Bollettino



Let their way be dark and slippery:

and let the angel of the LORD persecute them.

7 For without cause have they hid for me their net in a pit,

which without cause they have digged for my soul.

8 Let destruction come upon him at unawares;

and let his net that he hath hid catch himself:

into that very destruction let him fall .

-Psalm 35



You could not, in words, writing, or printing, legally curse Queen Elizabeth. To do so put you on the road to having one ear removed, or half a tongue taken for fishbait -- that is if the hangman caught you. Guy Fawkes was prosecuted partly for saying that James was accursed. Progress has brought it about that you can legally curse George Bush, but you can't legally threaten him.



So our question tonight is: what does that mean?



Cursing has definitely socially declined from the old days. Once it implied traffic with divine or demonic powers, and now it simply implies street level babbling, the unalterable fuck of all the movie script drug dealers. Once it was mixed up with blasphemy, slander, and a whole set of verbal crimes -- crimes that were, by their nature, eerie, insofar as they were hints of a black logos that operated just under the surface, just out of sight of the angels in paradise, that bunch of stinking losers.



There's always been a bit of a mixup, within Christianity, about cursing. On the one hand, Jesus, in Matthew, seems to come out against it:



"Again, ye have heard that it was said to the ancients, Thou shalt not perjure thyself: but thou shalt perform to the Lord what thou hast sworn. 34. But I charge you, swear not at all: neither by heaven, for it is the throne of God: 35. Nor by the earth, for it is his footstool: nor by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the great King: 36. Nor shalt thou swear by thy head: for thou canst not make one hair white or black. 37. But your speech shall be, Yes, yes; No, no for what is beyond these comes from evil." (Matthew 5). On the other hand, our savior enjoyed a good curse himself. Coming upon a fig tree that bore no fruit, he cursed it. Later it was observed to be dead -- quid erat demonstratum, or however the Latin goes. And then there are the Psalms, which are full of the most beautiful curses. And there are the Prophets. Nowadays, the secret service would definite pay an unexpected visit to Isaiah, to say nothing of Ezekial. These were men who knew how to wield a curse.



Shakespeare's Richard III dramatizes the curse the way The Merchant of Venice dramatizes the contract. There's a nice essay about cursing in the Studies in English Literature, winter 03 (unavailable on line, alas), by Mary Steibel, which takes the case of Jane Shore. Jane Shore was King Edward the IV's concubine. She was stripped of her goods by Richard III, and according to the anti-Richard III literature that flooded the Tudor market (Richard being an inveterate enemy to the Tudors, and conveniently Punch-like), Jane replied with a good many curses that, in the way of a good curse, came true. Steibel examines some accounts of Jane's curses, and shows how Shakespeare substituted Margaret's curses in his play. Margaret was the widow of Henry VI, and a grande dame at the court. Steible makes some excellent points about the way Margaret figures in the play as the spokesperson for the curse. She quotes Little, a scholar who has researched liturgical curses:



"Pope Gregory the Great, says Little, concluded in his study of scripture that "God is said to curse and yet man is forbidden to curse, because what man does from the malice of revenge, God does only in the exactness and perfection of justice." (40) The kind of cursing undertaken by Shore and Margaret is not of the divine sort, and therefore, in the strictest sense, could not be regarded as prophetic, even if they do foresee the known end of Richard's mortal life. Little concludes from his study of curses that the Church's position is that "[o]rdinary cursing by ordinary people [is] decidedly not legitimate. (41)"

Shore curses Richard over loss of position, fame, property--material goods. Margaret, to be sure, lost much more than Shore, but she wants vengeance, not the "perfection of justice." Her ravings are human, not divine. Shore's are equally human. Indeed, the uncontrolled anger of each woman implies the disorder that results from loss of control, and, in some ways, parallels the loss of control that leads Richard to his fated end.



Steibel tries to infuse a feminist color to her view of cursing:" If words, just words, could cause harm--earthly or otherwise--to others, anyone who could speak could acquire a power that superseded rank, gender, physical strength, and so on. Perhaps curses were feared to "touch the hidden order of things," especially in regard to the divinely sanctioned order of the monarchy; Shore and Margaret both use words with the intent to wish ill upon Richard's body, their curses being directed against his birth, his bo dy, and his soul. The king's body natural is stigmatized, dismembered even. Speaking through their characters, Churchyard and Shakespeare both protest Richard, both make treasonous noises. Embedded in the dominant discourse of the divinely provident, the subversive speech act of cursing is voiced by politically weak figures, "historical" women who are little more than disaffected players in the pre-Tudor court. Having further de-mystified the kingship of Richard through curses, their job is done. Cursed themselves with charges of witchcraft and stigmatized by their own foul cursing, Shore and Margaret are authorized to speak like women in the historical narrative, that is, like witches."



