Cretinism and more cretinism: the French right and Islamoguachisme

 

I spent the 00s in a froth of indignation, and my frothing found a home on my blog. But no matter how I whipped the hypocrisy, cretinism and downright pig ignorance of Bush’s administration and the general bipartisan DC foreign policy set, I got no satisfaction – it just went on and on, through the blood and mire, until gradually the seachange came, we all agreed Iraq was a mistake, and we all agreed to forget all about it. The Obama administration letting the CIA burn its little torture tapes in order to decide that it couldn’t, like, judicially do anything about torturers (just as it couldn’t find a single bankster to prosecute in that unfortunate 2008 financial meltdown thingy) should have taught me a lesson: the plebs will never be heard. Ever ever ever.

So I am doing my best to ignore the hilarious islamo-gauchiste campaign in France, even to the extent of deciding not to finish the incredibly dumb, no good, absolutely disqualifying rant of Pierre Jourde, late of Commentaire, in the Nouvelle Obs. Why froth when spring is here? The birds have their nests, and the son of man, or at least this son of a woman, has a place to lay his head, so whistle while you work.

But I am too tempted by the devil here. For really, what France should have been talking about for, oh, say the last twenty to thirty years is Islamo-Droiteism, otherwise known as the French foreign policy. While Jourde is in such a rage at the likes of  Clémentine Autain or Emmanuel Todd that he can’t be bothered to name one instance in which they have materially helped the Islamicist cause, or Islam in general – it is very easy to put names and dates together for the material and military helping of the great wen of Islamicism, the founder, the center, the om and omega, called Saudi Arabia. From 1956, when France was part of the military team that attacked Nasser’s Egypt – Nasser’s, you will recall, was the first secularist Middle Eastern revolution – to the French military team that was dispatched to help the Saudi royals in 1979, when the great Mosque in Mecca was attacked, all the way up to France bombing Daech on behalf of a coalition consisting of a few “secularist” fronts and a lot of Islamicist fronts – including al qaeda – in Syria, France’s foreign policy has been islamicist to the core. Not one word, of course, is said about this in the French press. After all, to doubt the King’s foreign policy is to doubt royal perogative at all! But this is how it is. After Holland’s disastrous neo-con turn in the Middle East led, predictably enough, to attacks in France, did anybody ask: what was the point of that? No. Dots are not connected if they are inconvenient dots.

If you want to track the growth of Islamacism – or, simply, the Saudi approved school of Islam – in Europe, you would do much better to read the Monthly Newsletter of the Royal Embassy of Saudi Arabia in Washington DC than Olivier Todd. There you can see wonderful photo ops of various Saudi royals conferring with various European officials, like Chirac in the 90s, about affirming “cultural relationships” – or, in other words, allowing the Saudis to flood the zone in Europe with mosquebuilding money, and propaganda against any other Islamic school. It was through that money that traditional mosques in Bosnia were taken over, razed, and rebuilt with an entirely new message for their congregations. This was seen with a benevolent eye by French politicians who saw weapons sales to the Saudis as an El Dorado, and who definitely were on the petroleum mainline. No, it is not Olivier Todd who is flogging French arm sales, but, gasp, those warriors against Islamo-gauchisme at the Elysee, the government of Macron. Here’s a little precis by AmnestyInternational of who is really promoting islamicism in the world. Hint – it isnot the faculty at the Sorbonne.

I can froth all I want, I know, and it won’t make a gnat’s ass difference. Still, even a gnat has a right to a horselaugh at the moronic inferno called the “french intellectual scene” every once in a while.

For Peace ... and the Draft

 

In 2006, Harper’s Magazine sponsored a forum on the possibility of an American coup d’etat. Among the participants in that discussion was one Major General Charles J. Dunlap, Jr.  Dunlap was part of an interesting exchange about the composition of the military.

