a collector speaks.

Other people collect butterflies. A hobby that gets you outside, and puts you in scenes of great natural beauty, and sharpens your sense of microscopic differences.
LI’s hobby doesn’t come with such healthful after-effects. We like to collect leftists who preach far right policies, in the name of the left. These people can’t ask for the salt without assuring all and sundry that asking for the salt is a leftist value. No, an enlightenment value. No, a universal value, comrades!
Figaro – which, for those not in the know, is a conservative paper – published a simply beautiful specimen Friday. Just as the ardent collector, spotting a patch of vetch, is on the q vive for anthrocera purpuralis, the collector of these apostles of true, of core, of hardcore leftism knows to venture into areas like the Wall Street Journal Editorial page, or transcripts of the Hugh Hewitt program, to scoop up some really great specimens. As they feed in these areas, they become much less shy – even garrulous. One of their traits, then, is known as the Nick Cohen maneuver – as they advocate, say, small scale massacres of dusky mannikens on what C. Hitchens likes to call, with manly insouciance, the killing fields, they throw out truly piteous echoes about the ‘betrayal of the left’ By which they mean that somehow, behind their backs, so dastardly machinatins have merged together the stalinists and the islamofascists in a fight to collective agriculture under Shari'a law. So betrayed are these specimens that inevitably their incomes, and media appearances, go up and up. It is wonderful that unlike other subgroups - Satanists, vampires, Christian strippers, etc. - which are represented in the media (usually on afternoon talk shows, although is Jerry Springer still on?) by real members of the group, the subgroup of the left is never represented except by members who have hurt feelings about it. And who are continually addressing it.

These specimens do take out of that immersion in the left subgroup the idea that everything is about the left. Which adds of course to the comedy. What better place to address the comrades than from the columns of Figaro? With a program we can all get with: deregulating that market, invading this or that barbarous country, spending more money on those missiles. Etc. As anyone can tell, a lefty program par excellence. Those interested in evolutionary issues should notice that there is usually a path of development here, going through the Cuba stage, the Mao stage – essential, the Mao stage, for creating the tendency to grandiose statements about cultures about which the speaker evidently knows nothing – going through a nice bashing liberalism stage, and finally settling on a perpetual urging of free markets, free minds, and neo-imperialism as the true and onlie heritage of Marx’s good gray beard.

Our specimen today is called Alain Boyer. Figaro’s headline writer gave his piece an exquisitely ridiculous title: Si vous êtes vraiment de gauche, votez Sarkozy ! For those who don’t read French, the translation is: If you like escargot, you will just love my recipe for Feces Alexander! Boyer begins with an almost Berman-like seriousness (nobody does this thing better than Paul Berman) with a reference to those two outstanding beacons of the left – Max Weber and – oh, shades of Gluckman! – Raymond Aron. The point of invoking them is to gild, with academic jellies, a dismal cliche about the difficulty, o saints, of bringing about properly lefty ends if you don't compromise a little with the worst reactionary economic policies ever to bankrupt a country.

My beating heart! This is truly the golden age - when in my lifetime has effrontery so easily shaded into imbecility right before my very own peepers? I love it. My butterfly net is all aquiver.

Boyer rings some bells to come, to his own satisfaction and that of all the comrades in the hall, to these paragraphs ringing with that degree of absolute nonsense we've all grown used to in this country:

‘Without incentives, who will take risks? If a measure which “honors” social justice, from the 35 hour law to refusing to lower the percentage of taxes or protectionism is admittedly counter-productive from the point of view of the real promotion of that same value, we must renounce it.

Today, seeing the state of the country, we must have the courage to propose certain “liberal” reforms, incentive producing and negotiated with those who, as the CFDT, have decided to no longer consider politics in a democracy like a war, a zero sum conflict, but like a deliberation followed by compromise.”

Etc, etc. The end of the article paraphrases De Sade: “Français, encore une effort pour promouvoir les valeurs de gauche !” Translated, this reads: “wasn’t that tasty? and I had my maid write this whole fucking thing! I especially imported her from Morocco for that purpose, and presented to her my big bad incentive. Now I’m off to New York to have it translated for the WSJ!”

But let's see. I imagine translation first to the Guardian. We will see. The Blairists will just orgasm over this.

negative inspiration

Spirit enough to be bored — Whoever doesn’t have enough spirit to be able to find himself and his work boring is certainly not a spirit of the first rank, be it in the arts or sciences. A satirist who was, unusually, also a thinker, could add to this, taking a look at the world and history: God must not have had this spirit: he wanted to make and did make things, collectively, too interesting.” – Nietzsche, Human all too H.

LI is unsure about the jab at God at the end of this little saying, but every writer knows the moment that comes upon him like negative inspiration, when he detaches and to find himself and his work boring. That’s the moment that Bely cuts his masterpiece, Petersburg, by a third; that may be the moment when Rimbaud said fuck it, although I am too little devil or angel to venture there into that affair. However, I’ve been pondering the economist’s version of happiness – even Bartolini’s, critical as he is of the treadmill of production that has brought us wheel of fortune lifestyles. Economists are so fucking weird because they combine the most sophisticated mathematical models with psychological insights that would shame a ten year old. It is all about not only licking a lollypop, but doing it forever and ever, and getting everybody’s lollypop to lick. It is a gross and unrealistic view of happiness. I suspect economists are so enthusiastic about growth not so much because growth is a good in itself, but because it perpetually puts off the question: what is the system for? And, of course, even Marxist economists will edge out of the room once you start pondering the many dimensions of alienation. Economics is really not the dismal science, but the clubbish science – and in clubs, it doesn’t do to pose such questions. They are so easily answered by dinner, especially if dinner includes port.

Now, in LI’s youth, boredom was our mark of Cain – it was the boredom generated by capitalism that we were against. We tended to be big supporters of the situationists, without really having a vast or even a tiny little knowledge of them more than they pissed people off, and the autonomen, because we loved the autonomen boldness, the kicking ass, the taking over of buildings people weren't using, the contempt for the Polizei. This sounded like the shit to us, even though we heard overtones of peasant hut nostalgia in some of that wish that enterprise consist of holding hands and weaving or something, which made us wrinkle our nose. The via negativa, through pure abjection, sounded pretty good, too, theoretically. Put Bataille on the internal stereo system and see if “we’re so pretty, oh so pretty” comes out.

However, although it was quite the enemy, boredom was never really an issue. Which is why we were undoubtedly a cause of unmitigated boredom in others. It wasn’t until we began to take writing seriously, and tried to write fiction, that boredom became interesting, and we became aware of our own karmic debt to those we had bored and bored and bored.

A debt that would merely grow heavier (oh, the motherfucking links!) if we went too far into it. More interesting is that, perhaps out there on the edge a bit, our experience with boredom, the way it became a boundary, is pretty much standard, nothing unusual. L'enfant du siecle after all, god damn it. And it is now become that which we all must flee. Any dialectical witch should find that which we all must flee interesting indeed.

Creating unhappiness, creating growth

"Keep your electric eye on me, babe
put your raygun to my head..."

Continuing from our last post re Stefano Bartolini's paper.

Bartolini’s model connects work, happiness and savings by hypothesizing that growth is a matter of exploiting two negative externalities, of which he concentrates on two types: “positional ones, and those which reduce the availability of free goods as final or intermediate goods.” In essence, that the promise of the affluence which is supposed to have been brought about by greater labor productivity and, especially, the increase in human capital, has not been borne out for reasons that are germane to the system itself. The system generates both an image of happiness and a pandemic of unhappiness. Bartolini wants to know why the savings rate does not effect the quantity of labor, why, that is, the amount of time spent working keeps going up, and why the satisfaction with one’s life is unaffected by increases over a certain amount of wealth. The latter begs the question that Geddes asks the John Houston character, the millionaire, in Chinatown: what more can you eat? How much better can you dress?

“The capacity of the hypothesis that relative income matters to explain the empirical
anomalies of growth theory should be intuitive. Individuals are induced to work hard
and to accumulate much by positional competition. The fact that the position of
people with constant incomes worsens if others increase their incomes is a powerful
incentive for the former to be interested in money.6 But, a general increase in income which leaves the relative positions unchanged cannot improve general well-being. In an economy of this kind the well-being of everyone cannot improve by definition.

Hence the hypothesis of negative positional externalities is consistent with
explanation of the happiness paradox. Positional negative externalities may be the
tertium movens which explains the empirical anomalies of growth theory.”

In a footnote, Bartolini explains those positional goods:

“The main precursors of the idea that relative position matters are Veblen 1899/1934 and Hirsh 1976. According to Hirsh, well-being in the rich economies depends increasingly on positional goods. The clearest definition of pure positional good has been provided by Pagano 1999, according to whom consumption by an individual of a positive amount of a positional good involves the consumption of an equal negative amount by someone else. Examples of pure positional goods are power, status, prestige. This definition implies that increased consumption of a positional good by someone produces a negative externality on someone else.”

While the notion of positional competition and measurement of wealth relative to position is not new, Bartolini’s second negative externality is much less explored:

“According to this approach, the theoretical and empirical difficulties of growth theory are due to the fact that it fails to consider that well-being and productive capacity depend largely on goods that are not purchased in the market but are furnished by the social and natural environment. The growth process generates extensive negative externalities which reduce the capacity of the environment to furnish such goods. These negative externalities may be the tertium movens of growth given the capacity of the market to supply costly substitutes for the diminishing free goods. If agents can purchase substitutes for free resources they will react to the decline in their well-being or in their productive capacity by increasing their use of goods purchased in the market. Negative externalities force individuals have increasingly to rely on private goods in order to prevent a decline in their wellbeing or productive capacity. In this way they contribute to an increase in output. This feeds back into the negative externalities, giving rise to a further diminution in free goods to which agents react by increasing output, and so on.”

