To continue from our last post� the Eyre affair. Governor James Eyre�s suppression of a �rebellion� in the Crown colony of Jamaica, and his subsequent trial by commission, is so much antiquarian dust today, but it shouldn't be. So we are grateful to two economists, David M. Levy and Sandra Peart, who have publicized this affair. In an interview with Reason magazine, these two sum up what they think they have discovered: the dark connection between opposition to laissez faire economics and racism. They are particularly focused on the chief disputants in England: Thomas Carlyle and John Stuart Mill. These men, for Levy and Peart, stand not only for themselves, but also for two different ideologies: one statist, paternalistic, ultimately socialist, and one laissez faire, individualistic, and liberal � in the classical sense.

Q: What were the connections between the contempt for markets and defense of slavery?
A: Markets bust hierarchy. Carlyle also coined the term "consumer sovereignty" in 1833. It was a sneering reference to political economist Richard Whately�s exchange theory of government, in which policy is viewed as a trade between something like equals. Carlyle�s view of the world was that it should be ruled by hierarchy and the worship of heroes. Obedience to the demands of your superiors was everything. The exchange inherent in markets -- rather than the command of hierarchy -- was anarchy.


That markets don't bust hierarchy is a claim that, of course, the two don't consider -- even though it certainly animates a large tradition in the left, which goes from the French Revolution to Galbraith. However, the tie between hierarchy and racism is the one that concerns us here. The Eyre affair seems to seal their case. After showing that the motives behind the defense of Eyre were demonstrably racist -- that is, the supposition that blacks were inferior, and thus not subject to the judicial conventions protecting whites, animates the protection of Eyre from the consequences of having misused black subjects -- Levy and Peart make a few bold leaps. One of them we will get back to in a further post: the claim that the Reactionary clique gave rise to eugenics. This, it seems to us, is a serious distortion of the historical record.


First, let's get back to what happened in Jamaica, in October of 1865. To get a broader view of the facts in the affair, we turned to an article in the Winter, 2000 Clio by Howard Fulweiler, a literature professor at UNC: The Strange Case of Governor Eyre: Race and the "Victorian Frame of Mind". Fulweiler begins, as Levy and Peart do, by claiming that the Eyre affair did reflect distinct cultural differences about race. Astonishingly, in our view, there are academics who claim that the affair was "undetermined' by attitudes towards race. Levy and Peart, who have given a paper on this topic, have made a disheartening discovery about race and racism. The view, currently, is that the past was simply a monologue of racism, from which we fortunate few have somehow emerged. Thus, Mill and Carlyle are lumped together, an indistinguishable duo: Carlyle with his pathological fixation on black bodies, Mill with his defense of the authoritarian rule that the imperial powers could extend to �barbarians.�

"Four months ago when we presented some of our research on the Dismal Science, we heard two criticisms. Two months ago at a conference where we presented different but related papers, we heard similar comments. The first was a rather simple but damning consideration�'Everyone in Victorian England was a racist, so why be particularly annoyed with Carlyle, Ruskin or anyone else's attitudes?'

Clich� liquidates history in the name of stupidity. The dispute between Mill and Carlyle on race was not the nitpicking of two blind lacemakers over the pattern of the drapes. It was a fundamental, and stirring, conflict. Mill�s letter to Carlyle, when Carlyle wrote a piece in the Fraser magazine with the disgusting title, �The N- Question� (I bowdlerize because I don�t want hits to this site based on searches for the word. It is depressing enough to get hit on for �cocksucker� and the like), is an all too little known piece of liberatory lit. Here�s the beginning of it:

�SIR,� Your last month�s number contains a speech against the �rights of Negroes,� the doctrines and spirit of which ought not to pass without remonstrance. The author issues his opinions, or rather ordinances, under imposing auspices no less than those of the �immortal gods.� �The Powers,� �the Destinies,� announce, through him, not only what will be, but what shall be done; what they �have decided upon, passed their eternal act of parliament for.� This is speaking �as one having authority;� but authority from whom l If by the quality of the message we may judge of those who sent it, not from any powers to whom just or good men acknowledge allegiance. This so-called �eternal act of parliament� is no new law, but the old law of the strongest � a law against which the great teachers of mankind have in all ages protested � it is the law of force and cunning; the law that whoever is more powerful than an other, is �born lord� of that other, the other being born his �servant,� who must be �compelled to work� for him by �beneficent whip,� if �other methods avail not.� I see nothing divine in this injunction. If �the gods� will this, it is the first duty of human beings to resist such gods. Omnipotent these �gods� are not, for powers which demand human tyranny and injustice cannot accomplish their purpose unless human beings co�perate. The history of human improvement is the record of a struggle by which inch after inch of ground has been wrung from these maleficent powers, and more and more of human life rescued from the iniquitous dominion of the law of might. Much, very much of this work still remains to do; but the progress made in it is the best and greatest achievement yet performed by mankind, and it was hardly to be expected at this period of the world that we should be enjoined, by way of a great reform in human affair, to begin undoing it.�

This clear account of the case makes even passages in Ruskin, one of the great Victorian rhetoricians, look as shabby as peeling gilt. It is, by the way, interesting how pieces of prose on this side were regarded at the time. Bagehot, one of the many sympathizers of the Confederacy in the British press, found Lincoln�s speeches and writings grotesque and ungrammatical.

Fulweiler makes a move, in his article, that would have made Levy and Peart�s essay stronger: he provides some background for the revolt. This is crucial stuff, since it seems to contravene Levy and Peart's thesis, or at least gives them something to explain. The "rebellion" occurred in the context of unemployment and the disinclination of the colonial government to protect small freeholders against the plantation party. The period succeeding emancipation saw a great increase in unemployment in Jamaica. The slave-owners, who were plantation owners, responded to the liberation of the slaves in two ways: they held onto their position in the Island as the chief generators of wealth -- they did not break out of the sugar dominated system, in other words; and they refused outlay to create infrastructure for the ex-slaves. There was no schooling, none of the supports, even of legality, that would make it possible for the ex-slaves to establish autonomous economic structures. The black and mulatto population petitioned Queen Victoria for redress. In other words, they requested the state's intervention in their economic plight. This goes unmentioned in Levy and Peart's account, but it tells us something about the kind of intellectual history they are pursuing: they are careless of the constituencies of the ideas represented by their champions. In many ways, the rebel movement is consonant with the Chartists, and the nascent union movements in England, both of which were criticized by Carlyle. The intervention petitioned for was not �free trade,� but for some security net. Of course, Levy and Peart could argue that the only way to achieve economic viability would have been through free trade � trade, for instance, with countries outside the British domain � but it is hard to see how small freeholders in Jamaica would have benefited from this.


Governor Eyre's suppression of the rebellion, which amounted to a riot in which 25 people were killed, including some white plantation owners, was to declare martial law, march militia (interestingly, composed of white, mulatto and black Maroon soldiers) into St. Thomas Parish, where the revolt was centered, and kill and whip. But what truly stirred up the intellectuals in London was what happened next:



"At the center of the ensuing storm was George William Gordon, a mulatto landowner, magistrate, member of the Assembly, and Baptist minister, who had championed the cause of the black poor, and had been an implacable enemy of Governor Eyre. Gordon had spoken several times at Bogle's church [Bogle, you will remember from the last post, was the rebel leader- LI] and had ordained him as a Deacon. Governor Eyre believed, as did many others, that Gordon was the mastermind behind the rebellion. Since Gordon was in Kingston during the disturbance, where there was no martial law, the Governor had him arrested, transported on The Wolverine to Morant Bay where he was quickly courtmartialed by junior officers and hanged on October 23 with the express approval of Governor Eyre. Although many deplored the general brutality exercised by the troops, it was the execution of Gordon which later would offer an opportunity to charge Eyre with murder."



Gordon's murder was at the heart of Mill's indignation, Carlyle's defense of Eyre, and the alliance of the evangelicals with the evolutionists. We'll discuss this in another post. Probably not the next one - indignation calls, we have other issues and tasks -- but soon.

Dope

LI was on the horn with our friend, MB. MB mentions an article she's writing for a book on Philosophy and Race, which gets us onto the topic of philosophy and race. So LI mentioned that if the editor expanded his mandate, he ought to include the Eyre Incident. MB hadn't heard of the Eyre incident, and --- putting our cards on the table -- LI has gone many moons in complete Eyre ignorance too. We came across a reference to it in a biography of Mary Kingsley. So we explained what we knew -- that Governor Eyre, in Jamaica, brutally put down a revolt of agricultural workers there, mostly black, in the 1860s. And that he was put on trial for murder. And that the case became a sensation in England, where two different committees were formed, one pro-Eyre, one anti. The pro-Eyre committee was openly contemptuous of the idea that a white man should be prosecuted for murdering black men. Alas, Charles Dickens was on the pro-Eyre committee, as well as the ever racist Thomas Carlyle, and John Ruskin. On the side of the angels, though, was James Stuart Mills. As well as Charles Darwin.

Well, after we got off the horn, we decided to look up Governor Eyre, in order to expand our knowledge from the rather potted account we'd given MB. We were in luck. Two free market economists, David M. Levy and Sandra J. Peart, have written a marvelous, long article that centers around the affair. For Levy and Peart, the themes are clear: critics of classical economics, the prototypical descendents of Adam Smith (who are, presumably, statists and other unspeakable things) are, from the beginning, advancing a racist agenda. Racist in the modern sense of refusing to grant, to blacks, or to disfavored ethnic groups (the Irish, mainly) a status of judicial equality, and backgrounding that refusal with a theory of racial or ethnic inferiority.

Now, LI doesn't buy Levy and Peart's entire argument. For one thing, the two make the mistake of taking ideological positions of circumstance to the be equivalent of ideological positions that unfold from logical necessity. Let me explain the difference with a more modern example. Religious conservatives in this country have been in the forefront of the attack on the whole language movement. The whole language movement seeks to teach reading by memorization, and using contextual clues -- whatever that means. Religious conservatives favor phonics.

Now, does is phonics somehow logically inferred from core conservative positions? I think not. LI thinks the whole language movement is, mostly, a crock, and that writing should be learned musically -- by way of phonics. We think this partly because it has been the more successful way to teach reading. We think it provides a more reliable interface between the text as a material object and the body. We think this for any number of reasons. But none of those reasons lead us to other conservative Christian positions. We think that, given other circumstances, the conservative position could as easily be whole language learning, and the liberal position phonics.