“WASIK: I want to address the question of partisanship in the military. Insofar as there is a "culture war" in America, everyone seems to agree that the armed forces fight on the Republican side. And this is borne out in polls: self-described Republicans outnumber Democrats in the military by more than four to one, and only 7 percent of soldiers describe themselves as "liberal."
KOHN: It has become part of the informal culture of the military to be Republican. You see this at the military academies. They pick it up in the culture, in the training establishments.
DUNLAP: The military is an inherently conservative organization, and this is true of all militaries around the world. Also the demographics have changed: people in the South who were Democratic twenty years ago have become Republican today.
BACEVICH: Yes, all militaries are conservative. But since 1980 our military has become conservative in a more explicitly ideological sense. And that allegiance has been returned in spades by the conservative side in the culture war, which sees soldiers as virtuous representatives of how the country ought to be.
KOHN: And meanwhile there is a streak of anti-militarism on the left.
BACEVICH: It's not that people on the left disdain the military but rather that they are just agnostic about it. They don't identify with soldiers or soldiering.
LUTTWAK: And their children have less of a propensity to serve in the military. Parents who describe themselves as liberal are less likely to make positive noises to their children about the armed forces.
DUNLAP: Which brings up a crucial point. Let's accept as a fact that the U.S. military has become more overtly ideological since 1980. What has happened since 1980? Roughly, that was the beginning of the all-volunteer force. What we are seeing right now is the result of twenty-five years of an all-volunteer force, in which people have self-selected into the organization.”

 I was recently in an exchange with a member of a supposed resistance to war group that posted a Reason Magazine article against the draft. I am for the draft. I think the draft puts the burden of war solidly on the people. If that doesn’t happen, we soon see the military becoming a praetorian group for itchy fingered presidents. And we also see, as in the capitol riot, that exmilitary people in a self-selecting armed group veer towards the right. This isn’t just the American experience – it is the French, British, German and Italian experience. It is the experience of Latin America and Japan. The rightwing tend is only countered by the formation of “people’s armies” – basically, the draft.

There are a number of political externalities, in the U.S., that came with the draft. One of the undiscussed ones is how much the draft contributed to the collapse of Jim Crow. The military was the first government organization that officially integrated, under Harry Truman’s Executive Order 9981  issued on July 26, 1948. I think one could even argue that, given the draft, to which iall young American men were subject at the time, this order did more to integrate America and kickstart the very much incomplete march towards racial equality than Brown v. Board of Education. There is a reason that white libertarians at Reason, Milton Friedman and Reagan were all on the anti-draft side – as well as on the white supremacist side, at least in practice.

I doubt we will have Selective Service again, unfortunately. And I also doubt that the Capitol Riot is a one-off. America runs under the delusion of its own exception to social patterns in history – hence, the bizarre belief that one can spend 700 billion per year on the military and still maintain an apolitical military force. The draft was a counter-vailing force – and its abolition has had just the effects you would predict – a heightening of rightwing military sentiment, an inability to stop wars – Iraq kicking the U.S. out was a rare favor accorded to us in this respect, otherwise it would be Afganistan – and an inability to adjust to changes in the global order. It was interesting to see the neolibs under Obama try to whip up sentiment for the no good, very terrible Transpacific Trade pact by militarizing the issue – we must stop Red China before it takes over a few ten square mile islands in the China Sea! That kind of thing is a D.C. specialty, now.

You feed the monster until the monster feeds on you.

Biography of a price - the argument from adventure

 

 

We live in an epoch in which objects have taken one of the attributes of kings - that is, they get biographies. The biography of the fork, the pencil, Wall Street – the transfer of the life story from the human to the inhuman has become quite fashionable, as though, since we all know about the pathetic fallacy, we are allowed to systematically commit it. I jest, ho ho – and in fact, I have to admit that there is something life-like about these things and their passage through our lives. If they aren’t alive, they still have mana – a lifelike power. They become totems.