Well, we aren't sure about this. Is the curse really subversive? And is that subversion really tied up with the woman's position -- and is that position most typically that of a witch? This seems an overhasty conclusion, especially when the most powerful sequence of curses in the play come at the end, and they come not from women, but from Richard's victims. These curses are definitionally pure, in a sense, because they are so starkly contrasted with the curse's opposite: blessing. Thus, Edward, and Clarence, and the young Princes, and all of Richard's dead victims visit him in his vision and pronounce his sentence, and then pronounce a blessing on Harry, progenitor of the Tudor line and Richard's opponent. It is as if one geneology -- Richard's cursed one -- is being formally replaced by another - Harry's blessed one. As the little Prince's say, "thy nephews souls bid thee despair and die!"



Richard is too modern a man to think that the curse has power. "Soft, I did but dream/O coward conscience, how dost thou afflict me." Once the curse is so rationalized, it loses its magical power -- and in its downfall brings all magic with it.



Which brings us to De Quincey's strange essay on Modern Superstitions. The architecture of DeQuincey's essays is always Piranesian, a descent from the tower to the dungeon by an infinite amount of stairs. In this essay he takes us, by degrees, from those superstitions later comprised under Ruskin's term, the pathetic fallacy -- that projection onto the natural of the human - to the superstitions of the ominous. The ominous, according to De Quincy, was as much the ancient's burden as colonialism was the white man's. He is particularly feverish (De Quincey is always supremely feverish) about the the accidental coincidence of a given name with some ill thing, in which the ancients saw malign powers. De Quincy instances the refusal of a Roman legion to go into Germany under the command of a man named Umbrius Ater -- a "pleonasm of darkness," as he puts it: Shadow Black. Offering a series of similar anecdotes, De Quincy gets to the paradoxical crux: that crossing of sign and accident, language itself: "These omens, derived from names, are therefore common to the ancient and the modern world. But perhaps, in strict logic, they ought to have been classed as one subdivision or variety under a much larger head,viz. words generally, no matter whether proper names or appellatives, as operative powers and agencies, having, that is to say, a charmed power against some party concerned from the moment that they leave the lips."







The essay probes the very texture of God's invisibility, which is, of course, symboled, modeled, consistes in logos -- the word, out of spit and air. That movement from the silent movie world of our apishness to the incredible communications of our never stilled tongue -- it has left a scar inside us. Richard III was right: it is our conscience, superstition's last stronghold.

Miscellanea



Limited Edition is too charming for words -- especially for those of us who grew up reading Victorian novels and mentally immersed in the English countryside. The magazine takes an antiquarian interest in Oxfordfordshire, and sends its reporters out to get the scoop on such hot stories as the latest ancient pots exhibit in the Wallingford Museum. Ourselves, we loved this piece about Anthony a Wood. Here are the first three grafs:



"A conceited, impudent coxcomb, is how a contemporary described Anthony a Wood, a 17th-century historian and antiquary with a genius for alienating people.



Born in 1632 in a house called Postmasters Hall facing Merton College gate, he studied at Merton and lived almost his entire life in Oxford.



Wood occupied two garrets at the top of the family house, making himself a hermit�s cell there where he pored over his books and papers. When he did venture out he managed to feud with just about everyone he knew: scholars, family and friends alike."



Hmm. Sounds like LI. Here's a bit of unexpected confirmatory evidence for Elias' Civilizing process thesis, to which we alluded a few posts ago:



"Through its pages [Wood's journal] we see unruly scholars stealing geese at Wolvercote; the spread of the pox in Oxford; panic in the city as the sky darkens with smoke-clouds from the great fire of London; the disgraceful behaviour of Charles II�s courtiers who, on quitting Oxford, �leave their excrements in every corner, in chimneys, studies, coal-houses, cellars. Rude, rough, whoremongers; vaine, empty, careless."



We have the same problem with Bush's courtiers.