In the same way, we think that the racist positions taken by Ruskin and Dickens -- which, in spite of Levy and Peart's efforts, seem marginal to the work of both of those writers -- aren't to be deduced from their criticism of classical economics. With Carlyle, however, it is a wholly other matter.
We'll defend this thesis, and modify it, later on.

However, Levy and Peart are right to use the Eyre dispute as a sort of litmus test to tell us a lot about the intellectual playing field in Victorian England.

Here is the pair's simple, forceful abridgement of the affair:

The Eyre Controversy

"The controversy was triggered by a seemingly trivial event in the British colony of Jamaica. A contemporary witness wrote:

On Saturday the 7th October, 1865, a court of petty sessions was held at Morant Bay. A man made a noise in the court, and was ordered to be brought before justices. He was captured by the police outside, but immediately rescued by one Paul Bogle and several other persons, who had large bludgeons in their hands, and taken into the market-square, where some one hundred and fifty more persons joined them also with sticks: the police were severely beaten. ... On Monday, the 9th, warrants were issued against Paul Bogle and twenty seven others for riot and assault on the Saturday.1 Paul Bogle lives in the lyrics to Bob Marley's"So Much Things To Say."

On Wednesday the police came to enforce the warrants. Stones were thrown at the police. Then the shooting began. The island's Governor, Edward James Eyre, took command. Eyre imposed martial law and called in the army to restore order. By the time the army was done, over 400 Jamaicans were dead, and thousands homeless. Britons were horrified by the methods of state terror, including flogging with wire whips and the use of military courts to deny civilians their rights."

To understand how history, especially if it involves English or American injustice, can be covered up, compare this account to the account in the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica, in the entry under Eyre:

"1846 he was appointed lieutenant-governor of New Zealand, where he served under Sir George Grey. After successively governing St Vincent and Antigua, he was in 1862 appointed acting-governor of Jamaica and in 1864 governor. In Octobef~ ~865 a negro insurrection broke out and was repressed with laudable vigour, but the unquestionable severity and alleged illegality of Eyre�s subsequent proceedings raised a storm at home which induced the government to suspend him and to despatch a special commission of investigation, the effect of whose inquiries, declared by his successor, Sir John Peter Grant, to have been �admirably conducted,� was that he should not be reinstated in his office. The government, nevertheless, saw nothing in Eyre�s conduct to justify legal proceedings; indictments preferred by amateur prosecutors at home against him and military officers who had acted under his direction, resulted in failure, and he retired upon the pension of a colonial governor."

Laudable vigour -- unpack that phrase and what do you find? Flogging with wire whips and 400 deaths. Something to keep in mind as Bush uses America's "laudable vigour" as he sees fit.

The "amateur prosecutors" -- can't you hear the Tory sneer in that phrase? -- were stimulated by John Stuart Mill, in one of his greatest moments. To understand Levy and Peart's article, you have to understand the divide between Mill and Carlyle, and what it represented in England.
To be continued...

Remora

The Times' David Sanger's article about Bush's first strike doctrine quotes the man on the reasons for changing, fundamentally, the principles of American foreign policy :


"Implicitly, Mr. Bush has agreed to engage the country in a discussion over a fundamental change in America's national security strategy: his doctrine that perilous times have forced the United States to assert a right to launch pre-emptive strikes against any state that could put weapons of mass destruction into the hands of terrorists.

"After Pearl Harbor and the invasion of Kuwait, presidents sought Congressional approval to strike back. Mr. Bush seeks approval to strike first, because Sept. 11 taught him that any other strategy may be too costly. "We're in a new era," he said, adding: "We spend a lot of time thinking about how best to secure our homeland even further. And this is the debate the American people must hear, must understand. And the world must understand as well that its credibility is at stake."

Ah, the credibility of the world is at stake, here. As opposed, one wonders, to the other planets? Perhaps Bush is hinting that, if he doesn't get his war, like that guy from N'Sync, he's going to apply to be a cosmonaut, and leave this world in a huff. Let Dick Cheney get it back in order. Let Laura deal with the reporters.

Well, of course, Bush's nonsense will be made into solemn sense by the commentariat, which exists to preform the invaluable service of making this brain-dead lightweight seem something more than the cartoon figure he, in actuality, is.

Meanwhile, let's talk about the suddenly grave problem of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, LI has already posted a long, meandering account of Iraqi-US relations. While researching that post, we came across a reference to Bruce Jentleson's book, With Friends Like These: Reagan, Bush and Saddam, 1982-1990. The book is about an earlier phase of American Foreign Policy. In this phase, we definitely liked the idea of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. We ought to have: we sold him the parts.

Jentleson provides two lists of "dual-use" items that Iraq (using credit supplied by the ever willing Export Import bank) purchased in the Reagan years, and in the Bush years -- before Saddam became the next Hitler. Here is the list from the Reagan years:

- Precision machine tools for 'general military use"
-a hybrid digital analog computer for 'materials research,' comparable to the one then in use at White Sands missile test range
-computers and other equipment for the 'Arab Company for Detergent Chemicals', a front for the production of chemical weapons
-numerous items for the Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission
-bacterial and fungus cultures for 'research purposes'
- quartz crystals and frequency synthesizers
-high speed oscilloscopes, used for missile guidance
-fuel air explosive technology.

Hmm, does this sound like the shopping list of a harmless old lady? Actually, it sounds like fattening up a man who is engaged in a war with the means of mass destruction -- which, in fact, it was.

The years roll by. Pastoral scenes, etc. The glorious Reagan years, remember how we all made money, broke the wicked unions, and defeated the Soviets? And those chemicals, which came not just from the U.S. but from all over the helpful West, and those bacterial cultures -- well, they got put to various brilliant uses. In 1988, the Kurds got a sound whacking with chemical weapons, as well as simple mass deportation and massacre. The U.S. senate voted, unanimously, to put sanctions on Iraq. An idea that was vetoed by our man Reagan, who was definitely seconded in this by his V.P., who saw economic opportunity on the horizon with Iraq.
(As in all things Cold War, there's an odd Alice in Wonderland aspect that keeps intruding into history: where once it was Reaganites who opposed sanctions, it is now Leftists who oppose them. It sometimes seems like a game of musical chairs).

Well, the Iraq-Iran war ground, like a meatgrinder all too full of flesh, to a halt.

One would think that now there's less toss the rabid dog meat chunks. But no! Remember, under Bush I the mission was originally to talk nice and make friends. So in the pre-Gulf War period, the White House was more than willing to see goods and services transferred to Iraq and, even, to the Sa'ad 16 weapons research complex. Here's the list from those years:
-- equipment for the inevitable Arab Company for Detergent Chemicals (it cleans! it makes whiter and brighter! it kills Kurds!)
-bacteria samples to the Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission and University of Baghdad
-nine high powered supply units for the steel industry that were diverted to the making of weapons grade uranium
-vacuum pump oil, later found by weapons inspectors to have been used to facilitate the corrosion preventing pumps used to keep uranium moving in the enrichment process
-communications and tracking equipment
-compasses, gyroscopes and accelerometers for the Iraqi air force
-helicopter guidance and fight equipment
-computers for the Iraqi navy
-command and control equipment for the Iraqi ministry of defense
Etc.

Now, there are readers who will say, what does this past history have to do with the current situation?

There are two answers to that.
One is, what is the moral background of the current US claim against Iraq? In other words, how has the US acted in that area before? If there is a pattern of promises and betrayals, if there is collaboration with military dictators followed by hostility to these same dictators followed by collaboration with succeeding dictators --well, that is a suspicious pattern. Patterns in the past are not to be discounted as predictors for patterns in the future. If an alcoholic swears off drinking on Monday, there's every reason to suspect you will find him drunk on Friday. If the U.S. has supported arming a nation that was visibly ruled by a military tyrant with regional ambitions on Monday, there's reason to suspect that it will be doing the same thing on Friday. Saddam Hussein or our current buddy, General Pervez Musharraf in Pakistan, are the same story. In Hussein's case, during the Reagan years the FPE (foreign policy establishment) was wont to produce canards like this one, one of Jentleson's more delicious quotes: "it is probably not just idle chatter when Iraqi officials express a hope that the end of the war [between Iraq and Iran] will bring more democracy affirming that Saddam Hussein is 'much concerned about democracy.'" As indeed he was -- he was concerned to torture to death anyone who suggested it. However, you have merely to transpose the word Iraq for Pakistan, or Afghanistan, to get similar stuff which floats around in the newspapers today. When the reality principle kicks in -- say, that Pervez' recent usurpation of power for the foreseeable future in Pakistan, regardless of elections -- and it becomes all too obvious what is happening, there is a switch in the American mind that simply turns to off. We forget what the struggle was all about. That switch, for instance, that makes Americans extremely incurious about the government of Kuwait, on whose rescue we expended 70 billion dollars a decade ago.
It is essentially the tabloid mindset. Does anyone remember Burt Reynolds divorce troubles? Does anyone remember Paula Jones? We pick up the dolls, we toss aside the dolls.
There is another reason, however, to look at the past. Bush's policy makers were intimately involved in crafting previous policy about Iraq, and the Middle East in general.
To be fair, this is also true of his Republican critics. But we should ask about the track records of people who are suddenly sensitive like the most liberal guys about the aches and pains of the oppressed Iraqi people. Why this sudden sensitivity?
Well, even if we grant LI's case weighing the moral reasons for a 'regime change' in Iraq against the suspicion that the structure of governance will not change by way of American intervention, if we maintain that we have every reason to believe that a post-Saddam Iraq will be ruled, with American connivance, by another bloody dictator -- even if we grant this, there still might be an American interest in going to war with Iraq. American interests aren't necessarily moral. Every war is not a crusade or a jihad, although of course, in talking up war, the powers that be have to make it seem like a crusade or a jihad. We'll discuss this at another time.

Dope

LI was in a restaurant last night with two friends. Over the fajitas, we started talking about Iraq, and the coming war to ensure infinite freedom and Bush's re-election -- or should we say first election? Since the thing that got him into office was definitely something between an election and a judicial coup. In any case, this is not a good subject to spring on LI spontaneously, because we get all red in the face, and start splashing the margaritas and gesticulating wildly.

