Once upon a time there was a peasant woman and a very wicked woman she was. And she died and did not leave a single good deed behind. The devils caught her and plunged her into the lake of fire. So her guardian angel stood and wondered what good deed of hers he could remember to tell to God; 'She once pulled up an onion in her garden,' said he, 'and gave it to a beggar woman.' And God answered: 'You take that onion then, hold it out to her in the lake, and let her take hold and be pulled out. And if you can pull her out of the lake, let her come to Paradise, but if the onion breaks, then the woman must stay where she is.' The angel ran to the woman and held out the onion to her. 'Come,' said he, 'catch hold and I'll pull you out.' he began cautiously pulling her out. He had just pulled her right out, when the other sinners in the lake, seeing how she was being drawn out, began catching hold of her so as to be pulled out with her. But she was a very wicked woman and she began kicking them. 'I'm to be pulled out, not you. It's my onion, not yours.' As soon as she said that, the onion broke. And the woman fell into the lake and she is burning there to this day. -- Grushenka's story in The Brothers Karamazov

My guardian angel in New York City, T., must have remembered some onion I had given away, because he sent me the money to deliver me from my current hell. Now the question is -- am I any better than that miserly peasant woman?

Why do I have a heavy suspicion the answer is no?

Since my time, right now, is dedicated to finding an extra-literary position and finishing a novel I have idly been scribbling for the last couple of years, I am not going to be putting out these dense posts any more. But I'll put them out now and then.

Bollettino

Lately I've been thinking about the politics of oil. I felt, at the very beginning of the fight over the War, that the petro aspect of the thing was horribly distorted by misunderstandings about the oil business.

When OPEC formed, the seven sister oil companies did everything they could to destroy it. But after the seventies, the international structure of petroleum production stabilized, with OPEC in the center. Sure, some oil cowboys dreamed of upending the cartel, but oil companies adapted and, inevitably, took advantage of OPEC's structure.

Bush is a mediocre oilman, and absorbed all the floating prejudices in the trade. So I think, at least, that he was not inclined to upset a system in the Middle East that he, and his buds, were accustomed to. The revolution in his thinking occured after 9/11, when he was genuinely persuaded to act against his previous biases. In a sense, the belligerents were right: the War wasn't about oil.

But they were only half-right, and the half they were right about is typical. The thinking about the War didn't extend beyond the War. And that is turning out to be... another war. Actually, the second phase of the old one. The occupation, we think, is all about oil. The stupidity of the occupiers derives from their grand, and ultimately futile, scheme. This scheme is to resurrect that old dream of breaking OPEC.

In the oil business, such turn-about of projects are not uncommon. The wildcatter myth is a strong and persistent cultural constant among these people. And that is exactly what Bremer's administration is acting like: it's a wildcatter occupation.

Why are we in Iraq? Beyond the claims about security and democracy, there is always entwined a little phrase about promoting "free enterprise." When Colin Powell was last interviewed on NPR, he managed to slip that in to his responses so smoothly that he was never asked about it. However, it isn't a little thing: it is the only thing. The goal of selling off Iraq's nationalized oil business is at the dead center of the behavior of the occupiers.

It is, of course, futile. As we are learning, and will learn, oil in Iraq depends on a delicate and easily disruptible infrastructure of pipes. It is going to be quite easy for any resistance group to do significant damage to those pipes. But that is a minor technical point. The major point is that there is not only not a popular demand in Iraq to privatize the oil biz -- there is almost no demand to privatize the oil biz.

For that reason, the occupiers are keeping Iraqis from exercizing any authentic authority. But notice how these things build. As we try to move towards re-constructing Iraq in our fantasy image, we have to secure ourselves as occupiers. As we secure ourselves as occupiers, we alienate more and more of the occupied. As we alienate more and more of the occupied, we have to put off devolving power on Iraqis for fear that they will represent that alienation.

If, in fact, we simply wanted an ally in the Middle East, we had, and still, perhaps, have a perfect opportunity. We accrued considerable good will for evicting Saddam. How can that good will be dissipated most easily? By a continued resistance to giving power to Iraqis. The idea that Iraqis will like us more in the future, which is the premise of Bremer and crew, is counter-intuitive. That doesn't usuallly happen in occupations. Sure, when the US and Russia occupied Germany, and when Japan was occupied, that might have happened. However, that is because Germany and Japan were absolutely devestated. The firebombing of Tokyo that happened in one single night killed four times as many people as died on all sides in the late War. Having broken the spirit of the people, occupation was not resented -- at least consciously -- by the occupiers, who felt considerable guilt and shame. And even then, the traditional economic structures of both countries -- Japan and Germany -- survived pretty much intact. The Iraqi occupation is in the mode of Napoleon's occupation of Spain, Japan's occupation of China, or the Nazi occupation of France -- the people in those countries were not cowed. Or, one could say, in the case of France, gradually recovered their spirits. Iraqis in particular aren't cowed -- they don't feel defeated as a people.

Eventually, someone will ask Colin Powell about the 'free enterprise' he slips into his responses. Maybe in, what, a year?

Bollettino

Writing as hell

The casualty report, today, is all autobiographical. It has been forty days and forty nights since LI was last paid by a major client. They float us, and they don't care, and that is ... life. We wrote, in good faith, reviews that were as good as we could make them, to deadlines that the newspapers laid down, and in return we get... this. The Sunday before last we begged a hundred dollars from our brother. That check came on Thursday, and foolishly we deposited it, where it was eaten by the money that we owed the bank from bounced checks. Since then, we�ve had nothing.

It is now Tuesday, July 8, 2003.

Hmm. The rent check will bounce in two days. The phone isn�t paid. And the electrical company is going to put a 24 hour notice on the door in about a day.

We went to the store today, and took stock of our wallet. Five dollars. We bought a can of peas.

What to do? We don�t have a clue. The money that is coming in might as well not, by now. We are too far into this dark tunnel. We went for a walk around the lake and tried to think it out, but nothing suggests itself. Or, actually, much suggests itself, and none of it is to our taste. It is ninety degrees in Austin at the present time. This isn�t good weather to be on the street. And, really, we don't know how to be on the street. In another ten days, the AOL account will be history, so if we were going to continue this, we'd have to work from a library. And it isn't worth it. We have no credit. Yesterday, we were looking at our clothes. We have one presentable shirt left.

We are about done, here.

So, our guess is: this is the last post for a while. We can�t go on in this vacuum.

So, my companeros -- you'll have to read the papers yourselves.

Bollettino

Casualty report: Reuters reports three U.S. injuries yesterday, one from a land mine. Another mortar attack last night in Balad, no injuries. And two more Saddam tapes have popped up, although no Saddam to go with them. LI is reminded of the numerous pretenders that appeared in the time of troubles in Russia.

Berlusconi

Viewing the most rightwing leaders in the world right now -- Bush and Berlusconi -- one has to wonder if it is necessary to be quite that stupid in public. But of course, stupidity in public is actually a shock technique of power. It is a way of suddenly casting a light upon what is said and unsaid. Power over the distinction is power, indeed. And so misspeakings, or crudeness of various sorts, acquire the fascination of a dirty joke -- taboos that run just beneath the surface, employed on the surface, have the power to make us laugh, and in that laughter crystalize both disgust and complicity. Comparison between Bush's "bring em on" remark and Berlusconi's 'invitation,' as Le Monde delicately puts it, to a Germany deputy in the European parliament to play the role of a kapo in a film being shot in Italy, demonstrate the use of political stupidity, insofar as they signal to a certain constituency the utter contempt of the "leader" for the forms of negotiation -- the whole paraphernalia of democracy, with its indirections, procedures, compromises, and deliberately fractured powers. Stupidity on this level is a blow, a coup, a tactic.


In fact, Italian politics now gives us a rather dark scenario for a possible American future; at least the one that beckons if the FCC succeeds in taking apart restraints on monopoly media. Berlusconi is getting credit for escaping jail -- this has added to his prestige in Italy. He's the Robin Hood escaping the censorious prosecutor. For the same reason, his stupidity in making a crude joke in his first session as EU president adds to his credit. Although it isn't as though Italians get to watch the event themselves. As the Guardian has reported:

"While coverage elsewhere in the world centred on Mr Berlusconi's offensive remarks - made as the prime minister took the helm of the European presidency - news programmes in Italy presented the incident as a vicious attack by Martin Schulz, leader of the German socialists in the Strasbourg assembly, which provoked the jibe. One evening news show on Radio Televisione Italiana (RAI), dubbed over the prime minister's voice as he delivered the joke that prompted uproar in the assembly and led to diplomatic protests from Berlin. Having seen only TV reports of the "squabble" and a "small incident", the Repubblica editorial concluded:

"The average Italian cannot understand why foreign ministries are on the move over such a trifle."

