people – the Davos set.

Since this mystery has a readily understandable social cause, i.e. as inequality soars, the people on the lower end find themselves paying higher prices at relatively lower wages, while the people on the higher end invest and “save” more and more, giving them a much greater power over the layout of the socio-economic system - we should expect that the apologists of this particular social order will do their traditional work. Their traditional work is to blame the natural order, and to try to make the state seem illicit, as long as the state is not guarding their property, so called, but trying to sustain its social welfare commitments. The apologists present the money made by the wealthiest as something that they have “earned”, in defiance of classical economics, which would define their wealth as a derivative of non-productive labor. The apologists are always on the prowl to put up one or another plutocrat as a hero and to erect a cult around him or her. In this way, one can keep an exploitative system going until it … goes to the dogs. So, it turns out that demographics are the thing to blame for liquidating private and public pension plans, for zooming medical entitlement costs that are locked into a for profit medical and drug system, and so on.

Back in 2005, I wrote a series of columns about the private pension crisis – of now blessed memory. That was back when there were pensions. Imagine! During the Bush boom years, corporation after corporation decided that there was too much honey in that pot, and through the magic of bankruptcy laws stole it, brazenly breaking their contract with their workers and getting away with it in the courtroom, and being applauded for it in the press. One case attracted my attention in particular: Delphi Corporation, an auto parts maker that was spun off from GM. Delphi was run by a man named J.T. Battenberg III’ in the 1999-2002 period, and he luckily was able to afford any hits to his pension, because for those three years – years that in retrospect led to bankruptcy in 2005 – he made 13.4 million dollars. He had an upper management team that did well too: for instance, V.P. D. L. Runkle made 6.4 million dollars. The press was unimpressed when the shit came down, cause what they saw were assembly line workers taking home bagfuls of the ready, 50 thou per year here, 60 thou there. Shocking amounts for those mere plebes, as was noted at the time by such well known “resistance” heroes as George Will.

From 2005 - sixteen years ago: The WSJ article about the looming default of Delphi’s pension plan is a sort of map to the way the chattering classes give cover to the investment class’s big lie: the lie of our increasing collective poverty. The beginning is classic bizspeak:

“Delphi Corp.'s Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing represents more than just another Midwest metal-bender facing harsh reality. It marks a true reckoning for the traditional auto industry and the end of a 75-year-old way of life in America: that of the highly paid but unskilled worker. It was a noble concept, established largely by the United Auto Workers union in the 1930s. But it cannot withstand a global economy that has ended the UAW's labor monopoly in the auto industry, and a consumer body that won't pay more to subsidize costly employee benefits that most consumers themselves don't have.”

You will notice that the squeeze here is in the traditional rhetorical pattern: the consumers won’t pay because they don’t have benefits themselves. In an odd turn, the cost of production becomes a subsidy. Interestingly, this idea has a cousinship to surplus labor value. But in the capitalist apologetic, “subsidy” has a limited substitution value. For instance, the idea that the workers at Delphi are subsidizing the management or the investors is strictly verboten. We don’t go down that dark alley at the WSJ.

For the past thirty years, our social order – or at least the economic dimension – has depended on reversing the ductus of the zeitgeist. Where we once read from right to left, from new deal to the social welfare state, we now read from left to right, from the social welfare state to gilded age levels of inequality. The current CEO of Delphi, R.S. "Steve" Miller, is getting huge amounts of love in the business press because he has made tons of money taking companies into bankruptcy and dumping their pension obligations. Every once in a while, the oracles speak, and they reveal the ugly little truth that capitalism is class warfare. Warfare, of course, doesn’t have to be total. In the Keynesian order that lasted until the eighties, the truce that obtained allowed the investment class to accrue an advantage, but a smaller advantage, in the economy. This truce has been destroyed piecemeal since, but the price of that destruction has been delayed. We are going to be seeing what it means at a narrower distance to our own flesh in the coming decade, since the devil’s deal of the Reagan era is essentially unworkable: you cannot make a system in which the top one percent of households own 38 percent of the wealth and expect to continue to provide services based on a time when that upper one percent owned around fifteen percent. Obviously, the upper class knows this, and so its heroes are the innovators who draw the logical conclusion: let the dead bury their own dead, or: we can dump the costs of pensions for the workers on the workers and get away with it, cause nobody is going to call for some kind of giveback of upper management’s compensation packages, circa 1970 – 2000. Miller is a hero among business journalists because he’s up front about his thievery. The job, now, is to translate that thievery into inevitability. That, after all, is why we have a business section in the newspaper.