Woods was a cantakerous fella, but he did like to play a jig now and then. He liked to disguise himself as a poor country musician and, with similarly disguised colleagues, stroll about from country green to country green regaling the interested with various airs. "After playing at Kidlington, however, they were overtaken by a group of soldiers who forced them to play in an open field and then left without giving a penny. �Most of my companion,� wrote Wood, �would afterwards glory in this, but I was ashamed, and could never endure to hear of it.�



And since we are strolling about the magazine scene, shouts out to our friend Lorin Stein for his piece in the New York Review of Books. Unfortunately, you have to fork over bucks to read it on-line. Lorin reviews Aleksandar Hemon's novel, Nowhere Man. It is a very pretty review. So check it out at a news stand.

Bollettino



Michael Kinsley is a puzzle to LI. He could have been a much greater writer than he is -- he definitely has the elements. There are columnists like George Will who write much worse -- Will, in fact, has one of the highest proportions of drivel to memorable graf in the industry --but who have attained disproportionate respect because they are sporadically sesquipedalian. Forget them. There are times that the spirit of Murray Kempton himself seems to hover round Kinsley.



That he has chosen to bank his major time in editing and tv shows that writing isn't the lure for some... Go figure.



His column about Bad Bill Bennett's Gambling prob is a thing of beauty and a joy for a newscycle parasec. Here's the beginning of it.



"Sinners have long cherished the fantasy that William Bennett, the virtue magnate, might be among our number. The news over the weekend�that Bennett's $50,000 sermons and best-selling moral instruction manuals have financed a multimillion dollar gambling habit�has lit a lamp of happiness in even the darkest hearts. As the joyous word spread, crack flowed like water through inner-city streets, family court judges began handing out free divorces, children lit bonfires of The Book of Virtues, More Virtuous Virtues, Who Cheesed My Virtue?, Moral Tails: Virtue for Dogs, etc. And cynics everywhere thought, for just a moment: Maybe there is a God after all."



The rest of it styles with as magnificent a swish. Lovely stuff.

Bollettino



For those interested in sex, kidnapping, bribery, underaged sex and our good friends over at Dyncorps, the company set to police Iraq(tm), (a wholly owned subsidiary of SIAC), here's a story in the Guardian. We are all happy to see that there's been such a big seachange in the corporate culture that the company has dropped its appeal against Kathryn Bolkovac, the employee who was fired as a killjoy after she complained about company employees visiting brothels in Bosnia to enjoy the charms of a bevy of kidnapped 14 year old Eastern European girls. Bokovac won a judgement of some 100,000 pounds from the now radically changed company.



We'd also recommend, just as a corrective downer, this article about Shiite politics in Ha'aretz. Perhaps LI is just imagining things, but hasn't there been an odd weakness for Shari'a in the left press? We hate to condescend to trafficing in such simplicities, but really, Indymedia, the enemy of our enemy is not our friend. We definitely agree with half and only half of the slogan, America, no, no, Islam, yes yes.



The left tradition in the Middle East has been undermined by the corrupt compromises of its own leadership -- which was forged in the nationalist struggle against colonialism, and deformed utterly by the Cesaerism attendent on the cults of personality crystalizing around petty colonels and by the cold war - so many times that to continue to believe in it almost requires as much faith as the belief in One God. However, all faiths are not equal -- in fact, that derives from the very logic of faith. How about a few slogans like: the American plan to privatize Iraqi oil, no, no, oppression of women, no no, etc. etc?

Bollettino



Alexander Stille (who wrote a very good book about the mafia in Sicily, Excellent Cadavers), writes about Elias' Civilizing Process in the NYT, and how Elias' theory that it was the civilizing process -- small changes in such things as the visibility one showed in managing one's own dirt, one's mucus, excrement, spit - signaled a larger, invisible change in the fabric of behavioral expectations that spread out over Western civilization tout court -- has been taken up by crime historians. The article is interesting, but it is also symptomatic of a discipline that, at least in the United States, consistently confuses crime and violence.



"Although there were no national statistics centuries ago, some historians discovered that the archives of some English counties were intact back to the 13th century. So in the 1970's they began diligently counting indictments and comparing them with estimated population levels to get a rough idea of medieval and early modern crime rates. Historians in Continental Europe followed suit and came up with findings that yielded the same surprising result: that murder was much more common in the Middle Ages than it is now and that it dropped precipitately in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries.



