notes on the continuing atrocity

There are so many reasons to be horrified at what is happening in Iraq that it shows a certain mad myopia to focus on last weeks Galloway/Hitchens debate. It rather irritates me to read so many blogs about the debate, since, in my opinion, the space taken up by commentary about the debate is space stolen from rational discussion about the war. That kind of burglary serves the pro-war forces.

That these two old troopers managed to network up a posse of publicity from their friends for the thing is depressing, in one way – the debate has the effect of giving us a very cockeyed view of the pro- and anti-war stakes – and in another way it quietly illuminates the irreality that infests discussion about the war in this country. Galloway, trailing a dubious past as a political jester who will say anything to make a name for himself, is disreputable and plain dumb enough that he seemingly can’t question Hitchens about his real role in the war. Since Galloway, on some accounts, was under the delusion that Saddam Hussein was a progressive, this shouldn't surprise anybody.

The Hitchens-ish role could start a real debate, since Hitchens, as a part of the D.C. media machine, has actively worked to delegitimate the opportunity for democratic secular rule in Iraq. How? When you put the faces of thieves and murderers on the supposedly “democratic secular” party, you delegitimate it. When you support ethnic cleansing and war crimes as they have been committed by the occupiers to the advantage of theocrats and puppets, you delegitimate secular democrats. This is pretty obvious stuff. In the same way, when you act as a conduit to lie brazenly to the public about the reasons for the war, you crack the facade of democratic governance at home, which depends on a maximum of good information. And when you work as an operative in the publicity machine that aimed at keeping a real coalition from forming (one of the great Bush-ite goals before the war being to appear to be trying to create a coalition while insuring that the invasion would be under unchallenged American supervision) by contributing to the mass hate sessions against old Europe, then you have an indisputable function in the war machine. Ironic how the success of the Bush people in destroying a real coalition has lead to the failure of the American enterprise in Iraq. Surely the French and the Germans would have blocked some of the more insane American ideas, like disbanding the Iraqi army without controling the Iraqi army.

Alas, the debate about that function will never be held. Just as nobody seems to want to investigate why, exactly, Chalabi came to hold the position he held in D.C. The G/H debate, instead, gave us a perfectly distorted perspective on the realities of the war, depressingly abetted by Democracy Now. Oh well.

…

The Independent’s story, Sunday, by Patrick Cockburn is starting the slow, slow movement across the Atlantic. Cockburn reported that a billion some dollars was stolen from Iraq under Bremer’s watch. It was siphoned off through the Iraq War Ministry – which is called, in conformity with the American Orwellism, the Ministry of Defense.

The billion in Cockburn’s story is turned into hundreds of millions in the Washington Post version – which isn’t an independent report, but a report on the Independent’s report.
“This story has been building for months. The Independent of London reported yesterday that U.S.-appointed officials in the country’s Ministry of Defense squandered hundreds of millions of dollars in Iraqi money on overpriced and outdated military equipment after the Bush administration transferred sovereignty to an Iraqi government in June 2004.

Patrick Cockburn’s dispatch adds some detail to the arms corruption scandal first reported in August by the Arab cable news site Aljazeera.net and the American newspaper chain Knight Ridder. Estimates of how much money has been wasted vary widely, but named sources in all three stories agree the amount was huge.
The reports underscore the continuing costs of the Bush administration’s failure to anticipate security problems after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003.”

The last sentence is a beautiful example of DC thinking. The reports underscore the corrupt nature of Bremer’s occupation, period. But no – Americans don’t do corruption, do we? Who could ever suspect the crew around Bremer or the Iraqis he associated with of wanting to profit off the Iraqis – especially when we have legalized so much corruption that DC is drowning in it? However, as soon as the for profit nature of the occupation arises, the American press has two responses. On the business page, they are all about eagerly making a killing on making a killing. On the editorial page, they are all about human rights. It is a nice, compartmentalized reflex, and it is meant to induce a nice, compartmentalized reflex.

The interesting politics in the story have to be inferred. An Allawi seems uncharacteristically voluble about the corrupt deal – the finance minister, Ali Allawi, Iyad’s cousin. When an Allawi is pointing fingers, it means something is up with his enemy, Chalabi. Much depends on an obscure man, Ziyad Cattan:
“Aljazeera.net, the Independent and Knight Ridder all reported that the auditors had found the dubious arms deals were arranged by the ministry's procurement chief, Ziyad Cattan. The three reports said he was fired in May.”

According to the Post report, Chalabi is vindicated by the current charges:

“The corruption reports, ironically, serve as a measure of vindication of Ahmed Chalabi, a onetime ally of the Bush administration who has faced corruption accusations himself. Last January, Chalabi invoked Shaalan’s ire by charging that the interim government had sent a plane laden with $300 million in U.S. currency to Lebanon to buy arms.

"Where did the money go? What was it used for? Who was it given to?" We don't know," Chalabi said in an interview with the New York Times.

Shalaan responded by announcing Chalabi would be arrested on corruption charges. But the arrest never happened.”

In the Independent today, Cockburn has further details about the corruption charges. Here’s an interesting tidbit:

“A further $600-800 million is also missing from the ministries of transport, electricity, interior and other ministries said Mr Allawi. In the case of the Electricity Ministry, which has notably failed to increase power supply to Baghdad, there has been heavy criticism of the way in which four or five contracts for power stations agreed under Saddam Hussein were cancelled. A new set of more costly contracts for natural gas or diesel powered stations were agreed. Unfortunately Iraq does not have adequate supplies of natural gas or diesel so this has to be bought at great expense from abroad. The new power plants have also been very slow to come on stream.

Laith Kubba, the spokesman for Ibrahim al-Jaafari, the prime minister, told The Independent that under the previous Iraqi government the special committee on contracts at the Electricity Ministry refused to sign off on the contract for one $750 million power station because it said information on the deal was inadequate. The committee was promptly dissolved by the minister and another one appointed which proved more willing to agree to the contract.”

Liberation has so many, many dimensions.

Now, we do wonder whether any American paper whatsoever will try to interview Bremer to find out what he knew, when he knew it, and who around him, if anyone, benefited. … Ah, let’s not kid ourselves. We know that no American paper will touch this scandal with a ten foot pole.

request

Readers of LI:

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The German election

It isn’t often that I agree with Anatole Kaletsky, the Thatcherite economist. But his column about the election in Germany is the best analysis I’ve seen so far.

As we have often said around here, the change in conservative doctrine post Thatcher is that it has merged with the radically Keynesian project of pumping up demand by all means possible. This means, in effect, liquidating savings to the extent that this is possible. The old fashioned Tories would be appalled to see what the new fangled Tories are up to.

In Germany, this hasn’t happened. The CDU has adopted those portions of the Thatcherite program that are straight out class warfare – making the template for all legislation the penalizing the poor and the rewarding the rich. However, while it is true that the Anglo-American rightwing penalizes the bottom economic percentile, the story is more complex as consumer power increases. Shifting the responsibility for welfare to the individual, that longterm, invisible project, would be roundly rejected if it wasn’t coupled with increasing the money supply and easing up credit markets – which directly effect even the lower middle income families. In the short term, then, the appearance of prosperity far down the line can be engineered, even as wealth shifts towards the top wealth percentiles. Health care, transportation and the rest of it can be put on the credit card; there are easy terms for buying houses; and while wages stagnate, two wage households disguise the real deflationary pressure on wages.

Kaletsky makes this point in another way:

“The whole eurozone, in fact, is in denial about one of the clearest lessons of modern economic experience, which is that tough structural reforms of the kind promoted by Germany’s new government will work only amid rapidly expanding demand. This was the lesson of the Thatcher and Reagan eras, when tough labour market policy began to be successful — and politically acceptable — only from 1985 onwards, when interest rates collapsed, the pound and dollar were devalued and economic growth and consumer spending moved from bust to boom.
However, the link between expansionary monetary management and structural reform was not just an isolated experience of the 1980s, as demonstrated by a fascinating study published in the summer by the OECD (The Effects of EMU on Structural Reforms, OECD Economics Department Working Paper No 438, July 2005). This study looked at more than 100 episodes of major economic reforms in OECD countries and tried to assess the interaction between reform processes and constraints on monetary policy independence. Although the econometric research could not, by its nature, be definitive, the balance of evidence suggested a clear conclusion: “The absence of monetary autonomy seems to be associated with lower reform activity.”
Writing from the perspective given by this mixture of an economic war against the working class and easy money policy, Kaletsky bemoans the economic proposals the CDU brought into the election and has a nicer view of the Lafontaine’s party than any other ‘respectable’ press commentator:
“Looking at the realistic options for political realignment, Germany’s economic performance seems bound to get worse, not better, in the year ahead. This is because the policies that all Germany’s establishment politicians seem most firmly to believe in are the ones that will do the greatest damage to economic activity, employment and consumer demand. The worst of these policies is the 2 per cent rise in VAT identified by Angela Merkel as her top economic priority. In a country suffering from the world’s slowest consumption growth, this is almost literally an insane proposal, hardly mitigated by the plan to spend half the proceeds on cuts in employers’ social security contributions, which are designed to lower labour costs. These social security reductions may be desirable in principle, but their first-round effect simply will be to increase already very ample profits and they will contribute nothing at all to the growth of demand.”