Ainsi Sprach 2005. The news is: it just keeps getting worse.

Thumbsuckers: a collective distemper

 There's an excellent little book by Italian researcher Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini , "Inevitable Illusions." P.P contends that our usual cognitive mechanism suffers from certain mental "tunnels," especially when it comes to probability, causal inference, and what I would call the narrative urge -- the drive to create, out of events, stories that are consonant with the pattern of stories we like. P.P's section on Predictability in Hindsight seems particularly apposite as tv gives acres of camera time to warhawks ranting about Afghanistan. Since the case goes something like: how could the Taliban be so strong? The Taliban isn't that strong. Thus, evil Biden musta done something. Or - the Afghanistans have themselves to blame! which is an easy position for the liberal hawks to attack, you simply have to identify the bribetakers in Afghanistan - the gov and its friends - with those forced to give bribes - Afghan peasants, soldiers and stuff - and you have your story. Like most stories, it needs unified characters, and damn the divisions that might actually fragment them.

P.P reports an interesting experiment, comparing two cases. In one case, a real result, and real prior data leading up to the result, was given to the subjects of the experiment, who were then asked if they could have predicted the result from the prior data. In a second case, they gave the same data, but an opposite result (in other words, they lied). In both cases, the subjects were confident, from the data, that they could have predicted the result. As long as we think we have a certain result, we immediately create a plausible backstory; and in the creation of that backstory we become confident of our power to correctly appraise each piece of evidence.

This is an experiment that should be practiced on thumbsuckers before they ever get a seat opinionating on any media venue.

But it won't be.

sloppy imperialism 2: what it means to be objectively anti-taliban

 When you criticize someone for using a shabby, cultish product to cure cancer, you are not being objectively pro-cancer. Similarly, if you criticize the shabby cultish foreign policy that got the U.S. into Afghanistan, you are not being objectively pro-Taliban.

I don’t speak Pashto and have never set foot in Kabul. But I have noticed a few things about the U.S. and imperialism in general. I’ve noticed how the American brand of sloppy imperialism is bad for peasants and good for strongmen. I’ve noticed that, in the years since the Cold War ended, the U.S. has tried to transform its sloppy imperialism into remote control imperialism. Bring out the drones, exert total control over the battlefield sphere, yadda yadda.

To this I say: give me a fucking break.

The moral and political rubicon was crossed when the U.S. refused the Taliban’s offer to either try Osama bin Laden or send him to a moslem country for trial. As American then did not notice, but the Middle East did, when Osama bin Laden escaped there was a less than adequate search for the man. In fact, it was so inadequate it made a mockery of the American moral position demanding Osama’s surrender. It is a bit like that La Fontaine fable, The Wolf and the Lamb, in which the wolf presents several inconsistent and false reasons for attacking the lamb, but does so anyway: "La raison du plus fort est toujours la meilleure".

Once the threshold was crossed, though, what would I – I as a railer at sloppy imperialism – have advised?

To my mind, imperialism doesn’t come cheap. What was needed, given the size of Afghanistan, was a U.S. force of at least 500,000 soldiers. What was needed was a five year occupation at the least. What was needed was putting in infrastructure on the American ticket. Electrification, minimum health care, education. The occupying power might well encourage civil society, of a type, but it would not be in name or deed a democracy. Corruption would be dealt with ruthlessly. Those who were the most corrupt would either be executed or jailed, as on this matter hangs the entire imperial exercise.

