And he spake a parable unto them, saying, The ground of a
certain rich man brought forth plentifully:
And he thought within himself, saying, What shall I do,
because I have no room where to bestow my fruits?
And he said, This will I do: I will pull down my barns,
and build greater; and there will I bestow all my fruits and my goods.
And I will say to my soul, Soul, thou hast much goods laid
up for many years; take thine ease, eat, drink, and� be merry.
But God said unto him, Thou� fool, this night thy soul
shall be required of thee: then whose shall those things be, which thou
hast provided? � Luke
Imagine ten archers, shooting at a target a mile wide and a mile high at a distance of three feet. And imagine them all missing. It would be easy to infer that they were all blind.
That�s the feeling LI sometimes gets with the ten Democratic presidential candidates. Here we have a presidency that has utterly failed. One that has amassed a five hundred billion dollar deficit on� nothing. One that has gotten us enmeshed in one war, in Iraq, that not only has nothing to do with our interests, but is actually harmful to them. Meanwhile, we have incompletely dealt with a group that really has physically attacked us � al Qaeda. By cautiously never pronouncing the name, Osama bin Laden, Bush attempts to exorcize the man. What is the result? In Morocco, Bali, Jakarta and Saudi Arabia the organization, or its allies, have attacked. The pretence that they are crippled makes sense only to people who cannot see what is in front of their nose. Here�s something in front of our noses: the people who hijacked the four planes three years ago did not have chemical weapons. They didn�t have Uzis. They used credit cards, airplane tickets, and hobby shop paraphernalia to wipe out three thousand lives. And so far, nothing that has happened tells us that this can�t happen again. Meanwhile, the Democrats act as if calling the President a �miserable failure� is some kind of logomachical triumph.
Well, it isn�t. The candidates are making promises, blithely, as though there weren�t a five hundred billion dollar deficit. As though the security alerts are all a joke. As though, in other words, we were all still living in 1999, except that we more frequently speak the phrase: �war on terrorism.� Without, of course, meaning it.
So let�s do a little scenario building. Let�s say that the phrase actually makes sense. Let�s say one of those bogus alerts isn�t bogus. Let�s say an attack happens, a mini 9/11.
Now, the last time that happened the market plummeted. It shed what, a trillion dollars worth of value? And while it temporarily regained ground, it drifted down again. To combat the inevitable downturn, the government, in 2002, threw an extra two hundred billion dollars into the system, in addition to the money already budgeted.
So � what is it going to do next time?
The next two hundred billion dollars is going to come out of our flesh. One of the odder spectacles of our time is watching the newspapers deal with the U.S.�s five hundred billion dollar deficit. They deal with it by assuring us that, as a portion of the GDP, this is nothing. Hasn�t Japan run an even bigger deficit? And Germany?
What they don�t say is that those two countries also run a trade surplus. The US hasn�t done that since the seventies. Counting the trade surplus, conservatively, at 350 billion dollars, we are already talking of an outflow of dollars of about 800 billion. If there is an attack, another two hundred billion would make more than a trillion. Now, it is true that the world�s investors are prone to periods of stupor in which they will invest huge sums in obvious death traps. The elevation of various dot coms is proof. But even the most inattentive investor is going to ask, sooner or later, what the US is doing to be floated on a trillion some dollars of debt.
Of course, of course, the account in trade is a little different from the money the US government borrows. There are caveats to adding the two figures together. But overconcentration on the caveats blurs the general picture, which is of a nation crazily careering, in an uncertain time, to the brink of financial disaster. With nobody in D.C. concerned about it; with the ten Dems pretending that they can ignore it and go on their Dem way, getting vaguely New Dealish about health care; and with the incompetent at the head of this enterprise still the odds on favorite in the next election. It makes no sense that the Dems do not make an issue of simple stewardship � of what you pass on to your successor. They should, and fast. The supposed �problem� the Dems have with national security should be flipped around: the problem with national security, right now, is the astonishingly vulnerable position Bush has gotten us into. As with all Bush initiatives, the bet is completely on the most unlikely set of combinations that will produce an optimal outcome. If the US were an investment fund in 1999, it would be as if we�d invested everything in the telecommunications industry. Not, retrospectively, the wisest of choices.
Monday, September 22, 2003
Saturday, September 20, 2003
Bollettino
When is a genocide not a genocide? When it doesn't fit in with anti-communist history, that 's when. In the Wash Post there is a jokey little article about the continuing presence of Lenin -- Lenin the evil -- in the former Soviet Union. The focus is on the controversy over taking Lenin's statue down in Kyrgyzstan. The article ends with this carefree paragraph:
"Ibraimov said he always intended to put the statue back up elsewhere in deference to Lenin's role in freeing Kyrgyzstan from the last Russian czar, who oversaw a 1916 crackdown here that killed 120,000 Kyrgyz, roughly one-sixth of the population. "He saved us from dying off," Ibraimov said. "Our attitude toward Lenin is unique."
Quite a crackdown there, for a saint of the Russian Orthodox Church. Frankly, we'd never hear of Czar Nicholas doing this. But surely, with all the concentration on Lenin's complicity in the construction of the Gulag -- a complicity that is almost always retrospective, since the crime isn't so much in what happened under Lenin as what happened after Lenin that we can see would have happened under Lenin if he'd lived -- surely some footnote should include these 120,000. A splash, a drop in the bucket, of course, nothing to worry about. Still, where did this number come from?
We looked around the Internet, and found an account, wierdly enough, at a tourist agency site. Here are some of the salient grafs.
"In the summer of 1916, the Russian Empire ordered a call up of non-Russians in the colonies that comprised the Russian empire to help feed it's desperate war effort in Europe. The Imperial Decree of 26th June 1916 was transmitted to Pishpek via Tashkent. It was quite specific, the locals were not to be drafted as combatants, but for support actities such as food production and road building � thus freeing the soldiers on these duties for combat. The wording of the decree was unfortunate in that it apparently referred to �requisition� rather than �conscription� � implying that the dractees were considered as �objects� rather than as people."
...
"There were attempts by the local Khans to prevent or delay the implementation of the decree. Accoding to some sources, the first uprising was in Khojent on July 4th 1916 and the movement spread to other parts of Turkestan. On July 11th a mass protest took place in Tashken and the police fired shots into the crowd. The Russians arrested an additional group and summarily executing thirty-five people. The Russian settlers, who had been brought into Tashkent some thirty to forty years earlier, began looting, apparently at the instigation of the Russian police."
...
"A Cossack army led by General Aninekov was sent from Vernoe (Almaty), and others from Ferghana and Tashkent and other regions of the far flung empire, to crush the rebellion. Even prisoners of war, who were being held in Russian POW camps in Central Asia, were recruited by the Russian generals as mercenaries with regular pay. The vigilantes and the army were given free reign and a the result was a serious of massive reprisals � slaughtering flocks, burning down Kyrgyz villages, killing men women and children, (and according to eyewitnesses, massacred even babies in the cradle) and hundreds of people were arrested. It is said that the trials in Pishpek were so disorganized that the authorities lost track of the people that had been executed..More Russian settlers were brought in to occupy confiscated Central Asian land and homes. Contemporary reports estimated that between 25 June 1916 and October of 1917, some one and one half million Central Asians were killed by the Russian forces and settlers, with the Russian casualties numbering around three thousand. Out of an estimated total population of 768,000 Kyrgyz, some 120,000 were killed in the fighting and the aftermath � according to one source, over 41% of the Kyrgyz population from the North of the country were killed. � and another 120,000 fled across the border to China, (referred to as �The Great Escape�) many dying en route in the snows, of hunger, or as the victims of bandits. There is a mountain pass called Ashu Surk � �the Pass of Bones� � which got it�s name from the number that died here in their attempted flight. The Aaly Tokombaev Museum in Bishkek has an exhibition dedicated to the exodus of many Kyrgyz to China in 1916 following the uprising. At least half of the Central Asian livestock was destroyed."
This is the lost liberal Russia lamented by Nabokov. This is the state of play ante Lenin. Hmm. Wonder if Annie Applebaum's recent history of the Gulag even mentions this, uh, regretable attempt on the part of a revanchiste backwards people to hinder the wonders of Western Civilization.
When is a genocide not a genocide? When it doesn't fit in with anti-communist history, that 's when. In the Wash Post there is a jokey little article about the continuing presence of Lenin -- Lenin the evil -- in the former Soviet Union. The focus is on the controversy over taking Lenin's statue down in Kyrgyzstan. The article ends with this carefree paragraph:
"Ibraimov said he always intended to put the statue back up elsewhere in deference to Lenin's role in freeing Kyrgyzstan from the last Russian czar, who oversaw a 1916 crackdown here that killed 120,000 Kyrgyz, roughly one-sixth of the population. "He saved us from dying off," Ibraimov said. "Our attitude toward Lenin is unique."
Quite a crackdown there, for a saint of the Russian Orthodox Church. Frankly, we'd never hear of Czar Nicholas doing this. But surely, with all the concentration on Lenin's complicity in the construction of the Gulag -- a complicity that is almost always retrospective, since the crime isn't so much in what happened under Lenin as what happened after Lenin that we can see would have happened under Lenin if he'd lived -- surely some footnote should include these 120,000. A splash, a drop in the bucket, of course, nothing to worry about. Still, where did this number come from?
We looked around the Internet, and found an account, wierdly enough, at a tourist agency site. Here are some of the salient grafs.
"In the summer of 1916, the Russian Empire ordered a call up of non-Russians in the colonies that comprised the Russian empire to help feed it's desperate war effort in Europe. The Imperial Decree of 26th June 1916 was transmitted to Pishpek via Tashkent. It was quite specific, the locals were not to be drafted as combatants, but for support actities such as food production and road building � thus freeing the soldiers on these duties for combat. The wording of the decree was unfortunate in that it apparently referred to �requisition� rather than �conscription� � implying that the dractees were considered as �objects� rather than as people."
...
"There were attempts by the local Khans to prevent or delay the implementation of the decree. Accoding to some sources, the first uprising was in Khojent on July 4th 1916 and the movement spread to other parts of Turkestan. On July 11th a mass protest took place in Tashken and the police fired shots into the crowd. The Russians arrested an additional group and summarily executing thirty-five people. The Russian settlers, who had been brought into Tashkent some thirty to forty years earlier, began looting, apparently at the instigation of the Russian police."
...
"A Cossack army led by General Aninekov was sent from Vernoe (Almaty), and others from Ferghana and Tashkent and other regions of the far flung empire, to crush the rebellion. Even prisoners of war, who were being held in Russian POW camps in Central Asia, were recruited by the Russian generals as mercenaries with regular pay. The vigilantes and the army were given free reign and a the result was a serious of massive reprisals � slaughtering flocks, burning down Kyrgyz villages, killing men women and children, (and according to eyewitnesses, massacred even babies in the cradle) and hundreds of people were arrested. It is said that the trials in Pishpek were so disorganized that the authorities lost track of the people that had been executed..More Russian settlers were brought in to occupy confiscated Central Asian land and homes. Contemporary reports estimated that between 25 June 1916 and October of 1917, some one and one half million Central Asians were killed by the Russian forces and settlers, with the Russian casualties numbering around three thousand. Out of an estimated total population of 768,000 Kyrgyz, some 120,000 were killed in the fighting and the aftermath � according to one source, over 41% of the Kyrgyz population from the North of the country were killed. � and another 120,000 fled across the border to China, (referred to as �The Great Escape�) many dying en route in the snows, of hunger, or as the victims of bandits. There is a mountain pass called Ashu Surk � �the Pass of Bones� � which got it�s name from the number that died here in their attempted flight. The Aaly Tokombaev Museum in Bishkek has an exhibition dedicated to the exodus of many Kyrgyz to China in 1916 following the uprising. At least half of the Central Asian livestock was destroyed."
This is the lost liberal Russia lamented by Nabokov. This is the state of play ante Lenin. Hmm. Wonder if Annie Applebaum's recent history of the Gulag even mentions this, uh, regretable attempt on the part of a revanchiste backwards people to hinder the wonders of Western Civilization.
Bollettino
When Chalabi and Chirac are singing the same song, you know something has gone seriously haywire.
This administration, packed with Straussians who are so proud of their lack of a sense of irony -- that horrid thing, irony, which many a conservative commentator in the post-9/11 dysphoria proclaimed to be DOA -- has now produced a situation that generates a world historical irony every newscycle. That Chirac has reverted to the timetable that Donald Rumsfeld was using back in May -- back in the cheery days when the plan was that the US footprint would dwindle to 30,000 in Iraq by September, with the rest, one supposes, liberating Damascus or Teheran - does not seem to be admired as much as it should be.
In a more just world, Chirac would be languishing in prison, convicted on various corruption charges. We don't live in a more just world, which is of course why we have irony in the first place. In the Spring, when France was opposing Bush's war, the internationale of anti-war forces overlooked Chirac's history and embraced him. It was an odd moment, paralleled by the oddity of the pro-war forces embracing Chalabi, who also, in a more just world, would be languishing in a cell next to various Enron execs. Perhaps even then it was inevitable that the two old crooks would converge. This NYT op-ed about the Chalabi delusion that suffused the Pentagon doesn't tell us anything we don't already know -- and is, besides, another round in the endless war between State and Defense -- but it does give us the backstory on Bremer's most outrageous mistake, the dissolution of the Iraqi army. At the time, LI pointed out that this was a nearly insane move. Now we know that it was a homage to Chalabi.
It's obvious, in broad terms, that the French are right. The idea that Iraq is going to be the stage for the simulacra of the American Revolution makes a weird kind of aesthetic sense for an administration that contains the likes of Ashcroft -- the kind of guy whose spiritual consanguinity with those Confederate re-enactors who spend quality time stressing their butternut uniforms in front of the mirror in the garage has been well documented. However, it makes no kind of sense otherwise. It is a measure of the rootlessness of American conservativism, at this time, that Bremer's constitution-ophilia is being allowed to pass without comment -- surely it is a just target for the loftiest kind of Burkean scorn. As the Council said this week, only Iraqis can secure Iraq -- similarly, only Iraqis can govern Iraq. Constitutions are for the burning. If Bremer really believes that a constitution is going to be a bulwark of American interest when Americans leave Iraq, he surely needs to de-tox.
That said, the tactic of obstructing the U.S. at the U.N. is not going to lead to Iraqis governing Iraq. It is often said, with militant indignation by rightwingers, that Chirac doesn't care about Iraq (and then it is said that the left doesn't care about Iraq). This is true. Although the professional vice of the French, the vice of their Frenchness, is to think of themselves as bringing enlightenment to the world, the French foreign office disregards morality in favor of short term self interest almost every time. It is the Normalian reflex. These people were literally swaddled in the collected papers of Raymond Aron. That is what they are about. The whole culture of diplomacy in France is about realism. Unfortunately, the Chiracian approach isn't realism -- it is nihilism.
However, it should be said that there is a counter-truth: Bush and the nationalist constituency he has assiduously nurtured could also care less about Iraq. Or, rather, their concern is evangelical. They care only about an Iraq that is reborn, in the Christian sense. Renouncing its past -- its sinful Iraqness -- and being baptized in the holy water of free enterprise, democracy (the election of an American friendly government), and oil flow. This care is worse than non-care, since dunking a whole (Moslem) country into the fount and baptising it in the name of Jesus Christ is, well, not a good idea. For one thing, the country will kick and scream. For another thing, there's something unctuous and creepy about this care -- something that smells like a cult. Or like that Mormon project of baptizing dead Jews through some spooky ritual, thus reclaiming Israel. It is very much the same mentality. Only by renouncing family and friends can Iraq truly enjoy our care. And in the cheerful way of evangelicals, once the rituals are out of the way, the question is: what's to eat? Or, in the case of Iraq: how can we make as much money as possible out of this sucker?
That is not going to work. That is not working. That will not work.
What Chirac could do that would be helpful (although not decisive -- the UN really is secondary in re Iraq) is to press for a speeded up schedule that isn't wholly indigestible to the Americans. One that would simply bypass the absurd constitution now, and if you are very good, aftewards we'll play "election"-- which is the mentality of the Bremer Palace. This is just the kind of thing the Iraqi Mussolini, Chalabi, would go for too. At the moment, his greed is a factor for good. That moment will pass. But it should be recognized, right now, for what it is, right now.
Not that LI thinks that any of this is going to happen; that any misplay is not going to be fumbled through, and exaggerated, by the krewe of clowns that run this country, and reported on seriously by the embedded krewe of clowns that bring us the news.
When Chalabi and Chirac are singing the same song, you know something has gone seriously haywire.
This administration, packed with Straussians who are so proud of their lack of a sense of irony -- that horrid thing, irony, which many a conservative commentator in the post-9/11 dysphoria proclaimed to be DOA -- has now produced a situation that generates a world historical irony every newscycle. That Chirac has reverted to the timetable that Donald Rumsfeld was using back in May -- back in the cheery days when the plan was that the US footprint would dwindle to 30,000 in Iraq by September, with the rest, one supposes, liberating Damascus or Teheran - does not seem to be admired as much as it should be.
In a more just world, Chirac would be languishing in prison, convicted on various corruption charges. We don't live in a more just world, which is of course why we have irony in the first place. In the Spring, when France was opposing Bush's war, the internationale of anti-war forces overlooked Chirac's history and embraced him. It was an odd moment, paralleled by the oddity of the pro-war forces embracing Chalabi, who also, in a more just world, would be languishing in a cell next to various Enron execs. Perhaps even then it was inevitable that the two old crooks would converge. This NYT op-ed about the Chalabi delusion that suffused the Pentagon doesn't tell us anything we don't already know -- and is, besides, another round in the endless war between State and Defense -- but it does give us the backstory on Bremer's most outrageous mistake, the dissolution of the Iraqi army. At the time, LI pointed out that this was a nearly insane move. Now we know that it was a homage to Chalabi.
It's obvious, in broad terms, that the French are right. The idea that Iraq is going to be the stage for the simulacra of the American Revolution makes a weird kind of aesthetic sense for an administration that contains the likes of Ashcroft -- the kind of guy whose spiritual consanguinity with those Confederate re-enactors who spend quality time stressing their butternut uniforms in front of the mirror in the garage has been well documented. However, it makes no kind of sense otherwise. It is a measure of the rootlessness of American conservativism, at this time, that Bremer's constitution-ophilia is being allowed to pass without comment -- surely it is a just target for the loftiest kind of Burkean scorn. As the Council said this week, only Iraqis can secure Iraq -- similarly, only Iraqis can govern Iraq. Constitutions are for the burning. If Bremer really believes that a constitution is going to be a bulwark of American interest when Americans leave Iraq, he surely needs to de-tox.
That said, the tactic of obstructing the U.S. at the U.N. is not going to lead to Iraqis governing Iraq. It is often said, with militant indignation by rightwingers, that Chirac doesn't care about Iraq (and then it is said that the left doesn't care about Iraq). This is true. Although the professional vice of the French, the vice of their Frenchness, is to think of themselves as bringing enlightenment to the world, the French foreign office disregards morality in favor of short term self interest almost every time. It is the Normalian reflex. These people were literally swaddled in the collected papers of Raymond Aron. That is what they are about. The whole culture of diplomacy in France is about realism. Unfortunately, the Chiracian approach isn't realism -- it is nihilism.
