Remora

Enron's stunt fall, during that portion of the Bush administration that we will certainly know more about if Cheney's office has to release its docs, was preceded by a rise duing a portion of Clinton's administration that hasn't received a lot of scrutiny, yet. Corporate Watch has published an article by Jimmy Langman on Enron's operations in Bolivia. The interlocking interests of capital and the state are put into special relief in this instance of what Cobbett would have called 'ruffian' capitalism.

Let's put this in terms of the mission statement, or the vision committment, or whatever seedy term you want to use.

Q: How can Enron, the free enterpriser's free enterprise, suck off the government tit by running a pipeline through an environmentally threatened forest? And how can it parlay false promises to a bunch of indigineous know nothings into an incredible amount of profit, without paying for an incredible amount of environmental damage, and still cheat its partners on the deal?

First, the setting:

"The 390-mile long Cuiaba natural gas pipeline, partly owned by Royal Dutch/Shell Group, stretches from near the city of Santa Cruz in eastern Bolivia to Cuiaba, Matto Grosso, Brazil. There, it fuels Enron's new 480-megawatt thermal power plant. The pipeline cuts through the 15 million-acre Chiquitano, the last, large, relatively intact tall dry forest in the world. The Chiquitano forest is "one of the world's richest, rarest and most biologically outstanding habitats on Earth" and one of the planet's 200 most sensitive eco-regions, according to the World Wildlife Fund. Approximately 90 species of mammals, birds and reptiles in the Chiquitano are listed as endangered. The adjacent Pantanal is the world's largest wetlands region, spanning 89,000 square miles and straddling the borders of Brazil, Paraguay, and Bolivia. It is one of the world's richest wildlife habitats."

Now, remember, this forest is inhabited. The inconvenient indigenes must be placated with some initial promise that will pay off the NGOs that virtuously claim to represent them. Don't worry about really representing them -- once the NGOs have satisfied themselves, and their mailing list of contributors, that they've operated with maximum virtue, they will forget about their "clients" -- or better, having bought into the enterprise, they'll defend it against any subversive dissent that might emanate from some village headman somewhere, like that guy knows anything. Enron, however, isn't Shell Oil, which would be satisfied with some such arrangement. Enron wants to hit the ball out of the park, because that is the innovative, asset light, creative destruction type of corporate culture that made the 90s so special. To really hit the ball out of the ball park, you have to simultaneously juggle your accounting in a fraudulent way, contribute as much as possible to the degredation of the wilderness described above, seduce monetary support from the taxpayer, and cheat your business partner. Enron, with the mastery that accompanied its spiking stock prices, was able to do it all, as Langman reports. What fascinated LI is the part played by another one of those obscure Federal agencies that exist to pump money, as in an artesian well, from a lower level to a higher one -- that is, lining the pockets of the porcine set with money that, as LI writes this, is going to be denied the unworthy poor in pending legislation to "reform" welfare even more.

This is the US aspect of the deal:

"The "Cuiaba Energy Integrated Project" cost an estimated $600 million to build, $200 million of which was originally to be financed by the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC), a US government agency that helps US companies with business projects in less-developed countries."

Never let it be said that America is indifferent to less developed countries, not with OPIC around to spread our bounty from jungle to glorious jungle. Enron was OPIC's number one cause, accruing 1.7 billion dollars in much needed aid since 1992. However, in Bolivia, OPIC was hampered by constraints on lending to environmentally destructive projects. But hey presto! that's where a little teamwork from OPIC's pliant chief environmental officer, Harvey Himberg, came in. By selectively describing the project, and by picturing the Chiquitano in wholly false terms, they were able to get around the restraints written into OPIC regulations. Himberg is what you call a visionary in the Forturne-'n-Forbes speak. Here's an example:

"After fires swept parts of the Chiquitano forest in the summer of 1999, OPIC even created a video highlighting the burnt out areas in an effort to convince individuals from other government agencies that the forest was not primary. The video led one US Agency for International Development staffer to tell an environmental group that he came away with the impression that there was no forest left.

"At every step OPIC sided with Enron, finding every way possible to circumvent its primary forest policy," says Atossa Soltani, executive director of Amazon Watch: "OPIC management put on an all out effort to defend its largest business client."

This sounds much like tactics used by the Bush administration to get its true clients, petro companies, oil leases in the Artic National Wildlife Refuge.

OPIC has a little convenient site for children set up to explain itself, with cute pictures of jungle plants and beasts (in keeping with the curious American custom of portraying, in cartoons, the happy frolicking creatures we stun, butcher, slice n dice, broil, bake, and fry -- the grinning pig at the Barbecue place, the dancing chicken who can't wait to immerse itself, breast and thigh, in boiling oil. MMM MMM Good, Kids!) and a whole buncha fun facts to know and tell. Did you know sometimes private insurance companies just are so poopy? Yeah, they simply won't underwrite those necessary ventures of American capital into the big scary world of lions and tigers and bears. Now, Uncle Sam don't want to coddle any of you or your welfare queen mamas, you hear? But if you are, say, a multi-billion dollar energy company, the bowels of our national compassion are moved:

Why Is OPIC Needed?


Private loans, loan guaranties, and political risk insurance are hard to get for companies who want to operate in less developed countries. The best way for a country to become more developed is to encourage businesses to build and operate there. Some banks refuse to do business in these countries because they think it is too risky. OPIC helps these growing nations by supporting those businesses that want to operate in these countries.

Kids will do the darndest things, and some of them might question whether Uncle Sam should leap in where angels and venture capitalists don't dare to venture. But have no fear. OPIC, you see, is good for America!

"How Does OPIC Help America?

OPIC helps American companies make investments in developing countries. When US companies make these investments they are likely to create US jobs and exports. For example, if OPIC is helping to build a power plant in a foreign country then the parts and equipment needed to build the power plant will often be supplied by other American companies. American companies may build the generator for the plant, as well as selling the cranes, bulldozers, and trucks needed to build it. Since 1971, OPIC has supported $138 billion worth of investments that will generate $63.6 billion in U.S. exports and create nearly 250,000 American jobs. OPIC does not support projects that may result in any loss of American jobs or exports.

OPIC also helps U.S. foreign policy by only doing business in countries that obey certain rules about workers� rights and human rights. OPIC will not help any country that abuses its people.

OPIC is self-sustaining , and has made money every year since it was created in 1971. Because OPIC is so successful, it contributes money to the U.S. foreign assistance account every year."

LI was a smart ass boy. And LI has grown up to be a smart ass man. And this man, reading about all those trucks and cranes and things, wonders how scared the lions and tigers and bears should be. But they are SCARY! We have zoos to put creatures like that where they belong: behind bars!

In the meantime, although OPIC is very open and touchy feely with the kiddies, it seems simply touchy when it comes to its accounting. Or at least according to the Friends of the Earth. Kids, you might want to add to OPICs fun facts page the question, how are we accounting for those projects that (zoom! zoom!) use all those like neat cranes and trucks to set up like coal burning fuel plants in Thailand and stuff.

"OPIC's Annual Reports provide Congress and taxpayers with an ambiguous and distorted picture. OPIC reports "commitments" to the public but not final signed contracts. Therefore, the public has no way of knowing whether or not a contract was actually signed, which would result in official U.S. financial exposure and could create debt for developing countries."

But lets not badmouth our friendly neighbor policy while our POTUS is with Putin. Children, after all, should be seen, and not heard -- and the same is true for citizens.






has a site for kids

Remora

Murder

Murder is definitely not one of the fine arts for scolds in the press. We expected, as soon as poor old Chandra Levy's body showed up in the front yard of some D.C. police station... oops, we mean as soon as it was uncovered in the veritable jungle, the impenetrable wilds, near a jogging path only accessible by way of Sherpa guides, of a D.C. park --- that the scolds would be down the throat of the press for trivializing, sensationalizing, and generally not realizing that, after 9/11, everything had changed -- yes, we were no longer gawkers at traffic accidents, mongerers of bootleg execution video tapes, spectators of Jerry Springer managed slap fights between hefty adult star queens, eaters of nitrate rich bacon and wankers to home video porn, but had been transformed into discerning consumers Brookings Institute White Papers. Howard Kurz, the barometer of conventional wisdom, didn't disappoint us:


"Terrorism, threats against the Brooklyn Bridge, Middle East violence, the president's trip to Europe � all were blown off the television screen at noon yesterday by the story that became the media's leading soap opera last summer.

"The Levy tragedy burst back into the news with the discovery of skeletal remains in Rock Creek Park. No matter that it wasn't clear for hours whether this was the Washington intern who has been missing for more than a year, or that Condit, the man romantically linked to her, has long since been defeated. The media were in full-blown, this-just-in, team-coverage mode."

Just to make sure we get it, the headline writer entitled Kurz' s column: Wall-to-Wall Levy Coverage
Pre-Sept. 11 Excess Returns to TV News After Discovery of Remains.

And so, though we feel sad, experience the pang of vicarious melancholy, feel even funky, for Chandra, we do want to hear everything. In the meantime, we've been pondering the varieties of murder, on the lines of De Quincey's essay on Murder as one of the fine arts. This essay, which really transformed the Newgate narrative into the Real Crime narrative (yes, Ann Rule owes her whole career to the opium addict), is often mentioned as notorious, or infamous, or the like.

Frank Tallis, a crime fiction writer, makes the by now standard reference in his essay in Crime Times,
Original Sin: On the Importance of Creative Killing. Tallis doesn't follow De Quincey's radical path, however. Where De Quincey looked at the murder itself in terms of art, Tallis looks for creativity in the murderer's hobbies -- poetry, crafts of various sorts.