There would be no more NGO photo ops. Schooling, in Afghanistan, under the Americans was a pathetic theater. The stats as to building schools and graduating teachers disguised other stats, such as those contained in a report by the World Bank that the Bank chose not to publish in 2008, showing that 98 percent of the girl students dropped out by third grade, and 90 percent of boys had dropped out by sixth. (Rosemary Skaine, 2008). In Afghanistan, women have a long experience of rape, and are not going to send their girls to classes taught by men. Yet there are fewer female teachers, and as we know from numerous reports, teachers have to pay big bribes, amounting to a considerable part of their first years salary, just to get a post.

The trouble with this vision of Afghanistan is not the Afghanis. It is the Americans. To actually occupy and improve this central Asian space would require manpower and material that would demand a draft. You could do imperialism without a draft in the 19th century – but that moment died in the trenches of northern France in 1914. Americans speak of sacrifice tearfully, but when they have to, well, sacrifice, it is not popular. Furthermore, the amount of money needed would be in the hundreds of billions every year.

This goes against the sloppy imperialism ethos. Americans are willing to spend a trillion per year, more or less, on the military and intelligence because that money comes back into the pockets of the CEOs and stockholders of Defense contractors and radiates out in the American labor force. But spending money on making a national healthcare and educational system for Afghanis would hit the American funnybone: there is nothing as unpopular in America as foreign aid. In 2001-2005, spending on Afghanistan could have taken the place that was filled by the borrowing for the housing boom. But this is, to say the least, an unpopular way of heating up the economy.

Iraq survived, mostly, America’s sloppy imperialism. After Iraq, we did it to Libya – the perfect remote control imperialist enterprise. Ten years afterwards, Libya has yet to emerge from the fragments, the warlords, the plunge in lifestyle. And, surprise, Khaddafi’s son looks like he might become the ruler of Libya in the next year or two. The repressed return, especially when the repression is affected by minimal commitment of troops, mucho droning, and bubble gum.

No, you can’t cure cancer with Milk of Magnesia. And those who urge the Milk of Magnesia are not objectively anti-cancer – they are deeply non-serious.

PS - none of my nostrums are guaranteed to work. In fact, it is rare for an occupying power to succeed in fundamentally changing the occupied state in the modern era. But at least it has a chance.

The end of sloppy imperialism? The Afghanistan experience

 For thirty some years, I have had my ears filled with Americans - mostly white guys who of course never fought there - saying that we were winning goddamit in Vietnam. That we lost must be due to some evil stab in the back. These peeps evidently think that the 388,000 tons of Napalm dropped on Vietnam was just not enough - another spoonful of sugar and we woulda won!

A similar crackbrained meme has sprung up, inevitably, about the 20 year Afghanistan war. Another thousand soldiers, brave Americans, put on the mountain passes and presto chango, the wonderful democratic government of Afghanistan, our ally (or ventriloquist dummy) who we respect so much, but did exclude from our negotiations with the Taliban, would have shown the world that it could eliminate illiteracy in another measly half a century, or maybe seventy five years.
I've grown old, I've grown old/I shall keep the cuffs of my trousers rolled, or something like that. And so it goes - nothing is more dangerous than educating an American in international relations at some Ivy League school and plunking him or her into a think tank. It poses a danger to peoples everywhere

As we watch the gnashing of teeth among the elite who, twenty years ago, cheered on the invasion and asked no questions.