And this is what Kaletsky has to say about the Left party:
“Meanwhile, the outcasts of German politics, the post-communist Left Party, had a broadly sensible policy to boost the economy’s demand-side, but none at all to improve supply.”
Kaletsky is an enemy I respect.

the Ampel election

PS -- The following was written before the results started coming in. Astonishing: the CDU actually managed to lower its percentage of the vote. We will see how the CDU godfathers treat Merkel; conservatives in Germany, as in the U.S. in 2000, are coming into power as the minority.

LI wanted to have its say on the Ampel [stoplight] election in Germany. The consensus view is that the worst thing of all would be a grand coalition between the CDU and the SPD. We think that, of all the grim options, it would be the best thing. In this, we disagree with figures we usually trust, like Claudia Roth, the Green candidate in Bavaria. Roth is a shrewd commentator. She is correct, we think, that Lafotaine’s supposed Linksopposition party is disturbingly reactionary. Her comment that “Lafontaine is operating on the lines of a graceless Right Populism” is essentially correct. And her concern about a coalition also makes sense. In Roth’s words:

“We remain by our clear position that the party of social coldness and of ecological madness is no partner for us. Therefore we are not going to cooperate in a stoplight coalition.”

Unfortunately, the Greens are a para-party – they have never had to confront the macro-economic issues, since they have grown up in the shadow of the SPD. This has encouraged their self-limiting tendencies.

In our opinion, the best thing would be a grand coalition. Drift is better, at the moment, then the loss of worker’s rights that are supposed to be traded for a supposed resurgence of entrepreneurial activity. Entrepreneurial activity, here, means a predators ball of mergers and acquisitions and hedge funds and the like, with only a small amount of that activity really going to the working class, and the large amount swallowed up by the already bloated upper class.

We are afraid of the chute effect from what we read in the press about the election. The Anglo-American press would dearly love to dump a mooing Germany down the free market chute, and watch the state strip workers of their rights while rewarding the parasitic upper ten percent class. You can feel that raw hunger – that contemporary entitled sensibility which combines the work of the butcher and the gourmand - in everything that is written about the German election in the NYT, or in, of all places, the Guardian (see James Meek’s incredibly stupid article ), or in the Times of London. As the Guardian leader put it, in the butter won’t melt in our mouth tones so beloved of the Blairites:

“There is little doubt that Mrs Merkel is better placed to bring about the kind of radical structural changes that Germany needs.”

Radical structural changes and reform are the words to watch out for whenever the governing class knocks you down and picks your pocket. You can see exactly the acids that stir in the guts of the mainstream press, which has been an important part of the machinery that has worked to make sure that the most prosperous time in history has mainly benefited a class that is now placed as far above the average worker as the great landholders in Roman times were above their agricultural slaves. The slaves had a bit more social mobility – lucky ones acquired more power and influence than any of the downtrodden in the 9th Ward are likely to get. According to the unanimous opinion of the bien pensants, we cannot afford a social welfare system in this most competitive of all worlds. And in the style section, we cannot afford to do without, say, the latest pair of 2,000 dollar shoes. It is odd, this social poverty on the global scale and the gilded age regilded on the private scale. It is odd that we can afford any number of wars and trillions of dollars of mortgages, but we can’t afford retirement. And to those who point to something out of wack, here, it is easy to write them off as anachronisms from another age. As though the other age were a richer one, instead of, as it really was, a vastly poorer one. Which is the paradox that the press is going to keep firmly mum about: the richer we are, the poorer we are.

However, an American sidelight has more to do with what should be, and is not, at stake in Germany than the sick “reformist” fantasies of Britain’s premier labour paper. There is an article about the new way to wealth for the old grabbers of semi-wrecked companies. These entrepreneurs are wringing wealth out of old steel companies, and old car parts manufacturing companies. And they are doing it not by the old fashioned way of productivity, or cutting upper management salaries, or anything stupid like that, but by the new and improved way of radical structural reform. They simply reform away the pension plan. Neat, isn’t it? You take a company like Bethlehem steel, and you take the contractually guaranteed pensions of the retired workers of Bethlehem steel, and you throw those benefits out – let the government take care of it! Is this reform at its most needed or what?

“ROBERT S. MILLER is a turnaround artist with a Dickensian twist. He unlocks hidden value in floundering Rust Belt companies by jettisoning their pension plans. His approach, copied by executives at airlines and other troubled companies, can make the people who rely on him very rich. But it may be creating a multibillion-dollar mess for taxpayers later.

As chief executive of Bethlehem Steel in 2002, Mr. Miller shut down the pension plan, leaving a federal program to meet the company's $3.7 billion in unfunded obligations to retirees. That turned the moribund company into a prime acquisition target. Wilbur L. Ross, a so-called vulture investor, snapped it up, combined it with four other dying steel makers he bought at about the same time, and sold the resulting company for $4.5 billion - a return of more than 1,000 percent in just three years on the $400 million he paid for all five companies.

Two years later, as the chief executive of Federal-Mogul, an auto parts maker in Southfield, Mich., Mr. Miller worked on winding up a pension plan for some 37,000 employees in England. The British authorities balked at the idea, fearing that such a move would swamp the pension insurance fund that Britain was creating; it began operations only last April. But the investor Carl C. Icahn has placed a big bet that Federal-Mogul will pay off after the pension plan is gone; he has bought its bonds at less than 20 cents on the dollar and is offering money to help the insurance fund. He, too, stands to make millions.”

As the Guardian noted about Schroeder:

“Schroeder has failed to bring down unemployment, now almost five million, and struggled to liberalise a social model that, like France's, seems a relic of an earlier time.”

Those relics of earlier times – why they are so dusty, so dirty, so full of, well, frankly people who you just can’t have a stimulating conversation with about democratization in the Middle East while forking up the camembert. What you have to do with relics is sell them off – and isn’t Mr. Miller doing a very fine job of that! You have to look at this model and ask: how could any nation resist?

As for the brave New World ahead of us, in which family togetherness is boldly encouraged, Grandpa having the choice of sleeping in the streets or being taken in by his entrepreneuring children living the two wage earner life style we all just love, it is all prepared for us from the relics of the ancient, bad times:

“James A. Wooten, a pension-law historian who is a professor at the University at Buffalo Law School, said that Congress knew it was creating an imperfect system when it established the pension corporation in 1974, and that it expected to make improvements later. The bill was highly contentious, and Congressional leaders struggled mightily to achieve compromise in the last chaotic months of the Nixon presidency, with the Watergate scandal roaring around them.

In the beginning, they set pension insurance premiums at a token $1 per employee. Today, the basic premium is up to $19 a head, but Congress has found it hard to raise the rates even remotely enough to cover growing claims. Some companies have warned that if they have to pay more for their pension insurance, they will stop offering pensions.

"They took cautious steps, and those cautious steps weren't enough to prevent the abuse of the insurance program," Mr. Wooten said. "Once there's insurance, you have an incentive to run up liabilities to get more out of the insurance."

MR. MILLER'S arrival at Delphi in July, and the intense labor negotiations that have followed, are signals that the auto parts industry may be in for a long cycle of bankruptcies and restructurings, like those that reshaped steelmakers and are beginning to transform airlines.”

Luckily the government’s spending now – which is, surprisingly, about the same amount of the GDP as it ever was – is being put to good use. Instead of those terrible social insurance guarantees, it is the ownership society that we are pouring our money into – or at least as much of it as we can borrow.

continuation on Goldstein

In my last post on Goldstein’s book, Incompleteness, I said that Goldstein tried to present Goedel’s two theorems from the perspective of Goedel’s own sense of what these theorems ultimately proved. That is, what they proved meta-mathematically. Goldstein is interested in the divergence between the popular image of what Goedel was up to and the fact that Goedle’s incompleteness proof, by insinuating a moment of absolute uncertainty into any formalization of arithmetic, seems to point to the insufficiency of conventionalism, not to affirm it.

The uncertainty, you will remember, goes like this: in any formally consistent language adequate for number theory, a., there will be one proposition that one can generate from the axioms of the system the truth or falsity of which can’t be decided by those rules, and b., that the consistency of the system can’t be proved within the system.

Now, Goldstein’s major point is to show why Goedel might take his theorems as evidence that there are real ideal objects. In other words, that at least one proposition in number theory must be either true or false without the system being able to determine its truth or falsity with its own resources begs the question of what the truthmaker, here, is.

However, Goldstein subverts her point a bit by admitting that Goedel’s view of the meaning of his work was conflicted. In public, he liked to claim that the theorems pointed to the reality of mathematical ideal objects, insofar as we associate reality with what makes a proposition true. But in private, Goedel was less certain. Here is what Goedel said to his student, Hao Wang:

“Either the human mind surpasses all machines (to be precise it can decide more number theoretical questions than any machine) or else there exist number theoretical questions undecidable for the human mind.”

Goldstein asks herself what the second part of this disjunct means, and gives us a … well, a postmodern answer. That is, one that refers the conceptual question to the personality quirks of its inventor.

“I think that what he is considering here is the possibility that we are indeed machines – that is, that all of our thinking is mechanical, determined by hard-wired rules – but that we are under the delusion that we have access to unformalizable mathematical truth.”