A simple example of this comes to mind: the cost of a highway. A highway presents an obstacle to travelers without cars of a rare type: it is as if the state had imported high mountains into an area. The traveler, to get around auto-intended roads, is strongly inclined to get an auto.

Now, here is the bit that has so much relevance to the current election in France – but as much relevance to the past seven years of the moronic inferno in the States.

“The idea behind GASP (Growth As Substitution Process) models is that one way to motivate people to accumulate money is to create a society in which increasingly less can be obtained for free; a society in which opportunities to acquire well-being in ways which do not pass through the market become increasingly scarce, and in which well-being can therefore only be purchased.

According to this approach, the theory of growth based on accumulation and
technical progress is unable to explain the paradox of happiness because it tells only part of the story of growth – the story, that is, in which goods are luxury goods for one generation, standard goods for the next, and absolute necessities for the one after that. The history of economic growth is obviously full of examples of this process. But the other side of this story is that of free goods which become scarce and costly ones for the next generation and luxury goods for the one after that. Urbanization is widely associated with phenomena of this kind. A world in which silence, clean air, swimming in clean seas or rivers, or pleasant strolls become the privilege of uncontaminated places and tropical paradises is a world which tends to spend considerable resources to evade the unliveable environments that it has constructed. The periodic mass migrations known as summer holidays that one observes in the rich countries, or the fact that tourism from the rich countries has become an important resource for many poor ones, may not be indicative of higher living standards but rather a response to a deterioration in the quality of life.”

And finally, my last quote from Bartolini – although this rich essay has a lot of things LI will mine later:

“… in GASP models, the inability of growth to improve happiness derives from
an institutional problem, and not a biological or cultural one. The price system does
not receive signals about the importance of fundamental needs which do not pass
through the market. Individuals are unable to control resources crucial for their
happiness. The fact that money does not buy happiness stems neither from biology nor from culture; money is unable to buy happiness amid a pattern of growth with
excessively high social and environmental costs.”

Now, if I were to criticize Bartolini, it would probably be on the happiness decline. I am not sure that he is right that happiness is on the decline, so much as the composition of happiness has changed in way that are disastrous for our human relationships. But that would be another story for another time.

The Rupture will not be Televised

LI has been pondering the slogan of Sarkozy, the Frankenstein candidate for President in France. Sarkozy has been calling for a ‘rupture’. This might sound like an odd thing for a conservative to do, but, since the 80s, there's a ponce conservative fashion for using those leftist terms associated with ‘revolution’ and revamping them in terms of reaction, much like some rich collector buying antique cars and making them road useable.

In reality, at this point in the developed economies, there are no longer a lot of unknown models. The last two hundred years have given us an ensemble of economic policies, and it isn’t too hard to put in one’s parameters and predict results. It is hard, on the other hand, to imagine another all encompassing economic policy. LI thinks that this will be the conceptual roadblock to really dealing with the environmental affects of the treadmill of production over the next thirty to fifty years. Sarkozy’s rupture is simply applying as much Thatcherism as he dares to create a typical neo-liberal boom in France – one that concentrates the benefits of growth in the wealth of the upper income percentiles, and that spreads affluence further down the percentiles by easing credit and by substituting upward job trajectories for wage raises. The advantage of this kind of growth is that the wealth it creates is extensive enough to expand the seeming base of goods shared by all – the image of prosperity, in other words, connects to a certain extent with the reality of prosperity. Credit is not a fiction. It is a real driver. And it fits well into the notion that greater income comes not from increases in wages, but rising through the ranks. A system that is built like this can’t, in the end, afford a large manufacturing sector. One of the prices of Sarkozy’s “rupture” is de-manufacturing. The Anglo-sphere is all about de-manufacturing.

There is an interesting article by Stefano Bartolini that deals with growth using a Polanyi-style scheme of analysis. It bears the rebarbative title (by which I mean a title fit for a cannibal's barbecue) “Beyond Accumulation and Technical Progress: Negative Externalities as an Engine of Economic Growth .” The abstract, however, hearteningly poses questions that economists generally feel are icky, and that LI feels are exactly the point.

“The traditional explanation of growth based on the primum and secundum movens of accumulation and technical progress, faces two major empirical anomalies. Why do people work so much i.e. why do they strive so much for money? The growth literature provides no answer to these question, nor to the further and very important one of why people are so unhappy. Moreover, finding a joint answer to the two questions seems particularly puzzling. Why do people strive so much for money if money cannot buy happiness? I argue that the solution to this 'paradox of happiness' can be provided by including in the theory a tertium movens of growth: negative externalities. These externalities can be of two kinds. The first are positional externalities, i.e. those due the fact that individuals may be interested in relative not absolute position. The second kind of negative externalities are those which reduce free goods. Some recent models, both evolutionary or with optimising agents, show the role of these externalities as an engine of growth. This approach emphasises that the growth process generates extensive negative externalities which reduce the capacity of the social and natural environment to furnish free goods. In these models individuals have increasingly to rely on private goods in order to prevent a reduction in their well-being or in their productive capacity due to decline in social and natural capital. This generates an increase in output which feeds back into the negative externalities, giving rise to a self-reinforcing mechanism whereby growth generates negative externalities and negative externalities generate growth. According to these models, growth appears to be a substitution process whereby free final (or intermediate) goods are progressively replaced with costly goods in the consumption (or production) patterns of individuals. From the point of view of this GASP (Growth As Substitution Process) models the two anomalies of growth theory are two sides of the same coin. People strive so much for money because they have to defend themselves against negative externalities: they work so much in order to substitute free goods with costly ones. But an increase in income does not improve their happiness because it involves a process of substitution of free goods costly ones. Some implications for environmental economics are drawn.”

Tomorrow I am going to comment a little more about this paper, which is very relevant to the issues before the French public in this election. One more quote to shore that up – my French readers will surely appreciate the relevance of this graf in Bartolini’s paper to the headlines in the papers:

“In short, the result of perpetual growth seems rather vulnerable to inclusion of a work/leisure choice in models. The plausible mechanisms emphasised by endogenous growth models which ensure a non-decreasing marginal productivity of capital over the long period are insufficient to generate perpetual growth. In order to generate it, individuals must work and accumulate i. e. must be interested in money, more than endogenous growth models predict. According to these models, in fact, individuals react to a long-period increase in labor productivity by enjoying life more than is necessary to ensure perpetual growth. This is as regards the theoretical problems.”

What they said - the Bush occupation plan, Oct. 10, 2002

Every once in a while, one needs benchmarks. Here's a benchmark. Here is a story from October 11, 2002, about what the Bush administration planned for Iraq. Contrary to the new shiny revisionism of the warmongers (Hitchens, Perle, Ajami, etc.), the Bush administration announced what it was going to do in plenty of time for its war supporters to know what it was going to do.

This is the war they supported.
Their butter-wouldn't-melt-in-my-mouth stances are actually cynical we-lied-to-cram-the war-down-your-throat-and-they-lied-to-us laments.

Notice, also, the con job of pretending that this was about WMD. The idea that there would be a major effort to find WMD was intrinsic to how the war was sold. Of course, after the invasion, the idea of spending a year making a major search for WMD was given the same status as the search for the tooth fairy or for Santa's reindeer.

"THREATS AND RESPONSES: A PLAN FOR IRAQ
Foreign Desk; Section A
U.S. Has a Plan To Occupy Iraq, Officials Report
By DAVID E. SANGER and ERIC SCHMITT
1380 words

WASHINGTON, Oct. 10 -- The White House is developing a detailed plan, modeled on the postwar occupation of Japan, to install an American-led military government in Iraq if the United States topples Saddam Hussein, senior administration officials said today.

The plan also calls for war-crime trials of Iraqi leaders and a transition to an elected civilian government that could take months or years.
In the initial phase, Iraq would be governed by an American military commander -- perhaps Gen. Tommy R. Franks, commander of United States forces in the Persian Gulf, or one of his subordinates -- who would assume the role that Gen. Douglas MacArthur served in Japan after its surrender in 1945.

One senior official said the administration was ''coalescing around'' the concept after discussions of options with President Bush and his top aides. But this official and others cautioned that there had not yet been any formal approval of the plan and that it was not clear whether allies had been consulted on it.

The detailed thinking about an American occupation emerges as the administration negotiates a compromise at the United Nations that officials say may fall short of an explicit authorization to use force but still allow the United States to claim it has all the authority it needs to force Iraq to disarm.

In contemplating an occupation, the administration is scaling back the initial role for Iraqi opposition forces in a post-Hussein government. Until now it had been assumed that Iraqi dissidents both inside and outside the country would form a government, but it was never clear when they would take full control.
Today marked the first time the administration has discussed what could be a lengthy occupation by coalition forces, led by the United States.

Officials say they want to avoid the chaos and in-fighting that have plagued Afghanistan since the defeat of the Taliban. Mr. Bush's aides say they also want full control over Iraq while American-led forces carry out their principal mission: finding and destroying weapons of mass destruction."

At the time this was published, LI pointed out that the Bush plan was a pipe dream.

one of the great isolatos

She enters history like the protagonist of an 18th century picaresque novel:

‘One evening in the month of September 1731, a girl nine or ten years old, pressed, as it would seem, by thirst, entered about twilight into Songi, a village situated four or five leagues south of Chalons in Champagne. She had nothing on her feet: her body was covered with rags and skins: her hair with a gourd leaf; and her face and hands were black as a Negroe’s. She was armed with a short baton, thicker at one end than the other like a club. Those who first observed her took to their heels, crying out, ‘There is the devil.” And indeed her dress and colour might very well suggest this idea to the country people. Happiest were they who could soonest secure their doors and windows; but one of them, thinking, perhaps, that the devil was afraid of dogs, set loose upon her a bull dog with an iron collar. The little savage seeing him advancing in a fury, kept her ground without flinching, grasping her little club with both hands, and stretching herself to one side, in order to give greater scope to her blow. Perceiving the dog within her reach, she discharged such a terrible blow on his head as laid him dead at her feet. Elated with her victory, she jumped several times over the dead carcase of the dog. Then she tried to open a door, which not being able to effect, she ran back to the country towards the river, and mounting a tree, fell quietly asleep.”