"Yet, even serial killers are guilty of not exploiting their creative powers to the full. Although they are generally very inventive with dead bodies (using them as sex aids or as a source of spare parts from which they can fashion objets d'art), they too show an unexpected conservatism when it comes to the dastardly deed itself. Nilson [see this link for an elaborate description of Nilson's career ], whose quite tolerable poetry elevates him to something of a laureate among villains (and who often spoke unambiguously about the 'art' of murder) was a boring old strangler at heart.

"Looking through one of the many millennial lists that appeared last year I came across a register of twenty titles voted the 'best ever' crime fiction. I couldn't help noticing that the authors of almost all of the genre classics opted for tried and tested methods of murder. They spurned originality. Why? Above, I mentioned that in my quest for an original methodology I was looking for something bold without being silly. And in these matters, the issue of 'silliness' is (as John Major might have said) not inconsiderable. Indeed, it seems to me that there is some kind of mathematical law in operation that enforces the co-variation of originality and silliness. That is to say, the more original the method of despatch, the more silly or ridiculous it will appear - the opposite also being true. Thus, like Icarus, the aspiring crime writer must be wary of hubris. The higher you fly the more likely it is that you will fall from the literary stratosphere."

There's a mistake here that is obvious to any literary critic -- the confounding of technological novelty with creativity. There are poems and novels that combine the two, granted. But the true poetaster of murder is as much in search of the adventure of content as the fashion of form. David Lehman, in an essay on the detective novel, quotes Gertrude Stein, of all people, on the genre. Stein delivers, as she always does, after transcending a few commas:


"Gertrude Stein, who called the detective story "the only really modern novel form," has an analysis that has always fascinated me. (You can piece it together from passages in Everybody�s Autobiography and in her lecture "What Are Masterpieces.") Stein explained that the detective story "gets rid of human nature by having the man dead to begin with the hero is dead to begin with and so you have so to speak got rid of the event before the book begins." In a detective story, she also observed, "the only person of any importance is dead" and so "there can be no beginning middle and end" in the conventional sense. Stein helps to account for why time in a detective novel flows not in a straight lines but in two directions concurrently: there is the time of the action culminating in the violent event that occurs just before the book begins, and there is the narrative time of the detective�s reconstruction of the events leading to that moment. Stein�s more important insight is that the discovery of the corpse represents the termination of an action at the same time as it initiates a new action, and since this is so, it makes sense to regard the detective as a new hero who emerges at the precise moment that his predecessor, the traditional hero of fiction, meets his violent end. The scene of the crime is the locus of the transition from a flawed hero (the victim) to one who is better equipped for survival (the detective).
"

Chandra, of course, is a heroine without a detective to vindicate her status. D.C. detectives are, indeed, better equipped for survival, as in Lehman's interpretation of Stein, but only in the way of all bureaucrats -- by assiduously avoiding real work, arresting the obvious and framing them when necessary, and generating excuses at will. Of course, Stein was thinking of real detectives, ones that quit the force and work on their own, for paying clients.

It's Chinatown, Jake. Somebody in D.C. is bound to say that at some point in this case.

Finally, LI would recommend the NYPost for leaping, a little late, into the story. The day before, the Post had been proclaiming stentorianly that all we had to fear was fear itself -- which of course was a bunch of bull, since we have to fear, really, being blown up by Al Quaeda folks. That this is what we have to fear should be obvious to even Murdoch's privileged minions. Were they out all last year or what? But today, the Post did itself proud. First the headline: It's Her. Simple, but thrusting. Then the pic of Chandra.Not the usual pic, not the way AOL clumsily promoted the story, like plastering up one of those tiresome have you seen this child posters for its forty million customers to see. The Post ain't no milk company. No, this one is of a dewier, a happier Chandra. Well, of course it is hard not to be happier than at the moment of your murder, but still. This Chandra reminded us that we didn't like it, not a bit, that she'd disappeared like that. Then, then, the Condit angle. Its a matter of tracking the camera, its the sweep, the pan that counts. The WP, of course, scratching at its girdle, provides a map for the reader to locate the skeletal remains, but how about the really important landmark in the case -- the location of Condit's apartment vis a vis the body?

"The location where the remains were found is about three miles from Levy's apartment in Dupont Circle, a little less than two miles from Condit's home, and a mile north of Pierce/Klingle Mansion Nature Center. "

If the Post doesn't get its man to traverse those two miles, timing it, and looking for broken twigs and broken bottles of Condit's favorite brandy, we will definitely lament the decline of tabloid ingenuity in this great land of ours.

Remora

Gould's is a demise foretold -- why else would he have written in his last book of essays that they were, indeed, the last book of essays -- but LI is sad about it anyway. On first reading, we found the NYT obituary ill-tempered. On second reading, the quote from John Maynard Smith about the "uselessness" of Gould's contribution to evolutionary theory was not the poke in the eye (some emergence of the mole from the ever vigilant network around Robert Wright?) than a on the one hand, on the other hand kind of thing. Although we doubt that Richard Dawkins obituary will suffer from this rather cheap shot:

"Some charged that his theories, like punctuated equilibrium, were so malleable and difficult to pin down, that they were essentially untestable."

We don't imagine the Times repeating the complaint that Dawkins use of the term gene has stretched it way beyond any correspondence to the physical thing, the gene. In Dawkins hands, the gene becomes something like one of Quine's event zones.

Thinking of Gould leads us to recommend this review, in Ha'aretz, of a terminally silly book entitled: "The Science of God: The Convergence of Scientific and Biblical Wisdom," by one Gerald Schroeder:

"...there is the Mishna in Tractate Sanhedrin that states: "The following will have no share of the Next World: Those who say that the resurrection of the dead is not mentioned in the Bible." Rashi's commentary on this passage is: "Those persons who admit and believe that the dead will be resurrected, but who claim that there is no allusion to this resurrection in the Bible are heretics because they are denying that the Bible mentions the resurrection of the dead."

Gerald Schroeder, author of "The Science of God: The Convergence of Scientific and Biblical Wisdom" [the title of the original book in English, published by the Free Press, 1997] takes an even more extreme position than that of the tana (scholar) in the above-mentioned passage in the Mishna. The Mishna demands that Jews look for an allusion in the Bible to something very specific: the resurrection of the dead, an event that belongs more to the next world than to this one. Schroeder, on the other hand, appears to be determined to find - at least, for himself - allusions in the Bible to many basic theories and many scientific disciplines that are related to this world, not to the next: astronomy, paleontology, geology and cosmic and biological evolution. "

The reviewer, Elia Leibowitz, finds Schroeder to be appalling, which of course he is. The Mishna, in fact, would certainly have mentioned his appallingness if God hadn't been distracted by other matters. The Free Press, which published Schroeder's book, is an establishment, conservative press, famously edited by one of Saul Bellow's children. From Leibowitz' description of Schroeder's book, however, it seems pander without any redeeming value to the dumbest hick prejudices out there in the hinterlands. Here's an ace example, set up by Leibowitz's common sense question:

"If the Bible is a human creation, what scientific sources were at the disposal of the authors of this book, which undoubtedly was written many centuries ago? For example, Schroeder does not explain how the author who wrote the marvelous passage on God's revelation to Moses (Exodus 3) knew that there are 26 dimensions in the world. Schroeder suggests - apparently, with total seriousness - that the numerology of God's explicit name (which is not mentioned by Orthodox Jews), which is 26, alludes to the fact that the world has 26 dimensions. Four of these dimensions - the three spatial dimensions and the dimension of time - are known, while the other 22 are invisible. The hidden dimensions - the word for "hidden" in Hebrew is "alum" - give the world its name, which in Hebrew is "olam," a term that can be interpreted as semantically linked to "alum."

Schroeder gets very excited by the numerology here and from the context in which it appears because 26 is the number of dimensions with whose help the world can be described, according to the early versions of the String Theory, which presents an ultra-modern picture of the world and which occupies a position midway between hypothesis and theory in recent thinking in the world of physics. Does Schroeder think that the author of Exodus was familiar with the String Theory? Did the author know, have familiarity with, and use the mathematical concept of dimension? "

There is a certain level of pap that should properly revulse even the editors of the Free Press. Alas, nobody has ever gone broke marketing New Age books or Conservative screeds. Schroeder's low genius was simply to combine the two. It isn't enough appreciated how much the contemporary right owes to Reagan --Nancy Reagan, that is.

Remora

Pigs

Limited Inc recently went to see Yo Mama Tambien with a friend. National origin of said friend:Turkish. Why mention the Turkish? Because this happened: on screen, after seeing a suitable amount of sex (the reason, after all, we were going to see Yo Mama etc.), a scene unrolls on a beach upon which the three main characters had pitched tents. A bunch of semi-wild, brownish looking pigs were shown rooting through these tents. To LI, a pig is a rather cute little animal making a snuffly noise, equipped with a snout. To our friend, however, as it turned out, a pig is a supremely revolting object stimulating the kind of response more usually provoked by some grotesque plumbing mishap that requires a plumber's helper, major amounts of Ajax, and a lot of Lysol.

Today's NYT has definitely put LI in the swinophobic camp. The swine in question have names: "Eugene M. Isenberg, of Nabors Industries; John M. Trani, of Stanley Works, H. John Riley Jr., of Cooper Industries; Herbert L. Henkel, of Ingersoll-Rand, and Bernard J. Duroc-Danner of Weatherford International ." These are the CEOs of companies moving their HQ, by legal legerdemain, to Bermuda, in order to pressure an always servile Congress to lower an already criminally low business tax rate. The fictitious Bermuda address will save on US taxes -- although why that should be the case is anybody's guess. David Kay Johnstone's article, if it were a movie, would show the following scene: Isenberg, an obscenely fat pig who has managed to swill 126 million dollars in the past two years, swilling "tens of millions of dollars" more by moving Nabors Industries, a maker of off shore oil drilling equipment, to Bermuda; John Trani, a gut busting porker famous already for his rudeness, his greed, and his general non-necessity to the Lebenswelt of any civilized culture, pocketing in his little pig pockets "an amount equal to 58 cents of each dollar the company would save in corporate income taxes in the first year after its proposed move to Bermuda." Etc.