Afghanistan and Iraq took different trajectories. In Iraq, the U.S., try as it might, could not take over the central governing powers. The Shi'ite militias withstood sustained efforts by the U.S. to wipe them out. In consequence, Iraq is a shaky but independent entity. Afghanistan is another story. The U.S. basically took over the funding and security functions of the government, while pouring in money that went to U.S. defense companies and into the pockets of various corrupt local officials and Kabul elites. The habit of freeriding and lack of governance can be found in the stats. All those hearts going out to the women of Afghanistan seem curiously blind to the fact that, as of 2018, according to Unesco, only 28 percent of women were literate. And only 55 percent of men were literate. So, by UNESCO's count, since 1979, when only 5 percent of women were literate, we've had a rise of less than 30 percent. According to Asian Development Bank, after the 20 years of governance by the U.S., 47.3 percent of the people live below the poverty line. Combine these incredibly depressing statistics with the state of play when the Afghanistan government was given back one power - the control over the military, including the duty to supply them with food and wages - and their utter failure to do so and you have pretty much the picture for the Taliban's enormous advance. In American heads, the Taliban is beating women and destroying schools for girls - unfortunately, they don't have to, as the schooling for girls was part of the puppet theater Americans played for themselves, unreflected in the stats that show an utterly different case. Why is it that the American public has such a different picture of Afghanistan? I'd say that it is the provinciality of the American elites, including the media, who never bother to learn the languages of the places they report on or the people they govern. Language illiteracy points towards an even deeper disjunction between the American sahib and the average Afghanistan man or woman. That disjunction, transferred to the United States, allows for absolutely abstract discussions of what is happening in Afghanistan, without any reference, even, to statistically represented realities.

Looking back, Afghanistan is the latest - and probably not the last - country to be subjected to that malignity of the 20th century, America's sloppy imperialism. Western interventionism obscures various very distinct features of American sloppy imperialism, which favors corrupt states and rule from the homeland - the people sent out to the propped up states are not colonists, like the French in Indochina or the British in Kenya, but state functionaries who take up temporary residence. WIthin the imperial realm of the French, British, and Dutch, there were serious attempts at, for instance, learning the languages of the ruled. The United States in the Cold War sponsored something similar - anthropologists in Laos and the like. But it seems to me that the Middle Eastern wars signal a decline in that activity. From the reportes to the "experts" in Afghanistan, my impression is that the overwhelming majority had no fluency in the languages - a basic requirement for governance - and depended on a subaltern group for communication without understanding that groups own interests.

America - if we pretend it is so, it must be so!

 America's idiocracy rolls on. This NYT sub is a great expression of the lack of reality that has seized this country, from the anti-vaxxer Trump won contingent to the Trump was Putin's puppet we must support our freedom lovin' pals, like Saudi Arabia contingent.

"After 20 years of diplomacy and support, American officials are now contemplating the harrowing question of whether — and how — they might engage with a Taliban government in Afghanistan."

Here, lets pick that header apart: after twenty years of supplying massive aid to the chief ally and host of the Taliban, Pakistan; after supervising the entry into the Afghanistan government the worst of the corrupt - and very anti-women - jihadis that the U.S. supported as freedom fighters in the 80s - after suppressing the poppy crop unsucessfully while providing nothing else - while watching successive U.S. puppets in Kabul do all they can to enrich themselves while earning zip loyalty from an armed force that only fought for money - and while knowing very well that the armed force was not being paid - the U.S. has to deal with a harrowing question - is it going to recognize reality or go on another fifty year binge of pretend, as it has done with Iran? Bets are on the binge!

The thumbsukcer war that is breaking out is firmly grounded in pretend, so a few remarks before it begins: a. if you set up a government as your "ally and supply it with billions that it couldn't collect in taxes or borrow; b. and you take over the task of governing, essentially making sure that said government won't, for instance, negotiate with the Taliban; so, c., said government and its infrastructure engages in massive peculation, siphoning off money from a citizenry whose role is confined to ritual voting; and d, you try to wean the government into the normal ways of governance, as for example, oh, paying the wages of its soldiers; and e., that doesn't happen, but a certain english speaking elite begins to enjoy a whole buncha western approved lifestyle choices - good home appliances, cultural goods, etc. then: f. your country will fall, and that small group that benefitted from the American lifestyle and exercized zero responsibility towards the rest of the country will quickly become the microsized cause du jour, no questions asked. Roll the film, this is the American way of sloppy imperialism. Every time.