Amid growing controversy over state television coverage in general, directors of the three RAI channels have been summoned to explain themselves at a parliamentary commission on broadcasting standards next week."

It is the jokes, the jokes that are killing us.

Bollettino

Stephen Nadler, in a review of Jonathan Israel's Radical Enlightenment, Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650�1750 published in the British Journal for the History of Philosophy, expresses the core idea of the Radical Enlightenment as being derivative, ultimately, of the thought of Spinoza -- or at least an interpretation of the thought of Spinoza:

"As Israel demonstrates at great length, and through the examination of a large variety of thinkers and an enormous body of published and archival material, �the essence of the radical intellectual tradition from Spinoza to Diderot is the philosophical rejection of revealed religion, miracles, and divine Providence, replacing the idea of salvation in the hereafter with a highest goodin the here and now�. The providential God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is an anthropomorphic .fiction, and sectarian religion nothing but organized superstition. And then there is the secular conception of eudaimonia, along with a rejection of monarchy (or even oligarchy) in favour of democracy."

We like to think of ourselves as the children of Spinoza, too -- that is, we subscribe, in broad terms, to the above program. So we were surprised, a couple of days ago, to be accused of having a soft spot for theocracy. A friend of ours who shall be nameless has very strong, negative feelings about the present party in power in Turkey. It is, she claims, the reincarnation of the Virtue party, and stands for the revival of an Islamic state. Now, we think she is probably right about a central current in the government of Erdogan; however, we think he probably pursued the only possible path in the lead up to the War. Our friend thinks he screwed the pooch -- he should have aligned Turkey, as is the tradition, with the U.S. The Turkish hesitancy was a definite signal to the Islamic states that Turkey is moving in the direction of Shar'ia.

To us, there's a certain ... well, vulnerability in the ideological shields available to a person of liberal sensibilities confronted with the revival of the theocratic impulse. The critical impulse that we have nourished has fed upon attacking and analyzing a secular order --- so we read our Dostoevsky, we read our Foucault, we concentrate upon the damage wrought by the erection of Western superstructures that enrolled populations in an order of production and exchange that was wholly alien to the symbolic order that proceeded it, etc. etc. But we thought the imp in the pre-capitalist, pre-enlightenment impulse was dead -- we thought we were dealing with treated pathogens. We thought ... or we didn't think, that God had been chased pretty thoroughly from the polis.

Apparently, he hasn't.

However, it won't do to retreat, to recapitulate the old gesture of totalitarian secularism. We know the wound there too intimately. That the theocratic direction of the party in power in Turkey is limited by the military is a scandal; it is a scandal, specifically, of the radical enlightenment, a failure in the core of the program. The scandal is shaped, as so often, by the utter corruption of the secular powers, socialist and capitalist alike; and by the brute force of the powers of coercion. In Iran, the convergence of stupid force and massive fraud was the outward shape and inward character of the Shah's regime. As Enlightenment collapses like an old Sadean fouteur in his castle of horrors, outside the forces of anti-Enlightenment turn ugly.

So -- we want to do something typically LI-ish, and examine the work of a French libertine from the seventeenth century, M. Gabriel Naude. Naude was the author of one of the first books of library "science" -- Advis pour dresser un biblioteque. He was also the author of a short treatise on the art of the coup d'etat, a phrase he invented. And finally, he wrote a book against the witch hysteria,
Apologie pour tous les grands hommes qui ont est� accusez de magie

The combination of info geek, demystifer, and authoritarian is, well, all too contemporary. Naude isn't as well known as his friend, Gassendi, but he was certainly known to humanists at the time. The book on libraries was translated by John Evelyn. The book on the politics of the coup d'etat was, if not read, at least practiced, in part, by Louis XIV.

As you know, we often promise to bite off more than three or four men with real jobs and libraries can chew. But we think we'll do this post some time.

Bollettino

Casualty report this morning: 3 Americans have been killed in the last 24 hours. 2 Iraqis charging American troops have been killed. 4 Americans were wounded in Ramadi.


There's a very nice article in the LAT this morning about Iraq's 'minister' of telecommunications, one Shakir Abdulla. Abdulla is a guerilla of the peaceful kind: a man who, with ad hoc equipment and an ever changing plan, is trying to put the telephone system back together again. With minimal help from the Americans, even though, presumably, some American slug is serving as an "advisor" to the group. As the article puts it:

"Like many Iraqis, Abdulla cannot understand how the governing U.S.-led occupation authority has allowed things to crumble so utterly.

"The coalition has a responsibility to create security. They created the situation that eliminated it," he said. "They must replace it."

In the meantime, the man must deal with a system that has no billing capability. A system that is more valuable in looted pieces than as a unit:

"So far, there has been little in the way of actual equipment delivered by the American overseers, Abdulla said.

"They are very cooperative, very nice people, but we didn't get any hard things from them," he said.

Repairing the telephone exchanges and building a new cellular system are, theoretically, not daunting tasks. The bombed-out exchanges can be worked around, and a skeletal wireless system is being installed.

"It is not only a technical problem," Abdulla said. "Technically, it's not very difficult. The difficulty is to have security. This is the most important issue."

An admirable instance of an enterprise being crushed, or that is one's pained sense, between a revanchist and accumulating Iraqi resistance and a clueless American occupation. And a brief glance at this newsletter article by a telecommunications group regarding the reconstruction of Iraq's system gives a much bleaker picture than the LAT. In fact, the two articles seem to be about two different worlds. According to Pulse, the Bremer people have been reluctant to start any national telecommunication project. They want such projects to be mounted in the indefinite future, by the Iraqis themselves. This heartening confidence in Iraqi autonomy, coming from the Bremer folks, is suspicious. Here's Pulse on the latest:

"Whether or not the State Department recommendation for a USAID contract will materialize is unclear. State has indicated that they are seeking to incorporate telecom infrastructure repairs into the already awarded Bechtel Capital Construction contract. If this were the case, the scope of telecom reconstruction would be limited to repairs and much smaller than indicated in the original State Department recommendations outlined above. Furthermore, to include telecommunications repairs under the already awarded Bechtel contract would require Congressional approval. In sum, the State recommendation seems to be a positive step, but the jury is out as to whether such a contract will happen any time soon -- if at all."

And here's the last graf, like the dying fall of some gut shot fat man:

"Circumstances under which future telecom contracts are issued are unclear. However, recent actions by the CPA and USG indicate that new contracts for large-scale telecommunications infrastructure will not be USG funded. Without USG funding, it is uncertain what company will be willing and/or able to pursue a contract that requires private or other forms of alternative funding. Iraq is far from being a safe/stable environment, and the cost of doing business there will be discouragingly high for the unforeseeable future." -- note: CPA=coalition provisional authority; USG=U.S. Gov.

The Iraqis have an uneasy feeling that the US purpose in Iraq is to render them perpetually helpless, a servile state . Reading PULSE's article, one understands how that feeling arises.

Bollettino

Casualty report this morning: 3 Americans have been killed in the last 24 hours. 2 Iraqis charging American troops have been killed. 4 Americans were wounded in Ramadi.


There's a very nice article in the LAT this morning about Iraq's 'minister' of telecommunications, one Shakir Abdulla. Abdulla is a guerilla of the peaceful kind: a man who, with ad hoc equipment and an ever changing plan, is trying to put the telephone system back together again. With minimal help from the Americans, even though, presumably, some American slug is serving as an "advisor" to the group. As the article puts it:

"Like many Iraqis, Abdulla cannot understand how the governing U.S.-led occupation authority has allowed things to crumble so utterly.

"The coalition has a responsibility to create security. They created the situation that eliminated it," he said. "They must replace it."

In the meantime, the man must deal with a system that has no billing capability. A system th Patriot
The Flag Shop is Out of Stock
I hang myself...via live telecast.