This is from the English translation that was commissioned by James Burnett, Lord Monboddo. Monboddo is one of those bit players – he had a reputation for eccentricity, built upon his massive multi-volume books that extended the Edinburgh enlightenment’s story of progress as the essence of history to natural history. Monbaddo, famously, thought orangutans were another species of human being – which was not really as odd as it seems, given that Linnaeus himself carved out a special category for wild boys and girls, homo sapiens ferus. And Monboddo had a strong suspicion that people might be born with tails. Or at least that is the legend, which makes Monboddo a crazy Scots Rousseau, crawling around, Nebuchadnezzar like, on all fours.

Michael Newton, in Savage Girls and Wild Boys, devotes a chapter to the Burnett-Memmie Le Blanc story. You can also find Julia Duthwaite’s essay, Rewriting the Savage: The Extraordinary Fictions of the "Wild Girl of Champagne” here As Douthwaite points out, the whole story of Memmie is wrapped in mystification, including the supposed memoir, written by her friend, Madame Hecquet. Madame Hecquet could be the daughter of Dr. Hecquet, who was famous earlier in the century, or she could not exist at all. She could be, and was suspected to be, a proxy for Charles de la Condamine. In Newton’s account, the translation of Hecquet’s work was done by William Robertson, James Burnett’s secretary, in 1765. When Burnett met her, through the offices of Condamine, Memmie Le Blanc was making her living as a curiosity – although in some sense she was still a nun. Burnett, curious as always about primitive man, must have been steered to Memmie, since the Hecquet book, according to Newton, was not selling – in fact, it was part of Memmie’s act to sell copies of it.

Monboddo wrote the preface to the translation of the Memoir. He makes a bee line between Memmie as a Man Friday and Memmie as the Lockean specimen, the subject who had, by good fortunate, befallen some subtraction on the path to human development – the metaphysician’s freak, in short. The preface is genial, and even gives Memmie’s Paris address, for those wanting to see her and put a penny in her box. Monboddo concedes that “the vulgar will be entertained with this relation much as they are with the history of Robinson Crusoe; but to the philosopher it will appear matter of curious speculation; and he will draw from it consequences not so obvious to the generality of readers. He will observe with amazement the progression of our species from an animal so wild, to men such as we. He will see, evidently, that though man is by his natural bent and inclination disposed to society, like many other animals, yet he is not be natural necessity social, nor obliged to live upon a joint stock, like ants or bees; but is enabled, by his natural powers, to provide for his own subsistence, as much as any other animal, and more than most, as his means of subsistence are more various.”

This fascinates LI – for isn’t it the devil of the spirit of capitalism that it is a system which forces men out of the autarkic state, in which all is barter for immediate use, or home production, into the world of monetary exchange – while at the same time defining his essence as being able “to provide for his own subsistence, as much as any other animal” by himself? The economic man, who stands, like Robinson Crusoe, at the very beginning of the labour process, contains this primordial twist like the sons of Adam contain original sin. And that twist comes out of the figuration of that inseparable and damned couple, the colonizer and the native, the European and the savage. So to have a savage retrace the original colonization is, to say the least, interesting.

And that is the story of Memmie, at least as Monboddo sees it. Born, he speculates, among the Huron (who he knows from the tales of an erudite traveler – although this account is contradicted, somewhat, by Monboddo’s insistance on the whiteness of Memmie’s skin), she was captured, while in a canoe, by a ship of unnamed Europeans, her face was blacked, and she was sold as a slave somewhere in the Carribbean. A white Indian in blackface, she was re-embarked for unknown reasons in a ship that foundered on the French shore. She escaped, and helped her girlfriend, a Negro girl, escape. Here things get murky. This black girl was seen when Memmie was first spotted, and there are some odd hints that Memmie might have beaten her to death and eaten her – but then again, there is an account that she sheltered her and the girl got sick. She is out of the picture by the time Monboddo meets Memmie, that's for sure. In any case, what we have here is a game of substitutes of an ingenious kind – the white for the Indian, the Indian for the black, Friday for Robinson Crusoe, Europe for the deserted island. For a moment, history goes, if not backwards, at least in a sort of spin.

More in a future post

ps – oddly, Robinson Crusoe never marked me. I assume I read it, or some abridgment, when I was a boy, but I don’t have the memory of it that I have of Gulliver’s travels. So I’ve been reading it this week, and finding it very surprising. The most surprising thing is the echo I catch of Kafka’s The Burrow. I’ve looked about and found some references to Defoe in the Kafka literature, but it is always about the island in the Penal Colony. But more impressive, to me, is Robinson Crusoe’s alternations between spasms of labour and spasms of fear – in particular, after he spots the imprint of a naked foot on the beach – and the same alternation experienced by the creature in the burrow. That creature attributes his ceaseless scrabbling and his moments of collapse to the need to defend himself:

“I have to have the possibility of an immediate exit passage, for in spite of all my watchfulness, can’t I be attacked from some wholly unexpected side? I live in the innermost part of my house in peace, and in the meant time, slowly and quietly, the enemy is boring towards me from somewhere.”

Crusoe has similar feelings.

“But now I come to a new scene of my life. It happened one day,
about noon, going towards my boat, I was exceedingly surprised with
the print of a man's naked foot on the shore, which was very plain
to be seen on the sand. I stood like one thunderstruck, or as if I
had seen an apparition. …

When I came to my castle (for so I think I called it ever after
this), I fled into it like one pursued. Whether I went over by the
ladder, as first contrived, or went in at the hole in the rock,
which I had called a door, I cannot remember; no, nor could I
remember the next morning, for never frightened hare fled to cover,
or fox to earth, with more terror of mind than I to this retreat.

I slept none that night; the farther I was from the occasion of my
fright, the greater my apprehensions were, which is something
contrary to the nature of such things, and especially to the usual
practice of all creatures in fear; but I was so embarrassed with my
own frightful ideas of the thing, that I formed nothing but dismal
imaginations to myself, even though I was now a great way off.
Sometimes I fancied it must be the devil, and reason joined in with
me in this supposition, for how should any other thing in human
shape come into the place? Where was the vessel that brought them?
What marks were there of any other footstep? And how was it
possible a man should come there?”

These passages precede a long description of Crusoe’s stratagems in creating a wholly disguised place to hide. As in The Burrow, working in panic is expressed by a confused sense of time. Where Crusoe has accounted for his time up until this point with as much exactitude as he has accounted for his tools, his firearms, his goats, his crops, and all the troublesome implements he has to make himself. But after seeing the footprint, it is a little difficult to understand the passage of the years. Similarly, the creature in the burrow, building out its tunnels, sometimes starts up from sleep and begins to work madly:

“… than I hurry, then I fly, than I have no time to calculate; for I just want to carry out a new, wholly exact plan, grasp arbitrarily what I find with my teeth, slink, carry, sigh, moan, stumble and only some irrelevant alterations of the present circumstances, that seem to me so very dangerous, will satisfy me.”

Perhaps the echoes are to be expected – Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe is so diffused in our culture that he is pretty much everywhere that you want to find him. Still, the parallels are striking.

Let them eat cake

LI heartily approves of the bill passed in the House today that ties the budget for the War to benchmarks that will never be met. Of course, this is the bill Bush is going to veto, but the bill itself isn’t as important as setting a new benchmark of the permissible. The reaction among the D.C. elite, this morning, is hysterical – read, for instance, Broder’s column. Oh, no, don’t hurt your eyes by actual reading – I’d suggest skimming it. It is a stern call to demote Harry Reid for saying the sky is blue, the earth is round, and the U.S. is losing in Iraq. Reid is the Democrat’s Gonzalez, according to Broder. This is surprising. Here I thought Broder thought he was a secret Al Qaeda agent.

A long time ago, in 1988, Joan Didion, covering the presidential election, wrote a series of articles about how the “narrative” was crafted. The narrative is the news story as it is manufactured, vetted, and transmitted by the media panjandrums. It is full of compromises for this interest or that one, but in general you can take it as a given that it will be a corporationist, warmongering, racist and sexist confection, a shit cake that the news media brings out with big smiles and a candle on the top, so proud - dig in, working class America! – get all the peanuts into your mouth, son! And generally the narrative works. The rich get richer, the middle gets all bug eyed from their shopping opportunities, the poor look for self-medication. But there is always the possibility that the narrative will get out of their hands. The Iraq narrative has done that. The way the stories in the Washington Post are written today, their headlines, the inclusion of a Joe Lieberman op ed along with the hit piece on Reed – it is all about a narrative that is coming apart in their soft little hands, and they don’t like it. They don’t like it one bit.

Fuckers.

ps – this has been a glorious week for warmonger apologias. Paul Berman’s was a stirring cry in the forum at Dissent (you will never believe it, but he addresses it to… the liberal-left. Like all the warmongers who stick sternly to the Leninist playbook, he is addressing an imaginary convention of the 20th international at all times - he can almost see the workers caps on the comrades heads, row on row). For Berman, it is a matter of keeping steady through the storm and strife, bearing ever onward the torch of democracy in the Middle East - alas, the prose does give off a refrigerated chill, as though it had been on the bottom shelf, in the back, behind the leftover beans, since 2004. TNR published what Fouad Ajami’s review of Ali A. Allawi’s The Occupation of Iraq, a book that was also reviewed as the acme of vindication by Hitchens in Slate. Ajami makes one good point: that the invaders knew nothing about Iraq:

“It was hard, practically impossible, to bond with the place. Shiism was not waiting to be deciphered or understood; Moqtada Al Sadr had no time, and no desire, to explain the origins of his worldview, his noble pedigree, the high clerical tradition of his family, to the American journalists in the bubble of the Republican Palace. It was enough for him that his devoted followers knew the magic of his lineage. The reclusive Ali Al Sistani, in his modest home on a lane in Najaf's souk, kept the invading power--and the press that came with it--at bay. In one of my favorite anecdotes of Iraq, an American diplomat of considerable sway asked an Iraqi interlocutor what the term hawza meant--the word for a Shia study group and academic circle. "It's amazing," the Iraqi academic answered. "You send a huge army to this country, but you don't know the most rudimentary thing about its life."

