Dope

The Pilate problem

James Fitzjames Stephen was a Victorian bravo of the purest water. When Gertrude Himmelfarb gets all fluttery about Victorian masculinity, she is undoubtedly envisioning a man of Stephen's type. In his entry in the 1911 Encyclopedia Brittanica, he is described as �massive, downright, indefatigable and sincere even to unnecessary frankness.� In other words, a sort of Mr. Rochester sprung from Jane Eyre�s tale.

Stephen was a member of the Apostles, the Cambridge group, in the 1840s � well before it became the conglomeration of aestheticism and the higher buggery under Keynes and Strachey � where he met Henry Maine, the legal historian; Stephen, having no taste for curateships, went into law himself; in his practical life, he eventually devoted himself to grafting principles of English common law into the workings of the British Raj in India.

The Mills, of course, father and son, were the redeeming intellectual ornaments of the East Indian Company, and Stephen must have been highly aware of them in his work. It is said � at least, in the 1911 Encyclopedia Brittanica it is said � that on the boat back from India, Stephen, reading John Stuart Mill�s On Liberty, devised his rebuttal, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity


The book rather sank. Lately, however, it has become the subject of a little Tory cult.

Among the little band of Fitzjames Stephen's acolytes, none is fiercer than Roger Kimball of the New Criterion. Kimball, who has done his warrior bit in the Kulturkampf of the early nineties, rousting out tenured radicals and exposing them for the dubious souls that they are, has featured Stephen as a sort of Archangel Michael, putting the sword in the breast of that loathsome liberal toady of Satan, John Stuart Mill. Kimball�s loathing of Mill has breathed even in the pages of the Opinion section of the Wall Street Journal, where all conservative hobby-horses eventually find a home. But there's a problem. Mill is widely revered in Libertarian circles. Kimball represents one crucial side of the untidy conservative front. He is plainly unhappy with his libertarian allies.

In an essay in November, 1998, that served as the centerpiece for a later, book-length attack on�liberalism,� Kimball poured out the vials of his wrath on Mill, � and as is the way of New Criterion loathings and the mood of the time, he attacks him as a sexual being as well as a thinker. Kimball, like Ken Starr, is a great one for keeping up with the bedroom habits of his enemies. In Mill�s case, the great sin was one of omission, rather than commission. Kimball writes, of Mill's relationship to his wife Harriet, �it is noteworthy that this "lofty minded" relationship was apparently never consummated.� There are, it appears, no sexual depravities to which the liberal mind won�t sink � including chastity.

In this essay, Kimball referred to Stephen�s book, Liberty, Fraternity, Equality. The book has already been rescued by Richard Posner, and has found its way into the reading list of the Federalist Society. Here�s Kimball�s assessment of it:

�By far the most concentrated and damaging single attack on Mill's liberalism is Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, first published serially in the Pall Mall Gazette in 1872-1873, and then in book form in March 1873 in the last year of Mill's life. It was written by the lawyer, judge, and journalist Sir James Fitzjames Stephen (1829-1894): Leslie Stephen's older brother and hence--such is the irony of history--Virginia Woolf's uncle. Mill himself never responded to Stephen's book beyond observing, as Leslie Stephen reports in his excellent biography of his brother, that he thought the book "more likely to repel than attract." But several of Mill's disciples responded--the most famous of whom was the liberal politician and journalist John Morley (1838-1923). Stephen brought out a second edition of his book the following year, 1874, in which he reproduces and replies to many criticisms raised by Morley and others. Stephen described Liberty, Equality, Fraternity as "mainly controversial and negative." Pugnacious and devastating would be equally appropriate adjectives. As one commentator put it, Stephen made "mincemeat" of Mill.�

One notes that there is nothing worthy, sexually, of noting about Stephen. Thank God.

The Federalist Society of Wisconsin has, very kindly, made available half of Stephen�s famous polemic on-line.We�ve entertained ourselves, in these doggy days of flu and cloud, by reading the great man. It turns out that Kimball is right � at least, he is right to accord Stephen a great deal of recognition. The confused elements of American conservativism, circa 1998 � the longing for an established religion, the opposition to dissent, and the confused sense that the marketplace is no model for ideas � already form Stephen�s politics. In fact, this is no surprise � Mill might have been an eminent Victorian, but Victorian society, in its imperial flush, was much better represented by Stephen than by Mill. Stephen articulates a type that dominated the latter half of the nineteenth century in Britain. Shaw, in Heartbreak House (his best play � the only play of Shaw�s that LI re-reads, as we re-read Shakespeare�s plays), was talking of the Mill/Stephen split when he describes the difference between Heartbreak House and Horseback Hall. Heartbreak�s liberalism, of course, was falling down around Shaw�s ears as he wrote � World War I was an unmistakable counter-blast to the genteel Victorian and Edwardian virtues, and seemed, at the time, to put an end to the matter. Shaw�s description of Heartbreak culture in the preface seems, to LI�s mind, alarmingly like contemporary academia, with the substitution of other references for Wells, of course -- try Foucault, or whoever:

�With their heads as full of the Anticipations of Mr H. G.
Wells as the heads of our actual rulers were empty even of the
anticipations of Erasmus or Sir Thomas More, they refused the
drudgery of politics, and would have made a very poor job of it
if they had changed their minds. Not that they would have been
allowed to meddle anyhow, as only through the accident of being a
hereditary peer can anyone in these days of Votes for Everybody
get into parliament if handicapped by a serious modern cultural
equipment; but if they had, their habit of living in a vacuum
would have left them helpless end ineffective in public affairs.
Even in private life they were often helpless wasters of their
inheritance, like the people in Tchekov's Cherry Orchard. Even
those who lived within their incomes were really kept going by
their solicitors and agents, being unable to manage an estate or
run a business without continual prompting from those who have to
learn how to do such things or starve.�

Horseback Hall has, of course, few voices, because its texts are woven of such common-places of the governing classes as have, usually, no need for the exposure of literature, being content with the half-grunted affirmations of one's fellow club-men over a nice glass of port. However, Shaw creates a sort of ambassador from Horseback Hall in the play, Lady Utterword, whose husband, Hastings, has been a colonial governor over various tracts of the empire. At one point in the play, the house discovers a burglar, and there is a debate about sending for the police. If they do, of course, their names will be in the paper, which is the kind of publicity to which both Heartbreak House and Horseback Hall are constitutionally averse. Lady Utterword alludes briefly to her husband�s ways of dealing with crime:

�Think of what it is for us to be dragged through
the horrors of a criminal court, and have all our family affairs
in the papers! If you were a native, and Hastings could order you
a good beating and send you away, I shouldn't mind; but here in
England there is no real protection for any respectable person.�

Hastings Utterword, who never appears, in propria persona, on the stage, is embodied once and for all in that outburst. His type was invented by such as James Fitzjames Stephen.

Ah� we�ve reached the limit of the post-able, for one day. And we haven�t even gotten to Pilate! But never fear � tomorrow we will try to make a stab at Fitzjames Stephen�s Gedankenexperiment with the honorable Pontus Pilate, and connect it to the current baying for war against Iraq.

Dope

LI has been battling the flu this week. Hence, the noticeable lack of activity in this space. Some of you probably concluded it was the curse of Coleridge -- wrestling with that writer's anfractuosities has done in many a better man than LI. But no -- we were on top of the Coleridge problem until we felt that tickle in the throat, and that slight, heady rise in the body temperature, portents and symbols of the pathogen in the blood.
We're going to try to put up some feeble thing or other in this space today, however. Coleridge, who deserves all our health, will have to be swept into that veritable out-box of promises, all the projects LI has mentioned and failed to carry out.

Remora

Bush insatiable appetite for CEOs was apparently not sated by Paul O'Neill's unspotted record of ineptitude. There were times we rather liked O'Neill -- for instance, his idea that financial gamblers who invest in high risk emerging markets should (gasp!) take their risks. But on the whole, the man was as out of the loop as any Treasury secretary since the late Andrew Mellon. So now we have John Snow, chairman of CSX, whose arrival has been greeted by the cautious hossanahs of various Democrat honchos. This is, of course, a bad sign -- to be followed by the rote label, moderate Republican, and such business. Here is Forbes, trumpeting the integrity of the man:

"Snow has been serving as co-chairman of a Conference Board blue-ribbon commission on corporate governance. In its first report last September, the panel called for widespread reforms in the way executive compensation is determined.

In a news release accompanying the report's issuance, Snow deplored the series of corporate scandals involving companies like Enron that weighed on the U.S. stock market this year.

"These egregious failures evidence a clear breach of the basic contract that underlies corporate capitalism," Snow said in September."

There you go -- in the fashion of moderate Republicans everywhere, a scandal that stinks up the culture for almost a year finally gets struck down with the true, denunciatory thunder of a man whose own compensation package will guarantee him steaks and lobsters, with a diamond garnish, for the rest of his born days, if he so choses.

LI reviewed a book by William Leach years ago. The book rather convinced us that the new world ushered in by the de-regulation of the railroad system deserved much of the credit that went to the Internet in the nineties. The internet merely ushed in a new way to order things -- the de-regulation of the railroad industry, allowing the merger of trucking and rail companies, was a significant factor in the great decline in transfer costs. That journalists, who are much more likely to hang around a computer terminal than a railroad depot, pumped the Internet as the miraculous offspring of Gutenberg and Jesus Christ shouldn't surprise anybody. After all, when Time was portentiously summing up the century in 2000, it somehow overlooked almost everything that had happened in agriculture during the last one hundred years -- for instance, the invention of artificial fertilizer, which has had much more effect on our lives than, say, the rocket or the modem.

So what is Snow's background? This report on the Rail industry,
Railroads at a Crossroads: Time for a New Business Model?

by Steven Ryder and Jay Frazier
is a nice place to start. If, indeed, deflation is the phantom menace around the corner, Snow must have caught the fatal intimations at CSX.