However, noone, so far as I know, has done a biography of a price. Ah, there’s a subject! One would first have to wrest it from the enormous mystifications of the economists, who know what a price must be without often looking at what a price is, and one would have to restore it to its true nature, its genesis, its type.
Scratch a price and you find an adventure. We’ve become accustomed to thinking that the adventure it encodes is determined by a thing called a “market” – and so mystery calls to mystery. The mystics of capitalism have shamelessly spoken of the “magic of the marketplace” – which serves as an alibi for our adventurer. In fact, all adventurers deal, at one point or another in their careers, with magic. From Raleigh to Cagliostro, from the average American politician to the Spanish conquistador, all have used magic to fill in the gaps, biographical and strategic. But the biographer’s strong suite is a counter-magic: a grasp of details. While the adventurer sheds one persona for another, one claim to effects at a distance for another, one spectacle for another, the biographer, that dogged leveler, reconnects the membra disjecta with a thousand and one facts, with fine filaments of cause, deliberation, association and purposes (a plural that covers serial disappointments, self-subversions and incompatibilities – for the biographer is not your rational expectations robot, explaining that all can be explained through a system that explains anything. A biographer who seeks to explain a life is a biographer who has gone mad).

The critic Harold Innes claimed that the story of modernization in the west is the story of the penetration of the price system. This is an insight that holds together a truth and a falsehood. Just as there are no solitary human individuals – every mother’s son or daughter of ‘em must be a mother’s son or daughter – so too, there is no single price. Price’s came into the world en masse, rather than as a single prototype – no caveman hammered out a price, held it up, and said, now what will this be goood for? But Innes’s insight is also false, in that it treats price system as something autonomous – it is as if, with the word “system”, we move from the puppet to the puppetmaster.

 

2.

 In the first week of April, 1963, Nina Simone and her trio signed a contract to appear for three weeks at the Village Gate for 1500 dollars per week, plus 10 percent commission. We happen to know something about the Village Gate and its prices from an article that appeared in the Village Voice in 1965, which described the Village Gate as one of the few Jazz clubs that was making a profit that year. “Usually two star attractions are presented on the same bill. .. The room is large enough to accomodate a sufficient number of customers to offset a high cost of talent without raising prices to an unreasonable level.” Later on in the article, we learn that the usual cost of the ticket is 3 dollars. The ticket sometimes came with a minimum drink requirement, depending on the event. The price of the ticket, then, is a compound thing – it is a guess at the demand for the performance, which is determined, in part, by the space of the room, and is annexed to other costs and prices – for instance, for drinks. This price is hard to compare, given these variables, to other prices. For instance, we know that in the last week of November, 1969, you could see Nina Simone at Fillmore East, another NYC club, for a ticket price of $3.50, $4.50 or $5.50. This would seem to indicate a very low rate of inflation – 50 cents over a period of 6 years, or around 2 percent per year. But that is misleading since, as we pointed out, the ticket price reflects a compound of other variables. As so often with services, the quality of the good varies wildly.  Fillmore East was the revamped Village Theater, and it flourished until it was closed in 1971, a closing its owner, Bill Graham, blamed on stadium rock concerts – which, Graham claimed, raised the cost of performers and competed on the ticket price with venues that did not have the seating capacity stadiums had.

 

If we were to do the biography of the price of a Nina Simone concert, we would find that the conditions for it probably satisfy neither the subjectivist economics school – where demand is the sole real determinant – nor the labor value school of economics – where the labor of Simone, her trio, and the staff of the places she sang at combine to give us the base determinants of the price. As if well known, ticket prices defy the demand school – the franchise manager of your local Metroplex movie theater does not try to juice up demand for movies that are unpopular by adjusting ticket prices. It is, normally, one ticket price for every movie. Often this is a condition in the distribution contracts.

 

All of thse things suggest the adventure school theory of the price. Unfortunately, most economists don’t recognize adventure when they see it. .

 

The ides of March, a poem

 

The Ides of March

 

Fate’s patent on circumstance

makes a monopoly of accidents.

Me, for instance – isn’t my every hair

counted by God on his golden throne?

 

Down here below, those that I lose

collect in the filtre de cheveux de drain

In the shower. Out of omen

Out of luck.

 

“Caesar self also doing sacrifice unto the gods,

Found that one of the beasts which was sacrificed had no heart.”

Myself, untouchable, hairpicker grub

In the soapscum for what I’ve shed.

- Karen Chamisso

 

 .

 

 

Bush years historiography: the axis of evil in the thirties

 Cold War reflections

During the Axis of Evil years, there was a sub-category of journalistic histories that went back over the 30s and the Cold War from a Bush-ite perspective, a search for the Good Guys (Americans, Churchill) and the bad guys (Stalin, communists, useful idiots, the whole nine yards).