What got us red in the face this time, though, was that one of these friends said that she'd been told that Iraq was armed by the Soviets. This version of Hussein's armory would make invading Iraq a sort of delayed clean-up operation of one of the peripheral bits of the Evil Empire.

Of course, LI launched into a long monologue that hastily reviewed the history of Iraq, going back to the Iraqi launch of an offense against Iran, in 1980. Long monologues, by the way, are not rhetorically effective. By the listener, these are often called harangues, shooting off at the mouth, hogging the spotlight, or yak yak yak. Hitler, by all accounts, was a very boring dinner companion precisely because he would launch a long monologue, aka yak yak yak, at the drop of a hat. His dinner companions, however, never complained, on the principle that criticizing a murderous dictator is even worse for your health than smoking a pack of cigarrettes a day. LI hopes that, in almost all ways, we are a better person than Hitler; but we do concede, when pressed, a somehwat lesser world historical importance... Maybe this is why our friends, at this dinner table, made fun of us, called us gabby, used the zip phrase from Austin Powers, and in other ways signified a desire to change the subject. Another problem is our grasp of fact is, as is often the case in these kind of conversations, subject to our indignation -- which entails a fatal habit of fillng in, with our own imagination, those inconvenient facts and themes that aren't quite at our fingertips. It is the intellectual equivalent of an asthma attack -- we know we are right, but in the heat of the moment we gasp for the air of memory, searching for info in our brain that has been disconnected or is no longer in service.

So, as is the case with all good keepers of weblogs, we went home and looked things up manically on the web. Here, as a public service, is a cooler outline of the Iraqi arming. The BBC outline goes back to the twenties, and on this topic goes something like this:

1980 1 April - The pro-Iranian Da'wah Party claims responsibility for an attack on Deputy Prime Minister, Tariq Aziz, at Mustansiriyah University, Baghdad.
1980 4 September - Iran shells Iraqi border towns (Iraq considers this as the start of the Iran/Iraq war).
1980 17 September - Iraq abrogates the 1975 treaty with Iran.
1980 22 September - Iraq attacks Iranian air bases.
1980 23 September - Iran bombs Iraqi military and economic targets.
1981 7 June - Israel attacks an Iraqi nuclear research centre at Tuwaythah near Baghdad


While LI is not going to go too far back, we should mention one of those nagging problems that seem to crop up when the American and British press report on Iraq. There seems to be the damndest problem with completeness. Omissions seem to flower of themselves. For instance, the BBC outline completely skips the first "successful" bombing campaign in world history, surely one of the high water points of civilization. It was mounted by the British against rebellious Arab groups in Iraq in the twenties. Here's a quote from the Financial TImes review of Patrick and Andrew Cockburn's excellent book, Out of the Ashes:

"The Cockburns' sketch of the past finds eerie echoes in the present. The colonial power withdrew its ground troops and tried to bomb Iraqis into submission. The British used poison gas on the fractious Kurds and then unleashed Arthur "Bomber" Harris, the architect of the air offensiveagainst Germany two decades later. The Arabs and the Kurds, Harris averred in 1924, "now know what real bombing means . . . they know that within 45 min-utes a full-sized village can be practically wiped out anda third of its inhabitants killed or injured."

Recently, however, this kind of history has been verboten. Since 9/11, it is generally accepted that the West has done only good things in the world. We are the Welcome Wagon Lady of History. If the West has made a mistake, a little thing, you know -- starving a native people, bombing third world wogs, or the like -- well, there's no use DWELLING on it. As we know, the official line now is: the only crimes committed by the West in the past 100 years were committed by the demented Nazis.

Well, that's a diversion from the main topic, right? So, let's get into it.
1. In 1980, Iraq, led by the Soviet backed Ba'athist regime, under Saddam Hussein, invades Iran. Good time to stage that particular act of aggression, given that Iran is pretty isolated. Outside of Iraq, the question of who initiated the war is, by the way, beyond dispute. What was the international community's response to this war? It was a dance that extended over several years, and did not exactly fall into place the way Cold War dualism would seemingly dictate.

First, the Soviet Union stopped arms shipments to Iraq, according to Stephen Shalom. Shalom, who is writing for the lefty mag, Z, might be a suspect source, except that he is quoting from a Hoover Institute analyst -- and let's just say the Hoover Institute has Coulterish views about the left:

"When the war first broke out, the Soviet Union turned back its arms ships en route to Iraq, and for the next year and a half, while Iraq was on the offensive, Moscow did not provide weapons to Baghdad.<30> In March 1981, the Iraqi Communist Party, repressed by Saddam Hussein, beamed broadcasts from the Soviet Union calling for an end to the war and the withdrawal of Iraqi troops."

In the first step of the dance, Iraq mis-stepped, basically.

2. However, the Soviets soon grew disenchanted, for obvious reasons, with Iran -- which was rapidly proving, body by body, televised confession by televised confession, not to be a soviet friendly country. Khomeini hadn't heard of liberation theology, and wasn't about to let some khafir goody goody doctrine about crossing Marx and Jesus be some stupid model for liberation Islam. So the Soviets, beginning in 1981, did supply Saddam Hussein with a great deal of weaponry, including scud missiles.

3. But who knew that detente would grow in such far flung niches? When those scud missiles started raining down on Teheran in 1988, it was due to the synergy of German tech and old fashioned Soviet rocketry. Yes, a weapons system from one Bloc got hotwired by technicians and equipment from another Bloc. Who said we couldn't all just get along?

On the principle that the enemy of my enemy is, etc., the Reagan administration tried to covertly woo the Iranians -- as we all know, or at least those of us who were intellectually alert in the eighties. Iran-Contra, remember? The cake, the bible, the package brought by eager beaver Reagan-ite Bud McFarland to the Teheran airport. The carrot, in other words. But since carrots are best tasted when some whacking big stick is poised to hit you on the crown if you don't make like Bugs Bunny, the Reaganites decided, in 1982, to play the Iraq card. This was simple: it was a matter of removing Iraq from the list of Terrorist Nations. That greased the wheels for what became a huge arming effort, propping up a regime that was seen, at least by our Middle Eastern allies (Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, to name the usual suspects) as an essential bulwark against chaos.

4. This is where the year by year breaks down. What do we know? Well, we still don't know the exact figures, who sold what to who, and who leveraged the deals. 43 billion dollars were fed into the arms network worldwide by S. Hussein, as crazy as a a gold-digger with her deathbed sugar daddy's credit card. This included chemicals for "fertilizer" from the U.S. Ah, ironically, the chemicals were used to make fertilizer, insofar as the corpse, in form of dead Kurds and Iranians fertilized the streets of Birjinni and the battle fields of Halapja. This was old time religion, here. The same principle that applied to Injuns in the ha ha Wild West days (as in the only good one is a dead one) applied at that time to Iranians. That's what they get for being axis of Evil. For a little article about the consequences of the Iraq's systematic use of chemical weapons on the battlefield, click here. Or check out this recent Guardian piece by Dilip Hiro. Hiro is a Middle East veteran, and writes not only for the lefty Guardian, but for the right-wing Washington Report on Middle Eastern Affairs too.

"As Iraq's use of poison gases in war and in peace was public knowledge, the question arises: what did the United States administration do about it then [in 1988]? Absolutely nothing. Indeed, so powerful was the grip of the pro-Baghdad lobby on the administration of Republican President Ronald Reagan that it got the White House to foil the Senate's attempt to penalise Iraq for its violation of the Geneva Protocol on Chemical Weapons to which it was a signatory. This made Saddam believe that the US was his firm ally - a deduction that paved the way for his brutal invasion and occupation of Kuwait and the 1991 Gulf war, the outcomes of which have not yet fully played themselves out."

Two further grafs in the story definitely take us back to the bad old days of the eighties.

"Between October 1983 and the autumn of 1988, Baghdad deployed 100,000 munitions, containing mainly mustard gas, which produces blisters on the skin and inside the lungs, and nerve gas, which damages the nervous system, but also cyanide gas, which kills instantly. From initially using these lethal agents in extremis to repulse Iran's offensives, the Iraqis proceeded to use them as a key factor in their assaults in the spring and summer of 1988 to regain their lost territories, including the strategic Fao peninsula. That the Pentagon had first-hand knowledge of Iraq's use of chemical agents during these offensives was confirmed by the New York Times two weeks ago.

'After the Iraqi army, with American planning assistance, retook the Fao peninsula, a Defense Intelligence Agency officer, Lt Col Rick Francona, now retired, was sent to tour the battlefield with Iraqi officers,' wrote Patrick Tyler of the Times. 'Francona saw zones marked off for chemical contamination, and containers for the drug atropine scattered around, indicating that Iraqi soldiers had taken injections to protect themselves from the effects of gas that might blow back over their positions.'

Well, between knowledge of its use and collaboration in its use, there seems to be a gap. There really isn't. The arms bazaar is a nexus of state and private interests, and the interlock is pretty tight. When the US wants a country armed, you don't always have to go through Congress to get authorization -- especially if the country in question has beaucoup oil wealth, as Iraq did. So you lift restrictions on the transfer of certain chemicals. And the private sector obliges.

Ah, dinner table conversation -- it is the mother of posts! I could have gone on (and on...), but the main points we should take away from this history lesson are:
1. American interest in the Middle East has not been about good and evil -- it has been about American interest.
2. That interest is defined partly by the changing perspectives and constituencies in the Foreign Policy elite. That elite isn't monolithic, but it is not motivated, ultimately, by Wilsonian ideals of a democratic New World Order. Nor is it repulsed by the most barbaric slaughters, or uses of the 'weapons of mass destruction," as long as the body counts consist of the right people.
3. There's no evidence this has changed. If the US gets its war on Iraq, one good thing -- from the standpoint of the aforesaid Wilsonian ideals of democracy -- will result -- the downfall of Saddam Hussein. But one bad thing will almost inevitably happen too -- the collapse of the Kurdish semi-states in Northern Iraq. Furthermore, the U.S has depended on military strongmen to maintain states in the Middle East, except for Israel (and Sharon looks more and more like an Assad figure than a Jeffersonian democrat). Do they have any incentive not to do that in the future? No. For evidence, one merely has to cast a glance at Pakistan to see how the Bush doctrine works. It works by shutting its eyes quite firmly to coup d'etats mounted by our guys.
4. Iraq looks like it is at an end, as a state. Totalitarian methods will provoke state split ups -- see the former U.S.S.R. To prevent this, expect the US to promote, actively, a military regime that engages in low grade repression (nothing so messy as gassing Kurds). But look for that strategy to fail. At least, LI is optimistic that it will. And look for panic to ensue among the Arab states that are our allies.