One of the puzzles of economics is the continuing belief in the myth that "corporate capitalism", to use Snow's term, is the best way to efficiently distribute investment. If one looks at the amount invested in fiber optic wire in the nineties, compared with the amount invested in reworking railroad track in order to make a faster system, it is easy to see that corporate capitalism is not driven to invest in those things which will ensure long term profit, but in those things that promise some kind of short term pay-off. It is all a matter of being convinced that there is, indeed, a short term pay-off -- which is the task of those drudges in the Biz journalism racket who mindlessly report the forecasts of the bought and sold in pages meant for the guileless. Rationally, the investment should have been in creating the kind of transportation network that would reinforce just in time manufacturing. The key stat from Ryder and Frazier is this:

"...railroads remain as a low-cost service provider. The operating cost of a railroad easily undercuts its competition in bulk freight surface transport. Shippers who choose to route freight by truck rather than by train typically pay a 25% premium in price. The dramatic rise in oil and energy prices will further magnify this cost advantage for rail. "

That premium, remember, exists in spite of the considerable support given by the State in the form of a highway system that is built and maintained with tax money. As a transportation mode, railroads, with their much greater carrying capacity and their potential, given the tracks and the equipment, to achieve greater speeds than road based vehicles, should have been the recipient of heavy investment. However, it is impossible for the American mind to get itself around the idea that railroads aren't something obsolete, out of a cowboy movie.

CSX, after taking over Conrail, spawned a protest site -- CSX sux. Why it sux isn't exactly clear on the site -- there is a gabfest of disgruntled employees, and there is some news about nuclear materials run by the company. Frankly, the site looks inward, to who did what in the Montgomery station at 2 p.m. on February 15th. However, the nuclear materials story definitely deserves some press play -- although we doubt anybody is really going to look into it in the big newspapers. Lately, the news has been Bush's party.

Remora

The Patriot game

Lately there has been a lot of, to LI�s mind, rather unseemly genuflecting to the American flag on the part of a group in the left press that apparently entertains the fear that honorable goals, such as economic justice and anti-belligerence, are being undermined by a googley eyed gang of flag burners. We have little patient with the thesis that America is the Great Satan; on the other hand, when lefists get chummy with the tropes of jingoism, we look for the exits.

Dissent recently published an essay by Michael Kazin, an editor, entitled �A Patriotic Left.� This is an excellent example of the neo-Popular Front in the age of Bush. Kazin has a good time sporting in progressive cant. You know the variety: You call for some moderate objective in the most bloodcurdling ultra rhetoric. After the writer is finished, you are supposed to count the silverware in the silverware drawer, to see if any of it has been expropriated by the masses. Since the rhetorical style at Dissent is fatally oriented towards what was hip when Sidney Hook bought his first Flivver, you get bizarre tirades against �cosmopolitanism.� It turns out that patriotism and cosmopolitanism are deadly enemies, in Kazin�s mind:



�In daily life, cultural cosmopolitanism is mostly reserved to the rich and famous. Radical environmentalists and anti-IMF crusaders seek to revive the old dream of internationalism in a version indebted more to John Lennon's "Imagine" than to V. I. Lenin's Comintern. But three years after bursting into the headlines from the streets of Seattle, that project seems stalled indefinitely in the Sargasso Sea that lies between rhetorical desire and political exigency.�

Wow. If the rich are for it, I must be agin� it � I suppose that is the response Kazin wants to induce in his readers; who will then form a posse to string up the varmints. However, LI rather likes those rich who are cultural cosmopolitans � are we talking about Gertrude Stein, here? Well, we are very fond of her. As well as Henry James, John Lennon, and the rest of em. The Frankfurt exiles � just loved those guys! Dutch architects and radical Italian fashion divas � love and kisses, guys and gals.

However, we have our doubts that this class of the rich and the famous actually still exists. Maybe some relics can be found in Tangiers. We live near the border with Mexico, and have found a lot of non-rich'nfamous cosmopolitans. For instance, the sons and daughters of Mexican migrants � or even Mexican migrants themselves, who cross the border to see the family on holiday occasions. They speak Spanish at home and in the street, they make meals that will, no doubt, eventually grace the tables of the the rich and famous (oh, please, please, let us get within rubbin', pick pocketing distance of the rich and famous) with a plethora of unpatriotic ingredients -- chiles, cilantro, or that displacement, to the Puritan mind, of chocolate from the frivolity of pastry to the sober thighs of chicken � mole, in short. Mostly, they are stalled indefinitely in the Sargasso Sea � of credit card debt.

However, just because the Left Patriot side is represented by Kazin�s risible New Masses rhetoric doesn�t make LI want to abandon patriotism to the New School rubes. For the next two posts (approx.), we want to look at Coleridge�s Patriotism � that is, we want to look at how Coleridge transformed himself from a Romantic Jacobin to a Burkean conservative around 1800 in the pages of The Morning Post � and John Stuart Mill�s idea that patriotism is a necessary adjunct of social stability, which, we believe, was probably influenced by Coleridge�s example. Coleridge gives us a sort of emblem of the career of the British intellectual, with its stages -- the romantic enthusiasm for Revolution with its aesthetic root -- the confrontation with the accidents and barbarisms of a real revolution � thebeing absorbed in that confrontation to the extent that the sense of the barbarism of tradition, the continuing structures of oppression, begin to blur � and the ending up speaking for the worst Tory elements � the jingoists, the theocrats, the belligerents, the fatuous defenders of massive economic injustice, etc. etc. Even as we speak, this pattern is being etched in the diatribes of Christopher Hitchens, who is floundering, rather sillily, to find some third, past reference in whose career he can justify his vain attempt to make consistent his past and present stands. Orwell, his choice, is perfect because he was cut off before he could really crawl into the carapace of crankdom that closed around Koestler. Orwell seems wrong, to us, for C.H.'s quest. Hitchens should touch up on his Burke and Coleridge � much more logical intellectual antecedents.

Remora

LI learned our probability theory from the Dover Press edition of Richard Von Mises book on same. At the time, we did not realize that Von Mises was presenting a much controverted thesis on probability -- that he represented the extreme point of the extensional school. von Mises was the brother of the conservative economist -- although, according to his biography, he was definitely not hedged about by his brother's libertarian ideology. He gave up an honor given to him by East Germany with the admission that he would have taken it if the times -- the year was 1952 -- didn't make any truck with the communists automatically suspicious.

James Rizzo, in this essay on expected utility, gives a good overview of the difference between the view that that probability refers to the frequency of the observation of an event's occurence in a series of observations, and the 'subjectivist' view, which makes a softer case for the meaning of likelihood.




"Probability is neither a simple nor innocent concept, and there have been profound disagreements, especially during the 20th century, over basic matters of definition. Although I have relatively few original things to say about the terms of these debates, my discussion cannot proceed without minimally outlining them -- for probability is where, I am arguing, decision theory stows its metaphysical baggage. I am not sure how obvious my basic point that probability is a metaphysics might seem. On the one hand, it is clear that even our everyday concept of "probability" depends on fairly specific claims about the nature of the universe (the cosmos) and its knowability. And Ian Hacking?s (1975, 1990) efforts to relate the emergence of probability to various modernist projects, like the building of the nation-state, are well-known. On the other hand, critical social theory and Marxism have paid far less attention to probability than it deserves -- if we take its metaphysics as seriously as I propose we do.

A first step in this direction would be to account for the opposition between the frequentist (objectivist) and personalist (subjectivist) definitions of probability.

In large part, frequentism represents an extension of the classical theories of Laplace and Pascal, in which probability was treated as a ratio of favorable to equally possible cases --the paradigmatic events here being series of coin tosses, dice rolls, and other recreations of the French aristocracy. Modern objectivism treats probability as the limiting value of the relative frequency with which certain events, or properties, recur within a sequence of observations. Most frequency theories (such as the one advanced by Richard von Mises) do not require this sequence of observations to be finite, i.e., it can stand in for limiting relative frequency that would be manifested by the unlimited repetition of the event. Peirce, whose theory of probability is in many respects frequentist, is quite clear on this point:

"Probability never properly refers immediately to a single event, but exclusively to the happening of a given kind of event on any occasion of a given kind. [I]tis plain that, if probability be the ratio of the occurrences of the specific event tothe occurrences of the generic occasion, it is the ratio that there would be in thelong run, and has nothing to do with any supposed cessation of the occasions.This long run can be nothing but an endlessly long run..."

Hans Reichenbach, who was also a logical positivist, was dissatisfied with a position that seemed to rule out saying things about singulars - like giving the probability of landing on Mars at a certain date. A professor Uchii has a nice site sorting through these issues. Reichenbach's compromise basically gives us a concept of possible worlds -- thus embedding a theory of probability in what will later, under Kripke, become a theory of description: i


"According to Reichenbach, the probability concept is extended by giving probability a "fictitious" meaning in reference to single events. We find the probability associated with an infinite sequences and transfer that value to a given single member of it. ... This procedure, which seems natural in the case of the coin toss, does involve basic difficulties. The whole trouble is that a given single event belongs to many sequences, and the probabilities associated with the different sequences may differ considerably. The problem is to decide from which sequence to take the probability that is to be attached "fictitiously" to the single event."

So: the point, here, is that when we are making probability claims, we have to get our theory of probability straight. And a refined version of extensional probability, one that can encompass a single event, still needs to construct a a reference class and an attribute class. The attribute class is some definite description, and the reference class is the particular, defining order of events or properties under which to classify our observations. Got that?

So what, pray tell, is William Saletan doing with his Saddameter in Slate?


The premise is the jokey one that invading Iraq is much like Wheel of Fortune -- an idea reinforced by the visual. This is, of course, in accordence with the idiosyncratic Saletan touch, tasteles and tacky, a subdeb Harvard Lampoon conceit. But it is also a completely odd exercise. Every day Saletan gives us the "odds" on invading Iraq. Well, what does this mean?