Coming live from my own funeral...the beautiful weather offered a nice shine,
Which is suitable for a full view of a forever altered skyline.
It's times like these I freestyle biased opinions every other sentence.
My journalistic ethics slip when I pass them off as objective.
Wondering how after it settles we'll
find who provided power to radical rebels. The Melting Pot
seems to be calling the kettle black when it boils over, But
only on our own soil so the little boy holds a toy
soldier... And waits for the suit and tie to come home. We
won't wait 'til he's older, Before we destroy hopes for a
colder war to end. "Now get a close up of his head..."
Makeshift Patriot
The Flag Shop Is Out Of Stock
Hang Myself...Half Mast


That's

Bollettino

Here's an item from the NYT.


"Military families, so often the ones to put a cheery face on war, are growing vocal. Since major combat for the 150,000 troops in Iraq was declared over on May 1, more than 60 Americans, including 25 killed in hostile encounters, have died in Iraq, about half the number of deaths in the two months of the initial campaign.

Frustrations became so bad recently at Fort Stewart, Ga., that a colonel, meeting with 800 seething spouses, most of them wives, had to be escorted from the session.

"They were crying, cussing, yelling and screaming for their men to come back," said Lucia Braxton, director of community services at Fort Stewart."

And here is an item from Aristophanes:


LYSISTRATA We will explain our idea.
MAGISTRATE Out with it then; quick, or... (threatening her).
LYSISTRATA (sternly) Listen, and never a movement, please!
MAGISTRATE (in impotent rage)Oh! it is too much for me! I cannot keep my temper!

LEADER OF CHORUS OF WOMEN Then look out for yourself; you have more to fear than we have.
MAGISTRATE Stop your croaking, you old crow! (To LYSISTRATA) Now you, saywhat you have to say.

LYSISTRATA Willingly. All the long time the war has lasted, we have enduredin modest silence all you men did; you never allowed us to open ourlips. We were far from satisfied, for we knew how things were going;often in our homes we would hear you discussing, upside down andinside out, some important turn of affairs. Then with sad hearts,but smiling lips, we would ask you: Well, in today's Assembly did theyvote peace?-But, "Mind your own business!" the husband would growl,"Hold your tongue, please!" And we would say no more.

CLEONICE I would not have held my tongue though, not I!
MAGISTRATEYou would have been reduced to silence by blows then.
LYSISTRATA Well, for my part, I would say no more. But presently I would cometo know you had arrived at some fresh decision more fatally foolish than ever. "Ah! my dear man," I would say, "what madness next!" But he would only look at me askance and say: "Just weave your web, please;else your cheeks will smart for hours. War is men's business!"
MAGISTRATE Bravo! well said indeed!
LYSISTRATA How now, wretched man? not to let us contend against your follies was bad enough! But presently we heard you asking out loud in the open street: "Is there never a man left in Athens?" and, "No,not one, not one," you were assured in reply. Then, then we made upour minds without more delay to make common cause to save Greece. Open your ears to our wise counsels and hold your tongues, and we may yet put things on a better footing.
MAGISTRATE You put things indeed! Oh! this is too much! The insolence ofthe creatures!
LYSISTRATA Be still!
MAGISTRATE May I die a thousand deaths ere I obey one who wears a veil!

Michael Massing examines one of Bush's "expert" appointees in Iraq, a man named James Haveman. Here's his bio, starting from the point at which he was appointed "advisor" to the Health ministry:

"Haveman, 60, was largely unknown among international public health professionals. A social worker by training, he has no medical degree or any formal instruction in public health, and he hasn't been in the military. From 1991 to 2002, he served in the cabinet of John Engler, the Republican governor of Michigan, directing state health programs. Most of Haveman's recent overseas experience had come through International Aid, a Christian relief organization that provides health care and spreads the Gospel in the Third World."

It gets much worse. Haveman's expertise seems to be in closing down health care units in Michigan, under the ever egregious Governor Engler. He's an evangelical pur et dur. International Aid is an organization dedicated to preventing birth control whereever it happens, and bringing the heathen to the Lord. The former might be more than acceptable to Iraq, but the latter is bound to cause trouble. In fact, it is ridiculously bound to cause trouble. Could you appoint a person more likely to burn Iraqi sensibilities if you made a search?

Ah, but Haveman does have one thing going for him. He's a Republican activist.

The US made its position in Vietnam one bad decision at a time. Bush seems determined to make his bad decisions all at once, in big clumps.

Finally, a casualty report from Bloomberg:

"A U.S. soldier was shot and critically wounded in Iraq, bringing to at least 28 the number of U.S. casualties in the country in the past four days. The soldier, from the 352nd Civil Affairs Command, was shot in the head while guarding Baghdad University in the center of the capital, U.S. military spokesman Corporal Todd Pruden said in an interview. The soldier was taken to hospital, Pruden added.

Attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq have become an almost daily occurrence since the beginning of June. At least 26 have died since President George W. Bush declared an end to major combat operations on May 1. Six British soldiers were killed in southern Iraq in June."

We need a Lysistrata.

Bollettino

"A dearth of general information is almost necessary to the thorough-paced coffee-house politician; in the absence of thought, imagination, sentiment, he is attracted immediately to the nearest commonplace, and floats through the chosen regions of noise and empty rumours without difficulty and without distraction. Meet 'any six of these men in buckram,' and they will accost you with the same question and the same answer: they have seen it somewhere in print, or had it from some city oracle, that morning; and the sooner they vent their opinions the better, for they will not keep. Like tickets of admission to the theatre for a particular evening, they must be used immediately, or they will be worth nothing: and the object is to find auditors for the one and customers for the other, neither of which is difficult; since people who have no ideas of their own are glad to hear what any one else has to say, as those who have not free admissions to the play will very obligingly take up with an occasional order. It sometimes gives one a melancholy but mixed sensation to see one of the better sort of this class of politicians, not without talents or learning, absorbed for fifty years together in the all-engrossing topic of the day: mounting on it for exercise and recreation of his faculties, like the great horse at a riding-school, and after his short, improgressive, untired career, dismounting just where he got up; flying abroad in continual consternation on the wings of all the newspapers; waving his arm like a pump-handle in sign of constant change, and spouting out torrents of puddled politics from his mouth; dead to all interests but those of the state; seemingly neither older nor wiser for age; unaccountably enthusiastic, stupidly romantic, and actuated by no other motive than the mechanical operations of the spirit of newsmongering." -- Hazlitt

Swift and Johnson had denounced coffehouse politicians in the eighteenth century, but Hazlitt was, we believe, the first to really paint the species in all the colors of its modernity: that is, connecting the triumph of the "moderns" over the ancients and with the triumph of a new mode of knowledge -- the triumph of the sensationalism of the newspapers (or of the laboratory) over the precepts of authority. Newspaper knowledge was the parody, the sotie, of science. In the latter, all that is ephemeral is true; in the former, all that is true is ephemeral.

There's an obvious cultural contradiction in the mournful theme. Johnson, Swift and Hazlitt both lived as literary journalists. In Hazlitt's case, this contradiction achieved pervasive surface expression -- one of the constants in his essays is his dislike of the role of essayist.

LI is making these Wizard of Oz like literary reflections because we are about to duck into cultural contradiction ourselves. That is, we are about to swell about in full coffehouse politician regalia. So be warned.

The WP reported, this week, that Howard Dean collected 7 million bucks this quarter. This is more than any other candidate, for the quarter. The e WP responded to Dean's sudden pre-eminence by publishing articles heavy with disdain for the man. The WP is as offended by Dean as some Hollywood movie mogul might be by internet movie trading among teens. It just isn't business. The WP beau ideal is beau ideal is a 'centerist' Democrat in the JFK mode. As in the headline, Centrist In Debt To JFK: Living Religion, Honing Ambition The headline was about, of all people, Joseph Lieberman, whose likeness to JFK is well disguised. As is his connection to the accounting industry and his bullying of the SEC in the nineties, when the head of the joint was trying to reign in corporate fraud on the books. About that topic, the WP profile is discretely mum.

Compare and contrast the headline about Dean: Short-Fused Populist, Breathing Fire at Bush. The profile is a hatchet job through and through, picking through Dean's flip flops, and leaving heavy, winking winking signs that here's a man who doesn't have a chance against Bush. They treat Dean more like some slightly disreputable shock-jock than, say, as a 'centrist in debt to JFK.' Here's a sample:

"In recent months he has been called "brusque," "brash," "blunt" and "belligerent"; a few more choice words on his part, and critics will be questioning whether Dean has the diplomatic skills needed to be the leader of the free world.