This is a thing we reiterated over and over in the run up to the war and in the first year of the occupation: we were messing in a culture that we knew nothing about – from what Iraqis like to eat for breakfast to what jokes they find classic. Overwhelming ignorance, on our part, was mistaken for a tabula rasa on theirs.

But then Ajami gets tangled up in the contradictions of telling us how great this book is by Allawi – not the former prime minister, but a man who, apparently, was on the same party line as that old, unpopular scoundrel, Chalabi. Contradiction one: after bemoaning ignorance of Iraq, Ajami begins by writing that Allawi had been exiled from Iraq at 10 – in 1958. Nearly fifty years out of the country? Ah, but those ten year old impressions make him a cultural expert. Two: Ajami reproaches Ayad Allawi’s prime ministership with corruption – while saying not word one about the notorious Chalabi. I guess Ajami’s idea is that cover-ups are allowable among friends. But it makes the review appear highly ridiculous. Three is an out of date sociological approach to Iraq that makes the highly problematic divide one between the desert and the city: Back and forth, Iraqis oscillated between the desert and the town. "The sense of the impermanence of the source of their values drove Iraqis into developing their noted schizoid qualities," Allawi observes. "The desert could actually or metaphorically encroach on the city, while at the same time, the city could tame the desert by harnessing the country's waters and cultivating its soil." The struggle between town and country took on a special deadly meaning here, for it lay across the fault line between the Sunnis and the Shia. In Wardi's classification, the southern part of the country, the heartland of Shiism, was a settled urban world, while Sunnism, with its nomadic and tribal culture, was based in the western steppes of Iraq.” This is quite correct – in 1958, when Allawi left. But just as the template for the U.S. has changed considerably since 1958, so, too, has it changed in Iraq. And speaking of out of date observations, we finally staunchly plant the flag of 2003 all over again: “It is true that the carpetbaggers and the profiteers have returned to Baghdad, and it is true that decent men and women have fled to neighboring lands, as waves of Iraqis once fled the terror of Saddam Hussein. It is certainly true that the sectarian violence in Iraq is excruciating, and a threat to all prospects of decency. And yet it is not nightfall that has descended on Iraq, but a savage and uncertain dawn. In those reams of sentences that reporters and travelers and outsiders have brought with them out of Iraq, my favorite remains that of a professional woman who declared that under Saddam Iraqis lived in a big prison and now they are in the wilderness--and that she prefers the wilderness. Ali Allawi rates this war as one of America's "great strategic blunders." That may be, but all is not yet lost. The "neo-conservatives"--a bête noire of Allawi--may have simplified Iraq's truth, and some of them may have given up on Iraqis and despaired of them and said of them the most uncharitable things; but at least they held out the promise of Arab liberty, and broke with the notion that Arabs have tyranny in their DNA.” Ah, those who opposed the invasion because they thought Arabs are genetically programmed for tyranny – all ten of them – are royally shown up by this sweeping and heartfelt prose. The rest of us are left not only untouched, but irritated, once again, by the refusal to come to grips with the meaning of the American invasion of Iraq. Instead of the bogus desert and town and come into my tent at midnight, my pretty sociology, a nice class analysis should be substituted here. That analysis would show that the Americans went into Iraq not only ignorant of Iraq, but without any consciousness of the middle class that is the natural ally of the U.S. The Americans didn’t even make that mistake in Vietnam – although they came close, by irritating the Buddhists. At the moment, America has no natural allies in Iraq. This is the debacle side of the debacle. And Ajami’s secularist are besmirched not only the by massive incompetence and cowardice they displayed, but, even more, by turning a blind eye to people like Chalabi, who – if justice had been done long ago – would have heard about events in Iraq on his prison radio, in Jordan. Ajami doesn't refer once to a much better book by a man who is equally conversant with Arabic and who actually went out and talked to real Iraqis, instead of those on the Governing Council who had a good deal on a London flat: Nir Rosen.

The Bear boy from Lithuania

One of the effects of Descartes and Locke on philosophy was to produce a search for more and more deprived figures, automatons who'd undergone major subtraction and didn't dream of electric sheep – the man born blind, the deaf mute, the boy marooned with the tutor. It is the philosophical equivalent of playing can you top this. Or the minimalist tendency that made Beckett explore the smallest sentences, and Perec see if a story could be told without the letter ‘e’. Condillac came up with the wonderful idea of a statue with only one faculty – that of smell – in the Treatise on Sensations, and uses it to build up the sensations, one by one, unconsciously reproducing the Ur-welt of the Vedas – although of course, because we employ a language that arises out of our full set of senses, and because we operate with the senses all operating at once (I see these words on the screen, I have headphones on listening to the Rice University Post-punk show, the pressure of one bare foot is felt on the other, there’s the usual industrial/apartment nothing is there to smell smell), the artificiality of this way of talking about sensations leaves its marks. In this universe of deprived figures, we get - in chapter 7, third part - the man discovered in the forests of Lithuania.

Interestingly, Condillac introduces this chapter by admitting that the statue, as he has constructed it, might not reflect at all. The reason is: the statue might have to work to survive. To nourish himself. The dulling effect of work on reflection isn’t really questioned, although it is an interesting paradox, left us by the Enlightenment, that the perfect system of affluence, which involves the perfect and total system of labour, comes to us with the warning that you can have the labor or you can have the reflection – you can’t have both. A little fairy tale for us nomads of capitalism, the implications of which have been superbly ignored by philosophers on the whole, and so drifted down to be bounced around in the currents and capillaries of popular wisdom.

Not being busy reflecting, Condillac considers that our statue might have fallen in with beasts and spend all day poking around for food: It is even likely that in place of conducting himself in accordance with his proper reflection, it learns from the animals with which it leives most familiarly. It will walk as they do, imitate their cries, munch on grass or devour those of which it has the strength to seize. We are so strongly inclined to imitation that a Descartes, in its place, would not learn to walk on its feet: everything that he saw would suffice to keep him from it.”

Such is, it seems, the fate of a child of about ten years of age who lived among the bears. They discovered him in 1694, in the forests which are contained in Lithuania and Russia. He gave no sign of reason, walked on his feet and hands, had no language, and formed sounds that did not resemble any aspect of man’s. It was a long time before he could offer some words, and still he did it in a very barbarous manner. As soon as he could speak, he was questioned on his first estate, but he could remember no more than we can remember what happened to us in our cradle.”

Ah, that amnesia of the infant, here transferred to amnesia of the beast! I will return to this, but the point I want to make in this little post is that feral children are in the corners and crevices in the Enlightenment – if you poke around for them, they are, surprisingly enough, just on the horizon. Condillac’s reference to his statue eating grass might, in fact, be a reference to the sheep boy discovered by Rembrandt’s friend, Nicholas Tulp, in Ireland – Tulp is the doctor in the Anatomy Lesson. The sheep boy, raised by sheep, supposedly baaed and ate like sheep. A hard thing for the human digestive system to reconcile itself with, really.

I’ve referred to this site before – it is superb. The feral children site. Check it out.

the american world view: drivel yesterday, drivel today, drivel tomorrow

The Washington Post, in its drive to turn its Georgetown party set editorial page into a veritable worldview, hosted two enlightening forums yesterday. One was headlined, Is France Doomed? A bold headline indeed, given the state of these here states, with the zero savings rate, the negative foreign investment - first time since the depression - the dandy Bush war we have lost while floating the cost of it through the friendly services of the Japanese and Chinese central banks, the ace prison population absorbing the unemployed, etc., etc. But, remember, France has the best health system in the world and the French have a 35 hour week – two reasons in themselves to suspect that the country is a sinking ship. The beauteous yawps that were let loose under that headline were amusing to read, but to get the full flavor of WAPO’s worldview, LI also read the discussion of Boris Yeltsin’s death, a Q and A with the foreign correspondent, David Hoffman, who covered Yeltsin in the early nineties who – you are not going to believe it, boys and girls! – turns out to be a firebreathing advocate for Milton Friedmanish economics. Just the kind of guy who'd give his unbiased two thumbs up to shock therapy. He was given to such nonsense as this:

“washingtonpost.com: You mention the privatization of Russian industries under Yeltsin, something Putin largely has undone. Is Russia better off with or without the oligarchs who built up empires after the fall of communism?

David Hoffman: Putin has only partially undone the privatization, and it will be impossible to reverse it entirely. The most important point is this: a lot of history shows that states and governments are lousy managers of capitalism. They should set rules but not run companies. Anyone who ever saw a Soviet state-owned factory, or one in China, or anywhere else will get the idea. If you look at the Russian oil companies about 2002, when a big study was made of them, it was fascinating: those that had been totally privatized had the best oil production, profits, etc. Well, now Putin is going back to state ownership of hydrocarbons -- oil and gas. He wants to build "state champions," like Gazprom. Well, history shows that state champions is an oxymoron when it comes to capitalism. It doesn't work.”