As she says a few paragraphs later:
“This possibility – its being precisely the possibility that gave Goedel pause – is particularly interesting when we consider an aspect of Goedel’s opaque inner life that we have touched upon before: his own serious delusions.”

Well, I want to tickle Goldstein a bit here, but I’m not really interested in pursuing the path of delusion. Rather, I want to pursue the path of the excluded middle, which is of course the framing assumption here. There is, I believe, a term of art in Zen, “mu”. “Mu” is neither yes nor no. It is, in a sense, the bifurcating moment itself, Deleuze’s “inclusive disjunct.” Perhaps all Goedel’s theorems are about is that we don’t have a formal grasp of the logic of “mu”.

Unfortunately, this post has sailed away from the point I originally started out to make. That is, I wanted to point out one peculiarity, from the formalist p.o.v., about Goedel’s proof – and that is that it depends on the possibility of constructing Goedel numbers, which is, in turn, the most extreme expression of formalism, and the most resolutely anti-Platonist “moment” in a theorem that Goedel thinks shows us the Platonist structure of number theoretical truths. Should I go into this? Hmm, perhaps not.

Two essays you might want to check out on the Web. Paul Bernays essay on Platonism in Mathematics is here. Putnam’s defense of Wittgenstein’s comments about Goedel are here.

The Big 'S'

LI used to write for a business mag. So naturally we like ‘synergy’ when we see it, and boy, did we see it in the NYT today. There is the President on the first page, photo opping in a New Orleans that has been cleared of the kind of people that would make his entrance there unsafe, promising to treat the Gulf Coast like he has treated Iraq – from the appointment of a Bremer like figure to screw things up (Karl Rove is going to be the Gulf czar) to another load of borrowing from the Chinese and Japanese central banks to stuff into the pockets of the croney-network – the engineering/petroleum/war industries outlined in Robert Bryce’s book, “Cronies.”

The organ Bush refers to most – his heart -- was enthroned last year by the simplest of all strategies – bribery, in the shape of tax cuts for people who are looking for some influx of money to substitute for their fallen wages (after all, the private sector is more than ever a first come first serve proposition, with the first comers being the “investor class”) combined with entertainment – in 2004, that function being taken care of by the verbal lynching of gays, to be followed by discrete private actions, no doubt, in your own subdivision or village.

And then, on the Business page, is Bushism in action: NBC is promoting a new show, "Three Wishes," hosted by an evangelical entertainer, Amy Grant, who will “[travel] to a different town each week in an effort to fulfill the heart's desire of needy families and community groups.” In other words, she will arrive to douse some poor suck in a little surplus value to amplify that compassionate glow in the tv audience. Giving away money on tv is the low rent road to ratings and votes, especially if it can be fairydusted with faith:

“In advance of the new prime-time television season, NBC sent more than 7,000 DVD's of the show's first episode to ministers and other clergy members, along with a recorded message to their congregants from Ms. Grant. ("At its core, 'Three Wishes' is faith in action," she tells them.) The network has also booked Ms. Grant - a pop singer who vaulted to fame singing Christian songs, crossed over to mainstream radio and recently released an album of hymns titled "Rock of Ages" - for interviews on Christian radio and taken out advertising in small-town newspapers.

And, perhaps most seductively, NBC has been stuffing cash registers at stores here like Goody's and others in or around Nashville, Salt Lake City, Des Moines and Milwaukee with tens of thousands of $1 bills used for groceries and other basics. The dollars are affixed with yellow stickers (removable, consistent with Treasury Department guidelines) that ask, "What's your wish?," and implore people to watch the show. All told, the network expects to give away 150,000 of those dollar bills in 15 cities and towns.”

Rest assured that those 1 dollar bills won’t be used for six packs of Pabst, at least on compassionate tv -- more’s the pity. The chintziness of the charity, the cheapness of the faith, and the underlying contempt for the yokel set – 150 thou is definitely not going to buy your way into the Houston Petroleum club – makes this show an electric match for the show just put on by the Prez. Rove missed it – wouldn’t it have been nice to see Ms. Grant handing out some of those one dollar bills to scrubbed evacuees at the end of the plea to put billions more in the pockets of those people who need it most, the CEOs of Brown and Root, of Halliburton, of Exxon Mobile, and of all the rest of the neediest in this fine country of ours?

If this isn’t the voice of Bush culture, I don’t know Arkansas, as the Duke says in Huckleberry Finn:
“The cash register at Goody's clothing store here flashed $106.01 - for a dress shirt and three pairs of Levi's - but as Lori Smith reached for her credit card, a nearby voice brought the transaction to a halt.

"Tell you what, why don't you let me take care of it?" said Scott Evans, his delivery as smooth as a car salesman's as he directed Ms. Smith to a partner brandishing stacks of $1 bills.”

Reasons to live in America

America, circa 2005.

Essential reading on the state of this so called civilization in the Washington Post story about the Civic Center.

There are two reasons, essentially, to live in America if you have a philosophical bent. One is that there is more pure buffoonery per square inch in this country than anywhere else in the world. The other is... what is the other? Oh yes, it is the freest, richest, and most just country in the whole wide world. No, that's not it. Let's see -- well, it is a country in which this can happen. Remember, this was after four days of no food and no water and no security, with the bodies piling up and gangbangers raping and stealing and assaulting people, with old ladies and men pushed into corners and left to die, and with the Secretary of Homeland Security very proud that he'd finally identified the Superdome on a Map of New Orleans:

“On Thursday … the New Orleans police made a dramatic entrance. Sgt. Hans Ganthier and 12 other New Orleans SWAT team members entered the center, M-4 commando rifles at the ready. Prayers had been answered -- only it was a rescue mission of a different purpose.

A Jefferson Parish police deputy had appealed to SWAT team Capt. Jeff Winn for help in bringing out his wife and a female relative from the center. "He knew they were there and was hearing nightmarish stories," said Ganthier, who declined to identify the officer for security reasons.

Winn approved the mission.

When the SWAT team entered at 11 a.m., the Jefferson Parish officer called out his wife's name. She heard him, and along with the relative rushed to his side. The SWAT team put the women in the middle of the team, then backed out the door.

Once it became clear that the SWAT team had come with the single goal of rescuing two white women, anger exploded.”

PS -- Not to worry, however. The Vatican has seen the Wickedness in America. They have noted the cries of the oppressed. Blake's America, in its travail, will be comforted by the Vicars of Christ! They have been moved by their infinite compassion to finally act:

Vatican to Check U.S. Seminaries on Gay Presence

ps -- LI's correspondent in NYC, Mr. T., wrote me after reading this:

"There are two reasons, essentially, to live in America if you have a philosophical bent. One is that there is more pure buffoonery per square inch in this country than anywhere else in the world. The other is... what is the other?"

Another way to cast this, a way I have thought autobiographically, is that one who finds themselves living in America either capitulates (the ultimate fate of most non-confomity), blows their brains out (another possible fate for a far smaller slice of the non-conformists), or develops a philosophical bent. For my own part - the rage and sarcasm of the punks of my youth (and the ones that pre-dated me) - those beautiful punkers that I was so enraptured by in those teen years of mine - seemed to lead only to one of the first two possibilites. At the same time, I started to encounter those writers of a philosophical bent, and some straight-up philosophy to boot. I couldn't capitulate, for some instinctual non-rational reasons, and, for similarly sourced reasons, I could not blow my brains out. A psychoanalyst might argue that the development of a philosophical bent was a matter of survival. "Whatever!" to that argument; I always thought that it was much more a question of style - only incidentially and accidentially might I have saved my own life.

To bring this all to the present: yes, what is that second reason?????

incompleteness

LI’s been reading Incompleteness, Rebecca Goldstein’s book on Kurt Goedel.

Goldstein’s book pursues an interesting philosophical argument and a feeble intellectual historical one. The latter consists of lumping together disparate currents (logical positivism, subjectivism, social constructionism, formalism) under the rubric “postmodernism, ” and then claiming that the postmodern annexation of Goedel’s incompleteness theorem is philosophically suspect. Postmodern here is a shapeshifting label lifted straight out of the Saturday arts section of the New York Times, but with little real meaning outside of being a caricature for a kind of touchy feely relativism that Goldstein evidently dislikes. Ourselves, we dislike the term, partly because it so often functions just as it functions in Goldstein’s text, as a moving target under which is gathered a diffuse sensibility.

But if it does have a distinct intellectual historical meaning, we imagine that Lyotard hit on it: postmodernity is what is entailed by the collapse of all the great metanarratives of modernity; Marxism, progress, revolution, laissez faire capitalism. In this, it is rather like the End of History and other low rent apocalypses that popped up at the end of the Cold War.

Goldstein’s feeble intellectual history argument allows her to group together logical positivism and subjectivism – whatever the latter is – as variants of the same thing. We think that this is much too gross a reading of logical positivism, and indeed of modernism itself.

The more interesting argument is Goldstein’s defense of Goedel’s own conception of what he was up to: a vindication of the Platonist view of mathematics. Goldstein is obviously more comfortable with these issues, and she does a very nice job of untangling the misconceptions around the apparent paradoxes entailed by incompleteness, showing that they are paradoxes relative to a positivist and/or formalist view of mathematics. For Goedel, and for Goldstein, Goedel’s incompleteness theorems aren’t paradoxes, but capital evidences against the formalist or positivist view of mathematics.