Remora

LI recommends this article in the Sunday Times:
A Guardian of Jobs or a "Reverse Robin Hood"? by Leslie Wayne

Since the question of bias in the press has been a hot button issue (which is one of those pundit phrases that make less and less sense as they are repeated more and more -- what, exactly, is a hot button? Rather, the issue has become a diacritical button issue -- like the period key, or the comma key, it has become a sustaining, semantic blank, functioning to convey an ideological payload hither and yon, to much yapping from the examiners of yap, aka media critics), it should be pointed out that bias, without which that title would make no sense, given its tilt towards the irresistable phrase, reverse Robin Hood, is inseparable from analysis, here.

Anyway, the analysis is on point. While much fuss and tossing of teathers went into forcing CEOs to sign off on their balance sheets, the Export-Import bank was quietly expanded. The article focuses on just what the Ex-Imlax Bank does. In the past, we dilated about another ridiculous tool of government finance: OPIC. The Ex-Lax is bigger, and more pernicious. Here's a graf:

"More fundamentally, there are questions about why the bank exists at all. Less than 1 percent of all American exports receive Export-Import financing, which comes in the form of direct loans, loan guarantees or export credit insurance. The bulk of Export-Import's benefits go to a small number of large companies that are sophisticated enough to get financing on their own: Boeing, Halliburton, General Electric, Northrop Grumman, Lucent Technologies, ChevronTexaco, Caterpillar and Dell Computer, among others."

More sickening stuff:

"Commercial banks, meanwhile, love Export-Import loan guarantees because they turn corporate loans for business in risky places into risk-free loans. If a corporate borrower halts payments on an Export-Import backed loan, the federal government must step in and pay it off. The bank claims a default rate of less than 2 percent.American exporters love it even more. With an Export-Import loan guarantee, they can borrow money from banks at lower rates and more favorable terms than usual. And if they get into a jam overseas, the Export-Import bank can be a powerful ally. "You've got the full weight of our U.S. embassy, our ambassador, the Treasury Department here and overseas, the State Department, all coming in," said Mr. Rice at the export coalition.

On the other hand, small businesses, which often need the help more than large companies, get short shrift from the bank, despite Congressional pressure to change that practice. Only 18 percent of the bank's financing last year went to small business, down from 21 percent in 1998."

Dope.
Screw the exordium.

Alberto Manguel's latest book is entitled Reading Pictures. That title didn't seem right to us -- the verb, surely, should be seeing. Looking at. But Reading does hint at a more theory packed gaze than is usual among the realists, so we overlooked -- or didn't read -- the title. Perhaps the title should have been Overwriting Pictures, a more confrontational, but also more truthful, guide to the author's intention.

But, but... just as we were getting into the book, we were stopped cold by two sentences set pretty close to one another in the introduction:



1. "With the development of perspective during the Renaissance, pictures froze into a simple instant: that of the moment of the viewing as perceived from the standpoint of the viewer."



2."Pictures, however, present themselves to our consciousness instantaneously, held by their frame..."



LI tried to go on, but these sentences so clouded our pleasure that we couldn't trust Manguel from then on. Whatever he had to say about Tina Modotti or Peter Eisenman was going to be colored, for us, by that initial instance of -- well, we hate to use the term, but there isn't another one available: logocentrism.



The first we would call historically ignorant, and the second, upon which the first depends, phenomenologically ignorant. It is an ignorance of a particular genre, however. The kind of ignorance that becomes a clue in a police novel. The telling distortion that hints at a larger, suppressed event.



The thing to do, here, is to track back from the phenomenological error -- the conception of the picture-as-instant -- to the dependent historical error. Will LI ever have time to do the latter? Probably not. But let's address ourselves, with the gusto of some paterfamilias carving the Christmas goose, to no. 2.



Manguel, to illustrate the instantaneousness of the picture, doesn't invoke the real sensory impact of pictures. He has already set the stage (and told us all we need to know of his particular approach) by claiming that "storytelling exists in time, pictures in space." He illustrates this claim, bizarrely, by using a picture -- but really, this isn't bizarre if, like LI, you are hip to the Derridian history of logocentrism, in which the compulsion to illustrate the logocentric claim by way of an example that takes exception to the thesis is a recurring pattern. Derrida calls this the logic of the supplement, and LI could call it the return of the repressed as your ideal straight man, but you get the idea. The idea of storytelling existing in time is, of course, consistent with the idea of language as primarily arising out of voice -- a long, long story of Platonism in action, the shucking off of the material for the spiritual essence, the refusal to countenance the double aspect of the Word unless the two faces were properly hierarchized, and pointed to, eventually, a founding, timeless sense. Etc. Similarly, the silence of pictures becomes prima facie evidence that they exist, primarily, in space. That silence is considered a wholly negative, and wholly accidental, attribute of the picture. But in order to effect the separation of space and times as modes, it is necessary to fictionalize the primary scene of viewing. There is, firstly, the matter of the picture that "presents itself" -- and we can already hear the whisper, the merest whisper, of the pathetic fallacy here, and farther back, in the cold hallways, yes,  that notion of the picture as some sub-anima like thing, zombie to human, opposed to the word, the dead letter, the tool, the techne -- well, there is that. Then there is what exactly it means, the picture-as-instant.



Now, if we unpack our idea (our mental picture) of the picture-as-instant, we get something like this: the gaze, which takes up some quantifiable time, is composed of atomic bits, little glances, indecomposable insofar as decomposition requires some extended period. This is not, by the way, a very good exposition of the phenomenology of seeing -- or its physiological correlates. But Manguel doesn't want to argue for it anyway. His argument takes another turn. The instantaneousness is not about timeless time atoms. No, it is about total impressions. It is about gestalt. Mangual illustrates (the pictures on pictures we string along in this analysis!) his point with, of course, Van Gogh (and excuse us, excuse us, have to say this, have to stick my head into the frame here, much like the film-maker in The Man who Envied Woman, remember that great scene when she appears at the bottom of the screen, on the top is her man, looking at a Playboy, and there she is, harried by her own imagination, this film, and she orders all the viewers who haven't menstruated from the room, or is it all viewers who haven't gone through menopause? well, here LI has to stick his head in, top of the screen is the Mangling of Manguel, bottom is me, and I'm going to allude, here, as my reader, with her ears pricked up, can surely already guess, I'm going to allude to Derrida's essay, Restitutions de la verite en pointure, and the mysterious presence of Van Gogh in these discussions, and not just Van Gogh but 'just-Van-Gogh,' the unspecified Van Gogh, which Derrida has gone through, exhaustively -- for which James Elkin criticizes him in this very pretty essay -- by pointing to the slip slip slip of the concrete referant, the substitution, in the moment of proof, of some variable for the real thing, the titled thing, the picture itself -- a sort of stage fright of reference -- and not in itself but as it presents itself, or is represented, the slip slip slip that in Manguel's case, as though following some fatal, secret law, is represented by Manguel's allusion, here, to an earlier reference to a Van Gogh picture of a beach that could be many Van Gogh pictures of beaches -- which, of course, is the danger of the picture having only space, since space has a tendency to yawn, to become general, to become a marker of itself in time, its truth encapsulated in a glance - that yawn of space being the absolute zero degree of boredom which is the real foundation of logocentrism, the sleep it induces), making the claim of instantaneousness like this: "Van Gogh's fishing boats, for instance, were for me, on that first afternoon, immediately real and definitive. Over time, we may see more or less in a picture, delve deeper and discover further details, associate and combine images, lend it words to tell what we see, but in itself the image exists in the space it occupies, independently of the time we allot to gaze upon it�"

We will take up the amphibolies in these brief claims at some latter date. Really, this post is an excuse to link to the letters of Van Gogh, which have been put up, very generously, with a search tool to shift through them. However, there is a passage we really must quote, here. Van Gogh is discussing with his brother the perennially hot topic, among painters, of drinking. Leading to this wonderful burst of eloquence:

"And very often indeed I think of that excellent painter Monticelli - who they said was such a drinker, and off his head - when I come back myself from the mental labour of balancing the six essential colours, red - blue - yellow - orange - lilac - green. Sheer work and calculation, with one's mind strained to the utmost, like an actor on the stage in a difficult part, with a hundred things to think of at once in a single half hour.

After that, the only thing to bring ease and distraction, in my case and other people's too, is to stun oneself with a lot of drinking or heavy smoking. Not very virtuous, no doubt, but it's to return to the subject of Monticelli. I'd like to see a drunkard in front of a canvas or on the boards. It is too gross a lie, all the Roquette woman's malicious, Jesuitical slanders about Monticelli.

Monticelli, the logical colourist, able to pursue the most complicated calculations, subdivided according to the scales of tones that he was balancing, certainly over-strained his brain at this work, just as Delacroix did, and Richard Wagner.

And if perhaps he did drink, it was because he - and Jongkind too - having a stronger constitution than Delacroix, and more physical ailments (Delacroix was better off), well, if they hadn't drunk - I for one am inclined to believe - their nerves would have rebelled, and played them other tricks: Jules and Edmond de Goncourt said the very same thing, word for word - �We used to smoke very strong tobacco to stupefy ourselves� in the furnace of creation.

Don't think that I would maintain a feverish condition artificially, but understand that I am in the midst of a complicated calculation long beforehand. So now, when anyone says that such and such is done too quickly, you can reply that they have looked at it too quickly."

