Dope

Wow. I love the New York Times Business section. The echt biz columnists are always sharp. But they opinion columnists, people like Virginia Postrel, are the red meat type - the kind that want to contractualize every pee. Today it is somebody named Daniel Akst - In Genoa's Noise, a Trumpet for Capitalism - who resurrects a trope last heard during the Vietnam war - that the protests against the G8 are staged by the spoiled children of the G8 who have just benefitted immensely from it all. Much like the protesters against the Vietnam war who a. didn't understand it and b. benefitted from America's robust, Bomber backed committment to freedom, longhaired punks that they were, and were trying to block the good fight with a lot of weepy-washy malarky about napalming children. Look, those children were dangerous! the Aksts of the world point out, being rational souls.

Well, there is one telling difference. Akst avoids saying that the protestors are smelly - among conservatives, the realization has slowly set in that the weapon of fashion is probably not the best stick in the house. It turned out that the hippies were fashionable - and lived to profit from it. So who knows - globo-protest chic might have some bucks in it. So don't knock it. Akst takes another tact - he claims they are beautiful but oh so, like, stupid - while the G8, the WTO, and others are working day and night to put "food on the tables in houses from Bolivia to Bangladesh," the young and restless out on the barricades are pretending like they have a right to have a say in it all. Ignorant ragamuffins! My god, the unmitigated gall. And hey, pay no attention to those pesky statistics that suggest that the share of wealth going to Bolivia and Bangladesh, since the advent of more robust freetradin', has gone down - although it has. Pay no attention to the difference between the economic behavior of a country like the US - which found it convenient, in the 80s, to finance its growth with massive deficit financing - and, say, Argentina, which is being poleaxed because of its deficit financing. Yes, to minds that aren't as, well, subtle as Akst (genius that he appears to be in this article) that might suggest economic policies in less wealthy countries have to encounter different international restraints, and thus might follow different internal courses, such as finding a more interventionist role for the state in supporting enterprises. And to minds less attuned to democratic theory than Akst, it might appear a little suspicious to have these multi-national organizations unilaterally changing domestic law in various countries, according corporations a more than equal legal status.

But heck - who said anything about democracy? Here's the killer graf from Akst's vile little column:
"That is why, young and handsome and idealistic as these protesters so often are, it is important to crush them � figuratively, of course � if they won't go home and find other means of exorcising their great guilt at their own good fortune. You may not like the collection of aging white men who, thanks in part to the power of corporations, lead the world's richest nations. But for all their flaws, the economic vision they represent is infinitely more plausible and more humane than the one their critics appear unable even to articulate."
Ah, figuratively crush them - like the cops were doing all over Genoa! Isn't that precious? The wording is so... well, it is so reminiscent of certain, shall we say, authoritarian regimes - Pinochet's comes to mind, as well as the dirty little junta in Argentina. The crushing metaphor is really what is behind the smiley face of the G8 leaders . Meanwhile we can liquidate those "subsistence farmers" in the third world that lead such crushingly poor lives, as Akst suggests, and send them off happily into cities, where they can die of various diseases for which cures have been found but, alas, patented beyond the pocketbooks of the third world (and by the way - crush those Thai companies that infringe on our godgiven patent law, too!), or drink the wonderfully unfiltered water, or live in wonderfully deconstructed kin patterns in wonderful brick and mortar burnouts in, say, Kampala. It is all to the greater glory of private initiative! And a lot of those poor, too, can be properly inducted into the sweatshop ethos, a much better way to take up 14 hours of their day than futile village pranks. This is civilization, after all. The rest can become what Thomas Friedman, another globo-advocate, calls "turtles" - you know, losers in the race for wealth. They can always steal.
Akst might be happy to know that in Brazilian cities, police are often hired to crush the "young and handsome and idealistic" - well, not so idealistic, and often rather scabby - by simply massacring them.
I am suprised that the headline writer for Akst piece didn't take advantage of his opportunity, though - given the tough love nature of the article. He should have headlined it: Exterminate the brutes.

Fus�e


Smoke Signals is an interesting little Village Zine - apparently rooted in the old 50s to 70s boho scene. Scroll to the end of the page to read Barney Rossett's account of how Grove Press was taken over - as in sit in taken over, as in seventies activism - by a contingent of protesting women's libbers - that is the language used in the article. Yes, a whiff of the archaic. It is a sad story for Rosset - but I am conflicted about it, ultimately. One of the great things feminism did for American culture was sweep away that schlocky male adolescent view of women in the Great American Novel (which I take it is that Novel consisting of all the aspirant novels). From Miller to Pynchon, this did a lot of damage to American lit, reducing female characters to a photo spread thinness. Compare, say, Henry James. There was nothing pleasant about seeing women thrown about like so many blow up sex dolls by male writers in the throes of temper tantrums better thrown when they were, say, thirteen.
On the other hand - Grove Press. One of the great publishers...

Fusee.
Alan - who is on my tail about this issue - makes the reasonable comment that, if I am competing with arts and letters, my macro commentary might be excessive load for good link. I hope my "fusee/dope" categories solve this problem. For those who want to be pointed to an interesting link without excessive interference by my interpretation, there are the fusee; and for those who don't mind me hopping around like some combination of Rumpelstiltskin and Karl Marx frothing about some possibly esoteric issue, there is the dope.

Yesterday, I was finishing up - for review - a copy of William Vollman's next novel, which relies heavily on John Smith's Generall Historie of Virginia, and I decided to look up the Generall Historie on the web. Shockingly, there is no complete text on-line. I found a fragment here. Even that fragment reveals that Smith was a admirable writer - and, even more, he eerily presages American humor. Apparently laconic exaggeration - the "whoppers" of Mark Twain, which are half initiatory test (do you get it? do you care?), half comedy routine - came with the country.

Fusee

A link to a nice essay on noir writer Jim Thompson (Jim Thompson's Lost Hollywood Years). Although the attempt at noir metaphor in the piece is a little silly ("Wielding words like a baby with a chainsaw" - a sentence that could only have been written by a man with a very unclear idea of what the conjunction of a baby and a chainsaw would actually look like - hint: it isn't very much like deathless prose), the fate dealt Thompson by Hollywood's studios reminds me of a bracing little essay by Joan Didion about the place in the pecking order accorded screenwriters by the sybaritic semi-literates that own the studios and act in the movies. Oh, well - why should Hollywood be any different from the rest of the country?

Now that I am starting to get technically sound and sassy on this site, I've been thinking about tightening up the writing.
From now on, I'm dividing up the posts between "fusees" - little fireworks - and dope. Dope will be elaborate, fusees will be one to two grafs.

This, for example, is dope:

The NYT report on water this morning -Near Vast Bodies of Water, Land Lies Parched - reminds me of a large piece I wanted to do on water last year. It is going to be one of the fascinating fights of the future. Very simply, the problem goes like this.

In the twentieth century an elegant technical solution was found to the problem of the land surface to crop ratio. This was synthesizing ammonia from hydrogen and nitrogen gases - fertilizer. It is a sign of how accustomed we are to our present food system that fertilizer, as a technical advance, doesn't even register in the popular imagination. Fritz Haber's name is generally not known - Time magazine did not include him among the worthies of 20th century civilization, even though they included Elvis Presley. Haber and Bosch's work is probably the most important technical innovation of the 20th century, even if it is not difficult to see, in hindsight, that it was technically inevitable, given the state of the German Dye industry. It's estimated, by the historian William McNeil, that without synthetic fertilizers the present population of the earth would require an addition of farmland equivalent to all of South America to feed it.

Now, however, we are just on the limits of a problem that is technically more intractable. Because the effect of water can't, so far, be synthesized - in fact, it is difficult to see what that would mean. Water is a very strange liquid - it has properties, notably those when it is heated or cooled, that seem different from other liquids in ways that aren't clearly understood.

Okay. Now, who do we meet at the crossroads of want and necessity but this decade's candidate for the anti-Christ - Enron corporation!

Graf from the Times story that should scare us:

"Already, bottled water costs more than gasoline in most stores, but nearly 90 percent of all municipal water systems are publicly owned. Enron, the nation's No. 1 marketer of natural gas and electricity, saw water as a commodity that would eventually be deregulated, just as electric power was in California. If that happened, Enron would be free to buy and sell water to the highest bidders � no different from oil or megawatts.
The company set up a Web site to trade water, and went prospecting for liquid gold. The people at Enron followed a trail already blazed by a fellow oilman, T. Boone Pickens, who has been buying underground water from farmers in hopes of selling it to parched cities in Texas, and the Bass brothers, who bought 46,000 acres in the desert of Southern California, only to be stymied by legal and technical problems over underground water rights."

Enron, it appears, has not yet prospered in the water trade - but that was before the Corporation owned a president. Look to see the Republicans in the House try to strip states and localities of rights to their water. The principle of local control, remember, is always subservient, among business conservatives, to the principle of profit.

NEW FEATURE - yes, as you can see, you can now talk back to me. Thanks are due to Alan Cook, who figured out how to put that reblogger tool in my template. Now we are cooking!
Alan also gave me some content advice - can the posts about italian politics, and for god's sake, can I please not be so shrill, please? He said I sound like the Rush Limbaugh of the Left.
Well, I sorta want to sound like the R.Limbaugh of the Left - that is, the Rush of his first, golden years, when he was still funny. But okay, moderate the tone, I can do that. As for the Italian politics - isn't everybody interested in the tangled history of the Andreotti? Maybe, maybe... maybe just me.

Another thing: I don't deliver on my promises. So my parable, yesterday, I promised to put up the gloss on the thing today, and tell you all about social costs. IAnd I didn't. Why? Cause I'm a liar. But 'm gonna, I'm gonna, tomorrow.

Alan neglected to say that at least I give good link. Like that social cost link - how many sites direct you to a magazine founded by Bertrand Russell, eh?
-give me your comments - bath me in your collective sputum, shout me down, I'm ready to defend myself! ---Sorry, new software always makes me dramatic.