One story circulating in Washington is about the time he met with the editorial board of Roll Call. Elections analyst Stuart Rothenberg, who writes a column for the Capitol Hill newspaper, asked Dean why, if he was so proud of signing the first same-sex civil union bill in the country, he had done so in a closed-door meeting rather than in a public ceremony, as a Democrat in Vermont had described. Dean, Rothenberg recalled, paused, leaned back in his chair and exclaimed: "That's [expletive]! Nobody from Vermont said that!"

"Sometimes Howard's tongue is faster than his brain," said Peter Freyne, a columnist for Seven Days, a weekly newspaper in Burlington, Vt. It doesn't help matters that Dean speaks off the cuff; out of hundreds of campaign speeches he has delivered, only four were written in advance. The rest were ad-libbed. "He's smart and energetic," Freyne said. "I've been calling him Ho-Ho for years, because he's like the little engine that could."

This is in stark contrast to the mellow tones that aureole Lieberman's moral agons as he ascends to that summit of all things good, the senatorial seat from Connecticut, at the conclusion of which we are given a dose of the true pap:

"All of this bespeaks a man of driving ambition, but it does not answer the question of what lies behind the ambition. What makes Joey run?"

Whether it's self-aggrandizement, selfish ambition or ambition to really do a good job, they all come out looking the same," said Peter Kelly, a Hartford lawyer and veteran of Connecticut and national Democratic politics. "It's really hard to picture Joe Lieberman as somebody who says I'm going to do this because it's going to get me something. That's just not the way the man thinks."

Lacking JFK's Charisma

Lieberman is 61 and, like so many others of his generation, he came of age politically with the 1960 election of Kennedy, the dashing Democrat from neighboring Massachusetts. Since Kennedy's assassination in 1963, all Democratic presidential hopefuls have paid homage to his memory, and none more so than Lieberman.

He describes himself as "still a Kennedy Democrat," almost suggesting that, if JFK were alive today, he, too, would be a member of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council." Etc., etc.

The subhead, Lacking JKF's Charisma would be humorous if the article wasn't so filled with kisses for Lieberman. Other subheadings suggest themselves: Lacks Orrin Hatch's Charisma. Lacks Nixon's Charisma. Lacks Gerald Ford's Charisma. Etc., etc.

But the WP is uneasily aware that, for some reason, Dean seems to be popular among voters. So -- in what will probably be the first of many similar articles -- they lightheartedly profile the antics of Karl Rove, Bush's Svengali, who wants Bush to opposed Dean -- signal to voters, don't get your panties in a wad for this Dean character.

Under the headline, Rove spends the fourth rousing voters for Dean, they portray a prank of Karl Rove's -- getting a bunch of Republicans to cheer for Dean at a parade -- in an attempt to insinuate that Dean is a sure loser. Insinuate might not be the word. Contemptuously state, in so many words is probably closer to it. It the old trick: don't vote for the sucker candidate - vote for the centrist loser.

So what, coffeehouse politicians everywhere wonder, should Dean do?

He should confront this contempt head on. Not in the attack mode of the media is too conservative -- that is silly. Rather he should confront the contempt as unprofessional. This is a line of reasoning that will resonate with the WP. Dean really has nothing to fear from quotes that compare him to the little train that could. But he does have a lot to fear from the press using him for target practice.

Bollettino

LI has been in a long and winding correspondance with an ardent supporter of the Iraq War. We spent a lot of time proposing and dissing each others analogies. Is the occupation of Iraq like the occupation of Germany and Japan, after WWII? Or is it like Vietnam? Etc.

Now, LI has a rule about history: there are no lessons in history. This is a rule we violate, for rhetorical reasons, all of the time. However, in calmer moments, we realize that the lesson metaphor is horribly overdetermined, and structurally suspect. For one thing, it implies a control, both conceptual and organizational, over history that doesn't and can't exist. Or at least it requires a belief in a trans-historical agency that needs to be established first. Such an agency could make history as a form of lesson, although it is unclear what that lesson would be about. A lesson is made around a subject, while history is made as history -- as the synthesis of the variously satisfactory enactments of human intentions with the contingency of natural events or countering intentions. This doesn't sound like lesson-making. For another thing, the metaphor downplays the complexity of the agents and systems at play within history. The lesson implies the class room, the teacher, the student. It follows a definite communicative channel, one determined by the social organization that allocates the teacher and the student positions. The odd thing about the lessons of history metaphor is that the teacher becomes the subject -- history teaches itself. The student of history reads the lessons of history from history itself. The triple relationship -- teacher, subject, student -- is collapsed into a double relationship -- teacher, student. The student's reception of the lesson requires a temporal and spatial location - a certain retirement -- while history, teaching itself, becomes a kind of confession. This is one of the attractions of the metaphor for the politician: such retirement is consonant with an old pattern, within Western culture, of making the values of the ascetic ideal superior to the practical one. It's the ruse of the priest, in a sense, to create the order for which the warrior fights. It's the ruse of the warrior to claim the priest's position -- that key retirement, that key distance. As Weber has remarked, somewhere, the artist and the politician emerge at the same time in the West, both of them signs of a certain form of modernity, both of them related in the peculiar individuality of their endeavors -- both of them throwing off the system of patronage as a sort of constitutive gesture. Which is just a way of saying, to paraphrase Marx, all insights into social science appear twice, once in poetry and once in Weber. Shelley's dictum that poets are the rulers of the world comes to much the same insight as Weber's, except that Shelley is sublime, Weber mundane.
However -- stepping back, here -- if history doesn't teach itself, and if, consequently, there are no students of history, how is one to take any practical action in the world? We do recognize a certain sense in saying that the occupation of Iraq is like that of Japan -- even if we disagree with it.

We're going to discuss this in our next post. In the meantime, we recommend this link to a book on metaphor in science.

As for our own embattled position -- we have now been running on an empty checking account since last Friday. The milk will be gone by the end of the day. We have four dollars, and we are trying to figure out how to spend it most wisely. There's bread and cheese and some cans of soup. There are some eggs too. Alas, no mail tomorrow, so -- if we aren't paid today, we will have to go into next week like this.

Hard times.

Bollettino


CNN has a very confusing report on casualties this morning. Bush's wish for "them" to "bring em on" was granted, to the extent of a number of attacks that wounded 10 American troops. A marine was killed clearing mines, and a soldier died of the wounds received from the attack yesterday that injured six. Or so we presume -- the soldier's death is extremely under-reported.

On another front -- LI wrote a post last week about the suspicious nature of the "accidents" that are killing American soldiers in Iraq. Here's a story from Maine that will get no play in the national press, which goes along, and goes along:

"ANDREWS AIR FORCE BASE -- Sen. Susan Collins says the army has assured her it will conduct a full investigation into the death of First Sergeant Christopher Coffin, a reservist from Kennebunk.

The senator just returned from a tour of Iraq herself and spoke with NewsRadio WMTW's Bob Dyk. In the interview, Collins said, "My heart just goes out to the family. It's gotta be so difficult, and the conflicting stories on how he died need to be cleared up."

Coffin was 51.

The army initially told his family that he died in a vehicle accident, but his family says news reports indicate he may have, in fact, died under enemy fire."

Here's the AP report:

An Army reservist whose retirement request was denied because of Operation Iraqi Freedom became the fifth soldier with Maine ties to be killed in the conflict, possibly when his convoy came under attack.

First Sgt. Christopher Coffin, 51, of Kennebunk, was a member of 352nd Civil Affairs Command assisting convoys traveling between Baghdad and Kuwait when he died Tuesday, his sister-in-law, Candy Barr Heimbach, said Wednesday.

The Army initially told the family Tuesday night that Coffin was driving a vehicle crashed after swerving to avoid an Iraqi civilian vehicle."

The family is not going to let that story go without questioning. Here's another piece in Coffin's story:

"Coffin, who was deployed overseas four months ago, was part of a unit based in Riverdale, Md., that was assisting in rebuilding efforts and was not supposed to be involved in active combat."

Interesting contrast: on the one side, Coffin, an honest guy working at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, did his best for his family, gets not only killed in combat in Iraq, but the Army that sends him there tries to disguise the death for political reasons; on the other side, you have a man who skipped his war in Vietnam, not because he opposed it, but because he could; the son of a rich man who officially acted to pipe poor black and white kids to Vietnam while making sure his own son didn't put his foot in that meat grinder; a boy who rose like a queer dollar from one failure to the next, until he has a job in which his evident limits, mental and personal, will have the maximum deleterious effect.