Because I’m writing a story about two lives in the cold war – Willi Schlamm and Otto Katz – I’ve been unpleasantly plunged into this literature. A literature heavily marked by the McCarthyism that succeeded the fall of the wall and the end of history decade of the 90s, that decade which was also the end of big government, also humanitarian intervention, and other alsos that led us to march, finally, on Baghdad.

It is a striking thing about this literature that the focus is so entirely on Stalin. There’s little mention of fascist Italy, and Hitler only crops up as Stalin’s secret ally. Much is made of the failure of the communists in Germany to join with the Social Democrats and defeat Hitler, and nothing is made of the curious failure of France, Britain and even Italy to intervene to stop the rise of a leader who quite openly wanted to trash the Versailles treaty.

It is all very curious. You would have to look around for a whole other set of books, usually in German or French, about the connections between businesses and banks in Germany and France or Britain. And if you want to find the literature on what the Anglophiles in the U.S. state department shared with their British counterparts, you will have to file FOIAs yourself – the lack of curiosity in the literature is overwhelming. This, in contrast with the examination of every move of every Russophile contact with Soviet officials. Of the counting of pores on Alger Hiss's nose, there is no end.

The paucity of information about secret contacts with the Italian fascists, not to mention the German National Socialists, is rather appalling. That is why Frances Stoner Saunders’ article about the MI6 file on Eric Hobsbawm struck so many people as a bombshell when it came out in the London Review of Books. The softness of the British establishment and government for Mussolini has been comparatively well known for some time now. But the cooperation of British intelligence and the Geheime Dienst of Hitler’s is still an unexpected news item.

“The week Hobsbawm left Berlin, Guy Liddell, MI5’s German-speaking deputy head of counter-espionage, arrived from London. The fearful symmetry in this – history throwing us a stray bone of coincidence – will become clear. Liddell left London on 30 March, and stayed for ten days. He had been invited to meet officials of the German Political Police, Abteilung 1A, which had installed itself in the KPD headquarters, now conveniently vacant. Liddell was assisted by Frank Foley, MI6’s Berlin station chief, whose diplomatic cover was passport control officer. On 31 March, the two men entered Karl Liebknecht Haus, now renamed Horst Wessel Haus and sporting a huge swastika where only weeks earlier Lenin had stared out from a hoarding.

Liddell and Foley were introduced to Rudolf Diels, head of Abteilung 1A, who explained urbanely that it was his intention to exterminate communism in its widest sense. By this he meant not only the Communist Party and its subordinate bodies but also left-wing pacifist organisations. It was immediately clear to Liddell that there was ‘certainly a good deal of “third degree” work going on’ and that ‘Jews, communists and even social democrats’ were being ‘submitted to every kind of outrage’. Swallowing his distaste (he witnessed a man being dragged into the building while ‘protesting loudly that he had never had anything to do with politics’), Liddell settled down with Foley, in a room placed at their disposal, to examine the files of Abteilung 1A, while their hosts refined their enhanced interrogation techniques on detainees held elsewhere in the building.”

If the visit to the Horst Wessel building had involved one of Stalin’s NKVD men, we would, of course, been told over and over again – a meme in the Bushite silly season – that Stalin was secretly allied with Hitler. This meeting does not mean, of course, that the British were allied with Hitler instead – but it does signify one of the motifs of the interwar period – a fear of communism that overwhelmed the fear of Naziism or fascism. Leaving Berlin, “Liddell was confident that if ‘constant personal contact [were] maintained’, the relationship would persist after the current ‘rather hysterical atmosphere of sentiment and brutality dies down’.”

This is not a pleasant story. It is much more pleasant, in hindsight, to denounce the German-Soviet Pact of 1939, which made a mockery of a decade of antifascist activity by the Comintern, than to ask questions about the Anglo-German Naval treaty of 1935, which cut out France and allowed Germany to build up a navy beyond what was allowed by the Versailles treaty. The latter, of course, has dropped into memory hole.

The past is a foreign country, indeed. Every visit to it is a visit to a new foreign country.