"Something very important changed in Western behavior and attitudes, and it stood much prevailing social theory on its head. "It was very surprising because social theory told us that the opposite was supposed to happen: that crime was supposed to go up as family and community bonds in rural society broke up and industrialization and urbanization took hold," said Eric H. Monkkonen, a professor of history at the University of California at Los Angeles and the author of several works on the history of criminality. "The notion that crime and cities go together made emotional sense, particularly in America, where at least recently crime is higher in cities."



Murder should be distinguished from war -- but it should not be allowed to engross violence to the exclusion of war. This was a mistake made by Francis Fukuyama in his book on the Great Instauration, in which he produced bogus statistics indicating a violence spike from 1945 to 1990 in the West. The statistics of course ignored war entirely. Crime went down under Hitler; violence didn't. In fact, the peacefulness of the post-war period is the most salient characteristic of the era, not a spike in violence.

Yet, this elementary mistake is repeated in the article:



"The theory that crime is determined by deterrence and law enforcement, by income inequality, by a high proportion of young men in a population, by the availability of weapons, by cities, most of those theories end up being wrong."Historians have offered various explanations for the unexpected fall in the crime rate. Initially some wondered whether the decline in early modern crime might be a result of industrialization and urbanization themselves. But James A. Sharpe, a historian at the University of York in England, said the big statistical dip in violence preceded industrialization and urbanization by more than a century."



Hmm. As I remember the 17th century, it was the era of one of the bigger spikes in violence: the Thirty years war. Significantly, the stats quoted by Stille come from British sources. Here's an idea: when two or more armies have been sweeping through an area for two or more years, the record of the "crimes" committed by individuals might not be an exact match with the level of violence in the area. Here's the way one historian, Ronald Asch, in German History, a scholarly journal, summed up the losses attendent on a war which took place as violence, supposedly, was collapsing:



"There is little doubt that the Holy Roman Empire suffered demographic losses of at least 30 per cent of its pre-war population, and that the worst affected areas, such as Pomerania or Wurttemberg, were depopulated to an even greater extent."



Asch quotes a contemporary about the way the war was waged:



"Later, in the midst of the war, a treatise on the art of war was published in Straubing by another military expert, Franciscus Bonbra, who considered it self-evident that soldiers would treat their own prince's or his allies' subjects just as badly as those who owed allegiance to the enemy. They would rape any woman who seemed halfway attractive, plunder the houses, destroy the crops and beat and torture the peasants to extort money. In the end they would set the entire village on fire."



Of course, these wouldn't be considered crimes to such as James A. Sharpe -- they were, after all, allowed by law.

Bollettino



A nice report on the Bush administration's plans for getting the fiercely independent Iraqi government, currently subcontracted out to SAIC, to agree to sell Iraqi assets at bargain basement prices to Bush cronies is featured on the Petroleum World site, culled from the WSJ. We are sure that Smilin' Jay Garner will cast a fiery glance with his eagle eye over any plan that he doesn't think is in the best interest of the Spirit of the Iraqi people. Fortunately for American Corporations, Smilin' Jay just might be pursuaded that what is good for Shell Oil is good for Iraq. Whew! So that wondrous privitization just might go through, benefiting the Iraqi people mightily, as it has done in Argentina, the Ukraine, the Soviet Union, and other places around the world!





"On the economic side, the AID plan serves as a detailed road map for achieving that end. The proposals for possible mass privatization of Iraqi industry are likely to be the most controversial. The document -- first drafted in February and circulated among financial consultants -- calls for liquidating some insolvent Iraqi companies, while assessing others for possible sale. Some state companies might be sold through "a broad-based Mass Privatization Program," which could distribute ownership vouchers to ordinary Iraqi citizens, similar to a program used in Russia in the mid-1990s. The document says that the contractors would help support "private sector involvement in strategic sectors, including privatization, asset sales, concessions, leases and management contracts, especially in the oil and supporting industries" that dominate Iraq's business activity.



Any attempt at privatizing Iraq's oil industry, which controls the world's second-

largest petroleum reserves after Saudi Arabia, would be a gargantuan business deal. It could be contentious, especially if assets wind up in the hands of foreign oil companies. In the Mideast and Europe, there is a widespread belief -- despite White House denials -- that the U.S. invaded Iraq to get control of its oil.