And so they "bring em on." Every day in every way.

Bollettino


We have to recommend this fascinating article on Qaddafi's daughter, the Libyan "Claudia Shiffer" Aisha al Qaddafi. It asks questions that Middle Eastern journalists are eager to ask, but can't in the press. As, for instance, where does Qaddafi's daughter come up with the dough to afford perpetual stays in elite London Hotels, where the going rate is $2200 a night?

Not surprisingly, as Aisha subsists on ye olde service and the best scotches Claridge's can come up with, she is also a great one for expressing solidarity with the downtrodden. She nearly bleeds -- or at least sweats -- for the Palestinian people, to whom she has recommended jihad. I'm sure they are much obliged.

And now for the Casualty report: here's the insufferable W. rallying the home troops, and incidentally supplying just the rationale that insurgents will use to kill American soldiers:

``There are some who feel like that, you know, the conditions are such that they can attack us there. My answer is bring them on,'' Bush said. ``We got the force necessary to deal with the security situation.'' Bush said he would welcome assistance from other countries willing to send troops to help restore peace. ``Anybody who wants to help, we'll welcome,'' Bush said. ``But we got plenty tough force there right now to make sure the situation is secure."

Bring them on? There's a phrase for a double take. Luckily, the President is in such disconnect from his tongue that we can dismiss the idea that he views grenade attacks on a US army vehicle in the light of a elementary school yard fight. He simply doesn't think.

Reuters is reporting that of the six wounded yesterday, one soldier has died:

"A U.S. soldier hurt in an attack on his convoy a day earlier died of his wounds, bringing to at least 23 the number of American servicemen killed by hostile fire since major combat operations were declared over for the U.S. forces and their British allies on May 1."

Ten have supposedly died from the explosion in Falujah. We are curious about an AP think piece last week, which outlined the dreamy peacefulness of Falujah, contrasting it with the wild hyperboles of violence thrown about by the Western press. We are eager to see AP reporter Mark Fitz's follow up. He will doubtless point to the lack of grafitti in the town, once again. Winning hearts and minds one covered up slogan at a time.

Bollettino

When LI lived in Santa Fe, we attended a number of parties organized by an art dealer. Actually, in Santa Fe, it is almost impossible to avoid parties organized by an art dealer of some type. You will be walking along, innocently enough, and suddenly you will be engulfed by rich Texas couples and amply funded California divorcees clamoring for a "purplish" picture to hang in the solarium. It is that kind of town.

These parties had a debilitating effect on my morale. I had hung with the wealthy before; I'd read Architectural Digest in their bathrooms; I'd talked to their almost always ancient maids, although I can't say I talked to them much. The maids eyed me with justified suspicion. No matter - I liked em. In my experience, wealth had had a gentle, softening effect upon people -- like some purling current of water, gradually brightening and shaping a bed of pebbles.

That was my feeling until I encountered the the crowds that gathered, like some species of vulture even the Audobon Society couldn't love, to drink white wine and eat Southwestern canapes in the rooms of this art dealer. They were a whole other order of philistine.

I was reminded of the type by this story about the Barnes Institute.

The Barnes has always stuck out because it was founded by a wealthy screwball. One of the things about art is that it demands a response. One of the things about money is that it doesn't. It is a contradiction that makes the true artist grit his or her teeth, when encountering the true client.

Not so for the founder of the Barnes, about which the Times article has this rather unhelpful bio:

"The collection was amassed by Albert C. Barnes, a patent-medicine millionaire who installed it in the 1920's on his estate in the Main Line suburb of Merion."

Barnes (unlike the vultures) not only amassed his collection, he formed definite opinions about it. Opinions that were not about its potential exchange value. He wrote pamphlets. He sought out intellectuals who had similar beliefs. And he decided to reveal his collection only to those who were able to see it in the right way -- as if, indeed, he'd done the work himself.

Since Albert's time, the foundation has had a pretty colorful career. LI saw an exhibit of some of the Barnes pieces years ago -- we remember being struck particularly by the Soutines. That exhibit was a rarity. Now the Barnes board is trying to find to build a museum to house the pieces, which means significantly re-structuring Albert's explicit instructions -- Albert was not a man who wanted the hoi polloi to wash up before his pictures. The board contracted for an audit, and it is being published today. The audit says a lot about a former president of the institute, Richard Glanton. Glanton is not amused.

"Mr. Glanton, 56, a former partner at the law firm of Reed Smith Shaw & McClay, was forced off the Barnes board in 1998 and left Philadelphia in May to become a senior vice president at the Exelon Corporation, a utilities conglomerate in Chicago. Under a section titled "Conflicts of Interest," the audit outlined a series of Barnes transactions that it said Mr. Glanton engaged in with outside business partners, without informing the foundation's board. It said he ran up more than $225,000 in travel and entertainment expenses; tried to barter the foundation's banking business for support on the board; and let two women live in Barnes properties under unusual circumstances.

Mr. Glanton dismissed the findings today as "a waste of money" and an act of "vengeance" by his enemies."

The Times is our last Victorian institution. The two women living under "unusual circumstances" -- unusual for what? The implication is that Mr. Glanton is, as well as being a man of the arts, a man of parts -- un homme moyen sensual -- and those parts needed some action from time to time.

"In another episode the audit cited, a woman working for a party and event planner, Cheryl Beck, said Mr. Glanton had arranged for her to move into a vacant Barnes-owned single-family residence in Merion around November 1996. There was no agreement to pay rent or utilities and Ms. Beck, who moved in with a roommate, Theresa Sentel, called the arrangement "like house sitting." Neighbors later complained of parties there."

The art world, man. Wyndham Lewis, who was voted the most perceptive fascist of 1926, was on to its unique seediness in The Art of Being Ruled. Like almost everything by Lewis, it is one of those proofs that genius can go out of its way to be unpleasant -- the reason Lewis never wrote a great novel. There's an old Guardian review of a bio of Lewis's life by David Trotter wonderfully sums up his problems:

"If having sex with Lewis seems to have been a thankless task, then lending him money was about as much fun as amputation. Sometimes the same person was required to fulfil both functions. Ida Vendel, the mistress acquired as a lifestyle accessory in Paris in April 1905, he thought of as his 'German allotment'. Ida's father had been a wealthy merchant, and Lewis was soon, and thereafter almost as a matter of policy, in debt to her. Indeed, the difficulty he found in extricating himself from the relationship had as much to do with its monetary as with its sexual arrangements, and he didn't really feel free of it until his mother had paid Ida what he owed her. Its termination, in the summer of 1907, meant that he now required alternative sources of revenue, as his friends and relations were soon to discover. "He's a cool card with other people's money," Augustus John complained in January 1908: "I don't know how much of mine he's calmly appropriated, without so much as a 'thank you'."

"The one thing even less likely to meet with gratitude than a loan was an outright gift. At the end of 1923, a group of well-wishers established a joint fund to provide Lewis with a stipend of �16 a month for as long as he might remain in need of it. The result was the usual mayhem, as dark suspicions flourished, and lifelong friends fell out. On one occasion, a delay in the dispatch of the monthly cheque elicited an unforgiving response: "WHERE'S THE FUCKING STIPEND? LEWIS." O'Keeffe dismisses this story as apocryphal, but he does not seem in much doubt as to the brutality with which Lewis often treated those who sought to help him. Earlier that year, Lewis had spent some time in France with one of the people who was to contribute generously to the fund, the painter Richard Wyndham. Sitting outside a caf� in Toulon, he told Wyndham that he was a 'Narcissus' and probably a 'bugger'. People, Wyndham remembered him saying, are only friends insofar as they are of use to you. Lewis, it seems, did not so much bite the hand that fed him as mistake it for the main meal."

Lewis -- to resume after that enjoyable hiatus -- had this to say about such as Glanton: "In the millionaire society defined in Part III [of Art of Being Ruled] those fortunate enough to possess the means were shown as enjoying the revolutionary joys of a communist millenium. They are naturally impatient of the slowness of revolution. They consequently decide to forestall the paradise to come, on a small scale, themselves. A painting, writing, acting, cultural paradise ensues, in which everyone is equal (that is, equally a 'genius') and every one is free -- at the expense, naturally, of the great majority, who have to wait for their revolutionary paradise."