The pigs in Yo M. T. "bedunged' the area, as Rabelais would say. However, face it, a little herd of swine like that is nowhere near as messy or toxic as the pigs listed in Johnstone's little piece. Those swine and their like have been trampling down a whole country, or at least doing as much damage as they could, and are even now feasting with their porky cousins on some rare, odious subcommittee up there in D.C., one of those numerous venues where the open conspiracy between the superrich and the superreactionary is cemented in handshakes and shaving cologne. The pigs in Y.M.T, we are told by the rather smug voiceover, were infected. When they were slaughtered and eaten, they gave their consumers trichonosis. Alas, chances are nobody is going to eat the pigs listed in the graf above; however, we would advise 400 degrees F. for at least three hours if, by some chance, one of them is caught and butchered, a la our previous post on Oswald de Andrade's Cannibal Manifesto.

Remora

Kanan Makiya
The Times (London) reviews Kanan Makiya's new book, The Rock -- a history of Temple Mount in Jerusalem. You'll remember Israel's Charles De Gaulle and man of peace, Ariel Sharon, cemented his reputation for peace by going there to taunt Palestinians two years ago.

Long ago and far away -- in the seventh century -- Jerusalem was conquered by Caliph Umar. Ah, the civilized days of yore! The city was taken from its Christian potentate, one of those provincial ecclesiastics memorable only for scornful eloquence Gibbon devoted to them ten centuries later. For a sense of the ramified cross purposes that have marked this ground forever -- like some cross roads cursed by the devil in backwoods Mississippi -- here's a summary Caliph Umar's investment of Jerusalem:

"Once he realises Jerusalem is lost, the Patriarch Sophronius � keen to gain the best possible terms � arranges a meeting with the caliph. He ensures that this takes place on the day before Palm Sunday, so that �the Arab takeover of Jerusalem would be lost in a show of Christian pomp and pageantry headed by himself�.

"He arrives �in full ecclesiastical dress, gold chains draped over his neck and shoulders, and long silk robes trailing behind in the dust�, although his conqueror greets him in a worn-out battle tunic. And he hands over a covenant of surrender to which has been added a single clause: �No Jew will be authorised to live in Jerusalem.� The caliph asks for a pen and crosses out the offending words."


Well, we do wonder who thrust his arm into the twentieth century and came up with a "pen" for the Caliph. But we like the tenor of this graf.

Makiya is an interesting man. He's an Iraqi architect, got out of Iraq with Hussein's dogs on his tail, wrote a book, Republic of Fear, about the police state ruled over by the aforementioned Hussein, and has recently been a big delver into the theory that Islam began as a alliance between Jews and Arabs to oppose Byzantine Christianity. Nick Cohen has written a nice profile of the guy in the Observer, from which we extract these grafs:


"A consequence of the Gulf War was that Republic of Fear became a bestseller and turned Makiya from an obscure exile working for his father's architecture practice into something of a star. Makiya, who had once called himself a socialist, found new friends but was hated by many of his former comrades for insisting that America forces shouldn't leave Iraq with the worst of both worlds - bombed but with Saddam still in power - but carry on to Baghdad.

"He dates the schism between supporters of universal human rights and those on the Left and Right who regard any Western intervention as imperialism to the moment when the opponents of Saddam were denounced. Israel was built on the destruction of 400 Palestinian villages, Makiya says; Saddam destroyed at least 3,000 Kurdish villages. Makiya, like every other Iraqi democrat you meet in London, has lost patience with those who will oppose the former but not the latter and is desperate for America to support a democratic revolution. All in all, we have a man whose been on Saddam's death-list for years and has more than enough enemies. He has still found the time and courage to pierce the thin skins of religious fundamentalists."

Makiya is a nuanced supporter of the American invasion to be of Iraq. Although maybe that is unfair. Some of what he has written seems to be more in the line of, increase American support for an internal Iraqi revolution. He wrote an op ed piece last November that includes this interpretation of contemporary history:

"The cracks in this American policy toward Iraq were beginning to show in 1996, when for the first time since the gulf war, the United States let Mr. Hussein get away with invading a city � Arbil � in what used to be the safe haven of northern Iraq. That was the year when the American-backed Iraqi opposition to Mr. Hussein was rooted out of the north of the country. More than 100 members of the Iraqi opposition died in Arbil waiting for American air support that never came.

"That was a pivotal moment because the United States shrank from supporting an opposition that would have brought about deep structural change in Iraq � a change that would have included the Kurds and the Shiites in a pro-Western, non-nationalist, federally structured regime. Instead, America held back in favor of what it thought to be much safer � an officer-led coup that would replace one set of Baath Party leaders with another. But that judgment proved to be wrong."

There is a deep structural problem in that interpretation of the Iraqi opposition: what basis is there for believing that a party that, for whatever reason, commits itself to a "pro-Western, non-nationalist, federally structured regime," is a party with a hope in hell of succeeding in bringing this program to fruition?

What happened at Arbil is significant, but LI reads this incident in a somewhat different way than Makiya. A succinct rundown of the sad and dirty history of US policy towards Iraq, an epitome of redneck machiavellism, is provided by by Nicholas Arons, of the Institute for Policy Studies:


"Over the past several decades, U.S. support for the Iraqi opposition has blown hot and cold. Four months before the 1990 Gulf War, two Republican senators visited Baghdad and reassured Saddam Hussein that Voice of America broadcasts criticizing the regime�s human rights record did not necessarily reflect U.S. government policy. When the Gulf War ended, President Bush called on Iraqi dissidents to rebel, implying that the U.S. would provide air cover. The uprisings materialized, but U.S. air cover never did. When the Iraqi military retaliated, butchering thousands of rebelling Kurds in the north and Shiites in the south, U.S. officials claimed that Bush favored a military coup within the regime, not a popular insurrection, which Washington feared would lead to a possible breakup of Iraq and a destabilization of the regional power balance. Internal Iraqi coups were reportedly attempted in July 1992, July 1993, and May 1995. Each ended with mass arrests, executions, and the restructuring of the ruling Ba�ath Party�s security apparatus and tribal alliances, but with Saddam Hussein�s regime intact. Most disastrous was a 1996 covert U.S. military training operation in Arbil in northern Iraq that degenerated into internecine feuds. Saddam Hussein�s forces crushed the INC, forcing its operations to come to a standstill.During the early 1990s, the U.S. spent over $100 million to aid the Iraqi opposition. Most of this money was for public relations and propaganda, not military hardware. In 1998, Congress passed the Iraq Liberation Act, which allocated $97 million for Pentagon training and used military equipment. But the INC has been slow to take advantage of Pentagon training, to submit proposals, or to complete audits, so most funds remain unspent.There are over seventy opposition groups within and outside Iraq, representing a diverse network of religious minorities, Iraqi monarchists, and military exiles. The U.S. has long played favorites, pitting these groups against each other. The Clinton administration selected seven for assistance, foreseeing the INC as the umbrella organization. "

So -- what are we to do? as Lenin liked to ask. LI, omniscient as ever, will supply the answer to that question after breakfast, or in some upcoming post. Stay tuned, kids.

Remora

A couple of days ago LI indulged in that infantile positivism that makes our fair readership grimace and pretend not to know us. We made fun, that is, of the Yale Philosophy department's "probability theory and Jesus is my fave philosopher" conference. Or whatever it was called. We might have even implied that, between the News of the World's interviews with the Alien that advised Clinton, and Yale's faculty's attempts to prove the verity of the gospels, integrity, honesty, and science are all on the News of the World's side. As a followup, we recommend Jerry Coyne's mugging of a soft focus book by Michael Ruse that attempts to meld Darwinism and Christianity into the cutest little choir of Christmas decorations you ever saw.


The first paragraph actually solves our problem with the probability argument for the resurrection. If you will recall -- or even if you won't -- the post was about a NYT story involving a man who seemingly combined all the charming physical characteristics of Santa Claus and Charles Manson -- a Mr. Swinburne -- dispensing this shaky, if not downright dishonest, argument:

"Mr. Swinburne, a commanding figure with snow-white hair and piercing blue eyes, proceeded to weigh evidence for and against the Resurrection, assigning values to factors like the probability that there is a God, the nature of Jesus' behavior during his lifetime and the quality of witness testimony after his death. Then, while his audience followed along on printed lecture notes, he plugged his numbers into a dense thicket of letters and symbols � using a probability formula known as Bayes's theorem � and did the math. "Given e and k, h is true if and only if c is true," he said. "The probability of h given e and k is .97"

Mr. Coyne's article gives us an even better argument for Jesus' resurrection -- that is, if we are truth table freaks. Coyne reports on a recent radio interview given by some pius geneticist. The talk got around to the virgin birth. Well, the geneticist rather unhappily conceded, that is an, uh, anomoly. So where, a questioner wanted to know, did Jesus' Y chromosome come from? The geneticist dug through his bag of tricks, and came up with the answer that maybe Mary's two X chromosomes carried a piece of a Y chromosome. He didn't, according to Coyne, go any further with this fascinating discussion. But Coyne reminds us that for this to have happened, Mary would have to be a sterile man.