Let's see what happens if I try to post something.

Bits for today.

--- One of my favorite French authors, Raymond Queneau, was fascinated by "homemade" science - theories developed outside the purlieus of rationality which unfold with rigorous logic from a set of illogical premises - like Novalis' "blue flowers" - encyclopedic offspring of the night, deviant heliophobes. Queneau worked, briefly, on creating an anthology of visionaries from old pamphlets, police reports, and other disjecta - rather like Foucault's later attempt to find, in the archives, micro-historical deviancies beneath the level of hegemony. Anyway, Queneau would have loved the internet. I just found the Ed Conrad site, which brought to mind, irresistably, some of Queneau's cases. If you've ever wondered if man really was around 300 million years ago, Mr. Conrad is your man.

-- I was reading Richard Holmes Footsteps last night. Holmes is the biographer of Shelley and Coleridge. Footsteps is a collection of biographical essays, expressing Holmes' biographical method - that one literally follows in the footsteps of ones subjects. Being in the footstep is different from pretending to be "in" the subject - which I suppose could be called the Bob Woodward theory of biography, in which we presume the author has bugged his subject's mind, gone through his old underwear, and kept watch beneath his bed. Holmes submits to the evidence that the biographer is always outside the subject, knocking on the door. But much as Dupin, Poe's great detective, recommends that one try to "feel" one's way into the psychology of one's opponent by assuming his postures and facial expressions, Holmes tries to feel his way into his subjects by tracing their physical journeys. Of course, the footsteps aren't literally there - what Shelley actually saw in August, 1823 is long gone news. But there is something still powerful for us in sympathetic magic - Fraser's term, in the Golden Bough, for obtaining some object belonging to the target of the magician's spell in order to effect that spell. It is why we collect autographs and read biographies. And Holmes operates within that mentality.

The collection contains a very pretty essay on Mary Wollstonecraft, and in it Holmes quotes Hazlitt about William Godwin - MW's second husband, and a political radical in the 1790s, although not so radical in the 1820s:
"Is the truth then so variable? Is it one thing at twenty and another at forty? Is it a burning heat in 1793 and below zero in 1814?... Were we fools then, or are we dishonest now? Or was the impulse of the mind less likely to be true and sound when it arose from high thought at wram feeling, than afterwards, when it was warped and debased by the example, the vices, and follies of the world?"

Which is my question of the day.

There's a sick and sad story in the The New York Observer about the end of Science magazine. The details are reminiscent of what has been happening at the Smithsonian - the same shameful trampling of a rich culture by honchos (in this case, an odious toad by the name of Nichols) who are under the delusion they are CEOs. There is, it must always be remembered, a price for charity. Name a stadium, a school, a museum after a corporation and soon corporation mores will haunt your hallways. To put an end to a magazine put out by a foundation that promotes science because it is a "drain" is outrageous - it puts the profit motive before common sense.
I'll quote from two grafs in the article: "Its [the magazines] supporters have put up a Web site, SaveTheSciences.com, and are urging the academy�s international membership and other readers to register a protest at the site.

"Naturally, The Sciences� impressive roster of contributing editors�Stephen Jay Gould, Laurence Marschall, Rosamond Purcell, Robert Sapolsky and Hans Christian von Baeyer�oppose the academy�s decision. But the chief signatories to the Web site also include Richard Stolley, editorial director of Time Inc. magazines; Dennis Flanagan, retired editor of Scientific American; Frances Farrell, publisher of The Sporting News; and Dr. Nicholas Charney, co-founder of Psychology Today."

Go to the savescience website and raise your voice against Cor(po)ruption. - the Editor

Kiddies, gather round and let me tell you a story.
This is the story of Mr. X and Mr. Y., who lived next to each other in a subdivision. Mr. X lived in a house approximately one hundred times bigger than Mr. Y. Mr. X held parties every night for hundreds of people, drove a SUV/Sherman tank, and kept his lights burning brightly 24/7. Mr. Y had nine kids, drove a used pick-up truck, and he and his wife together managed to scrape through. One day Mr. X appeared at the fence separating their property and called Mr. Y over to pow-wow.

Mr. Y, Mr. X said, I have a problem. You see, I really want to get an SUV/Lear Jet next year � it is the newest thing. But I have to cut down on my living expenses, somehow, to do it. So I�ve decided to cancel my garbage service � it has been costing me a pretty penny! I�ve decided to dump my garbage on your property, instead. With that, Mr. X gave the signal, and his servants hoisted garbage cans and dumped two tons of leftover caviar on Mr. Y�s property.

Now, Kiddies, this is an interactive story! What do you think Mr. Y. said?

a. Well, Mr. X, two years ago you drove me to the bus stop in your SUV/Sherman tank, and that sure was neat! Maybe you�ll give me a ride in your SUV/Lear Jet, huh? if I help out here. What say? So sure, dump that garbage!
Or
b. I�m getting� my gun and gonna blow your ass away.
Or
c. You must think I�m dumb � I�m gonna sue you if you drop even a speck of stinky caviar on my property.

Now, your faithful storyteller used to think that the appropriate response was b, back in the days when he had utopian/revolutionary hopes. Now your storyteller is a middle-aged man with more moderate views � or perhaps he is simply more depressed. So he�d opt for c.

Nobody, I think, would opt for a. Well, nobody except for public policymakers in the US of A., who have unanimously opted for it, from the local to the federal level, for the last thirty years. Those funny guys!

You see, this story illustrates the social cost of doing business. Can you say social cost, kiddies? Now of course there�s a big opaque name for such things � externalities. Notice how that seems so Pentagon gray as a word � it is like those frightening latin words the teacher uses in sex ed, isn�t it? Actually, business here is a bit of a misnomer � as the Soviet Union showed, there are terrific social costs in socialist enterprise too. In fact, they can be higher than in capitalist enterprises. But let�s put that aside for a second � the point here is that Mr. Y is being asked to assume a cost. He has to assume it somehow � with two tons of caviar rotting on his lawn, he has to either pay the garbageman to clean it up, or take refuge from its fumes in a hotel, but he has out of pocket expenses, here.

One of the paradoxes of libertarian oriented defenses of �property rights� is that, as policy, it ends up justifying the degradation of small properties to the benefits of large ones. This comes out of a stubborn refusal to understand or consider scale, and how it effects a social system. (By the way, I call this a paradox to be polite � in fact, the revolutionary/utopian side of me considers that this is an intended outcome, favoring, by means of a childish mystification, the wealthier class over the working class. But, ha ha, I�ve gotten all Clintonian about those things in my middle age, like I said. So I�m just going to say it�s a theoretical glitch, but aren�t we all workin� for the same darn goal?)

Now, let�s take our parable a little further, shall we? Uncle S. comes to Mr. Y., who is standing next to that steaming mound of caviar, and Uncle S. says, hey, I�ve got an idea! You just give me 40 percent of your salary and I�ll clean that mess up tout suite! Which the hapless Mr. Y. does. Now Uncle Sam, he�s a sort of card, and so what does he do with Mr. Y.�s money. Why, first he gives a goodly bit of it to Mr. X. That�s because Uncle Sam has had so many rides in Mr. X�s SUV/Sherman tank that he thinks it�s just natural to help Mr. X get a larger vehicle. Boy, wait till he�s tooling around with Mr. X, Uncle Sam thinks, won�t those female interns go wild! Then he contracts to remove the caviar. You known that Uncle S., though, he has good intentions but somehow things just get in the way. It is hard to say what things, but he doesn�t do exactly the best job of it. He does say that he�s gonna take care of that unsightly pile on a schedule � yessir, in three or four years, or maybe a decade, he�s gonna get rid of it. But it gradually starts rotting into the water supply and such, don�t you know. And then it is sorta invisible, so who really cares? In the meantime, Mr. X saves money by throwing all his garbage out on Mr. Y�s lawn. After a while, Mr. Y., who hasn�t had a raise in years (his boss, Mr. X�s cousin, always says, a raise is the devil�s workshop � why it leads to inflation!) gets a little impatient. Why is Uncle Sam taking such a bite from his paycheck and doing diddly squat?

At this point Mr. X, who, let�s admit it, is a bit of a card himself, appears at the fence again. You are so right about that Uncle S., Mr. X says. He�s taking way too much out of your check, so the thing to do to solve this mess you are in is to get him to stop doing that!

Like I say, Mr. X is canny, and he�s been figuring out his costs again. Although Uncle S. gives him a great deal of support, Mr. X does have to pay Uncle S. a certain amount too � the neighborhood association dues, don�t you know. So when Mr. Y gets a lower rate from Uncle S., so does Mr. X! And by the law of percentages, don�t you know that the chunk going to Mr. X is much bigger than the chunk going to Mr. Y.!

Luckily, there�s an explanation for this � Mr. X is a much more ingenuous guy � why, doesn�t he deserve to harvest the fruits of his ingenuity? With one thing and another, that canny jack of all trades is now making so much money he gets two or three of those great new SUV/Lear Jets.

Oh well. All stories must have an end. In order to drive his vehicle around, Mr. X had to have the roads widened, so Uncle S., with tears in his eyes, condemned Mr. Y�s house and moved him out, lock stock and barrel. So there it is, a bare fact - the road got widened and no more Mr. Y in the neighborhood. Mr. X is kindly disposed, however, so he even got his cousin to put up a toll booth on the road, so that Mr. Y�s wife could get an extra job to help support the family. She also got a badge and a gun, to make sure the gardeners toiling on Mr. X�s land didn�t escape � turned out a goodly percentage of them had intoxicated themselves with terrible chemicals! INEXPLICABLE, ain�t it � given the beauty of reality and all, with towering purple mountain�s majesty of rotting caviar for all to see! People who escape reality, as Mr. X explained to Mrs. Y, have it coming. (Mr. X then pulled out a fine little softcore porn tape and invited Mrs. Y to see it with him in the master bedroom). So - All�s well that ends well! And Mr. Y is doing just fine in a
smaller trailer � he didn�t need that property of his, after all!