Look back in Anger - Afganistan November 25, 2001 to August 15, 2020

 

Ah, how it all comes back!

Long before “fake news” was a cry to rally the yahoos at presidential candidate rallies, it was a quite m.o. of the media during the Bush golden years. My blog, limited inc, which goes back twenty years, contains a treasure of fools gold culled from the asinine, warmongering, fakin’ and lyin’ press – mostly in the realm of print. I am not and never have been a listener to news on the radio or a viewer of news on tv. Eccentrically, I consider tv one of the worst platforms for news, and radio is, to me, best when playing music, second best when doing drama or standup or some funky shit, and bottomlessly bad doing news. Of course, I’ve heard that in its time, Pacifica radio was primo, but that’s hearsay.

NPR, though, I did hear enough of in the Bush golden years to realize that it viewed its job as transforming hysterical America ueber alles-ism into dulcet toned America ueber alles-ism.

So much of news is in the non-reporting. What were the headlines on November 24, 2001? For the NYT, it was a curious headline: Pakistan again said to evacuate allies of Taliban.  The story, by Dexter Filkins, begins with a graf that tells us that Pakistani airplanes are evacuating Pakistani soldiers who fought with the Taliban. Not exactly a warshaking scenario, right? What Filkins didn’t say, and what was not headlined and burned into the American psyche, with all its peppy get up ‘n kill them Taliban, is that the evacuation was not just of Pakistani soldiers.

Here's a long quote from an intelligent assessment of what happened in Kunduz:

“The request was made by Musharraf [Pakistan’s president] to Bush, but Cheney took charg- a token of who was handling Mussharraf at the time. The approval was not shared with anyone at State… until well after the event. Musharraf said Pakistan need to save its dignity and its valued people. Two planes were involved, which made several sorties a night over several nights. They took off from air bases in Chitral and Gilgit in Pakistan’s northern areas, and landed in Kunduz, where the evacuees were waiting on the tartmac. Certainly hundreds and perhaps as many as one thousand people escaped. Hundreds of ISI officers, Taliban commandos and foot soldiers belonging to the IMU (Islamic movement of Uzbeckistan) and Al Qaeda personnel boarded the planes. What was sold as a minor extraction turned into a major air bridge.” - from 102 Days of War by Yaniv Barzilai

Well, the selling went down all right, signed by Dexter Filkins and the NYT. The voices that told us that Afghanistan’s Taliban was not down for the count, as its central commanders were saved, weren’t just mocked – the news didn’t give enough information to make mocking possible. Still, some got it. Ted Rall, writing in the Village Voice in December, 1981, under the headline “How we lost Afghanistan” already got it right by doing basic research. But the mainstream press had its story. And, as America is always just,naturally it attracts the best and brightest as its allies. Thus, when Musharraf retired as Pakistan’s president in 2008, he was given a tongue washing by the NYT:

“A commando at heart, and a man of often impetuous decisions, Pervez Musharraf ended Pakistan’s support of the Taliban leadership in Afghanistan after 9/11 and pledged to help the United States, becoming one of Washington’s most crucial allies in the campaign against terrorism.”

This is fake news with a bullet, my friends. Even the NYT knows it, so in one of those “walks with a schizo” that tells you that the editors at the paper are nervous about leaving reality for neverneverland entirely, they quote journalist Ahmed Rashid, whose words are modified to the format. Best not shock the Americans entirely:

“Musharraf continued to provide cover to the Taliban, but still managed to convince the Americans for many years that it was not a double game,” said Ahmed Rashid, a Pakistani expert on the Taliban and the author of “Descent into Chaos,” a book that details the relationship between Mr. Musharraf and Washington. “It was a remarkable feat of balancing on the tightrope.”

Definitely that. And a remarkable feat of ensuring that the leadership of the Taliban escape unharmed and have the territory and supplies to go back. But that the U.S. is that pig ignorant, that Bush was a disaster on every level, that the slimy administration lied and lied with the help of the shiny centrist press – well, that is not a story anybody wants to headline, surely.