Well, the Light (capitalize that Light, editor) flashed before my eyes. Because but bien sur! If Mary were a sterile man, there is no Jesus. If no Jesus, no crucifixion. If we simply put this in truth table terms, we have two falses. Well, two fs make a t, as we all know. So Jesus not only resurrected, he trailed fishes and breadsticks out of that gloomy tomb! Mr. Swinburne should definitely write an article about this, making the argument that if c is true, that is Mary is a bachelor living in New York, and d is true, the Y chromosome determined Jesus' sex, there is a .97 percent chance that Giuliani is Jesus's father. No wonder the late mayor hated it when artists kept making fun of his bundle of joy!

Limited Inc is contemplating making a pitch to Yale. Surely, bearing such truths, a tenured position is waiting for us. We could definitely use the money.

Remora

A Ramble

"The golden age proclaimed by America. The golden age. And all the girls."

Exquisite Corpse does civilization and its discontents a favor, and publishes a translation of Oswaldo de Andrade's Cannibal Manifesto.

"I asked a man what was Right. He answered me that it was the assurance of the full exercise of possibilities. That man was called Galli Mathias. I ate him."

Oswaldo's works and days were spent on poetry, the libido, and communism. Or at least until, like all Latin American intellectual poobahs, he settled down into the utter fatuousness of old age, wallowing in his own lipids and lying memories. We do like his definitive refutation of the liberal principle, by the simple expedient of eating the liberal. St. Paul advises us to prove all things and hold fast that which is good.
Oswaldo simply supplements that dictum: do it with your mouth and teeth and tongue. We also like the fact that the the golden age proclaimed by America was, indeed, all about all the girls. For Oswaldo, the younger the better. This is easier to do when you have the time for it. Luckily, Oswaldo came from a wealthy family. He was not only a creator of modernism, but a creation of one of modernism's monsters: the newspapers. He became a personality in Brazilian newspapers in the twenties, traveled to Europe and discovered the Futurists, Dadaists, and pullulating other ists, and returned with the mission to create some Brazilian equivalent of what he'd seen. In some ways, the typical modernist in the Picabia mode:


"In his behavior and other features like the mania of meeting people and the insistence on seeing those that he knew, the speed with which he got sick of those whom, the previous day, he had put up in the clouds, the ingenuous search for contact with foreigners who were passing through; the experience of living in so many different environments; the familiarity with Midases and politicians, all these demonstrating an obvious quality of the nouveau riche; but also with chauffeurs and black Indians, who amused him intensely and whom he would collect. To crown all of this, the love for novelty of whatever form: ideas, books, meetings, new people, crimes. An overwhelming use of everything to reach knowledge, a notion, at least an increase in information, like someone who wished to swallow the world." CANDIDO, Antonio. "Digress�o sentimental sobre Oswald de Andrade" ("Sentimental Digression on Oswald de Andrade"). V�rios escritos (Various writings). S�o Paulo: Duas Cidades. 1970.

Limited Inc would like to put its seal of approval on cannibal poetics -- it surely is more fun than the disembodied, Jack Kerouacian Gooey Gupta school out there in Colorado. Or whatever it is called. However, being a politically minded we, we are aware that the image of the Indian, in a space that has been intentionally depopulated of same, can exert all the fascination it wants to: this is still all about the criminal's heirs pickpocketing the corpse for his one last thing thing of value -- his fame. And even getting that wrong. There is, after all, something in Nietzsche's complaint about poets: they do lie too much: or as Zarathustra, who classes himself with the poets, says, "we know too little and are bad pupils: so we are forced to lie."

Limited Inc has been reading Scott Malcomson's book on race in America, One Drop of Blood. Business Week published a nice review of the book when it came out. However, we think the reviewer, Marilyn Harris, misses at least one of Malcomson's points:

In one of the most persuasive and unnerving revelations, the writer shows that before Europeans arrived on American shores, there was no consciousness of Indian-ness among the many, highly distinct tribes; instead, identity was tribe-based. It took a while for white colonists to think of the natives as a group, as ''the other.'' It also took time for Indians to perceive that they were being defined as such. By degrees, ''colonial law and practice turned native tribal citizens into Indians,'' Malcomson notes, and into ''the still more mystifying category of people of color--a group that, in a further move, was associated by colonists with permanent slavery.''

The Native Americans' future would hold paradoxes and ironies as well as manifold miseries, and Malcomson deftly teases them from the historical record. The parallels between their story and that of both blacks and whites shackle the three groups together in an uncomfortable journey through the centuries. Some Indians were enslaved, but others held black slaves. Some Indians in the early 19th century constructed a ''theology of separation''--much as certain blacks did later on. This amounted to a fundamentalist creed that rejected white influences and culture. Those who mixed with whites and converted to Christianity entered a cultural purdah and were rejected by both sides. Still, there was intense government pressure to assimilate. Malcomson shows how the national census reflected a dwindling Indian population up until the 1950s. After that, it began increasing sharply--as racial pride grew and Indians, rather than census takers, were allowed to state their own affiliation."

Harris misses the context of Malcomson's irony. It is true that the population of Indians has been growing sharply, but there's a circular logic in thinking that it is because Indians have been allowed to state their own affiliation, if in fact the question is: who is an Indian? Rather, if we are reading Malcomson rightly, he is trying to say something about the slipperiness of racial categories. The whole racial notion of Indians went from being a unity enforced by the original, European colonialist understanding of the New World to being a category that justified, firstly, the depossession of the members of the category, and then their assimilation into the property laws and morals of white society (a category that was constructed in relationship to its others -- as any good deconstructionist would expect), and finally into being a category in which to take "pride." Why the continual evocation of pride? Because these racial categories operate on the limit of their definitional usefulness against the most puzzling of them: white. That "white blood" flows in the veins of the suddenly franchised lost nation of the Indians -- that a lost nation recovered by a change in census methodology -- shows... well, it shows what? It shows that the Indian is defined by the problem of being an Indian, rather than by some certain knowledge that makes for declaring an "affiliation." It shows that, by inference, the same is true for that not so universal solvent, white -- which can absorb Jew, Italian, and even Indian, but can never seemingly absorb black.

Perhaps we can emerge from the whiteness by way of the cannibal. But Limited Inc has his doubts about that optimistic program. At one time it looked like Rimbaud would make us free. But now we need a bulldozer.

Remora

Privatization is as much an ideological as a business proposition. Operating on the level of railroads or power, its ideological use is as a lever against regulation: a way of extracting things from the State. The idea that engrossing, macro projects can magically summon up the investment to make a profit in the far off future on selling to customers who have to 1. accustom themselves to the technology, and 2. justify the early adopter costs has been severely hit by the telecom meltdown -- Gilder's telecosm, like a middle aged man's orgasm, proved to be a spike of ecstatic sensation followed by the sag of deflation, and a heavy post-coital headache.

In today's NYT, there's an item by DIANA B. HENRIQUES and JACQUES STEINBERG
about the much vaunted Edison School project. Headed by Charles Whittle, the Tennessee money goon who contrived Channel One (that odious tv corporate brainwash that swept through the school systems (especially of the South) in the early 90s), Edison schools were supposed to show that education is best left to people who can grind a nice return on investment out of it. Ah, but it turns out that even if you put your tax dollars into these supposedly cost cuttin' ventures, the ventures can't make money on it. In fact, they never will, except on a scale that would, ironically, nationalize education:

"Analysts have estimated that Edison needs to raise as much as $40 million before next fall to fulfill the Philadelphia contract and to sustain the schools it already runs, which educate 75,000 children in 22 states.

The recent decline in Edison's share price from more than $20 a share in January to $2.66 at the close of the stock market yesterday makes the sale of fresh shares unlikely.Borrowing remains an option, but an expensive one. Edison had to pledge $61 million in assets last fall as collateral for a loan of only $20 million. It has paid as much as 20 percent interest on other loans, equivalent to credit card rates. It could still seek an infusion from private investors, help from government or aid from private foundations that look favorably on its mission. "

When you are borrowing at 20 percent, you are pretty much doomed. According to the article, the company's cumulative losses so far have reached 200 million dollars. And there are some questions about the revenue generated by Edison's schools -- appparently, costs are cut partly by using private donations. In other words, this for profit outfit is depending on non-profit charity.

Help might be on the way for Edison. As Mother Jones notes,, one of Edison's chief financial backers is John W. Childs. And Mr. Childs has a soft spot for the GOP:

"A graduate of Yale and Columbia universities, Childs first worked with leveraged buyouts at Prudential Insurance during the 1970s, and later moved on to manage the Boston-based buyout firm of Thomas H. Lee (No. 190, $256,800). There he helped negotiate the buyouts of Snapple Beverages and Ghirardelli Chocolate, among others. In 1995, Childs split from Lee, who remains a prominent Democratic donor, to start his own firm. Childs has since earned a reputation as a veritable ATM machine for the GOP. According to a recent study by the State Net Capitol Journal, Childs' contributions in Massachusetts accounted for 25 percent of total receipts to the national Republican Party between 1997 and 1999.

"One of Childs' most politically sensitive companies is Edison Schools, the country's largest for-profit operator of public schools. Childs and his buyout firm control 14 percent of Edison's common stock. President Bush's proposal to subsidize $3 billion in federal loans to establish new charter schools and issue private school vouchers to students in low-performing schools would certainly encourage Edison's business. As a recent Edison filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission noted: "If this business model fails to gain acceptance among the general public, educators, politicians, and school boards, we may be unable to grow our business."

One of the great myths of thrown around by Republican types is that there is a grassroots hunger for private schools in the ghetto ("in the ghetto" -- to be sung in an Elvis like tone). Now, on the one hand, that must be true -- just as there is a great hunger for any prestige item. If Andover plunks down in South Chicago and opens its doors, you can bet there'd be a line forming.

Unfortunately, most private schools aren't prestige factories. Andover isn't going to South Chicago, and if it did, it would either destroy its prestige (which depends heavily on it being the school of choice for wealthy parents), or select the same elite children.