Yeah, you can’t build state champions. I do wish the Asian tigers had just listened to the common sense of people like Hoffman. In other news, Toyota surpassed GM in car sales to become the world's largest auto company today.
…

However, LI isn’t writing this post to playfully shoot our elephant gun at the Dumbos of the Washington Press – we’ve taken it down to shoot our old friends, the Dumbos of the war mongering set. So many things have flowed from the razing of Fallujah in 2004, all of which were so easily predictable that LI mentioned them at the time that war crime was being perpetrated by American forces. The latest idiocy of walling off Sunni neighborhoods in Baghdad is revelatory of the dead end of the American strategy that began when American troops razed Fallujah, killed the males there in the ages between 13 and 65, erected concrete barriers around the city, and instituted Big Brother surveillance. At the time, Fallujah was touted openly by the military as the wave of the future.

If this is democracy, Iraqis are right to violently reject it; in fact, Tom Paine doesn't have to turn over in his grave, for this is democracy like a high school production of Guys n Dolls is Broadway. The vaunted elections, as we know, were contrived in the spirit of clubhouse farce. They were held, remember, as soon as the constitution was illegally approved. The illegality stemmed from the very rules adopted to govern the process. The elections consisted of the presentation of party names to the Iraqis, with the keebosh put on campaigning on such issues as ending the occupation. The result of the election of vague party tickets was a shuffling of dupes and strawmen at the top, the better to direct the grift. Maliki, the ersatz leader of Iraq, can’t even apparently order the American troops to stop building a concrete wall in his own capital city; meanwhile the Americans are told by their embedded newsjocks that the GI name is so jokey, “gated community”, that it naturally becomes headline fodder. Pity, a name like sealing off the Sunni scum, or Sunni untermenschen imprisoned, awaiting final solution didn’t creep into the American journalistic parlance. The wall provides this wonderful message to the Sunni: resist or die.

In late November, 2004, as LI pointed out at the time, the assault on Fallujah basically magnified and helped create violent tensions between the Sunni and the Shiite. It was supposed to. There is no doubt that the internicene war going on in Iraq at the moment, in which lamblike America is ‘in the middle’, got its start when lamblike America engaged in razing Fallujah, importing death squad tactics from the old days in El Salvador. Lamblike America did what it could to ensure that the political leadership of the Shi’a – a group idiot D.C. warmongers thought were in the warmonger pocket, save for the ever arrestable Muqtada Sadr – was give the green light to trample on the Sunnis. It was a tension in Iraq that had not resulted in civil war in eighty years, even as Saddam persecuted Shi’a religious leaders – but that the Americans put their fuckin boots on it with all their might, being occupiers with little knowledge of the country they occupied, and of course being led by the Bush gang.

Royal!!!

Not a bad day in France. LI was prepared for the worst. We have watched in agony as Segolene Royal seemed to deliberately piss away a win. Our own candidate was probably Buffet the vampire hunter – Marie-George Buffet from the PCF, don’t you know, the woman denounced as a Stalinist by the ever obnoxious Onfray – but in the end, if we lived in France, sheer fear of Sarkozy would have driven us to the Royal side.

The second round is going to be different. I hope that Royal concentrates for real on giving a picture of just what Sarkozy is offering. It is a watered down neo-liberalism that will cause the usual type of economic boom and bust – with all the proceeds going to the top, and the usual dissolving rat race by the middle and the bottom to give themselves wage raises through sheer borrowing. We’ve seen this all too often before. It only beckons as a good model because, on the whole, the people who benefit most own own own the media. All of it. Royal ought to speak out for a robustly Keynesian approach to counter the utterly awful Sarko, and talk about government expenditures in terms of what brings the highest social return. So she should speak out about putting more government money, not less, into vital services, particularly education. If compromises must be made to make labor markets more “flexible” – for instance, to remove some of the burden of hiring people for short term positions – they can only be made in the context of a greatly expanded educational sphere – one that would, as in the U.S., absorb many of the unemployed. I think what the Netherlands and Sweden have done in this regard might well be looked at.

As for France’s position in the world, Sarkozy is a crazy Bushophile, but I fear Royal would be a French Tony Blair. There’s nothing one can do about that. More (unsolicited, unheard) advice from this blog – figure out that the vote against the European constitution meant no to expanding the EU blindly, no to rule by central banks, no to the attack on labour, and that these aren’t domestic but international issues. The EU has a chance to offer a model of affluence with social justice, and it should be steered in that direction.

I’m unhappy that Sarko won the first round, but he won much less grandly than many had predicted, and Royal did a lot better. So – here she is! (in a youtube production that is a moony tour of Royal’s dentition to the melodious strumming of cheesy seventies arena rock! at least it made me laugh.)

ps – LI should have cast away childish things long ago – but, childishly, we were shocked by the awful reporting and commentary in the Guardian about the French election. It is a true reflection – the pro-Sarko bias – of Blair’s legacy, God help us. The newspaper has a blogger in Sarko’s camp; it has lined up four or five commenters on the French election, all but one of which have sung the Sarko song; and in general, refused to comment on the story line followed in the anglosphere of Royal falling apart. In fact, the 25 percent was much better than was predicted by this pack of Pecksniffs. If Royal loses, the loss will not be – as the Guardian so hopefully puts it – a mandate for Sarkozy. It will be a close election, followed by the regionals, and the destruction of France’s social welfare network, so ardently hoped for by the Thatcher-Blairist set, will, LI is pretty sure, be indefinitely delayed. As the Iraq war taught us, the media will rush like rabid lemmings towards any cliff that the worst stock option dregs point them to, and ask questions only at as the splat point grows overwhelmingly large to their rodent-like peeps – but one forgets just how bad and creepy the filter is until ‘socialism’ becomes something more for these fuckers than a distant polemic.

But if you want to read a reasonable analysis of the election, go to Michel Noblecourt here.

The birth of the age of reason out of the meditations of a feral child

Hayy ben Yazdhan is a philosophical story, in which the framing devise is a consideration of the relationship between the world, the senses and the mind from a Sufi point of view, leading – as it has lead in many a philosophical text, all the way up to Quine’s Word and Object – to a children’s story. The story in Word and Object gives a rough and ready behavioralist account of a child associating words to things. The story in HBY is a bit more complicated, and combines two themes that were much loved, centuries on, in the Enlightenment. One is of the isolated man – either Robinson Crusoe, physically separated from his fellows, or the man born blind, the aveugle-né, for whom speculation about shape and color was not so much metaphysical as existential, a way, as Ibn Thofail puts it, for the blind man to be able to walk through the city. However, the story of the marooned baby whose cries, heard by a female gazelle, induce her to go over and nurse him, is rather… bizarre. The bizarre part isn’t imaging our proto-Mowgli hanging out with the other gazelles, and noticing differences. The Disney cartoon part stops when Mother Gazelle dies. Here we leap from Disney to Psycho, by way of Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson. Our worldless gazelle raised boy does not know what death is. But he does know that something is wrong with the female gazelle. He knows that when his eyes are closed, or he puts his fingers in his ears, his sense of seeing and hearing is darkened. The unmoving female gazelle, he decides, has a similar problem on a more massive scale. Something is blocking her on the inside. So he decides to dissect her. He already has the idea that inside the body, this directing sense of senses must operate in some cavity – either in the head, or the chest, or the stomach. His hunch is that the directing sense must be in the center – thus, must be in the heart. With a sharp stone and some reeds that he has also sharpened, he opens up his mother, hoping that he can remove the obstruction that is causing her to act so funny. He is looking for something like a hand over her heart. First, he finds the lungs in the chest cavity. Then he finds the heart, but “it is covered by an extremely strong envelop.” Finally he cuts away enough of the lung and other obstructing tissue to get a good look at the naked heart, but he doesn’t see anything wrong.

Well, no matter how far our gazelle boy probes, he can’t find the obstruction or the sense organ he is looking for. Finally he decides that the thing that was there left. That the heart is the seat of the thing that was there, but that he is looking at, as it were, an empty house. And also, Ibn Thofail notes, the mother gazelle is beginning to stink. After watching a dead bird being buried by another bird, gazelle boy decides to do the same. Thus, he’s gone through cognitive science, anatomy, and the rudiments of civilization – before he’s even learned to speak! Pretty good for a marooned child.

The translation of the text into English by Simon Ockley, which is how Defoe knew about it, if he knew about it, can be read at your leisure here. Pococke’s Latin version is passed around in the 1680s. Ockley’s English version (“The Improvement of Human Reason: Exhibited in the Life of Hai Ebn Yokdhan”) comes out after the first edition of Locke’s Essay, in 1708

In 1719, Robinson Crusoe is published. In 1725, Wild Peter, the feral boy caught near Hamlin and shipped as a curiosity to England, was shown to the English court. In 1726, Defoe writes his Mere Nature Delineated, or a Body without a Soul. Being Observations upon the Young Forester lately brought to Town from Germany… And in 1731, the wild girl of Sogni was caught. From Locke to the marooned tabula rasa to the feral child, something might be going on here, some gnawing nighttime doppelganger of the Whig projector and bourgeois individual. Ho ho ho, the torches are burning low in the vault, the professor is growing incoherent and oddly hairy about the wrists, and the assistant has been riveted by the cry of wolves somewhere outside the crypt, which seem to be getting closer....

enlighten the troops - we have lost in Iraq and you are being played for suckers

LI has read, on many a liberal site, immediate complaints that whenever somebody prominent like Senator Harry Reid says we are losing the war, conservatives immediately claim that this damages the morale of the troops. Here’s Talking points memo getting indignant with CNN. The push back is always vaguely about supporting the troops.