Ah, the memories! Rarely do you catch the NYT and the pseudo-liberal media in real lies, since they hedge the falsification. Thus, fake news instead of lying liars news. But sometimes they have to admit to lies in the interest of empire. From my blog, I reach back to the interesting case of Robert Levinson, which occurred at the end of the Golden Bush years. Levinson “disappeared” in Iran in 2007. The NYT was on the case, and for seven years kept up the heat: Iran had captured an innocent American businessman! And like all evil Islamicists, they put him in a dungeon. A businessman who made a border crossing mistake!

Well, after seven years the AP reported that Levinson was no businessman, but was a CIA agent. It was rather obvious that he was one: his family was in fact suing the CIA in court. So the public editor of the NYT, which was back when they had one, went into the case and found that the NYT had not had the wool pulled over their eyes. In fact, they’d always known the man they labelled an innocent American businessman was a CIA agent. But they held back the info not because they are in the service of the American establishment’s foreign policy – no, the answer will bring tears to your eyes, its so romantic and sweet.  As explained by the editor at the time, Jill Abramson:

https://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/22/public-editor/a-missing-spy-and-the-right-to-know.html?ref=thepubliceditor&_r=0,

Holding a story entirely is “a very rare thing,” she said. “The more usual situation is to withhold a level of detail, and those decisions are excruciating.”

“In this case, Ms. Abramson said, the reason for holding back the story was not because of a government request about national security, but in deference to Mr. Levinson’s family. “What caused us to hold the story was their profound worry that he would be killed.”

Of course, that profound worry didn’t prevent them from outing dear old dad themselves. At the same time, Levinson’s disappearance, as Abramson might have known, was being used as yet another reason to attack Iran. But come hell or high water, the NYT, which would never ever ever ever ever hold back information because the government told them to – after all, the whole point is to inculcate a set of responses so the government doesn’t have to do that – but only for sweet reasons of family love.

Ah, the memories. And the forgetting – the long forgetting I’ve tried to do of America in the 2000-2010 period. Alas, what you forget can kill you – or others. In droves.

Jack Shafer, immortal moron, and our last twenty years

 I have a long memory for stupid media. Luckily, in the 2000-2003 period, it was all gathered together in one place: Slate! Today, let us celebrate Jack Shafer. Frankly, Shafer is an idiot and a valient member of the uncancelable media club. He goes from place to place within the DC circuit, always wrong, always smug, always promoted.

In 2003, Shafer presented his own greatest hits as he lambasted a much better reporter, Johnny Apple of the NYT. Johnny Apple had the unpatriotic instinct that the Afghanistan war fought in 2001 was going to lead to quagmire. The heresy! As Shafer unforgettably put it, Apple's view was"

"The United States has bitten off more than it can chew; the allied war effort is underpowered; we’ve underestimated the enemy—again!; air power is overrated; and guerrillas can do U.S. forces great damage as they did in Vietnam."

As Shafer contemptuously showed, what rot!

"Apple’s fear that dropping bombs on civilians wouldn’t “win Afghan ‘hearts and minds’ ” and that the country would prove ungovernable even if the United States won turned out to be unfounded. Two weeks after his comparison of Afghanistan to Vietnam, the allies liberated Kabul, and 16 months later the place is at least as governable as San Francisco.""

Ah, the things they said at the beginning of this century! The things they did! The fan club for the utter shit of the Bush foreign policy, the moronic smugness that would result in a sentence like: "the place is at least as governable as San Francisco." But fear not, failing upwards is the one iron rule of punditry. And when that rule is attacked, letters are written to Harper's magazine about how the entire freedom of expression is under attack!

I laugh until I want to vomit about the waste of the last twenty years.