The Philadelphia News has, of course, a more keen interest in Edison Schools than the NYT. This is a story about a request, filed by Republican Senator Arlen Spector and Dem congressman Chaka Fattah, for a good comparison of the record of Edison schools to the record of public schools. Although you can't bump into a conservative column on this subject without reading that these comparisons have already been made, and Edison come out the winner; in actual fact, Edison seems to be engaging in Enron accounting on more than one level:


"Benno C. Schmidt Jr., chairman of Edison's board of directors, who also testified, said Edison's schools overall have improved test scores by 5 or 6 percent a year, depending on the measure. He acknowledged that a small percentage of schools have slid backward."Look at it the way you would look at the record of Mike Schmidt as a third baseman," he said, referring to the former Phillies slugger. "It's not a matter of whether he struck out on occasion. It's a matter of the whole record."

One more time, for those slower readers who don't see LI's point: the conservative contradiction, here, is between ideology and mechanism. Ideologically, the grassroots right have fought to maintain local control of schools whereever they have fought. However, in the conservative dialectic, the libertarian moment is that in which public enterprises are released into private hands. What this means for schools is that, inevitably, control is wrested from the neighborhoods. As a pseudo-Marxist, I'm not sure what I think about this. I suspect a nationalized school system would accord children a more equal education. And I suspect that, to advance that kind of project, the initial takeover of local schools by a national private business would have to be the first step. Since the national private business will inevitably stumble -- according to the laws of the marketplace, and any study you want to make of the Fortune 400 companies over the last fifty years -- these schools would have to be rescued by the govenment. That, in turn, would creat a mosaic of governmentally controlled schools. And if those schools performed adequately, it would be hard to turn them back over to private enterprise.

There is a parallel here to agriculture. The Republican party included, as its most stalwart members, small farmers for most of the twentieth century. Yet the iron law of capitalism applied to those small farmers as well as to any other enterprise. The iron law, of course, was propped up, when drooping, by Congressional handouts, and a socialized water policy that benefited the wealthiest. So that today, the small farmer is as much an anachronism in the USA as he was in the former USSR. There is more than one way to collectivize, my brothers and sister.

"There was a law of lese-majeste against those who committed some fault against the Roman people. Tiberius grasped this law and applied it, not to those cases for which it was made, but for all those which could serve his hatred or his suspicions. Not only actions fell within the limits of the law, but words, signs, even thoughts: for what was said in the flow of the confidence of the heart between two friends can only be regarded as a species of thought. There was no liberty in celebrations, or in the confidences of parents, or in the fidelity of slaves; the dissimulation and melancholy of the prince communicated itself into all parts. Friendship was regarded as a reef, brilliance as an imprudence, virtue as an affectation which could recall, in the minds of the people, the happiness of times past."
-- Montesquieu, Considerations on the causes of the greatness and decadence of the Romans

The Observer sends its man to report from Cuba on the eve of Carter's visit. He wanders about, and picks up such gems as this, about the school system:

"The children, in pressed white shirts with red scarves tied neatly round their necks, eventually scuttle off to the call of the bell at Ruben Alvarez school - named, of course, after a revolutionary hero. ' Sin educacion no hay revolucion posible ' declares the sign at the entrance - Without education, revolution is not possible - alongside pictures of Elian Gonzalez restored to his father's loving arms. Head teacher Pilar Mejia explains that curricula are taught in strict accordance with the latest directive from the education ministry, and around five basic principles the first of which stipulates that (she reads, dutifully): 'To love our motherland should be the political goal of the educative process.'

The revolutionary catechism that began with such high hopes in Europe in the 19th century impinges itself by such low means on the children who must suffer this particular autumn of the Patriarch. Castro decays, and the country runs on liberal tourists of the Swedish variety, who can sample the delights of collectivization and still make the circuit for the prostitutes that troll through Habana -- no longer the brothel of the U.S., as it was under Batista, but a brothel with a motherland and a Che Guevara poster over the "put the quarter in the slot" bed. Remember that Pixies song?

She's a real left winger 'cause she's been down south
And held peasants in her arms
She said "I could tell you stories that could make you cry"

Well, here's some travelogue to make us all feel good:

"If there is a trinity of clich�s that brands Cuba, it is communism, cigars and libido. This third is nothing new, but it, too, has themes and variations. Sex walks the streets of Havana. Castro promised to liberate Cuba from its role as America's brothel. But by reintroducing the dollar, he has turned it into the boudoir for a new generation of clients from Europe, Canada and South America. Thousands of Havana's girls and women are for rent - by the hour, day, even by the week. Two in the morning, and the Parque Central is emptying out, but Mileydis Padrino Diaz is still on her patch, escorted by two gentlemen. One of them makes the approach, describing himself as 'a lawyer'. Milyedis, with braided hair and jeans, smiles bittersweetly. Ten dollars for the chica, plus another 10 for la casa - 12 quid the package.

The Observer's man (who, incidentally, has portrayed himself, in the best tradition of Clark Kent, resisting Mileydis' blandishments, and merely casting an objective eye over her, uh, habitus) digs up a dissident that Limited Inc can approve of (and we approve of so little, you know): Elizardo Sanchez. Apparently the Trotskyite wing of the Castro opposition. So he talks with Sanchez. But Sanchez doesn't look like a man with a lot of markers to play with in the post Castro era. Sadly enough.

Yes, the depressing thing is, Sanchez will be swept away by the deluge after the Patriarch is eaten, as is inevitably the case, by vultures. Castro has spent what? thirty, forty years? producing an island society that depends on him utterly, and will be gone, the victim of the recidivist Miami right, when he is gone.

I said, "I want to be a singer like Lou Reed."
"I like Lou Reed," she said, sticking her tongue in my ear.
"Let's go, let's sit, let's talk, politics goes so good with beer.
"And while we're at it, baby, why don't you tell me one of your biggest fears?"
I said, "Losing my penis to a whore with disease."
"Just kidding," I said. "Losing my life to a whore with disease."
She said, "Excuse me, please?"
I said, "Losing my life to a whore with disease."
She said, "Please."
Well, I'm a humble guy with healthy desire
Don't give me no shit because

I've been tired, I've been tired, I've been tired

Remora

Carnap once complained that the talk in the philosophy lounge in the University of Chicago reminded him less of the talk of scientists than of the talk of health food cranks. Carnap, of course, had the view that philosophy, if it wasn't a science, should be ashamed of itself. Unfortunately, post Carnap, philosophy regained its shamelessness. Witness this article about faith and logic in the NYT. Emily Eakins' article reports on a conference at Yale honoring Christian philosopher Richard Swinburne. When, years ago, there was a conference at Harvard that seriously considered UFO abduction stories, the university itself came in for considerable criticism for basically condoning tripe. And it should have. But what to make of a major university sponsoring a conference that includes things like this:

"For someone dead for 36 hours to come to life again is, according to the laws of nature, extremely improbable," Mr. Swinburne told an audience of more than 100 philosophers who had convened at Yale University in April for a conference on ethics and belief. "But if there is a God of the traditional kind, natural laws only operate because he makes them operate."

Mr. Swinburne, a commanding figure with snow-white hair and piercing blue eyes, proceeded to weigh evidence for and against the Resurrection, assigning values to factors like the probability that there is a God, the nature of Jesus' behavior during his lifetime and the quality of witness testimony after his death. Then, while his audience followed along on printed lecture notes, he plugged his numbers into a dense thicket of letters and symbols � using a probability formula known as Bayes's theorem � and did the math. "Given e and k, h is true if and only if c is true," he said. "The probability of h given e and k is .97"

Given the probability that there was a Carnap, and assigning values to the probability that, in life, he would have reacted to this crapola with a violence ranging between x and z, the probability of him rolling in his grave right now must be around .993. The mindblowing nature of this mumbo-jumbo (we especially like the "factor" of Jesus' behavior during his lifetime -- does this mean Jesus was a nice guy, or that he didn't smoke?) is highlighted by the fact that that it can be tolerated at a school which, at least once upon a time, did have a respectable philosophy department. We know the glory days have long departed for Yale, but this is more than sad -- this is the sort of intellectual activity one expects to encounter at a Peshawar medresse. Alvin Plantinga is the mullah at the center of this particular intellectual decline and fall.

"More influential at the moment, however, are the "reformed epistemologists" led by Mr. Plantinga and Mr. Wolterstorff, who are Calvinists. These scholars reject the evidentialist insistence on independent proofs. After all, they point out, the ability to distinguish good evidence from bad requires reason, but why trust our ability to reason? Where's the proof that our reason is any good? For the evidentialists, reason is considered a "basic belief," one that doesn't require additional evidence to be true. But if reason can be considered a basic belief, then so, too, say the reformed epistemologists, can faith in God."

Plantinga's giant contribution to the world is a philosophical defense of intelligent design.

"Mr. Plantinga has devoted three thick volumes and the last 20 years to the effort [to distinguish between justified true belief and illegitimate belief], stressing, among other things, that for a belief to be justified, it must be held by a person whose mental faculties are functioning properly.

More aggressively, he has suggested that our capacity for true beliefs is proof that a divine creator � rather than Darwinian natural selection � is behind evolution: if human beings evolved by random process from mentally primitive creatures, how could we be sure that any of our beliefs � including our belief in evolution � are true?"

That Ms. Eakins was impressed that theologians could do math and spout nonsense at the same time is not incomprehensible -- it is a little like an idiot savant being able to simultaneoulsy play with a yoyo and multiply. In other words, there's a respectable place in traveling carnivals and Midwestern Christian academies for this kind of thing. But she is a little too, uh, tolerant at this point. Surely a reporter for the NYT who'd hotfooted back to the paper iwth news of the teachings of, say, Abdul Rashid Ghazi, would probably have to deal with some editorial collaging -- the compare and contrast editing that conditions the outrageous claims of one's source with the moderating citations of other, countering sources. LI would recommend subjecting the perfervid lucubrations of Plantinga to a similar treatment.