However, it should be said that there is a counter-truth: Bush and the nationalist constituency he has assiduously nurtured could also care less about Iraq. Or, rather, their concern is evangelical. They care only about an Iraq that is reborn, in the Christian sense. Renouncing its past -- its sinful Iraqness -- and being baptized in the holy water of free enterprise, democracy (the election of an American friendly government), and oil flow. This care is worse than non-care, since dunking a whole (Moslem) country into the fount and baptising it in the name of Jesus Christ is, well, not a good idea. For one thing, the country will kick and scream. For another thing, there's something unctuous and creepy about this care -- something that smells like a cult. Or like that Mormon project of baptizing dead Jews through some spooky ritual, thus reclaiming Israel. It is very much the same mentality. Only by renouncing family and friends can Iraq truly enjoy our care. And in the cheerful way of evangelicals, once the rituals are out of the way, the question is: what's to eat? Or, in the case of Iraq: how can we make as much money as possible out of this sucker?
That is not going to work. That is not working. That will not work.
What Chirac could do that would be helpful (although not decisive -- the UN really is secondary in re Iraq) is to press for a speeded up schedule that isn't wholly indigestible to the Americans. One that would simply bypass the absurd constitution now, and if you are very good, aftewards we'll play "election"-- which is the mentality of the Bremer Palace. This is just the kind of thing the Iraqi Mussolini, Chalabi, would go for too. At the moment, his greed is a factor for good. That moment will pass. But it should be recognized, right now, for what it is, right now.
Not that LI thinks that any of this is going to happen; that any misplay is not going to be fumbled through, and exaggerated, by the krewe of clowns that run this country, and reported on seriously by the embedded krewe of clowns that bring us the news.
Bollettino
For reasons I've noted before (abject poverty and systematic non-payment of Roger), I am about to lose my AOL account. My new mailing address is: rogerwgathman@yahoo.com. I think I've caught everybody who needs to know this, but if I haven't -- well, if you send me an email and it bounces back, this is the reason why.
Similarly, I'll be losing my phone service some time next week. Anybody who wants or needs to call me should be advised to do it before then.
In the words of Lou Lou Lou Reed -- "I'm going out/on the dirty avenue."
For reasons I've noted before (abject poverty and systematic non-payment of Roger), I am about to lose my AOL account. My new mailing address is: rogerwgathman@yahoo.com. I think I've caught everybody who needs to know this, but if I haven't -- well, if you send me an email and it bounces back, this is the reason why.
Similarly, I'll be losing my phone service some time next week. Anybody who wants or needs to call me should be advised to do it before then.
In the words of Lou Lou Lou Reed -- "I'm going out/on the dirty avenue."
Friday, September 19, 2003
Bollettino
Car ce sont les conqu�tes qu'on est menac� de subir qui font
horreur ; celles qu'on accomplit sont toujours bonnes et belles. -- Simone Weil
Fishing the internet is one of the addicting sports. For those of you up to the French, I'd strongly recommend the Jean Marie Trembley's fantastic collection at the Universite of Quebec, Les Classiques des sciences sociales. They've just added Weil's Ecrits on history and politics, which includes the famous -- or to some people, infamous -- essay on Hitlerism and Rome. I've been reading it. Simone Weil used to mean a lot to me -- but I gradually turned against her. In fact, I view her with a bit of dread.
She was a woman whose response to oppression was practically somatic. She had a strong case of Christ envy, which, I imagine, ever her death by starvation did nothing to assuage. It isn't often noted that Weil fascinated Georges Bataille, whose readers come from a very different pool than the pious, Maritain like Catholics who took over Weil in the 50s. Bataille wrote about her, in that scabrous Bataille way, in one of his novels, le bleu de ciel -- she was the model for Lazare. Suleiman, in an essay on Bataille's 1930s writings that appeared in Critical Inquiry, mentions that Bataille was fascinated with Weil's filthiness. In the thirties, Weil was filled with the messianic mission of the proletariat, so she planned out the stages of her crucifixion, first as a factory worker, then as a volunteer in Spain on the Loyalist side -- not as a fighter, but as a health worker. Weil did share the most important thing with Jesus -- a complete lack of humor. The lack of a sense of humor is a pretty rare thing, actually. And it is an active thing -- it burns a hole in the self, and it continues that dark work until the self becomes a hole. Bataille, of all people, knew this -- and it is hard to believe that he didn't envy Weil this gift. Suleiman's retelling of this section of Bleu de ciel is nicely done:
"Lazare, yet another French Marxist invellectual in Barcelona, is a young woman who simultaneously fascinates and repels Troppman [the protagonist] because of her political passion and authority -- and also becuse he finds her sexually unattractive, an ugly "dirty" virgin in contrast to the beautiful, exciting Dirty...
Troppmann's association of the workers with Lazare evokes a crucial earlier scene that occurred while he was still in Paris. Just before falling ill but already in a feverish state, Troppmann visits Lazare in her apartment, which she shares with her stepfather, a professor of philosophy. THe discussion centers on what Melou, the stepfatehr, calls the :"anguishing dilemma" confronting intellectuals once they have admitted :the collapse of socialist hopes": "Should we isolate ourselves in silence? Or should we, on the contrary, join the workers in their last acts of resistance, tuhus accepting an implacable and fruitless death?" Troppmann, in a state of shock, feels unable to respond. Finally, he asks Lazare to show him the toilet, where he proceeds to "piss for a long time" and tries to vomit by shoving two fingers down his throat."
Bataille's genius consisted in knowing the conceptual value of a good piss -- its argumentative weight. He joins a select group in knowing this -- Johnson kicking a stone in refutation of Berkeley, and a few Daoists. The idea that the carrier of every concept must be in language -- a formal system -- is the presupposition of every philosophy, and (at least this is Bataille's interpretation of Nietzsche) at the base of every form of nihilism -- the last, devastating stroke that divides the human from the animal.
Which is why Weil is so important, read as a sort of dialogue partner of Bataille. Because Weil definitely wanted to produce that last, devastating stroke. There is no logical one direction of nihilism -- it penetrates like a stain in all directions. Weil, however, saw the continuity of one of those directions: the uprooting of a whole people. Her writing about hitlerism, especially when France was occupied and Weil herself, by Hitlerian definition a Jew, was threatened with imminent death, is luminous with her complete hatred of power. It is only by maintaining herself at that level, in that position, that Weil could see, clearly, how much the pattern of Western culture was mirrored in the Hitlerian project. Far from being barbaric, Hitler was -- Weil thought -- a pure product of civilization, civilization reduced to its essential process: the destruction of the other, to be followed by the destruction of the self. Since the second stage of the program paralleled Weil's own desire -- since she could see, that is, how she could become a Nazi -- she could also diagnose it. Sentiment, for the philosopher, has a diagnostic value that can be replaced by nothing else.
Well... we could go on with this. How did we get here? Oh yes, recommending the social science site. Go to it, gentle reader.
Car ce sont les conqu�tes qu'on est menac� de subir qui font
horreur ; celles qu'on accomplit sont toujours bonnes et belles. -- Simone Weil
Fishing the internet is one of the addicting sports. For those of you up to the French, I'd strongly recommend the Jean Marie Trembley's fantastic collection at the Universite of Quebec, Les Classiques des sciences sociales. They've just added Weil's Ecrits on history and politics, which includes the famous -- or to some people, infamous -- essay on Hitlerism and Rome. I've been reading it. Simone Weil used to mean a lot to me -- but I gradually turned against her. In fact, I view her with a bit of dread.
She was a woman whose response to oppression was practically somatic. She had a strong case of Christ envy, which, I imagine, ever her death by starvation did nothing to assuage. It isn't often noted that Weil fascinated Georges Bataille, whose readers come from a very different pool than the pious, Maritain like Catholics who took over Weil in the 50s. Bataille wrote about her, in that scabrous Bataille way, in one of his novels, le bleu de ciel -- she was the model for Lazare. Suleiman, in an essay on Bataille's 1930s writings that appeared in Critical Inquiry, mentions that Bataille was fascinated with Weil's filthiness. In the thirties, Weil was filled with the messianic mission of the proletariat, so she planned out the stages of her crucifixion, first as a factory worker, then as a volunteer in Spain on the Loyalist side -- not as a fighter, but as a health worker. Weil did share the most important thing with Jesus -- a complete lack of humor. The lack of a sense of humor is a pretty rare thing, actually. And it is an active thing -- it burns a hole in the self, and it continues that dark work until the self becomes a hole. Bataille, of all people, knew this -- and it is hard to believe that he didn't envy Weil this gift. Suleiman's retelling of this section of Bleu de ciel is nicely done:
"Lazare, yet another French Marxist invellectual in Barcelona, is a young woman who simultaneously fascinates and repels Troppman [the protagonist] because of her political passion and authority -- and also becuse he finds her sexually unattractive, an ugly "dirty" virgin in contrast to the beautiful, exciting Dirty...
Troppmann's association of the workers with Lazare evokes a crucial earlier scene that occurred while he was still in Paris. Just before falling ill but already in a feverish state, Troppmann visits Lazare in her apartment, which she shares with her stepfather, a professor of philosophy. THe discussion centers on what Melou, the stepfatehr, calls the :"anguishing dilemma" confronting intellectuals once they have admitted :the collapse of socialist hopes": "Should we isolate ourselves in silence? Or should we, on the contrary, join the workers in their last acts of resistance, tuhus accepting an implacable and fruitless death?" Troppmann, in a state of shock, feels unable to respond. Finally, he asks Lazare to show him the toilet, where he proceeds to "piss for a long time" and tries to vomit by shoving two fingers down his throat."
Bataille's genius consisted in knowing the conceptual value of a good piss -- its argumentative weight. He joins a select group in knowing this -- Johnson kicking a stone in refutation of Berkeley, and a few Daoists. The idea that the carrier of every concept must be in language -- a formal system -- is the presupposition of every philosophy, and (at least this is Bataille's interpretation of Nietzsche) at the base of every form of nihilism -- the last, devastating stroke that divides the human from the animal.
Which is why Weil is so important, read as a sort of dialogue partner of Bataille. Because Weil definitely wanted to produce that last, devastating stroke. There is no logical one direction of nihilism -- it penetrates like a stain in all directions. Weil, however, saw the continuity of one of those directions: the uprooting of a whole people. Her writing about hitlerism, especially when France was occupied and Weil herself, by Hitlerian definition a Jew, was threatened with imminent death, is luminous with her complete hatred of power. It is only by maintaining herself at that level, in that position, that Weil could see, clearly, how much the pattern of Western culture was mirrored in the Hitlerian project. Far from being barbaric, Hitler was -- Weil thought -- a pure product of civilization, civilization reduced to its essential process: the destruction of the other, to be followed by the destruction of the self. Since the second stage of the program paralleled Weil's own desire -- since she could see, that is, how she could become a Nazi -- she could also diagnose it. Sentiment, for the philosopher, has a diagnostic value that can be replaced by nothing else.
Well... we could go on with this. How did we get here? Oh yes, recommending the social science site. Go to it, gentle reader.
Wednesday, September 17, 2003
Bollettino
Ledger of a writer.
What a fabulous month. At the beginning of the month, I was informed by two New York papers for whom I had written reviews that appeared in the first week of August, who had me write them to deadlines by mid July, that they wouldn't be paying me until the last week of September. Now a friend, who offered me money to do some research for her, has pretty much told me that she is sending me a check -- through the post office of the country that she lives in -- that will reach me by the end of October, or November, or December. I made a grandiose gesture, and told her to forget it. But it really isn't that grandiose: who knows what address I will have when the wayward check hits my box? The torment of waiting for it overshadows the amount itself. I have offered to pay (with an I.O.U.) for her not to send the check.
So: zero dollars has landed in my account, and I made zero in August. I am facing a bills of about 550 dollars. Oh, and that money they take at the store when you try to buy bread. And the month is half over. This is only the icing on this comedy. There is also the pathetic twenty to thirty jobs I have applied for, with a cover letter that has increased in specificity of what I'd do even as I know that all of that servility is being wasted on the indifference of a waste basket. No: I did get the stray post card, one from the Bar Association of Austin, the other from some legal firm, both informing me that my application was under consideration. Well, of course the only consideration it was really getting was by the guy at the dump, directing the garbage truck it was in to this or that site. If Walt Whitman embodied America, LI is embodying the cursed part of Bush's America, the non-dividended, the luckless, the unskilled and the doomed. We have contemplated, with teeth grinding envy, those who are wheeled about in wheel chairs; those who enter or exit prison; those from broken families -- in fact all who call down upon them, for one reason or another, the intervention of one of the thousand points of light. But the truth is, LI doesn't even know how to steal. That just isn't going to happen. So we went to the grocery store and used the credit portion of the debit card, knowing that there was no money there. Why should there be? But we don't intend to starve to death quite yet.
It's good to record this, in spite of my friend D.'s protests whenever I write one of my lamentations. There is a value to waving your fist in the face of an absent deity -- or the all too present spirits that haunt this economy. I wander through this landscape with all the contemporary marks of Cain -- the inability not to appear sweaty (the mark of the pedestrian); in the clothes I have worn out from five to ten years of use, and can't afford to replace (the mark of the ragpicker); with my decaying teeth (the mark of the Lombrosian idiot); and of course the pathetic inability to disguise my age -- 46 -- and my evident criminal record -- I have been a freelance writer, for God's sakes (the mark of the turd).
Solomon, in Proverbs, claims the dog returns to his vomit -- which, if true, indicates that I do not bear, at least, the mark of the dog. If, oh glorious if, I can snag a counter postion, a sales position (outside), a research position (do you have allergies? are you alcoholic? are you a diabetic man between the ages of 25 -39?), a general labor position (no drunks need apply), I will not return, I will never return, to the torments of being a "freelancer" -- and if you see my byline in, say, the San Francisco Chronicle again, may my tongue be torn out! and all that jazz. Seriously, I think I have really witnessed the end of a certain cultural pattern in America. Ginsberg thought he had seen the best minds in his generation go mad. LI doesn't have a generation. If I had one, I would piss on it with all my might.
I was going to write -- call me Ishmael. As if I, too, had witnessed a great wreck. But this is a small and private wreck. My life keeps reminding me of Titular Counselor Marmelodov's, in Crime and Punishment. Here is how my precursor introduced himself to Raskolnikov:
"Honoured sir," he began almost with solemnity, "poverty is not a vice, that's a true saying. Yet I know too that drunkenness is not a virtue, and that that's even truer. But beggary, honoured sir, beggary is a vice. In poverty you may still retain your innate nobility of soul, but in beggary--never--no one. For beggary a man is not chased out of human society with a stick, he is swept out with a broom, so as to make it as humiliating as possible; and quite right, too, forasmuch as in beggary I am ready to be the first to humiliate myself. Hence the pot-house! Honoured sir, a month ago Mr. Lebeziatnikov gave my wife a beating, and my wife is a very different matter from me!
Do you understand? Allow me to ask you another question out of simple curiosity: have you ever spent a night on a hay barge, on the Neva?"
A question which, lately, I have to physically hold myself back from asking random strangers.
Addendum: I have idly been figuring out the economic consequences of my disastrous decision, in 1999, to become a full time writer. Using as a base my last full time job, I'd estimate I've lost about 30, 000 dollars over the last four years. But the dollar loss is just the tip of the iceberg. From 98 to about the middle of 2000, I wrote for about ten publications. On average, the job would schedule like this: a deadline for the piece would be set, I'd meet it, it would be published one or two weeks afterwards, and three weeks later I would be paid. Maybe 25 percent of the time, I'd be paid late. A small, lefty magazine like In These Times, for instance, would try to stretch a payment out for four months. A newspaper like the Wall Street Journal would usually stretch the deadline to publication date, but would otherwise be timely.
After mid 2000, I wrote for maybe 10 other publications. Many of the publications in the 99-2000 period went under. After 9/11, a clear pattern emerged. Deadlines would spread apart from publication dates by almost a week more than the previous average. And even generous payers -- National Post -- would 'accidentally" lose my invoice about 40 percent of the time. Meanwhile, the float -- the three weeks after publication date before I would be paid -- turned into a five week float.
So, here's the picture. Just to stay current with what he made in 2000, a freelancer would have to have almost twice the client base. And even then, given the raised percentage of 'lost" invoices, and the extra week added to the payment schedule, it is unclear that he would be able to forecast his income for a month. That is, although bill schedules remained steady -- rent, phone, electricity, etc. -- payment varied so widely that there was no guarantee, at any time during the last two years, that those payments could be met.
I imagine the same thing happened to blacksmiths and saddlemakers when the horse was replaced by the car. The written culture exploded during the Internet bubble -- writers were all over the place, with more outlets than ever -- but it was the fever before the death. To be an indenpendent writer now, you must have at least $50,000 you can fall back on. You must be able to fall back on it for at least five years. And at the end of that time, if you have not placed in some major market -- say, the NYT - you should definitely pack it in. Even if you have, you will be poorer than anybody you know with your level of education. But if you haven't, you will be radically poor -- third world poor. I myself can't, at the present time, respond to certain want ads in the paper. Why? Because to pay the two dollars in bus fare is beyond me. This might be a temporary condition -- who knows, tomorrow a place that has owed me money for three months, really, might actually pay me -- but it is a chronic condition.
I smile, nowadays, when I see those popular directories, Writers Publishing Guide 2003 or whatever. They list magazines and newspapers with little dollar signs next to them to signify that they pay. But one question they never ask is: when do they pay? It doesn't really matter anymore if it is Dow Jones or Times Mirror -- they will probably pay late at least forty percent of the time. One time in three they will pay radically late -- like months late.
The upshot is: writing has become like polo. It is a sport for the idle rich.
Writer beware!
Ledger of a writer.
What a fabulous month. At the beginning of the month, I was informed by two New York papers for whom I had written reviews that appeared in the first week of August, who had me write them to deadlines by mid July, that they wouldn't be paying me until the last week of September. Now a friend, who offered me money to do some research for her, has pretty much told me that she is sending me a check -- through the post office of the country that she lives in -- that will reach me by the end of October, or November, or December. I made a grandiose gesture, and told her to forget it. But it really isn't that grandiose: who knows what address I will have when the wayward check hits my box? The torment of waiting for it overshadows the amount itself. I have offered to pay (with an I.O.U.) for her not to send the check.
So: zero dollars has landed in my account, and I made zero in August. I am facing a bills of about 550 dollars. Oh, and that money they take at the store when you try to buy bread. And the month is half over. This is only the icing on this comedy. There is also the pathetic twenty to thirty jobs I have applied for, with a cover letter that has increased in specificity of what I'd do even as I know that all of that servility is being wasted on the indifference of a waste basket. No: I did get the stray post card, one from the Bar Association of Austin, the other from some legal firm, both informing me that my application was under consideration. Well, of course the only consideration it was really getting was by the guy at the dump, directing the garbage truck it was in to this or that site. If Walt Whitman embodied America, LI is embodying the cursed part of Bush's America, the non-dividended, the luckless, the unskilled and the doomed. We have contemplated, with teeth grinding envy, those who are wheeled about in wheel chairs; those who enter or exit prison; those from broken families -- in fact all who call down upon them, for one reason or another, the intervention of one of the thousand points of light. But the truth is, LI doesn't even know how to steal. That just isn't going to happen. So we went to the grocery store and used the credit portion of the debit card, knowing that there was no money there. Why should there be? But we don't intend to starve to death quite yet.