Actually, I have no idea why liberals should complain about this. I fucking hope it damages the morale of the troops. I would hope that, eventually, the volunteer forces that trusted their country to use them wisely, instead of as an array of crash test dummies, would revolt. I hope they strike. I hope they increasingly refuse to serve. I hope they link up with the Iraqi population and say basta! We need to leave this country, and fuck our leadership and fuck yours for not making that possible, but increasingly putting us in a hole. I hope they have gone past discouraged to a righteous, revolutionary anger that would sweep away the whole sick and senile war culture machinery, disentangle us from the merchants of death, lead to a future in which America stops being an imperial power, unplugs our society and economy from war as our mainstay and guide, and faces the real environmental problems that will either kill us all or … vide bathroom Nietzsche … make us stronger. Stronger, that is, a loving, affectionate, cultured, hedonistic people – ah, just the kind of people who are everything the right hates: feminized, non-macho, caring, all of that shit.

Now, I doubt my hopes will be realized and I imagine discouragement comes out of the barrel of a mortar firing cannon more than a senator's speech. The soldiers, like the marks in a massive con game, are for the most part you, self-selected for their faith in a certain kind of patriarchal authority, and inclined to find targets for their anger that are shaped in the peckerwood superstitions that are undoing this country. I understand why that is so. But one hopes that someday, through that thick icing of crap that surrounds the war culture mindset, some piercing word will go, some realization not only that the Iraq war is lost but that it was unjust to begin with, continued with shameless and criminal negligence in order to extract the least amount of sacrifice from the coddled upper and upper middle class, was born in the vanity of a subpar golf pro president and the senile power wanderlust of his sidekick/bully/vp, and is being continued solely in order that the demented elite can postpone that inevitable moment when they lose face.

where's friday when you need him?

In one of the most famous, or at least one of the most written about, chapters of Capital I, THE FETISHISM OF COMMODITIES AND THE SECRET THEREOF, Marx makes a snarky detour through the Robinson Crusoe myths so dear to the classical economists of the 18th century.


The chapter deals with both the capitalist system and the sense-making that goes on within it – for, as a human system with human actors, it requires explanations to work. Marx has a bone to pick with those explanations – a complaint that allows us to catch a glimpse of the Wiccan Marx, who, like Michelet’s witches, has discovered the power of the negation of the negation, the power of saying the Lord’s Prayer backwards:

“Man’s reflections on the forms of social life, and consequently, also, his scientific analysis of those forms, take a course directly opposite to that of their actual historical development. He begins, post festum, with the results of the process of development ready to hand before him. The characters that stamp products as commodities, and whose establishment is a necessary preliminary to the circulation of commodities, have already acquired the stability of natural, self-understood forms of social life, before man seeks to decipher, not their historical character, for in his eyes they are immutable, but their meaning.”

As is evident from the chapter’s title, Marx is set on some good ol’ mythbreaking here. He trains his peeps on a myth that has jumped out of a novel into the popular consciousness – Robinson Crusoe. It is a brilliant move by our man Marx. The establishment of a system that depends on abstracting labor into the commodity form – the fictitious commodity, as Polanyi calls it – generates, at the same time, a justifying ideology of individualism. The bond between the system and the ideology is not accidental – as we said above, every human system has to explain itself. It won’t work, otherwise. Ideology, then, is a surface phenomena only the way skin is a surface phenomena – try living without it. Here are the two long grafs re Robinson Crusoe, which will take us to Robinson Crusoe’s predecessor in Hayy ben Yaqdhân, the boy raised by a gazelle on an uninhabited island. By various detours, we hope to then advance to feral children and, in particular, the Wild Girl of Sogny in future posts – and from there get to the European savage. An ambitious program which we will no doubt flub, like a muscle-challenged landlubber courting Olive Oyl with comb-music.

Here’s Mr. Marx:

“Since Robinson Crusoe’s experiences are a favourite theme with political economists, let us take a look at him on his island. Moderate though he be, yet some few wants he has to satisfy, and must therefore do a little useful work of various sorts, such as making tools and furniture, taming goats, fishing and hunting. Of his prayers and the like we take no account, since they are a source of pleasure to him, and he looks upon them as so much recreation. In spite of the variety of his work, he knows that his labour, whatever its form, is but the activity of one and the same Robinson, and consequently, that it consists of nothing but different modes of human labour. Necessity itself compels him to apportion his time accurately between his different kinds of work. Whether one kind occupies a greater space in his general activity than another, depends on the difficulties, greater or less as the case may be, to be overcome in attaining the useful effect aimed at. This our friend Robinson soon learns by experience, and having rescued a watch, ledger, and pen and ink from the wreck, commences, like a true-born Briton, to keep a set of books. His stock-book contains a list of the objects of utility that belong to him, of the operations necessary for their production; and lastly, of the labour time that definite quantities of those objects have, on an average, cost him. ….

Let us now transport ourselves from Robinson’s island bathed in light to the European middle ages shrouded in darkness. Here, instead of the independent man, we find everyone dependent, serfs and lords, vassals and suzerains, laymen and clergy. Personal dependence here characterises the social relations of production just as much as it does the other spheres of life organised on the basis of that production. But for the very reason that personal dependence forms the ground-work of society, there is no necessity for labour and its products to assume a fantastic form different from their reality. They take the shape, in the transactions of society, of services in kind and payments in kind. Here the particular and natural form of labour, and not, as in a society based on production of commodities, its general abstract form is the immediate social form of labour. …”

Ah, and since I am quoting, let’s quote Karl Polanyi, from the chapter in the Great Transformation about fictitious commodities. Polanyi sets up a dialectically charged polarity between individualism and autarky that makes the boundary-marking in the Robinson Crusoe figure all the clearer:

“As a rule, the economic system was absorbed in the social system, and whatever principle of behavior predominated in the economy, the presence of the market pattern was found to be compatible with it. The principle of barter or exchange, which underlies this pattern, revealed no tendency to expand at the expense of the rest. Where markets were most highly developed, as under the mercantile system, they throve under the control of a centralized administration which fostered autarchy both in the household of the peasantry and in respect to national life. Regulation and markets, in effect, grew up together. The self-regulating market was unknown; indeed, the emergence of the idea of self-regulation was a complete reversal of the trend of development. “

idle fellows as I am

The Enlightenment has been subject to an odd and schematic misreading over the past ten years. The colonialist mentality that appears at the end of the period, and that takes a very sharp and harsh look at enlightenment figures has been moved backwards in time, and the sharp and harsh look well nigh forgot. This reading derives from taking Kant’s notion of the enlightenment as a sort of official goodhousekeeping seal on the whole enterprise, thus skipping over, specifically, the disagreements that were expressed with Kant’s whole philosophical stance by his contemporaries, such as Lichtenberg, and more generally, the reality of enlightenment literature and its preferred forms over the period from, say, the Glorious Revolution to the French Revolution. LI doesn’t want to get into Kant’s bent for universalist prescriptions here, but simply note how odd it is that no justification seems to be needed, lately, for reading the Enlightenment through Kant’s essay on the Enlightenment. We suspect that an essay of a certain length and clarity that can easily be taught and anthologized will have an effect on the teaching of intellectual history that it might not have had within intellectual history.

LI thinks that the lineaments of any particular past are deposited under other pasts – that our assumption that our current routines are somehow the end result of all past processes, and as such so easily projected backwards as to give us an inlet into the sort of secret rationality at work in the historical process, will bump up against too many accidents, disasters, contingencies and false images to be of use as a valid measure. It will soon be wrecked by facts. And even the starting point is jinxed – for, in fact, assumptions about our own times are provisional, limited, and subject to the massive and inescapable bias of vanity and p.o.v.

My own bias is to fish in the torrents of time for certain images – to try to describe their destinies – and to rescue their essential oddness. There is a nice phrase of John Aubrey’s, who ends his ‘brief life’ of the ‘celebrated beautie and courtizane”, Venetia Stanley, with a description of the monument her husband, Kenelm Digby, erected to her, which was looted during the English civil war. Aubrey writes:

“About 1676 or 5, as I was walking through Newgate-street, I sawe Dame Venetia’s bust standing at a stall at the Golden Crosse, a brasier’s shop. I perfectly remembered it, but the fire had gott-off the guilding: but taking notice of it to one that was with me, I could never see it afterwards exposed to the street. They melted it downe. How these curiosities would be quite forgot, did not such idle fellows as I am putt them down!”

Things about the Arabick influence on John Locke and Daniel Defoe my first year philo class never taught me

In messing around in the vaults – the vaults under the surface of history and literature, as per the posts of last week - LI recently came across an article that piqued our curiosity. The article, by G.A. Russell, claims that an eleventh century Arabic philosopher, Ibn Tufayl, influenced both John Locke and Daniel Defoe through a book of philosophy he wrote which contains a parable about a boy who was raised by a gazelle on a desert island. Hayy Ibn Yaqzān was translated by the remarkable Edward Pococke in 1671 into Latin. Pococke gave it the wonderful title, Philosophus Autodidactus.

Since the Paul Bermans of the world are so hot on the trail of fascism in the intellectual history backgrounding Al Qaeda, I think it is intriguing that an ‘Arabick’ tale could show up in the background of two writers who so shaped the conjunction of the early capitalist ethos and democratic political theory.

The story goes like this. Pococke, as Robert Irwin points out in his recent book on Orientalism, was England’s heaviest arabist in the 17th century, a time when the Koran was officially banned. Pococke learned his Persian, Turkish, Arabic and Hebrew in the Netherlands – that was where you go if you wanted an education, in the 17th century. Of course, you could attend courses at Cambridge taught by Isaac Newton, but few did, and of those, none understood what the hell he was talking about. Pococke proceeded to translate Arabic texts into the language of scholarship, Latin, and to introduce coffee into England – for which we are all pathetically grateful. We know that Robert Boyle and John Locke both read Philosophus Autodidactus.