The problem is that the relationship to a reference class, here, begs the question: what is the reference class? Let's try to think this one through.

100% must refer to the certainty of invasion. But, if this is so, what does 0% refer to?

On the one hand, LI could make the case that, unconsciously, Saletan has constructed a reference class that includes all the non-USA nations. We can then assign hostility quotients to them -- Canada, for instance, would get so much, and Syria would get so much, and so on. Thus, the probability of invading Iraq would refer to the class of invadable nations.

But we doubt this is Saletan's point. Although he believes that odds talk is self-explanatory, LI thinks that Saletan's assumption is much more revealing than his exercize. The relevant reference class, in LI's opinion, is the punditocracy sense of the certainty of an Iraq invasion. The odds, in other words, refer to another level of odds. And that refers to the penchant, among the punditry, for belligerence or pacifism. So 100% would be, say, the Weekly Standard editorial board, and 0 would be,, say, Hans Blix p.r. man. With the in betweens probably being those who are pacifistic but think the US will invade Iraq, those who are belligerent but think Bush will chicken out, and so on.

You'll notice the large divergence between the reference classes. They don't, actually, share any members. Well, this doesn't surprise us. Saletan, for all his snobbery about the great unwashed that live outside his zip code, has never shown himself to be a very bright bulb himself. That the odds thing continues to take up space on the Slate site is a little amazing to me, however, since Slate prides itself on running nit-picky pop sci features that knock down buncomb in other forums.

Dope

James and Dickens

Only a short time ago it might have been supposed that the English novel was not what the French call discutable. It had no air of having a theory, a conviction, a consciousness of itself behind it-of being the expression of an artistic faith, the result of choice and comparison. I do not say it was necessarily the worse for that; it would take much more courage than I possess to intimate that the form of the novel, as Dickens and Thackeray (for instance) saw it had any taint of incompleteness. It was, however, na�f (if I may help myself out with another French word)... -- Henry James, The art of fiction.

LI, yesterday, contended that the first chapter of Our Mutual Friend could be put up against Dickens great first chapters -- that of Bleak House, of David Copperfield, and of Great Expectations. Of these, OMF is most like BH in its blending together of nature -- in the case of Bleak House, London fog; in the case of OMF, the Thames River -- and the polis. The London fog in which the bodies of the dispossessed rather bob, and become alternately trackless and to be tracked -- become, that is, objects upon which there is an interest in tracking -- makes of the first chapter of BH something on the order of the musical overture to an opera, rehearsing a set of motifs that will assume greater import later, as these motifs structure the dramatic situation of the songs. That sense of tracking and tracklessness, and the implication of texture in which the trace is supported, or erased, is even more marked in OMF. The first chapter begins on the Thames, with some unnamed thing, which by numerous hints assumes, eventually, a form of some horror to the reader, is being towed behind a boat that is powered by a girl. The unexpected conjunction of the girl, the boat, and her scavenger father gives us, who have read Dickens before, the idea that sentiment, here, will be wound by Dickens art of exaggeration, juxtaposition, and comparison into the sort of grotesque that makes Dickens novels, sometimes, seem to lurch, rather than to progress.

Henry James review of the book in the Nation is a startling shot across the bows, from its first condemnatory sentence to its last. James does not chose, at this point, to clutter his judgement with the tone of retraction and balance that becomes, later, his signature style. In this review, however, James sentences are definitely more in the way of bullets, those most unretractable of the things one might shoot across the bow, rather than, as it sometimes seems in his latter essays and fictions, the murmurs of a foggy judge on a winter night in the uncertain light of a dying fire. Here's how the review pops off -- really, in the manner of some kid on the streets of Boston bringing down a Beacon Hill bourgeois:

"Our Mutual Friend is, to our perception, the poorest of Mr. Dickens's works. And it is poor with the poverty not of momentary embarrassment, but of permanent exhaustion."

After such a death sentence, James reads out a bill of particulars that alternates between the insinuation of senility and the insinuation of pandering. This is from the second graf:

"To say that the conduct of the story, with all its complications, betrays a long-practised hand, is to pay no compliment worthy the author. If this were, indeed, a compliment, we should be inclined to carry it further, and congratulate him on his success in what we should call the manufacture of fiction; for in so doing we should express a feeling that has attended us throughout the book. Seldom, we reflected, had we read a book so intensely written, so little seen, known, or felt."

There is one aspect of OMF that seems, in particular, to have stirred up the acids in James' soul -- it is the treatment of Miss Jenny Wren. Here's James' inimitable prosecutory description:

"What do we get in return for accepting Miss Jenny Wren as a possible person? This young lady is the type of a certain class of characters of which Mr. Dickens has made a speciality, and with which he has been accustomed to draw alternate smiles and tears, according as he pressed one spring or another. But this is very cheap merriment and very cheap pathos. Miss Jenny Wren is a poor little dwarf, afflicted, as she constantly reiterates, with a "bad back" and "queer legs," who makes dolls' dresses, and is for ever pricking at those with whom she converses, in the air, with her needle, and assuring them that she knows their "tricks and their manners." Like all Mr. Dickens's pathetic characters, she is a little monster; she is deformed, unhealthy, unnatural; she belongs to the troop of hunchbacks, imbeciles, and precocious children who have carried on the sentimental business in all Mr. Dickens's novels; the little Nells, the Smikes, the Paul Dombeys."

This is the most striking passage in James' review, at least if we read it in the light of James' future work. The review was written in 1865. Interestingly, when James came to write a novel on the scale of one of Dickens -- namely, Portrait of a Lady, in 1881 -- he choses, in Ralph Touchwood, the benefactor of Isabella Archer in the novel, to present us with just such an unhealthy and deformed creature, all the way down to the queer legs. In fact, James, as well as Dickens, choses to carry out all the sentimental business with a more decorous train of precocities. LI can't, at the moment, recall a definite Jamesian hunchbacks, but the mysteriously sick abound -- the supreme instance being Milly Theale, in Wings of the Dove. In the preface to that novel, written in 1902, James might almost have been thinking of his review of OMF almost forty years before, speaking of the crystal of inspiration in these terms:


"It [the idea of the story] was formed, I judged, to make the wary adventurer walk round and round it--it had in fact a charm that invited and mystified alike that attention; not being somehow what one thought of as a "frank" subject, after the fashion of some, with its elements well in view and its whole character in its face. It stood there with secrets and compartments, with possible treacheries and traps; it might have a great deal to give, but would probably ask for equal services in return, and would collect this debt to the last shilling. It involved, to begin with, the placing in the strongest light a person infirm and ill--a case sure to prove difficult and to require (vi) much handling; though giving perhaps, with other matters, one of those chances for good taste, possibly even for the play of the very best in the world, that are not only always to be invoked and cultivated, but that are absolutely to be jumped at from the moment they make a sign."

So what, our longsuffering and probably fewer readers might be asking, is your point, LI? We don't, exactly, have one today -- there are times when having a point, as my old Dad used to say, following George Wallace, just makes you pointy headed. So we are entertaining the first drafts of speculation, and without trying to weave it into the denser texture of an argument. Speculation, pursued to a certain degree of exhaustion, merely evaporates, as though it had reached some scientifically calculable temperation of cognition that determines a change in the phase of the thing. Which point has been here, we think, reached.

Dope

My friend S. and I were talking about Christmas movies. I mentioned a cartoon version of the Christmas Carol that I remember, still, with great affection -- the affection one feels for those tv shows of childhood in which the memory is less of the show itself than of the very experience of watching it, of being, in retrospect, that small body so consciously cocooned in the warmth, the sofa, the pjs, the accumulated stuff -- embodying a family history of purchases, breakages, hobbies taken up and abandoned, and the crude taste for the adornments of mass merchandizing characteristic of middle class America - of some room in your house that is all turned, like the minds eye gazing at the image of the self, towards the pictures that might show on the tv screen, that box's weirdly animating presence, while outside the window the clouds are gray, low and full of the odious promise of chill.

My friend S. is from Istanbul. She had never heard of the Christmas Carol.

Now, this didn't surprise me -- I had the misfortune to tell her the story of Christmas, as it is derived from Luke, once. She found the whole thing an amalgam of tedious nonsense, too long by half and unrelieved by the poetry that, for me, at least, makes the whole myth emotionally weighty. So I didn't know what she would make of the Christmas Carol. We rented an eighties version, starring George Scott as Scrooge. Scott was his usual scenery eating self -- which was all to the good, since the rest of the movie was a fat, suet pudding of theatrical Victorianism. The actors had that look of constraint as they mouthed various of the sentimental pieties Dickens attributes to his walk on characters, as though they couldn't believe it, either. Scott, who has all the good lines -- well, almost all -- the spirits of Christmas past and present also get off a boutade or two -- went through the puddingness like an electric carving knife.

Still, I was really moved. I mean, to tears, gentle tears, moved at Scrooge's immersion in the ruin of his life, and his redemption, and the way that redemption, for a brief moment, seems indissolubly connected to the redemption from misery of the poor, the working class, and the system that paid so little to so many and so much to so few.

S. was moved too. I was glad to see this.

It has been a long time since I've read Dickens, so yesterday I went hunting around for Dombey and Son, and began to read it. I've read almost all of Dickens novels at one time or another. Dombey and Son, and Little Dorrit, are the two major ones that defeat me. Reading the first chapter of Dombey and Son, I realized that it was going to defeat me again. So I turned, instead, to one of my favorites -- Our Mutual Friend. The first chapter of that novel is one of the best in all of Dickens, a writer who was very conscious of first chapters. After all, the sale of a serialized novel depends greatly on the appeal that exists, from the first, in that opening. No time for the long haul -- for the gradual winding in of your audience. I'd put that chapter against David Copperfield, Bleak House, and Great Expectations.