Goldstein begins with a nice clarification of the Platonist position. Bertrand Russell famously tweaked Goedel by writing:

“Goedel turned out to be an unadultered Platonist, and apparently believe that an eternal “not” was laid up in heaven, where virtuous logician might hope to meet it hereafter.”

Goedel was understandably peeved by Russell’s joke. As Goedel pointed out, his own position was consistent with Russell’s statement, in 1919, that “logic is concerned with the real world just as truly as zoology…” Russell’s fall into the Dunciad quicksands of positivism was due, in Goedel’s opinion, to Wittgenstein’s malign influence.

Goldstein unpacks the meaning of Platonism by way of a nice example: Goldbach’s conjecture. As she observes, this conjecture has never been proven. Goldbach’s conjecture is that all even numbers greater than two are the sum of two primes. As Goldstein astutely remarks:

“The fact that Goldbach’s conjecture remains unproven means (at least according to the Platonist) that lurking out there beyond the point where mathematicians have checked there might be a counterexample… Then again… there may not be a counter-example: every even number may be the sum of two primes, without there being a formal way to prove that this is so. A Platonist asserts that there either is or isn’t a counter-example, irrespective of our having a proof one way or another.”

Like Schroedinger’s cat, which is either alive or dead, the Platonist thinks that the structure of reality is such that nothing can be real that is not either so or not-so: either the conjecture is right or wrong. (actually, Plato recognized doxa as being half real and half not – but let’s not mess up Platonism by referring to Plato). Nothing in nature would continence it being structurally indeterminate. Now, it is easy to see how the Platonist’s claim can get a bit confusing. To return to Russell’s joke, we like to think of the real in terms of crude correspondences of object to perception. We think that the real is what we encounter, or meet. Hence the comedy of the virtuous logician meeting some cartoon “not” in logical heaven. But the Platonist contends for the existence of abstract structures that simply are not encounterable by the senses. They are, rather, encountered by the intellection – by Reason. That encounter should count as real – that is to say, the mind has a specific reality as an organ that detects the suprasensible, and the suprasensible – abstract structures – exists as what can so be detected. And just as there can be false sensibles – for instance, the flying horse – that do not overthrow the structure of the sensible itself, so, too, there can be false supersensibles – the square circle – which do not overthrow the structure of the supersensible itself. In this way, the logical is on par with the zoological.

The Goldbach example cleverly creates a sense for the direction in which Goedel was going. Goldstein’s point is to drive a wedge between Goedel’s incompleteness theorems and the formalist assumptions about mathematics. For the formalists, and most notably Hilbert, mathematics is what is generated by some given set of axioms. The formalist conjecture is that these axioms entirely determine what is true about what is in the system – so that, according to the formalist, we will eventually understand why the successor of the successor of zero has the singular property of demarcating a property change in the natural numbers such that Goldbach’s conjecture is correct. As Goldstein points out, Wittgenstein’s language games rely on a similar sense of the power of conventions to determine the truth content of discourse. To use Davidson’s notion (and to abbreviate it a bit) coherence precedes correspondence.

Wittgenstein keeps popping up in Goldstein’s account as a sort of devil’s advocate. Wittgenstein referred to Goedel’s incompleteness theorems as “logische Kunststuecken” – logical tricks. Goldstein’s sympathy with Goedel moves her to dismiss Wittgenstein’s phrase as one deriving from the panic of seeing certain of his fundamental presuppositions collapse. We aren’t sure that is entirely right. Put in terms of the formalist vs. Platonist conception of mathematics, there is something odd about Goedel’s incompleteness theorems. We will dissert on this in another post.

norway sinks again

Last year, the NYT published an article by Bruce Bawer that fed into the perennial rightwing American suspicion that Europe never did recover from WWII, due to the terrible socialists. Bawer’s article made various claims that had been touted by some Ayn Randish Swede think tank (literally -- the think tank had commissioned translations of Ms. Rand's works), and supplemented it with his own witness, as a man who lives in the terrible slum of the Nordic country:

“In Oslo, library collections are woefully outdated, and public swimming pools are in desperate need of maintenance. News reports describe serious shortages of police officers and school supplies. When my mother-in-law went to an emergency room recently, the hospital was out of cough medicine. Drug addicts crowd downtown Oslo streets, as The Los Angeles Times recently reported, but applicants for methadone programs are put on a months-long waiting list.
…
After I moved here six years ago, I quickly noticed that Norwegians live more frugally than Americans do. They hang on to old appliances and furniture that we would throw out. And they drive around in wrecks. In 2003, when my partner and I took his teenage brother to New York -- his first trip outside of Europe -- he stared boggle-eyed at the cars in the Newark Airport parking lot, as mesmerized as Robin Williams in a New York grocery store in ''Moscow on the Hudson.''

One image in particular sticks in my mind. In a Norwegian language class, my teacher illustrated the meaning of the word matpakke -- ''packed lunch'' -- by reaching into her backpack and pulling out a hero sandwich wrapped in wax paper. It was her lunch. She held it up for all to see.”

The shivering masses over there could obviously use some good old fashioned American politics. Tax cuts for the wealthy. Privatization, and letting the magic of the marketplace turn desolate cities like Oslo into wealthy, happy cities like New Orleans.

But such things are a bit too much to hope for, in the face of the incredible communistic propaganda machine that carefully places chips in the heads of those readers in the Oslo public library and even in the few, the very few, who get to see the wonders of American capitalism. How else to explain the facts reported in today’s Guardian?

“Kjell Magne Bondevik's centre-right coalition government, which campaigned on promises of tax cuts, was beaten by a leftwing opposition bloc.
Mr Bondevik made his announcement after a count of more than 99% of the vote showed Jens Stoltenberg's Red-Green three-party alliance had gained 87 seats in the 169-seat assembly.
The opposition bloc won the vote on its promises to spend more of the oil-rich country's money on its already generous welfare system. Offshore oil platforms have made it the world's third-largest oil exporter, after Saudi Arabia and Russia.”

The pauvre Norwegians, addled no doubt by the national addiction to heroine, got the tax argument backasswards. Taxing the wealthy, as Grover Norquist has conclusively demonstrated, is morally on par with killing Jews in Auschwitz. Thus, one would think that the humanitarian strain in the Norwegian heart would have been touched by the government’s attempt to make up for this black mark in Norwegian history. But no!

“Much of the election debate focused on how to use the oil income, and Mr Bondevik's campaign was hurt by claims that his tax cuts had only helped the rich.”

A black day indeed. We hope Mr. Bawer is brave enough to remain at his post and report on the further sinking of Norway into the sea of poverty. His blog hasn't emanated any signals of distress, but we have hopes that the Times will kindly lend him a forum to explain how, now, Norway is economically lower than Upper Volta.

fragments

ps -- readers should go to the NOLA site and read about the Superdome, which was opened up to visitors for the first time since the National Guard evacuated it. Here's a snippet:

The floor and Momentum Turf playing field have been transformed into a mushy lake of inch-deep black water. The fetid soup coated a sea of trash and spoiled food. The bathrooms on the 200 level overflow with human feces and urine. In one men’s room, the human waste spilled out of the entrance and into the concourse. Blood stains several walls. Stagnant for days in the still air, the water, spoiled food and human excrement will require decontamination and will be removed by professionals.

“You could put a petri dish in here and just see what grows,” one technician said. “The flies are telling you there’s a biohazard.”

The leftovers run the gamut – from mundane items such as clothes and blankets to the more personal, car keys, wallets, photo albums. One collection includes an organ donor card, a personal identification card, and another card with worn edges showing the picture of the Virgin Mary on one side and text on the other that reads, “I Am A Catholic. In case of accident please notify a priest.”

On the desk in the Dome’s office, ransacked by the people seeking shelter in the building, lay a neatly handwritten note on a small piece of folder notebook paper:




“Search and Rescue Team


Please Get


Old woman and legless old man


@ 2432 Ursalines Ave. (N.O.)”




‘The ultimate test’

Officials said at least 10 to 12 people died in the Dome, including a man who jumped or was pushed 50 feet to his death from one of the pedestrian walkways. A military police officer also was shot in the leg during an assault."

police force tattered

LI has been tough on the New Orleans cops. However, this WP article gets past our authority suspicious radar. The description of the current state of the NOLA police force reads much like Cormac McCarthy’s description of Glanton’s scalphunters in Blood Meridian:

“They sleep on the concrete sidewalk or in their cars. They scavenge for food from abandoned stores and cook by fire. They wash the laundry by hand and leave it to dry on lines hung from lampposts.
This is what life has been like for New Orleans police officers since Hurricane Katrina tore apart their city nearly two weeks ago.”
LI has a feeling that we should be studying this reduction of the American way of life: who knows what city or situation will emerge as the next object lesson in massive, contemptuous mismanagement, blessed by a governing class that lives in the monied equivalent of light years away from the mother ship, the homeland, or whatever you want to call our native muck and grease. They are the fly over people, and we are the flown over.
Here’s a little reminder of what was happening as the President was, according to the NYT’s flattering account (see our Saturday post), being handed actual news copy that contradicted the smiley faced reports of his aids (news copy that the NYT’s DC reporter assures us, in hushed, awestruck tones, that the President actually read!):
“For David Holtzclaw, 42, a tough-talking, macho police officer who has been on the force for nearly 25 years and has seen many dead bodies, it's about a baby. He was helping at the convention center one night when a man came up to him carrying his baby in a filthy blanket.