Remora

LI was going to write a post about Ann Coulter, but we didn't have the heart. Actually, this post was going to use Coulter's remark, in the New York Observer that "My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times Building." I thought I'd use this remark to map the interlocking major political weblogs and how they operate to exclude or include agents in the blog discourse -- which has a form consonant with other closed clubs, cliques, and in-groups. And blah blah blah. But... but I didn't have the heart for any comments on Ann Coulter, beyond the fact that the more interesting part of the Coulter story was the writer's part in it -- George Gurley. One got a whiff of something I haven't thought about in years: that old 'Nancy Reagan's queens'" culture. Frankly, I thought that was good and dead. The explanation is probably that Gurley, on his own account, is from one of those tight assed hetero villes -- Kansas City -- where camp is still alive. In larger cities, that aesthetic of resistance and self mockery is pretty dead. The parasitic attachment to some uber-heterowoman's desires, which fills the piece, is quite, uh, familiar. LI was raised in the South, and saw a lot of that weird nexus between a certain rich strata of rich, cultured but limited women and gay guys, who are in a much more precarious position in midsized towns in the South and Midwest than they are in, say, California. Anyway, I'd see that attachment to the only sophistication available -- which was in the salons of these women. The agreement was that these guys would close their eyes to peripheral, anti-gay context these women operated in, while the women ornamented their circles with something definitely different from the country club wit of their hubbies. Ah, the compromises that were struck! I remember a friend of mine, who had confessed the love that dare not speak its name to his best friend, an older, wealthy woman, being told, at one point, that she didn't want him hanging around with her son. Just out of the blue, and as a matter of course. But I felt at the time that there was something that satisfied my friend in that gesture, however hurt he was.

In any case, Gurley's political motives are quite funny. They go back to being insulted in his senior year -- it isn't clear whether this is in high school or college.

"I first started thinking I might be conservative after witnessing the communist radical Angela Davis give a speech at University of Kansas in the late 80�s. Hundreds of students cheered after she blamed the Bush administration for the crack epidemic.

This reminded me of that hippie girl my senior year who berated me at a party for saying I admired Margaret Thatcher. "She�s a capitalist pig!" she screamed at me. I stammered. Then one of my best friends defended her, saying, "George, sorry, you got no leg to stand on, man." I had left the party ashamed, powerless.

That was in 1991. So I called up this same friend of mine, Hampton Stevens, now a freelance writer now living in Kansas City. He responded to Ann immediately. "I love it when she�s unafraid to say that people are stupid and ignorant. She�s written some stuff about liberal folly and it�s so fantastic."

And so, dear readers, leaving that party ashamed and powerless, Gurley vowed that someday, he'd show that hippie girl (not chick, oddly enough)! Which he does, by getting Coulter to tell us who she thinks is sexy, and the candy just rolls out:

How did she feel about the Vice President?"Cheney is my ideal man. Because he�s solid. He�s funny. He�s very handsome. He was a football player. People don�t think about him as the glamour type because he�s a serious person, he wears glasses, he�s lost his hair. But he�s a very handsome man. And you cannot imagine him losing his temper, which I find extremely sexy. Men who get upset and lose their tempers and claim to be sensitive males: talk about girly boys. No, there�s a reason hurricanes are named after women and homosexual men, it�s one of our little methods of social control. We�re supposed to fly off the handle."They are supposed to be rock-solid men. Dick Cheney exudes that. Can you imagine him yelling at Lynne Cheney? No. Every female I know finds that so incredibly attractive.

"What about Rumsfeld?"Mmmmm-hmmmm. And I might add, inasmuch as we have just left the Clinton era, everyone recognizes this: There is absolutely no possible way any one of those men have ever cheated on their wives. No possible way. Even Colin Powell, who I don�t particularly like politically�no possible way. These are honorable men and I think America recognizes that."

Mmmmm-hmmmm. Sometimes, like, when you leave a party ashamed and powerless? Don't remember it forever, or in a newspaper I sometimes write for. Please.

Remora

On the side of the angels.

Dan Gilmour's column points to an issue LI has been clamoring about, like an alarm in the Sahara desert, since before Moses was a pup, or at least since, a year ago, we started doing this thing: breaking IP monopolies. We've been against the Big Pharma ones, and against the increasing use of patent law in blatantly silly or pernicious ways, to impede technology, and we've been arms akimbo, we've been a regular scourge.

We are also totally without influence, but that's a minor thing.

The Carolinas have elected a set of senators and legislators (like Hollings S.C. and Cobble N.C.) who collectively represent Disney first. We don't know why the Carolinas -- possibly because being bought by the entertainment industry in those two states has minimum down side. These states aren't known for nursing alt entertaiment tech. They are the high end slave labor states -- they suck in industry by using tax breaks and union busting legislation.

Coble, who is less known than Hollings, is just as anxious to pre-emptively strike new tech -- to sterilize it with mechanisms that will forestall "copying." He's the chairman of a House committee on IP, which means he gets to lick the leftovers that Disney throws at him. That's the kind of money that gives you an office for life.

Well, against Representative Coble there has arisen a challenger, at last. The libertarian candidate, Grubb. Here's the graf d'explication:

"Grubb, 26, came to the attention of Net activists largely because several webloggers -- bloggers for short, those increasingly ubiquitous writers of online journals -- have been wondering how to fight back against the cartel [of MicroDisney -- LI] and the politicians who support it.

In the past week, partly at the urging of those bloggers, she's created a weblog (http://radio.weblogs.com/0112137/). On that site she's taking stands and answering questions from the Web community that sees an opportunity to at least put a scare into Coble."

LI says, scaring isn't enough: -- let's kick the bum out. Grubb's slogan should be "Coble to Kabul" -- which is what the tech Taliban wants to reduce us to.

My my, the alliteration, and the spittle, is flying today!.

Remora

LI hasn't commented much about Bush's war fever because we find it so depressing. We find it depressing because the United States has no cause to go to war with Iraq. Or rather, its causes for going to war with Iraq would work just as well for going to war with Pakistan -- or even Israel, which, after all, is the nation with the greatest (illegal) nuclear arsenal in the Middle East, and the one nation that has shown, time and time again, that it will take any pre-emptive action it deems necessary to protect itself -- not necessarily a good thing from the point of view of U.S. interests. After all, no law says our interests are aligned with Israel in the Middle East.

We find the peace side preferable, insofar as the argument is against the U.S. mounting an armed force to overthrow Saddam Hussein's government. On the other hand, we do think that government should be overthrown. It is unnecessary to rehearse the wickedness of the current government in this post -- we've done it a lot in previous posts. We'd prefer, of course, a velvet revolution, but that isn't going to happen. The Iraqi people deserve a representative government, one that guarantees them their rights -- that goes without saying. Unfortunately, the reality is that there might not be an Iraqi people -- rather, there might be a number of peoples gathered together in this colonial era contraption who want to get out.

Still, US policy up to now has been miserable and criminal. It rests on enforcing an economic blockade to encourage revolt, while at the same time refusing to support any democratic elements that would wish to make that revolt. In other words, we want an uprising of prisoners that would conveniently install another jailor, one to the American taste.

There's an essay in the guardian by David Clark that makes the very good point that it is not a moral option to simply let Hussein stay on, unopposed. The Left's point should be war is not the right way of dissolving the Ba'athist state structure, and should not be that that state structure is a good one, or a just one, or a justified one:



"The political and military risks of a ground invasion may be disproportionate to the nature of the current threat, but there is an equally dangerous fallacy that has gained ground in recent weeks. It is the assumption, latent in much of the anti-war commentary of the British left, that the notion of an Iraqi problem is nothing more than a figment of George Bush's imagination. Many of these voices seem to regard Saddam as a sort of Middle Eastern version of Fidel Castro: an authoritarian, but essentially harmless figure, to be admired, in a sneaking sort of way, for his ability to tweak Uncle Sam's nose. This view took its most egregious form in George Galloway's recent eulogy about Saddam's supposedly Churchillian qualities.

"It is a travesty of the real picture. There was a time when the British left was clear about the nature of the Iraqi regime and the moral obligation to take action against it. In the aftermath of the Halabja massacre, when Saddam murdered 5,000 Kurdish civilians with mustard gas, Jeremy Corbyn MP spoke for most of us when he denounced the regime as "fascist" and demanded the imposition of comprehensive sanctions; "no trade, no aid and no deals while the present repression continues against people in Iraq". Nowadays he signs motions denouncing those very same sanctions as an act of genocide against the Iraqi people."

Christopher Hitchens pitches in, too, in Sunday's Guardian, but Hitchens is so attached to his Jeremiah of the left role that he seems, lately, to be a poseur. It isn't the case, and has never been the case, that any serious figure on the left likes Hussein (while, of course, that was the case when old S. was supported by the Reagan/Bush folks). Why would they like him, particularly? The old third world-ism that developed a crush on any third world dictator that came along with a beret was long passe by the time Saddam murdered his way to the top. Hitchens reports on the use of poison gas in the Iraq - Iran war as though he broke the scoop, but in fact he didn't -- Andrew Cockburn has been there long before him. The other problem with the Jeremiah routine is that Hitchens was much more concerned, in the 90s, with Clinton's fellatio, than with whether the sanctions against Iraq were designed to liberate the Iraqis or to encourage them to, see above, exchange jailors. The immorality of the blockade came down to that. The immorality of the end of Bush I's war came down to that too -- the encouragement of an uprising, the standing aside while it was crushed, the hope that some American leaning Ba'athist would come along, whose gas attacks we'd be quite prepared to allow -- that was what was awful. That is what is still awful. The same people who crafted that piece of criminality are busy, today, making war plans to the greater glory of Bush's presidential chances in 2004. Even Jeremiahs should sometimes figure out a trick or two.

Note: This is the second part of "Thirteen Ways of Looking at Celebrity Biography." The previous post contained the first part.

5. Novalis said that God was a problem whose solution was another problem.
The same can be said for the celebrity - not the flash in the pan, but the super celebrity, the one who transcends her epoch, the one whose enigma is always fresh - the one who can be found listed in People Magazine�s 100 most intriguing people of the century (Special Fall 1997 edition).


6. "Buckalo did let Reselli back out of the Copa deal. The terms of the split were that Roselli would honor his obligation to play the Copacabana each year for seven years, but in all other ways he was no longer under Buckalo�s control." - David Evanier, The Jimmy Rosselli Story.

An act of 1572, in England, proscribed "common players in interludes and minstrils." Players had to �belong� to a baron or an honorable personage - hence Shakespeare's membership in the "Queens men." The punishment for being a wandering player ranged from whipping, to having your ears lopped off, to being shipped out of the district.

Entertainers, like Jews and slaves, were outside the bounds of the Holy City - Augustine's City of God, Christian Europe�s millennial long dream. They were, one way or another, under the ban of social death. It wasn�t only the Puritans who objected to the actor. Here�s Bossuet, a French bishop, commenting about Moliere, who - according to legend - died right after acting in La Malade imaginaire: he "passed from the pleasantries of theater, among which he practically drew his last breath, to the judgment seat of him who said: cursed be those who laugh now, for you shall cry."