At the time it was published, however, Our Mutual Friend received withering blasts of criticism -- especially from the young Henry James. Tomorrow's post will be about the ferocity Dickens work aroused in James, who read it as exactly the kind of thing that would never do; and that, still, with the great reading public, did. In my opinion, James is the greatest artist of the English language novel, but Dickens is a much greater writer -- a matter I should sort out some time.

Remora

LI's uncertain morality

We just finished re-reading the day before yesterday's post. My God, we do go on and on, don't we?

We'll allow the pro-legalization argument to settle, for a bit, in the stomachs (or, okay, brains -- the metaphors are getting awfully out of hand here, lately) of our poor readers. There's a lot to digest there, in a little space.

And we will highlight the article du jour from the NYT -- it is surely this wonderful piece about the glamorous, highwire lives of certain executive secretaries who choose to defraud their bosses. Intro grafs ahead:


"ike many busy executives, E. Scott Mead, a top banker at Goldman Sachs, trusted his secretary to help him run his life. Beyond answering the telephone and setting his schedule, she helped organize family vacations and managed his expense account.

Mr. Mead may have trusted her too much. The secretary, Joyti De-Laurey, is to appear in court today in London, charged with embezzling more than $5 million from Mr. Mead in an elaborate fraud in which she is accused of wiring blocks of his money to bank accounts in Cyprus."

Joyti DeLaurey, it turns out, isn't the only exec secretary with the sense to dictate the terms of her employment on the sly. A number of these buccaneers of the office pool are covered. Anamarie Giambrone, for instance, who worked for a Bear Stearns bigwig, used erasable ink to make out checks that she had her boss sign. Then she erased the names of the payees, substituted her own name in their place, and inflated the sums. She poured 800,000 dollars into such ventures as buying a pizzaria for her family. Of course, her lazybones boss never checked up on his checkbook.

Having often worked as a secretary ourselves, LI just can't get into a froth about these crimes, like we get into when we approach the topic of the Neronian exec set pillaging their companies. Secretaries don't usually have such colorful sub-streams of income. A friend of ours works at a multi-national corporation in which the secretaries are so badly compensated that a number of them have to work second jobs. Alas, tthe luxuriant lifestyles of exec secs in NY are not, by any means, the norm -- the second job lifestyle is the more usual pattern.

LI had just started to get into the heart of this issue -- the link between secretaries, typewriters, Arthur Krystal's review/non-review, in the latest issue of Harper's, of German Philosopher Friedrich Kittler. After I'd assembled my magpie bits, however, my computer blinked off. I don't have the heart, at the moment, to shore any more fragments against that ruin. More, though, about secretaries and such in the next post, which will probably be after the holiday. In the meantime, since you can't access the Krystal review, here's a page with some of Kittler's writings ( in German) posted. And here's a very munchy interview, in English, with the man his own self.

Even more astonishing is the fact that tobacco use not only spread at an unprecedented rate and in the absence of media advertising, but in the face of penaltiesthat remain unparalleled in the history of smoking. For example, the council of
Bern, Switzerland, placed the prohibition against tobacco among the Ten Commandments, gave it the same penalty as for adultery, and initiated an Inquisition-like tribunal known as the Chambre du tabac to deal with offenders. In
Turkey, smokers had the stems of pipes thrust through the cartilage of the nose and were seated backwards on mules as they were led through the streets. Meanwhile, Tsar Mikhail Fyodorovich Romanov had Russian tobacco users whipped and their nostrils slit, whereas the Persian shah ordered tobacco traders to have their noses, lips, and ears cut off or molten lead poured down their throats. In India, the Mughal Emperor Jahangir also decreed that smokers should have their lips slit. He
was lenient compared with the Ottoman tyrant Sultan Murad IV, who imposed the death penalty for smoking, and the Chinese, who issued an edict against selling tobacco on pain of decapitation. All of these measures, which were rarely motivated by health concerns, failed to stop the spread of smoking during the early 17th century. The ruling classes soon were obliged to rescind their laws. Alexander von Gernet

My friend T replied to LI�s post re the Drug War with an interesting set of objections. Here�s his letter:

yes, yes, and again yes, a nightmare as envisioned by Foucault it is. But will the legalization of the drug trade rouse anyone at all from that unrestful slumber?

To be fair, I have no idea beyond a gut-sourced jerk of the knee where I stand on the topic, except that any discussion (which, as you note, will never happen) must exclude anything pretending to morality and must include a sophisticated (not NECESSARILY cynical) acceptance that the product will do irreparable harm to many of its users (plenty of precedent here), and that the concept of "choice" for the user for a similar number of users becomes moot for the use of the product.
Thus, yes, inverse the Hegelian dialectic; temporarily, in the first instance, set aside concerns for those who the product will harm irreparably (which helps, I thing, in setting aside matters moral and cynical), let fall one's attention of the Marxian material relations of society; more specifically, on the material relations of producer/distributor/consumer in the conditions following the legalization of the drug trade.

Not that I would (or could) measure the efficacy of implementing any bit of Hegel or Marx in its predictive possibility, but shouldn't the specter of legalization consider the "violence of putting environmental hazards in poor neighborhoods...of allowing corporations to operate in regulatory breakdown..."? Would not this same violence all so effectively propagate through the channels created by a sanctioned trade? Surely the billboard for "Crack - brought to you by Pfizer" might be regulated beyond 500 feet of a schoolyard, but that would place it adjacent to an advert for Newport cigarettes, which is across the street from a poster for some swill of a malt liquor. Do we then devolve to a mere cost-benefit analysis in the discussion (which will never happen) of the legalization of the drug trade?�

This is the problem with having sharp eyed friends.
Reaching under the brilliant plumage, LI thinks that T is expressing two objections to our post, one formal, and one political. The formal one is that really, to pretend that the analysis of the mechanism comes first ignores the motivation for the discussion in the first place. If drugs did us no debateable harm, there would be no point in discussing whether to ban them.

This is true. In the order of motivations, the discussion of harm has to come first. But LI thinks that that discussion should be held in light of a very clear eyed sense of what the State has done, in the past, in terms of regulatory bannings, and how it has done it. That clear eyed sense of mechanism would recognize that the variables of enforcement are not to be wished away when deciding to banish or legalize marijuana, heroin, ecstasy and the lot. Even on the level of harm, of course, discussion is skewed by the reticence of the consumers of these drugs to defend them. The defense of pleasure is always a shy and naked thing in forums in which utility is King. Pleasure, of course, is the Jack. And that pleasure can lead to addiction is considered the main and only subject. That utility can lead to empty, disgusting lives, lives full of polyunsaturated fats and tv, is considered, well, merely frivolous.

But let�s grant the norms their normativeness, for the moment. LI would prefer to overcome these values in a great Nietzschian burst, but we have learned, from experience, that great Nietzschian bursts empty the hall. So by all means, let�s say that we have the harm of addiction on one side. And that there is only the contentless demand on the other. Demand, practically, wins. The Murads cut off the lips of smokers, the King Jameses blast tobacco, but tobacco wins.

The political objection is about the very nature of the relationship between the State, the market, and the people. Indeed, drug use can be framed as an environmental hazard � in the same way that DDT is an environmental hazard.

Dealing with this question is hazardous. Even the drug war skeptics often mis-frame what is at stake. In the fall, 2001 Social Research (unfortunately not on-line), there were a number of articles about drugs, criminality, and economics. One of them, by Jeffrey Miron (Drug Economics and Drug Legalization), is a comparison of the �costs� of legalization versus the �costs� of the drug war. Miron is forthright about his conclusion:

�This paper explains that many of the harms typically attributed to drug use are instead due to drug prohibition. This is not to deny that drugs can have powerful effects on the user, nor to deny that drugs differ in some respects from other commodities. But a wide range of outcomes typically thought to result from drug use is far more accurately attributed to the current legal treatment of drugs.�

However, Miron frames the argument in terms that LI will have to object to. This makes sense: Miron is a libertarian. That slant gets into the very way he presents economic categories � or doesn�t. His opening move is to observe that drug prohibition creates a black market in drugs. He then observes:

�Even though prohibition does not eliminate drugs, it is likely to have important effects on the operation of the market. In particular, prohibition might affect the demand for drugs as well as the supply. I address each of these in turn.

Prohibition potentially affects the demand for drugs through one of several mechanisms. First, the mere existence of prohibition might reduce demand if some consumers exhibit respect for the law. This mechanism does not appear to be quantitatively important since abundant evidence suggests that many people disregard laws that are weakly enforced. Second, prohibition might encourage demand for the good through a "forbidden fruit" effect. There is little concrete evidence to support this effect, although anecdotally it appears plausible for some groups (for example, teenagers). Third, prohibition might reduce demand directly by punishing purchase or possession of the good.�

What is the problem, here? The problem begins with the notion of drug prohibition �creating a market�, and runs through the analysis of the drug market itself. That drugs are bought by people is true, but not true enough. A prohibition doesn't necessarily create a market in itself. DDT is bought by people, yet there is very little black market in DDT in this country. What creates a market is an group of consumers who strongly prefer a certain good, and what creates a black market, at least in the case of drugs, is a group of consumers whose preferences: a. are specific enough not to be eroded by legal substitutes, and 2., are of a scale, either in wealth or number, great enough to make the risk of getting caught marketing the product, in comparison to the benefit of selling it, favor the latter course.
To understand how this is so, we have to understand what is missing in Miron's article. We have to get clear about the fundamental differences between kinds of goods, how those differences effect regulation, and how those regulations fold into democratic forms of government. In other words, one must really consider how a thing like asphalt or DDT or dioxin differs from a thing like heroin or cocaine. Since this transgresses the libertarian credo that all goods are the same, and all government regulation is the same, it is easy to see how Miron might not be inclinded to make essential distinctions here. Still, as an economist, he really should distinguish between perishable and durable goods.