It's good to record this, in spite of my friend D.'s protests whenever I write one of my lamentations. There is a value to waving your fist in the face of an absent deity -- or the all too present spirits that haunt this economy. I wander through this landscape with all the contemporary marks of Cain -- the inability not to appear sweaty (the mark of the pedestrian); in the clothes I have worn out from five to ten years of use, and can't afford to replace (the mark of the ragpicker); with my decaying teeth (the mark of the Lombrosian idiot); and of course the pathetic inability to disguise my age -- 46 -- and my evident criminal record -- I have been a freelance writer, for God's sakes (the mark of the turd).
Solomon, in Proverbs, claims the dog returns to his vomit -- which, if true, indicates that I do not bear, at least, the mark of the dog. If, oh glorious if, I can snag a counter postion, a sales position (outside), a research position (do you have allergies? are you alcoholic? are you a diabetic man between the ages of 25 -39?), a general labor position (no drunks need apply), I will not return, I will never return, to the torments of being a "freelancer" -- and if you see my byline in, say, the San Francisco Chronicle again, may my tongue be torn out! and all that jazz. Seriously, I think I have really witnessed the end of a certain cultural pattern in America. Ginsberg thought he had seen the best minds in his generation go mad. LI doesn't have a generation. If I had one, I would piss on it with all my might.
I was going to write -- call me Ishmael. As if I, too, had witnessed a great wreck. But this is a small and private wreck. My life keeps reminding me of Titular Counselor Marmelodov's, in Crime and Punishment. Here is how my precursor introduced himself to Raskolnikov:
"Honoured sir," he began almost with solemnity, "poverty is not a vice, that's a true saying. Yet I know too that drunkenness is not a virtue, and that that's even truer. But beggary, honoured sir, beggary is a vice. In poverty you may still retain your innate nobility of soul, but in beggary--never--no one. For beggary a man is not chased out of human society with a stick, he is swept out with a broom, so as to make it as humiliating as possible; and quite right, too, forasmuch as in beggary I am ready to be the first to humiliate myself. Hence the pot-house! Honoured sir, a month ago Mr. Lebeziatnikov gave my wife a beating, and my wife is a very different matter from me!
Do you understand? Allow me to ask you another question out of simple curiosity: have you ever spent a night on a hay barge, on the Neva?"
A question which, lately, I have to physically hold myself back from asking random strangers.
Addendum: I have idly been figuring out the economic consequences of my disastrous decision, in 1999, to become a full time writer. Using as a base my last full time job, I'd estimate I've lost about 30, 000 dollars over the last four years. But the dollar loss is just the tip of the iceberg. From 98 to about the middle of 2000, I wrote for about ten publications. On average, the job would schedule like this: a deadline for the piece would be set, I'd meet it, it would be published one or two weeks afterwards, and three weeks later I would be paid. Maybe 25 percent of the time, I'd be paid late. A small, lefty magazine like In These Times, for instance, would try to stretch a payment out for four months. A newspaper like the Wall Street Journal would usually stretch the deadline to publication date, but would otherwise be timely.
After mid 2000, I wrote for maybe 10 other publications. Many of the publications in the 99-2000 period went under. After 9/11, a clear pattern emerged. Deadlines would spread apart from publication dates by almost a week more than the previous average. And even generous payers -- National Post -- would 'accidentally" lose my invoice about 40 percent of the time. Meanwhile, the float -- the three weeks after publication date before I would be paid -- turned into a five week float.
So, here's the picture. Just to stay current with what he made in 2000, a freelancer would have to have almost twice the client base. And even then, given the raised percentage of 'lost" invoices, and the extra week added to the payment schedule, it is unclear that he would be able to forecast his income for a month. That is, although bill schedules remained steady -- rent, phone, electricity, etc. -- payment varied so widely that there was no guarantee, at any time during the last two years, that those payments could be met.
I imagine the same thing happened to blacksmiths and saddlemakers when the horse was replaced by the car. The written culture exploded during the Internet bubble -- writers were all over the place, with more outlets than ever -- but it was the fever before the death. To be an indenpendent writer now, you must have at least $50,000 you can fall back on. You must be able to fall back on it for at least five years. And at the end of that time, if you have not placed in some major market -- say, the NYT - you should definitely pack it in. Even if you have, you will be poorer than anybody you know with your level of education. But if you haven't, you will be radically poor -- third world poor. I myself can't, at the present time, respond to certain want ads in the paper. Why? Because to pay the two dollars in bus fare is beyond me. This might be a temporary condition -- who knows, tomorrow a place that has owed me money for three months, really, might actually pay me -- but it is a chronic condition.
I smile, nowadays, when I see those popular directories, Writers Publishing Guide 2003 or whatever. They list magazines and newspapers with little dollar signs next to them to signify that they pay. But one question they never ask is: when do they pay? It doesn't really matter anymore if it is Dow Jones or Times Mirror -- they will probably pay late at least forty percent of the time. One time in three they will pay radically late -- like months late.
The upshot is: writing has become like polo. It is a sport for the idle rich.
Writer beware!
Tuesday, September 16, 2003
Letter
My friend T. has responded to my posts about reviewing.
Here are some of the juicy bits.
"I wasn�t going to do this. I had a plan. I left work and was going to get home a hellofalot earlier than my usual; I was not going to log on, jack in, read or research or write�no, I was going to drink beer and watch the Giants-Cowboys game, or a Steve McQueen movie and drift off to sleep earlier than is my usual�.but, no, not to be�I�d rather respond to your post regarding the book review.
I will not disturb your account of the track of the book review unto nullity implicated in the fate of magazines and newspapers; I will accept it wholly as a report from a front that I have no interest in visiting. As for your account of the experience of finding books becoming a nullity in its absorption by academia, I will confirm that report as a fellow traveler. The quotes from Copperfield, MB and Middlemarch brought me great pause and teary eyes; thank you.
From your post, I thought a bit about my encounters with books as a reader, as a finder of books, as a dilettante and contrarian, as one with no obligations but my pleasure of texts. Nevertheless, I read book reviews and mostly think them shit; think of most reviewers as morons who either never exactly know what they want to be, or, alternatively, morons who are in fact quite what they thought themselves to be, but they are not readers of books. Here�s the issue: for fiction, there is a nexus of the book reviewed, the reviewer�s take on it and other similar books; comparison and superlative made necessary; there are in such reviews the author�s previous books or earlier book, or books of a certain similar style, manner or genre, and then there is this one, the one reviewed and whether and how it is as good or not as good. Then there is non-fiction: there is the book reviewed, the reviewer�s take on it, and the subject matter of the book reviewed; comparison and superlative are as necessary to this manner of review: how and why the methodology or source or credentials of the reviewed author are either acceptable or no. In each case, the reader of the review has no place whatsoever except as a potential consumer of the book reviewed; that this reader is given an endorsement or not; that a cookbook might as easily be reviewed as a novel, that a collection of letters might be as easily and as similarly be reviewed as a self-help book; that a book of philosophy might be as easily reviewed as a biography of a philosopher.
The reviewer, it seems to me, if he aspire to art (which he never will or cannot, which you cover in your post), must invoke Tolstoy: the commonality and sharing of emotion; he must invoke Deleuze (and therefore Clem Greenberg): that art medium joined to feeling.
So I though a bit about book reviewing, the (lost art of) finding books, and libraries and ideal readers (not the technical sense, here), and then, inevitably and naturally enough for me to Borges and Barthes and Derrida and Eco; thoughts of their libraries, to their �reviews� (Derrida as a reviewer of Plato and Austin; what about Leibniz�s �review� of the I Ching; aw hell, I can�t afford these indulgences!); and thoughts that our dear Nietzsche probably had as scant a library as any.
Have you ever read any of Borges� book reviews? I went and found and reread them in the Viking edition of his selected non-fictions (selected from his writings in El Hogar Magazine (1936-1939)). Much formulae (references of the number of pages of a book, grand introductionary sentences regarding books and writers, each writ large, to Chesterton, etc and usw), and much �Borges�, but there is evidence of that extraordinary capacity to consider the general, the specific and one�s problematic place in such considerations; some are damned lovely; here are three, in their entirety:
William Faulkner, Absalom! Absalom!
I know of two kinds of writers [as an abrupt aside: someone sent me a quote from Woody Allen this morning: there are two kinds of people: the ones who say there are two kinds of people, and the ones who don�t]: those whose central preoccupation is verbal technique, and those for whom it is human acts and passions. The former tend to be dismissed and �Byzantine� or praised as �pure artists.� The later, more fortunately, receive the laudatory epithets �profound,� �human,� or �profoundly human,� and the flattering vituperation �savage.� The former is Swindburne or Mallarm�; the late, C�line or Theodore Dreiser. Certain exceptional cases display the virtues and joys of both categories. Victor Hugo remarked that Shakespeare contained G?ngora; we might also observe that he contained Dostoyevsky� Among the great novelists, Joseph Conrad was perhaps the last who was interested both in the techniques of the novel and in the fates and personalities of his characters. The last, that is, until the tremendous impact of Faulkner.
Faulkner likes to expound the novel through his characters. This method is not entirely original � Robert Browning�s The Ring and the Book (1868) details the same crime ten times, through ten voices and ten souls � but Faulkner infuses if with an intensity that is almost intolerable. There is an infinite decomposition, an infinite and black carnality, in this book. The theatre is the state of Mississippi: the heroes, men disintegrating from envy, alcohol, loneliness, and the erosions of hate.
Absalom! Absalom! is comparable to The Sound and the Fury. I know no higher praise.
The Literary Life: Oliver Gogarty
Toward the end of the civil war in Ireland, the poet Oliver Gogarty was imprisoned by some Ulster men in a huge house on the banks of the Barrow, in County Kildare. He knows that at dawn he would be shot. Under some pretext, he went into the garden and threw himself into the glacial waters. The night grew large with gunshots. Swimming under the black water exploding with bullets, he promised the river that he would give it two swans if it allowed him to reach the other bank. The god of the river heard him and saved him, and the poet later fulfilled his pledge.
An English Version of the Oldest Song in the World
Around 1916, I decided to devote myself to the study of Oriental literatures. Working with enthusiasm and credulity through the English version of certain Chinese philosopher, I came across this memorable passage: � A man condemned to death doesn�t care that he is standing at the edge of a precipice, for he has already renounced life.� Here the translator attached an asterisk, and his note informed me that this interpretation was preferable to that of a rival Sinologist, who had translated the passage thus: �The servants destroy the works of art, so that they will not have to judge their beauties and defects.� Then, like Paolo and Francesca, I read no more. A mysterious skepticism had slipped into my soul.
Each time fate brings me before a �literal version� of some masterpiece of Chinese or Arabian literature, I remember that sorry incident. Now I recall it again, reading the translations that Arthur Waley has just published of the Shih Ching, or The Book of Songs. These songs are of a popular nature, and it is believed they were composed by Chinese soldiers or peasants in the seventh or eighth century B.C. Here are some of the translations of a few of them [�]
My friend T. has responded to my posts about reviewing.
Here are some of the juicy bits.
"I wasn�t going to do this. I had a plan. I left work and was going to get home a hellofalot earlier than my usual; I was not going to log on, jack in, read or research or write�no, I was going to drink beer and watch the Giants-Cowboys game, or a Steve McQueen movie and drift off to sleep earlier than is my usual�.but, no, not to be�I�d rather respond to your post regarding the book review.
I will not disturb your account of the track of the book review unto nullity implicated in the fate of magazines and newspapers; I will accept it wholly as a report from a front that I have no interest in visiting. As for your account of the experience of finding books becoming a nullity in its absorption by academia, I will confirm that report as a fellow traveler. The quotes from Copperfield, MB and Middlemarch brought me great pause and teary eyes; thank you.
From your post, I thought a bit about my encounters with books as a reader, as a finder of books, as a dilettante and contrarian, as one with no obligations but my pleasure of texts. Nevertheless, I read book reviews and mostly think them shit; think of most reviewers as morons who either never exactly know what they want to be, or, alternatively, morons who are in fact quite what they thought themselves to be, but they are not readers of books. Here�s the issue: for fiction, there is a nexus of the book reviewed, the reviewer�s take on it and other similar books; comparison and superlative made necessary; there are in such reviews the author�s previous books or earlier book, or books of a certain similar style, manner or genre, and then there is this one, the one reviewed and whether and how it is as good or not as good. Then there is non-fiction: there is the book reviewed, the reviewer�s take on it, and the subject matter of the book reviewed; comparison and superlative are as necessary to this manner of review: how and why the methodology or source or credentials of the reviewed author are either acceptable or no. In each case, the reader of the review has no place whatsoever except as a potential consumer of the book reviewed; that this reader is given an endorsement or not; that a cookbook might as easily be reviewed as a novel, that a collection of letters might be as easily and as similarly be reviewed as a self-help book; that a book of philosophy might be as easily reviewed as a biography of a philosopher.
The reviewer, it seems to me, if he aspire to art (which he never will or cannot, which you cover in your post), must invoke Tolstoy: the commonality and sharing of emotion; he must invoke Deleuze (and therefore Clem Greenberg): that art medium joined to feeling.
So I though a bit about book reviewing, the (lost art of) finding books, and libraries and ideal readers (not the technical sense, here), and then, inevitably and naturally enough for me to Borges and Barthes and Derrida and Eco; thoughts of their libraries, to their �reviews� (Derrida as a reviewer of Plato and Austin; what about Leibniz�s �review� of the I Ching; aw hell, I can�t afford these indulgences!); and thoughts that our dear Nietzsche probably had as scant a library as any.
Have you ever read any of Borges� book reviews? I went and found and reread them in the Viking edition of his selected non-fictions (selected from his writings in El Hogar Magazine (1936-1939)). Much formulae (references of the number of pages of a book, grand introductionary sentences regarding books and writers, each writ large, to Chesterton, etc and usw), and much �Borges�, but there is evidence of that extraordinary capacity to consider the general, the specific and one�s problematic place in such considerations; some are damned lovely; here are three, in their entirety:
William Faulkner, Absalom! Absalom!
I know of two kinds of writers [as an abrupt aside: someone sent me a quote from Woody Allen this morning: there are two kinds of people: the ones who say there are two kinds of people, and the ones who don�t]: those whose central preoccupation is verbal technique, and those for whom it is human acts and passions. The former tend to be dismissed and �Byzantine� or praised as �pure artists.� The later, more fortunately, receive the laudatory epithets �profound,� �human,� or �profoundly human,� and the flattering vituperation �savage.� The former is Swindburne or Mallarm�; the late, C�line or Theodore Dreiser. Certain exceptional cases display the virtues and joys of both categories. Victor Hugo remarked that Shakespeare contained G?ngora; we might also observe that he contained Dostoyevsky� Among the great novelists, Joseph Conrad was perhaps the last who was interested both in the techniques of the novel and in the fates and personalities of his characters. The last, that is, until the tremendous impact of Faulkner.
Faulkner likes to expound the novel through his characters. This method is not entirely original � Robert Browning�s The Ring and the Book (1868) details the same crime ten times, through ten voices and ten souls � but Faulkner infuses if with an intensity that is almost intolerable. There is an infinite decomposition, an infinite and black carnality, in this book. The theatre is the state of Mississippi: the heroes, men disintegrating from envy, alcohol, loneliness, and the erosions of hate.
Absalom! Absalom! is comparable to The Sound and the Fury. I know no higher praise.
The Literary Life: Oliver Gogarty
Toward the end of the civil war in Ireland, the poet Oliver Gogarty was imprisoned by some Ulster men in a huge house on the banks of the Barrow, in County Kildare. He knows that at dawn he would be shot. Under some pretext, he went into the garden and threw himself into the glacial waters. The night grew large with gunshots. Swimming under the black water exploding with bullets, he promised the river that he would give it two swans if it allowed him to reach the other bank. The god of the river heard him and saved him, and the poet later fulfilled his pledge.
An English Version of the Oldest Song in the World
Around 1916, I decided to devote myself to the study of Oriental literatures. Working with enthusiasm and credulity through the English version of certain Chinese philosopher, I came across this memorable passage: � A man condemned to death doesn�t care that he is standing at the edge of a precipice, for he has already renounced life.� Here the translator attached an asterisk, and his note informed me that this interpretation was preferable to that of a rival Sinologist, who had translated the passage thus: �The servants destroy the works of art, so that they will not have to judge their beauties and defects.� Then, like Paolo and Francesca, I read no more. A mysterious skepticism had slipped into my soul.
Each time fate brings me before a �literal version� of some masterpiece of Chinese or Arabian literature, I remember that sorry incident. Now I recall it again, reading the translations that Arthur Waley has just published of the Shih Ching, or The Book of Songs. These songs are of a popular nature, and it is believed they were composed by Chinese soldiers or peasants in the seventh or eighth century B.C. Here are some of the translations of a few of them [�]
Monday, September 15, 2003
Bollettino
"Ala and his friends - in the local patois - are 'capsilun': the capsule people, part of a drug culture that, in Iraq, has its very roots in violent criminality. Their drugs of choice - Artane, valium and other hypnotics, and powerful anti-epileptics like clonazepam - were the drugs of choice in Abu Ghraib prison, smuggled in by families or sold to inmates by corrupt doctors". -- The Guardian
And thus runs a story in the Guardian about hopped up Baghdadi bandits. Capsilun is too good a term to reserve for those who rely on an all too physical pharamacopeia to get them through the night -- how about those, in D.C., who are drugged on power, arrogance and ignorance? Much worse drugs, all the way around. The Washington Post this Sunday is full of their bellowing.
Not that the Post is against their bellowing. One must always remember that Iraq was D.C.'s war, and D.C. is a Republican establishment town. The Washington Post was in the forefront of the half brightest and second best that afflicted the country with this war; it was the WP that gave its seal of approval to the Jessica Lynch myth, and to the various ridiculous versions of the weapons of mass destruction (I think that it is still not clear, to the great mass of Americans, that on the day we attacked Saddam, almost a quarter of his country was not only free of his influence, but had been for almost ten years. How is that for an imminent threat? A country that dare not even attack its seceding upper half); the WP has a bloodthirsty editorial page that has calmed down, somewhat, since the summer's debacle in Iraq. The big shift, however, has been with the dwindling liberal contingent on the paper, who can be relied on to talk about how we have to now take up the fight. The new liberal meme is to proclaim both America's moral responsibilitiy to Iraq and to dismiss the idea that Iraq could, at present, raise its own army or security -- of course, these would be riddled with minions of evil. Far better for those essential functions to fall on the minions of good, ie the US forces. Until, in the year 2020, the only people signing up to join Iraq's armed forces are thoughtful readers of John Rawls and Hilary Clinton.
The head Defense Department capsilun is Donald Rumsfeld, who has still not been questioned about how much of the 87 billion dollars we are potentially committing to Iraq is earmarked to restore the structures that were looted in the first, heady days of the liberation, while the Americans benignly looked on. The WP has noticed that some people are after Rumsfeld's scalp. It goes through the Rolodex, stopping heavily at former Army secretary White -- I mean, aren't all issues in America about the far right versus the less far right? But we really loved the end of the article, which was a big kiss for D.C. thinking:
"The view among many in the administration, Congress and military interviewed for this article was that Iraq likely would simmer down in the coming months and that security conditions would improve, in part, they said, because of the extraordinary efforts by the 122,000 troops deployed there. "
Simmering down, eh? Like a classroom of unruly kids. Or a big silly stew. This is the kind of non-thinking that the D.C. Bush crowd does so well -- it poses the question, are you for the 122,000 hard working troops in Iraq, or aren't you? Instead of the question, what the hell is "simmer down" supposed to mean? The extraordinary efforts of the troops -- who are being put out on an extraordinary limb by the extraordinary mindset of the Defense Department -- have little, really, to do with whether Iraq simmers down. On the weekend after the Fallujah massacre, one would expect a little more ... perspecuity from the makers and promoters of this unnecessary war. Apparently, the mental sloth of the supply-sider has spread from Bush's economic advisors to the military advisors. Just as tax cuts bring about unexplained and magical rises in tax revenues, so does straining the ability of an undermanned force in pursuit of an ignorant policy that expresses no intelligible goal bring about a general simmering down of the great Iraqi soup.