Another legend said that Moliere was denied burial in consecrated ground.

Consumer culture, which raised the entertainer to an industry, was formed, and is still being formed, by the overthrow of that old feudal master morality. This is one of those "long events" Nietzsche talks about which, over the centuries long arc of its happening, threads itself so closely and finely into the way things are that it is all but invisible.

So the contract is more than just money in the CB - it is a sign. A historically rich sign. Follow the performer, follow the contract.

7. Ariel: Is there more toil? Since thou dost give me pains
Let me remember thee what thou hast promised,
which is not yet performed me.

Prospero: What now? Moody?
What is�t thou canst demand?

Ariel: My liberty.
- William Shakespeare, The Tempest, I,ii

The primal scene in show biz is staged between stage mother or manager or agent or director or studio owner or mob boss - all Prospero surrogates - and the performer, always gaining his freedom with his pranks, his shows, his image. And the dialogue between them (Shakespeare�s such a prophet!) always oscillates between the rational register, in which everything is cashed out in unmistakable numbers, and the emotional register, where it is all a question of love: How now? Moody? The money made by entertainers, from football players to TV stars, evokes an emotional response that indicates some genealogically knotty issue, here. Perhaps this is why the numbers never seem to come out right. They are the least blur-able of symbols, but even as they are added up in the CB ("Jimmy was earning up to $5,000 per performance at major venues like Palumbo�s in Philadelphia..."), they don�t add up.

The grosses are, in the end, fetishes - libidinal detours.

Out of the pairing of Prospero and Ariel, we have endlessly repeated variants. The synth-pop trasmutation of it gives us the Human League�s "Don�t you want me." Invert the power structure and you have Judy Garland in A Star is Born (which, ironically, inverts the real structure of her life). Don�t forget, the political economy of love is still very much in question, with its pre-contractual substructure (absolute slavery) and its post-contractual longings (which would be - what? The brotherhood and sisterhood of man? Or ... depending on the kindness of strangers?)

The celebrity�s social function is to embody the history, here, in fear and trembling, through booze and percadan, car wreck and drug bust. The contract is the nexus of love and value, and thus the source of pain and sorrow. The CB of the future, the perfect CB (Mallarme�s Book, to which all things in the world ultimately tend) will track these paradoxes with an infinite understanding of their connotations.

8. "The brave dreams of an invert seldom can be transmuted into real events," Irving Shulman, Harlow: an intimate biography

Consumer culture is a scandal to the Marxists and a stumbling block to the Tories. The Marxists have long forgotten the punk Karl who wrote, "everything that is solid melts into air." The Marxists have seen fire, and they�ve seen fascism, and they�ve grown so old. The Tories are caught between the glorious theory of free enterprise, where every man�s a king, and the moral monopoly of Christianity, where Old Adam has to be knocked on the head with a billyclub if he gets too happy.

Every contradiction evolves a storyline. The storyline on celebrity is put in classical form in Daniel Boorstin�s book, The Image: A guide to pseudo events in America.

The storyline is of a G�tterdammerung.

Boorstin lays it out. Once there were heros. The hero is a "human figure - real or imaginary or both - who has shown greatness in some achievement. He is a man or woman of great deeds."

And then, suddenly, there came a time when the hero was replaced. His replacement was also a mockery - the celebrity. The celebrity, according to Boorstin, is a person who is known for his well-knowness.

There�s no point in going into how a hero can be both real and imaginary, or how imaginary people perform great deeds. Boorstin�s book, which was published in 1961, is not the first to feature the rivalry between the celebrity and the hero. But certainly since the book appeared, the rivalry he describes, and the mournful moral consequence of a society that allows itself, somehow, to worship the idols of the marketplace, has become a structural constant of cultural criticism.

9. Susan Faludi, interviewing Sylvester Stallone for Esquire, writes about the way one of Stallone�s paintings symbolized "the fleeting quality of modern fame, the way celebrity has corrupted, and caused the death of, the classical hero." The painting depicts Hercules as a Christlike figure, bleeding from a bullet wound, with a clock near him. The clock symbolized time. As in, the fleeting quality of time. The image, silk-screened onto T-shirts, was retailed by Planet Hollywood in its Celebrities Limited Edition.

The bitter sense that somehow, in the past, the heroes were rampant, is scrolled around the pages of Nick Tosches Dino: "Like Dean and Jerry, most people would not even read. Ajax was no longer a Homeric hero; he was the Comedy Hour�s sponsor�s foaming cleanser, no longer a contender with Odysseus for the Arms of Achilles but the consort of Fab, which had itself transplanted Melville�s musings on "The Whiteness of the Whale" with the dictum "Whiter Whites without Bleaching."

10. The storyline insinuates itself in the CB. It produces a whole subclass of CBs in which the point is that the hero rivals some usurper, some Hamlet�s uncle, some fake - some supposedly bigger celebrity. Tosches is the master of this. In his three recent books - on Jerry Lee Lewis, Dean Martin, and Sonny Liston - he opposes authentic second tier celebrities against hollow first tier ones. Lewis is pitted against Elvis from the very introduction of the book, which shows Elvis wrapped in a prophetic slumber while Jerry Lee, armed, hammers at the gate of Graceland, demanding entrance. In the boxy Dino , it is Frank Sinatra who proves to be the hollow giant - a man whose heart follows his dick, a man who falls for the ersatz glamour of the Kennedy boys, while Dean lays back, his virtu protected by his disengagement. It is this image of Dean that moves Tosches to write lines like: �as the god-king of mob culture, he had blown aside the Beatles with the breath of his might." In the Devil and Sonny Liston, his most recent book, it�s Cassius Clay that is marked down as a motormouth and a gull, who never notices Liston is fixed - that Clay�s victories are bought.

If the values can be inverted like this, however - if we look back at the sixties and see the Beatles, if we forget where Sonny Liston is even fucking buried, if we ignore the Killer - there must be someone somewhere who is benefiting.

11. "The files of the Warren Commission show that he was one of the last people Jack Ruby called before the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Whoever, whatever, he really was, Barney Baker�s secrets dies with him, in March, 1974. - Nick Tosches, The Devil and Sonny Liston
.
In 1679, the French explorer Lasalle left a group of 15 men in the heart of the American wilderness, at a fortress on the Mississippi river named, appropriately, Fort Heartbreak (Crevecoeur). When he returned in 1680, he discovered his men had gotten tired of living at the end of Lonely Street. They had killed his second in command, burned the fort, and left a message in charcoal for their old commander on a punctured boat they�d leaned on a tree: "Nous sommes tous sauvages," it said. We are all savages.

This marauders� Declaration of Independence interpenetrates the more stately one Jefferson penned ninety years later to indicate a certain hidden system of paths through the continent�s dreamlife. Greil Marcus, in his book on Bob Dylan, calls this the Old, Weird America.

The Old Weird America is a sub-imperial braid woven out of New Orleans whorehouse slang, desperate coal miner winters, elevated Okies in L.A. bungalows and all the bandit chances of a casually amoral Volk. It�s art is linked, by ties of dread - the Wilderness keeps growing, the commander is probably dead - to its paranoia. Some of that feeling crops out in the CB - naturally. Because that is where the celebrities come from. It isn�t democracy, it is the Old, Weird America we are seeing up there, in lights. However it is genteelly bent to taste. The rivalry isn�t between the hero and the celebrity, but between the marauder and the image.


12. Errol Flynn: The Untold Story; The Secret Life of Tyrone Power; Peter Lawford: The Man who Kept the Secrets.

Leo Lowenthal, a Frankfurt School Marxist, once wrote, about "popular biographies": "Whatever the biographers proclaim about their heroes, they are heroes no longer. They have no fate, they are mere variables of the historic process."

Lowenthal had that old European idea about fate. For him, it was inextricable from the Hegelian program, Fate (God, this is so old!) is the confrontation of a great figure with the never completely unified moral universe, in which two contrary duties can be equally compelling.

Americans and the ancient Greeks have a more stripped down idea of fate. It is about hunting. It is about who is the hunter and who is the hunted.

A foot for flight he needs
Fleeter than storm-swift steeds,
For on his heels doth follow,
Armed with the lightnings of his Sire, Apollo.
Like sleuth-hounds too
The Fates pursue. - Sophocles, Oedipus the King

The hunt disrupts the usual order of things, the agricultural order, the lists, the official hierarchy, the difference between play and work. The American dream life returns to the archaic order. You have to merge with the flow of the hunt, you have to take secondary details, side-events, pseudo-events, seriously.

It is the private dick�s method. The paranoid method. The method by which great CBs are made. The biographer - the unauthorized biographer - wants a secret. So the biographer�s interests are not wholly consonant with his subjects. And yet the value of the secret depends on the value of the fame. Even killer biographers, like Kitty Kelly and Albert Goldmann, depend upon the fame of their victims (Nancy Reagan, Frank Sinatra, John Lennon) to preserve the interest in their stories.
That paranoid method has not yet been put to its maximum use. Mailer was always almost there - he was never able to quite write it down. But celebrity itself has now become a conspiracy, a constant flow, from radio, tv, movie screen, HTML, Java Script and out there, to the always stereotypically passive consumer, the one who "doesn't read." I think someday, though, the scream will come from the CB - the consumer will have absorbed too much, all the good objects and bad objects, will have felt inside himself some basic, cancerous transmutation, and will expell it - some consumer, some fan, some biographer - in the pentacostal tongue, the American glossalalia, that will penetrate to the heart of all conspiracies and explain, in paranoid metaphors and exaggerations, just what America means.

13. �That�s the great thing about living in Los Angeles. Anything that happens in the news - great tragedies, scandals - people just think: "what a great idea for a movie!"
Sissy Spacek, Interview Magazine, May, 1977

Thirteen ways of looking at a Celebrity Biography
(Part one)

1. "Rita and her first husband, Eddie Judson, shortly after they eloped, in 1937. He pressed her to sleep with other men if it would help her career." - caption to a picture in Barbara Leaming, If This was Happiness: a biography of Rita Hayworth.

When I flip through a new novel, I first read the description on the inside cover, and the first paragraph. When I pick up a CB, I go right to the photographs.