Kiddies, tomorrow I�m going to explain the deeper meaning of my story. Till then � this is the Editor.

Sorry, a null set post. Today, the blog isn't working. I'll have something up tomorrow.

Bjorn Lomborg seems set to be the most quoted environmentalist of the season. The reason? He has a conversion story. There he was, according to himself, your average know nothing Greenpeace schmoe, kvetching about mass extinction and Global Warming on Planet Gaia, when he got knocked down (spiritually, that is) by libertarian skeptics of the environmental model. No doubt, like Saul, he had his days of reclusion and blindness, the night sweats, the fever - but a vision of Gale Norton apparently visited him, saying, in an unearthly voice, go and tell all mankind about the wonders of cost benefit analysis! So he arose from his bed and now he's come out with a book, and at such a convenient time, too! What with the trashing of the Kyoto accords and all, which looks so terrible in the press. The book plays a theme dear to the corporate mindset - that is, that environmentalists exaggerate, and that such things as climate change, or environmental damage, are myths generated by inaccurate or skewed stats and projections of enviro- Nazis. Of course, modern day converts never convert all the way - they want to bring their cultural capital with them, otherwise they become just another Jack in the Pack. So instead of taking the mantle of libertarian debunker, Lomborg, of course, is still describing himself as an environmentalist. He is of that less dogmatic type, undisturbed when they blacktop those pristine redwood forests in California. Plenty more where that came from! Hell, wonders of biotech nowadays, we'll just fix us up a batch in a laboratory. So come on down, Butterfly!!!

Lomborg summarizes these views in an Economist article. He has developed a handy name - the Litany - for the general complaints about ecological degradation bandied about by environmentalists. He goes through the four major points in the Economist article.
I actually agree with one of his points - I have no sympathy with the population control crowd. In fact, the Litany is very skewed, itself, to the kind of environmentalism represented by Paul Ehrlich and the Club of Rome, which has always been very alarmist about the depletion of natural resources and the danger of over-population.
It is his third and fourth points I find extremely shaky. First, there is the threat of biodiversity loss. Lomburg says this is exaggerated. But his base for that loss is extinction. He doesn't defend this as a standard. He writes, for instance, of predictions of extinction, "...the data simply does not bear out these predictions. In the eastern United States, forests were reduced over two centuries to fragments totalling just 1-2% of their original area, yet this resulted in the extinction of only one forest bird." Presumably he means the Ivory Billed Woodpecker, or perhaps the Carolina Parakeet (that I can name two candidates off the top of my head - and I'm no ornithologist - makes me think that his claim is probably factually dubious). Lomburg simply ignores monoculture, and the destruction of biodiverse habitats. If the loblolly pine takes over the ecological niche of, say, the live oak in Southern Georgia, sure, that doesn't entail the extinction of the live oak - it simply entails its rarity, its being thrusted to the periphery. The whooping crane is not extinct - but the number of the whooping crane is such that its former environmental role is, basically, non-existent. In other words, bio-diversity certainly doesn't mean that species that hang on in severely diminished numbers are some kind of proof that the ecology has remained unimpaired.
Finally, the claim that "pollution is also exaggerated" is much too unilateral. Lomburg shows that London air was much more polluted in the 1880s then now. His claim is, presumably, about particulate pollution. But the harm of a pollutant isn't necessarily in its quantity - small quantities of certain pollutants are much more harmful than large quantities of other pollutants. Take Lead. When lead was put into gasoline, it was emitted in quantities that were less than, say, the quantity of carbon dust released by coal energy - but lead is much more toxic. Also, Lomburg simply ignores the complexity of pollution. London is a good example - after the killing fogs of the fifties, a concerted effort was made to clean up the London air. But the clean-up inadvertantly lead to ozone problems, as the sunlight could now interact with car emissions - in other words, smog.

Finally, Lomburg engages in some suspicious cost analysis. For instance, he quotes a chart showing how much it costs to save a persons life in terms of regulation, and enforcing the use of various pollution reduction devices. This is a very common fallacy among the anti-enviro set - that there is only one set of costs. What is never done is to ask - what does pollution cost if it isn't cleaned up? The tacit assumption is that pollution control is some kind of bizarre luxury. If your car emits certain gases, well, that's a moral problem, but surely not an economic one. Right? Wrong. Pollution is not a free lunch. The question is: who pays for the social cost of pollution? This question is evaded by giving us the unilateral costs to businesses of pollution clean-up - which is like being given one side of an accounting ledger. If it costs 800 dollars to install seat belts, for instance, what isn't asked is - how much does it cost to pay for the additional injuries that would result from lack of seat belts? If it costs a million dollars to install filters on a coal burning power plant, how much does it cost, in terms of life and property degradation, when the unfiltered pollution is allowed to spread from the plant? In fact, this is where environmentalists, far from being alarmists, have been sleepwalking - partly because they don't think in terms of, say, property values. The anti-enviro crowd is happy enough with that - they can pass the cost of skewed statistics onto the back of the average citizen, in the shape of using them to justify dirty public policy.

I've written a little essay on the social costs of doing business which I ought to post this week, to continue this discussion.
Anyway, all my caveats aren't going to matter - Lomburg is on his way as the corporate environmentalist du jour. He is handsome, he has a conversion story, and he uses models preferred by the business crowd. What could be better?
Contact me at the Editor

Ah, Fascism. Two stories this morning about the fallout from the G8 summit - which has been abundantly underreported, as in not at all, in the US. Der Spiegel has a pretty shocking story:Genua: Wer ist verantwortlich f�r die Pr�gelorgien? - Politik - SPIEGEL ONLINE that, in the end, dovetails with what one suspects about the Berlusconi crowd - I mean, these people have deep roots in the culture of White terror. Certainly in the seventies, right wing groups used the tactics of the agent provacateur, as well as committing acts of terror - notoriously the bombing of the Milan train station - which they hoped would be blamed on the left. Genoa seems, more and more, like old home week - notice, in the Spiegel article, the references to Pinochet, a much admired old man in Euro right circles. Italian culture seems to have a talent for magnifying conflicts which are given a more discrete instantiation in other cultures. The second story about this is in today's New York Times. The Times story doesn't have the bite about Berlusconi, but does have an interesting bit about the arrest of an Austrian theater troupe.

Very nice essay by Walter Johnson -Common-place: Re-readings: Roll, Jordan, Roll. Eugene Genovese, the historian of slavery in question, is one of those odd American figures, like Sydney Hook, who advanced, by a somnabulistic logic, from left to right without ever seeming to notice where he was heading - which is why he can consort with Confederate revivalists today without a qualm.

Johnson is sharp about two of Genovese's controverted themes in Roll, Jordon, Roll - paternalism and hegemony. Here's a quote:

"The notion of slaveholders fabricating themselves for an audience of their own slaves in a kind of Hegelian dialectic is an extraordinarily powerful one, and it illuminates countless aspects of American slavery. It does not, however, quite capture the quicksilver slipperiness with which slaveholders could reformulate the nominally beneficent promises of paternalism into self-serving regrets, reactionary nostalgia, and flat-out threats. Can it be mere coincidence that so many examples of planters expressing ostensibly "paternalist" sentiments refer to slaves who have disappeared or are in the process of disappearing?"

I'd like to quote more, since the theme of paternalism is endlessly suggestive of the rhetorical structure to which the American ruling class seems to instinctively turn when it is justifying its position. Johnson doesn't mention the obvious similarity between the rhetoric of factory owners in New England and the slaveholding class, although they obviously emerge at the same time. This isn't to equate the two, that persistant trope of Southern apologists - it is merely to point out that the rhetorical apparatus can be applied to quite different objects.

Yesterday I wrote two long pieces about the need to raise CAFE standards. I wasn't nice to the auto companies in those posts. I feel like continuing my mean streak by linking to the main story at Commercial Alert :

Nader Criticizes Smithsonian Head For Proposed Naming Rights Deal With General Motors.

First graf is in R.N.'s best meateatin' style:

"Following a news report that the Smithsonian Institution has offered General Motors the right to name the museum's new transportation hall for $10 million, Ralph Nader said that Smithsonian Secretary Lawrence Small "seems to recognize no limits to the commercialization of this historic, non-profit, taxpayer-supported institution. To let GM pay for, be associated with and influential over a transportation exhibit, given its decades long record of criminal convictions, buying up and displacing mass transit systems, producing unsafe and polluting cars, is to confess to a complete abdication of any standards of museum integrity and independence."

But I do think Nader shouldn't be so upset at the GM deal - word is that Zurich Banks are going to be funding a funfilled Smithsonian exhibit on Swiss resistance to the holocaust in the Autumn season - followed of course by an Exxon funded exhibit, You are my sunshine: climate change and progress! in the spring. Remember to bring the kids - the motto of this latter is, inevitably, the future's so bright, you gotta wear shades!

Chubby Checker (Biography)has written a letter to the world in which he makes a dignified plea to the Nobel Committee to finally give it up and give him his prize. The key graf is this:

"Chubby Checker gave birth to aerobics.

He gave to music a movement that could not be found unless you were trained at some studio learning something other than dancing apart to the beat. It's easy. It's fun. The "Twist" [is] the only song, since time began, to become number one twice by the same artist. Oh yes, we're talking about the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. But lets face the truth. This is Nobel Prize Territory."
Mr Checker, you'll notice, talks about himself in the third person, imitating Henry Adams.

Well, let's compare Mr. Checker to Mr. Henry (the butcher) Kissinger, who did get a Nobel Prize, for peace no less.
On the one side you have The Twist, the invention of aerobics, and an eponymous brand of beef jerky, which you can buy from his site.

On the other side, you have the bombing of Cambodia, the Tilt towards Pakistan, the support of the Military regimes in Argentina, Indonesia, Chile, and Greece, the unnecessary extension of American military engagement in Vietnam for six years, and - oh, just throw in various slimy actions in Africa, culminating in the co-support, with the South African government of so-called Liberation fronts in Angola,and the propping up of such dictators as Mobuto in Zaire.

