Bollettino
Readers should go to Business Week for several articles that gingerly sift through the budget debacle. Trying to be fair to the White House, the writers put in some mush mouth disclaimers about how the US could "carry" a deficit equivalent to 5% of the GDP indefinitely. Yes, we could, but if the experience of the 90s showed us anything, it is that we are better off not. It is true that a smoker can still do two packs even after they yank out one of his lungs, but it isn't, I hear, recommended. Of course, these kinds of things are always wrapped around comparisons with long term corporate debts. The argument -- the sound argument -- is that any large organization needs to borrow to maintain and expand its infrastructure. That seems right to me. But there really is no corporate parallel that fits what Bush has done. The production of this debt load is not derived from any sane project -- it is actually coming on top of the refusal to finance forseeable future liabilities. When a corporation borrows heavily to give its top managers raises, and tries to disguise the loans on top of it, what do you have? Even Tyco avoided peculation on that scale.
My favorite of the BW articles this week is the one that describes the magic trick/pick pocketing act that is being performed before our very eyes with Bush's famous 87 billion -- and by the way, don't you love that 7? Not 8, and not 6. Of course, we know that it will really be closer to 100 -- a round number -- billion, if that.
Howard Gleckman points out that the 87 bil isn't going to be inked into the Fed budget:
"Said the Office of Management & Budget on Sept. 4: "Only within such a fiscal environment can we encourage increased economic growth and a return to a balanced budget." Expect veto threats and perhaps even veiled warnings of a government shutdown if that $784.7 billion spending cap isn't met.
There's just one problem. While Bush and Congress are fighting over every dollar, they're going to pretend the $87 billion in Iraq money doesn't count as part of the discretionary budget ceiling, even though every thing else the Pentagon does is included.
This is an accounting gimmick that would shame even Enron. "We will hold down spending," Bush and GOP leaders on Capitol Hill will say. But next to that boast will be a little imaginary asterisk that says, "For everything, that is, but Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, a fistful of trust funds, and the war in Iraq." In truth, the government will spend more than $1.3 trillion next year -- close to twice the discretionay-spending target -- on stuff that doesn't count in Washington's debates over fiscal responsibility."
Now, you ask, how can they do that? The simple answer is: raw abuse of power.
"Watch for Bush to claim by the end the year that he held discretionary outlays to a 4% hike, even though spending will go up by close to 15%. The White House and Congress will just pretend it didn't happen.
And how will Uncle Sam pay for all these extra burdens? With real money that Treasury will have to borrow, creating real debt that your kids will be paying off for the rest of their lives."
Rumsfeld compares the war to the occupation of post-war Germany. The left compares Bush to Hitler or Mussolini. LI wants to introduce a different parallel (watch this meme sink, kiddies): this is Bush's equivalent of Versailles. Instead of a complex of palaces, our bewildered POTUS is setting up a 'theater of terrorism." Louis XIV never thought of that one -- he did pay for theatrical entertainments, but he was not a big thinker: he merely hired Racine and Moliere and the like. Kafka had a clearer instinct for the kind of big project Bush is pushing. Hence the Oklahoma Nature theater that comes at the end of Amerika. But even Kafka never imagined one country using a whole other country to set up a theater of terrorism. Is that a grand gesture or what? It's not hard to figure out why the natives don't like it -- they aren't civilized like we are. Otherwise, they'd be appreciative of our administration's artistic sensibilities. What an idea, after all: using their real flesh and blood for our adventure movie. Yee-haw!
Saturday, September 13, 2003
Friday, September 12, 2003
Bollettino
This week the arts and letters website has been highlighting articles about the extinct art of book reviewing. This Poets and Writers article treads the same ground Clive James covered in the Sunday NYT. Same references - the Believer, Heidi J., Dale Peck - and the same dull stirring about the non-question: should reviewers diss the books they don't like?
Books, here, means solely fiction.
Myself, I have been a valiant reviewer of fiction for five years now. I am trying to end my association with that game - I haven't reviewed more than three books in the past two months. I am willing to do almost anything other than continue working as a freelance reviewer. Yesterday, in fact, yours truly went to Pacesetters, an employment agency that is geared towards the mentally disturbed and the perpetual on the move. It consists of a cavernous building located next to the downtown police station, and the joint is peppered with helpful signs advising that drug takers will be arrested, that backpack carriers won't be allowed to carry backpacks to job sites, and that there were police on duty on the premises. A hopeful kind of place.