"The baby's lips were blue," he remembered. He hadn't eaten in days, and the mother was unable to breast-feed because she was ill.
Holtzclaw didn't know what to do. There was no hospital, no paramedics to call. He rushed the father and baby into his car, and began speeding west, away from the water. He stopped in St. Charles Parish and called an emergency medical service crew, which picked up the child. He found out later that the baby did not survive.”
It is a safe bet that we can mark that child down as one of the uncounted. Not that the state is unkind – we hear they are moving heaven and earth to keep pictures of such dead children away from the tv cameras.

quality versus quantity

LI is pleased to see that Liberty Library has been putting up a pretty extensive Herbert Spencer collection.

We’ve been reading The Man versus the State. We do not find Spencer a particularly pleasant author to read. Unlike James Fitzjames Stephen, who cast his ideas into the sort of Victorian hulking prose we can imagine Doctor Moriarity indulging in whilst planning to overthrow obscure monarchies, Spencer has a tendency to fall into that dulcet tone of dyspepetic conservative indignation Dickens satirized in Scrooge. His melancholy for the tragic loss of liberty in civilization is the kind of thing that later became a specialty of the National Review. It is one thing for Burke to wax tragical at the death of Queens; it is another to wax tragical at having to pay a shilling in property tax to keep up a public library. Here is Spenser in full cry, listing the terrible regulatory intrusions of the State:

“Then, under the Ministry of Lord John Russell, in 1866, have to be named an Act to regulate cattle-sheds, etc., in Scotland, giving local authorities powers to inspect sanitary conditions and fix the numbers of cattle; an Act forcing hop- growers to label their bags with the year and place of growth and the true weight, and giving police powers of search; an Act to facilitate the building of lodging- houses in Ireland, and providing for regulation of the inmates; a Public Health Act, under which there is registration of lodging-houses and limitation of occupants, with inspection and directions for lime-washing, etc., and a Public Libraries Act, giving local powers by which a majority can tax a minority for their books.”

Since Spencer harps on themes that have since become the boilerplate of American conservative politics (the baleful influence of the interfering state, the abridgment of freedom by said state, especially in regulatin’ and taxin,’ and so on), he is well worth reading, both for what passed into the conservative temperament and what did not. What did not was the ur-Liberal strain of anti-militarism. In this, he is more ancient than Fitzjames Stephens, who is both a convinced imperialist and an upholder of the theory that the state’s allowance of the greatest possible economic liberty should be coupled with the state’s role as the coercive guardian of society’s official morality.

…

Spencer starts out by positing a simple duality between Liberalism and Toryism.

“Dating back to an earlier period than their names, the two political parties at first stood respectively for two opposed types of social organization, broadly distinguishable as the militant and the industrial—types which are characterized, the one by the régime of status, almost universal in ancient days, and the other by the régime of contract, which has become general in modern days, chiefly among the Western nations, and especially among ourselves and the Americans. If, instead of using the word “cooperation” in a limited sense, we use it in its widest sense, as signifying the combined activities of citizens under whatever system of regulation; then these two are definable as the system of compulsory cooperation and the system of voluntary cooperation. The typical structure of the one we see in an army formed of conscripts, in which the units in their several grades have to fulfil commands under pain of death, and receive food and clothing and pay, arbitrarily apportioned; while the typical structure of the other we see in a body of producers or distributors, who severally agree to specified payments in return for specified services, and may at will, after due notice, leave the organization if they do not like it.”
One notices at once the class peculiarity in the last sentence, with its vision of healthy men, grit and determination in their eyes, giving due notice and leaving their jobs to strike out on their own, instead of doing something distasteful, like banding together in a union, sitting down in the factory, and forcing the owners, in violation of God’s law and contract, to negotiate with them. And it goes without saying that the producers and distributors can fire at will. All of which lends to the term ‘voluntary cooperation” more than a touch of the tendentious. Further, one notices that the system of “compulsory cooperation” involved fixed protections for the users of public lands, for instance – a system that was overturned by the system of enclosures coordinate with the advance of “voluntary cooperation.” In fact, “liberty”, a term that Spencer narrows to his purpose, was used, in the time of status, to denote obligations that the liberal era abolished, in favor of those property arrangements that enriched the bourgeoisie.
Spencer has two theories that provide the background for much of what he wants to say in MvG. One theory is evolutionary. It has recently been revived in certain circles, most notably by Robert Wright in Non Zero. Spencer’s idea was that progress is synonymous with the emergence of complexity. Evolution is the advance from the simple to the more complex in the living world. The same process is at work in that subset of the living world, human civilization. The other idea is about liberty and property. The political meaning of liberty is of crucial important to Spencer, and he identifies it with one’s willing control over one’s goods. Consequently, the state’s taxation of those goods is an encroachment on liberty:
“Nothing more than cursory allusion has yet been made to that accompanying compulsion which takes the form of increased taxation, general and local. Partly for defraying the costs of carrying out these ever-multiplying sets of regulations, each of which requires an additional staff of officers, and partly to meet the outlay for new public institutions, such as board-schools, free libraries, public museums, baths and washhouses, recreation grounds, etc., local rates are year after year increased; as the general taxation is increased by grants for education and to the departments of science and art, etc. Every one of these involves further coercion—restricts still more the freedom of the citizen. For the implied address accompanying every additional exaction is—“Hitherto you have been free to spend this portion of your earnings in any way which pleased you; hereafter you shall not be free so to spend it, but we will spend it for the general benefit.”
This is a passage that has gone directly into the bloodstream of American conservatism. But there is something odd about it from the liberal perspective, since underneath the claim about taxation is a classic Hegelian conflict between quantity and quality. On the one hand, if money is the index of the freedom of purchase, then Spencer must be right: the state’s taking is an encroachment on liberty. On the other hand, if the state’s taking leads to economic growth, than the index of liberty – money, or the amount of productivity within the economy – will also grow. This quantitative growth will lead to a greater ability for a greater number to spend. This is the liberal assertion that leads us from Mill to Keynes. Spencer’s categories are such that he has put himself in a conceptual bind: he simply can’t confront the liberal assertion. His defense of liberty on the dimension of the political economy ignores the macro nature of the political economy. That blindness has a sociological result: in a society in which, in reality, a greater number of people are free in the practical sense (free to travel, free to advance socially, free to express themselves) due to acts of the liberal state (with its taxes, its compulsory education, its sanctioning of unions, etc.), the classical liberal of the Spencerian type can only see a loss of freedom. This is exactly how Hayek ended up.

That sociological blindness to practical freedom has other consequences for Spencer. Which we will enumerate in another post.

spitting up what they feed us

"Seattle, Wash.: Why do the Bush advisors shield him from the reality all the rest of of see and manipulate his public encounters?

"Robert G. Kaiser: Well, do we know for sure that they do this? I share your suspicion that they do, but we also know that Bush DOES read the newspapers, despite saying he doesn't, and I bet he watches some TV too." Washington Post associate editor Robert G. Kaiser , September 8, "live" discussion

“The president, long reluctant to fire subordinates, came to a belated recognition that his administration was in trouble for the way it had dealt with the disaster, many of his supporters say. One moment of realization occurred on Thursday of last week when an aide carried a news agency report from New Orleans into the Oval Office for him to see.

The report was about the evacuees at the convention center, some dying and some already dead. Mr. Bush had been briefed that morning by his homeland security secretary, Michael Chertoff, who was getting much of his information from Mr. Brown and was not aware of what was occurring there. The news account was the first that the president and his top advisers had heard not only of the conditions at the convention center but even that there were people there at all.

"He's not a screamer," a senior aide said of the president. But Mr. Bush, angry, directed the White House chief of staff, Andrew H. Card Jr., to find out what was going on.

"The frustration throughout the week was getting good, reliable information," said the aide, who demanded anonymity so as not to be identified in disclosing inner workings of the White House. "Getting truth on the ground in New Orleans was very difficult." -Elizabeth Bumiller, September 9 Italics added

...
…

The bullhorns of the national greatness movement, who will no doubt surround Hillary in her triumphant second place finish in 2008, have been experiencing uncharacteristic depression about the whole greatness thing. Luckily, the White House has been throwing greatness at us in clumps and cities lately. Not content to preside over the flight of a million people from the NOLA area, the White House modestly tossed another 200,000 on the pile from Tal Afar

“In a bid to soften resistance, the U.S. military carried out repeated air and artillery strikes on targets in the city, where most of the population of 200,000 was reported to have fled to the surrounding countryside.”


As Tom Friedman might put it, those 200 thousand are the freest people in the Middle East right now, and so soft and squeezable, like Charmain's toilet tissue, after we tickled them with our high explosives. We are very enthusiastic here. Many have been freed from a burden that all Buddhists deplore – life and limb. Others are freed of their houses, their vehicles, and all potable property left behind. Freedom is what the Iraq war is all about, and… and greatness. Oh, some say the Huns were great, others plump for Tamerlane. But such are the prejudices of liberal historians. Surely an objective view of King George the Feeble would elevate him to his proper place.

One is especially pleased to see that the bombing of a civilian town wasn’t accompanied by any of that less than great preparation for refugees, which mars freedom by burdening down the population with objects and possessions.