Okay. Judges, have you decided? Write down your answers on a piece of paper and give them to my lovely assistant. The clock is ticking away. One .... two.... three....
And now let's tally the vote, shall we. Silence, please ----
YES! IT IS UNANIMOUS! TAKE HENRY KISSINGER'S NOBEL PRIZE AND GIVE IT TO CHUBBY CHECKER! THE JUDGES HAVE SPOKEN.
Could there possibly be a better cause?
Contact me at - rgathman@aol.com. Let's make this cause a party.

This week saw the House, in a typical display of cowardice, greed, and ideology, pass an energy bill that would mandate drilling in the Arctic refuge, license more coalburning and nuclear power plants, and (oh acme of corporate happiness! Oh Tom Delay�s toupee! Oh American satanic mills, asleep in every garage! � to get all Allen Ginsburg about it) block raising the CAFE (corporate average fuel economy) standard, and in particular the notoriously lower CAFE for what are comically called light trucks, officially defined as those having a �gross vehicle weight rating� of 6000 pounds or less. This action comes on the heels of our latest amnesia � that is, the announcement in the spring, when fuel prices were high, by the Big Three that they were voluntarily going to raise the miles per gallon for both passenger and light truck. Yeah, right. Because amnesia leads to repetition � memory loss being one thing, and habit, or addiction, being quite another, this the double track of human nature � nobody remembers that the same noise came rolling out of Detroit, like a sadly safety challenged Pinto, in the seventies, and thereafter has been issued whenever legislation looked like it was going to force Detroit to actually move its more than 6000 pound metal behind.

The history of Detroit�s callous attitude towards clean cars has been detailed by Jack Doyle in a book entitled Taken for a Ride, put out by Four Walls Four Windows press (which, incidentally, puts out some killer investigative journalism). Doyle was interviewed about the book by EVWorld. Doyle discusses an argument made by the UAW to nudge enough Dems loose to support continuing the CAFE freeze � that the standards would lead to job cuts. The thinking is, it is so expensive to institute the technology that would be necessary to achieve fuel efficiency that the companies would have to shut down factory lines. As Doyle points out, quite correctly, the auto companies seem to have no problem throwing the truly astonishing wads of money they have amassed in the past ten to fifteen years � veddy veddy good years for Detroit�s profit picture, and enough to make the whole of the computer industry look like yokels vending home made pie recipes � to buy diverse non-auto-related companies (did anybody say Hughes Electronics) and revamp, at exorbitant cost, factories with up to date robotics and computers. The odious Roger Smith, former CEO of GM, was particularly gaga about robotics, and spent enormous sums on them without getting a corresponding return. One study concluded about Smith�s leadership of GM in the eighties:
�GM ended up spending tens of billions of dollars for little or no reward. Despite the high-tech, GM became less, not more, efficient.� So one can only conclude that money spent making cars and light trucks more fuel efficient is magic money, peculiarly cursed from the labor perspective.

Another argument about CAF� that has become popular among the auto hacks and their political allies is that fuel efficiency is dangerous. When the House voted on raising CAFE standards for SUVS, the Times quoted Billy Tauzin, the petro point man in the house, as saying "This amendment will end up killing Americans." The argument goes like this: since the automakers have unleashed a flood of heavier �light trucks� on the roads, small cars are less safe. And so any attempt to reduce the throw weight of a car, now, is a sort of unilateral disarmament in the arms race. Of course, this argument is in itself a little screwy. In fact, it is the logic of power Detroit always, in the last resort, relies upon. It is as if a bankrobber were to argue that since he now is in effective possession of the bank�s money, there�s no sense in preventing him from investing it. USA today published a canonical, and influential, version of this script in an article by their automobile journalist, James Healy, Death by the Gallon, in 1999.
. The article�s point is summed up like this:
�� in the 24 years since a landmark law to conserve fuel, big cars have shrunk to less-safe sizes and small cars have poured onto roads. As a result, 46,000 people have died in crashes they would have survived in bigger, heavier cars, according to USA TODAY's analysis of crash data since 1975, when the Energy Policy and Conservation Act was passed. �
Small cars �pouring� onto the roads? And big cars shrinking to �less safe sizes�? I suppose one should parse this sentence the way one parses Clinton�s court testimony. Big cars aren�t the equivalent of �light trucks,� so possibly the throw weight of your average Mercury Lincoln has been modified, although isn�t there something, well, pre-formed about describing downsizing as shrinking it to a �less safe size?�

The sensational news in the USA piece, widely quoted, is that there are �roughly 7,700 deaths for every mile per gallon gained, the analysis shows.�

Notice, of course, the assumption that auto emissions are harmless � that the increase in emissions from cars cause no loss of life to be measured against the 7,700 deaths. Air pollution, subtext is, is a airy fairy issue � I mean, who dies from ingesting a few thousand pounds more CO2 every year?
As for that number and its link to CAFE standards � even Healy is a little nervous about the direct correlation, since it implies
1. the only way to make a car more fuel efficient is to downsize it.
and
2. that materials technology has not advanced a whit from 1975.
In fact, outside of the Auto industry, it certainly has. Bill Lovens, who has been working on the clean car for years, has advocated using carbon fiber technology, instead of moving to aluminum alloys � Detroit�s favorite way to shave car weight. Instead of spending billions on robotic factories that don�t make money, GM could have spent the equivalent sum re-designing smaller cars with safer and lighter materials.
But Detroit has always played a passive aggressive game when it comes to auto manufacture. When the California Air Resource Board, in the early nineties, mandated a certain percentage of zero emission vehicles, Detroit grumblingly created some Evs, which they then priced exorbitantly and closed down as soon as they could � the latest victim being a GM EV that it claims was not selling, although it refuses to back up that claim by showing any records. Similarly, it is due to Detroit that we play this game of trading off fuel efficiency against safety.
Healy�s article goes on to make a curiously schizophrenic point � that small cars are no match for large cars, or trucks, so that they are unsafe by physical law - but that the majority of small car fatalities don�t involve crashing into large SUVs, or trucks. After all, point one leads to asking about point two � where did these large vehicles come from? Since the article�s premise is that there has been a general downsizing of �cars,� it renders the real composition of the road unintelligible. But the reality principle demands that you admit that, yes Virginia, the real question isn�t larger �automobiles� � it is the monstrous �large trucks� which have infested the road and made driving in a smaller vehicle more hazardous.
The report�s odd logic when it comes to the safety of small cars becomes positively bizarre when it lays out the case againt CAF�. It notes that �CAFE and its small cars have not reduced overall U.S. gasoline and diesel fuel consumption as hoped. A strong economy and growing population have increased consumption. The U.S. imports more oil now than when the standards were imposed.� Really? You freeze a standard for twenty years, you make a loophole for the largest percentage of vehicle sold, and you don�t reduce oil consumption? My god, call the presses!

As for USA�s statistical analysis, it is disputed. Paul Rauber of Sierra Magazine responded to Healey�s article:

�The General Accounting Office studied the same basic data as USA Today and declared that "it is not true that cars become more dangerous simply by becoming lighter." Nor is that the main reason they're becoming more fuel efficient; rather, 86 percent of fuel-efficiency improvement is the result of technological innovation." CAFE does not dictate vehicle size, weight, or safety," says Dan Becker, head of the Sierra Club's Global Warming and Energy campaign. "Automakers do." Cars have become twice as fuel efficient since CAFE was instituted, he points out, but automobile death rates have been cut in half�

With all the demos against the WTO and the G8 - demos that I heartily approve of - its the phalanxes of the auto industry that really determine what is going to be done about our atmospheric deterioration. Instead of to the barricades, may I suggest: to the auto-lot?

read the second to last post first, then the last one. Sorry, I somehow screwed up the order.

Saturday. Hmm. Since my posts are all going into the archive, and hence will remain unlooked at and unneeded, in that state of suspended animation known to vampires and retired vice presidents, I figure this is a good time to make some recommends - you know, explore the Net's Black Sea, those odd and mystic reaches, where who knows what can jump out and seriously scare you. Recommend one is a magazine named Vice - the site is named Viceland. They have an interview with a twenty-four year old Italian director and actress who wants to make an even sharper nail out of porn and violence, like her daddy, an old shockmeister moviemaker, did. And then they have this: THE ROAD TO EUPHORIA - A True Story of Dealing E back in 1993. This is an absolutely funny account of trying to sell a drug before its time - namely, Ecstasy to Manitobians and the like in 1993. Those lumberjacks and meatshop men want to party like its 1988, with your standard crack pipe, and they don't know what to make of the chic divinity in a white pill that this guy is dealing - like, does it go well with Moosehead? Here's a quote, a potdealer explaining where how to market the product to the yahoos, with a sidenote about the history of the substance :

"And second you got to find a jazzy name. You should call yours White Lightning or Pearl Buzz, too bad they didn�t think to throw in some color. You need color in the psychedelics business. You could have Pink Nike or Chocolate Rave, although E ain�t a real psychedelic, in the sacred sense I mean. It came out of the designer drugs in Southern Cal back in the 70s. Originally, there were supposed to be five Es: Ecstasy, Euphoria, Empathy, Epiphany, and Enlightenment, but the DEA grabbed the principal guy in Laguna before he could get all of the Es done up. Then the bikers came along with their bathtub PCP and fucked up everything. The rest is history, but hey, real Es got some integrity.�

And we have so little integrity in the modern world, n'est-ce pas?

Please read the 12:36 am post first.

The New Colonist is a webzine. Not a lot of people have heard of it, but it does an ace job of reporting on urban culture and issues. Also, isn't it nice to see a webzine not go down like some junky cosmonaut, to quote a song? Eric Miller has a nice article on the abuse of eminent domain laws.
AH, I know, I know -- those are sleepin' words, pardner - eminent domain. But while the legalese puts the good people to sleep, city honchos often operate as front men for corporations and developers by using the power to seize property in order to suppress "blight." Here's a quote from the piece:

"But just what is blight? Can a business district will almost full retail occupancy be considered blighted? Can a discount store be labeled as blighted so that an upscale chain can move in? Can a golf course constitute blight? Can a working factory be labeled as blighted so that another factory can raze the plant to build a new facility? Increasingly, the answer to these questions is yes.