LI, the loafs and the fishes

Well, it is day five. LI went and sold fifty dollars worth of books on Thursday. We've been living on it since. We are now down to five dollars. What do you get for five dollars? We went to the grocery store and looked around. The meat was out of the question. What about cheese? Cheese would take up half of the sum. Now, you can nibble on cheese and survive several days, supposedly. Haven't we read that in the journal of some South Pole explorer? But our mouth revolted at the all cheese regime.

Hmm. So we chose two dollars worth of coffee, and a dollar forty loaf of bread. Extravagant, that bread.

Tonight, we are going to face up to the loss of alcohol -- although I can hear our friend David urging the beer. And tomorrow, maybe there will be a check in the mail.
Although at this point, we've rather lost hope.

Our bet -- another notice for electric bill due tomorrow. That will be the killer. This is going to be the worst summer of our life -- hey, and we thought that was LAST summer.

Bollettino

Casualty report: The sweeps in Iraq have been so successful that the Americans have arrested a colonel. At this rate, in another, say, one hundred years we might imprison the whole of the Iraqi officer corps. That has the advantage of giving us a political corps, since Americans are also appointing former Ba'athist military guys to ruling positions in Iraqi cities, and blocking elections.

The NYT (AP) issues this report: "Rocket-propelled grenades slammed into U.S. military vehicles in two attacks in and around Baghdad on Tuesday, and an explosion at a mosque in the town of Fallujah killed 10 Iraqis and injured four others. Meanwhile, unidentified assailants in a pickup truck gunned down the head of Saddam Hussein's tribe while he was riding in a car in the former dictator's hometown of Tikrit, the local governor said Tuesday. "


According to the Middle East news, the attack in Baghdad is worse than Cencom is yet willing to affirm:


"BAGHDAD, YUSUFIYEH & FALLUJAH, Iraq - Four US soldiers were killed and two others wounded Tuesday in a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) attack on their vehicle by unknown assailants in central Baghdad, witnesses said.The attack occurred at 10:00 am (0600 GMT) when assailants fired an RPG on a US Humvee light multi-wheeled vehicle near a gas station in the al-Mustansiriya neighborhood, they said.Four US troops were killed and two others wounded, they said. The casualties were immediately removed from the scene.An Iraqi civilian was also wounded and taken to hospital, said the witnesses, confirming that his 18-seat transport bus parked by the gas station was completely burnt."

Recently, Bremer cancelled elections in Najaf. This had the effect of prolonging the rule of Abu Haydar Abdul Mun'im, who had been placed in the position of governor in Najaf by the Military. Today he was arrested by the military for a few petty crimes: theft, kidnapping, graft. The NYT story explains:



"...Abu Haydar Abdul Mun'im, who had been put in place by a Marine lieutenant colonel in April, comes on the heels of the cancellation of Najaf's first general election about two weeks ago by allied officials. At the time, they asserted that conditions in Najaf were not suitable yet for an election.
Today, Charles Heatley, a spokesman for the occupation authority, said an investigation of Mr. Mun'im over the past few weeks had been based on a "large amount of evidence from a number of people.""We've always said we would make mistakes," Mr. Heatley said."

That's big of 'em.

We knew why, approximately, we were in Vietnam. But it is becoming unclear why we are in Iraq. Are we there to structure an autonomous Iraqi government, or are we there to exploit the place for our own convenience? It looks increasingly like the D.C. plan was to do the latter, thinking that it was in perfect concord with the former. Unbelievable as it seems, nobody seems to have asked if US interest and Iraq interest could, just possibly, conflict. In American Outlook, a conservative mag from the Hudson Institute, there is a cynical article by Irwin Stelzer, a rightwinger pur et dur.

"Bremer�s vision for the [oil] industry, indeed for Iraq�s economy, is worthy of Margaret Thatcher at her free-market best. He sees an economy in which state-owned and supported industries are starved of the subsidies that sustained them under the Saddam regime, in which domestic markets are open to free trade, and in which prices, exchange rates, and other variables are set by market forces. The oil industry would be operated for the benefit of the Iraqi people. And the new Iraq would set an example so irresistible that other Middle East oil producers would be forced to adopt the new model.

Why Bremer and Washington�s policymakers think that the seeds of free enterprise will bear fruit in the desert soil of Iraq is something of a mystery�a triumph of hope over experience. After all, no oil-producing country in the region has shown the slightest interest in such a model, the young protesters in Iran being a possible exception."

Stelzer goes on to analyze American plans to use Iraq as a pressure point on OPEC, and he is quite clear about who benefits in this scenario:

"The one ray of hope is that Iraq�s skilled technicians will ramp up production more rapidly than now seems likely, and that the nation�s need for cash will force it to violate OPEC quotas, pushing prices down. America and other consuming countries would benefit from cheaper oil, an economic stimulant equivalent to a tax cut, but with none of the long-term adverse effects on interest rates and investment that the Bush cuts are likely to produce."

Stelzer mentions a commonly mentioned plan: the split up of Iraq's nationalized oil company into six private companies, which would be sold to American or British companies. The cynicism of this vision is breathtaking. It is hard to believe that the American occupation, after having experienced the deaths and looting and disarray and Iraqi impatience for self government on the ground, would actually be heading in this direction. This really would be making true the protest in the anti-war chant, no blood for oil.

Bollettino

Various

A little self-promoting here: LI has a review of Houellebecq's latest novel at the Chicago Sun-Times site, and a review of a Robert E. Lee biography at the San Antonio News Express site.

Casualty report:

"An Australian working as a sound man for NBC News was injured in Iraq when insurgents fired a rocket-propelled grenade at a US military vehicle in the restive town of Fallujah. Three Iraqis were killed in the incident when their pick-up truck slammed into a vehicle helping to evacuate the sound man, the US military said yesterday."


And this, from Reuters: "At least 30 Iraqis were killed and scores injured on Saturday when an ammunition dump they were looting blew up, residents said on Monday.They said U.S. forces arrested several looters after the blast at the ammunition dump in a desert area north of the town of Haditha, 260 km (160 miles) northeast of Baghdad."

LI has never lived in a neighborhood with an ammunition dump. So it is hard for us to viscerally understand exactly what the phrase means, although Reuters apparently knows all about it.

The unstoppable market

New Zealand did a rather wonderful thing last week. It decriminalized prostitution -- a position that Jesse Ventura was ridiculed for. This is the kind of debate you won't find in the US House of Representatives:
"GILLIAN BRADFORD: It was one of the most passionate speeches Parliament had ever heard, Labour MP, Georgina Beyer, herself a former prostitute, relating a harrowing tale of a knife point encounter

GEORGINA BEYER: And yes I'm a prostitute and no it was not right that I should have been raped because I said no. It would have been nice to have known that instead of having to deal out the justice myself afterwards to that person I may have been able to approach the authorities, the police in this case, and say I was raped.

GILLIAN BRADFORD: That speech swung at least one vote, leading to a final vote of 60 for reform, 59 against and 1 abstention."

The politics of prostitution -- or the politics of the control of vice in general -- is shaped in ways that aren't wholly predictable from the perspective of the left/right divide. There is a strong reformist element in feminism -- stemming from its New England religious roots -- which is very supportive of the most repressive state action in favor of banning vice. This is the 'it takes a village" politics, the politics of liberal coercion, that, LI must admit, drives us nuts. Partly this is because it sacrifices liberty to a symbol of virtue. This is the most dangerous tendency of the left.

Cops, as we've said before, should not be the regulators of first resort -- which they become when prostitution is banned. Or drugs. The bans don't repress the market, but they do shape it -- banning, here, aggravates mechanisms of monopoly and violence that are always latent in market structures. Power devolves to those willing to use that power which exists outside the civil sphere -- sheer violence. This is why we are so totally against the banning of guns -- that goal towards which the gun control people tend. But we do believe in the regulation of guns. Those who argue these issues from the top down -- arguing from the theory of rights to its application -- are, we think, mistaken. The real arguments should be from the bottom up -- from the practical harms inflicted by banning. Our position does involve a little "begging of the question," since among those practical harms is the restriction of liberties defined by rights. But we don't believe that rights without pragmatic embodiment -- without some kind of embedding in the social order -- makes sense.