At LI, we think that soup, unsimmered, is going to spill all over our laps. That is, if we have the current crew of incompetents around mismanaging things for the next six months. But if we do, no doubt the WP will still be firing off just such probing articles.
"Ala and his friends - in the local patois - are 'capsilun': the capsule people, part of a drug culture that, in Iraq, has its very roots in violent criminality. Their drugs of choice - Artane, valium and other hypnotics, and powerful anti-epileptics like clonazepam - were the drugs of choice in Abu Ghraib prison, smuggled in by families or sold to inmates by corrupt doctors". -- The Guardian
And thus runs a story in the Guardian about hopped up Baghdadi bandits. Capsilun is too good a term to reserve for those who rely on an all too physical pharamacopeia to get them through the night -- how about those, in D.C., who are drugged on power, arrogance and ignorance? Much worse drugs, all the way around. The Washington Post this Sunday is full of their bellowing.
Not that the Post is against their bellowing. One must always remember that Iraq was D.C.'s war, and D.C. is a Republican establishment town. The Washington Post was in the forefront of the half brightest and second best that afflicted the country with this war; it was the WP that gave its seal of approval to the Jessica Lynch myth, and to the various ridiculous versions of the weapons of mass destruction (I think that it is still not clear, to the great mass of Americans, that on the day we attacked Saddam, almost a quarter of his country was not only free of his influence, but had been for almost ten years. How is that for an imminent threat? A country that dare not even attack its seceding upper half); the WP has a bloodthirsty editorial page that has calmed down, somewhat, since the summer's debacle in Iraq. The big shift, however, has been with the dwindling liberal contingent on the paper, who can be relied on to talk about how we have to now take up the fight. The new liberal meme is to proclaim both America's moral responsibilitiy to Iraq and to dismiss the idea that Iraq could, at present, raise its own army or security -- of course, these would be riddled with minions of evil. Far better for those essential functions to fall on the minions of good, ie the US forces. Until, in the year 2020, the only people signing up to join Iraq's armed forces are thoughtful readers of John Rawls and Hilary Clinton.
The head Defense Department capsilun is Donald Rumsfeld, who has still not been questioned about how much of the 87 billion dollars we are potentially committing to Iraq is earmarked to restore the structures that were looted in the first, heady days of the liberation, while the Americans benignly looked on. The WP has noticed that some people are after Rumsfeld's scalp. It goes through the Rolodex, stopping heavily at former Army secretary White -- I mean, aren't all issues in America about the far right versus the less far right? But we really loved the end of the article, which was a big kiss for D.C. thinking:
"The view among many in the administration, Congress and military interviewed for this article was that Iraq likely would simmer down in the coming months and that security conditions would improve, in part, they said, because of the extraordinary efforts by the 122,000 troops deployed there. "
Simmering down, eh? Like a classroom of unruly kids. Or a big silly stew. This is the kind of non-thinking that the D.C. Bush crowd does so well -- it poses the question, are you for the 122,000 hard working troops in Iraq, or aren't you? Instead of the question, what the hell is "simmer down" supposed to mean? The extraordinary efforts of the troops -- who are being put out on an extraordinary limb by the extraordinary mindset of the Defense Department -- have little, really, to do with whether Iraq simmers down. On the weekend after the Fallujah massacre, one would expect a little more ... perspecuity from the makers and promoters of this unnecessary war. Apparently, the mental sloth of the supply-sider has spread from Bush's economic advisors to the military advisors. Just as tax cuts bring about unexplained and magical rises in tax revenues, so does straining the ability of an undermanned force in pursuit of an ignorant policy that expresses no intelligible goal bring about a general simmering down of the great Iraqi soup.
At LI, we think that soup, unsimmered, is going to spill all over our laps. That is, if we have the current crew of incompetents around mismanaging things for the next six months. But if we do, no doubt the WP will still be firing off just such probing articles.
Saturday, September 13, 2003
Bollettino
Readers should go to Business Week for several articles that gingerly sift through the budget debacle. Trying to be fair to the White House, the writers put in some mush mouth disclaimers about how the US could "carry" a deficit equivalent to 5% of the GDP indefinitely. Yes, we could, but if the experience of the 90s showed us anything, it is that we are better off not. It is true that a smoker can still do two packs even after they yank out one of his lungs, but it isn't, I hear, recommended. Of course, these kinds of things are always wrapped around comparisons with long term corporate debts. The argument -- the sound argument -- is that any large organization needs to borrow to maintain and expand its infrastructure. That seems right to me. But there really is no corporate parallel that fits what Bush has done. The production of this debt load is not derived from any sane project -- it is actually coming on top of the refusal to finance forseeable future liabilities. When a corporation borrows heavily to give its top managers raises, and tries to disguise the loans on top of it, what do you have? Even Tyco avoided peculation on that scale.
My favorite of the BW articles this week is the one that describes the magic trick/pick pocketing act that is being performed before our very eyes with Bush's famous 87 billion -- and by the way, don't you love that 7? Not 8, and not 6. Of course, we know that it will really be closer to 100 -- a round number -- billion, if that.
Howard Gleckman points out that the 87 bil isn't going to be inked into the Fed budget:
"Said the Office of Management & Budget on Sept. 4: "Only within such a fiscal environment can we encourage increased economic growth and a return to a balanced budget." Expect veto threats and perhaps even veiled warnings of a government shutdown if that $784.7 billion spending cap isn't met.
There's just one problem. While Bush and Congress are fighting over every dollar, they're going to pretend the $87 billion in Iraq money doesn't count as part of the discretionary budget ceiling, even though every thing else the Pentagon does is included.
This is an accounting gimmick that would shame even Enron. "We will hold down spending," Bush and GOP leaders on Capitol Hill will say. But next to that boast will be a little imaginary asterisk that says, "For everything, that is, but Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, a fistful of trust funds, and the war in Iraq." In truth, the government will spend more than $1.3 trillion next year -- close to twice the discretionay-spending target -- on stuff that doesn't count in Washington's debates over fiscal responsibility."
Now, you ask, how can they do that? The simple answer is: raw abuse of power.
"Watch for Bush to claim by the end the year that he held discretionary outlays to a 4% hike, even though spending will go up by close to 15%. The White House and Congress will just pretend it didn't happen.
And how will Uncle Sam pay for all these extra burdens? With real money that Treasury will have to borrow, creating real debt that your kids will be paying off for the rest of their lives."
Rumsfeld compares the war to the occupation of post-war Germany. The left compares Bush to Hitler or Mussolini. LI wants to introduce a different parallel (watch this meme sink, kiddies): this is Bush's equivalent of Versailles. Instead of a complex of palaces, our bewildered POTUS is setting up a 'theater of terrorism." Louis XIV never thought of that one -- he did pay for theatrical entertainments, but he was not a big thinker: he merely hired Racine and Moliere and the like. Kafka had a clearer instinct for the kind of big project Bush is pushing. Hence the Oklahoma Nature theater that comes at the end of Amerika. But even Kafka never imagined one country using a whole other country to set up a theater of terrorism. Is that a grand gesture or what? It's not hard to figure out why the natives don't like it -- they aren't civilized like we are. Otherwise, they'd be appreciative of our administration's artistic sensibilities. What an idea, after all: using their real flesh and blood for our adventure movie. Yee-haw!
Readers should go to Business Week for several articles that gingerly sift through the budget debacle. Trying to be fair to the White House, the writers put in some mush mouth disclaimers about how the US could "carry" a deficit equivalent to 5% of the GDP indefinitely. Yes, we could, but if the experience of the 90s showed us anything, it is that we are better off not. It is true that a smoker can still do two packs even after they yank out one of his lungs, but it isn't, I hear, recommended. Of course, these kinds of things are always wrapped around comparisons with long term corporate debts. The argument -- the sound argument -- is that any large organization needs to borrow to maintain and expand its infrastructure. That seems right to me. But there really is no corporate parallel that fits what Bush has done. The production of this debt load is not derived from any sane project -- it is actually coming on top of the refusal to finance forseeable future liabilities. When a corporation borrows heavily to give its top managers raises, and tries to disguise the loans on top of it, what do you have? Even Tyco avoided peculation on that scale.
My favorite of the BW articles this week is the one that describes the magic trick/pick pocketing act that is being performed before our very eyes with Bush's famous 87 billion -- and by the way, don't you love that 7? Not 8, and not 6. Of course, we know that it will really be closer to 100 -- a round number -- billion, if that.
Howard Gleckman points out that the 87 bil isn't going to be inked into the Fed budget:
"Said the Office of Management & Budget on Sept. 4: "Only within such a fiscal environment can we encourage increased economic growth and a return to a balanced budget." Expect veto threats and perhaps even veiled warnings of a government shutdown if that $784.7 billion spending cap isn't met.
There's just one problem. While Bush and Congress are fighting over every dollar, they're going to pretend the $87 billion in Iraq money doesn't count as part of the discretionary budget ceiling, even though every thing else the Pentagon does is included.
This is an accounting gimmick that would shame even Enron. "We will hold down spending," Bush and GOP leaders on Capitol Hill will say. But next to that boast will be a little imaginary asterisk that says, "For everything, that is, but Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, a fistful of trust funds, and the war in Iraq." In truth, the government will spend more than $1.3 trillion next year -- close to twice the discretionay-spending target -- on stuff that doesn't count in Washington's debates over fiscal responsibility."
Now, you ask, how can they do that? The simple answer is: raw abuse of power.
"Watch for Bush to claim by the end the year that he held discretionary outlays to a 4% hike, even though spending will go up by close to 15%. The White House and Congress will just pretend it didn't happen.
And how will Uncle Sam pay for all these extra burdens? With real money that Treasury will have to borrow, creating real debt that your kids will be paying off for the rest of their lives."
Rumsfeld compares the war to the occupation of post-war Germany. The left compares Bush to Hitler or Mussolini. LI wants to introduce a different parallel (watch this meme sink, kiddies): this is Bush's equivalent of Versailles. Instead of a complex of palaces, our bewildered POTUS is setting up a 'theater of terrorism." Louis XIV never thought of that one -- he did pay for theatrical entertainments, but he was not a big thinker: he merely hired Racine and Moliere and the like. Kafka had a clearer instinct for the kind of big project Bush is pushing. Hence the Oklahoma Nature theater that comes at the end of Amerika. But even Kafka never imagined one country using a whole other country to set up a theater of terrorism. Is that a grand gesture or what? It's not hard to figure out why the natives don't like it -- they aren't civilized like we are. Otherwise, they'd be appreciative of our administration's artistic sensibilities. What an idea, after all: using their real flesh and blood for our adventure movie. Yee-haw!
Friday, September 12, 2003
Bollettino
This week the arts and letters website has been highlighting articles about the extinct art of book reviewing. This Poets and Writers article treads the same ground Clive James covered in the Sunday NYT. Same references - the Believer, Heidi J., Dale Peck - and the same dull stirring about the non-question: should reviewers diss the books they don't like?
Books, here, means solely fiction.
Myself, I have been a valiant reviewer of fiction for five years now. I am trying to end my association with that game - I haven't reviewed more than three books in the past two months. I am willing to do almost anything other than continue working as a freelance reviewer. Yesterday, in fact, yours truly went to Pacesetters, an employment agency that is geared towards the mentally disturbed and the perpetual on the move. It consists of a cavernous building located next to the downtown police station, and the joint is peppered with helpful signs advising that drug takers will be arrested, that backpack carriers won't be allowed to carry backpacks to job sites, and that there were police on duty on the premises. A hopeful kind of place.
It struck me as a distinct social and economic advance from freelancing.
But to get to the point. Book reviews used to be read. Macaulay and Bagehot, to name only two Victorian sages, produced classic essays in the form of book reviews. In the twentieth century, Virginia Woolf and Edmund Wilson, among others, wrote book reviews that are still read. But over the last twenty years, as newspapers and magazines have been absorbed into an entertainment industry that is ferociously conscious of ROI, book reviews have been neglected. Monotony - and book reviews are generally tedious beyond belief, much more tedious than movie reviews - has naturally led to a fall off of readership. This takes place against a background in which the newspaper industry has been cutting its own throat -becoming a cheap guide to other venues of entertainment. It will never be cheap enough. This is a death spiral. As the newspaper reader is herded towards ever more cretinizing forms of Hollywood fantasy, the reader naturally loses the reading talent, or will to read. That will certainly includes newspapers. By their very structure, newspapers require a certain talent in reading. This seems to go over the heads of the owners of newspapers. That a newspaper is a thing to read, rather than a billboard to put advertisements in, is not a truth admitted in the boardrooms of Gannet or Cox. The reader, that mythical bearer of cultural goods, has fled to academia. The site of reading is now the classroom. This doesn't signify the death of literature, but it does signify a regression to the pre-modern era of reading and writing. The modernist impulse, which from the philosophes to the modernists depended on a network of independent readers and writers, is petering out. Independence was always a high wire act. Academia was never set up to foster it, and doesn't. But as the air is taken out of that cultural space, the newspaper, which was a creation of the modernist era, is dying. While most editors could care less about the book review section (for good reason), its corruption is a symptom - an ineradicable black spot, signalling the corruption and death to come.
If we look back upon the 19th century novel, one thing stands out: the site of reading - of finding the book, and then finding the next book - is not the classroom. The classroom has almost wholly taken over the educated readers ideal of the place of reading. When Book stores encourage reading by encouraging reading groups, the groups almost invariably become like classrooms. The classroom ethos is also mirrored in the standard book review, which is composed of two parts: plot and theme. The art of the novel is almost skipped - in the classroom, the subteties of art makes for bad tests. Much easier to ask for an essay (in five hundred words or less) about the theme of War and Peace than to ask for an essay about the construction of Prince Andrei as a character. Classrooms elicit themes the way factories produce cars. Libraries, if the witness of nineteenth century writers is any testimony, created complex day dreams. That day dreams could become political and social realities was the message of the two great events of the early nineteenth century: the French revolution and the rise of Napoleon.
I'll write more about this on some later post.
Here are three citations from three different 19th century writers, selected at random.
I believe I should have been almost stupefied but for one circumstance.It was this. My father had left a small collection of books in alittle room upstairs, to which I had access (for it adjoined myown) and which nobody else in our house ever troubled. From thatblessed little room, Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, HumphreyClinker, Tom Jones, the Vicar of Wakefield, Don Quixote, Gil Blas,and Robinson Crusoe, came out, a glorious host, to keep me company. They kept alive my fancy, and my hope of something beyond thatplace and time, - they, and the Arabian Nights, and the Tales ofthe Genii, - and did me no harm; for whatever harm was in some ofthem was not there for me; I knew nothing of it. It is astonishingto me now, how I found time, in the midst of my porings andblunderings over heavier themes, to read those books as I did.
-- David Cooperfield
For six months, then, Emma, at fifteen years ofage, made her hands dirty with books from old lending libraries.
Through Walter Scott, later on, she fell in love with historical events, dreamed of old chests, guard-rooms and minstrels. She would have liked to live in some old manor-house, like those long-waisted chatelaines who, in the shade of pointed arches,spent their days leaning on the stone, chin in hand, watching acavalier with white plume galloping on his black horse from thedistant fields. At this time she had a cult for Mary Stuart and enthusiastic veneration for illustrious or unhappy women. Joan ofArc, Heloise, Agnes Sorel, the beautiful Ferroniere, and ClemenceIsaure stood out to her like comets in the dark immensity of heaven...
Madame Bovary
"What did Missy want with more books? What must you be bringing her more books for?" "They amuse her, sir. She is very fond of reading." "A little too fond," said Mr Featherstone, captiously. "She was for reading when she sat with me. But I put a stop to that. She's got the newspaper to read out loud. That's enough for one day, I should think. I can't abide to see her reading to herself.
Middlemarch
This week the arts and letters website has been highlighting articles about the extinct art of book reviewing. This Poets and Writers article treads the same ground Clive James covered in the Sunday NYT. Same references - the Believer, Heidi J., Dale Peck - and the same dull stirring about the non-question: should reviewers diss the books they don't like?
Books, here, means solely fiction.
Myself, I have been a valiant reviewer of fiction for five years now. I am trying to end my association with that game - I haven't reviewed more than three books in the past two months. I am willing to do almost anything other than continue working as a freelance reviewer. Yesterday, in fact, yours truly went to Pacesetters, an employment agency that is geared towards the mentally disturbed and the perpetual on the move. It consists of a cavernous building located next to the downtown police station, and the joint is peppered with helpful signs advising that drug takers will be arrested, that backpack carriers won't be allowed to carry backpacks to job sites, and that there were police on duty on the premises. A hopeful kind of place.
It struck me as a distinct social and economic advance from freelancing.
But to get to the point. Book reviews used to be read. Macaulay and Bagehot, to name only two Victorian sages, produced classic essays in the form of book reviews. In the twentieth century, Virginia Woolf and Edmund Wilson, among others, wrote book reviews that are still read. But over the last twenty years, as newspapers and magazines have been absorbed into an entertainment industry that is ferociously conscious of ROI, book reviews have been neglected. Monotony - and book reviews are generally tedious beyond belief, much more tedious than movie reviews - has naturally led to a fall off of readership. This takes place against a background in which the newspaper industry has been cutting its own throat -becoming a cheap guide to other venues of entertainment. It will never be cheap enough. This is a death spiral. As the newspaper reader is herded towards ever more cretinizing forms of Hollywood fantasy, the reader naturally loses the reading talent, or will to read. That will certainly includes newspapers. By their very structure, newspapers require a certain talent in reading. This seems to go over the heads of the owners of newspapers. That a newspaper is a thing to read, rather than a billboard to put advertisements in, is not a truth admitted in the boardrooms of Gannet or Cox. The reader, that mythical bearer of cultural goods, has fled to academia. The site of reading is now the classroom. This doesn't signify the death of literature, but it does signify a regression to the pre-modern era of reading and writing. The modernist impulse, which from the philosophes to the modernists depended on a network of independent readers and writers, is petering out. Independence was always a high wire act. Academia was never set up to foster it, and doesn't. But as the air is taken out of that cultural space, the newspaper, which was a creation of the modernist era, is dying. While most editors could care less about the book review section (for good reason), its corruption is a symptom - an ineradicable black spot, signalling the corruption and death to come.
If we look back upon the 19th century novel, one thing stands out: the site of reading - of finding the book, and then finding the next book - is not the classroom. The classroom has almost wholly taken over the educated readers ideal of the place of reading. When Book stores encourage reading by encouraging reading groups, the groups almost invariably become like classrooms. The classroom ethos is also mirrored in the standard book review, which is composed of two parts: plot and theme. The art of the novel is almost skipped - in the classroom, the subteties of art makes for bad tests. Much easier to ask for an essay (in five hundred words or less) about the theme of War and Peace than to ask for an essay about the construction of Prince Andrei as a character. Classrooms elicit themes the way factories produce cars. Libraries, if the witness of nineteenth century writers is any testimony, created complex day dreams. That day dreams could become political and social realities was the message of the two great events of the early nineteenth century: the French revolution and the rise of Napoleon.