Think tanker alert

 "Afghanistan’s rapid unraveling is already raising grumblings about American credibility, compounding the wounds of the Trump years and reinforcing the idea that America’s backing for its allies is not unlimited." - NYT

Apparently, this paragraph has spread panic in think tank world. Thousands of boltons and kagans have climbed out high windows and are threatening to jump. There's a neo-con and humanitarian intervention watch on for these poor figures. In other news, Christopher Hitchens is turning in his grave. His friends are perplexed as to whether this is simple contrarianism, or whether he has decided God is Great.

epidemic terror

 

“But though the nation be exempt from real evils, it is not more happy on this account than others. The people are afflicted, it is true, with neither famine nor pestilence; but there is a disorder peculiar to the country, which every season makes strange ravages among them; it spreads with pestilential rapidity, and infects almost every rank of people; what is still more strange, the natives have no name for this peculiar malady, though well known to foreign physicians by the appellation of Epidemic Terror.”

-I cull this quotation from Oliver Goldsmith’s essay, which appeared in his zine, the Citizen of the world, as letter LXIX. Commentators have confessed that the rabies panic Goldsmith described has few other witnesses – and Goldsmith was a bit of a fabulist. One of Goldsmith’s most noted poems was entitled Elegy to a Mad Dog, and perhaps in the fervor of composition he projected a panic.

 

And in that town a dog was found,

As many dogs there be,

Both mongrel, puppy, whelp, and hound,

And curs of low degree.

 

The dog and man at first were friends;

But when a pique began,

The dog, to gain some private ends,

Went mad, and bit the man.

 

According to the sociologists, Stanley Cohen coined the phrase “moral panic”. Cohen studied the media attention that was devoted, in the 1960s, to the Mods and Rockers. His problem was that Mod violence was not, rationally considered, one of Britain’s great problems, or even more than a three day sensation. But it grew with the attention it received.

In a sense, what he was doing, with a different vocabulary, was what Oliver Goldsmith had done two hundred years before, in his essay on Mad Dogs. Since I don’t believe Goldsmith’s essay has ever been referred to by those who have written about the history of moral panic, I thought I’d compare Goldsmith’s Epidemic Terror with Cohen’s moral panic – and in particular, the way in which Goldsmith used the epidemic image to medicalize an older image of rumor.

Here’s how Cohen defines his term:  “Societies appear to be subject, every now and then, to periods of moral panic. A
condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as athreat to societal values and interests; its nature is presented in a stylised and stereotypical fashion by the mass media; the moral barricades are manned by editors, bishops, politicians and other right-thinking people; socially accredited
experts pronounce their diagnoses and solutions; ways of coping are evolved or (more often) resorted to; the condition then disappears, submerges or deteriorates and becomes more visible. Sometimes the object of panic is quite novel and at other times it is something which has been in existence long enough, but suddenly appears in the limelight. Sometimes the panic passes over and is forgotten, except in folklore and collective memory; at other times it has more serious and long-lasting repercussions and might produce such changes as those in legal and social policy or even in the way the society conceives itself.(1972:9)

The Epidemic Terror of Goldsmith’s essay is exactly of Cohen’s type-of thing-that-suddenly-becomes-visible, even though it has been in existence a long time: mad dogs.

Goldsmith, of course, is writing in a tradition about rumor and ignorance that goes back to Virgil's goddess of Rumor, who perches on the walls of the city. What is interesting about his essay is the direction he takes. It would be easy to employ the old routines that targeted ignorance and the mob. The term “mob” came into existence in the 18th century – it was a shortened form of mobile vulgarum, common people in movement. And Goldsmith, as well as any 18th century intellectual, wasn’t averse to tossing around a little abuse of the mob. However, he is more interested in mechanism than typology – he is after the dynamic of his “epidemic terror”. And to understand that, you have to pose some non-traditional questions that concern the about-ness of ignorance – questions that latter led Freud and Canetti to their (different) conclusions about crowd behavior.

Goldsmith begins with examples to show that epidemic terrors are both chronic and structurally similar:

“One year it issues from a baker’s shop in the form of a sixpenny loaf; the next, it takes the appearance of a comet with a fiery tail; the third, it threatens like a flatbottomed boat; and the fourth, it carries consternation in the bite of a mad dog.”