Remora


Terry Eagleton begins his review of Michael Moore's book -- the one about White Men, or that has White Men in the title, or something like that -- with a few choice kicks at the US of A. Now, LI enjoys kicking Uncle Sam ourselves. It is a pity that Eagelton's kicks are so lackluster and lacking, beginning with a silly exaggeration, going on to make a valid point about Saddam Hussein (although the point should be qualified, since France and the Soviet Union were Hussein's main arms suppliers), but damning it with the lukewarm phrase, "backing" (instead of specifying the real wickedness of US policy -- namely, tilt towards Iraq during the first phase of the war, supplying the country with a four hundred million dollar loan and taking it off the blacklist of terrorist states and all that jazz, and then tilting towards Iran when it appeared Iraq had reconciled with the evil empire, as this Z Mag article documents). Finally, and most pathetically, Eagelton a leftist in editorial heat, decides to ecrasez l'infame that is oppressing high school students everywhere by making them, shockingly, change their politically charged t shirts for more neutral gear. Is this swallowing a camel and straining at a gnat, or what? In his lather at such nazi like tactics, he overlooks the imprisonment without cause or trial of some 3,000 persons of middle eastern origin. This, however, is sadly typical of the left in high dudgeon. There should be courses taught, somewhere, in how to get in high dudgeon without making a fool of yourself.


It is a pity that the Land of the Free lacks a free press and media. CBS and the Wall Street Journal are not in the business of reminding their customers that Osama bin Laden was a creation of the CIA, or that the USA once backed Saddam Hussein in a war which left one million Muslims dead.They are not given to trumpeting the truth that the US is a democracy with a fraudulently elected president, or that it turned a blind eye to Indonesia's genocidal invasion of East Timor while pummelling Iraq for moving non-genocidally into Kuwait. It is not every evening that Fox TV, in denouncing Iraqi weapons of mass slaughter, castigates in the same breath the nuclear weaponry of an increasingly state-terrorist Israel.Since September 11th, political dissent in the USA has become not only muted but positively perilous. Radical academics have been threatened with dismissal for sounding less than gung-ho about the Afghanistan adventure, while a schoolgirl who sported a T-shirt reading "Neither Bush nor Bin Laden" was ejected from her school for fear of contaminating her fellows.

It is this kind of shopping list that exasperates LI. When Marx thundered against Louis Napoleon, he did not consider Louis' oppression of lycee couture. He had a grasp of the macro features of oppression, and was able to convey them. Eagleton, on the other hand, whines like a ponce in the hands of the cops. Is it any wonder the left is becoming a sideshow cult?

We can only hope some of those radical academics are dismissed, thereby taking their anger to the street, instead of distributing it, over cheese on crackers, at the English faculty party.

Remora

The Washington Post reports on the Colombian Civil war today. The article is very impressed with the derring do that went into its making:


"With the U.S.-backed military apparently powerless to intervene, leftist rebels and right-wing paramilitary forces staged a major battle over several days without interference from the government.

A two-day visit to this remote jungle region -- reached after six hours of river travel -- revealed a civilian population abandoned to its fate. Despite warnings that a battle was imminent, the Colombian military did not arrive in the area until Tuesday, after Mirage jets and Black Hawk helicopters fired on rebel positions on the banks of the muddy Atrato River and two of the jets dropped bombs in the jungle to clear landing zones. The army's first ground troops arrived in the town today."

Six hours of river travel! You know Scott Wilson, the man who presumably traveled down river in such exciting style, will be bragging about this in Foggy Bottom bars for the rest of his natural born days. Probably had indian scouts, too.

Of course, there is something a little suspicious about the apparent "powerlessness" of the US backed military. Because those right wing paramilitary forces, where do they come from? How are they armed?

Think: Plan Colombia. Think: how were the Contras armed?

Michelle Lescure reports, in the World Press Review , on one of the biggest arms shipments to Colombia -- biggest illegal arms shipment, I should say. Although its illegality is shrouded in beach and jungle night, just as its source is:

"The biggest illegal arms shipment known to have arrived in Colombia landed in Turbo, a port on the Gulf of Urab�, on Colombia's Atlantic coast, last November. The weapons, enough to equip a lethal paramilitary offensive, were unloaded into trucks at the port, which has been controlled for several years by the right-wing United Colombian Self-Defense (AUC) militia. What happened to the weapons after they disappeared inland is still, officially, a mystery. But an unidentified "member of the AUC high command" boasted in the April 25 edition of Bogot�s centrist El Tiempo that "we have fooled the authorities of four countries," and claimed his paramilitary force has the arms. A belated Colombian investigation into the matter has sparked a many-headed international scandal."

Later on in her article, Lescure finds hints that the arms might have originated, or at least been purchased by, some of the dribs and drabs money Congress has been shuffling to the Colombian military (that "powerless" force in the WP article):

"Investigators are following a trail of documents and financial records. According to one source close to the investigation, who spoke on condition of anonymity, the trail appears to lead directly back to the coffers of Plan Colombia, a sweeping Colombian program designed to end the civil war, curtail narcotics production and trafficking, and stimulate the economy. On July 13, 2000, former U.S. President Bill Clinton approved a US$1.3-billion assistance package for the plan. On Oct. 24, 2001, the U.S. Congress approved an additional US$698 million, US$106 million less than U.S. President George W. Bush had requested, for the Andean Regional Initiative, which seeks to prevent the conflict in Colombia from spilling over into surrounding countries.

Panamanian President Mireya Moscoso has assured journalists that "the police never arranged to acquire these arms." But the Israeli arms dealers, Oris Zoller and Uzi Kisslevich, who---acting as co-owners of the Guatemalan company Grupo Internacional de Representaciones (GIR, S.A.), allegedly on Panama's behalf---bought the weapons that eventually made it to Colombia, insist that the import license by which they acquired the weapons was authorized by Panama's Minister of Government and Justice, Alex Vergara. "We had an understanding that the document pertained to the Panamanian police," Zoller told Guatemala City�s independent Siglo XXI (April 24)."

Admittedly, the trail of these particular weapons, as Lescure uncovers it, is an obscure affair that seems to confound Lescure's ability to clarify it, as Israeli arms dealers and Nicaraguan middle men pullulate at an astonishing rate in the course of the Otterloo, the boat that was loaded with weaponry for one of Colombia's mercenary forces.

Dope

The Judge�s skin


�Cambyses was a great emperor, such another as our master is. He had many lord-deputies, lord-presidents, and lieutenants under him. It is a great while ago since I read the history. It chanced he had under him, in one of his dominions, a briber, a gift-taker, a gratifier of rich men; he followed gifts as fast
as he that followed the pudding, a hand-maker in his office to make his son a great man, as the old saying is: Happy is the child whose father goeth to the devil. The cry of the poor widow came to
the emperor�s ear, and caused him to flay the judge quick, and laid his skin in the chair of judgment, that all judges that should give judgment afterwards should sit in the same skin. Surely it was a
goodly sign, a goodly monument, the sign of the judge�s skin. I pray God we may once see the skin in England.�

This is Hugh Latimer, quoted for splendid, bloody effect by Macaulay as he reaches his butcher�s hand in and takes hold of the last little sweetmeats that are left to Francis Bacon�s immortal moral character. Macaulay has a very meat eater�s joy in attacking his prey. His prose assumes this wonderful sahib drollery, which you can tell he used to roll out when some heathen was brought to his office in Calcutta and he had to �straighten the boy out.� There�s a phrase in one of Shaw�s plays, Heartbreak House, in which Lady Utterwood explains what her husband does in the colonies:

LADY UTTERWORD. There is Hastings. Get rid of your ridiculous sham democracy; and give Hastings the necessary powers, and a good supply of bamboo to bring the British native to his senses: he will save the country with the greatest ease.

I should say that Lady Utterword belongs to a latter period of the governing classes, when they were in decay. Still, that bamboo sometimes obviously tempts our Mac.

There must be, there is, more to say about Latimer's vivid, wild, frightening image. If Limited Inc had world and time, we would dive into the numerous literary uses of the flayed human skin � from the Nazi lampshade to this marvelous judge�s chair. Judges, of course, ask for it. Daumier saw it � how costume essentially gives them away, how the faces assume, over the years, a Polichinello cast. But to see
the sign of the skin in England � ah, that is harsh, harsh. Yet doesn�t LI wish, sometimes, to see some (not all, a select few) congressmen and Senators flayed in just this way? The insufferable Billy Tauzin, for instance, presiding right now, with appropriate outbursts of righteousness, over the Enron scandal, who previously shilled shamelessly for the auditor giants and against Levitt.

Off track, (CHARACTER WITH MOUSTACHE SAYS), we are getting off track...

Macaulay�s assault on Francis Bacon chose an object of enduring, and mysterious, interest. Francis Bacon has a knack for attracting attention -- or at least he does dead.. There is the famous McGuffin of claiming Bacon wrote Shakespeare�s plays. There are also claims that he was Queen Elizabeth�s bastard son, that he was one of the avatars, like Buddha and whoever the guru of the day is, and so on. The Macaulay attack, for these people, is a perennial source of infinite indignation. It is the devil�s view of the gospels. For a nice point by point in this direction, click this link.

Where to start with Francis Bacon? We aren't going for the whole bio. A few facts is all. Francis Bacon and his brother Anthony were born to one of the Tudor�s political families. Like the Cecils, the Bacons flourished in office, had that peculiar ability to administer. This was no mean thing � the Tudors, unlike the clan monarchs before them, or the Stuarts that succeeded them, survived by administering.