According to the timetable in the documents, officials would spend a year building a

consensus for industry privatization, and then transfer assets over the following three years."



Building consensus -- hmm, now that is the sweetest little term we've heard for mass repression, enforced by bayonet and tank, in a long time. Just as the Russians "built consensus" in post-68 Czechoslovakia. Of course, they were following their 'roadmap" there. You will notice that the Middle East is starting to drown in roadmaps.



LI also recommends the NYT article on Baghdad -- a place name that we can now, with superb confidence, drop into the vast pool of our national amnesia now that our flying ace of a President has declared the war over. It remains only to unleash massacre on a few demonstrations in a few unimportant outposts, set up a puppet regime, and steal the Iraqi oil infrastructure. In any case, the NYT account has a nice quote about Chalabi:



"The scion of a wealthy Shiite family, Mr. Chalabi left Iraq in 1958. In 1992, he was convicted in absentia of embezzlement and fraud in Jordan over the operations of bank he founded there; he denies those charges, saying they were fostered by the Iraqi government. Since his return to Iraq last month, the behavior of his entourage has outraged many Iraqis, and even some Americans.



"What we have done is import mafias into Baghdad," said one American official, who insisted on anonymity.



We've been reading the Gus Russo's encyclopedic account of the Chicago mob, The Outfit. At one point Russo describes the way two freelance hoods, George Browne and Willie Morris Bioff, shook down movie houses in Chicago. A movie house would open, and eventually Bioff would show up in the office of the owner and ask, "how are we doing?" Then it would start -- the stream of cash towards Bioff and Browne. In return for which, the movie house owner got to retain entrepreneurial control over his vitals, as well as a working pair of legs and arms. This theory generates spontaneously in the heads of the incurably crooked. So it has generated in Chalabi's head. The Times article continues:



"The official was referring to the takeover of many of Baghdad's best houses by groups of men claiming to have formed new political parties. Kurdish parties have taken over a Baath Party headquarters and the engineering building of Mr. Hussein's office. Some have set up roadblocks and established militias, sometimes saying they are operating with the authority of the American military.



An early expropriator was Mr. Chalabi, whose supporters seized the elite Hunting Club, apparently with the permission of American soldiers. Various groups associated with him took over other expensive houses in the same area.Last weekend, General Garner appeared to give tacit approval by dining with Mr. Chalabi at the club. All that, critics here say, has only encouraged other groups to go house-taking."



Smilin' Jay is just obeying the time sanctioned instincts of politicians through the past century. As Bioff, who started out as a pimp, put it: "I never saw a whore who wasn't hungry; and I never saw a politician who wasn't a whore."



And so Bioff articulates the typical businessman's disdain for his work force. Whores have contributed infinitely more to civilization than politicians.

Bollettino



LI has already written one post on Dyncorps. You remember Dyncorps -- the private company America has contracted for policing work in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq. Dyncorps (unsurprisingly) has its little connection to Enron, as does most of Bush's administration's important cadres. The man who was Dyncorps chairman, "Pug" Winokur, was the head of Enron's board's financial committee -- and approved the setting up of the partnerships for which Andrew Fastow, Enron's CFO, is now undergoing the ritual judicial bastinado -- although we are wise enough to know that the bastinado is mostly mock, and that no man who has a few million dollars stuffed into the mattress is ever going to suffer excessively from Bush's Justice Department. Dyncorps has apparently spread its tentacles far and wide, so that the SEC itself depends on its computer expertise. This makes for an interesting, mobius like situation if the SEC ever decided to investigate these corporate cops.



We are particularly concerned with the role of Dyncorps in providing America's friendly police face in Iraq -- which has now been officially pronounced, by our commander in chief, a place where the lion has laid down once and for all with the lamb so that we can get on with those tax cuts, please -- given Dyncorps role in Bosnia. The sex scandals in Bosnia have, for some reason, not aroused the same American press that was ever vigilant in monitoring the tumescence and detumescence of President Clinton's governing organ. Perhaps it is because enslaving, raping, and stealing from a bunch of underaged girls from Eastern Europe is just too depressing for your average American newspaper reader to handle -- far better to feed them the scraps from some California murder. Well, there's an interesting little article on what went down in Bosnia by Cali Ruchala and Emir Kaganovich.



In the meantime, the contracting out of the Iraq operation continues to benefit from a massive lack of media curiosity.