That’s why we love this country of ours. So thoughtful!

Be sure to compare the AP story on the Tal Afer war crime with the latter softcore NYT account -- NYT is on the battlements again, guarding against the facts whereever they are inconvenient to our way of life. Bully for them!

marx and pavlov

The Bush culture has made it pretty clear that Marxist class analysis must be supplemented with Pavlovian psychology. The governing class in this country salivates to the bell that opens the NYSE every morning – and that is their only physiological/moral response to any public event, the cue that creates their entire world. The world of the dog in the cage is intentionally narrowed by the scientist. The world of the rich has also been narrowed, by self-choice, during the last twenty five or so years. Reagan’s tax cuts for the wealthy, in retrospect, signaled not just a change in a particular phase of American history (the return of a particular set of oligarchs), but looks, now, like a monument to the end of the civic sense among the oligarchs tout court. Among the governing class, the civic sense, with its complications of ritual, its sacrifices, its seriousness, its orientation to an imagined social collective, has been pretty much taken down, like an old and drafty building. In its place is a new, sleeker building – one composed of a degree of inhumanity and cultural blindness that is very difficult to reckon with if one is operating with the old tools of analysis, the old sense of some shared value system, the old responsive angers that once powered the Left, dependent as they were on a dialectical relationship with the builders of the post-war order. Dependent, that is, on a system of recognitions, however skewed.

This decade has given us the full flavor of the new order. The manysplendored disasters of Iraq and now New Orleans produce a schizoid split in assessment – for where, on the level of the cornered class, one sees failure and misery, on the level of the contracting class, one sees endless opportunity. The Bell rings, and out come the Pavlovian rich, salivating to beat the band, lining their pockets with the sweetest little contracts to come down the pike since God signed that no-bidder with Adam and said let her rip. And Adam didn’t get cost overruns. Halliburton, of course, does.

So it is no surprise that the money now pouring out of Washington (and there goes that little decline in the deficit the Bushies were so proud of – who knew that unexpected things could impact a budget?) is going to be spent largely to enrich the circle of the Bush culture’s favored companies.

This WP article about Bush’s campaign manager and ex head of FEMA, Joe Allbaugh, has been much circulated in the blogosphere. Still, there are touches of marvelous obscenity in the article. Our favorite of all is distilled in these two grafs:

Among those clients [which Allbaugh’s consulting company represents] are: the KBR division of Haliburton; TruePosition, a manufacturer of wireless location products, services and devices; the Shaw Group, a provider of engineering, design, construction, and maintenance services to government and the private sector; and UltraStrip, which is marketing the first water filtration system approved by the Environmental Protection Agency.
The firm's Web site quotes Allbaugh: "I carry pictures of close friends who died in the September 11th terrorist attacks as a constant reminder of what we lost that day. It's my personal commitment to always honor their memory by working to protect this nation. I'm dedicated to helping private industry meet the homeland security challenge."

A man who will pimp his dead friends is certainly a man to trust in trying times. I would bet that the upper management of the companies on the client list are going to have great Christmas parties this year. At LI, we wish them the best of luck and hope that all the delicacies they devour at those end of the year parties taste of human blood, mixed with a little toxic Mississippi river water.

That debbil GOP

Scratchings linked to our post about Lieberman the other day. I was interested to read one of his commentators accuse me of being a Republican.

I have been accused of many things, but this is a new one for me. Yet, in one way, it is a very just accusation. Lately, from my point of view (that of an extinct beast, much like the mastodon), I have been trying to sort out the relationship between the sense that this decade has seen the great American failure and the sense that the two party system here is broken. That sorting out begins with the premise that the parties are secondary to the real political life of the Republic. This premise is a hypothesis – I’m not going to defend it as the ultimate truth of the matter, but I think there’s a strong case to be made for constructing an analysis from it.

That analysis would trespass on the current verities of political analysis on my side, the liberal side. Given my premise, the question I want to put is: why did liberalism become so attached to one of the parties? I think there are good reasons for thinking that that attachment was devoutly wished by academic political scientists in the fifties and sixties, who felt that American political parties weren’t following the more rational European pattern – a pattern that sorted out the conservatives into a Conservative party, the Socialists into a Socialist party, etc. Rather, the American pattern was rather a jigsaw puzzle, in which populists would pop up as Republicans and segregationists would pop up as Democrats, etc. The rationalization of politics, according to the school prevailing in the fifties and sixties, would create parties as monopolists of ideologies.

This idea so sank into the framework of official political discourse that it is now presupposed. So when, for instance, a “radical” analysis of politics appears – for instance, Thomas Franks “what’s the matter with Kansas” – the problem goes something like: why don’t Kansans vote for their economic self interest, i.e. Democrats?

Myself, I think the process of this rationalization has been a disaster. The real question, to me, is: why have Kansas Republicans deviated from the old Progressive Republican norm? I think the answer is: the monopolization of ideologies by the parties has destroyed the machinery that made progressive politics possible in this country.

Take, for instance, Texas, where I live at the moment. The next Senatorial election here is going to be utterly predictable. The Republican candidate will be a rightwinger from hell. The liberal element in the state will concentrate exclusively on finding a Democrat of acceptable views to lose to him or her. The liberal element will devote an incredible amount of creativity and passion in a project that, intellectually, they know is doomed to failure. The Democrat they pick will, in the campaign, veer farther to the right than any New York State Republican. And that will be that.

Lefties will proceed to bitch and moan about the rightwing Dem, and propose that we all rush into the Green party. The right, which will have no competition whatsoever within the Republican party, will use its leverage to make its reactionary candidate even more reactionary – while at the same time guaranteeing that the freerider politics of borrowing and siphoning money disproportionately from the Federal government to Red states continues. This money will, in truth, be less than the money siphoned from the primary products extracted in the Red states which profit the investors living in New York City and the surrounding wealthy states.

Now, a fair question for a liberal to ask is: what is the weak link in this chain? To me, the obvious answer is: continuing to support the Democratic party unilaterally. By refusing to contact the Republican party, liberalism loses any of the leverage it used to have. Period. Instead of searching for Republican Yarboroughs, the liberal element will continue to stick with promoting losers at the statewide level. Instead of seeing that the Republican base is avid to exploit the government, as rational economic agents, the liberals will continue to affirm that the Republicans stand for small government – under the cover of which delusion Republicans will continue to maintain an expanded government. The reality is that this is a non-issue – in the Keynesian world system, the GDP taken up by a modern industrial state will probably range about the same percentage, regardless of the party in power. The last thirty years should have taught us that much, at least.

I had an Edward till a Michael Brown killed him

Tell o'er your woes again by viewing mine:
I had an Edward, till a Richard kill'd him;
I had a Harry, till a Richard kill'd him:
Thou hadst an Edward, till a Richard kill'd him;
Thou hadst a Richard, till a Richard killed him;
-- Richard III

In a previous post, the Counted and the Uncounted, LI wrote:

"One expects that the clearance of the Convention Center, since it is administered by thieves and murderers, will probably encompass hiding a number of corpses. This is evidence, after all, and you want to burn or bury evidence. So LI hopes that all those who knew the victims – the parents, or children, or friends – will not give up when the victims turn up in the “missing” list – will point the finger and make as much noise as possible."

This morning, in the LA Times, we read this:

"FEMA Wants No Photos of Dead
From Reuters

NEW ORLEANS — The U.S. agency leading Hurricane Katrina rescue efforts said Tuesday that it does not want the news media to photograph the dead as they are recovered.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency, heavily criticized for its slow response to the devastation caused by the hurricane, rejected journalists' requests to accompany rescue boats searching for storm victims."

We saw them crushed in life, jeered at as they struggled to survive, and burned furtively by the criminals that rule in D.C. We can only offer a voodoo hope that the murdered of New Orleans will be revenged in one way or another.

tales from FEMA

I don’t know if I’ve told this story in some post. But here goes…

I once worked, temporarily, for FEMA. I was in Santa Fe, trying to write a novel. I needed a job, so I went to a temp agency and was sent out on various jobs.

The instructions I’d get from the temp agency sometimes merely consisted of an address. One morning I set out for one of those addresses. The previous night I’d been at a party, and indulged in a little doobie. I still felt a bit of the pleasant bloodborne vertiginousness of the joint in my system as I found myself driving into the parking lot of what looked like a police station. Vertigo turned immediately into paranoia. I went into a building that seemed occupied by cops, and went down several flights of stairs until I found the office I was to report to.

It was FEMA.

The place was crawling with ex military. My boss was recently retired from a fat gig with NORAD, about which he liked to reminisce at lunch time with the other ex Norad boys – the times they would commandeer planes and go to Labrador on fishing expeditions, or parties to which they would fly in girls, etc. It sounded like the defense of our nuclear capability was a lot of fun if you were in the right circles. That first day, however, when I was briefed as to what they wanted me to do, I had this feeling that I must have smoked more than pot the night before. This was their plan: they wanted me to transcribe into a computer a typed up list of places in New Mexico that had, check one, toilet facilities, check two, kitchen facilities, three sleeping facilities. This list was supposed to be pulled out in case of nuclear attack. My boss even, helpfully, pulled out a diagram illustrating nuclear attack on a city, with circles of the various degrees of salvation radiating out from the dead center.