That distinction isn�t fine grained enough for the analysis LI has in mind, but it is common enough to get to some of the salient features of the economic embeddedness of narcotics. Usually, durable goods are thought of as products that have a use that extends over at least, I believe it is, three years time, while perishables are bought for semi-immediate consumption.

We need to build on this distinction.
When you buy a house, you buy a quantity of nails, so many pounds of asphalt in the roof shingles, some amount of copper in the wiring, the PVC in the pipes, etc. Yet this is not what you are really buying. It is the rare housebuyer who asks about the PVC � and only the impossible ones want a count of the nails. Out of that mass of goods, the buyer aims at an emergent property � the house itself. This isn�t to say that some buyers want hardwood floors, some want bullet proof glass windows, etc., but in the end, you buy a house to get a house. Consumers are like phenomenologists: they want to go to the things themselves.

When, on the other hand, you build a house, you are, indeed, concerned with the amount of nails put in. You are concerned with the matter and the labor. But if you are building the house to sell, you are ultimately concerned with these things as they affect sale. Because you are concerned, like the Kantians, with the thing-in-itself, otherwise known as lucre, moola, the green stuff, bucks, dineros, bread, money.

This distinction is not, of course, absolute. The workman is also concerned with workmanship, and the homeowner is concerned with resale value. The point, however, is that, from the state�s point of view, different regulatory mechanisms are appropriate for different kinds of economic activity.

For the emergent property � whether it is bubble gum or a car � the rules that adhere usually gain their force through social convention. Compliance with the rules, which always depends largely, over time, with self-compliance, usually depends on trust. One can be fined for, say, junking up a yard in contravention of a zoning ordinance. But this kind of fine doesn�t insert itself into the owner�s sense of costs and benefits of continuing an enterprise. When one descends into banned activities such as stealing, murder, rape, etc., we find that only stealing is really about monetary gain � the rest are about emergent properties. Among the most prominent of which is pleasure.

An enterprise, however, is all about continuing to make a profit. Incentives to obey regulation must attach to that sense. What is interesting is how easily the regulation of business activity can be embedded into democracies � in spite of the gloom of the latter phase Hayek, real liberty has certainly increased in democracies in the last hundred years. Why? Because the relationship between the state and business enterprise is not, primarily, conflict. It is, rather, collusion. Business enterprise depends on contract. The cost of enforcing contract � a cost that could really unravel most enterprises � is offloaded onto the state. The state also allows externalities that would otherwise cripple the system of property ownership. Property as use -- property considered dynamically -- is a different thing than property as a claim -- property considered statically. Of course, Libertarian ideology is engaged in massively disguising these distinctions, and it has done so so energetically that it has seeped into the common sense way we see things. But we have to shake off the image of the state as a monster to get a clear idea of what the state does well and what it does badly.

LI hopes our readers have already done this. If not, we recommend you jettison the idea of the State as Leviathan. The State, alas for romantics and Che Guevara, is merely another algorithm.

Money, which is derived from the contractual nexus, is the black magic that makes it possible to constrain corporate power. In this sense, every good leftist should harbor some kindly feeling for money in his heart.

We�ll go into the rest of this tomorrow, if we can.

Remora

At all times sincere friends of freedom have been rare, and its triumphs have been due to minorities, that have prevailed by associating themselves with auxiliaries whose objects often differed from their own; and this association, which is always dangerous, has been sometimes disastrous, by giving to opponents just ground of opposition, and by kindling dispute over the spoils in the hour of success. No obstacle has been so constant, or so difficult to overcome as uncertainty and confusion touching the nature of true liberty. If hostile interests have wrought much injury, false ideas have wrought still more; and its advance is recorded in the increase of knowledge as much as in the improvement of laws. The history of institutions is often a history of deception and illusions; for their virtue depends on the ideas that produce and on the spirit that preserves them; and the form may remain unaltered when the substance has passed away. -- Lord Acton


There's a general sense on the Left that the tools of invective should be expropriated from the Right. Expropriated? It's become a common paradox, worthy of a Slate writer, that the tools of invective were invented on the Left, usually in the sixties, when the Left was fun. Although the Slate writer, in keeping with the immortal rule of journalism, coined by Evelyn Waugh in Scoop, that the truth is only worth pusuing "up to a point" (that point being determined by the prejudices of who is in charge), never seems to find Leftists like Cockburn hilarious.

However, this cause has been taken up by many on the Left. It's the vague desire that for every Rush Limbaugh, our side should have a Michael Moore. LI can understand this. Certainly, Cockburn's Counterpunch is founded on the premise that the American public will be moved more by rock em and sock em than by the dictates of pure reason. The tabloid style is in Cockburn's blood -- from his dad, Claude -- and such is the style of CP.

But LI feels that this is a misunderstanding of the sources of rightwing triumphalism. That triumphalism does, indeed, go back to the dictates of pure reason, at least as it is purveyed among the makers and shakers in conservative think tanks, and absorbed, with a decreasing amount of substance and an increasing amount of smugness, among the Right's constituencies. The phrase, endless attributed to Churchill, that if a man isn't a socialist at twenty, he has no heart, and if he isn't a conservative at forty, he has no brain,
captures the mood of this crowd exactly. (Incidentally, LI finds that little saying screamingly funny -- it is usually quoted as if we've really hunted down a zinger, here, boys. Wisdom at last! When we know the real organs in question are the penis, in the first instance, and the intestine and anus, in the second. LI prefers Leon Bloy's Exegese des lieux communs, which treats such bourgeois maxims to the acid bath of inversion, in keeping with St. Paul's verse: Videmus nunc per speculum in aenigmate: tunc autem facie ad faciem.)

Excuse the convoluted prolegomena, ladies and germs, and on with tonight's feature presentation!

There's a nice article about pot on the Counterpunch site. It is by Ben Tripp. It scores on honesty -- Tripp is not coy about his own pot experience. We also approve of Tripp's sardonic tone. Of course, there's something peculiar about the "medical" part of the "free marijuana" campaign. There's something refreshing about demanding the end to the banning of pot on the grounds that it is a harmless and pleasurable recreation, instead of its supposed helpfulness in cases of glaucoma. However, there's an underlying rule in Tripp's piece, one endemic to both the Left and the Right in the endlessly sterile war over the Drug war. It is the premise that the main question, when discussing the banning a product, is to find out if it is immoral or harmful. As soon as you have that sorted out, you ban or you don't ban. Is pot as bad as alcohol? Is it better than cigarettes?

This, we think, is inverting the real analysis of the material conditions of banning.

We've just been in correspondance on this very topic with a friend. Our friend believes in banning guns, especially handguns, and LI doesn't. But by making LI defend that belief, our friend has refined the way LI thinks about what is involved in regulation -- in the mechanisms of governance.

Here are some various excerpts from our letters.

"What if the law prohibiting slavery resulted in locking up more people than the slave population?

I mean, the question isn't slavery so much -- and I really think that is something that can be successfully banned within a democracy, because the mechanism for banning it actually increases the domain of democracy -- as the question of what has happened to the poor and working class in this country during the last thirty years. I'm increasingly convinced that the "lockdown America" thesis has some merit. It isn't just that the prison population increased from something like 60 thou in 1970 to 1 and a half million in 1998 -- that really understates the number of people who have been cycled through the prison-court system. It is that this systematic marking, the explosion in the number of offenses that lead to prison, and their assymetrical enforcement, is the shadow Great Society program for dealing with blacks, hispanics, the unemployed, the blue collar white male, etc. It is the threat that has effectively demoralized these groups. I mean, I think there is something symbolically just in the fact that Gore lost the presidency because the Florida State Department "dis-enfranchised" black voters by going through felonies lists and delisting the appropriate (and inappropriate) names -- for this is the same Gore who advocated taking people who are found with drugs in prison and doubling their sentences.

He was, in fact, the perfect candidate for the era of punitive liberalism -- in which, behind a front of seemingly liberal concerns, like controlling the "violence" endemic in American society, the mechanisms were put in place to coerce the poor at the buttend of the policeman's Tasar. As for the real, systematic violence -- the violence of putting environmental hazards in poor neighboorhoods, the violence of allowing corporations to operate in a regulatory breakdown (or is it break dance?), the violence of allowing police to, in affect, abolish the constitution at their leisure in poor neighborhoods in NYC, in LA, in Chicago, in whereever -- that just isn't an issue. It is a joke.

What determines a successful ban is not the harm done by the product or the service, or the morality of it. Rather, it is the way the product or service is embedded in the political economy. That's it. That's the one and holy clue. Marx was right: you have to inverse the Hegelian dialectic before it comes out right -- start with the material relations of society, rather than the ideas. Or in this case, the morality. Or the harm.

So what are the signs of an unsuccessful ban? Let's just talk about one of them. An unsuccessful ban depends not on the compliance of the people in the marketplace -- the producers, dealers and users -- but on the police. The police are always the regulators of the last resort. They are the most inefficient, and do the most harm to liberty, justice and equality -- my trinity, still, after all these years. This is a rule of thumb that has some exceptions. Those exceptions depend, however, on the scale of the supply. For instance, when you look at environmental regulation, a good part of it is devoted to protecting a rare resource -- the water in a particular area, or endangered species, etc. In this case, police power can efficiently be concentrated, and can operate with a maximum respect for liberty. Even there, however, the only way a ban will be more beneficial than harmful is if it on a good or service that is amenable to other sources of cultural suasion -- this is why I think banning the trade in endangered bird feathers in this country worked at the turn of the century. The Audubon society, first of all, was able to militate against bird massacring, and there was a ready substitute available -- you could easily manufacture artificial flowers. But this point can't be gotten over in the rhetorical cloud around the 'war on drugs' because nobody wants to discuss substitutes -- they want to discuss abstinence. In other words, they don't want the market to be what it is.

So the market continues, its suppression continues, and the cops form the interface between the two. This is a disaster.