It struck me as a distinct social and economic advance from freelancing.
But to get to the point. Book reviews used to be read. Macaulay and Bagehot, to name only two Victorian sages, produced classic essays in the form of book reviews. In the twentieth century, Virginia Woolf and Edmund Wilson, among others, wrote book reviews that are still read. But over the last twenty years, as newspapers and magazines have been absorbed into an entertainment industry that is ferociously conscious of ROI, book reviews have been neglected. Monotony - and book reviews are generally tedious beyond belief, much more tedious than movie reviews - has naturally led to a fall off of readership. This takes place against a background in which the newspaper industry has been cutting its own throat -becoming a cheap guide to other venues of entertainment. It will never be cheap enough. This is a death spiral. As the newspaper reader is herded towards ever more cretinizing forms of Hollywood fantasy, the reader naturally loses the reading talent, or will to read. That will certainly includes newspapers. By their very structure, newspapers require a certain talent in reading. This seems to go over the heads of the owners of newspapers. That a newspaper is a thing to read, rather than a billboard to put advertisements in, is not a truth admitted in the boardrooms of Gannet or Cox. The reader, that mythical bearer of cultural goods, has fled to academia. The site of reading is now the classroom. This doesn't signify the death of literature, but it does signify a regression to the pre-modern era of reading and writing. The modernist impulse, which from the philosophes to the modernists depended on a network of independent readers and writers, is petering out. Independence was always a high wire act. Academia was never set up to foster it, and doesn't. But as the air is taken out of that cultural space, the newspaper, which was a creation of the modernist era, is dying. While most editors could care less about the book review section (for good reason), its corruption is a symptom - an ineradicable black spot, signalling the corruption and death to come.
If we look back upon the 19th century novel, one thing stands out: the site of reading - of finding the book, and then finding the next book - is not the classroom. The classroom has almost wholly taken over the educated readers ideal of the place of reading. When Book stores encourage reading by encouraging reading groups, the groups almost invariably become like classrooms. The classroom ethos is also mirrored in the standard book review, which is composed of two parts: plot and theme. The art of the novel is almost skipped - in the classroom, the subteties of art makes for bad tests. Much easier to ask for an essay (in five hundred words or less) about the theme of War and Peace than to ask for an essay about the construction of Prince Andrei as a character. Classrooms elicit themes the way factories produce cars. Libraries, if the witness of nineteenth century writers is any testimony, created complex day dreams. That day dreams could become political and social realities was the message of the two great events of the early nineteenth century: the French revolution and the rise of Napoleon.
I'll write more about this on some later post.
Here are three citations from three different 19th century writers, selected at random.
I believe I should have been almost stupefied but for one circumstance.It was this. My father had left a small collection of books in alittle room upstairs, to which I had access (for it adjoined myown) and which nobody else in our house ever troubled. From thatblessed little room, Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, HumphreyClinker, Tom Jones, the Vicar of Wakefield, Don Quixote, Gil Blas,and Robinson Crusoe, came out, a glorious host, to keep me company. They kept alive my fancy, and my hope of something beyond thatplace and time, - they, and the Arabian Nights, and the Tales ofthe Genii, - and did me no harm; for whatever harm was in some ofthem was not there for me; I knew nothing of it. It is astonishingto me now, how I found time, in the midst of my porings andblunderings over heavier themes, to read those books as I did.
-- David Cooperfield
For six months, then, Emma, at fifteen years ofage, made her hands dirty with books from old lending libraries.
Through Walter Scott, later on, she fell in love with historical events, dreamed of old chests, guard-rooms and minstrels. She would have liked to live in some old manor-house, like those long-waisted chatelaines who, in the shade of pointed arches,spent their days leaning on the stone, chin in hand, watching acavalier with white plume galloping on his black horse from thedistant fields. At this time she had a cult for Mary Stuart and enthusiastic veneration for illustrious or unhappy women. Joan ofArc, Heloise, Agnes Sorel, the beautiful Ferroniere, and ClemenceIsaure stood out to her like comets in the dark immensity of heaven...
Madame Bovary
"What did Missy want with more books? What must you be bringing her more books for?" "They amuse her, sir. She is very fond of reading." "A little too fond," said Mr Featherstone, captiously. "She was for reading when she sat with me. But I put a stop to that. She's got the newspaper to read out loud. That's enough for one day, I should think. I can't abide to see her reading to herself.