Usually there will be two or three sets of them in the book. Usually they are in black and white. This says something about my choice of celebrities. I am not of the Britney generation. And I'm nostalgic for the larger than life, black and white divas. Somehow, color is tacky. First we get the family, all unknown faces, badly mounted shots. Then, gradually, one of those faces becomes familiar. A pudgy cheeked little boy with a cap becomes James Dean. Margarita Cansino, at three years and eight months, becomes Rita Cansino, "before she underwent electolysis treatments to alter her hairline," and then Rita Hayworth.
I look for the odd, lewd shot, the one that shows a different level of nakedness � the nakedness of not looking famous, of not having yet achieved, or temporarily discarding, the iconic image. Here�s "a rare shot� of John Wayne without his toupee. And here�s Janis Joplin, naked. John Wayne looks more naked - he has been stripped, briefly, of his recognizability.

2. Captions. The picture stands in the visual order, the caption in the verbal. These two orders come at the world in different ways.

When I look at Rita and her first husband, I see a woman sitting down, smiling, wearing what looks like a camel hair coat. Her hair is a mass of black, pulled back. Not yet the famous hair, the trademark hair. She has made a little pistol with her thumb and index finger. This in itself is interesting and odd � what is she doing? I�ll never penetrate that hermetic gesture, not now. Is she pointing her �pistol� at this man to shoot him, a sort of comic joke between them? Should he have seen the message in this photo? Could he, did he have that much intelligence? There he is, sitting on the arm of the sofa, sitting slightly above her, turned to look at her, a woman who doesn�t look famous at the time the photo was taken, and looks famous now, now that we know this is Rita Hayworth. He, however, looks the same � he was not then, and is not now, famous. He wears a suit, and, oddly, either a scarf or an Ascot tie, left casually unfastened around his neck. I could amass a long list of more and more specific details, here, but the image is systematically fixed, it is all there is of it, it is one of a kind. I�d say that the picture doesn�t change, but of course it did. Fame changed it.

So I read the caption, knowing what I know. What changes with the caption? Not Rita. No, her husband changes. Her husband, not being famous, seems suddenly slightly louche, as if there were something slightly sinister about that scarf or Ascot tie. Is this the ornament that betrays the pimp? And the woman�s gesture - the pistol - is now defensive. She smiles, but she won�t let him get to her. He sits so pretty on the arm of the loveseat, above her, patronizing, even... threatening. He �pressed her� - but surely she resisted.

The caption makes the picture talk to me, as the picture itself doesn�t. The linguistic order, as opposed to the order of the image, is expansive. Whatever frames the possibility of speech, here, is indeterminate. I unconsciously think of the caption as what these two are saying to each other, but that isn�t quite it. It is what they aren�t saying � it is what they are meaning to each other. Something which isn�t said � something which transcends saying. Meaning is easy for the picture, saying is impossible. Linking the picture to that verbal data is the celebrity biographer�s act of supreme fiction. The pictures in the celebrity biography are a sort of abridged version of what the biography is about: becoming-famous.

3. �Who were these serious cocksuckers, these jerk-offs who approached moving pictures as if they were fucking reality, who wouldn�t even know reality if it bit them on the ass?" - Nick Tosches, Dino: Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams.
The technical term for a verbal picture, in classical rhetoric, is ekphrasis. Ekphrasis is considered slightly suspect in the world of scholarly biographies. It exists there, if at all, in order to entertain, as a distraction from the real business of analysis.

Not so in the CB - it is ekphrasis-happy.

Since a verbal picture is a picture, it permits - it wants - a caption. This way, the same dynamic between picture and caption can be embedded in the story. The voice of the caption can become, by imperceptible increments, the actual voice of the celebrity. Martin is not being quoted verbatim by my citation from Tosches, but is being, in a sense, invaded. We are overhearing his thoughts as he ponders some bad press. In Tosches� Dino, we overhear his thoughts quite a bit. Tosches extrapolates from quotes he�s culled from other celebrity bios - most notably, Kitty Kelly�s His Way: The unauthorized biography of Frank Sinatra. He couldn�t extrapolate "cocksucker" from, say, Dean Martin�s interview with TV Guide - that language is already public, already completely invaded. It is not Dean Martin�s own, whether he spoke it or not. When the celebrity speaks in an interview, we know the words are part of a program. They are publicity. They are, as Jack Nicholson once said, "selling eggs." Cocksucker, though, is oddly authentic.

It is necessary to stage some invasion if we are going to be intimate with the celebrity. We are presumed to be not famous, our faces never figuring in the pictures. But we have no solidarity with the other not famous � they compete with us. Why them? So the CB, promising us intimacy, restores some fairness. The real story, the man as he has never been seen before. The man behind the mask.

Tosches� technique, in a novel, would be called interior monologue. Because modernist novels started using it in the 20s - Joyce, Faulkner, Woolf - the academic might suppose that the celebrity biography took this technique from the novel. I think, however, that both genres got it from the where captions and pictures come together - the newspapers and the movies.

4. "Here�s the deal: No one knows, and no one with any integrity has ever spoken. About anything" - Loni Anderson, My Life in High Heels, about her alleged fight with Burt Reynolds on the eve of their wedding.
In philosophical relativism, the truth of an expression depends upon a given system�s norms for selecting true statements. Truth isn�t necessarily about picturing facts, unless, within the system, we make it a rule that the truth is necessarily about picturing facts. Coherence trumps correspondence, to use the jargon.
The C.B. is a limit case of relativism. Here, the relation between tabloid truth and the sources of verifiable fact are shadowy, at best. Was Errol Flynn a Nazi Spy, as Charles Higham maintains in Errol Flynn: The Untold Story? Or is Higham a fraud, as Tony Thomas says, in Errol Flynn: The Spy who never was? On her wedding night, did Jean Harlow naughtily wave a giant dildo under her husband�s nose, mocking his penis, which measured about the size of her pinkie? Or was Irving Shulman fantasizing in Harlow: An Intimate Biography, as Jean�s friend Adela Rogers St. Johns forcefully maintained (by "forcefully maintained, I mean she whacked Shulman on the head with her purse on TV, according to David Stenn in Bombshell, Jean Harlow�s most recent biography. As we know from Freud, the purse is a symbol of the vagina. So if Shulman is lying about Harlow�s husband�s dick, how appropriate that he get whacked with Harlow�s friend�s pussy � okay, pussy substitute). Did Sonny Liston throw his first fight to Cassius Clay, as Nick Tosches charges in his just published The Devil and Sonny Liston? Or did Sonny�s lineman, Joe Polino, put a special linement on Sonny�s gloves in the fourth round to blind the challenger, as Nigel Collins says in Boxing Babylon?

It isn�t just that the norms, in this genre, are vague - you get a feeling that they are a sap�s game. There�s another game going on, another history. It�s Chinatown, Jake.

Remora
LI's brothers live in Gwinnett County, Georgia. For their affection and votes, two men were running for the House of Representatives in the Republican Primary this year: Bob Barr and John Linder.
LI knew who the right choice was there, all right. It was Barr, all the way.
Barr, though, was defeated, and polite liberalism everywhere seems to find this only proper. Here's the WP editorial about it:

"There was no nastiness or acid-dripping one-liner that was too much for Bob Barr. He proudly broadcast a commercial depicting himself as a bulldog. Voters in the 7th District, though conservative, had no use for a spotlight-craving politician who lives for the insult."

Living for the insult isn't such a bad thing to do if you are good at insulting. Bob Barr was to conservativism what Gorgeous George was to wrestling -- a man who made a minor art form out of a fixed and venal venue. To call Linder, his opponent, non-descript is to exaggerate. Apparently at one point, Linder, in a debate with Barr, alluded to his 39 year marriage. Well, that is about the sum of the man's accomplishments -- he is able to perform monogamy.

Barr and Linder shared rightwing records, but the good thing about Barr was that he was, eccentrically enough, a civil libertarian. He sponsored a bill with Barney Frank to abolish drug forfeiture law, and it even passed. It was later vetoed by Clinton, ever afraid of not appearing tough on crime, even if that means countenancing the transformation of police departments into banditti. And banditti, moreover, who prey on blacks -- racial profiling being, in one of its aspects, the expropriating of 'inappropriate' sums of money from black men on our nations highways, from New Jersey to Louisiana. Barr was, like Linder, a good second amendment man -- and LI does have a weakness for that second amendment. But the love affair with the pistol does seem to have awakened him to some of the more onerous encroachments of the government on our civil liberties. There was a story in the American Prospect, last year, about the alliance between Barr and the ACLU to modify the more barbarous strippings of our freedom proposed, in the name of the Heimat, by the Bush coup team:

"The day after the attack, Halperin [with the ACLU] began e-mailing his colleagues. By the time they called their first press conference on September 20, they had a name (Organizations in Defense of Freedom), a 10-point statement of principles, and even spin-offs (such as Computer Scientists in Defense of Freedom). They also had a secret weapon: Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, scourge of the liberals, conservative guru par excellence. "The Bush administration said, 'We've got a bill that we've gotta pass right away,'" recalls Norquist. "As soon as I heard that, I began to get worried."...

"Almost immediately, prominent Republicans on Capitol Hill began to sound a lot like Ted Kennedy. "Why is it necessary to propose a laundry list of changes to criminal law generally and criminal procedure generally and cast such a wide net?" Republican Congressman Bob Barr demanded in the House Judiciary Committee's first hearing on Attorney General John Ashcroft's antiterrorism proposals. "And why is it necessary to rush this through?"

It strikes LI as nutty that some liberals think electing Linder is a victory. It isn't. It seems like a victory only if you confuse partisan wrangling -- for instance, Barr's prominence as a Clinton impeacher -- with real political goals. If you do, you will always have a home with the DNC.

Note: LI looks around the world, or its representation, today, and what do we see? Breaking news on Enron (from the flipping of one of Andie Fastow's crucial boys to the odd, unremarked arrest of the past chairman of Wessex Water, an Enron spin-off, for bribery), global warming (ignored by coup leader Bush) on the agenda in Johannesberg, and the ever present Iraq war. But instead of politics -- it is much too hot for politics -- we are thinking of putting up an old essay we wrote for Feed on Celebrity Biographies. Feed's editors, as a matter of fact, didn't like the piece, so after several tries we parted ways, with LI out of pocket to the extent of having spent the time to do the thing. Anyway, the CB essay is entitled, 13 ways of looking at a Celebrity Biography. At some point today, we are gonna put it up.

Remora
Remora

LI is surprised, this morning, that the Bush administration came through on an old American promise, and released documents on the 1970s Terror in Argentina.