One of those 'pragmatic embodiments" is the extraordinary chance of violence that is the prostitute's fate. Georgina Beyer is absolutely correct. We wrote a little review, a long time ago, in the Austin Chronicle about a book that profiled a serial killer, Kevin McDuff. The author of the book, Gary Lavigne, refers to our "incompetence" in reviewing his book on his site (without naming us, or the paper in which the review appeared), which we find rather amusing. One of the more interesting parts of that creepy little account was the feeling, rampant among the cops, that prostitutes did not deserve protection. As one of them said, approximately, if they go into somebody's car to do their business, what can we do? Which is true for bible salesman and mechanics who answer towing calls at two o'clock at night, too; prostitutes, however, were clearly considered scum. The inequality in enforcing the law breeds lawlessness. A killer like McDuff is a school book example: when he began to kill prostitutes, the cops were scandalously uninterested -- which of course aggravated his sense of immunity. Then he started taking out middle class women, and the cops got interested right away.

We think there is a correlation between unequal enforcement of the law -- by which we don't just mean arrests and punishments, but the act of investigation itself, from its initiation to its conclusion -- and violence. This is our theory about the consistently high crime rate in the South -- callousness towards crimes committed against one class of persons breeds violence that spreads out among all sectors. The pseudo-science of FBI 'profilers" has always struck us as pointless -- the profile the FBI really needs is sociological. It is no surprise that a psycho of a certain type will kill -- the interesting thing is how he creates a sense of immunity for himself about the killing. And that sense is best constructed when his victims are treated as scum by the cops.

So, three cheers for New Zealand.

Bollettino

If this report is true, it would certainly cause a minor meltdown in D.C. According to the Asia Times, the US is seeking to negotiate with the Taleban. The report claims that the US has even tried to find acceptable Taleban leadership:


"The hard truth is that US intelligence simply does not really know what is going on in the Taliban and al-Qaeda camps. This is evidenced by the countless raids that have been launched in recent times, none of which have resulted in the capture of anyone in Afghanistan.

In an effort to find a breakthrough, US authorities recently made two initiatives involving the Taliban. (See US turns to the Taliban, June 14) In the first, they tried to establish a new Taliban leadership through Mullah Ghous and other Taliban leaders who were expelled during Taliban rule from 1996-2001. This failed virtually before it was born. A second attempt was then made to forge contacts with "real" Taliban, with the idea being that they provide any acceptable leadership (ie, not Mullah Omar) to take a significant part in the running of the country so that peace could be established. This, too was rejected.

Another attempt to give Afghan clerics an important role in power politics is in the US cards in Afghanistan, but like the other attempts, this, too, looks like another shot in the dark."

There is a crooked sense in this, if it is true. The Bush-ites have decided, for their own reasons, to turn a blind eye to Pakistan. So the country that supplied North Korea with nuclear materials and know how is getting 3 billion dollars in aid. This might not cause any collateral political damage in the US, but it is bound to let other countries know that the US has no real standard when it comes to nuclear proliferation. And at some point, this will impinge on the pressure being brought upon Iran.

We wonder, though, at the complete contrast between reporting on Afghanistan elsewhere and that in the Asia Times. Wilder things have happened, but really -- it would simply destroy the legitimacy of the Karzai regime even to think of negotiating with the Taleban.

Bollettino

The hawks have been saying, for months, that reconstruction is on schedule. That it is moving forward. That things are getting better in Iraq.

What we need to test these propositions is some comparison. A nice one is with the reconstruction that happened after 1991.

In 1991, the Iraqi infrastructure was much more damaged than it was this last April. Yet, as has been pointed out by Iraqis, the electricity came on-line quicker under Saddam:


"After security, one of the most common complaints of postwar Baghdad residents has been unreliable electricity.

"Why is the electricity only on eight hours a day?" one resident asked last week. "In 1991, Saddam had the electricity on sooner than this, and all the power stations were bombed."

Another two enlightening grafs from the same article:

"In 1991, the damage was much greater because the damage was concentrated not only on the substations but the power stations," said Adnan Wadi Bashir, who worked as a power generation and transmission engineer for the government for 24 years. "Most of the attacks were on the transmission lines, and the repair of these is much easier. We restored part of the power in 1991 within six weeks of the ceasefire and we supplied the whole Iraqi system without any shortage in five months. The job now could have been finished within a month" of April 12.

Starting literally from scratch, engineers in 1991 managed to generate about 1000 MW of power six weeks after the war ended, Bashir said. Last week, nearly eight weeks after the American effort began, about 3450 MW were available countrywide, 1000 MW less than were available before the invasion."

Admittedly, tyrants are always reputed to make the trains run on time. But we suspect that the real difference is that in 1991, the Iraqis weren't being second guessed by a bunch of advisors largely shipped over from a foreign country and possessing, among them, skills in basic Arabic that a five year old Iraqi could easily overshadow. There's an incalculable advantage in having on-site people do on-site work. And if advice is necessary, the people giving the advice should have something at stake.

We've often gone on, and on, about letting Iraqis run Iraq. Here's a corollary to that position: if we have advisors in place in government agencies, or actual order givers, those people should be paid out of the same funds, and using the same scale, as their Iraqi colleagues.

This would be the simplest way to align the interests of the Americans with the interests of the Iraqis.

Bollettino

I have never read a novel by William Harrison Ainsworth. LI's vast readership is astonishingly literate -- you all are out there devouring Alain Badiou's difficult essays on Dedekind's mathematical ontology and such, I know -- yet it is a good bet that none of you are familiar with the thrills of Rookwood, or the clever drama of Jack Sheppard.

Is this because of the Courvoisier murder?

Phillip Allingham provides a potted bio of Ainsworth on the Victoria Web site. It's an impressive 19th century life. As a boy, Ainsworth was inspired by the romances of Walter Scott, along with all of literary Europe and, to its misfortune (according to Mark Twain), the South. Ainsworth even knew Charles Lamb. He scored a big success with Rookwood, a historical that painted, among other things, a dashing highwayman, Dick Turpin. The money poured in, Ainsworth bought the appropriate gaudy pile, and then the wife dies. Beloved, of course, and young, of course, providing the standard unities for that pious exercise of melancholy Victorians liked in widowers and widows. Then came an even greater success, Jack Shepherd. Here Ainsworth makes the conscious artistic decision -- at least according to Allingham -- to break with the picaresque. This was especially interesting since Jonathan Wild is one of the main characters, taken less from history than Fielding -- or perhaps one can say that Fielding's Wild is more historically real than the historically real Wild himself. Such is the form of fate that generally befalls the celebrity.

Jack Shepherd has not been transferred to the less than silver screen by the good elves at Gutenberg, so I am relying on Allingham here:

"Jack Sheppard (1839) reveals Ainsworth at his best in terms of characterisation and plot construction. Wishing to avoid a loose succession of incidents in the picaresque style, Ainsworth introduces two characters (the historical Jonathan Wild and the fictional Thames Darrell) to create a unifying thread in this tale set in eighteenth-century England. In a manner reminiscent of various television and film versions of The Fugitive, the thief-taker Wild relentlessly pursues the subtle and cunning Jack Sheppard, thief and house-breaker. Because Jack's mother has rebuffed Wild's sexual advances, Wild seduces Jack's father and then Jack himself into committing crimes that will inevitably lead them to the gallows. While Jack chooses the path of vice, his foil, Thames Darrell (like Jack in youth apprenticed to Mr. Wood the carpenter, and like Jack, the son of a father who has died violently after abusing his wife) chooses the path of virtue. Thames ultimately prospers with the aid of Jack's second-in-command, Blueskin, and wins the hand of the lovely Winifred, his master's daughter. Although the protagonist, Jack, is reconciled with his mother and saves both Thames and Winifred from Wild, he is ultimately hanged for his crimes. Poetic justice, however, is served when the narrator reveals that within seven months Wild himself is hanged.

Thus, the book illustrates the Hogarthian theme of the lazy and diligent apprentices that Dickens vivifies in Great Expectations and elsewhere, and which had already been dramatised in George Lillo's The London Merchant, or the History of George Barnwell(1731), a domestic tragedy based on the seventeenth-century ballad which appears on Percy's Reliques. In the ballad, young Barnwell is a London apprentice who falls in love with a Shoreditch prostitute (Sarah Millwood). In return for her favours, the apprentice gives her �200 which he has stolen from his master; again to supply the harlot with cash, he robs his uncle, a Ludlow grazier, and beats him to death. The hussy and the varlet impeach each other, and are subsequently hanged at Tyburn. The literary progeny of the tale is the so-called Newgate Novel, popularized by Thackeray, Dickens, Ainsworth, and Bulwer-Lytton."