I think the number one act that can lower violence in this country is not the banning of handguns. I think that will eventually increase it. No, if we really want to eliminate gun violence -- gun homicide violence, that is, not gun suicide violence -- is the legalization of the drug trade. I think that is undoubtedly the biggest weapon used against the poor in this country -- it is where the cracks of race and class gape. Until that happens, I don't think there will ever be a real decline in gun violence -- or any violence -- as compared to other countries. And I think a debate (that will never happen) should occur about the lockdown mentality. And I think that debate would put into question what I see as the increasingly upper middle class composition of the only kind of lefty discourse that gets allowed in the media of this country, which can stage a million mom march but seems disinclined, to say the least, to stage, say, the five million, the ten million mom march of mothers whose kids, husbands, lovers and fathers have been cycled through the lockdown state. Unless, of course, that class doesn't get something -- when its candidate, Gore, loses, then they come out shrieking. Where was that shrieking when Gore and his boss were presiding over the sharpening of laws to imprison more people! Or calmly let neighborhoods slip into the maws of the penal system? When you build your house of virtue on the backs of the classe laborieuse et dangereuse, eventually it will tumble down. And before it does, a pervasive, unconscious sense of the hypocrisy of the whole exercise will become the norm -- feeding into the most reactionary currents abroad in the country, as well as demoralizing the most progressive segment.

So I guess this is my deal. I think we really are living in the Foucaultian nightmare.

Remora

The Justice department scored another smashing triumph over that unnamed colluder of all terrorisms, your constitutional rights, today. According to the NYT, Judges Ralph B. Guy of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit; Edward Leavy of the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit; and Laurence H. Silberman of the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, who were all appointed by Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist of the Supreme Court and make up an entity grandiosely called the United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, overturned the first ruling against the government's wiretap request in an 'intelligence' investigation ever by a special secret lower court, which bears the bogus moniker of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Court.

Now, LI's question is, how did these Kangaroo Courts come into existence? We are always ready, on this site, to bash Bush. But it turns out the Bush Justice department is merely magnifying trends that started in the previous administration, with the US PATRIOT act merely the enhanced, special effects version of Clinton's own anti-terrorism legislation. There's a fascinating review of the Kangaroo Intelligence Malarky courts by Patrick Poole here. The Courts were instituted under the Ford administration. Ford was, apparently, terribly afraid that the intelligence infrastructure was being hurt by the Church committee. In Poole's words:

"The FISA bill was a product of closed-door negotiations lasting several months between legislators and the Justice Department. Senator Edward Kennedy (D-MA), who had attempted to regulate the power of warrantless surveillance in four different sessions, sponsored the FISA legislation. The FISC concept was a compromise between legislators who wanted the FBI and National Security Agency (NSA), the only two agencies affected by the FISA statute, to follow the standard procedure for obtaining a court order required in criminal investigations and legislators. The federal agencies believed that they should be completely unfettered in conducting their foreign intelligence surveillance work inside US borders. Hence, the FISC was born."

The seventies was a regular cauldron of agencies being hatched to crawl across the American landscape in search of rights to devour. The orthodox historical account is that this was the decade in which the system of civil rights violations was unravelled, via the Church committee and several pieces of legislation mandating intelligence agencies to spill the secrets to selected congressional committees. LI has read several accounts of the era, and none mentioned FISC.

Poole, however, shows that FISC is not a monster summoned from the deep by Ashcroft in all of his evil. Rather, since the end of the Cold War -- during, that is, the administration of Clinton -- FISC went into overtime, ruling on twice the number of cases that were ruled on in Reagan's era. As always, the secret growth of some malign habit in one administration gets carried over to the next administration, regardless of party, to metastasize among the flags and desks. As for the vaunted independence of the judiciary -- a concept that can be disposed of only at the expense of all democratic processes -- forget about it! Yesterday's news! Montesquieu and all the rest of those guy never faced "pure evil," as we now like to call our opponents. Ah yes, "pure evil" calls for a whole bunch of special whoopass. So we go to FISC, which has the rigidity and integrity and independence of a wet strand of pasta. The reason FISC hit the news today was that the court, for the first time, questioned the nature of a case. That is, they decided that the over-ride of our rights in some "intelligence" case was really a criminal case. So the FISC appeals court was duly convened, and of course they trashed the idea that there are any rights that the Justice Department can't take away from us, in the name of National Security.

Where are all those Orwellites -- the Hitches and such, who are using Orwell as a prop to support an unjustifiable and unprovoked war? Perhaps they better come out of the corners. But of course -- they are too busy doing battle with such dangers to the republic, and all of Western Civ, as Susan Sontag. A few thousand dark skinned individuals being stripped of their rights by secret courts at the discretion of the Justice department doesn't really register on the list of current dangers.

Remora

Out of the American mangle

The poor you don't need to have with you always. But if you do, and you give them credit (only 19.9% compounded monthly!), why, make their life a living hell for a generation. That was, and is, the message and substance of the bankruptcy "reform" act that died, again, in the Congress this week. Here's the Friday NYT:

"With a long-stalled bill to toughen bankruptcy laws declared dead today in Congress because of abortion politics, Senate Democrats and House Republicans were left to blame each other for the collapse of a measure that otherwise had broad bipartisan support and was championed by powerful corporate lobbyists."

The New York Times is long on the Homeric epithet -- you know, those things like "wine dark sea", or "swift footed Achilles", that fill in rhythmic spaces in the epic. The 'broad bipartisan support" and "championed by powerful corporate lobbyists" is the Times standard description of the bankruptcy act. LI would suggest, perhaps, corrupt enforcement of usurious practices similar in kind to that practiced by your average loan shark," but maybe the rhythm is off. What do you think?

LI has written about that undead bill before -- don't worry, it will be back. It was killed this time due to the ineffable mysteries of legislation: it got caught in a pr abortion rights -- right to life crossfire. LI has gone into the penetralia of the bill once too often before -- the way it penalizes the working class in extraordinary ways, the way it privileges paying back credit card debt over, say, paying child support, the way it sets up one more obstacle to blue collar redemption in an age in which every clintonoid politician tells us that we have to promote "flexible" job markets.

Open Secrets has a nice little summary of the issue and the parties in play. Here's their abridged version of what the legislation is about:

HOW THE INTEREST GROUPS SEE IT
Banks, credit card companies and credit unions have been leading the drive to rewrite of the nation�s bankruptcy laws. The American Financial Services Association, the trade group that represents the major credit card companies, joined other financial industry trade associations, Visa and Mastercard in 1998 to form the National Consumer Bankruptcy Coalition. The coalition has been the leading voice in favor of bankruptcy reform, contending that more than 30 percent of those filing bankruptcy have the ability to repay significant portions of their debts. But the financial sector isn�t the only group lobbying on this issue. Gambling interests, including some of Las Vegas� biggest casinos, also are pushing for a new bankruptcy law, according to their lobbying filings. Car dealers, retail stores and even entertainment companies also have weighed in on the issue, mostly in support of reform.

Consumer groups, including the Consumer Federation of America and Public Citizen, are lobbying against the bill. They contend Congress should crack down on the financial companies, which they criticize for handing out credit cards and credit lines indiscriminately. Additionally, they contend the legislation is too far-reaching and could ultimately do more harm to indebted Americans than limit fraud and abuse.

As things go in America, there is, of course, another story about credit -- its extension and forgiveness -- that clues us in to the central moral of our skewed times. For the slackers and the lags that gamble and renege, that buy their fancy cars and thumb their noses at GM, well, their hatefulness -- and we know how bad bad bad they are -- could be washed as white as snow if only they were , well, a little higher in the food chain. There, the terms of the loan are reversed. There's a nice story about the unpaid and forgiven loans of CEOs and their immediate underlings, and the board members that "govern" them, in Business 2.0 -- happily coinciding with the vote on the the credit card company wish list act. Here's the core graf:

"Roughly three-quarters of the nation's top 1,500 companies -- 1,133, to be precise -- have disclosed loans to insiders in recent regulatory filings, according to a study due to be published in November by the Corporate Library, a firm based in Portland, Maine, that analyzes corporate data and advocates greater accountability to shareholders. Of the companies that disclosed loans, 510 made them for the purchase of stock, for a handful of other uses such as housing and tax payments, or for purposes that weren't specified at all. The average loan was about $5.5 million."

My my, 5.5 million dollars. For that money, even a slag might start biting his knuckles and wondering how, oh how he was going to repay it. But the GMs and MBNA America Banks that are weaping oceans of tears over the stray sheep lying through their sheep teeth in bankruptcy courts thoughout the land have, at least, a good heart. These are essentially Christian corporations when it comes to their highest employees. Character, you know, attracts its own redemption. That is why owing such terrific amounts of the ready has not distracted our governors from the tiller. No, they bravely shoulder those five million dollar, or fifteen million dollar, or even four hundred million dollar debts. Yes, and now we can admire them more, because it is so hard, what with yachts and depreciating stocks and such, to come up with 5.5 mil to pay back their companies! oh, could this mean the loss of invaluable personnel? These giants of industry, sucked into the industrial waste with the rest of us! Gasp!
But gentle reader, don't weap for them. This is a big country. Here's another delicious graf:

"All told, loans to insiders in recent years may have reached more than $5 billion. Hundreds of millions of dollars in loans, perhaps as much as $1 billion, have been or will be forgiven, based on Securities and Exchange Commission records and estimates by corporate compensation experts. This suggests that companies will be eating losses from insider loans for years to come. But the more damaging legacy may be that the practice -- by helping fuel the explosion in CEO pay that is at the heart of much of today's outcry over corporate behavior -- will contribute to the perception that management has all too often lined its pockets at investors' expense, and to the public's distrust of how American companies are run."