So, that is what I read and it is one of those things where you go huh. But now, thanks to the wonders of Google Books, I was able to call up a copy of Hayy Ibn Yaqzān, in a French translation by Leon Gauthier. And looking through it, what to my wondering eyes doth appear but this passage, on page five:

“If you want a comparison that will make you clearly grasp the difference between the perception, such as it is understood by that sect [the Sufis] and the perception as others understand it, imagine a person born blind, endowed however with a happy natural temperament, with a lively and firm intelligence, a sure memory, a straight sprite, who grew up from the time he was an infant in a city where he never stopped learning, by means of the senses he did dispose of, to know the inhabitants individually, the numerous species of beings, living as well as non-living, there, the steets and sidestreets, the houses, the steps, in such a manner as to be able to cross the city without a guid, and to recognize immediately those he met; the colors alone would not be known to him except by the names they bore, and by certain definitions that designated them. Suppose that he had arrived at this point and suddenly, his eyes were opened, he recovered his view, and he crosses the entire city, making a tour of it. He would find no object different from the idea he had made of it; he would encounter nothing he didn’t recognize, he would find the colors conformable to the descriptions of them that had been given to him; and in this there would only be two new important things for him, one the consequence of the other: a clarity, a greater brightness, and a great voluptuousness.”

This is six hundred years before Locke, but any student of the early modern era would recognize, in this story, the heart of the Molyneux problem – introduced by Locke in his Essay on Humane Understanding in book 2, chapter 9, like this:

I shall here insert a problem of that very ingenious and studious promoter of real knowledge, the learned and worthy Mr. Molyneux, which he was pleased to send me in a letter some months since; and it is this:- "Suppose a man born blind, and now adult, and taught by his touch to distinguish between a cube and a sphere of the same metal, and nighly of the same bigness, so as to tell, when he felt one and the other, which is the cube, which the sphere. Suppose then the cube and sphere placed on a table, and the blind man be made to see: quaere, whether by his sight, before he touched them, he could now distinguish and tell which is the globe, which the cube?" To which the acute and judicious proposer answers, "Not. For, though he has obtained the experience of how a globe, how a cube affects his touch, yet he has not yet obtained the experience, that what affects his touch so or so, must affect his sight so or so; or that a protuberant angle in the cube, that pressed his hand unequally, shall appear to his eye as it does in the cube."- I agree with this thinking gentleman, whom I am proud to call my friend, in his answer to this problem; and am of opinion that the blind man, at first sight, would not be able with certainty to say which was the globe, which the cube, whilst he only saw them; though he could unerringly name them by his touch, and certainly distinguish them by the difference of their figures felt. This I have set down, and leave with my reader, as an occasion for him to consider how much he may be beholden to experience, improvement, and acquired notions, where he thinks he had not the least use of, or help from them. And the rather, because this observing gentleman further adds, that "having, upon the occasion of my book, proposed this to divers very ingenious men, he hardly ever met with one that at first gave the answer to it which he thinks true, till by hearing his reasons they were convinced."

The problem has a long career. It was taken up by Berkeley, and many of the French philosophers. We see, in the man born blind who wanders about a city, the Molyneux problem by way of the Arabian Nights, with an ending that prefigures what Diderot will say in Lettre sur les aveugles.

Which I will go into tomorrow.

Is this the promis'd end? or image of that horror?

I think it is done. I think I have finished all that needs doing on my preface, and on correcting the text. Silja Graupe’s The Bashō of Economics will be coming out from Ontos Verlag next month. I think next month. Translated, with a preface, by Roger Gathman. I have seen the cover. I have seen the inner sheets. My preface needs a spot or two of editing, and oh Lord ... through bramble and brier I have finally come out, limping and panting but still alive! I have that Julie Andrews feeling, boys - buy me a fuckin drink!

O CAPTAIN! my Captain! our fearful trip is done;
The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won;
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring…

Which grim and daring vessel I’m gonna be hyping as soon as it gets out. Tell your Ma, tell your Pa, tell your librarian: the revolution is now!

the virginia tech massacre

Yesterday, LI just couldn’t leave the news from Virginia Tech alone. We were transfixed.

There’s a famous story in the Fourth book of the Republic. Socrates and Glaucon are discussing the soul and its vagaries, with the aim of trying to anatomize it. Socrates suggests that the soul is composed of a rational part and an irrational part. The irrational part, characteristically, desires – Socrates uses the example of the desire to drink. Thirst might not be irrational in itself, but it gains its power from the irrational part of the soul. However, that desires are not enacted immediately is, for Socrates, evidence that something - and Socrates tries to show that it is the other part of the soul, reason - impinges on the irrational part:

“S: And the forbidding principle is derived from reason, and that which bids and attracts proceeds from passion and disease?
G: Clearly.
S: Then we may fairly assume that they are two, and that they differ from one another; the one with which man reasons, we may call the rational principle of the soul, the other, with which he loves and hungers and thirsts and feels the flutterings of any other desire, may be termed the irrational or appetitive, the ally of sundry pleasures and satisfactions?
G: Yes, he said, we may fairly assume them to be different.
S: Then let us finally determine that there are two principles existing in the soul. And what of passion, or spirit? Is it a third, or akin to one of the preceding?
G: I should be inclined to say--akin to desire.
S: Well, I said, there is a story which I remember to have heard, and in which I put faith. The story is, that Leontius, the son of Aglaion, coming up one day from the Piraeus, under the north wall on the outside, observed some dead bodies lying on the ground at the place of execution. He felt a desire to see them, and also a dread and abhorrence of them; for a time he struggled and covered his eyes, but at length the desire got the better of him; and forcing them open, he ran up to the dead bodies, saying, Look, ye wretches, take your fill of the fair sight.
G: I have heard the story myself, he said.
S:The moral of the tale is, that anger at times goes to war with desire, as though they were two distinct things.”

In the ancient world, the instruments of the senses were sometimes given character, as if they existed as persons in their own right. That famous saying of Jesus – “if thy eye offend thee, pluck it out” – comes out of this background. There is a deeper background in the Upanishads – as Paul Deussen writes:

In the beginning, Atman alone existed. He resolved to create the worlds and created as such the four spheres [the flood of the heavenly ocean; the light atom of space; earth as death; and the ur-water]… Further the Atman creates eight 'world-guardians', when he out of the ur-water brings forth the Parusa (ur-man the primeval man) and first creates out of mouth nose eyes ears skin heart navel and the generative organ the corresponding psychical organs (speech, in-breathing, sight, hearinghair, Manas, out-breath, semen) and out of these Agni, Vaya, Aditya, quarters of directions, plants, moon, death and water as world-guardians. But immediately, weakness overcomes these world-guardian gods.”

We pretend that we have escaped from this mythology, and we talk of the senses being “personified” – as though, on one side, there is the myth, the eye god, and on the other side there is rationality, the person. But the person will never lose the mythic caul with which he came into the world.

And so it is in the herky-jerky of that merger of media and murder yesterday. Depressingly but inevitably, the thing will be called a tragedy – for we have never devised another category for these outlier acts of beserker violence. And we want – for understandable reasons – to instill some dignity into the bloody spasm that ended so many lives that no aesthetic form can catch. The phrase from the Vietnam war – fragging – is much more appropriate. However, like a peculiarly fascinating film, LI can’t turn away his eyes. We all know Leontius’ peculiar discovery about himself, and what can we do? Well, we will turn the whole thing into the site of an argument of some kind – already Glenn Reynolds, with the boldfaced and thuggish stupidity that is his trademark, has suggested that if more students had been packing, the shooter would have shot fewer. Rather overlooking the fact that … oops, sorry. LI was about to address Reynolds as though he were making an argument.

It is the advantage of religion that it is prepared for these cases. The religious can say, (and do, all the time) my prayers are with you. As if praying were an activity, a form of work, a rolling up of the sleeves. If people said what they meant: I am going to say some words out loud, or think them, that relate to what I saw on tv – we would have a fairer sense of why the promise of ‘prayer’ is so infuriating to a non-believer. Myself, I am not such a non-believer – prayers, trances, spells, poems, equations, diagnosis, they are what we have.

the monument to a lack of a monument

LI was going to spend this week threading through the crimes of classical liberalism. Heavy emphasis, in other words, on the famine in Ireland, which served as a template for the series of famines in India.

This is how we were going to start: with that most familiar of strangers in a strange land, the Martian. If a Martian were to make a quick visit to D.C.’s National Mall, what information would he gather about the U.S.? He’d see that the U.S. had a pharaoh named George Washington; a great white father, Abraham Lincoln; that the U.S. was very concerned about the crimes of German history; and that some kind of disaster or war happened named Vietnam.

From our monuments, the Martian would never know that there was such a thing as a black American. And he would certainly never know that there was such a thing as slavery in the U.S.

It has long been a sort of joke that the American government is much happier exploring the horrors visited by Germany on the Jews than the horrors visited upon blacks by white plantation owners, some of whom wrote the original documents that founded these here states. However, going past the local issue, my moral is that the martian is us - we are in the position of the martian when we visit the past – or that part of the past that extends beyond the body of our memories, that extends beyond the memories of two or three generations. There is a history of the surface and a history of the vaults, and there no law that says that what happened in the vaults will be monumentalized on the surface. On the contrary, histories have a double purpose: to erect monuments and to create and communicate erasures. But those of us who are critical martians – moi, f’rinstance – have a perverse urge to counter this history, to take down the monuments and fill in the blanks. LI’s motive in throwing in our lot with the critical martians is simple: we are fated for blankhood. Poor, aberrant, marginal – what the fuck do we have to lose?

To give a small example of what we mean: David Gilmour, a very good historian, wrote a biography of Lord Curzon a few years ago. In the bio, he devotes four pages to the famine in India that occurred while Curzon was the Viceroy of India. He never, in this account, actually tells the reader how big the famine was. That is, he never mentions that it killed between 3 and 4 million people (as calculated by Arup Maharatna, quoted by Mike Davis in the Victorian Holocaust). Imagine a man writing a book about Stalin’s leadership in the thirties and simply skipping the famine in the Ukraine. It isn’t that this is Gilmour’s fault, of course – this is just how colonial history has come to be written. In 1930, though, the reach of generational memory would make such insouciance a little harder – and, indeed, the way the Bolsheviks responded to and used the famine in the Ukraine was very much influenced by the model provided by the British of seeing famines as providential genocides, mass murders by a Darwinian god that, luckily, were prefigured in the market – for after all, demand goes down when the demanders are dead – and so food prices, by the superbly beneficent invisible hand, go down too.