I'll write more about this on some later post.
Here are three citations from three different 19th century writers, selected at random.
I believe I should have been almost stupefied but for one circumstance.It was this. My father had left a small collection of books in alittle room upstairs, to which I had access (for it adjoined myown) and which nobody else in our house ever troubled. From thatblessed little room, Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, HumphreyClinker, Tom Jones, the Vicar of Wakefield, Don Quixote, Gil Blas,and Robinson Crusoe, came out, a glorious host, to keep me company. They kept alive my fancy, and my hope of something beyond thatplace and time, - they, and the Arabian Nights, and the Tales ofthe Genii, - and did me no harm; for whatever harm was in some ofthem was not there for me; I knew nothing of it. It is astonishingto me now, how I found time, in the midst of my porings andblunderings over heavier themes, to read those books as I did.
-- David Cooperfield
For six months, then, Emma, at fifteen years ofage, made her hands dirty with books from old lending libraries.
Through Walter Scott, later on, she fell in love with historical events, dreamed of old chests, guard-rooms and minstrels. She would have liked to live in some old manor-house, like those long-waisted chatelaines who, in the shade of pointed arches,spent their days leaning on the stone, chin in hand, watching acavalier with white plume galloping on his black horse from thedistant fields. At this time she had a cult for Mary Stuart and enthusiastic veneration for illustrious or unhappy women. Joan ofArc, Heloise, Agnes Sorel, the beautiful Ferroniere, and ClemenceIsaure stood out to her like comets in the dark immensity of heaven...
Madame Bovary
"What did Missy want with more books? What must you be bringing her more books for?" "They amuse her, sir. She is very fond of reading." "A little too fond," said Mr Featherstone, captiously. "She was for reading when she sat with me. But I put a stop to that. She's got the newspaper to read out loud. That's enough for one day, I should think. I can't abide to see her reading to herself.
Middlemarch
Tuesday, September 09, 2003
Bollettino
I must, I must stop writing about the War.
One last post -- and then, no mas. Not for this week. Sanity, I crave sanity...
All right. Let's do a review. The war was supposed to bring some benefits. There would be costs, there would be benefits. Now we have a better picture of both, and we have a sense of how -- from the American perspective -- they are defined. One of the great benefits of the war was the bringing down of Saddam H. The cost, in human lives and in dollars, hasn't yet been toted up -- on the Iraqi side it may never be -- but as of today we have some feel for it.
So, the Bush administration has defined the ultimate benefit in Iraq in terms of several abstractions and one pre-war claim. The pre-war claim is that Iraqi oil will pay for the war and the American contribution to Iraq. In other words, we are spending about 150-200 billion dollars on Iraq, but we will receive that money back. The abstractions can be boiled down to: a democratic, American friendly country. Like Iran under the Shah, only with elections.
Given these baselines, we can come up with combinations of possible outcomes, assign them probabilities, and ask which one will give us both 1) the greatest benefit and 2) the best odds.
I can think of five basic combinations.
1. American troops withdraw. We leave behind a stable, American friendly democracy, that pays America back its 200 billion dollars, with interest, in a timely matter.
2. American troops withdraw. The government that is left behind is less friendly to America than Kuwait, but more friendly than Iran. It is, however, stable, and has certain democratic aspects. The 200 billion dollars is not paid back.
3. American troops leave. The American friendly democracy that is left behind tries to repay the American debt, causing a nation wide rebellion. It is overthrown by a government that is hostile to America.
4. American troops leave. Iraq is riven with conflict. The 200 billion dollars is gone. The conflict lasts for a long time, is destabilizing, and no side in it is openly pro-American.
5. American troops don't leave, but have to stay indefinitely, due to conflict. Another 100 billion dollars is spent on Iraq, but the nation is riven with conflict. Casualties mount. No stability, no democracy, and increasing harm to American forces.
One can argue that there are innumerable subsets. There are. But I imagine each one simply enriches the detail of one or another item on this list.
The problem with the Bush solution is simple. It bets everything on 1. Myself, I think one has about the same chance as Dennis Kucinich has of being the next US president.
The second option is much more possible. But humans drive their own history -- it will definitely be made impossible the more Bush bets on 1. The other three options are progressively worse for American interests. And for Iraq.
So, rationally, for our 150-200 billion dollars -- money we are not going to see again -- I'd say the reasonable thing to do is to take 2 as a scenario and try to improve it. That means ... well, it means handing power over to the Iraqi cabinet, and letting Bremer tell rotary clubs in Indiana all about his splendid plan for an Iraqi constitution. It means getting real about the money -- this money isn't coming back. It means letting the Iraqis decide what kind of economy they want -- from the contractors they hire to repair oil wells to the market system they are comfortable with. Of course, the "Iraqis" don't operate in isolation. But we should certainly not get into a situation in which there is a puppet Iraqi elite that simply obeys Americans, and thus abruptly abridges its shelf life. The commentary I've read about Iraq is truly odd -- it is as if nobody even thinks about what happens when the Americans withdraw. The Americans are not going to enforce a permanent solution to the Iraq problem -- period. The arguments are all about the chaos that will ensue if we withdraw right now, and how we have to do this, and how we have to do that... But by the force of things (ah, Lucretian phrase!) the Iraqis are the ones who will be there when the Americans are long gone. The american exit strategy better be shaped with that reality in mind.
I must, I must stop writing about the War.
One last post -- and then, no mas. Not for this week. Sanity, I crave sanity...
All right. Let's do a review. The war was supposed to bring some benefits. There would be costs, there would be benefits. Now we have a better picture of both, and we have a sense of how -- from the American perspective -- they are defined. One of the great benefits of the war was the bringing down of Saddam H. The cost, in human lives and in dollars, hasn't yet been toted up -- on the Iraqi side it may never be -- but as of today we have some feel for it.
So, the Bush administration has defined the ultimate benefit in Iraq in terms of several abstractions and one pre-war claim. The pre-war claim is that Iraqi oil will pay for the war and the American contribution to Iraq. In other words, we are spending about 150-200 billion dollars on Iraq, but we will receive that money back. The abstractions can be boiled down to: a democratic, American friendly country. Like Iran under the Shah, only with elections.
Given these baselines, we can come up with combinations of possible outcomes, assign them probabilities, and ask which one will give us both 1) the greatest benefit and 2) the best odds.
I can think of five basic combinations.
1. American troops withdraw. We leave behind a stable, American friendly democracy, that pays America back its 200 billion dollars, with interest, in a timely matter.
2. American troops withdraw. The government that is left behind is less friendly to America than Kuwait, but more friendly than Iran. It is, however, stable, and has certain democratic aspects. The 200 billion dollars is not paid back.
3. American troops leave. The American friendly democracy that is left behind tries to repay the American debt, causing a nation wide rebellion. It is overthrown by a government that is hostile to America.
4. American troops leave. Iraq is riven with conflict. The 200 billion dollars is gone. The conflict lasts for a long time, is destabilizing, and no side in it is openly pro-American.
5. American troops don't leave, but have to stay indefinitely, due to conflict. Another 100 billion dollars is spent on Iraq, but the nation is riven with conflict. Casualties mount. No stability, no democracy, and increasing harm to American forces.
One can argue that there are innumerable subsets. There are. But I imagine each one simply enriches the detail of one or another item on this list.
The problem with the Bush solution is simple. It bets everything on 1. Myself, I think one has about the same chance as Dennis Kucinich has of being the next US president.
The second option is much more possible. But humans drive their own history -- it will definitely be made impossible the more Bush bets on 1. The other three options are progressively worse for American interests. And for Iraq.
So, rationally, for our 150-200 billion dollars -- money we are not going to see again -- I'd say the reasonable thing to do is to take 2 as a scenario and try to improve it. That means ... well, it means handing power over to the Iraqi cabinet, and letting Bremer tell rotary clubs in Indiana all about his splendid plan for an Iraqi constitution. It means getting real about the money -- this money isn't coming back. It means letting the Iraqis decide what kind of economy they want -- from the contractors they hire to repair oil wells to the market system they are comfortable with. Of course, the "Iraqis" don't operate in isolation. But we should certainly not get into a situation in which there is a puppet Iraqi elite that simply obeys Americans, and thus abruptly abridges its shelf life. The commentary I've read about Iraq is truly odd -- it is as if nobody even thinks about what happens when the Americans withdraw. The Americans are not going to enforce a permanent solution to the Iraq problem -- period. The arguments are all about the chaos that will ensue if we withdraw right now, and how we have to do this, and how we have to do that... But by the force of things (ah, Lucretian phrase!) the Iraqis are the ones who will be there when the Americans are long gone. The american exit strategy better be shaped with that reality in mind.
Monday, September 08, 2003
Bollettino
Here's what we said before the war, on March 14th. It seems relevant, in the light of W.'s speech.
"Given this, here is the primer for the upcoming catastrophe:
1. Occupation is not peace. The media has defined the war as having a beginning -- when Bush declares it -- and an end -- when Saddam Hussein is dissolved. Now, the beginning, as we all know by now, has not been clear. In fact, it is unclear what Bush will declare, if we are actually engaged in warlike hostilities now, and who will be responsible for the war -- as in, you know, the marquis. Is it the UN vs. Saddam, the U.S. vs Saddam, or the Coalition of the Willing vs. Saddam? Similarily, the dissolution of Saddam ends only one phase of the war. The next phase, if the post-Saddam history of Northern Iraq is relevant, begins with squabbling between hostile factions that soon escalates into shooting. Plus, of course, with a soldiery strung out in Iraq and no central authority besides that army, the terrain and disposition of forces is ideally suited for suicide bombers.
2.You can't give what you take. As we've pointed out before, Paul Wolfowitz has testified that we intend to pay for the war with Iraq's money. At the same time, we intend to reconstruct Iraq. Those are mutually cancelling propositions. This is when the lesson of Afghanistan kicks in. There is no constituency in this country willing to see a transfer of about one hundred billion dollars to Iraq. And if the economy continues to suck, the pressure will be overwhelming to subsidize this war with the spoils.
3.A democratic government won't last if its strips the country of its wealth. Stripping, here, is pretty direct. We aren't talking fancy Swiss bank accounts. We are talking oil money going out in ways that everybody sees. If this is the American strategy, be prepared for a guerilla war.
4 The current civil society in Northern Iraq is endangered by American adventurism. Northern Iraq, and the Kurds, have become the stuff of propaganda lately. That there was no outpouring of admiration for their civil ways before 9/11 had a simple cause: for the first five years of the No Fly Zone, Kurdish factions killed each other. They also gave shelter to the PKK, a guerrilla group in Turkey that was as dirty as they come. This isn't to say that Northern Iraq hasn't made progress -- they have. They've done it in the way that progress is made -- it is a grassroots effort, and it takes security, money, and time. If the U.S. expects to 'integrate' Northern Iraq, by force, into its idea of Iraq, all of that progress will be undone.
The NPR interviewed Gordon Adams about the cost of the war a while back. Gordon Adams is some defense analyst. Here is his comment: "In Gulf War I, we paid $60 billion to fight the war. Our allies gave us back all but about $10 billion of that money. So it was--you know, Gulf War I was subsidized. Gulf War II will not be subsidized."
Here's what we said before the war, on March 14th. It seems relevant, in the light of W.'s speech.
"Given this, here is the primer for the upcoming catastrophe:
1. Occupation is not peace. The media has defined the war as having a beginning -- when Bush declares it -- and an end -- when Saddam Hussein is dissolved. Now, the beginning, as we all know by now, has not been clear. In fact, it is unclear what Bush will declare, if we are actually engaged in warlike hostilities now, and who will be responsible for the war -- as in, you know, the marquis. Is it the UN vs. Saddam, the U.S. vs Saddam, or the Coalition of the Willing vs. Saddam? Similarily, the dissolution of Saddam ends only one phase of the war. The next phase, if the post-Saddam history of Northern Iraq is relevant, begins with squabbling between hostile factions that soon escalates into shooting. Plus, of course, with a soldiery strung out in Iraq and no central authority besides that army, the terrain and disposition of forces is ideally suited for suicide bombers.
2.You can't give what you take. As we've pointed out before, Paul Wolfowitz has testified that we intend to pay for the war with Iraq's money. At the same time, we intend to reconstruct Iraq. Those are mutually cancelling propositions. This is when the lesson of Afghanistan kicks in. There is no constituency in this country willing to see a transfer of about one hundred billion dollars to Iraq. And if the economy continues to suck, the pressure will be overwhelming to subsidize this war with the spoils.
3.A democratic government won't last if its strips the country of its wealth. Stripping, here, is pretty direct. We aren't talking fancy Swiss bank accounts. We are talking oil money going out in ways that everybody sees. If this is the American strategy, be prepared for a guerilla war.
4 The current civil society in Northern Iraq is endangered by American adventurism. Northern Iraq, and the Kurds, have become the stuff of propaganda lately. That there was no outpouring of admiration for their civil ways before 9/11 had a simple cause: for the first five years of the No Fly Zone, Kurdish factions killed each other. They also gave shelter to the PKK, a guerrilla group in Turkey that was as dirty as they come. This isn't to say that Northern Iraq hasn't made progress -- they have. They've done it in the way that progress is made -- it is a grassroots effort, and it takes security, money, and time. If the U.S. expects to 'integrate' Northern Iraq, by force, into its idea of Iraq, all of that progress will be undone.
The NPR interviewed Gordon Adams about the cost of the war a while back. Gordon Adams is some defense analyst. Here is his comment: "In Gulf War I, we paid $60 billion to fight the war. Our allies gave us back all but about $10 billion of that money. So it was--you know, Gulf War I was subsidized. Gulf War II will not be subsidized."
Bollettino
We were going to do a little thoughtful post about reviewing -- which, the god of coincidence being a faithful reader of this stream of fluff, is made easier by a hook: Clive James' op ed in the Sunday NYT.
"Over the course of literary history some legitimately destructive reviews have been altogether too enjoyable for both writer and reader. Attacking bad books, these reviews were useful acts in defense of civilization. They also left the authors of the books in the position of prisoners buried to the neck in a Roman arena as the champion charioteer, with swords mounted on his hubcaps, demonstrated his mastery of the giant slalom. How civilized is it to tee off on the exposed ineptitude of the helpless?
"Back in the early 19th century, the dim but industrious poet Robert Montgomery had grown dangerously used to extravagant praise, until a new book of his poems was given to the great historian and mighty reviewer Lord Macaulay. The results set all England laughing and Montgomery on the road to oblivion, where he still is, his fate at Macaulay's hands being his only remaining claim to fame. Montgomery's high style was asking to be brought low and Macaulay no doubt told himself that he was only doing his duty by putting in the boot. Montgomery had a line about a river meandering level with its fount. Macaulay pointed out that a river level with its fount wouldn't even flow, let alone meander. Macaulay made it funny; he had exposed Montgomery as a writer who couldn't see what was in front of him."
Clive James' piece is occasioned by the now distant racket that was made in May, on the appearane of Heidi Julavits' piece, in the Believer, entitled "The Snarky, Dumbed-Down World of Book Reviewing." Since we have made almost all our money in the past year book reviewing, you would think we'd have commented in a more timely fashion about what couldn't have been more relevant to us. However, at the time we were in a constant state of sweat over Iraq, and theories of bookreviewing just didn't urge our commentating instincts. However, James' piece did send us back to Julavits. Not to her essay, so much, but to the interview in the NYObs, which was, to the detriment of the moral betterment of book reviewers everywhere, so much more fun to read.
During the course of the interview, Ms. Julavits (to use Observerspeak) morphed into a rather bizarre semblence of Jerry Lundegaard, the car salesman character in Fargo. Or at least linguistically. For instance: in her article, Ms. Julavits apparently attacked one Sam Sifton, whose review of some novel in the New York Times attracted her attention on account of its untoward snarkiness.Now this Sifton, according to the Observer, is not entirely unknown to Ms. Julavits. In fact, he was the best man at her inauspicious wedding to her first husband, who has, in another magazine, recollected in detail the vices that drove his bride from the house and from the marriage. Here is the interviewer presses Ms. Julavits on this unhappy topic:
At the mention of her personal connection to Mr. Sifton, Ms. Julavits darkened. "Unfortunately, Sam is someone whom I really, really, really like," she said, sitting up in her chair. "So if it�s not dispassionate, I guess it�s that I read that review, and I was just so upset the whole time I was reading it�and then when I saw who wrote it, it was devastating, because I respect him immensely."Ms. Julavits didn�t see her attack on Mr. Sifton as personal, but she admitted that the connections were a bit odd. "It�s definitely bizarre," she said, "but Dave Eggers is friends with Sam and whatever, so it�s all�everybody knows everybody in one way or another."
It is hard to read this without thinking of William Macy's worried face -- Macy is the guy who played Lundegaard -- and thinking of what he'd do with these lines. They are golden, these lines. Especially "Sam is someone whom I really really really like..." Ms. Julavits' way of speaking -- the Midwestern nice that wraps around a rubber dagger, or at least a bad review of a bad review -- has that Lundegaard twitchiness, that discontent. The interview includes a citation of Ms. Julavits really pouring on the harshness, taking on the negative reception accorded to Rick Moody's The Black Veil. The "cautionary underlying message" she found in Mr. Moody�s bad press�most famously, a blistering attack by Dale Peck in The New Republic�was this: "If you try to be overly ambitious and fail, you will get the heck spanked out of you. You will be mocked."
Jaa, gettin' the heck spanked out of you. It happened two years ago, over to Lake Crane I think it was, you remember Marge, when the danged dog ate the snowplow tires...
Well, our own thoughts about reviewing have not been crystalized by Julavits. Rather, we've been thinking of the malign influence of Pauline Kael. We've been thinking of resentment. We've been thinking of how the site where literature is processed -- chosen, read, discussed -- has changed over the last century from the library to the classroom. We've been thinking of crowds. Our next post will take some of this up. Or it won't
We were going to do a little thoughtful post about reviewing -- which, the god of coincidence being a faithful reader of this stream of fluff, is made easier by a hook: Clive James' op ed in the Sunday NYT.
"Over the course of literary history some legitimately destructive reviews have been altogether too enjoyable for both writer and reader. Attacking bad books, these reviews were useful acts in defense of civilization. They also left the authors of the books in the position of prisoners buried to the neck in a Roman arena as the champion charioteer, with swords mounted on his hubcaps, demonstrated his mastery of the giant slalom. How civilized is it to tee off on the exposed ineptitude of the helpless?
"Back in the early 19th century, the dim but industrious poet Robert Montgomery had grown dangerously used to extravagant praise, until a new book of his poems was given to the great historian and mighty reviewer Lord Macaulay. The results set all England laughing and Montgomery on the road to oblivion, where he still is, his fate at Macaulay's hands being his only remaining claim to fame. Montgomery's high style was asking to be brought low and Macaulay no doubt told himself that he was only doing his duty by putting in the boot. Montgomery had a line about a river meandering level with its fount. Macaulay pointed out that a river level with its fount wouldn't even flow, let alone meander. Macaulay made it funny; he had exposed Montgomery as a writer who couldn't see what was in front of him."
Clive James' piece is occasioned by the now distant racket that was made in May, on the appearane of Heidi Julavits' piece, in the Believer, entitled "The Snarky, Dumbed-Down World of Book Reviewing." Since we have made almost all our money in the past year book reviewing, you would think we'd have commented in a more timely fashion about what couldn't have been more relevant to us. However, at the time we were in a constant state of sweat over Iraq, and theories of bookreviewing just didn't urge our commentating instincts. However, James' piece did send us back to Julavits. Not to her essay, so much, but to the interview in the NYObs, which was, to the detriment of the moral betterment of book reviewers everywhere, so much more fun to read.