LI has no doubt they were sifted to remove various inconvenient names -- such as Kissinger's -- but it is one of the few applaudable American actions of the past couple of months. Here are two grafs:

"One embassy dispatch, for example, cites an Argentine source who says that captured leftist fighters, known as Montoneros, were all dealt with in the same way, through "torture and summary execution."

"The security forces neither trust nor know how to use legal solutions," the dispatch quotes the source as saying. "The present methods are easier and more familiar."

Now, LI has always thought that the great mystery of the Argentina terror was whether the Monteneros weren't ultimately led by an agent provacateur. This is the thesis put forth in a great book of political reportage, "Dossier Secreto: Argentina's Desaparecidos and the Myth of the "Dirty War," by Martin Edward Anderson. The leader of the Monteneros, the sinister Mario Firmenich, survived the military repression, and is now, we believe, languishing in jail, an odd scapegoat in the accord that basically allowed the fascist apparat in Argentina to escape, unscathed, with its crimes. According to Jorge Castaneda's history of the Latin American left, the money accrued by the Montonero's policy of systematic kidnapping went to Cuba, and thence to the Sandinistas, with Castro acting as a broker. There's a strange parallel in the course of action taken by the right and left in Argentina, with the right proceeding to install a cocaine-ish military regime in Bolivia and aiding the Contras with weapons and training, and the left helping the Sandinistas even up to training their secret police. Meanwhile, in Argentina, the guerrillas proudly proclaimed their responsibility for acts of violence some of which they certainly did not commit. Firminich seemed to have a passion for the planning and committing of acts that were, from the perspective of either damaging the regime or rousing the people, so grossly misplanned, and so criminal, that they seem congruent with the military's own on-going effort to legitimate its counter-terror to the population. And that population, of course, went about its business purposely not noticing the disapppearance of this or that person, or the body parts washing up on the banks of the La Plata. For what was special about Argentina was that the crimes were known as they were being committed.

Moral is, of course, don't think that the good middle class will necessarily rise up in revolt if some of its sons and daughters, and many of its troublemakers, are bloodied. In fact, in the U.S., how many have risen up, so far, and asked questions about the illegal detention of at least a thousand people since 9/11? Count em on your fingers. This is not even an issue going into the November election. And if these arabic named guys and gals disappear, does anybody imagine the American population drawing back in revulsion?

Now, Anderson's thesis would be absurd in the world as it is portrayed in your average daily paper. That is the newspaper, by the way, that publishes, with the utmost credulity, scare stories fomented by the Attorney General's office about the capture of terrorists with dirty bombs in the A section -- and publishes retractions of those stories months later, in the C section, if at all. But the figure of the agent provocateur is all too common in the political netherworld -- as Joseph Conrad shows in Under Western Eyes. And in Argentina, the idea that the Montonero high command could have been working on an agenda that converged with the military agenda has floated around for some time. In a memorial notice to the great Argentina journalist Rudolfo Walsh, a journalist for the Buenos Aires Herald recently discussed the possibility that his ambush and assassination was a set-up:


"At the moment of his death, Walsh, disguised as an old-age pensioner, was on his way to a meeting with Jos� Salgado, the Montonero and police officer who - in July 1976 - placed in the Central Police Department the bomb which killed 20 policemen and maimed some 60 others. Strangely enough, Walsh - who was a high-ranking member of Montoneros intelligence - did not know on that fatal morning Salgado had been captured months previously, tortured beyond recognition and executed. In other words Rodolfo Walsh was set up by his own Montoneros whose leadership may have been working with and for the armed forces. The point has never been clarified, but there can be no doubt some terrorists were serving both masters and not everyone was as committed to their ideals as Rodolfo Walsh was."

That Walsh, a moralist in the tradition of Kraus and Peguy, and a journalist in the mould of Seymor Hersch, could countenance Salgado, tells us something about the state of terror then existing. Walsh's daughter, incidentally, was killed in a shootout with the cops the year before Walsh was bushwacked. Walsh's career is not known in the U.S. -- he hasn't been translated -- so for our American readers, here's a summary of his career:

"He is credited with being the father of investigative journalism in Argentina. In 1957 he published Operaci�n Masacre - based on an interview with a survivor - which tells the real story of how a group of 34 men, most of whom had no connection with a recent revolt against the Aramburu dictatorship, were taken to a garbage dump in Jos� Le�n Su�rez, a suburb of Buenos Aires, and summarily executed in a hail of machine gun fire. "All Peronists", said Per�n, "are indebted to the author of Operaci�n Masacre", but Walsh was now a marked man and anonymous death threats became part of his life.

"In 1969 he published �Qui�n Mat� a Rosendo? which tells how trade-unionist, Rosendo Garc�a, died in an Avellaneda pizzeria in a shoot-out between rival unionists, Raimundo Ongaro and Augusto �Wolf� Vandor (2). In 1973 he published �El Caso Satanovsky� which tells the sordid tale of the murder of a leading lawyer who was litigating against the military government. None of these cases were ever solved and Rodolfo Walsh became an unpopular name for many powerful people for having investigated them."

LI wonders whether the full story of what happened in the seventies in Latin America will ever be uncovered. But certain things can be uncovered by the determined individual investigator. Although I could not find a photo of Jose Salgado, I did find a picture of a kid -- Alfredo Daniel Salgado -- whose clear and present danger to the State was snuffed, no doubt by an airplane trip, or the bloody necessity of torture. The Sinolvido site, by the way, contains photos of 3,000 of the disappeared. The high school album.

Dope

LI is not posting like it used to because LI doesn't have a computer like we used to.
Instead, we are being ground to death by computer service places, who are supposedly saving the stuff we've written over the last four years.
Okay?

Sunday, LI watched Dona Flor and her two husbands with a friend, S. S. said she'd never seen it, and we thought she'd like it -- S. likes bawdy comedy. Hell, S. likes mere lechery on film, if it is done right, as any right thinking person should. Cinema has added immeasurably to the human sex life, I would imagine, but this is one of the unsung triumphs of the Arts and Sciences.

So we watched the video. LI had last seen the film many presidents ago -- in the Prytania Theater, in New Orleans. Watching a film you liked at one point in your life is sometimes a tricky proposition -- the bogus stretches that, somehow, you didn't see on first viewing stick out, and the clever bits seem less clever than sophomoric. Still, we like the divine Sonia Braga, still young, and as yet not totally advanced on her career as Brazil's answer to ... to whoever that actress was who played in the Emmanuel Films. We liked the music. No, we loved the music, still. The first husband. The Flaubertian business with the ineffably repulsive second husband, poor guy, a pharmacist of sterling character and an absolute sexual blank. This time, it was clearer that the film was referring to the novel it came out of -- in the same way the rude mechanicals in Midsummer Night's Dream refer to the whole of ancient literature, seen peaking through their flaws and flippancy.
LI hates to admit this -- one of our Brazilian readers, in particular, will raise holy hell with us, we know -- but we haven't read the Amado book. In fact, we have somehow acquired this snobbish sense about Amado, that he is the Brazilian equivalent of Isabel Allende -- a writer for tourists only. But there were numerous touches in the film that implied some rich novelistic subtext over and above the merely picayune. So today we dutifully went out and found the novel, and plan on reading it.
We aren't the only ones to have this sense about Amado. His death last year was obituarized in the Guardian in ambiguous terms. After making the traditional distinction between the first phase and the second phase of Amado's career, with the first phase being serious and the second being, uh, carnival-esque, Sue Branford and David Treece write:


"By then Amado was changing the way he wrote. He had become critical of his early novels for being "too serious, too ideological, too full of rage", and became convinced that the most effective way of dealing with political enemies was to laugh at them. He had by then read the Russian critic, MM Bakhtin, who was an exponent of what he called "the subversive power of comedy". Bakhtin's notion of the carnivalesque, with its potential to upset the hierarchies of power and turn the world upside down, had a particular relevance for Brazil, where each year the keys of cities, such as Rio de Janeiro, are handed to Rei Momo (the king of carnival) for three days of riotous living.

This perspective came to define the second major phase of Amado's writing, beginning with Gabriela, Cravo e Canela (1958, Gabriella, Clove and Cinnamon), but it was not without its problems. The earlier dramas of social conflict, class consciousness and collective change gave way to the carnival of cultural and ethnic promiscuity, the celebration of diversity in the indiscriminate infusion of the melting-pot. The post-war novels tended increasingly towards a formulaic recipe whose typical ingredients - the white plantation baron, the black rural worker, the tropical landscape and the mulatta seductress - were tempered with the spices of sex and magic. The result was a dish which all too easily corresponded to official Brazilian and international expectations of a prepackaged, stereotypical image of an exotic third world culture able to dance, sing and love its way out of its misery.

Fiction here became the playground in which Brazil's vast contradictions could be subverted without overflowing the constraints of individual rebellion, just as the shortlived revelry of carnival is circumscribed by the realities of the wider world, and order is ultimately restored as everyone returns home on Ash Wednesday. Amado's solution to the problem of racism - that whites and blacks should simply go to bed together - similarly failed to address the fact that a centuries-old history of miscegenation, while contributing much to the myth of a Brazilian "racial democracy", has not in any way diminished the country's profoundly racist structures. The celebration of cultural promiscuity is, instead, a recipe for a complacent resignation to the impossibility of radical social reform, which doubtless explains why Amado's work has become the centrepiece of Brazilian cultural diplomacy."

This is an example of that very British art of turning up your nose at the gaucheries of the dearly departed. We looked around for criticism of Amado that was a bit more in depth, and discovered that Dona Flor is a much book clubbed novel. We also found an outpouring of bile on the subject of Amado by one Janer Cristaldo that must hold a 20th century record for insults thrown at a man of letters. Cristaldo accuses Amado of being a Nazi, a Communist, and a tool of multi-national Capitalism. I mean, the man is in blood up to his elbows, according to Cristaldo, who has, to say the least, a spotty sense of the repressiveness of Brazilian governments.

But still -- Communist, Nazi, Capitalist Pig -- this is the kind of triple denunciation action LI envies. Although we try hard, so far, we have remained undenounced on the Web. A year of this, and nobody has accused us of rampant anti-Americanism, anti-semitism, Chomskian lunacy, phallogocentrism, nor nothin'. It discourages a man. We must be doing something wrong.