Middlemarch
This week the arts and letters website has been highlighting articles about the extinct art of book reviewing. This Poets and Writers article treads the same ground Clive James covered in the Sunday NYT. Same references - the Believer, Heidi J., Dale Peck - and the same dull stirring about the non-question: should reviewers diss the books they don't like?
Books, here, means solely fiction.
Myself, I have been a valiant reviewer of fiction for five years now. I am trying to end my association with that game - I haven't reviewed more than three books in the past two months. I am willing to do almost anything other than continue working as a freelance reviewer. Yesterday, in fact, yours truly went to Pacesetters, an employment agency that is geared towards the mentally disturbed and the perpetual on the move. It consists of a cavernous building located next to the downtown police station, and the joint is peppered with helpful signs advising that drug takers will be arrested, that backpack carriers won't be allowed to carry backpacks to job sites, and that there were police on duty on the premises. A hopeful kind of place.
It struck me as a distinct social and economic advance from freelancing.
But to get to the point. Book reviews used to be read. Macaulay and Bagehot, to name only two Victorian sages, produced classic essays in the form of book reviews. In the twentieth century, Virginia Woolf and Edmund Wilson, among others, wrote book reviews that are still read. But over the last twenty years, as newspapers and magazines have been absorbed into an entertainment industry that is ferociously conscious of ROI, book reviews have been neglected. Monotony - and book reviews are generally tedious beyond belief, much more tedious than movie reviews - has naturally led to a fall off of readership. This takes place against a background in which the newspaper industry has been cutting its own throat -becoming a cheap guide to other venues of entertainment. It will never be cheap enough. This is a death spiral. As the newspaper reader is herded towards ever more cretinizing forms of Hollywood fantasy, the reader naturally loses the reading talent, or will to read. That will certainly includes newspapers. By their very structure, newspapers require a certain talent in reading. This seems to go over the heads of the owners of newspapers. That a newspaper is a thing to read, rather than a billboard to put advertisements in, is not a truth admitted in the boardrooms of Gannet or Cox. The reader, that mythical bearer of cultural goods, has fled to academia. The site of reading is now the classroom. This doesn't signify the death of literature, but it does signify a regression to the pre-modern era of reading and writing. The modernist impulse, which from the philosophes to the modernists depended on a network of independent readers and writers, is petering out. Independence was always a high wire act. Academia was never set up to foster it, and doesn't. But as the air is taken out of that cultural space, the newspaper, which was a creation of the modernist era, is dying. While most editors could care less about the book review section (for good reason), its corruption is a symptom - an ineradicable black spot, signalling the corruption and death to come.
If we look back upon the 19th century novel, one thing stands out: the site of reading - of finding the book, and then finding the next book - is not the classroom. The classroom has almost wholly taken over the educated readers ideal of the place of reading. When Book stores encourage reading by encouraging reading groups, the groups almost invariably become like classrooms. The classroom ethos is also mirrored in the standard book review, which is composed of two parts: plot and theme. The art of the novel is almost skipped - in the classroom, the subteties of art makes for bad tests. Much easier to ask for an essay (in five hundred words or less) about the theme of War and Peace than to ask for an essay about the construction of Prince Andrei as a character. Classrooms elicit themes the way factories produce cars. Libraries, if the witness of nineteenth century writers is any testimony, created complex day dreams. That day dreams could become political and social realities was the message of the two great events of the early nineteenth century: the French revolution and the rise of Napoleon.
I'll write more about this on some later post.
Here are three citations from three different 19th century writers, selected at random.
I believe I should have been almost stupefied but for one circumstance.It was this. My father had left a small collection of books in alittle room upstairs, to which I had access (for it adjoined myown) and which nobody else in our house ever troubled. From thatblessed little room, Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, HumphreyClinker, Tom Jones, the Vicar of Wakefield, Don Quixote, Gil Blas,and Robinson Crusoe, came out, a glorious host, to keep me company. They kept alive my fancy, and my hope of something beyond thatplace and time, - they, and the Arabian Nights, and the Tales ofthe Genii, - and did me no harm; for whatever harm was in some ofthem was not there for me; I knew nothing of it. It is astonishingto me now, how I found time, in the midst of my porings andblunderings over heavier themes, to read those books as I did.
-- David Cooperfield
For six months, then, Emma, at fifteen years ofage, made her hands dirty with books from old lending libraries.