During the course of the interview, Ms. Julavits (to use Observerspeak) morphed into a rather bizarre semblence of Jerry Lundegaard, the car salesman character in Fargo. Or at least linguistically. For instance: in her article, Ms. Julavits apparently attacked one Sam Sifton, whose review of some novel in the New York Times attracted her attention on account of its untoward snarkiness.Now this Sifton, according to the Observer, is not entirely unknown to Ms. Julavits. In fact, he was the best man at her inauspicious wedding to her first husband, who has, in another magazine, recollected in detail the vices that drove his bride from the house and from the marriage. Here is the interviewer presses Ms. Julavits on this unhappy topic:
At the mention of her personal connection to Mr. Sifton, Ms. Julavits darkened. "Unfortunately, Sam is someone whom I really, really, really like," she said, sitting up in her chair. "So if it�s not dispassionate, I guess it�s that I read that review, and I was just so upset the whole time I was reading it�and then when I saw who wrote it, it was devastating, because I respect him immensely."Ms. Julavits didn�t see her attack on Mr. Sifton as personal, but she admitted that the connections were a bit odd. "It�s definitely bizarre," she said, "but Dave Eggers is friends with Sam and whatever, so it�s all�everybody knows everybody in one way or another."
It is hard to read this without thinking of William Macy's worried face -- Macy is the guy who played Lundegaard -- and thinking of what he'd do with these lines. They are golden, these lines. Especially "Sam is someone whom I really really really like..." Ms. Julavits' way of speaking -- the Midwestern nice that wraps around a rubber dagger, or at least a bad review of a bad review -- has that Lundegaard twitchiness, that discontent. The interview includes a citation of Ms. Julavits really pouring on the harshness, taking on the negative reception accorded to Rick Moody's The Black Veil. The "cautionary underlying message" she found in Mr. Moody�s bad press�most famously, a blistering attack by Dale Peck in The New Republic�was this: "If you try to be overly ambitious and fail, you will get the heck spanked out of you. You will be mocked."
Jaa, gettin' the heck spanked out of you. It happened two years ago, over to Lake Crane I think it was, you remember Marge, when the danged dog ate the snowplow tires...
Well, our own thoughts about reviewing have not been crystalized by Julavits. Rather, we've been thinking of the malign influence of Pauline Kael. We've been thinking of resentment. We've been thinking of how the site where literature is processed -- chosen, read, discussed -- has changed over the last century from the library to the classroom. We've been thinking of crowds. Our next post will take some of this up. Or it won't
Bollettino
Ah, pity the poor right wing draft dodgers. Deprived of their share of military glory, and forced to take on domestic tasks, such as bringing down a 100 grand on that first job, and fighting real hard, and successfully, at the office, to be promoted over the deadwood, they have longed, longed for their own war -- not one, mind you, where they would have to be consigned to those yucky barracks at the airport and made to eat that yucky army food (puh-leeeze), but an in and out kind of thing -- sort of like an extreme vacation. The newest status symbol isn't climbing Mount Everest any more (with the natives bearing your lap top so you can hook it up and email your friends) -- no, it is going to Iraq and reporting on the "amazing progress" we are making there.
Following in the footsteps of Donny Rumsfeld in Iraq is Max Boot, WSJ author and general authority on all things military. He's at his best telling us how we are in the midst of being stabbed in the back by the media again, while Iraq is going our way! And how did he discover this? By making a tour exclusively with an army unit. A US army unit. Here's some derring do on the part of Monsieur Boot. First, in excited tones, he announces what counterinsurgency is all about:
"The success that both divisions are having is based on a smart counterinsurgency strategy that combines carrots and sticks. Both are careful not to use indiscriminate firepower that would alienate civilians. Their raids are carefully focused so that they hit Baathist safe houses while minimizing inconvenience for and humiliation of the innocent."
Yeah, those innocent. I'm sure they are all psyched about that minimizing of inconvenience and humiliation. Those are bummers, man.
But -- oh joy! -- the second, action part of Boot's exciting Iraqi vacation comes about when he gets to go out with real men! Yes, the boys in the Marine Corps invited him along for a ride. All that working out in the gym in New York has paid off! Here, our great white hunter encounters the little brown enemy himself!
I went with the Marines' Task Force Scorpion on one such raid, in a Sunni neighborhood south of Baghdad. As we drove, three remote- controlled bombs went off on the roadside. Luckily no one was injured; the blasts missed our vehicles. The Marines immediately got out and searched for the perpetrators. One suspect tested positive for explosive residue on his hands. He was plexi-cuffed and stuck in the back of an armored vehicle next to me. A corporal asked me to cover him with a 9-millimeter pistol. I was happy to comply. The next day, the task force caught four suspected Fedayeen who had explosive devices. Through such successes, Scorpion has managed to dramatically reduce terrorism in its area."
This, of course, is a city that the belligerent crowd insists is as safe as D.C. -- you know D.C, the city where they blow up embassies and police stations and shit. Now, Boot's experience seems to be of a dramatic increase of terrorism, since it is happening, on his account, in broad daylight. But why believe your own 5 senses when you can believe the Pentagon! -- think, too, of his trembling excitement, covering the bad guy with a 9-millimeter pistol! Yes indeed, if today's new, free market army could market this as a vacation package for your alpha Wall Street male, we are in business!
Ourselves -- well, LI advises our readers to drain that drop of alpha blood in your veins. It only leads to a lifelong and dubious puerility.
Ah, pity the poor right wing draft dodgers. Deprived of their share of military glory, and forced to take on domestic tasks, such as bringing down a 100 grand on that first job, and fighting real hard, and successfully, at the office, to be promoted over the deadwood, they have longed, longed for their own war -- not one, mind you, where they would have to be consigned to those yucky barracks at the airport and made to eat that yucky army food (puh-leeeze), but an in and out kind of thing -- sort of like an extreme vacation. The newest status symbol isn't climbing Mount Everest any more (with the natives bearing your lap top so you can hook it up and email your friends) -- no, it is going to Iraq and reporting on the "amazing progress" we are making there.
Following in the footsteps of Donny Rumsfeld in Iraq is Max Boot, WSJ author and general authority on all things military. He's at his best telling us how we are in the midst of being stabbed in the back by the media again, while Iraq is going our way! And how did he discover this? By making a tour exclusively with an army unit. A US army unit. Here's some derring do on the part of Monsieur Boot. First, in excited tones, he announces what counterinsurgency is all about:
"The success that both divisions are having is based on a smart counterinsurgency strategy that combines carrots and sticks. Both are careful not to use indiscriminate firepower that would alienate civilians. Their raids are carefully focused so that they hit Baathist safe houses while minimizing inconvenience for and humiliation of the innocent."
Yeah, those innocent. I'm sure they are all psyched about that minimizing of inconvenience and humiliation. Those are bummers, man.
But -- oh joy! -- the second, action part of Boot's exciting Iraqi vacation comes about when he gets to go out with real men! Yes, the boys in the Marine Corps invited him along for a ride. All that working out in the gym in New York has paid off! Here, our great white hunter encounters the little brown enemy himself!
I went with the Marines' Task Force Scorpion on one such raid, in a Sunni neighborhood south of Baghdad. As we drove, three remote- controlled bombs went off on the roadside. Luckily no one was injured; the blasts missed our vehicles. The Marines immediately got out and searched for the perpetrators. One suspect tested positive for explosive residue on his hands. He was plexi-cuffed and stuck in the back of an armored vehicle next to me. A corporal asked me to cover him with a 9-millimeter pistol. I was happy to comply. The next day, the task force caught four suspected Fedayeen who had explosive devices. Through such successes, Scorpion has managed to dramatically reduce terrorism in its area."
This, of course, is a city that the belligerent crowd insists is as safe as D.C. -- you know D.C, the city where they blow up embassies and police stations and shit. Now, Boot's experience seems to be of a dramatic increase of terrorism, since it is happening, on his account, in broad daylight. But why believe your own 5 senses when you can believe the Pentagon! -- think, too, of his trembling excitement, covering the bad guy with a 9-millimeter pistol! Yes indeed, if today's new, free market army could market this as a vacation package for your alpha Wall Street male, we are in business!
Ourselves -- well, LI advises our readers to drain that drop of alpha blood in your veins. It only leads to a lifelong and dubious puerility.
Saturday, September 06, 2003
Bollettino
Stanley Weintraub wrote an indictment of General Macauthur in the nineties that was approvingly reviewed in the military journal, Parameters. The reviewer, General Harold Nelson, USA Ret., former US Army Chief of Military History, wrote:
"I next felt the need for a book such as this when we taught case studies in senior leadership at the War College in the 1980s. MacArthur's "genius" was predictably discovered by enthusiastic students each year, and the Inchon operation was inevitably--and appropriately--cited as key supporting evidence. Professor Weintraub does a fine job laying out the importance of MacArthur's intractable commitment to that operation as the main reason it was tried. He spares no praise where praise is deserved. But he goes beyond Inchon, questioning MacArthur's insistence on subsequent amphibious operations against the east coast of the Korean peninsula--a decision that removed combat forces from the pursuit following the liberation of Seoul and weakened UN forces available in North Korea when the Chinese intervened. He also reminds us that MacArthur surrounded himself with "yes men," was terribly vain, and pushed the careers of undeserving subordinates--hardly the traits one would seek in an ideal senior leader.
I next needed this book when I was Chief of Military History for an Army Chief of Staff who was pledging "No more Task Force Smiths." I could dig out the necessary facts and figures on the undermanning and lax training of the Occupation Forces in Japan from James Schnabel's Policy and Direction: The First Year. But that official history put most of the blame on Washington--both the politicians and the Pentagon generals. Weintraub reminds us how much MacArthur was to blame, not only with his hands-off approach to day-to-day issues related to readiness, but in the bluff and bluster he put into his briefings when men such as Army Chief of Staff General Joseph Lawton Collins came to visit his command. Schnabel emphasizes the optimistic reports Collins filed when he returned to Washington. Weintraub reminds us that Collins had been a major when MacArthur was Army Chief of Staff, and that General of the Army Omar N. Bradley, ostensibly MacArthur's boss as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had been promoted to lieutenant colonel during those years. He also reminds us that MacArthur "never materialized at field exercises, where pampered and poorly trained garrison soldiers could not figure out how to erect tents, break down a rifle, assemble chow wagons, or maintain themselves in any way without indigenous assistance." Thank God the Army wasn't saddled with any superannuated five-star generals unwilling to be team players when we were saying "No more Task Force Smiths."
Well, one wonders what the future historian will say about Donald Rumsfeld. The Macarthur comparison is apt -- the same vanity, the same play to a certain reactionary crowd, the same court behavior. The yes men, now, are the strategists like Wolfowitz and Feith. And the same utter contempt for anyone who contradicts the faith. One of the many disturbing things about the long Democrat somnolence is that there are no cries for Bush to fire Rumsfeld. Surely if ever a man deserved to be fired, it is a man who has taken upon himself to usurp the function of the state department; whose personal pique at our Atlantic allies is now costing us perhaps an extra billion dollars per week, and probably more; whose ingenuity in stirring up the Macarthur strain in our culture has proven wholly pernicious to any sensible discussion of American interest and strategy in Iraq.
Rumsfeld and his minions are uncomfortably caught between their propaganda and reality. The official line is that the occupation is on course. If that official line were right, Rumsfeld's plan -- diminishing the US troop committment ot 30,000 this month -- would have been implemented. But even the most delusional Pentagon player has dropped that item from the agenda. The other reality -- the financial one -- is looming. No doubt Bush's speech will gingerly prepare the ground for the 60 billion dollar request from Congress. Again, if the progress were 'remarkable" -- as Rumsfeld likes to say -- the oil revenues would already be flowing in at the estimate the Pentagon liked to give in the pre-war period. That estimate was widely accepted at the time -- a sign of that the Pentagon's delusions had become the establishment's -- but it is now obvious that they were nearer lies than mistakes.
It is hard to imagine any "progress" in Iraq as long as it is in the hands of Donald Rumsfeld. It isn't that LI expects Bush to replace him with Susan Sontag. But McCain would be nice.
Of course, given Bush's feeling about McCain, Sontag might be more likely.
Unfortunately, the editorialist's well meaning opinion, that we should be sending more troops to Iraq, is like so many editorialist's opinions: a blandness wrapped around a hollowness. What are these troops to do? If there is a real guerilla war happening in Iraq -- and by now, I think it is obvious there is one -- the troops should be smothering the resources that sustain that war. That means sealing the borders, and it means interdicting the network of small internal forces. To do that wouldn't just require a little increase in American forces -- it would probably take at least 300,000 more.
No, Iraq is not going to regain its sovereignty with 400,000 or even 100,000 American troops roaming around in it. Perhaps a multi-national force would have squelched the beginnings of the guerilla war, but it seems to me that that force is going to face the same problem that the American forces face presently.
The only force that can really face the guerillas is an Iraqi force. The number of soldiers needed to deny insurgent groups resources is about equal to the number disbanded at the end of the war by Rumsfeld's deputy, Bremer. Bremer's decision, a compound of ignorance and hubris, is now blowing back on us. The idea that we are going to change the direction of Iraq in D.C., which is still current in both the belligerent and anti-war camps in this country, is simply false.
It hurts to agree with retired military men -- especially when they have names straight out of Doctor Strangelove -- but the WP article on the coming request for 50 to 60 billion dollars (which will undoubtedly mean 70 to 80 billion dollars -- it is how the Bush administration does its money) ended with these two grafs.
"In a sign of growing friction between Bush and the military establishment, retired Marine Lt. Gen. Paul Van Riper, a Gulf War commander, said in an interview during the meeting in Arlington that he is hearing an unprecedented amount of concern among retired officers over how the Bush administration has handled Iraq.
"Their criticism focused on Rumsfeld, he added."I've never seen so such discontent among the retired community," Van Riper said. Last week, he said, he was at a breakfast with eight retired generals at which one asked about Rumsfeld, "When are they going to get rid of this guy?""
Indeed.
PS -- The Boeing vote has been delayed, per our post on Darleen Druyun. The WP has reported that an alternative lease plan is being considered.
Stanley Weintraub wrote an indictment of General Macauthur in the nineties that was approvingly reviewed in the military journal, Parameters. The reviewer, General Harold Nelson, USA Ret., former US Army Chief of Military History, wrote:
"I next felt the need for a book such as this when we taught case studies in senior leadership at the War College in the 1980s. MacArthur's "genius" was predictably discovered by enthusiastic students each year, and the Inchon operation was inevitably--and appropriately--cited as key supporting evidence. Professor Weintraub does a fine job laying out the importance of MacArthur's intractable commitment to that operation as the main reason it was tried. He spares no praise where praise is deserved. But he goes beyond Inchon, questioning MacArthur's insistence on subsequent amphibious operations against the east coast of the Korean peninsula--a decision that removed combat forces from the pursuit following the liberation of Seoul and weakened UN forces available in North Korea when the Chinese intervened. He also reminds us that MacArthur surrounded himself with "yes men," was terribly vain, and pushed the careers of undeserving subordinates--hardly the traits one would seek in an ideal senior leader.
I next needed this book when I was Chief of Military History for an Army Chief of Staff who was pledging "No more Task Force Smiths." I could dig out the necessary facts and figures on the undermanning and lax training of the Occupation Forces in Japan from James Schnabel's Policy and Direction: The First Year. But that official history put most of the blame on Washington--both the politicians and the Pentagon generals. Weintraub reminds us how much MacArthur was to blame, not only with his hands-off approach to day-to-day issues related to readiness, but in the bluff and bluster he put into his briefings when men such as Army Chief of Staff General Joseph Lawton Collins came to visit his command. Schnabel emphasizes the optimistic reports Collins filed when he returned to Washington. Weintraub reminds us that Collins had been a major when MacArthur was Army Chief of Staff, and that General of the Army Omar N. Bradley, ostensibly MacArthur's boss as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had been promoted to lieutenant colonel during those years. He also reminds us that MacArthur "never materialized at field exercises, where pampered and poorly trained garrison soldiers could not figure out how to erect tents, break down a rifle, assemble chow wagons, or maintain themselves in any way without indigenous assistance." Thank God the Army wasn't saddled with any superannuated five-star generals unwilling to be team players when we were saying "No more Task Force Smiths."
Well, one wonders what the future historian will say about Donald Rumsfeld. The Macarthur comparison is apt -- the same vanity, the same play to a certain reactionary crowd, the same court behavior. The yes men, now, are the strategists like Wolfowitz and Feith. And the same utter contempt for anyone who contradicts the faith. One of the many disturbing things about the long Democrat somnolence is that there are no cries for Bush to fire Rumsfeld. Surely if ever a man deserved to be fired, it is a man who has taken upon himself to usurp the function of the state department; whose personal pique at our Atlantic allies is now costing us perhaps an extra billion dollars per week, and probably more; whose ingenuity in stirring up the Macarthur strain in our culture has proven wholly pernicious to any sensible discussion of American interest and strategy in Iraq.
Rumsfeld and his minions are uncomfortably caught between their propaganda and reality. The official line is that the occupation is on course. If that official line were right, Rumsfeld's plan -- diminishing the US troop committment ot 30,000 this month -- would have been implemented. But even the most delusional Pentagon player has dropped that item from the agenda. The other reality -- the financial one -- is looming. No doubt Bush's speech will gingerly prepare the ground for the 60 billion dollar request from Congress. Again, if the progress were 'remarkable" -- as Rumsfeld likes to say -- the oil revenues would already be flowing in at the estimate the Pentagon liked to give in the pre-war period. That estimate was widely accepted at the time -- a sign of that the Pentagon's delusions had become the establishment's -- but it is now obvious that they were nearer lies than mistakes.
It is hard to imagine any "progress" in Iraq as long as it is in the hands of Donald Rumsfeld. It isn't that LI expects Bush to replace him with Susan Sontag. But McCain would be nice.
Of course, given Bush's feeling about McCain, Sontag might be more likely.
Unfortunately, the editorialist's well meaning opinion, that we should be sending more troops to Iraq, is like so many editorialist's opinions: a blandness wrapped around a hollowness. What are these troops to do? If there is a real guerilla war happening in Iraq -- and by now, I think it is obvious there is one -- the troops should be smothering the resources that sustain that war. That means sealing the borders, and it means interdicting the network of small internal forces. To do that wouldn't just require a little increase in American forces -- it would probably take at least 300,000 more.
No, Iraq is not going to regain its sovereignty with 400,000 or even 100,000 American troops roaming around in it. Perhaps a multi-national force would have squelched the beginnings of the guerilla war, but it seems to me that that force is going to face the same problem that the American forces face presently.
The only force that can really face the guerillas is an Iraqi force. The number of soldiers needed to deny insurgent groups resources is about equal to the number disbanded at the end of the war by Rumsfeld's deputy, Bremer. Bremer's decision, a compound of ignorance and hubris, is now blowing back on us. The idea that we are going to change the direction of Iraq in D.C., which is still current in both the belligerent and anti-war camps in this country, is simply false.
It hurts to agree with retired military men -- especially when they have names straight out of Doctor Strangelove -- but the WP article on the coming request for 50 to 60 billion dollars (which will undoubtedly mean 70 to 80 billion dollars -- it is how the Bush administration does its money) ended with these two grafs.