Francis Bacon rose very high in Elizabeth�s court. Lord Essex was, Macaulay points out, his patron. Elizabeth had an incredible number of very sinister figures working for her. If you read about the infighting that characterized her reign, you soon get the feeling that there was something very ... Stalinistic about the whole thing. Not that she was Stalin. Rather, it is the way the odor of the secret police seems to scent the air of her counselor's confabs.

Lord Essex is one of her great courtiers. We all associate him with Shakespeare. Macaulay emphasizes the relationship between the rising Francis B. and Essex, leaving out Anthony B., who was even more attached to the man. It is an invidious elision -- much of what went down when Essex conspired against Elizabeth, and Francis made his move against Essex, has to do with loyalties to Anthony.

But the worst is that Macaulay sentimentalizes Essex. Bacon�s most recent biographers, Lisa Jardine and Alan Stewart, emphasize the homoerotic culture of Essex�s entourage. Macaulay doesn�t even mention Anthony Bacon, but, J and S have painstakingly discovered, Anthony was in trouble with the authorities over a little bit of sodomy... in his time. And Francis, too, was inclined to is it AC or DC? I always forget. Until, at forty, he married some thirteen year old girl.

Well, we can�t expect the Victorians to be as endlessly fascinated with sex as we are, so these are the
unmentioned in Macaulay�s essay. That doesn�t mean he is unaware of at least the rumor that Bacon was AC (or DC). Macaulay�s first accusation against Bacon is that he betrayed Essex. It is a very interesting accusation, considering how Macaulay is considered the epitome of philistinism, because it echoes something very deep in English culture � one hear�s in this boorish gentleman�s creed the distant tintinnabulation of the Bloomsbury credo, phrased, in this century, by E.M. Forster�s �if I had to betray my friend or my country, I hope I would have the guts to betray my country.�

Those who defend Bacon make the point that Macaulay abbreviates episodes, distorts the meaning of the
justification of Essex�s execution that Bacon, under Elizabeth�s order, was obliged to grind out, and quotes
selectively from the trial. J. and S., however, come down gingerly on Macaulay�s side. It seems that Coke, that
idiot, was messing up the hearing on Essex, when Bacon straightened the case out with a well chosen
comparison to recent events in France. Macaulay is horrified by the coolness of Bacon�s move.
TBC

Dope
Auguste Dupin once traced the course of his companion�s thoughts by a series of inductions that attached to the dumbshow of his companion�s expressions - the microworld of steps, frowns, glances, and furrows that, in the nineteenth century, was being explored with absurd confidence by German physiognomists -- until, interrupting that silent monologue, he made some magically relevant comment. The nineteenth century motif: detective as magician, consciousness as a rather easily demystified magic trick � we love it, we love it. LI (and the century we escaped from) has only a broken faith in the coherence and topical unity of the consciousness, even our own; still, we find it worth while (infinitely narcissistic as we are) to navigate the branches of our thought on the bateau ivre until we come to the source of our sudden interest in Macaulay.

Because in the last post we lied. Our readers haven�t been clamoring for explication de texte; they�ve been clamoring for naked pictures of Britney Spears.

But patience, one day, perhaps....
In the meantime -- our more faithful readers will remember that lately, we have been fascinated with Burke. At least, we have been quoting him a lot. And we have been reading Burke�s most ardent current defender, Conor Cruise O�Brien. O�Brien�s spirited attack on Burke�s critics prompted us to pick up Jeremy Bernstein�s biography of Warren Hastings, the East Indian company�s governor in Calcutta after Clive, and the victim of an impeachment process in the 1780s that never succeeded completely in impugning his character, but did succeed in giving Burke a reputation for madness. Even in the 18th century, when there was a patience for extended, hypoglycemic oratory that can only be compared to the curious stoner enthusiasm of the of the sixties and the seventies for 15 minute guitar solos of extreme monotony, Burke�s rants got on the nerve of the governing classes. They liked to see an orator collapse in tears and sweat, but they were less thrilled when these effects were more generally present in the audience, and the audience had gambling to do.

Bernstein convinced me that Hastings was a much better man than Burke and O�Brien painted him; there's an essay about the nostalgic imperialism of the new conservative crowd in the New Statesman that bears quoting on this point. It is by Maria Misra, and it conflates, without ironic intention, I think, the programs of Hastings and Burke:

"It would be anachronistic to identify these tolerant 18th-century attitudes to race and culture with those of modern liberal opinion. Hastings and his colleagues were certainly not bien-pensant radicals. Colour prejudice was common, not just among the British. Many Indians, then as now, favoured the "wheaten" complexion (the Indian word for caste is varna, meaning "colour").


But what made Hastings and his peers different from the pith-helmeted empire-builders of the Raj lay in their adherence to a kind of Burkean conservatism, which, with its concern for tradition, its respect for the authority of custom and practice, and hostility to the new, nurtured a kind of 18th-century cultural relativism. As Hastings himself observed: "Bengal is already a great nation and has no need of the supposedly superior wisdom of the English." It may dismay modern liberals, but this tolerant era was to be swept aside by their early Victorian avatars, the utilitarians.


For utilitarians, relativism of any kind was anathema. Good government, to them, consisted in the application of universal principles of law. From this universalising liberalism emerged the more extreme examples of Victorian imperial arrogance; 19th-century liberalism may have been liberating at home, but abroad it was a weapon in the armoury of the cultural imperialist. Without the iron-clad confidence of the ideological zealot, the utilitarian James Mill (father of John Stuart Mill), a man who had never set foot in India, could not have written a multi-volume history of the subcontinent, denouncing manners, culture and practices of which he was almost wholly ignorant. Likewise, it was the liberal polemicist and historian Thomas Macaulay who confidently claimed that a single shelf of books in a good European library was worth more than the entire written corpus of India and Arabia put together."

Misra's Macaulay is the common type, the one I have some passing acquaintance with. However, there�s a passage that intrigued me in Bernstein. Macaulay, Bernstein said, has a style like champagne, so that one sometimes forgets how bogus his points are in one�s appreciation of how he is making them.

These disjunct fragments can't be shored against Macaulay's ruin. They simply have to be sorted through.
Since Macaulay lived in Calcutta, and must have had some gossipy knowledge of Hastings himself, I wonder if Bernstein is being wholly fair. O�Brien is a fierce twit about Burke�s detractors, yet the politics of Burke�s objection to Hastings seems sound to LI. However, do we really want to turn in the gyre of the
Hastings story? No. We got more interested in the long essay on Bacon, for the reasons we gave
in the last post.

Meaning � sorry, but the next post will be about Macaulay and Bacon. Those looking for the usual trenchant missiles we hike at the NYT, or Sharonophiles, or Enron apologists, will just have to come back here in a couple of days, when we have found our mind. Right now, we simply want to lose it.

Dope

Limited Inc has been in operation for almost a year now. And we've discovered that our readers want bold stands. They want LI out there on the barricades. They want no shirking. They want LI to march, martyr-like, into the burning issues of the day -- into the very heart of the pyre. This is why so many of you have written in -- flocks of you, herds of you, you know how you congregate out there, in the darkness, a murder of readers, sometimes we wake up and feel you out there, sometimes we really do -- written in to ask us point blank: was Macauley right about Francis Bacon?

You are, of course, referring to Macaulay's hundred page "review" of Basil Montague's edition of the works of Francis Bacon. Macaulay wrote it in Calcutta, and saw it published by the Edinburgh Review in July, 1837. Like many other of Macaulay's essays, it had an electric effect after it was published. The Victorians always did things on an imperial scale: While LI is happy if we have 1000 words to tussle with a book, Macaulay was given 100 pages to review, essentially, a preface. The next editor of Bacon's works, a man named Spedding, wrote a nine hundred page refutation of Macaulay's essay. This is the same logic that conquered most of Africa and half of Asia.

In John Clive's biography of Thomas Macaulay, he devotes the last chapter, a sort of epilogue, to surveying the Victorian response to the Bacon essay (And no, no, LI has not read the refutation of Macaulay published by Spedding; we have a habit, around here, of taking nine hundred page refutations written in the 1870s on trust). Clive's point is that one can use Macaulay's essay to measure a fracture in the Victorian mind between the rampant positivism which infused the attitude of the Whig power structure, with its strong hold on the merchant and business class, and the Conservative reaction to capitalism. Marx, of course, thought that capitalism was a revolutionary force dissolving the tough integument of traditional ties, unconsciously but efficiently carrying out the labor of the the Weltgeist. Of course, by and by, when all the ties were dissolved and the key to wealth was unlocked, history's favored class, the proletariat, would sit in the faux palaces of the bourgeoisie, and we'd all become literary critics in the morning, do a little bit of steel producing in the afternoon, and some fishing on the weekends. The Conservative critique, however, was much more on the screen for the the Victorian poobahs, who only gradually realized that the working class was beginning to feel itself as a class. In the early Victorian period, that critique took its bearings from Coleridge. Clive identifies Coleridge as the third man in Macaulay's enemy, the force behind Montague. Coleridge had already promoted Bacon as the English Plato. (See this essay by Harvey Wheeler on Coleridge's claim on the constitution org site) As a Plato, Bacon could be used against the force that was transforming the traditional form of property, and the hierarchy built upon it, because that force was perceived to be against every cultural value worth keeping. The Whiggish assault on the conventions of the rural landholders, on religion, was to its professional mourners (from Carlyle to Ruskin) the Dunciad writ large -- dullness as a social force, philistinism as a cultural dominant, the rush into some vast darkness within which one could hear, faintly, the reverberation of gunfire. From Emerson to Newman to Arnold, all the 19th century poobahs agreed that the philistine attitude had a charter, a Magna Carta, and it was the Bacon essay.