In Las Vegas, some legislators and community activists recently opposed a new �development,� not on the grounds of saving historic buildings, but on the grounds that the local government may have larger goals than removing blight. The group demanded that potential beneficiaries in �blight removal� schemes be named.

Nevada Assembly woman Chris Giunchigliani introduced legislation that would redirect five percent of redevelopment money away from commercial projects to be used for sidewalk repairs, street lights and other improvements, but according to the Las Vegas Sun, officials �came out in force� to object to redevelopment money being used for neighborhood blight. "

To fight blight is one thing, but to find out who benefits from that fight is a dastardly usurpation of a timehonored government function - graft and the redistribution of wealth upwards.

Okay, I'm rather splenetic today. Mal d'actualites, don't you know. It is one of those days, Congress rolls over for Bush, the planet's whacked, and Dick Cheney, in all his goutridden and disgusting length, is infused with a feeling of youth. Doesn't it make you sick? Write me at the Editor

Calling Ralph Nadar -
Last year, much heavy weather was made of Nadar's "betrayal" of the progressive cause by running against the oleaginous Al Gore, Among the organizations that berated Nadar's lese majeste was the Sierra Club. Well, Sierra Club, what do you think of your big dumb dead Dems now? According to a nice piece in the Times today, Bush's energy bill, routinely denounced by Dem bigshots when it was wheeled out, was quietly voted for by Dem bigshots when it was on the floor. Roll of Shame in a minute. First, two quotes from the NYT article:

"One decisive factor appeared to be support for drilling and opposition to substantially higher fuel efficiency standards among Democratic members of the Congressional Black Caucus. Representatives Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, Edolphus Towns of New York, Earl F. Hilliard of Alabama and James E. Clyburn of South Carolina were among Mr. Bush's supporters on both measures. Each refused to comment."

Why would they refuse to comment? Perhaps because they were selling their constituents down the river? Unfortunately, they could do this because they know their constituents don't know it. The ranks of the enviro and consumer movements are lilly white, and this is beginning to tell in the kind of pull these groups can exert. It doesn't have to be this way. God knows, the most egregious environmental crimes wrought against human beings in this country by the oil companies and the highway lobby are aimed against black and hispanic neighborhoods - for example Cancer Gulch, the extraordinary concentration of refiners and petro-chemical factories south of Baton Rouge in Louisiana - which I presume Bennie Thompson knows about.

"Environmentalists were also stung by the opposition of several senior Democrats. In addition to Mr. Gephardt and Mr. Bonior, Representatives James L. Oberstar of Minnesota, the ranking Democrat on the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure; Paul E. Kanjorski of Pennsylvania, the minority whip at large; and Martin Frost of Texas, chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, all voted in accordance with the president on at least one of the two major energy amendments."

That's right, kiddies - the Dem minority leader in the House and the Whip voted for Royal George's Flush as in, flush the environment down the toilet. There will be a progressive movement in this country - I'm sure of it - AS SOON AS WE DRIVE A STAKE THROUGH THE HEART OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY!

And while we are at it about the progressive coalition - guess who did the watercarrying for the Auto companies about blocking raising the CAFE standards - that is, blocking raising that requirement for fuel efficiency in cars, which - attention to those of you enamored of Bill and Al's excellent adventure in the White House - hasn't been raised since the Gipper's funfilled decade? The UAW, that's who. On this issue, Unions in this country are still adhering to the Peronista standard - the only thing that counts is money, the corporations have the money, let's play with the corporations. Well, they've been beaten by the corporations every time they take this stance. It doesn't seem to matter, however - the George Meany learning curve seems set in concrete up there in Detroit. Plus, the threat to cut jobs - always the standard tropism of the Big Three whenever they are poked about, oh, getting rid of lead in gas, or making cars that don't explode like balloons filled with gasoline - seems to galvanize unions like the volts zipping through Frankenstein's monster. But this is an instance which might cost them - after all, they need the environmentalists to block trade deals (giveaways like NAFTA).
I'd like to give you a hall of shame - the names of the 36 Dems who voted for the bill - but you have to parse out the individual Dems at the Roll Call supplied by Yahoo.

This site is definitely a find:
rockcritics.com
I've always wanted to like rock critics - to find that magic skipping style supposedly developed in the early seventies by Rolling Stone's best - but usually they disappoint me. Nick Tosches is an exception, at least in his history/extended muse on Country music, and his bio of Jerry Lee Lewis (the biography of Dean Martin, on the other hand, gets stuck in its own jam). But face it, rock critics have much more glamour than us poor book reviewers.

You never know what you're gonna find on the Net - still. For instance, the Paris Review has been putting up its interviews. The latest one is of Rick Moody. I have to get to the interview I am supposedly writing up today, although I've been so lazy lately I wonder if I should resist this undertow, this doggy inertia.
Write me at the Editor

Annals of Business Life

I've been following the news stories in the Times Business section about AremisSoft ever since the company claimed it had discovered the key to wealth in Bulgaria. According to its initial press release, the company was all set to sell the Bulgarian government something like a hundred million dollars worth of software - and then the Bulgarian government said, hey, wait a minute, we don't have that kind of money. It was all a scam, but as soon as this scam broke the surface in the news, the company execs and some brokers who'd been shilling AremisSoft stock counter-attacked, claiming this was a company of exemplary prospects being viciously attacked by shortsellers. Well, today's news is that the company "misplaced" its profits. Darn it, they'd stuffed that money in some old jar in the kitchen and just couldn't remember where. More Trouble for Maker of Software

Here's my favorite quote from the article:

"In addition, the company said that Michael Tymvios, its chief financial officer, had resigned for health reasons and that its auditors could not find $5.4 million that AremisSoft booked as revenue last year. AremisSoft said it had asked PKF, its auditor, to review its books, but that the inquiry had been delayed because AremisSoft had been unable to contact its own executives to get information that PKF needed to complete the review."

Apparently everybody connected with AremisSoft has simultaneously been afflicted with telephone aphonia - the article goes on to list the unreturned calls to the president, the brokers who were shilling the stock, etc.

AremisSoft is just the most extreme version of a quiet re-evaluation of the profits that were made by companies in the bubble years. There was a WSJ article about that last week, which I can't link to, since I am not a WSJ subscriber. But do you hear any contrition from the bubble boosters, the James Glassmans (of the infamous Dow36,000 book)?
No. Contrition, my dear, is for losers.

Everybody is talking about the rude obit of Katherine Graham crafted by some anonymous minion of Scaife's Pittsburg rag. The best part of the National Post article, by Mark Steyn, is this (first a quote from the Pittsburg article, then Steyn's comments):

"She married Felix Frankfurter's brilliant law clerk, Philip Graham, who took over running The Post, which her father purchased at a bankruptcy sale. Graham built the paper but became estranged from Kay. She had him committed to a mental hospital, and he was clearly intending divorce when she signed him out and took him for a weekend outing during which he was found shot. His death was ruled a suicide. Within 48 hours, she declared herself the publisher."

That's the stuff! As the Tribune-Review's chap has it, Mrs. G got her philandering spouse banged up in the nuthouse and then arranged a weekend pass with a one-way ticket. "His death was ruled a suicide." Lovely touch that. Is it really possible Katharine Graham offed her hubby? Who cares? To those who think the worst problem with the American press is its awful stultifying homogeneity, the Tribune-Review's deranged perverseness is to be cherished. Give that man a Pulitzer!"

Unfortunately, he ruins the mood by getting to his point, which is that Katie Graham was soft on Clinton - a rather ridiculous charge, as anybody who read the Post during the dismal impeachment days knows. Or at least, it is ridiculous as Steyn couches it. If Steyn's problem with the Post that they did not harp continually on Clinton's willingness to bomb Sudan for petty political gain, certainly an impeachable offense in my book, then I would have been all with him - but no, Steyn thinks that Monica =Watergate. The delusions of the right have no end.

On the other hand, give The Spectator, definitely a rightwing magazine, a prize for a really scathing obituary by a Andrew Gimson. He starts off with a killer lede: "Helmut Kohl has buried many bodies in his time, and now he has buried his wife Hannelore." He manages to stuff into the first graf an jibe at Kohl's arranging the funeral in a Roman Catholic church for a supposed protestant suicide, and then ends on this wonderfully abrasive note:
"The German media had already, almost without exception, swallowed Mr Kohl�s explanation for her death, which was that she was suffering from such an agonising allergy to light that for the last 15 months she had only been able to leave the house under cover of darkness."

Subsequently, Grimson shows that Hannelore Kohl's curious condition might have had less to do with the heliophobia, and more to do with his husband's "companion/secretary," Juliane Weber.

Basic subtext is the fat guy strangling his wife, then unctuously conducting her obsequies in a cathedral stuffed vest to wurst with Deutschland's best and brightest, in a tableau right out of Georg Grosz. Probably took his chippie out for funeral meats, afterwards. Much more topical than Philip Graham's suicide, right? I wasn't expecting such a bracing little tale from the Spectator, of all places.