"In a sign of growing friction between Bush and the military establishment, retired Marine Lt. Gen. Paul Van Riper, a Gulf War commander, said in an interview during the meeting in Arlington that he is hearing an unprecedented amount of concern among retired officers over how the Bush administration has handled Iraq.
"Their criticism focused on Rumsfeld, he added."I've never seen so such discontent among the retired community," Van Riper said. Last week, he said, he was at a breakfast with eight retired generals at which one asked about Rumsfeld, "When are they going to get rid of this guy?""
Indeed.
PS -- The Boeing vote has been delayed, per our post on Darleen Druyun. The WP has reported that an alternative lease plan is being considered.
Tuesday, September 02, 2003
Bollettino
Various conservatives and Bushites have claimed that too much attention has been paid to pot shot casualties in Iraq. Actually, this is not new -- in Frank Bruni's biography of George W., he shows that Bush sr. went on a 'fact finding' tour of Vietnam in the sixties and came back with the same conclusion -- that basically, difficulties in South Vietnam were being exaggerated. Now, partly this is just the prejudiced eye. And partly it is a fact about modern guerilla warfare -- it operates in eerie synch with the everydayness. Because the kind of warfare that finds its main grammatical component in the 'battle' has tended towards total war, those who have been trained in that tradition simply don't understand the partial war of the guerilla. Shops are open in the cities, electricity runs, most of the time. The observer can rent a car, drive around. However, guerilla wars do not bring with them less casualties than total wars. They bring with them a different kind of casualty ratio -- since the aim is to incrementally break the opponents spirit, the means -- the sudden interjection of violence, and the equally sudden disappearance of the guerilla force. While warfare has always produced more wounded than dead, in guerilla warfare, the numbers of the dead can be, for periods of time, nugatory. The thing to look for is an increasing amount of wounded. This is happening.
The Washington Post has a belated piece on the astonishing injury counts US forces are sustaining in Iraq. It was a surprise to me that last week, 55 American soldiers were wounded. That is a major figure -- it is a Vietnam type figure. The whole article, which also discusses how the military is trying to de-emphasize the nature of the violence it is experiencing in this occupation, is definitely worth reading.
Now, onto Titus Andronicus.
There's an article in the NYT outlining the book by Brian Vickers that makes the case for co-authorship in five of Shakespeare's plays. The case seems reasonable, and was reached through the standard textual editing procedure:
"Examining factors like rhetorical devices, polysyllabic words and metrical habits, scholars have been able to identify reliably an author of a work or part of a work, even when the early editions did not give credit."
Reliably, here, is a weasel word, since we are not talking about a procedure that refers to some standard. It isn't as if someone, reading the Two Noble Kinsmen, said, hey, this sounds like Shakespeare, and then the ms was discovered with the Bard's handwriting. Not that there aren't sensibilities so fine that such a thing is unthinkable -- but there's no sensibility so fine that you could use the word "reliable," At this point, we edge into those criminological pseudo-sciences that are so popular on TV, and so pernicious in court. Vicker's procedure builds on itself. In other words, we are talking about connoiseurship, not science. What is unreasonable about the article is the imputation that doubts about the standard textual editing procedure are always motivated by some heady romantic sense of the individual author:
"Professor Vickers's book also gives a good sense of the opposing forces in the co-authorship debate. On one side are scholars who use ingenious methods to dissect a text for clues to co-authorship. On the other are so-called conservators, who ridicule those efforts and want no deviation from the idea that the entire canon was written by a solitary genius."
Actually, you can think that the texts were co-authored from other, extra-textual cues, and still doubt in specific instances that the case for, say, Titus Andronicus being "two-fifths" George Peele are overwhelming. For a discussion of the attribution to Peele, here's a link.
Various conservatives and Bushites have claimed that too much attention has been paid to pot shot casualties in Iraq. Actually, this is not new -- in Frank Bruni's biography of George W., he shows that Bush sr. went on a 'fact finding' tour of Vietnam in the sixties and came back with the same conclusion -- that basically, difficulties in South Vietnam were being exaggerated. Now, partly this is just the prejudiced eye. And partly it is a fact about modern guerilla warfare -- it operates in eerie synch with the everydayness. Because the kind of warfare that finds its main grammatical component in the 'battle' has tended towards total war, those who have been trained in that tradition simply don't understand the partial war of the guerilla. Shops are open in the cities, electricity runs, most of the time. The observer can rent a car, drive around. However, guerilla wars do not bring with them less casualties than total wars. They bring with them a different kind of casualty ratio -- since the aim is to incrementally break the opponents spirit, the means -- the sudden interjection of violence, and the equally sudden disappearance of the guerilla force. While warfare has always produced more wounded than dead, in guerilla warfare, the numbers of the dead can be, for periods of time, nugatory. The thing to look for is an increasing amount of wounded. This is happening.
The Washington Post has a belated piece on the astonishing injury counts US forces are sustaining in Iraq. It was a surprise to me that last week, 55 American soldiers were wounded. That is a major figure -- it is a Vietnam type figure. The whole article, which also discusses how the military is trying to de-emphasize the nature of the violence it is experiencing in this occupation, is definitely worth reading.
Now, onto Titus Andronicus.
There's an article in the NYT outlining the book by Brian Vickers that makes the case for co-authorship in five of Shakespeare's plays. The case seems reasonable, and was reached through the standard textual editing procedure:
"Examining factors like rhetorical devices, polysyllabic words and metrical habits, scholars have been able to identify reliably an author of a work or part of a work, even when the early editions did not give credit."
Reliably, here, is a weasel word, since we are not talking about a procedure that refers to some standard. It isn't as if someone, reading the Two Noble Kinsmen, said, hey, this sounds like Shakespeare, and then the ms was discovered with the Bard's handwriting. Not that there aren't sensibilities so fine that such a thing is unthinkable -- but there's no sensibility so fine that you could use the word "reliable," At this point, we edge into those criminological pseudo-sciences that are so popular on TV, and so pernicious in court. Vicker's procedure builds on itself. In other words, we are talking about connoiseurship, not science. What is unreasonable about the article is the imputation that doubts about the standard textual editing procedure are always motivated by some heady romantic sense of the individual author:
"Professor Vickers's book also gives a good sense of the opposing forces in the co-authorship debate. On one side are scholars who use ingenious methods to dissect a text for clues to co-authorship. On the other are so-called conservators, who ridicule those efforts and want no deviation from the idea that the entire canon was written by a solitary genius."
Actually, you can think that the texts were co-authored from other, extra-textual cues, and still doubt in specific instances that the case for, say, Titus Andronicus being "two-fifths" George Peele are overwhelming. For a discussion of the attribution to Peele, here's a link.
Monday, September 01, 2003
Bollettino
In January, Counterpunch's co-editor, Jeffrey St. Clair, wrote an article about Darleen Druyun. Druyun was an acquisitions official for the Air Force. She called herself the Godmother of the C-7, a Boeing aircraft that was perfectly expensive and unnecessary, and thus just the thing to order 100 billion dollars worth of. Except that 100 billion dollars is nothing if you can maximize it by, say, renting the aircraft to the Pentagon. As St. Clair pointed out, Druyun, who served under Clinton as well as Bush, did her best for Boeing. In my father's house are many rooms, Jesus said; a similar principle holds for Boeing with regards to Defense Department employees. As St. Clair reported, Druyun cashed in her chips, resigned from the Pentagon,and floated into a perth at Boeing:
Now she's [Druyun's] stalking bigger game: missile defense, a multi-billion dollar bonanza for defense contractors, with Boeing at the head of the trough."Ms. Druyun is now officially an employee of the company whose interests she so ardently championed while she was supposedly representing the interests of the taxpayers," says Danielle Brian, executive director of the Project on Government Oversight. "This is one of the most egregious examples of the government revolving door in recent memory."Of course, plucking operatives from the halls of the Pentagon is nothing new for Boeing. Over the years, the company has festooned its corporate board and the halls of its lobby shop with a bevy of top brass.Recently, Boeing's board has boasted both former Defense Secretary William Perry and John M. Shalikashvili, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In 2001, Boeing also hired Rudy de Leon, Clinton's Deputy Secretary of Defense, to run its Washington office. Although De Leon is known as a proud hawk and a masterful dealmaker, his hiring may have been a rare misstep for Boeing, since congressional Republicans howled that the company should have picked one of their own from the Pentagon's rolls.
Druyun's patriotic work in behalf of Boeing is now getting a little scrutiny. The story is in U.S. News, it is in Forbes, and it is in the Washington Post. Alas, the WP, DC's paper, is so weak about it that their report misreports Druyun's name, Darleen, as "Darlene." The deal of spending an extra 5 billion dollars renting supplier planes from Boeing through a financial entity controlled by Boeing has aroused the curiosity, and even the wrath, of a Senate Committee chaired by Bush's nemesis, Senator McCain. The committee has released certain documents:
"The documents also illustrate the integral role that Darlene Druyun, now a senior Boeing executive, played in formulating the lease deal while she was the Air Force's principal deputy assistant secretary for acquisition and management. In one exchange Boeing officials questioned how a change in the lease terms could provide Druyun "political cover. She apparently understands that this may not be the best business case.
"Committee investigators want to know whether Druyun improperly told Boeing that its competitor, Europe's Airbus Industrie, had submitted a bid of $5 million to $17 million lower per plane. An April 2002 e-mail exchange between two Boeing officials, which said Druyun had given the information to Boeing, was turned over to the Defense Department inspector general's office, a congressional source said.Boeing denied that it received proprietary information, and a spokesman for the inspector general's office declined to comment on whether it had begun an inquiry. Aircraft prices are widely available on the Internet, and the e-mail was distributed after the Air Force announced that it would negotiate a deal with Boeing, so the information did not help formulate their initial bid, industry officials said."
A story in Forbes about this same incident refers to US News, which has gone to some length to report on what should be a major scandal. Still, even the US News dares not tell the public what St. Clair revealed in January -- that not only are we dealing with greedy pigs, but that the greedy pigs are selling low quality goods. In other words, the aircraft could potentially endanger the lives of the soldiers this administration loves to death -- when it is photo op time.
Here's how stinky the deal is:
"Such complicated financing was alien to Air Force officials. Boeing's documents make clear that in crafting the financing plan, the Air Force played student to its contractor. "The USAF clearly does not understand financing and has asked for our help to educate them (in layman's terms)," wrote Robert Gordon, the vice president of Boeing Capital Corp., in an E-mail message in December 2001. Indeed, Gordon noted, an Air Force general "made a special comment to thank Boeing for all its work over the past months to try and help this leasing proposal make sense" to the government.
Investigators with the Commerce Committee, however, are not as awestruck. They are examining the financial vehicle that's the linchpin of the deal. "It's an Enron-like entity," says McCain. For one thing, U.S. News finds, there is a built-in conflict of interest in the arrangement because, documents indicate, it gives Boeing oversight of its own deal. Boeing and the Air Force have sold the deal to Congress as a way to save money, but lease terms mean it's impossible to say today how much the government will pay tomorrow. Actual lease payments will be set as planes are delivered, and if interest rates rise more than expected, the government's costs will go up. Boeing's price will also be adjusted up for inflation; Boeing says that's standard procedure. One clause requires the Air Force to pay more if its new tankers spend too much time in the air; the Air Force says the service has negotiated far more flight hours than it will use. Still, Boeing and the Air Force can't shake the criticism that taxpayers are the losers. Last week, the Congressional Budget Office weighed in, saying that leasing the 100 planes will cost as much as $5.6 billion more than if they had been purchased. Boeing rejects the findings as flawed."
According to Druyan's official biography, she started out in D.C. as the procurements person for NASA. In other words, she's been raised in the finest school of boondoggling in the country. A natural, then, to suck up the gravy at Boeing. While it is nice that the mainstream press is coming to this story at the last minute, we do wonder why they couldn't have leaped in January. Or would that have sounded, hmm, unpatriotic?
In January, Counterpunch's co-editor, Jeffrey St. Clair, wrote an article about Darleen Druyun. Druyun was an acquisitions official for the Air Force. She called herself the Godmother of the C-7, a Boeing aircraft that was perfectly expensive and unnecessary, and thus just the thing to order 100 billion dollars worth of. Except that 100 billion dollars is nothing if you can maximize it by, say, renting the aircraft to the Pentagon. As St. Clair pointed out, Druyun, who served under Clinton as well as Bush, did her best for Boeing. In my father's house are many rooms, Jesus said; a similar principle holds for Boeing with regards to Defense Department employees. As St. Clair reported, Druyun cashed in her chips, resigned from the Pentagon,and floated into a perth at Boeing:
Now she's [Druyun's] stalking bigger game: missile defense, a multi-billion dollar bonanza for defense contractors, with Boeing at the head of the trough."Ms. Druyun is now officially an employee of the company whose interests she so ardently championed while she was supposedly representing the interests of the taxpayers," says Danielle Brian, executive director of the Project on Government Oversight. "This is one of the most egregious examples of the government revolving door in recent memory."Of course, plucking operatives from the halls of the Pentagon is nothing new for Boeing. Over the years, the company has festooned its corporate board and the halls of its lobby shop with a bevy of top brass.Recently, Boeing's board has boasted both former Defense Secretary William Perry and John M. Shalikashvili, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In 2001, Boeing also hired Rudy de Leon, Clinton's Deputy Secretary of Defense, to run its Washington office. Although De Leon is known as a proud hawk and a masterful dealmaker, his hiring may have been a rare misstep for Boeing, since congressional Republicans howled that the company should have picked one of their own from the Pentagon's rolls.
Druyun's patriotic work in behalf of Boeing is now getting a little scrutiny. The story is in U.S. News, it is in Forbes, and it is in the Washington Post. Alas, the WP, DC's paper, is so weak about it that their report misreports Druyun's name, Darleen, as "Darlene." The deal of spending an extra 5 billion dollars renting supplier planes from Boeing through a financial entity controlled by Boeing has aroused the curiosity, and even the wrath, of a Senate Committee chaired by Bush's nemesis, Senator McCain. The committee has released certain documents:
"The documents also illustrate the integral role that Darlene Druyun, now a senior Boeing executive, played in formulating the lease deal while she was the Air Force's principal deputy assistant secretary for acquisition and management. In one exchange Boeing officials questioned how a change in the lease terms could provide Druyun "political cover. She apparently understands that this may not be the best business case.
"Committee investigators want to know whether Druyun improperly told Boeing that its competitor, Europe's Airbus Industrie, had submitted a bid of $5 million to $17 million lower per plane. An April 2002 e-mail exchange between two Boeing officials, which said Druyun had given the information to Boeing, was turned over to the Defense Department inspector general's office, a congressional source said.Boeing denied that it received proprietary information, and a spokesman for the inspector general's office declined to comment on whether it had begun an inquiry. Aircraft prices are widely available on the Internet, and the e-mail was distributed after the Air Force announced that it would negotiate a deal with Boeing, so the information did not help formulate their initial bid, industry officials said."
A story in Forbes about this same incident refers to US News, which has gone to some length to report on what should be a major scandal. Still, even the US News dares not tell the public what St. Clair revealed in January -- that not only are we dealing with greedy pigs, but that the greedy pigs are selling low quality goods. In other words, the aircraft could potentially endanger the lives of the soldiers this administration loves to death -- when it is photo op time.
Here's how stinky the deal is:
"Such complicated financing was alien to Air Force officials. Boeing's documents make clear that in crafting the financing plan, the Air Force played student to its contractor. "The USAF clearly does not understand financing and has asked for our help to educate them (in layman's terms)," wrote Robert Gordon, the vice president of Boeing Capital Corp., in an E-mail message in December 2001. Indeed, Gordon noted, an Air Force general "made a special comment to thank Boeing for all its work over the past months to try and help this leasing proposal make sense" to the government.
Investigators with the Commerce Committee, however, are not as awestruck. They are examining the financial vehicle that's the linchpin of the deal. "It's an Enron-like entity," says McCain. For one thing, U.S. News finds, there is a built-in conflict of interest in the arrangement because, documents indicate, it gives Boeing oversight of its own deal. Boeing and the Air Force have sold the deal to Congress as a way to save money, but lease terms mean it's impossible to say today how much the government will pay tomorrow. Actual lease payments will be set as planes are delivered, and if interest rates rise more than expected, the government's costs will go up. Boeing's price will also be adjusted up for inflation; Boeing says that's standard procedure. One clause requires the Air Force to pay more if its new tankers spend too much time in the air; the Air Force says the service has negotiated far more flight hours than it will use. Still, Boeing and the Air Force can't shake the criticism that taxpayers are the losers. Last week, the Congressional Budget Office weighed in, saying that leasing the 100 planes will cost as much as $5.6 billion more than if they had been purchased. Boeing rejects the findings as flawed."
According to Druyan's official biography, she started out in D.C. as the procurements person for NASA. In other words, she's been raised in the finest school of boondoggling in the country. A natural, then, to suck up the gravy at Boeing. While it is nice that the mainstream press is coming to this story at the last minute, we do wonder why they couldn't have leaped in January. Or would that have sounded, hmm, unpatriotic?
Wednesday, August 27, 2003
In Shestov�s In Job�s Balance, there is an essay on Tolstoy�s latter writings. LI wants to say there is a brilliant essay on Tolstoy�s latter writings, but one of the effects of the essay is to cast in doubt such unthinking terms as �brilliant.� It is just this kind of flattery, that critical blank of praise, which is a way of turning the reader aside, keeping him from entering the empty room at the heart of the heart of it all. Modern criticism, after all, originated in the royal courts, or at best among the circle around powerful families in Italian city states � and it still retains a lot of the courtier�s arts. Why else do critics feel called upon to praise, to like, or to dislike? It is a way of reconstituting the circle around the patron.
So I won�t say use the word "brilliant." I will say this: Shestov is a philosopher � and hence, a writer of death threats. This essay is one of them.
He quotes a letter written to Tolstoy by Dostoevsky�s official biographer. It is a scalding passage, and I�m going to quote it in full:
There is a firmly established tradition in literature, which is to show to the reader only the good side of a great man's existence. The "lower" truths are of no use to us; what can we do with them? We are convinced that truths are not necessary to us for their own sakes, but only in so far as they can help us to action. This is the position taken up, for example, by Strakhov in writing Dostoevsky's biography, as he himself admits in a letter to Tolstoy which was only published in 1913.
"All the time that I was writing I had to struggle against a feeling of disgust which kept rising in me. I tried to stifle my evil thoughts. Help me to get rid of them! I cannot look upon Dostoevsky either as a good or a happy man. He was malicious, envious, and debauched. Throughout his whole life he was a prey to passions which would have rendered him miserable and ridiculous if he had not been so clever and so wicked. I remembered these feelings vividly while I was writing his biography. In Switzerland once he treated his servant so abominably in my presence that the man could stand it no longer and cried out, "But I am a man too!" I remember how these words struck me as reflecting the ideas of a free Swiss on the rights of man, and addressed to one who was for ever preaching to us about humanist feelings. Such scenes occurred frequently, he was unable to control his bad temper. Many times I answered his ravings with silence, when he burst out suddenly and often perversely, like an old woman; but once or twice I did break out and say very disagreeable things to him.