Emerson, in the English Traits, is referring to that essay when he shrewdly sums up Macaulay:

"The brilliant Macaulay, who expresses the tone of the English governing classes of the day, explicitly teaches, that _good_ means good to eat, good to wear, material commodity; that the glory of modern philosophy is its direction on "fruit;" to yield economical inventions; and that its merit is to avoid ideas, and avoid morals. He thinks it the distinctive merit of the Baconian philosophy, in its triumph over the old Platonic, its disentangling the intellect from theories of the all-Fair and all-Good, and pinning it down to the making a better sick chair and a better wine-whey for an invalid; --this not ironically, but in good faith; -- that, "solid advantage," as he calls it, meaning always sensual benefit, is the only good. The eminent benefit of astronomy is the better navigation it creates to enable the fruit-ships to bring home their lemons and wine to the London grocer. It was a curious result, in which the civility and religion of England for a thousand years, ends, in denying morals, and reducing the intellect to a sauce-pan."

So, let's sum up before the next post: the Macaulay essay was considered, on the one hand, to be a vicious caricature of Francis Bacon's character by a whole line of Bacon enthusiasts; and on the other hand, to be an extension of the unpleasantly practical side of Bacon's character by those who saw the practical turn in philosophy, and its social consequences, as the downfall of the best and the brightest. To quote a historian quoted by Clive, the essay was the "locus classicus of Victorian anti-intellectualism."

Since these forms are still with us, and these forces still rage underneath our feet, LI feels entitled to survey, at luxurious length, M.'s essay. Until the next post, children, adieu.

Remora

Among the more remarkable purveyors of nonsense about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is, surprisingly, Ron Rosenbaum. His Edgy Enthusiast column in the NYObserver has gone over the edge. We'd like to remind Mr. Rosenbaum that Enthusiast was a code word, in the enlightenment, for Bigot. The underground work of connotation is slow, but apparently sure.

In two columns of invective and malignly erroneous analysis, on April 15th andApril 29th, Rosenbaum has been going on about the second holocaust, an idea he cops from that great social commentator, Philip Roth. The idea is that in Europe and the MiddleEast, the dark machinery is clanking that will be put in place to eliminate Jews wholesale. This explains the sympathy of the Europeans for the PLO, and their blindness to the David-like qualities of the present Israeli Commander inChief, Sharon (a man of peace, as our own commander in chief has admiringly opined).

Now to present a thesis like this, Rosenbaum has to overcome a few little problems. One, a big one it would seem, is that Jews per se are not being targeted en masse by any European government or faction -- immigrants are. And guess what? Those immigrants are Turks, they are Algerians, they are Africans, they are Bosnians -- in short, they are the Evil ones, the ones condemned to wallow in the cachots of American prisons as material witnesses, the ones with names like Muhammed. You know the ones I'm talking about. As for the anti-Semitism of Middle Eastern countries -- here, I believe, RR is on firmer ground. Not being a speaker of Arabic, I don't know how to judge the reports that filter in from Egypt, or from Saudi Arabia, and get distributed by right wingers like the ineffable Krauthammer -- reports that speak of widespread anti-Jewish motifs in Arabic media. However, I am inclined to think this is true. You don't have to go far on the web to find Anti-zionist sites that are really anti-Semitic.

However, it is important to note something right away about this. RR's second holocaust has already happened. In Morocco, Yemen, Iraq, and numerous other Middle Eastern countries, pogroms against the Jews broke out in the fifties, and many of these so called Oriental Jews decamped for Israel. This was a great crime, but there's been little attention paid to it. In fact, LI is so smart about these events because we've been reading a lot of books about Israel's history. Those books necessarily mentioned the influx of Yemeni, Iraqui, Syrian, and other Jews into Israel. Standard books about the fifties that don't focus on Israel, however, ignore this displacement. Why? Well, face it, America was allied with many of those places back then. And since the fifties, Israel has maintained disgraceful relations with vilely anti-semitic regimes, from South Africa to Argentina to Morocco. This strategy of calling attention to anti-semitism when it is convenient to do so has rather lessened the credit of the strategy of calling attention to anti-semitism.

What happened in the fifties wasn't, we should say, a holocaust. There is something cheap about this baker's dozen notion of the holocaust. If Mr. Rosenbaum can't distinguish the Holocaust from a pogrom, we can. We can also distinguish the Holocaust from the torching of synagogues by right wing punks; and we can distinguish it from the murder of Israelis by Palestinian suicide bombers, or bombers, period.

But let's grant, for the moment, this truly disgusting degradation of the word Holocaust. Rosenbaum�s thesis is a pretty simple one. That an anti-Zionist can be anti-semitic means, in Rosenbaum's world, that an opponent of Israel, at any time, on any of its policies, is necessarily anti-Semitic. This sounds like exaggeration on LI's part. Surely nobody is that over the edgy. But read, oh read this: RR simultaneously shedding crocodile tears over the Palestinians and wishing them, well, a form of endless night. Call this the Cherokee solution, after Andrew Jackson's decisive mode of dealing with those Native American terrorists in the Southeast:

"I feel bad for the plight of the Palestinians; I believe they deserve a state.But they had a state: They were part of a state, a state called Jordan, that declared war on the state of Israel, that invaded it in order to destroy it�and lost the war. There are consequences to losing a war, and the consequences should at least in part be laid at the feet of the three nations that soughtand lost the war. One sympathizes with the plight of the Palestinians, but one wonders what the plight of the Israelis might have been had they lostthat war. One doesn�t envision spacious homes and ping-pong for their leaders."

It is a plight those Palestinians are in. Always a plight. Have any people been so plighted in the press before? It isn't a crime, it isn't a ghetto, it isn't civil servitude, it isn'tthe denial of the right to property, political sufferage, and all the rest ofit. It is a plight. The phrase Palestinian plight is beginning to sound like the phrase, Jewish problem, in the thirties. It is, well, disturbing.

But not so disturbing as that idyll of spacious houses. Hmm. Gaza? Are we talking about the spacious houses of Jenin? Of Hebron? The spacious houses of those wonderful Palestinian resorts in Southern Lebanon?

Far be it from me to doubt the sincerity, the aching wonder, of RR's bad feelings about the Palestinians. I'm sure it makes him lose his appetite, sometimes. I am sure that the first thing he wants to do, when he goes to Israel, is contemplate the squalor of the Gaza strip. I'm sure I have no gauge to measure RR's heart. But we do have some rough gauges to measure his hypocrisy. For instance: did you notice how cutely shedding tears over the Palestinians edges into taking a position indistinguishable from that of the most right wing of Sharon's cabinet ministers, Ephraim Eitam? Instead of simply saying, let's bus em out, no, there's the infinite pity on these losers of a war. Like our Commander in Chief, RR is a compassionate nationalist on this issue. His heart is full of love. And his advice is full of extermination. In the end, what RR is advocating is: the expulsion of all Palestinians to Jordan. It is a more in sorrow than in anger kind of thing. It is a far far better thing I do than I have ever done before kind of thing. It is a well, it is a dirty job, but somebody has to do it kind of thing. And to those who find it too dirty -- those hoodlums, those distributors of blood libels who dare question the great Sharon's account of the humane treatment of Jenin scum -- well, we know their motives.

But just when you thought the curtain was going down on this kind of farce, it rises again in the second column on the Second Holocaust. Here, here is the spot where RR truly takes leave of his senses, taking the position that Le Pen is campaigning chiefly against the Jews. This is rather like thinking that the KKK? You know, in the sixties, in Mississippi? They were really focused on the Jews. The stuff about the negroes? That was just, well, collateral.

It is hard to describe just how silly RR's idea is. The "'raus 'raus" in Le Pen's speeches is not, as educated readers of this post know, directed against the Jews. Le Pen is no doubt a Jew hater. Jew hating wouldn't get him the percentage that he received. No, what gets him the votes is his Arab hating. His immigrant hating. It isn't the synagogues Le Pen wants to burn, at least not at first. It is the mosques. But here's RR, going out of his mind again:

"And now Le Pen. Its seems as if the mask is coming off European anti-Semitism right and left. I don�t want to say I told you so aboutEuropean�specifically French�anti-Semitism (see my April 15 column on the rootsof the Second Holocaust). It doesn�t afford any satisfaction to have one�s darkest imaginings confirmed.

"But when I heard the news about Le Pen, I was thinking about Amos Oz, theIsraeli novelist and longtime dovish advocate of living side-by-side in peace with a Palestinian state, and how he had been driven by events of the past fewweeks to ask the question (in The Nation), "Would an end to occupationterminate the Muslim holy war against Israel?" This is, of course, the key question that the anti-Israel Euro-idiots don�t get, and here Amos Oz,peace-loving man of letters and friend of many Palestinians, says that "If, despite simplistic vision, the end of occupation will not result in peace," he favors war. "Not a war for our full occupancy of the HolyLand"�he�s against the occupation of the West Bank�"but a war for ourright to live � in part of the land. A just war, a no-alternative war. A war we will win."

RR goes on to doubt the "we will win" line -- without alluding to Israel's nuclear arsenal. I guess the fact that Israel has a greater nuclear weapon delivery capacity than, say, Britain, doesn't matter to RR, who is up there on a much higher, even a metaphysical level. Facts, as one of our great leaders once said, are stupid things. And who needs stupid things to interfere with the higher truths? Among which, for RR, is that it is high time that Jordan was for the Jordanians. Especially those nasty ones in the West Bank and Gaza. Ship em back, but don't forget to shed tears over their dispossession.

I don't know. LI feels bad, too. In general.