Luckily, most of these loans aren't made with interest -- that would be oh so gross. I mean, we are talking about some of america's best and brightest -- interest is something they collect, darling, not something they should be forced to pay out. But that the rate of non-payment is 20 percent -- now, that is something, ain't it?

The poster boy for corporate loans in the King article is from Microsoft. Meet Rick Belluzzo:

"Early in September, Microsoft (MSFT) had a small confession to make. Back in December 2000, the company had lent its president, Rick Belluzzo, $15 million, taking some of his stock options as collateral. Though the options were underwater and had no value at the time, Microsoft figured its stock would eventually go up. But by last August, when Belluzzo resigned, the options were even further submerged. So the software giant forgave the loan -- it had no choice under the deal Belluzzo had struck -- charged off the $15 million, and said its belated disclosure was "appropriate" because the loan was really just an "advance." "

Now, to be fair, our legislature has officially outlawed insider loans of the Belluzzo type. The Sarbanes-Oxley act definitely puts them under bar. This will call for a lot of semantic ingenuity on the part of corporate lawyers. In the meantime, the bankruptcy bill will rise again. You can MBNA bank on it!

Remora

LI finds discussions of "saving" the Democratic party repellent and boring. Who cares? The DC press is, of course, in hyperdrive about the elections, but that is because politics is their industry. Still, we've been following the discussion between Robert Reich and Joe Klein at Slate, partly because these two are typical DC-kabuki types. The ritual entrances. The stereotypical phrases. The rigid decorum, the predictable plot. Without, we should say, plumbing any of the deep sources of kabuki's beauty -- the body's presence to itself as a drama of obstruction and annihilation, passion as a disruption on the surface of expression, etc.

Klein, in particular, illustrates the convention of hypocrisy that makes political discourse, as it is practiced by the op ed set, so off-putting.

This is how Klein starts out:

"Some say move left. Some say move right. Both are right and both are wrong. If we're to have a vaguely interesting national debate, the Democrats have to move forward�away from the boring, tiny, and tactical issues, and language, and interest groups that the party has championed in recent years. This will mean a change in style as well as content. Above all, it will mean an extremely risky change in focus from the beloved and reliable geezers to the edgy, cynical, apathetic young people. The electorate has to be expanded. But the most valuable cache of votes isn't to be had in the poor neighborhoods�as admirable as such efforts may be�it is to be found on the college campuses, where the next generation of activists lives. We can discuss the policy details over the next few days."

So, what is the premise here? That Klein is going to give us the technique by which the Democrats can win elections. But what he is actually doing? He is trying to influence the party to represent his point of view. In DC talk, when that point of view comes from, say, a teacher's union rep, it is known as special interest. As if there were some disinterested point of view. And as if, hey, the political pundit set represents that disinterestedness. When Robert Reich replies to Klein with his prescription for the Democratic Party -- which is, basically, to represent Robert Reich's lefty point of view vigorously -- this is how Klein replies:

"You mock moderates, call them Republicans-Lite. But, to my mind --and I'm a flaming moderate - the best new ideas have come from the middle of the spectrum in recent years. In domestic policy, it was the idea that centralized, industrial-era bureaucratic systems are too rigid and too expensive (urban school districts, for example); it's better to give individuals money -�tax credits, vouchers, whatever you want to call it -and allow them to make their own choices on health care, housing, prescription drugs, day care, schooling, and so forth. You were a pioneer in the field, Bob, with your voucherized job training and retraining program at the Labor Department. The reactionary left opposes this idea (the AFL-CIO wasn't too hot for your program, if I recall). The Republicans pay lip service to "empowerment" but don't want to actually pay money for it. The progressive middle says: Fund it amply, monitor it, regulate it - but do it. (By the way, tax disincentives are a good idea, too: I'd favor a cigarette-level tax on bullets, for example; I would tax corporations on their "externalities" - the social and environmental disruptions they cause -- not their profits.)

In foreign policy, the basic idea is global citizenship: American leadership -- with lots and lots of quiet diplomacy and consultation -- in organizing collective action against terrorists and rogue governments, against environmental depredation, against the transnational efforts of corporations to escape taxation and of criminal combines to escape the law, and the free flow of goods, services, information, and, to the greatest possible extent, people."

Now, what is this discussion really about? It isn't about how Democrats can rebuild their party, it is about molding a party to one's own beliefs. LI thinks that is honorable. LI thinks the dishonor comes in the pretense that one is simply trying to "save" the Democratic party. It is this third way bull crap. LI doesn't vote for a faction just because it is a faction. Nobody does. The technicians who "analyze" politics -- the Broders, the Kleins, the Barneses, etc. -- are really just importing their ideas into politics, under the pretense that their ideas represent the 'center' -- represent the average American voter.

Well, LI is unrepresentative of the average. Our motto is: screw the average. If you look at this country and you say, hey, we are rich enough to shed six trillion dollars worth of wealth in the stock market and still buy record numbers of cars, so we are rich enough to design a national health care system, then you work for that through a number of modalities. A faction exists as one in a set of mechanisms of suasion. And who cares if you run this goal through the Republicans or the Democrats? The point is the goal.

Now, if Klein doesn't like national health insurance, fine. But there is no reason that the Democratic party should abandon national health insurance. Certainly the reason can't be that it is "unpopular" -- the whole point is to make it popular. And, contra Klein, that happens all the time, as it should. Our two big factions exist to make ideas that the guy selling cigs at the Tenneco isn't entertainng at the moment entertain-able. Look how the abolition of inheritance taxes was made popular. Or how invading Iraq was made popular. This is what factions are for. It is about struggle. So the first task of the Reichs in the Democratic party, it seems to me, is to unmask the language of consensus for what it is: the language of position taking. And deal with it as such.

Remora

LI, having liberally annointed our back molars with a codeine, or benzocodeine, salve, would like to do a piece on today's big news story. Sorry, the consideration of time as a component of picturing will have to be postponed -- we aren't Boethius, nor were meant to be...

Onto the big story, which as my readers will know by now, is the on-going collapse of National Century Financial Services. Oh, you thought it was the bread and circuses, or rather war games, thing going on in D.C.?

No, today we have an excellent example of why the press can calmly talk about how the "wave of corporate scandals" has broken. That's because nobody wants to talk about it. Plus, no star is involved in this scandal.

The story is in the biz section of the Times.

"The rapid collapse of National Century Financial Enterprises Inc., a large provider of cash flow financing, is sending hundreds of health care companies and their affiliates scrambling to avoid big financial trouble."

Cash flow financing means this. The thirty thousand dollars that X is paying to have his prostate operated on is out there in segments. The insurance is paying for it, but the deductible means that X has to pay for it on credit. Here comes NCF, then, offering to aggregate such debts and securitize them, much as mortgages are securitized. Beautiful, right?

"Two of National Century's largest clients have sought Chapter 11 protection from their creditors, while the dubious status of two of the company's bond deals worth $3.3 billion has set off a spate of threatened legal action against National Century, J. P. Morgan Chase, Bank One and other firms involved in the asset-backed securities. Amid the meltdown, National Century's chairman and chief executive, Lance K. Poulsen, quit both posts on Friday and left the company, which is based in Dublin, Ohio."

Ah, there's a little backstory with this Lance Poulson. And with National Century. But first, here's the fishiness in this creature from the depth. This will tell you pretty much all you need to know about the state of corporate creative financing in this "reform" period:

"This complex brew [of bonds based on hospital receivables] began to boil over in May when the Fitch rating agency warned that it might downgrade National Century bonds, which it did in July. It cited "increasing levels of defaulted and rejected receivables" and a lack of information from the company. This made it harder for National Century to issue new bonds, and the company soon ran into trouble finding the money to pay its clients.

In response, National Century began taking money from the reserve funds of two bond trusts � NPF VI and NPF XII. When J. P. Morgan, as trustee for NPF VI, asked for documentation as to how this was acceptable, National Century stopped taking money from NPF VI and eventually replaced it.

But the trustee of NPF XII, Bank One, is said to have made no such demand, so the company took about $300 million from that reserve fund, draining it to almost zero. At first, bondholders assumed the money went to buy new receivables. But in their motion filed in the Franklin County Court of Pleas in Columbus, Ohio, they say Mr. Poulsen admitted using it for other purposes."

Well, well. It turns out that junior, who flunked eighth grade mass, could have done better than bought the mortgage theory. He could have pointed out that hospital receivables are much more volatile, subject to a much higher percentage of defaults and restructurings. And traditionally, such volatility attracts, well, the loan shark -- because sharks are the type to be able to cover their bets with high interest and the threat of immediate violence following non-payment. Mr. Poulson isn't exactly a loan shark, but according to this account by Doug Noland (who writes the Credit Bubble report for Safehaven, a website for contrarian investors), the history of National Century is spotted with shady characters -- or should we say fly specked?

First, the sentence about the use of NPFXII funds in the Times story is confusing. It implies that the bondholders would be fine with the draining of the reserve fund to invest in further receivables. But of course, that is not what a reserve fund is for -- it is to serve as a barrier against the risk of defaults.

"From Dow Jones� David Feldheim: �No ratings Rx appears in sight for National Century Financial Enterprises (NCFE) amid concerns about revenue streams backing some of its securitizations. In the 11-plus years since its inception, NCFE has become the largest financier of healthcare receivables, according to its spokesman Jim Nickell. Over this period NCFE has securitized in excess of $6 billion of healthcare receivables, and it has bought substantially more than that from providers. It has also drawn recent scrutiny from the ratings agencies who rate those securitizations. Fitch Ratings said over the weekend that it has been informed by interested parties that NCFE directed the trustee to reroute certain funds intended for the NPF XII reserve accounts in order to fund the purchase of new receivables. �The company's apparent willingness to disregard the documents and commit such a serious breach, causes Fitch to question NCFE�s viability.��

Second, how did this company get so big, and why has nobody heard of it? One of the results of "restructuring" investment regulations in the eighties and nineties is that everybody gets to play investment bank. Without any pesky regulators looking at what you are doing. So anywhere cash is being transferred, somebody, somewhere, is trying to get a piece of that. Securitizing, slicing and dicing issues -- it is a wondrous way to make money, as long as you aren't on the other end when the stuff starts coming apart.