But he always got the better of ordinary people, and the worst of it was that he enjoyed it and never genuinely repented of his bad behaviour. He liked wickedness and gloried in it. Vistovatov (a professor of Dorpat University) told me how he had boasted to him of having seduced in her bath a little girl who had been brought to him by her governess. Among the characters of his books, the ones most like him are the hero of The Notes from Underground, Svidrigailov, and Stavrogin. Katov refused to publish one of the scenes with Stravrogin (the rape, etc.), but Dostoevsky read it aloud here to a large company of people. With all this, he was inclined to sickly sentimentality, and exalted humanitarian dreams, and it is these dreams, his literary gifts, and his tenderness of heart which endear him to us. In fact, all his novels are an attempt to exonerate their author; they show that the most hideous villainy can exist in a man side by side with the noblest feelings. This is a little commentary to my biography; I could describe that side of Dostoevsky's character; I remember many other incidents even more remarkable than those which I have quoted; my story would have been more genuine; but let the truth perish; let us go on exhibiting the beautiful side of life, just as we always do on every occasion."
I do not know if in the whole of literature there are many documents more valuable than this. I am not even sure whether Strakhov himself really understood the meaning and significance of what he admitted to Tolstoy. Many men in recent times have declared that a lie is better than the truth. Oscar Wilde and Nietzsche have said it, and even Pushkin declares that "The lie which elevates us is dearer to us than a legion of base truths ". But they were all addressing the reader, teaching him. Strakhov is quite simply and sincerely making a confession, and this gives his words a special force and significance. It is probable that this letter produced a great impression on Tolstoy, who was just then finding the burden of the conventional lie very hard to bear, and burned with the desire to purify himself by a full confession. For he himself was one of the priests of the supreme lie, and how beautiful and beguiling that lie was!�
The supreme lie is a certain form of literature, which reflects a certain form of life. This life is, for lack of a better term, ultimately hedonistic. Life is about happiness � about the world we share with others -- not about death. Death, Shestov thinks, is the collapse of the world we share with others into the terrible singularity of the world we can�t share with others � the world of the self that smothers us. Shestov choses to make his point about Tolstoy�s uneasy consciousness of this second world by concentrating on one of his fragment � a little known story entitled, after Gogol, Diary of a Madman.
�Among Tolstoy's posthumous works there is a short, unfinished story called The Diary of a Madman. The subject is very simple. A rich landowner, having learned that an estate was for sale in the province of Penza, makes up his mind to go down, have a look at it and buy it. He is very pleased about it; according to his calculations, he will be able to buy it at a very low figure, almost for nothing. Then, suddenly, one night at an hotel on the way, without any apparent reason, he is seized by a horrible, insufferable anguish. Nothing in his surroundings has changed, nothing new has happened, but until now everything had always inspired him with confidence, everything had seemed to him to be normal, necessary, well - regulated, soothing; he had felt the solid earth beneath his feet and reality on all sides of him. No doubt, no questions! Nothing but answers! Then suddenly, in an instant, in the twinkling of an eye, everything is transformed as though by a magic wand. Peace, answers, the solid earth, consciousness of right, and the easy feeling of lightness, simplicity and certainty which springs from this � all suddenly disappear. Around him are nothing but looming questions with their inevitable train of importunate anxiety, of doubt, and senseless, gnawing, invincible terrors. The ordinary means by which these painful thoughts are usually routed are completely ineffectual.
"I tried to think of things which interested me; of the acquisition of the estate, of my wife. Not only did I find nothing pleasant in these thoughts, but they were all as nothing to me. The horror of my wasted life overshadowed everything. I tried to go to sleep. I lay down, but no sooner was I on my bed than terror roused me again. And anxiety! An anxiety like one feels before one is going to be sick, but it was moral. Fear, anguish - we think of death as terrible, but when we look back upon life, it is the agony of life which overwhelms us! Death and life seemed in some way to be confounded with one another. Something tore my existence to rags, and yet could not succeed in tearing it completely. I went once more to look at my fellow-sleepers; I tried again to get to sleep; but terror was ever before me, red, white, and square. Something was tearing, but it still held."
Thus Tolstoy pitilessly strips himself before our eyes. There are few writers who show us truths like these. And if one wants, if one is able to see this truth - for even naked truth is not easy to see - then a whole series of problems arise which are out of all relation with our ordinary thoughts. How are we to apprehend these groundless terrors which so suddenly appeared, red, white, and square?�
Next post, if we can do it, will explore just that question.
So I won�t say use the word "brilliant." I will say this: Shestov is a philosopher � and hence, a writer of death threats. This essay is one of them.
He quotes a letter written to Tolstoy by Dostoevsky�s official biographer. It is a scalding passage, and I�m going to quote it in full:
There is a firmly established tradition in literature, which is to show to the reader only the good side of a great man's existence. The "lower" truths are of no use to us; what can we do with them? We are convinced that truths are not necessary to us for their own sakes, but only in so far as they can help us to action. This is the position taken up, for example, by Strakhov in writing Dostoevsky's biography, as he himself admits in a letter to Tolstoy which was only published in 1913.
"All the time that I was writing I had to struggle against a feeling of disgust which kept rising in me. I tried to stifle my evil thoughts. Help me to get rid of them! I cannot look upon Dostoevsky either as a good or a happy man. He was malicious, envious, and debauched. Throughout his whole life he was a prey to passions which would have rendered him miserable and ridiculous if he had not been so clever and so wicked. I remembered these feelings vividly while I was writing his biography. In Switzerland once he treated his servant so abominably in my presence that the man could stand it no longer and cried out, "But I am a man too!" I remember how these words struck me as reflecting the ideas of a free Swiss on the rights of man, and addressed to one who was for ever preaching to us about humanist feelings. Such scenes occurred frequently, he was unable to control his bad temper. Many times I answered his ravings with silence, when he burst out suddenly and often perversely, like an old woman; but once or twice I did break out and say very disagreeable things to him.
But he always got the better of ordinary people, and the worst of it was that he enjoyed it and never genuinely repented of his bad behaviour. He liked wickedness and gloried in it. Vistovatov (a professor of Dorpat University) told me how he had boasted to him of having seduced in her bath a little girl who had been brought to him by her governess. Among the characters of his books, the ones most like him are the hero of The Notes from Underground, Svidrigailov, and Stavrogin. Katov refused to publish one of the scenes with Stravrogin (the rape, etc.), but Dostoevsky read it aloud here to a large company of people. With all this, he was inclined to sickly sentimentality, and exalted humanitarian dreams, and it is these dreams, his literary gifts, and his tenderness of heart which endear him to us. In fact, all his novels are an attempt to exonerate their author; they show that the most hideous villainy can exist in a man side by side with the noblest feelings. This is a little commentary to my biography; I could describe that side of Dostoevsky's character; I remember many other incidents even more remarkable than those which I have quoted; my story would have been more genuine; but let the truth perish; let us go on exhibiting the beautiful side of life, just as we always do on every occasion."
I do not know if in the whole of literature there are many documents more valuable than this. I am not even sure whether Strakhov himself really understood the meaning and significance of what he admitted to Tolstoy. Many men in recent times have declared that a lie is better than the truth. Oscar Wilde and Nietzsche have said it, and even Pushkin declares that "The lie which elevates us is dearer to us than a legion of base truths ". But they were all addressing the reader, teaching him. Strakhov is quite simply and sincerely making a confession, and this gives his words a special force and significance. It is probable that this letter produced a great impression on Tolstoy, who was just then finding the burden of the conventional lie very hard to bear, and burned with the desire to purify himself by a full confession. For he himself was one of the priests of the supreme lie, and how beautiful and beguiling that lie was!�
The supreme lie is a certain form of literature, which reflects a certain form of life. This life is, for lack of a better term, ultimately hedonistic. Life is about happiness � about the world we share with others -- not about death. Death, Shestov thinks, is the collapse of the world we share with others into the terrible singularity of the world we can�t share with others � the world of the self that smothers us. Shestov choses to make his point about Tolstoy�s uneasy consciousness of this second world by concentrating on one of his fragment � a little known story entitled, after Gogol, Diary of a Madman.
�Among Tolstoy's posthumous works there is a short, unfinished story called The Diary of a Madman. The subject is very simple. A rich landowner, having learned that an estate was for sale in the province of Penza, makes up his mind to go down, have a look at it and buy it. He is very pleased about it; according to his calculations, he will be able to buy it at a very low figure, almost for nothing. Then, suddenly, one night at an hotel on the way, without any apparent reason, he is seized by a horrible, insufferable anguish. Nothing in his surroundings has changed, nothing new has happened, but until now everything had always inspired him with confidence, everything had seemed to him to be normal, necessary, well - regulated, soothing; he had felt the solid earth beneath his feet and reality on all sides of him. No doubt, no questions! Nothing but answers! Then suddenly, in an instant, in the twinkling of an eye, everything is transformed as though by a magic wand. Peace, answers, the solid earth, consciousness of right, and the easy feeling of lightness, simplicity and certainty which springs from this � all suddenly disappear. Around him are nothing but looming questions with their inevitable train of importunate anxiety, of doubt, and senseless, gnawing, invincible terrors. The ordinary means by which these painful thoughts are usually routed are completely ineffectual.
"I tried to think of things which interested me; of the acquisition of the estate, of my wife. Not only did I find nothing pleasant in these thoughts, but they were all as nothing to me. The horror of my wasted life overshadowed everything. I tried to go to sleep. I lay down, but no sooner was I on my bed than terror roused me again. And anxiety! An anxiety like one feels before one is going to be sick, but it was moral. Fear, anguish - we think of death as terrible, but when we look back upon life, it is the agony of life which overwhelms us! Death and life seemed in some way to be confounded with one another. Something tore my existence to rags, and yet could not succeed in tearing it completely. I went once more to look at my fellow-sleepers; I tried again to get to sleep; but terror was ever before me, red, white, and square. Something was tearing, but it still held."
Thus Tolstoy pitilessly strips himself before our eyes. There are few writers who show us truths like these. And if one wants, if one is able to see this truth - for even naked truth is not easy to see - then a whole series of problems arise which are out of all relation with our ordinary thoughts. How are we to apprehend these groundless terrors which so suddenly appeared, red, white, and square?�
Next post, if we can do it, will explore just that question.
Monday, August 25, 2003
Bollettino
WP's article, today, on the death of writing systems is a bit incoherent.
The article's theme is hearteningly democratic. A writing system -- for instance, Sumerian cuneiform -- dies out because there are too many restrictions on its use. That, at least, is the finding of a certain group of scholars:
"The collaboration among Houston, University of Cambridge Egyptologist John Baines and Assyriologist Jerrold S. Cooper of Johns Hopkins University began at a meeting that Houston hosted earlier this year to discuss the origins of writing. What resulted was "Last Writing," an essay on script death published recently in the British journal Comparative Studies in Society and History. Its basic conclusion: Writing systems die when those who use them restrict access to them."
. But its instances seem to cast that theory into doubt. Since "Both Egyptian and cuneiform survived for 4,000 years, a millennium longer than the Latin alphabet that Westerners use today, and both died in the early centuries of the Christian era after long declines," one has to wonder whether the extinction thesis of restricted use -- with its implication of rarity of users -- is a prime cause, or the result of some other factor. If, in fact, the long decline is defined, in fact, by rarity of users -- so that, by definition, access to the writing system is restricted. For if the Egyptian system lasted 4,000 years with the same level of restriction over time -- that is, with about the same number of rare users -- then it's death is not due to the restriction of access, but is caused by some concerted attack, conceptual, linguistic, or otherwise, on those users. If it had more users in the course of its functioning, and less users over time during its decline, this would essentially make the WP assertion nonsensical. It is like explaining that fire burns because it is hot.
In evolutionary terms, one has to wonder about the counter-case: what benefit accrues to the system by restricting access? It might be that the initial flood of Greek culture into Egypt, after Alexander's invasion, would have displaced even a more widespread writing system -- and that the very restrictedness and prestige of the welders of the older system preserved it.
So, given these weirdnesses in the article, we looked around to see if we could find other reports on Houston, Baines and Cooper's study. Here's the Brigham Yount U. news release (Houston is a BYU scholar):
"Changes in writing systems mirror larger changes that take place, not because of technological 'advances,' but because of feelings about the associations of past kinds of communication,� said Stephen Houston, Jesse Knight university professor of anthropology at Brigham Young University. �This is a new take on communicative 'technologies' -- that they are completely saturated with cultural values and conditioned by history.�
"Houston, a Maya expert, was joined by Oxford Egyptologist John Baines and Johns Hopkins� Jerrold Cooper, who studies cuneiform. Their study is reported in the new issue of Comparative Studies in Society and History, published by Cambridge University Press.
This a brilliant paper by three experts in two ancient scripts of the Old World and one of the New,� said Michael Coe, professor emeritus of anthropology at Yale and author of the bestselling Breaking the Maya Code. �Until now, no one has analyzed the deaths of these scripts from a comparative perspective. As for the Maya writing system itself, only Stephen Houston could have covered such a complex subject in such a convincing way. This is probably the world's most difficult script, and Professor Houston has been in the forefront of its ongoing decipherment.�
Here, there's no mention of restriction of access. In other words, the progressive thesis, which is what the research tends to dispute, is sustained, under a different form, by the WP article, in contradiction to the very study upon which it is reporting. A Derridean would expect no less. Because the writers of the WP article can't give up the thesis that writing systems "progress," with those that are technologically superior succeeding those that are inferior, the WP article distorts the whole point of the Houston, Baines and Cooper study.
Hmm. One could make extensive analogies to other WP distortions, of late, about Middle Eastern cultures. But one won't.
WP's article, today, on the death of writing systems is a bit incoherent.
The article's theme is hearteningly democratic. A writing system -- for instance, Sumerian cuneiform -- dies out because there are too many restrictions on its use. That, at least, is the finding of a certain group of scholars:
"The collaboration among Houston, University of Cambridge Egyptologist John Baines and Assyriologist Jerrold S. Cooper of Johns Hopkins University began at a meeting that Houston hosted earlier this year to discuss the origins of writing. What resulted was "Last Writing," an essay on script death published recently in the British journal Comparative Studies in Society and History. Its basic conclusion: Writing systems die when those who use them restrict access to them."
. But its instances seem to cast that theory into doubt. Since "Both Egyptian and cuneiform survived for 4,000 years, a millennium longer than the Latin alphabet that Westerners use today, and both died in the early centuries of the Christian era after long declines," one has to wonder whether the extinction thesis of restricted use -- with its implication of rarity of users -- is a prime cause, or the result of some other factor. If, in fact, the long decline is defined, in fact, by rarity of users -- so that, by definition, access to the writing system is restricted. For if the Egyptian system lasted 4,000 years with the same level of restriction over time -- that is, with about the same number of rare users -- then it's death is not due to the restriction of access, but is caused by some concerted attack, conceptual, linguistic, or otherwise, on those users. If it had more users in the course of its functioning, and less users over time during its decline, this would essentially make the WP assertion nonsensical. It is like explaining that fire burns because it is hot.
In evolutionary terms, one has to wonder about the counter-case: what benefit accrues to the system by restricting access? It might be that the initial flood of Greek culture into Egypt, after Alexander's invasion, would have displaced even a more widespread writing system -- and that the very restrictedness and prestige of the welders of the older system preserved it.
So, given these weirdnesses in the article, we looked around to see if we could find other reports on Houston, Baines and Cooper's study. Here's the Brigham Yount U. news release (Houston is a BYU scholar):
"Changes in writing systems mirror larger changes that take place, not because of technological 'advances,' but because of feelings about the associations of past kinds of communication,� said Stephen Houston, Jesse Knight university professor of anthropology at Brigham Young University. �This is a new take on communicative 'technologies' -- that they are completely saturated with cultural values and conditioned by history.�
"Houston, a Maya expert, was joined by Oxford Egyptologist John Baines and Johns Hopkins� Jerrold Cooper, who studies cuneiform. Their study is reported in the new issue of Comparative Studies in Society and History, published by Cambridge University Press.
This a brilliant paper by three experts in two ancient scripts of the Old World and one of the New,� said Michael Coe, professor emeritus of anthropology at Yale and author of the bestselling Breaking the Maya Code. �Until now, no one has analyzed the deaths of these scripts from a comparative perspective. As for the Maya writing system itself, only Stephen Houston could have covered such a complex subject in such a convincing way. This is probably the world's most difficult script, and Professor Houston has been in the forefront of its ongoing decipherment.�
Here, there's no mention of restriction of access. In other words, the progressive thesis, which is what the research tends to dispute, is sustained, under a different form, by the WP article, in contradiction to the very study upon which it is reporting. A Derridean would expect no less. Because the writers of the WP article can't give up the thesis that writing systems "progress," with those that are technologically superior succeeding those that are inferior, the WP article distorts the whole point of the Houston, Baines and Cooper study.
Hmm. One could make extensive analogies to other WP distortions, of late, about Middle Eastern cultures. But one won't.
Sunday, August 24, 2003
Bollettino
The NYT has a nice story about the peaceful coexistence between Americans and Iraqis in the city of Diwaniya
"As the area around Baghdad endured a week of repeated violence, a happier scene unfolded in this city, a two-hour drive to the south.
American soldiers, without helmets or flak jackets, attended graduation ceremonies of the Diwaniya University Medical School. At ease with the Iraqi students and their parents, the American marines laughed, joked and posed in photographs. One by one, the students walked up to thank them, for Marine doctors had taught classes in surgery and gynecology and helped draw up the final exams.
"We like the Americans very much here," said Zainab Khaledy, 22, who received her medical degree last Sunday. "We feel better than under the old regime. We have problems, like security, but everything is getting better."
In goes on in this vein for quite a while, making Diwaniya seem like a candidate for Forbes One Hundred Best Cities to Work In. No attacks on friendly American GIs, no anti-American grafitti on the walls, the lion lying down with the lamb, etc.
Yet according to Spanish new agencies, the a military base located in this 'relatively peaceful' city in which Spanish soldiers are being trained was attacked just two days ago. 19 mortar shells were lobbed into the camp. Perhaps the NYT reporter doesn't pay attention to the papers owned by the NYT Company, because the story is up on the International Herald Tribune website. Alas, it is in pdf. Still, it does make you wonder who is in wonderland, here. At the very least, I think that the editors of Forbes would hesitate to recommend a city as Great to Work In that was subject to occasional mortar bombardments.
The NYT has a nice story about the peaceful coexistence between Americans and Iraqis in the city of Diwaniya
"As the area around Baghdad endured a week of repeated violence, a happier scene unfolded in this city, a two-hour drive to the south.
American soldiers, without helmets or flak jackets, attended graduation ceremonies of the Diwaniya University Medical School. At ease with the Iraqi students and their parents, the American marines laughed, joked and posed in photographs. One by one, the students walked up to thank them, for Marine doctors had taught classes in surgery and gynecology and helped draw up the final exams.
"We like the Americans very much here," said Zainab Khaledy, 22, who received her medical degree last Sunday. "We feel better than under the old regime. We have problems, like security, but everything is getting better."
In goes on in this vein for quite a while, making Diwaniya seem like a candidate for Forbes One Hundred Best Cities to Work In. No attacks on friendly American GIs, no anti-American grafitti on the walls, the lion lying down with the lamb, etc.
Yet according to Spanish new agencies, the a military base located in this 'relatively peaceful' city in which Spanish soldiers are being trained was attacked just two days ago. 19 mortar shells were lobbed into the camp. Perhaps the NYT reporter doesn't pay attention to the papers owned by the NYT Company, because the story is up on the International Herald Tribune website. Alas, it is in pdf. Still, it does make you wonder who is in wonderland, here. At the very least, I think that the editors of Forbes would hesitate to recommend a city as Great to Work In that was subject to occasional mortar bombardments.
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