Back in June, when Roland Dumas was sentenced to a pittance punishment, I got up a head of steam and wrote my friend MB an e-mail which read:

I don't know if you have been following L'affaire ELF, but the sentences came out today, and Dumas got basically six months. That is so outrageous I can barely believe it. The french elites definitely protect each other - to an alarming and disgusting extent. Even in the USA, not a standard by any means, the secretary of Defense being on the take would have brought a sentence of at least 5 years or more. I don't remember how much John Mitchell got, but I think it was something like that.
It did get me thinking, however, about Dumas' old patron, Mitterand, and whether he was, possibly, the worst Western leader since 1945. I think Nixon has to have that honor, but Mitterand is a close second. His system of traditional corruption - you know, it was through ELF that M.'s government basically fronted money to Kohl - his gutting of socialism, so that it is impossible to know, nowadays, if you are a voter, whether a vote for the socialist or the conservative will result in more conservative politcies - his dirty-ness in Africa, especially Rwanda - his intellectual filthiness, starting with his collaborationist past - hmm, yeah, right after Nixon. Even Thatcher and Reagan weren't as bad as old M. Really, if Europe takes a lunge towards fascism again - as is possible with Berlusconi - it will be because of the seeds left by the eighties - the sort of triangle of corruption, Andreotti/Craxi -- Mitterand -- Kohl.
Ah, as Rimbaud used to say,
Mon triste coeur bave � la poupe.

And then, still not finished with the subject, I wrote:

I am still steaming over the Dumas trial. Finally I've been able to read most of the net newspapers about it - and one of the things which does make me, well, sad, is how it was reported in Liberation. Which used to be a lefty, investigative paper. It seems to me that their reporting, here, was pretty establishment. Something has gone out of Libe - they are too interested in being cool, nowadays. They'd rather report on some goddamn trend in French pop music than on who is giving who money under the table.
I guess the thing that amazes me most is that Dumas' ex-mistress got a tougher sentence than he did. That makes no sense to me - her job, as procuress for ELF, would not exist except for the fact that she was indeed able to procur for ELF, via Dumas. She was just an instrument.
But anyway, what really amazes me is that a thug like Dumas still has his influence in the PS - and more, that Jospin is doing his best to stifle the few legislators who are willing to go after the elite crooks, including Chirac. The NYT quoted the mayor of Paris as saying that if they made arrests for all the corruption, they'd "empty" the political field.
My god, what a system.
Well, I might have been too harsh on Libe.
Anyway, the point of the post today, people, is that the tie between the financing of the CDP in Germany, Mitterand, and ELF, still has not become totally clear. Maybe poor Frau Kohl knew too much. Reach me for comments at the Editor

NATIONAL POST ONLINE | Printer Friendly | News Article

Yesterday I promised the story of the Mirror spies. This comes from The Mirror, a history by Sabine Melchior-Bonnet. She found it in a nineteenth century historian, Elphege Fremy.
The seventeenth century Venitian Republic was, as is well known, wealthy due, in part, to its monopoly on fine glasswork, and in particular its fine mirrors. The craftsmen who produced those mirrors were recipients of the hundred techniques handed down through two centuries that made Venice's mirrors the clearest, largest, and most expensive in Europe. The French, under Louis XIV, were jealous - especially Louis' financial minister, Colbert. Colbert decided to have the French ambassador to Venice entice a certain number of mirror masters to Paris, where the government could sponsor a factory. Being an early mercantilist, Colbert was firmly persuaded that the flow of wealth out of France for these mirrors was depleting the national economy.
But there was a problem. The Venitians kept a close watch on their mirror makers. They had laws forbidding them from emigrating, and when these laws were violated the Venitians had a very efficient spy-system to enforce the wrath of the Republic on its erring workmen. Well, somehow the French ambassador was able to round up and dispatch to Colbert in Paris a number of mirrormakers, and so a factory was set up - the Royal Company of Glass and Mirrors, the ancestor of the famous St. Gobain works. But then the Venitians struck. Two mirrormasters died mysteriously, in 1667; the whole set of the mirrormakers were continuously provoked in the streets, and kept getting into brawls; and worst of all, they were lonely. Colbert promised to get their wives out of Venice, but the Venitian spy service actually substituted letters, purportedly from the wives, in response to Colbert's request, the upshot of which was the wives wanted their husbands back home. Meanwhile, the mirror works kept losing money, and mirror smugglers started operating on the South coast of France, bringing in the more expensive Venitian mirrors to undercut the native product.

Somehow, this history naturally lends itself to metaphor. Angleton, the crazy head of CounterIntelligence I wrote about yesterday, once called Counterintelligence a "wilderness of mirrors." Someday I think I will write a story about these mirrormakers and their dark shadows, the spies. It would make a nice little historical mystery, don't you think?
Whatever you think, send me an e-mail. The Editor

Today's motto, which is startlingly pertinent to the weblog form, is from Jules Renard. Here's the quote:

Le plus artiste ne sera pas de s'atteler � quelque gros oeuvre, comme la fabrication d'un roman, par exemple o� l'esprit tout entier devra se plier aux exigences d'un sujet absorbant qu'il s'est impos� ; mais le plus artiste sera d'�crire, par petits bonds, sur cent sujets qui surgiront � l'improviste, d'�mietter pour ainsi dire sa pens�e. De la sorte, rien n'est forc�. Tout a le charme du non voulu, du naturel. On ne provoque pas : on attend.

Let's see, the translation goes roughly: What becomes the artist most isn't going to come out of harnessing oneself to some huge work, like the fabrication of a novel, where the spirit bows to the exigencies of a wholly absorbing subject it has imposed on itself; instead, it will come from writing, by little jumps, on a hundred subjects which spontaneously emerge - to crumble into palpable bits, so to speak, one's bright ideas. Nothing is forced, this way, and everything has the improvisational charm of the natural, of what isn't willed. One doesn't provoke - one awaits."

As you can see, even when the French is simple, the translation is tortured. "Improvisational charm", for instance, is obviously not there, and yet the preceding sentence, with its "a l'improviste", has an on tiptoes lightness which I was determined to pull into the translation, in spite of the leaden footing of my "spontaneously emerge." The point is that Renard saw his journal as the ultimate expression of his peculiar genius, and he was right. Supposedly Becket was inspired to his most pared down passages by reading the Journal.

I'm not that kind of writer - my pared down passages, under revision, have a magical tendency to branch out, to luxuriate - but I like the hundred hops, the bouncing ball brain.

Hey, read the first post today first. Then this.

Secrets to Spies.

As I said in an earlier post, lately I have been working on a review of Body of Secrets for the Austin Chronicle. Now, my usual way of reviewing a book like this is to spend a lot of time researching matters extraneous to it � looking for an angle. I spend a lot of time in the library. In the real world, meanwhile, the Hanssen case has been in the news, a little memento mori from the Cold War era, for which our president is so nostalgic that he has decided to give us the 1980s redivivus if he can.

Although I am fascinated with spying, I�m not unduly impressed by it. Intelligence had a tremendous impact on the behavior of the Allies in World War II � to name just two instances, the Sorge ring in Tokyo was crucial to the timing of Stalin�s resistance to Hitler in 1942, and the by now well known story of the breaking of the Enigma code obviously gave the Britain and the US a tremendous advantage in the Battle of the Atlantic � for the fictional record of which, I recommend Cryptonomicon. But it isn�t clear that a fighting war with the peculiar attributes inherent in the German political structure is a very good guide to the cold war fought between the US and Russia. Two great features of the intelligence war in our time seem plain: one, American intelligence, both human and sigint, have been repeatedly and massively penetrated and exposed. Not only by the line going back from Hanssen to Philby, but by such disasters as the abandonment of tremendous caches of military and cryptological information by the NSA, at the end of the Vietnam war.

And the second fact is � it hasn�t mattered.

When the damage caused by such as Hanssen is assessed in the press, we are almost always told about agents betrayed, or codes handed over. In other words, the Intelligence community bears the brunt of losses caused by betrayals in their midst. But there is a closed circle here � because if the intelligence agency exists primarily to protect American interests, in practice they seem merely to protect their own interest. Their interest is disguised as merely analysis � it is something the CIA and the NSA like to say a lot, that they merely analyze. But of course that isn�t true � it is in the nature of intelligence organizations to distort the nature of the enemy by concentrating on the enemy�s intelligence. It is a subfight, in other words, within a larger fight; and that larger struggle soon starts to reflect the smaller one in the minds of intelligence officers. This famously happened with James Jesus Angleton, the mad head of CI in the fifties and sixties . His mind wholly ossified around his own perception of a worldwide communist conspiracy, to the extent that he thought that the Sino-Russian spit was faked. In other words, he thought the Russians were staging history to fool the CIA � or, finally, to fool one alcoholic bureaucrat, J.J. Angleton. Intelligence solipsism can�t go any further. .

While the CIA was fighting their battle as if it was the war, the real grassroots war was fought and finished. One day, the spies looked up and lo! The West, the good old Free Peoples of the West, to use the boilerplate of Cold War presidents, won! It came as a shocking surprise.

In the end, it didn�t matter that Aldrich sold the KGB the names of CIA sources in the Kremlin. It didn�t even matter that the Russians could read our encryption. The keepers of the secrets were keeping secrets, in the end, not from the enemy, but from the people they are supposed to be responsible to, however dimly the line of responsibility is traced. They were keeping secret what they had done in Chile, Argentina, Pakistan, Vietnam, Cambodia, South Africa, and a host of other countries where they have been in cahoots with killers, thieves, rapists, and other forms of freedom fighter.

Over the last fifty years, however, the importance of the intelligence community in our history really doesn�t have to do with the Russians � it has to do with the ideological function of these organizations. If you read a bunch of spy books, you�ll soon become familiar with what that ideology is about � loyalty. That loyalty is identified with a certain brand of anti-communism that gradually became less ecumenical about accepting, say, anti-communist leftists. It gradually settled into the recognizable mold of American conservativism. Why does that ideology have a right wing taint? Probably there are a number of sociological reasons � the same reasons that would enable you to predict a leftish tilt in academia. Insular groups maintain themselves by filtering non-conformists out � they develop rituals for doing that, and sometimes the filtering process becomes the very center of the group, the thing it is about. The cosa nostra � the our thing. It is a contingent fact why, exactly, the filtering process is attached to a particular ideology � an accident depending not on the structure of the institution, but on the history of the personnel within it. Although these places always have that same stale reek, you know?

Tomorrow I�m going to switch to mirrors and spies, an Italian story.