According to Noland, the company, founded in 91, has ties to a group of other companies, many of them connected to one Steven Scott. Scott ran a company called PhyAmerica Physician Group, which was delisted by the NYSE when its stock plummeted to pennies. PhyAmerica seems to be running on money loaned to it by NCF. In 2000, this became an issue, as stockholders sued Scott and Poulson for, as they put it, draining the company: "They alleged that Scott and Lance K. Poulsen, National Century�s president, had an agreement: Poulsen would fund Scott�s spending while Scott �looks the other way while Poulsen improperly diverts the company�s cash into NCFE�s coffers.� Even as the company�s finances deteriorated, PhyAmerica bought one corporate jet for $6.6 million and leased another for $848,000 -- expenses that benefited Scott because he owned the aviation company that provided the jets, shareholders said.� Also from the article: �There was a report on �60 Minutes� accusing�Dr. Steven Scott, of hiring doctors who had been disciplined or sued for malpractice.�

Forbes profiled the 'bearded" Poulson, and found him to be sanguine about NCFE -- at least in October. From Risky Business, on Friday October 11, By Seth Lubove:

"In between the court appearances Poulsen has thrived in his niche, making himself and his partners comfortably wealthy, though in ways that might raise eyebrows among traditional lenders. Poulsen, his wife and other company executives, for instance, have occasionally taken personal stakes in NCFE's borrowers. In addition to lending $107 million to something called Med Diversified as of the end of last year, NCFE also owns 6% of the company, or 5 million shares, while Poulsen personally controls another 109,000 shares of preferred stock. Med Diversified also acquired a company that was 22% owned by Donald Ayers, an NCFE cofounder and Med Diversified director. Med Diversified is dependent on NCFE in more ways than one. It derived $4 million in revenues in its 2001 fiscal year from NCFE for various "consulting services," in addition to being owed another $4.3 million in unpaid invoices from NCFE. Another $2 million in revenues during the same period came from an outfit called Millennium Healthcare, a company owned "indirectly" at the time by NCFE. Med Diversified fared badly anyway. It was delisted from the American Stock Exchange in July after losing $605 million in the past two fiscal years on sales of $296 million."

Medicine, attracting only the most sterling kind of entrepreneur! Noland's Safe Haven articule digs up some other intricate connections between NCF, Poulson, and various schemes, in twisted deals that have the involute structure of Jacobean drama, without the pretty poetry. This comes on the heels of two other medical scandals: one at Health South, and one at Tenet. Well, if hospitals start going bankrupt due to this Ohio case, the newspapers might even have to pay attention to it. We'll see.

Notice

I am not going to be as regular in posting this week, due to a toothache. Actually, three of my back teeth are in death star mode, causing me to suffer the pangs of hell in regular cycles. Like after I eat. Alas, having no money, what is LI to do? Well, this morning we called up the Texas Dental Examiners, who referred us to Texans for Healthy Smiles, who referred us to a clinic that will supposedly process us through the dread labyrinth of paperwork so that we can actually get these teeth extracted. Whether this will work or not is hard to say. If it doesn't, we'll rob a store and give ourselves up, and enjoy the amenities of prison dentistry. Anything to get rid of these molesting molars.

In the meantime, here's a thought from our friend, Tom. He sent us a little Moby Dick like medley of quotes, except not about the great fish. Here's the joke on the board above his office desk.

"The physicist Carl Friedrich von Weizacker told Heideggar the story of a man who spent all his day in a tavern. Asked why, the man replied that it was because of his wife: 'She talks and talks and talks and talks." He was asked, "What does she talk about?" He replied, "Ah, that she doesn't say." Heideggar is supposed to have said, "Yes, that is how it is."

Dope


We know for certain that sight is one of the most rapid actions we can perform. In an instant we see an infinite number of forms, still we only take in thoroughly one object at a time. Supposing that you, Reader, were to glance rapidly at the whole of this written page, you would instantly perceive that it was covered with various letters; but you could not, in the time, recognise what the letters were, nor what they were meant to tell. Hence you would need to see them word by word, line by line to be able to understand the letters. -Leonardo da Vinci

Seeking some calm from the excitements of this week � the injustice meted out to Winona! the latest report on the distribution of stock options during the 90s! und so weiter -- LI has been reading Leo Steinberg�s marvelous essay, Leonardo�s Incessant Last Supper. Steinberg is, as he calls it, a Leonardista. Among the splendors of the book are the photos he has taken, over the years, of the Last Supper. These photos record the changes made to that painting as its slow, inexorable restoration moved glacially forward. Frankly, if the restoration does look like the end page fold-out � and we have no doubt it does � LI suspects that, in another twenty years, we are going to be talking about the Last Supper Disaster. One has only to compare James Major, the second figure to Christ�s left, as he has been �restored� to earlier pictures. The restoration seems to have sentimentalized the painting, and to have created a muddiness where, before, there was a decay. I agree with Jacques Franck:"Ninety per cent of the work has disappeared, and the fact that you repaint 90 per cent is to me something that has not much sense."

This is not, I think, Steinberg�s opinion.

But what interested us, among other things, about Steinberg�s essay was the comparison of readings of the Last Supper. As Steinberg demonstrates, from the eighteenth century to quite recently, a secular interpretation prevailed. The �moment� portrayed in the painting, on this interpretation, was Jesus� revelation that he was going to be betrayed. Goethe was one of the great institutors of this interpretation � although, as a dissident pointed out, in 1903, Goethe depended on a reproduction of The Last Supper by Raphael Morghen that left the wine out of the painting � the wine in the glass before Jesus� upraised right hand. This is crucial to the counter-secular reading. This is how the scene is reported in Matthew, 26:

�19: And the disciples did as Jesus had appointed them; and they made ready the passover.
20: Now when the even was come, he sat down with the twelve.
21: And as they did eat, he said, Verily I say unto you, that one of you shall betray me.
22: And they were exceeding sorrowful, and began every one of them to say unto him, Lord, is it I?
23: And he answered and said, He that dippeth his hand with me in the dish, the same shall betray me.
24: The Son of man goeth as it is written of him: but woe unto that man by whom the Son of man is betrayed! it had been good for that man if he had not been born.
25: Then Judas, which betrayed him, answered and said, Master, is it I? He said unto him, Thou hast said.
26: And as they were eating, Jesus took bread, and blessed it, and brake it, and gave it to the disciples, and said, Take, eat; this is my body.
27: And he took the cup, and gave thanks, and gave it to them, saying, Drink ye all of it;
28: For this is my blood of the new testament, which is shed for many for the remission of sins.
29: But I say unto you, I will not drink henceforth of this fruit of the vine, until that day when I drink it new with you in my Father's kingdom.�
which was that the consternation at the table was provoked by Jesus�s pronouncement, this is my body, take eat, this is my blood.�

Steinberg traces the rise of the secular interpretation, buoyed by the spirit of Goethe, until the early sixties. But then the second, eucharistic interpretation began to emerge and contest the secularists. The salient fact about the Last Supper is that, at both ends of the table, the disciples register some kind of shock, while, at the very center, Jesus looks preternaturally mild. So what is this contrast? The secularists think that Leonardo has painted a Shakespearian tableau. Jesus� pronouncement, which could be uttered with cunning, or with anger, is uttered, by the son of man, with a sort of shame for the traitor � while the disciples, human all too human, have fallen to debating, among themselves, the crucial question of cultic loyalty. The eucharistics, according to the secularists, can�t account for the appearance of shock among the disciples. But this is because the secularists are thinking of the eucharist as it has been normalized for the last two thousand years. The eucharistics, however, think Leonardo has transported us back to the initial, shocking moment in which a man who these twelve men regarded as the son of God said to them, in effect, this bread, here, and this wine, over here, represent my body and my blood. And I want you to eat these things in order to remember me.

This is a shocking thing to hear. It is so very sexual, so very intimate, it releases a train of wild images in the mind that are normally repressed. It goes way back, saying something like that. There are stone floors of caves, there is firelight, there are night sweats, there is struggle. It forces the person who hears it to really look at the flesh saying it , and know that flesh is the world � that we live in a fully carnal world. The cannibal�s speech is that the mouth that speaks eats other mouths that speak. Words turn flesh, and flesh turns into words, feverishly. This is the effect caught in John 6, where Jesus says:

51: I am the living bread which came down from heaven: if any man eat of this bread, he shall live for ever: and the bread that I will give is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world.
52: The Jews therefore strove among themselves, saying, How can this man give us his flesh to eat?
53: Then Jesus said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, ye have no life in you.
54: Whoso eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, hath eternal life; and I will raise him up at the last day.

The effect of this speech on the disciples is remarked on in verset 60:
60: Many therefore of his disciples, when they had heard this, said, This is an hard saying; who can hear it?

So, this is the eucharistic case. But, as the saying is, sometimes Hegel happens. That is, sometimes the thesis and antithesis really do form a synthesis. Steinberg claims that the current consensus has moved to the conjunction of the secularist and eucharistic versions � that in this instance, as the hands go out for bread and wine, as the disciples cluster, as Thomas raises a finger and James Major spreads his arms in amazement, what is happening is a dream condensation, in the classical Freudian sense, of these two events � a Verdichtung. Steinberg does not make the Freudian detour, tempting as it might appear. LI is going to avoid it too � merely referring readers to the Chapter on Dreamwork in the Interpretation of Dreams. http://www.psywww.com/books/interp/chap06a.htm

We are after a different subject, which is: how exactly do we analyze the temporal element in the pictorial? In other words, how is time constituted in the picture?

Well, more on that tomorrow.