I should point out that this was 1993. I should point out that my boss wanted this work done because they had the funding to do the work, even though, as he acknowledged, it might not be the most useful work. I should point out that the list I was using was last updated in 1970.

So for the next two weeks I became an expert on where New Mexicans could take a dump in 1970.

…
In my last post, I was trying to analyze the culture of busyness that, I believe, intersects with the macro ineffectuality which plagues all plans floated in the Bush culture. The emphasis here is that busyness can operate even better as the content of busyness – the acts of busyness – tend towards zero. At zero, there can be complete speed and control. The ur-Bushites – Bremer and Brown – were peculiarly talented in pushing busyness towards the zero. My little FEMA job (under Good King Clinton, it should be added) was no more nor less busy than other jobs I have had, but it is distinguished by its outstanding uselessness. It had one justification – it was funded.

Those who would say, hey, that is the government. Private enterprise can’t afford such luxuries should study the exemplary career of the CFO of Enron. Profit is not a sign of content, as any hedge fund trader could tell you.

...
Eventually, I was displaced from my office at FEMA by the Governor of New Mexico, as a real moral panic arose in the state. There was an outbreak of a hantavirus carried by field mice that seemed especially potent, and the Governor commandeered an office in FEMA to make it seem like he was in charge.

pissing while

“Many people use their social activities to mark time rather than the other way around. In parts of Madagascar, questions about how long something takes might receive an answer like "the time of a rice cooking" (about half an hour) or "the frying of a locust" (a quick moment). Similarly, natives of the Cross River in Nigeria have been quoted as saying "the man died in less than the time in which maize is not yet completely roasted" (less than fifteen minutes). Closer to home, not too many years ago the New English Dictionary included a listing for the term "pissing while"—not a particularly exact measurement, perhaps, but one with a certain cross-cultural translatability.” – Robert Levine.


It is no news that the President was not born the twin of industriousness. But blaming Bush’s indolence doesn’t really get us too far in understanding the culture that allowed New Orleans to drown, and the cornered class to either fight or starve; nor does it explain the spectacle of seeing the governing class and its thugs in the press jeering at drowning wheelchair victims for “not getting out when they were told” while waiting for their “welfare checks” (which is apparently what a social security payment has become).

That culture – the Bush culture – precedes, of course, its namesake. But Bush, a garbage fly in human form, is as wonderfully implicative of the American governing class as the garbage fly is of a garbage can: if one is buzzing around a can, you can guess there is rotting meat in it. Similarly, the buzzing of the President’s men tells us a lot about the decaying assumptions that are embedded, over the last thirty years, in those circles that have money and power.

How to approach the thing we have all seen, and still can’t comprehend?

Here’s one small approach. The latest issue of Social Research is devoted to busyness. This is one aspect of that culture which we saw, in appalling living color, last week, fail at every juncture. An understanding of busyness is essential to understanding how “Brownie” did an outstanding job last week in helping to kill ten people in the Civic Center, one hundred in Chalmette, and so on.

We think that you should start with Robert Levine’s article, “A Geography of Busyness.” Levine, who teaches at California State University, Fresno, has been studying cultural differences in the perception of time – and his researchers have gone so far as to clock the speed of your average walker in cities in Brazil, Germany, the U.S., etc., to understand the use of time, under the sign of busyness, in two respects:

“I propose that the subjective experience of feeling busy has two main components: speed and activity.

Speed refers to the rate at which an activity is performed. It is the amount of activity per unit of time. The speed may be measured over brief and immediate periods of time, as when one experiences rapidly oncoming traffic or an upcoming deadline; or over longer, more sustained intervals, such as when we speak of the accelerating tempo of modem life.

The second component of busyness, activity, is the absence of unscheduled time. It is the amount of time that is consumed with activity; or, the ratio of doing things to doing nothing.”

Levine hypothesized that walking would be faster in European countries than in Brazil and the middle range of developing countries, and faster still in the U.S. He found that “pedestrians in Rio de Janeiro walk only two-thirds as fast as do pedestrians in Zurich, Switzerland,” for instance. This was important, insofar as walking is emblematic of speed as a measure of busyness. It is also exemplary of one variety of the emptiness entailed by busyness. The value of that walk is purely in its being completed with speed from the perspective of busyness. It is, in a sense, clipped out of life. It is dead time.

In another sense, nothing can be clipped out of life, which is made up of all of its parts. Of course.

Now, LI’s feeling is that the men around Bush are busy men. The Homeland Security Secretary, the director of FEMA, they are of that quality that no one could deny them busyness. It is also our feeling that their busyness is at the root of their incompetence. And that they reflect a kind of incompetence-in-busyness endemic to the managerial class.

Levine makes an interesting observation, contrasting event time with scheduled time:

“Keeping time by natural events has become increasingly less useful, or even impossible, in most contemporary urban cultures. There is, however, a variation on this type of timekeeping, what we might call "event time," that continues to be dominant in much of the world. In clock-time cultures, the hour on the timepiece governs the beginning and ending of activities. When event time predominates, scheduling is determined by activities. Events begin and end when, by mutual
consensus, participants "feel" the time is right. The distinction between clock and event time deeply divides cultures. Sociologist Robert Lauer (1981) conducted an intensive review ofthe literature concerning the meaning of time throughout history. The most fundamental difference,
he found, has been between people operating by the clock versus those who measure time by social events.”

In a previous post, we noted the interesting coincidence of two functions that give us the two faces of the “then:” the logical then, which moves from a possible condition to an entailment; and the narrative then, which sequences events. Busyness complicates this relationship, and might explain why planning has become a lost art, in the Bush culture. We will expand on this in a later post. Meanwhile, we recommend the issue of Social Research, if you can get ahold of it.

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Another account

Read this account of the escape from New Orleans, and the escape from the government’s idea of a refugee center (hint: they seem to have gotten their plans for it from Buchenwald)for the escapees from New Orleans, by Michael Homan. Let’s not let these histories go down the drain. Even if nothing changes, even if the monsters still rule us and the thugs in the press still ritually praise them and the whole mill grinds inevitably forward, making bonemeal of our bones, we can still preserve a record of how things really were in the U.S.A., circa 2005:


Here’s an excerpt:

“But then in the end I left. I learned that my father-in-law was flying to Jackson Saturday, and Friday those guys in the airboat showed up. I was very worried because I had heard that they were not letting people evacuate with their animals. But these guys said that had changed, and so I put my computer and a few papers in my backpack, loaded the dogs, let the birds go, and put Oot the sugar glider with food and water in Kalypso's room to await my return, much like Napoleon leaving for Elba I suppose. We drove in the boat all over the city looking for people. It was so surreal with the helicopters and all the boats up and down Canal Street amidst all the devastation. Towards dusk on Friday I arrived at I-10 and Banks Street, not far from my house. There they packed all of us pet owners from Mid City into a cargo truck and drove us away. They promised they would take us to Baton Rouge, and from there it would be relatively easy for me to get a cab or bus and meet the family in Jackson.

But then everything went to hell. They instead locked up the truck and drove us to the refugee camp on I-10 and Causeway and dropped us off. Many refused to get out of the van but they were forced. The van drove away as quickly as it could, as the drivers appeared to be terrified, and we were suddenly in the middle of 20,000 people. I would estimate that 98% of them were African Americans and the most impoverished people in the state. It was like something out of a Kafka novel. Nobody knew how to get out. People said they had been there 5 days, and that on that day only 3 buses had shown up. I saw murdered bodies, and elderly people who had died because they had been left in the sun with no water for such a long time. I’ve traveled quite a bit, and I have never seen the despair and tragedy that I saw at this refugee camp. It was the saddest think I have ever seen in my life. I am still so upset that there were not hundreds of buses immediately sent to get these people to shelters.”

Also, see this report from a Green Party member, Malik Rahim, who has remained in Algiers. The whole report is interesting, since it emphasizes one thing that should be made obvious:
1. the state not only abandoned New Orleans, but expended a lot of energy trying to keep a self-organizing population from rescuing each other, even as they allowed gangbangers and vigilantes to run wild.

"My son and his family -- his wife and kids, ages
1, 5 and 8 -- were flooded out of their home when
the levee broke. They had to swim out until they
found an abandoned building with two rooms above
water level.

There were 21 people in those two rooms for a day
and a half. A guy in a boat who just said "I'm
going to help regardless" rescued them and took
them to Highway I-10 and dropped them there.

They sat on the freeway for about three hours,
because someone said they'd be rescued and taken
to the Superdome. Finally they just started
walking, had to walk six and a half miles.

When they got to the Superdome, my son wasn't
allowed in -- I don't know why -- so his wife and
kids wouldn't go in. They kept walking, and they
happened to run across a guy with a tow truck
that they knew, and he gave them his own personal
truck.

When they got here, they had no gas, so I had to
punch a hole in my gas tank to give them some
gas, and now I'm trapped. I'm getting around by
bicycle.

People from Placquemine Parish were rescued on a
ferry and dropped off on a dock near here. All
day they were sitting on the dock in the hot sun
with no food, no water. Many were in a daze;
they've lost everything."

no comment

“I am glad the President has nominated someone already familiar with FEMA's mission to become Deputy Director. Mr. Brown is currently General Counsel and Chief Operating Officer of the agency, a position he has held since February of 2001. Before joining the Bush Administration, I note from his resume, he served as executive director of the Independent Electrical Contractors in Denver. In the early 1980s, Mr. Brown served as staff director of the Oklahoma Senate's Finance Committee, while serving on the Edmund, Oklahoma, City Council.