In one of his essays, Louis Marin speaks of a certain book of traps, written by a 16th century Venetian. What an evocative title that is! Traps, spies and secrets have always fascinated me. The secret itself has not, for some reason, been a large topic in philosophy, even though it is certainly a conceptually involuted trope.

Secrets come in two types � first order secrets in which the content of the secret is secret, while the form (that is, that there is a secret there) is not; and second order secrets in which both the content and the form are secret.

This rough division doesn�t really give us the essence of secrets, but it is a start. Obviously, not all instances of ignorance are instances of secrecy: that I went to highschool in Clarkston, Georgia, might not be known to my reader, but I am not �keeping� it a secret, nor would the reader presume that my high schooling was a secret, unless there was some contextual reason for thinking that this information was being deliberately suppressed. If, however, I was the killer of President Kennedy, that would be a secret. In the later case, my game plan would be to keep not only the act I�d committed a secret � I would keep it a secret that I had a secret.

You might think this is a trivial distinction, but actually, it is the distinction that informs the relationship between secrecy and political power. We know, for instance, that the CIA holds back information from American citizens � we know that they have secrets. The peculiar status of the CIA depends on our knowing that they know what we don�t know � in much the same way that the Minister D., in the Purloined Letter, holds sway over the Queen because she knows that he possesses a letter that she doesn�t want the king to know about. The queen�s secret, then, is a second order secret, while D.�s is a first order secret. Second order secrets are often such as to make their possessor vulnerable, while first order secrets are often of the type to make their possessor powerful. This generalization obviously has some very important exceptions, but when it comes, at least, to Intelligence agencies in the U.S., it holds true.

In fact I once wrote a little spy novel � scattered, alas, with the rest of my ms., in some box or other in somebody�s closet � in which the premise was that the real US Intelligence agency was the asphalt testing division of the US Department of Highways and Transportation, while the CIA and the NSA were shells. That was a sort of joke. It is funny because, of course, we think of the CIA, etc., as powerful, and even romantic, because we know they operate in secret, whereas asphalt testing has no James Bond-ian resonance. But if we didn�t know that we don�t know about them, we wouldn�t think of them as powerful � and that would definitely be felt as a diminishment of power within the agency.

A little info link - the association for the study of dreams has an interesting page devoted to dreams in film. See what you think.
Dream Videophile by Deirdre Barrett - Association for the Study of Dreams

Today's article to get upset about - and what else is the newspaper for? has to be this one:

Panel Tones Down Report on Fuel Economy Increases

Apparently, in the current Bushsphere, panels have to be supersensitive to corporate need and greed. When the Times leaked the story that the Panel on Energy efficiency in Automobiles might actually recommend measures to bring about better fuel economy in the next 4 to 6 years, the panel was "contacted" by concerned automakers. You know how concerned those automakers can get. And hey presto - the measures now have a different time window - just a little nudge. Just 6 to 10 years. Sounds like what happened in the early nineties with the California Air Resources Board, which battled the big three about emissions and lost - but the auto companies are acutely aware that they can't simply crush an emission standard, since that would not look good. Instead, you move the time frame up - it is sort of like Zeno's paradox of the tortoise and the hare.

The hare, here, is a real clean air standard. Let the tortoise represent the auto companies. And let father time be represented by a bunch of greedy s.o.b.'s otherwise known as congressmen, senators, and the president of the united states. The tortoise, in this revised version of the paradox, bribes father time with millions of dollars, and father time obliges by issuing a time edict that makes the hare hop faster and move forward slower. Isn't that a wonderful fairy tale, kids? And it is true.

Ah, and as to the members of the panel who are showing such concern, such touching concern, for the automakers, here's the quote:

"E. William Colglazier, the executive officer of the National Academy of Sciences, said he was confident that the committee would resist all such pressures. Environmentalists have complained that the panel has many engineers linked to the auto industry and no consumer advocates, but Mr. Colglazier said the panel needed technical expertise and was balanced."

The need for technical expertise is important. You have to have that expertise to explain why Ford, for example, needs bigger and heavier platforms to sell bigger and more monstrous SUVs. Sympathetic heads nod on the panel, and everybody goes out for a cigar and a scotch. Shucks, it is a shame, a damned shame, that technologies that were developed, say, ten years ago, using carbon fiber body parts, can't be used to lighten the chassis of these monsters, if they must be produced at all - because, gosh darn it, Detroit just doesn't want to do that. The thing to do when pesky innovators come up with these crazy ideas for reducing car weight and getting better gas mileage is to call upon mysterious technical difficulties, requiring technical expertise by people whose expertise is in designing heavy body, gas guzzling vehicles - and so you see the problem. Now go to sleep.

Here's a nice link for more information about SUVs.
And, as always, I'm the Editor.

Ah, since I started the day with a book review, let's go on to the topic of criticism in general, shall we?

I went to get my usual dose of media news at Poynter org and was pointed to this article, by a Sean Glennon.
Valley Advocate | Arts. Now, Mr. Glennon is not a heavyweight, but his article does reveal a very American response to the word critic. Critics seem to open some obscure anti-intellectual toxin in the American body. The idea that one's whole job is criticizing - with the implication that one can do better, and the evident disdain for really doing so - goes against both the native pragmatism and that boosterism which is a thread running all the way back to colonial times.

Mr. Glennon has structured his article on a series of denials - by which I mean denials in the psychoanalytic sense. A denial is embedding an assertion in a grammatical negation - a "not... but." As in, "Not that I am saying you are a liar, but you do have a problem with the truth." This advances propositions behind an ostensible denial that one is advancing a proposition. Of course, the "not...but" structure is not to be taken as the only way denial works - but it is at the core of denial, and one can reduce most denials to sentences of that form. In Mr. Glennon's case, the series of denials goes something like this:

-Not that I read the critics, but here's what the critics are like.
-Not that I care about the critics, but really they should be forced to be reporters before they are critics.
-Not that I think we should have critics.

This kind of logical series is, classically, coordinate with a certain kind of resentment.

We begin, then, with Mr. Glennon denying, first, that he is ever influenced by film reviews:

... I almost never read reviews of movies I haven't already seen. I just don't find most film criticism particularly helpful when I'm trying to decide whether to see a movie.

That's a fair enough position. But, having made it clear that he is not very acquainted with film criticism, he has no problem going on to tell us about film criticism. He tells us his opinion of film criticism without reflecting on the fact that he has just proclaimed his ignorance of film criticism, which, presumably, should undermine his credit with his readers. That is, if they believed his account. It is one of the odd but compelling features of resentment that statements made under the sign of this intellectual mood are not to be taken at face value. We aren't, in other words, to believe Mr. Glennon is as innocent of film reviews as he claims. This rhetorical game of making claims that the speaker presumes the hearer won't quite believe has a name - demagogery. Editors usually block that kind of thing when it comes to, say, a consumer report about cars, or a business story. But when it comes to the arts, editors don't really care. This is an odd but telling fact about newspaper life.

To get back to Mr. Glennon. In the paragraph succeeding his preliminary denial of any concern for or persuasion by film critics, he goes on to analyze the types of film critics - revealing that he does, indeed, read film reviews. This presents us with a conundrum. If he doesn't read critics before he sees films, presumably he reads these critics after he sees films. But why would he do this? It goes against the normal way of treating film reviews, which is to read them not only for the opinion of the film reviewer, but as a guide to what movie one is going to see. It is a very common phenomenon: you are with some friends, you want to see a movie, and somebody pulls out a supplement from a newspaper and starts reading out bits from selected film reviews, and somebody else vets the movies - I don't want to see that, I want to see this, etc. Mr. Glennon is immune to this middle class ritual. But he is also, apparently, secretly obsessed with film critics, since after he sees a film, he collates the reviews from newspapers and magazines to the extent that he has even developed a typology of film reviewers. Otherwise, how would he know enough about them to make the following generalizations?

"What I end up reading most of the time is the work of "critics" who aren't really critics at all -- the ones who don't seem to understand the difference between a review and a plot synopsis. Then there are the dry, tedious, self-aggrandizing, academic essays tendered by critics who think of themselves as "writers" rather than journalists (people who regard the word "reporter" as a slur), and whose main interest seems to be showing off their knowledge of film. And, most infuriating of all, there are those breathless, fawning and utterly shallow raves about movies that almost invariably turn out to be just more of the Hollywood same. "

Notice that critics attracts the scornful quotation marks. Really, to be a critic, in Mr. Glennon's estimation, is something secondary, and vaguely disgusting. The quotation marks, here, prolong the logic of denial. And then there is the positing of the critic and the reporter - both are given scare quotes, but it is interesting that the "critic" lends the scare quotes to the "reporter" - which in a sense negates the effect of the scare quotes. Two negatives, after all, make a positive.

This is all leading up to Mr. Glennon's proposal:
"At the very least, I propose that no one should be allowed to work as a film critic who hasn't logged at least three years as an actual, honest-to-god reporter. Not only would that serve to weed out the bulk of the "writers," the glamour critics and the not-actually-a-critic critics, but it would ensure that the people writing about film have some real-world perspective. Spend a couple years covering fatal shootings and city hall shenanigans and it becomes hard to forget that most movies aren't actually all that important."

At this point the logic of denial breaks down - or perhaps it would be better to say that the revenge of logic on the demagogue is to undermine his point. Because surely Mr. Glennon's admiration for reporters isn't premised on the fact that they make hard subjective decisions about which stories are important and which ones aren't. Or does Mr. Glennon think that reporters who are dealing with some story they think is unimportant - say the shooting death of some vague poor person - should research and write about that event carelessly? Actually, as anybody who has read a regular local paper can attest, this is how the news is reported - with a bias towards the powerful, and an incredible carelessness towards inconvenient facts, if they concern the "unimportant."