Allingham doesn't mention the ill consequences of Jack Sheppard. But this amusingly account of the murder of Lord William Russell -- amusing because it drops noble names and titles like some dotty butler doing door duty at a ball - does. We take this up because we are still in search of a response to Oscar's contention that art has no moral effect. Or, rather, we are in seach of the kind of moral panic that art can provoke.

If it is true that Ainsworth was shunned after the rumor circulated that Lord Russell's murderer was unduly excited by Jack Sheppard, then this explains, perhaps, why he never made the canon. We aren't totally satisfied that Jack Sheppard backballed the man, but after the Courvoisier trial, he certainly had to fend off charges, and he seems to have been deserted by the ever timid Dickens.

So consider this an effort to make some headway towards a rather Wildean truth -- which is that just because art has no moral effect doesn't mean that morality has no artistic effect. That effect is less in the text than in the selection -- the unnatural selection that evolves a canon.

To get to the case -- Courvoisier, like Sheppard, was a servant. And like Sheppard, he considered himself held down by brute force, and that force embodied in the riches and life of his employer, Lord Russell.

The crime and its detection are described amply by McCann. We like his description of the scene of Courvoisier's execution:

"The execution was carried out at Newgate, on the 6th of July, 1840. The hangman was the notorious Jack Ketch and the trial was attended by both Charles Dickens (a regular at these events) and William Makepeace Thackeray. The latter published an article about the execution in Frazer's Magazine later in the month. A third novelist of the period had a rather different experience. This was William Harrison Ainsworth, then famous for his nlovel about the higwayman Dick Turpin. However, he had also published, in the previous year, a sensational novel about another notorious criminal, Jack Sheppard. The latter had been a violent robber who escaped from Newgate four times before he was finally hanged at Tyburn in 1742. The novel was adapted to the stage by John Buckstone and it opened at the Adelphi in the Strand on October 28 1839. It was the hit of the season and ran for 121 performances finishing the run on April 11th 1840. It went on a tour of the Provincial theatres in May, not long after the murder. During Courvoisier's trial it was put about that he had either read Ainsworth's Jack Sheppard or attended the play before committing the murder. This provoked a wave of concern at the effects of cheap, theatrical adaptations on working-class youth culture. The popular opinion was that the charge against Ainsworth seemed incontrovertible. Unfortunately, his status as a good Victorian and a serious literary novelist never fully recovered even though he went on to write some of his more famous historical romances in the following years. Dickens managed to avoid similar problems, but, despite the fact that Ainsworth had been a major influence on his early career, with his characteristic selfishness he publicly and privately distanced himself from Ainsworth."

Thackeray's account, entitled "Going to See a Man Hanged", is on the Net -- oh, there are so many things on the Net nowadays. It is an interesting piece. For one thing, Thackeray politicizes the crowd -- it is odd that Benjamin never, to my knowledge, referred to this piece, but it would have done his heart good. Or perhaps not -- unlike Hugo, Thackeray was completely secular. No messianic moment in the character, just that puzzling English confidence in Good Will . Thackeray is a writer who always surprises us -- both by his accesses of sentimental swill, and his hard-edged comedic vision. Here's a bit of a rather long political passage re the crowd:

Throughout the whole four hours, however, the mob was extraordinarily gentle and good-humoured. At first we had leisure to talk to the people about us ; and I recommend X-'s brother senators of both sides of the House to see more of this same people and to appreciate them better. Honourable members are battling and struggling in the House; shouting, yelling, crowing, hear-hearing, pooh-poohing, making speeches of three columns, and gaining "great Conservative triumphs," or "signal successes of the Reform cause," as the case may be. Three hundred and ten gentlemen of good fortune, and able for the most part to quote Horace, declare solemnly that unless Sir Robert comes in the nation is ruined. Throe hundred and fifteen on the other side swear by their great gods that the safety of the empire depends upon Lord John; and to this end they quote Horace too. I declare that I have never been in a great London crowd without thinking of what they call the two "great" parties in England with wonder. For which of the two great leaders do these people care, I pray you? When Lord Stanley withdrew his Irish bill the other night, were they in transports of joy, like worthy persons who read the Globe and the Chronicle? or when he beat the Ministers, were they wild with delight, like honest gentlemen who read the Post and The Times? Ask yonder ragged fellow, who has evidently frequented debating clubs, and speaks with good sense and shrewd good-nature. He cares no more for Lord John than he does for Sir Robert, and, with due respect be it said, would mind very little if both of them were ushered out by' Mr. Ketch, and took their places under yonder black beam. What are the two great parties to him, and those like him? Sheer wind, hollow humbug, absurd clap-traps; a silly mummery of dividing and debating, which does not in the least, however it may turn, affect his condition."

And so it goes, Thackeray capturing the political as a question of the balance between two crowds -- a thought that is much deeper than he himself could plumb. Still, there it is.

Famously, at the end of the essay, Thackeray reflects on his repugnant participation in killing a man:

"There is some talk, too, of the terror which the sight of this spectacle inspires, and of this we have endeavoured to give as good a notion as we can in the above pages. I fully confess that I came away down Snow Hill that morning with a disgust for murder ; but it was for the murder I saw done. As we made our way through the immense crowd, we came upon two little girls of eleven and twelve years. One of them was crying bitterly, and begged, for Heaven's sake, that someone would lead her from that horrid place. This was done, and the children were carried into a place of safety. We asked the elder girl - and a very pretty one - what brought her into such a neighbourhood? The child grinned knowingly, and said, "We've koom to see the mon hanged!"

Tender law, that brings out babes upon such errands and provides them with such gratifying moral spectacles!"

Bollettino

"The bodies of two U.S. soldiers missing for days were discovered early Saturday northwest of Baghdad, as the toll rises past 200 for Americans killed since war started in Iraq.

News of their killings came amid a torrent of guerrilla-style attacks and sabotage that has marred U.S. efforts to re-establish order since Saddam Hussein's ouster. About a third of U.S. troops killed in the Iraqi conflict have died in attacks or accidents since major combat was declared over May 1." -- Washington Post

And, to add to our casualties, this is the latest brilliant scheme from our resident representative in Bagdhad, Mr. Bremer:

U.S. military commanders have ordered a halt to local elections and self-rule in provincial cities and towns across Iraq, choosing instead to install their own handpicked mayors and administrators, many of whom are former Iraqi military leaders. -- Washington Post

From another graf:

'The most recent order to stop planning for elections was made by Maj. Gen. Ray Odierno, commander of the 4th Infantry Division, which controls the northern half of Iraq. It follows similar decisions by the 3rd Infantry Division in central Iraq and those of British commanders in the south.In the capital, Baghdad, U.S. officials never scheduled elections for a city government, but have said they are forming neighborhood councils that at some point will play a role in the selection of a municipal government."

The guerilla war is being lost at the outset. Can the US adopt a worse stretegy? Well, wait till they unroll their economic nostrums, and a seemingly permanent strata of Iraqi unemployed gets to mull over the American meaning of democracy.

As anybody with a memory that is larger than a flea's will remember, in 91 the Bush administration made the fatal mistake of calling for an intifada and then not backing it up. Why? Because that administration was petrified by the idea that Shi'a power might be installed in Iraq. The present colonial administrator seems to suffer from that same fear. This time, the intifada will be against the Americans.

How many times do we have to make the same mistake?
I guess as many times as there are Bushes around to make it.

Bollettino

"I come to Vienna to refresh my ambivalence," he said.

The profile of Frederic Morton in the NYT this morning is a little gift for us. Morton is the type of person LI looks up to absolutely -- the type of person we have tried to be, alas for our well-being, since the age of 20. The Viennese intellectual, who sharpens his teeth by savaging the Viennese intellectual -- which is the way of Karl Kraus.

Morton does seem less acerbic, less prone to bite, than such as Canetti or Musil. But that his books are being taken so seriously by Vienna says a lot about that place. Including why it isn't the Vienna of the Nervous Splendor that Morton writes about.

Perhaps Thomas Bernhard was the last of those savages -- the ones who tore, with bleeding claws, at a splendor they found to be half criminal in its beginnings and half rotten in its endings. Sentiment and petty pilfering, leading up to the auto de fe of the Jews -- that was pretty much the Bernhardian view. And the view of Canetti, I think. We are closer, however, to the geniality of Morton. We see less animal in the menschlische Maul than those three.

Nice article.