L’appétit vient en mangeant, la soif s’en va en buvant - Biden's stimulus

 "The Tax Policy Center in Washington estimates that the direct payments and expanded tax credits in the bill would, by themselves, increase after-tax income this year by more than 20 percent for an average household in the lowest quintile of income earners in the United States. It previously had forecast that Mr. Trump’s tax cuts would raise that same group’s income by less than 1 percent in the first year."

Start with stuff. The stimulus package, as we know to our sorrow, did not contain the minimum wage increase. What it does contain, though, is a program that is targeted to award those in the lower income and median income percentiles. This should not be cause for trumpets, but it is. Since the turn in the seventies - the cat's foot creep of neoliberalism - the neoliberal consensus shared by both parties has been: millionaires first. On the Dem side, this was the a real break with the Clinto-Obama paradigm. Set the conditions for working class people to actually see government working for them, and you can get working class people "excited" to garner further gains. The illusion that progressives will impose those conditions from the top by force majeure arises from the despair induced by the age of nudgery. This, though, a temporary stimulus, will increase the desire for a structural stimulus. 

L’appétit vient en mangeant, la soif s’en va en buvant, as comrade Rabelais put it.   

Balloons

 

Balloon love goes through three stages. First there is the curious rubber minnow, with the strange mouth. Your mom or dad blows it up, because though you try and try, you just seem to end up with spit all over the minnow. There’s a resistance in the balloon’s embryonic form. When your mom or dad blows the balloon up, they too visibly pause after the first exhale. The embryonic state, midway between minnow and blimp, is an important part of the natural history of the balloon. Professionals – who work in malls – seem to have mastered the smoothest of transitions between minnow and blimp. They don’t visibly pause. Of course, these professionals treat the balloon like it is a fluid substance, twisting it into animal shapes. In the evolutionary history of balloons, these animal shapes correspond, on might hypothesize, to when animals first came out onto land, developed lungs and locomotion. The difference is that the animals flourished and diversified, whereas the balloon’s larger destiny, the dirigible, is definitely foreshadowed by the simplest balloon mechanics.

Second there is the tying and playing. When the balloon achieves that equilibrium between too much – popping – and too little – drooping – the adult ties the mouth. The mouth now has the corded texture of a belly button, an ombilicus. There’s a squeeking sound that comes when the belly button is extended a bit so there is matter to tie. The tying is often a complicated matter, since it one of those operation in which the patient can lose its vital fluid, in this case air. Luckily, we are oversupplied with air, so that the balloon can be blown up again.

There are basically two kinds of knots. One knot is deliberately boobytrapped, so that when the balloon is batted around, the knot will untie and the balloon will, enjoyably, turn into a rocket, rapidly deflating as it shoots away. The other kind of knot is more solid. In the end, this is the knot that wins, since the second phase of balloon love is definitely batting the balloon in the air and following it around – at the risk of it or you knocking into furniture – and keeping it flying. This can satisfy both the balloon and the balloon batter for a surprisingly long time. There are variants to this game, but the point is definitely not to let the balloon touch the floor. If it touches the floor, there’s some kind of negative in the invisible scorekeeping going on.

The third and most mysterious phase of balloon love is finding the balloon the day after it was birthed into a big fat blimp. Now, the balloon is in the winter of its being, shrunken, usually strayed to a corner. It is a lesson in old age, the balloon is. There are two options, of course. One is to let the balloon shrink down to nothing. This option is basically forgetting the balloon – it is indifference. The other is to end it all by popping the balloon. There are those who maintain that the popping is best done to a young balloon, which produces the most surprising sound; and then there are those who keep the balloon in play until distracted by one of the ten million distractions that can capture one’s attention in the day. For the latter, the final popping is not as glorious, but it is not un-fun. At this point, the pop will be a little dumpy, a little curbed, but it will make a definite noise.

Pop, it will go, but more quietly than the defiant pops of its maturity.

It can be enough of a pop to surprise someone who doesn’t know you have the balloon and are planning on popping it.

And then the balloon, an exhausted and shred piece of rubber, is thrown away. Or put, for some reason, in a desk drawer, where years latter it will be taken out and thrown away. But throwing away is fate, and who escapes fate?