From the "Where does Richard Bernstein come from?" department.
Bernstein and Janet Maslin have always puzzled me. Why are they reviewing books for the Times? And why do they chose the books they chose to review for the Times? Bernstein writes as if he had somehow got lost in a wool sweater on some small New England campus in 1958. In today's book review is a pretty typical example: Bernstein discovers - ta da! the police procedural. Let's see, this genre has been around how long? Since the sixties? Here's the quote: Bringing the Real Police to a Police Procedural Procedural � it sounds like something that might happen to you in your dentist's office rather than in your book club, but never mind

Genoa's over. Some of my friends might wonder why I have spent so much time on the jockeying of the Tories in these posts. One reason is because - I wonder if I've said this before? - the remaining left in the Anglo world (the US and the UK) has almost completely died out. Being a leftist in Britain, now, is like being a monarchist in Paris in 1840. It gives you a unique point of view (witness Balzac), but it is a point of view sharpened by the impossibility of the political success of one's views. In the UK, right now, there is only one real ideology - Thatcherism. As Hegel once said, or perhaps didn't, the first time around in history is tragedy, the second time is farce. Tony Blair is the farcical Thatcher - Thatcherism absorbed in a cup of cocoa to make it go down better. But it is still a rabid ideology. Here's what Mr. Blair said about the police in Genoa:

'To criticise the Italian police and the Italian authorities for working to make sure the security of the summit is right is, to me, to turn the world upside down,' Blair said yesterday.

'Of course, it is a tragedy that someone has lost their life. But it's very difficult for the police when they are faced with people throwing petrol bombs and using extreme forms of violence.'

The only thing the police can do, in the face of such violence, is, I suppose, go raid the hq of the non-violent organizers of the protests. And, while they are about it, club some heads. Even Mayor Daley was more sensitive to the situation, in 68.
And this is the man who is the head of the so-called Labor party.
It has fallen to the socialist parties in Europe to play the undertaker for socialism. This has been their role since the Mitterand days - it didn't start with Tony Blair. It is just coming to its comic and shameful end with him, as he privatizes the rest of the transport system and cracks down on civil rights. Of course, anybody with any sense can predict that the transport system will eventually have to be re-nationalized, or junked altogether in favor of the American system - which is to have no system. When that time comes, don't be surprised if it is a conservative government that does the nationalizing - just as it might well be conservative Republicans from the West Coast that bring a halt to privatizing power.

But enough of that. Yesterday I read Sven Lindqvist's History of Bombing. I read it because I am writing a review of Body of Secrets and Suspect Identities for the Austin Chronicle, and I am researching. Also, I read it because I'm procrastinating writing up this profile article I have to finish pretty soon. The important thing is, I read it, and found it, in a grisly way, quite fascinating. I went to two reviews of it, one in the Financial Times, and both of them said essentially the same thing: the problem with the book was that it made our boming morally equivalent to their bombing.
Which comes down to saying this: it isn't as bad to burn the flesh off of a four year old German girl, or to boil out her eyes, or to crush her ribs and skull, or to let her die in a burning building, as it is to burn the flesh off an English or American girl. It's odd - Lindqvist is attacked for moral relativism, for not distinguishing between one side and the other, when the moral relativists are actually those who can distinguish one use of a petrol bomb from another, one slaugher of civilians from another.
Ah, but there is more to say about this book. Maybe I'll get to it in another post.
Write me at Editor

The New Yorker site, which used to be a big joke, is now a really nice place to steal a read - although I still have to go to the library to see the cartoons. Speaking of which, I liked the profile of the zine cartoonist, Clowes, in the current issue:
.

Enough and more than enough about Trollope. For at least the time being.

Sometimes the NYT makes me despair for the souls of its editors - for instance, the coverage of the G8 conference. Did you notice that the Times was the only major paper in the world to put the number of protestors at 50,000? Even the Italian police estimated 100,000 - Le Monde put the number at 150 - 200 thou. Washington Post settled for the 100. The Times, however, has always been protective of globalization, and the editors must have decided that 100 thousand people, not to mention 200 thou, was unseemly. So they downed the number. In fact, I'm surprised they didn't take off another zero - what the hell, why not have 5,000 people, mostly anarchists, making whoopee in the streets of Columbus' home town.

On the other hand - I always read the Times. Today, the article of note is on coal, in the Magazine. How Coal Got Its Glow Back. The article should make us send letters to our congressmen - or e-mails - in support of the current EPA regulation of CO2 emissions.

The article ignored completely the people who mine coal, talking instead to industry spinmeisters and environmentalists. This isn't a-typical - the labor aspect of business is routinely ignored in articles of this sort. It is one of those silent omissions that is countenanced, too often, by environmentalists, who should make it a point to tell journalists to talk to workers. A lot of times, they are going to hear a fairly un-environmental message from the guys and gals on the ground, but too bad. In the end the environmental issues should be folded into the issue of economic justice - of who bears the social cost of business activity - but I think there's a lot of working class suspicion that really, the people who are going to bear all the costs are the ones who always bear the cost - the employees. IF this isn't addressed, environmentalism just becomes complicit in the corporate mentality. It isn't as if the NYT Mag article is an exception - too many times, journalism splits the world into a dialogue between two groups the journalist can identify with - college educated environmentos, on the one hand, and executives, on the other - whcih leads to a lot of anger on the part of working people. What they see is that they are simply dropped from the process. Justifiably they ask, why is this guy from Greenpeace or whereever talking like I don't even exist? It is as if the work was being done by nobody. This is especially disconcerting in an article on coal mining, of all things - for in no other industry has the war between labor and management been so fiercely fought, so close to a real war.

Yesterday�s post about Trollope�s The Prime Minister ended just as I was about to get into the first chapter � the marvelous first chapter. Anyone who doubts Trollope�s artistry should read the first chapter of this novel, which has the clean unswerving course and direction of a well aimed pistol shot. He begins the chapter with one of those authorial interventions that fascinate my friend Sarah, the woman I mentioned in yesterday�s post. Her dissertation, in fact, is an attempt to get at these moments in the classic 19th century novel and look at what they really do. The authorial intervention, according to Sarah, who I hope won�t be mad if I borrow one broad feature from her upcoming diss, finds itself most at home in the generalization. At least in Trollope, this is certainly true. He love these authorial asides. It is no use ignoring them, because they are a very real part of the text's structure. But we should ask - how can we talk about them?

First, let's recognize that these generalizations are modeled on that most political rhetorical form, advice. They fall into topics common to what Kant called prudence - hedged truths about society, sex, age, or status. This is an old tradition, running through sermons and moral essays (going all the way back to Seneca), and reiterating the truths of egotism. French moralistes, like La Rouchefaucauld, turned this into the maxim. And the maxim, in turn, was systematized by the ideologues - I mean, the ideologues proper, in the French Revolution, Tracy Destutte and the like.

Because our tendency is to think, oh, here�s the author, a real being, interfering in his story, which consists of made up beings doing made up things, we have trouble reconciling these moments, on a theoretic level, with the basic premise of fiction � that it be fictional. That's why Victorian fiction sometimes seems so moralistic to us. On a reading level, however, we don�t have this problem. That�s because stories don�t emerge in self-selected contexts � reading a novel, I don�t myself become novelistic. The reader, unconsciously, recognizes the maxim as a passage between the reader�s world and the fiction�s world. The generalization, in other words, is, on one side, a reader�s ritual, and gives us those kinds of truths native to ritual � performative truths. On the other side, for the fictional character, the maxim is fate, and the authorial intervention always has a slight whiff of destiny. This, incidentally, should remind us that the mythic root of Kant's counsels of prudence is found in the oracle. In fact, if we see this textual mode as originally home in the essay, and migrating to the novel in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, we should think a little bit about the importance of oracles for the ancient essayists - Plutarch, Cicero, and Seneca. What distinguished them as essayists, rather than philosophers, was their fascination with fate - with the irrational arrangement of the life of rational beings. Stendhal, who was very consciously close to the ideologues, picks up this thread in La Chartreuse de Parme.

So here's one way to think about these moments of authorial presence. In them, fate speaks. If our fates could, in fact, speak, they would speak in just these kinds of generalizations. We would, then, understand our luck.


Well, we don�t, and neither do fictional characters, who never hear what their authors have to say.

But Trollope does not make heavy going of the oracular mode. He simply paints a picture of Ferdinand Lopez which tells us he is ineffably foreign, that his origins are mysterious, and that gentlemen, according to Samuel Johnson, are distinguished in one thing above all others � that their origins are never mysterious. Ferdinand Lopez is no gentleman, then. Trollope takes, at least consciously, the normal position of the privileged class with regard to gentlemen � they are the summit of English civilization, the vital difference between the Anglo-Saxon race and all lesser breeds without the law. A man with the name Ferdinand is, of course, going to be especially suspect. King Ferdinand was a notoriously Machiavellian ruler, much disliked by Whig historians.

So we have a moral sketch of Lopez, and then we see him going into the City by an almost hidden, dark route, to the office of a vulgar man vaguely connected with finance, Sextus Parker. We are never told Parker is a moneylender � we assume he is a jobber, a man who makes his money work in many different and hard to pin down ways. Perhaps an unsightly man, perhaps an unethical man, but certainly a necessary man. Lopez pops the question to him right away:

�Then he [Lopez] continued without changing his voice or the nature of his eye. 'I'll tell you what I want
you to do now. I want your name to this bill for three months.'

Sexty Parker opened his mouth and his eyes, and took the bit of paper that was tendered to him. It was a promissory note for 750 pounds, which, if signed by him, would at the end of the specified period make him liable for that sum were it not otherwise paid.�

Notice that sum, that beautiful sum. A thousand pounds would have been too much � Parker would never have gone for it. Five hundred pounds would be too little � our sense of Lopez� largeness would have been dampened. But 750 is just right. It is the kind of sum that inevitably turns up in political scandals, which never seem to be about really large sums � how much did Spiro Agnew take, something like 10,000 dollars? No, they are always those awkward, intermediate sums � and Trollope has that down. It is that 750 pounds which makes us trust him.

Oh well, I�m probably boring those of you who haven�t read, and don�t care for, Trollope.
Write me at Editor.