In all of the cases, the risk is disproportionate to the terror it spreads. However, the element I want to underline is that Goldsmith isn't showing that the disproportion is irrational -- he is trying to show how it is rationalized. Hence, my reference to Freud. The essay was probably penned sometime in the 1750s or 1760s. Goldsmith, as I have said, was himself a purveyor of a rumor about a rumor, in that England was perhaps not so swept with various epidemics of what surgeon John Hunter, who wrote about it in the 1780s, called canine madness, as Goldsmith implies. However that may be – and I trust that there was some objective correlate to Goldsmith’s essay – he intentionally parallels two forms of madness – one is spread by a mad dog’s bite, which has a pathology and a physical cause; while the other is a psychopathology, with lines of infection that are traceable not by the effort of the physiologist but rather by the observer of social mores – the philosophe. In both cases, though, the contagion model applies. The individual madness of the hyrophobe is paralleled by the collective madness of the crowd.

Goldsmith, as a good doctor, describes the outward symptoms of the ‘disease” of fearing mad dogs – people “sally from their houses with that circumspection which is prudent in such as expect a mad dog at every turning;” “a few of unusual bravery arm themselves with boots and buff gloves, in order to face the enemy…” In short, a city operates as though it were suddenly under imminent threat.

And what of that threat? Goldsmith observes how the discovery of whether a dog is mad or not resembles the old trial of dunking witches – if she floats, she’s a witch, if she drowns, she is innocent. Since the symptoms of being a mad dog are biting, or running away, crowds gather around dogs, jab or stone them, and then are either attacked – proof that the dog is mad – or escaped from – proof, again, that the dog is mad. Out comes the halter and the dog is hung. It is an interesting parallel. Myself, I have long felt that the form of trial that the courts used for witches has never really gone away, and is applied now to “drug dealers”, now to “terrorists”. The connection between rumor, panic and the judiciary is close.

“When epidemic terror is once excited, every morning comes loaded with some new disaster.” Goldsmith anticipates Cohen once again. In Cohen’s model, the menace has to be repeated over and over. In the age of the copy machine, tv, and radio (Cohen’s book dealt with the pre-Net age), the vector of transmission runs through these vast news machines. In Goldsmith’s day, the vector of transmission was still as much oral as it was print. What is interesting is that there will suddenly be a wave of information about the menace that runs through oral space – much like today’s “watercooler talk.” ‘As in stories of ghosts, each loves to hear the account, though it only serves to make him uneasy.” Goldsmith imagines a story beginning in some outlying area, where a woman is frightened by a dog. As the story is retold – and as it spreads towards more densely populated areas – the story’s characteristics change, until they assume the shape of the usual terror: a mad dog, a sudden attack, a highly placed woman who is suddenly transformed into a foaming hydrophobic on all fours.

Goldsmith’s epidemic terror includes all three elements of Cohen’s moral panic: exaggeration, the prediction that such things are inevitable, and symbolization. In Cohen’s case, the symbolization congealed around the image of the “Mod;” in Goldsmith’s case, around the image of the dog. The dog isn’t simply diseased, but mad – a disturbance of the rational faculties, a lowering of the censure between the Id and the ego – to use an anachronistic vocabulary to poke at what Goldsmith is describing.

We especially like the end of Goldsmith’s essay, because he goes to the heart of the terror – to the dog itself – and makes a little plaidoyer for the dog: “in him alone, fawning is not flattery. …  “How unkind then to torture this animal that has left the forest to claim the protection of man! How ungrateful a return to the trusty animal for all its services!”

It is interesting that the moral panics of our day have a certain inverted nature – they are moral panics of claiming that real diseases don’t exist, or exist but are harmless, or were invented in a lab and spread by devils – and of course the panic is of a similar nature with regard to the vaccine. That the formerly “free world” is so subject to these panics and inverted panics should tell us a lot about the way the “free world” fought the Cold War.