He ran for Congress in the sixth district, and, in what I think is
particularly useful experience, early in his career, was assistant city manager in Edmond, with responsibility for police, fire and emergency services.”

-- Senator Joe Lieberman (D), HEARING before the COMMITTEE ON GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS UNITED STATES SENATE,ONE HUNDRED SEVENTH CONGRESS ON THE NOMINATION OF MICHAEL D. BROWN TO BE DEPUTY DIRECTOR OF THE FEDERAL EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT AGENCY

Via The Left Coaster.

Population of Edmond, Oklahoma: (year 2000): 68,315.

Being and the Wack

History is the superstition of intellectuals. They are always trawling among the time’s Rorschach blots for analogies, and for the determinants among the innumerable skirmishes of the night's ignorant armies, and for our particular future in the past, which contains all futures except one: the one where before and after are abolished. That future annihilates itself.

LI is as superstition as any of them. We do cling to the “then.” The then is where logic ( the possibilities encoded in the if/then) crosses temporality (the then that sequences the narrative). We do believe that we can create modest structures around the then, and imagine that history is coordinate with event, and that events are real. The then is my repository for what Santayana called animal faith. And so I am led down the path that led up to this week, and will lead from this week. Before we endorse any ideology whatsoever, we want to have a lucid sense of the then.

We have been thinking about this because we have been thinking about agency and structure. During the vacation, we read a lot of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. This time, we did not read it with that undertone of Derridean derision we brought to our last reading of it. Sartre’s rewiring of the whole notion of transcendence, putting it in terms that resonate with the double face of the then, struck us as a pretty good project, even if the notion of liberty on which it is grounded is peculiar and unconvincing.

Which brings us by way of the backdoor to two comments about the drowning of New Orleans. Harry, in our comments section, objects to our instant personalization of the event in terms of Bush. Harry sees structure, here, as the overriding issue. My sense that Bush has made a difference – that there is a specific Bush signature to what we have seen happening – seems to him to be a bit naïve:

“Whoever comes after him [Bush] as the sockpuppet for his class and culture will fit that description too.”

The other comment is by Jim Henley at Unqualified offerings, who writes sarcastically that the drowning of New Orleans, like 9/11, has so far confirmed the liberal in his view, the conservative in his, and the libertarian in hers:

“From what I can tell in the last couple days’ reading, Katrina has chiefly served to confirm people in their previously held views. Liberals proclaim it proof of the need for a robust federal government (shades of Bill Moyers in September 2001), conservatives find themselves confirmed in their belief in the overriding importance of social order vigorously enforced, and libertarians regard the disaster and its aftermath as an exemplary failure of government. (Anarchists see government failing at even its core functions. State-accepting libertarians see government as having ignored its core functions for inappropriate pursuits.)”

Henley’s point is that the structure of the ideologies so determines the response as to make ideology an unfalsifiable structure – a thing no test can dent. It thus removes liberalism, conservatism and libertarianism from any real situation.

I grant that both of these points are valid, insofar as agency is largely determined by the background of the sense one makes of the world through structures one has neither created nor had any choice in assimilating. You can’t pull yourself out of your culture by the hair on your head. But I also think that they over-rely on the imperviousness and determinateness of structures which, to my mind, are always slightly out of equilibrium due to acts and events. Acts and events are the wack dimension (I would substitute wack for liberty in Sartre).

For instance: the liberal belief in a robust federal government doesn’t automatically translate into a liberal belief that we needed Homeland Security. LI, a liberal if there ever was one, for instance, thought it was a stupid idea when the Dems came up with it, and a scary idea when the GOP adopted it. That the increase in Government spending on Homeland security has gone up something like 22 percent per year since the boondoggle was started showed simply that the conservative critique of the robust federal roll stopped at its traditional limits, which are, not coincidentally, the limits of the economic interests of the conservative constituency. Like the robust Federal War Department, the robust Homeland Security department served to siphon off government money to a multitude of very GOP-ish military industrial corporations. Which is another way of saying that ideological structures aren’t necessarily homogenous and don’t necessarily serve as predictors of social action.

Those discrepancies and breaks create the Wack, which is where agency comes into play. And this is where I would have to protest against the idea that Bush is a sock puppet. Of course, we can trace a certain learning curve in Bush’s career and see how it corresponds to the culture he grew up in, but it is a mistake to think that you could put any man or woman from Bush’s class in that curve and come out with the same result.

the counted and the uncounted

One expects that the clearance of the Convention Center, since it is administered by thieves and murderers, will probably encompass hiding a number of corpses. This is evidence, after all, and you want to burn or bury evidence. So LI hopes that all those who knew the victims – the parents, or children, or friends – will not give up when the victims turn up in the “missing” list – will point the finger and make as much noise as possible. That the murderers Chertoff and Brown are directing efforts in NOLA means that men who have the motive for covering up their crimes are directing efforts in NOLA. There is a new chapter in the black book of the African-American massacres, and it will be curious to see how the media ignores it, and how it is swept under the rug all the way around.

John Barry’s article in the NYT (I wrote about Barry in an earlier post) includes this graf:

“The scope of the 1927 devastation also resembled today's. No one knows the death toll. The official government figures said 500, but one disaster expert said more than 1,000 in Mississippi alone. The homes of roughly one million people, nearly 1 percent of the entire population of the country, were flooded. The Red Cross fed 667,000 people for months, some for a year; 325,000 lived in tents, some sharing an eight-foot-wide levee crown with cattle, hogs and mules, with the river on one side and the flood on the other.”

Here’s an editorial from the Times-Pic, which has been one of the most reactionary papers in the U.S. for years:

"OUR OPINIONS: An open letter to the President
Dear Mr. President:

We heard you loud and clear Friday when you visited our devastated city and the Gulf Coast and said, "What is not working, we’re going to make it right."

Please forgive us if we wait to see proof of your promise before believing you. But we have good reason for our skepticism.

Bienville built New Orleans where he built it for one main reason: It’s accessible. The city between the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain was easy to reach in 1718.

How much easier it is to access in 2005 now that there are interstates and bridges, airports and helipads, cruise ships, barges, buses and diesel-powered trucks.

Despite the city’s multiple points of entry, our nation’s bureaucrats spent days after last week’s hurricane wringing their hands, lamenting the fact that they could neither rescue the city’s stranded victims nor bring them food, water and medical supplies.

Meanwhile there were journalists, including some who work for The Times-Picayune, going in and out of the city via the Crescent City Connection. On Thursday morning, that crew saw a caravan of 13 Wal-Mart tractor trailers headed into town to bring food, water and supplies to a dying city.

Television reporters were doing live reports from downtown New Orleans streets. Harry Connick Jr. brought in some aid Thursday, and his efforts were the focus of a "Today" show story Friday morning.

Yet, the people trained to protect our nation, the people whose job it is to quickly bring in aid were absent. Those who should have been deploying troops were singing a sad song about how our city was impossible to reach.

We’re angry, Mr. President, and we’ll be angry long after our beloved city and surrounding parishes have been pumped dry. Our people deserved rescuing. Many who could have been were not. That’s to the government’s shame.

Mayor Ray Nagin did the right thing Sunday when he allowed those with no other alternative to seek shelter from the storm inside the Louisiana Superdome. We still don’t know what the death toll is, but one thing is certain: Had the Superdome not been opened, the city’s death toll would have been higher. The toll may even have been exponentially higher.

It was clear to us by late morning Monday that many people inside the Superdome would not be returning home. It should have been clear to our government, Mr. President. So why weren’t they evacuated out of the city immediately? We learned seven years ago, when Hurricane Georges threatened, that the Dome isn’t suitable as a long-term shelter. So what did state and national officials think would happen to tens of thousands of people trapped inside with no air conditioning, overflowing toilets and dwindling amounts of food, water and other essentials?

State Rep. Karen Carter was right Friday when she said the city didn’t have but two urgent needs: "Buses! And gas!" Every official at the Federal Emergency Management Agency should be fired, Director Michael Brown especially.

In a nationally televised interview Thursday night, he said his agency hadn’t known until that day that thousands of storm victims were stranded at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center. He gave another nationally televised interview the next morning and said, "We’ve provided food to the people at the Convention Center so that they’ve gotten at least one, if not two meals, every single day."

Lies don’t get more bald-faced than that, Mr. President.

Yet, when you met with Mr. Brown Friday morning, you told him, "You’re doing a heck of a job."

That’s unbelievable.

There were thousands of people at the Convention Center because the riverfront is high ground. The fact that so many people had reached there on foot is proof that rescue vehicles could have gotten there, too.

We, who are from New Orleans, are no less American than those who live on the Great Plains or along the Atlantic Seaboard. We’re no less important than those from the Pacific Northwest or Appalachia. Our people deserved to be rescued.

No expense should have been spared. No excuses should have been voiced. Especially not one as preposterous as the claim that New Orleans couldn’t be reached.

Mr. President, we sincerely hope you fulfill your promise to make our beloved communities work right once again.

When you do, we will be the first to applaud."