The conventions of telling the history of the British in India – at least, in the Anglosphere – are different from the conventions of telling the history of the Soviet Union. That the amount of food given to prisoners in the Gulags, and the amount of work they were required to do (which resulted in their mass deaths) matches the amount of food distributed by the British to starving Indians in the labor camps they set up, which was also directly linked to the amount of work they did – the British having the idea that a man weighing 70 pounds and eating, on the whole, a pound of rice a day really ought to be able to work at breaking rocks for nine hours a day – makes no difference in the difference with which the stories will be told. One is a crime of communism itself; the other is an unfortunate sideproduct of all the good the British brought to India – railroads, for instance, that could quickly and efficiently take rice away from India peasants and transport it to hungry Englishmen a world away; big canals into which mineral salts would leach, instead of the system of small, capillary irrigation canals that had maintained small landholders in India for centuries, and that the British regarded as impediment to the needful consolidation of agricultural properties.

So what I was going to do in some threads this week was tie together Classical liberalism and communism, not as opposites but as positions on a spectrum compounded, materially, of a system of production that both ideologies sought to encode – but that both, also, fully accepted.

But LI doesn’t know whether we have the energy to pursue this thread this week. We will see.

Natasha Wimmer

There are some who say that LI, underneath a surface pretentiousness, is just the kind of redneck who is going to end up sprawled in the gutter someday, another victim of cleaning fluid intox. But here’s some au contraire evidence! Readers may remember that LI threw a party for itself last December at the 7b bar. Among the attendees was the talented and beauteous Natasha Wimmer, who was coming off of translating Roberto Bolano’s The Savage Detectives. The Savage Detectives is the best novel of the year – I’m pretty confident that nothing this year is going to upset that statement.

And – abracadabra – here’s her book, gracing the front page – did I say front page – yes, front page of the Sunday New York Times! Reviewed by the Man, James Wood no less, who writes:

The pleasure we take in this, as readers of English, owes everything, of course, to the book's talented translator, Natasha Wimmer, who repeatedly finds inspired English solutions for what must be a fiendishly chatty and slangy novel.)

Alas, I can't say that James Wood really gets the novel, but I have that feeling about every Wood review I read. If I had been Sam Tannenhaus, I would have assigned the review to Eliot Weinberger, who would get the novel.

Shouts out to Natasha. My interview with her is on the Publisher Weekly site.

Now I’m going back to shooting up cleaning fluid.

A mystery

LI has often been puzzled by a double thread that seems to run through pro-war discourse. I wish someone would explain it to us.

If a man came up to you and said: “you are a pig and a jackass. I hate your religion. I hate the way you spend your money. I am afraid of you, because you are psychopathic. I don’t think anybody would blame me if I killed you.” And then the man said: “I am only here to help you. I definitely think you ought to let me take care of your security. Furthermore, I insist that you follow all my advice about what you should do with your money. And I also think my friends should live in your house for a while.” Surely the sensible response would be: “go away, or I’m going to call the police.”

However, this seems to be the inevitable message of the pro-war commenters, bloggers and pundits I see around the Net. The denunciation of Islam, Arabs, and anything that smacks of Arabic culture is standard. More than that, there is a rivalry as to how extreme the language of denunciation and threat will go. On the other hand, these are the same people who assure us that the U.S. is in Iraq for the good of the Iraqis. This makes no sense. If the argument was, we are in Iraq because we hate Arabs, we want to root out Arabic culture, and we want to give as much pain as we can to every Moslem in Iraq, that would seem to be the logical consequence of the anti-Arab hatred. Or, going from the second argument, if the pro-war group was competing in praises for Islamic culture, Middle Eastern history, and the beauty and glory of Arabs, and in particular Iraqis, that would be consistent. But to maintain these two threads strikes me as simply schizophrenic. More evidence, actually, that channel changing is the form and essence of the right’s discourse – you press a button and you go to channel one, Kill Arabs hour, and you press a button and you go to channel two, Help Iraqis hour.

I am curious how these two viewpoints are synthesized by the pro-war side. They make no sense to me.

blasts from the past

Mike Davis has a new book out on the history of the car bomb. LI wanted to review this book, but we have fallen behind on our querying, and so … here it is April, and the book is already out there.

But lucky internauts don’t have to spend no stinking money nowadays to get to the heart of the heart of it. Davis spun the book out of two articles he posted with Tom’s Dispatch, here and here.

Davis is ragpicking history here – but what rags! His conceit – that the car bomb is the poor man’s bomber airplane – is one of those immediately clarifying images – especially for those who are familiar with Sven Lindquvist’s oneiric history of air bombing. Lindqvist did a lot of vampirehunting through the vaults in his book, ranging through the dream images of literature as well as the newspapers, the military reports, the testimonies. He grasps the idea that the war culture is not just found on the battlefield:

“In an illustration in Jules Verne's The Flight of Engineer Roburs (1886), the airship glides majestically over Paris, the capital of Europe. Powerful searchlights shine on the waters of the Seine, over the quays, bridges, and facades. Astonished but unperturbed, the people gaze up into the sky, amazed at the unusual sight but without fear, without feeling the need to seek cover. In the next illustration the airship floats just as majestically and inaccessibly over Africa. But here it is not a matter merely of illumination. Here the engineer intervenes in the events on the ground. With the natural authority assumed by the civilized to police the savage, he stops a crime from taking place. The airship's weapons come into play, and death and destruction rain down on the black criminals, who, screaming in terror, try to escape the murderous fire.”

That sense of who get blasted and who doesn't, that divide into acceptable and unacceptable victims, is of course still the flowsheet of our history, and its miseries.

America has always tried to be first with the weaponry, and if the poor men use car bombs, by Jihad, we are going to use them too! So, as Davis points out, we began to sponsor them in Lebanon, against Hezbollah:

“Gunboat diplomacy had been defeated by car bombs in Lebanon, but the Reagan administration and, above all, CIA Director William Casey were left thirsting for revenge against Hezbollah. "Finally in 1985," according to the Washington Post's Bob Woodward in Veil, his book on Casey's career, "he worked out with the Saudis a plan to use a car bomb to kill [Hezbollah leader] Sheikh Fadlallah who they determined was one of the people behind, not only the Marine barracks, but was involved in the taking of American hostages in Beirut… It was Casey on his own, saying, ‘I‘m going to solve the big problem by essentially getting tougher or as tough as the terrorists in using their weapon -- the car bomb.'"

The CIA's own operatives, however, proved incapable of carrying out the bombing, so Casey subcontracted the operation to Lebanese agents led by a former British SAS officer and financed by Saudi Ambassador Prince Bandar. In March 1984, a large car bomb was detonated about 50 yards from Sheikh Fadlallah's house in Bir El-Abed, a crowded Shiite neighborhood in southern Beirut. The sheikh wasn't harmed, but 80 innocent neighbors and passersby were killed and 200 wounded. Fadlallah immediately had a huge "MADE IN USA" banner hung across the shattered street, while Hezbollah returned tit for tat in September when a suicide truck driver managed to break through the supposedly impregnable perimeter defenses of the new U.S. embassy in eastern (Christian) Beirut, killing 23 employees and visitors.”

But Lebanon was much too complex a field for the U.S. to operate in with any assurance. In the 80s, the golden era in which uncle sam’s cartoon heroes took on the evil empire and invented the forms that would later be used by Al qaeda to attack the U.S., all the shit gravitated to Afghanistan. We already know that the U.S. and Pakistan and Saudi Arabia set up the international network to shuffle around men and money that is with us today, and that will no doubt be used when the U.S. or the U.K. or France or Denmark or wherever is attacked again. What fascinates Davis is the way the CIA – probably in a peek moment, a blue orgasm of deep ops – actually spread the technology of car bombing:

“U.S. Special Forces experts would now provide high-tech explosives and teach state-of-the-art sabotage techniques, including the fabrication of ANFO (ammonium nitrate-fuel oil) car bombs, to Pakistani intelligence service (or ISI) officers under the command of Brigadier Mohammed Yousaf. These officers, in turn, would tutor thousands of Afghan and foreign mujahedin, including the future cadre of al-Qaeda, in scores of training camps financed by the Saudis. "Under ISI direction," Coll writes, "the mujahedin received training and malleable explosives to mount car-bomb and even camel-bomb attacks in Soviet-occupied cities, usually designed to kill Soviet soldiers and commanders. Casey endorsed these despite the qualms of some CIA career officers."

Pynchon's novel, Against the Day, features Webb Traverse, a dynamite addict from the old mine wars back in the Rockies in the nineties - wars of the owners against the unions - who gets lost in the arcana of dynamite - for, as is usual in Pynchon, matter at the deeper levels is not physical so much as gnostic. Webb and his Finn buddy Veikko celebrate new years, 1899 with a little home anarchy, attaching fuses to a railroad bridge:

"Four closely set blasts, cracks in the fabric of air and time, merciless, bonestrumming. Breathing seemed beside the point. Rising dirt yellow clouds full of wood splinters, no wind to blow them anyplace. Track and trusswork went sagging into the arroyo.

Webb and Veikko watched across a meadow of larkspur and Indian paint brush, and behind them a little creek rushed down the hillside. "Seen worse," Webb nodded after a while.

"Was beautiful! what do you want the end of the world?"
"Sufficient unto the day," Webb shrugged. "Course."
Veikko was pouring vodka. "Happy fourth of July, Webb."