Through Walter Scott, later on, she fell in love with historical events, dreamed of old chests, guard-rooms and minstrels. She would have liked to live in some old manor-house, like those long-waisted chatelaines who, in the shade of pointed arches,spent their days leaning on the stone, chin in hand, watching acavalier with white plume galloping on his black horse from thedistant fields. At this time she had a cult for Mary Stuart and enthusiastic veneration for illustrious or unhappy women. Joan ofArc, Heloise, Agnes Sorel, the beautiful Ferroniere, and ClemenceIsaure stood out to her like comets in the dark immensity of heaven...
Madame Bovary
"What did Missy want with more books? What must you be bringing her more books for?" "They amuse her, sir. She is very fond of reading." "A little too fond," said Mr Featherstone, captiously. "She was for reading when she sat with me. But I put a stop to that. She's got the newspaper to read out loud. That's enough for one day, I should think. I can't abide to see her reading to herself.
Middlemarch
Tuesday, September 09, 2003
Bollettino
I must, I must stop writing about the War.
One last post -- and then, no mas. Not for this week. Sanity, I crave sanity...
All right. Let's do a review. The war was supposed to bring some benefits. There would be costs, there would be benefits. Now we have a better picture of both, and we have a sense of how -- from the American perspective -- they are defined. One of the great benefits of the war was the bringing down of Saddam H. The cost, in human lives and in dollars, hasn't yet been toted up -- on the Iraqi side it may never be -- but as of today we have some feel for it.
So, the Bush administration has defined the ultimate benefit in Iraq in terms of several abstractions and one pre-war claim. The pre-war claim is that Iraqi oil will pay for the war and the American contribution to Iraq. In other words, we are spending about 150-200 billion dollars on Iraq, but we will receive that money back. The abstractions can be boiled down to: a democratic, American friendly country. Like Iran under the Shah, only with elections.
Given these baselines, we can come up with combinations of possible outcomes, assign them probabilities, and ask which one will give us both 1) the greatest benefit and 2) the best odds.
I can think of five basic combinations.
1. American troops withdraw. We leave behind a stable, American friendly democracy, that pays America back its 200 billion dollars, with interest, in a timely matter.
2. American troops withdraw. The government that is left behind is less friendly to America than Kuwait, but more friendly than Iran. It is, however, stable, and has certain democratic aspects. The 200 billion dollars is not paid back.
3. American troops leave. The American friendly democracy that is left behind tries to repay the American debt, causing a nation wide rebellion. It is overthrown by a government that is hostile to America.
4. American troops leave. Iraq is riven with conflict. The 200 billion dollars is gone. The conflict lasts for a long time, is destabilizing, and no side in it is openly pro-American.
5. American troops don't leave, but have to stay indefinitely, due to conflict. Another 100 billion dollars is spent on Iraq, but the nation is riven with conflict. Casualties mount. No stability, no democracy, and increasing harm to American forces.
One can argue that there are innumerable subsets. There are. But I imagine each one simply enriches the detail of one or another item on this list.
The problem with the Bush solution is simple. It bets everything on 1. Myself, I think one has about the same chance as Dennis Kucinich has of being the next US president.
The second option is much more possible. But humans drive their own history -- it will definitely be made impossible the more Bush bets on 1. The other three options are progressively worse for American interests. And for Iraq.
So, rationally, for our 150-200 billion dollars -- money we are not going to see again -- I'd say the reasonable thing to do is to take 2 as a scenario and try to improve it. That means ... well, it means handing power over to the Iraqi cabinet, and letting Bremer tell rotary clubs in Indiana all about his splendid plan for an Iraqi constitution. It means getting real about the money -- this money isn't coming back. It means letting the Iraqis decide what kind of economy they want -- from the contractors they hire to repair oil wells to the market system they are comfortable with. Of course, the "Iraqis" don't operate in isolation. But we should certainly not get into a situation in which there is a puppet Iraqi elite that simply obeys Americans, and thus abruptly abridges its shelf life. The commentary I've read about Iraq is truly odd -- it is as if nobody even thinks about what happens when the Americans withdraw. The Americans are not going to enforce a permanent solution to the Iraq problem -- period. The arguments are all about the chaos that will ensue if we withdraw right now, and how we have to do this, and how we have to do that... But by the force of things (ah, Lucretian phrase!) the Iraqis are the ones who will be there when the Americans are long gone. The american exit strategy better be shaped with that reality in mind.
I must, I must stop writing about the War.
One last post -- and then, no mas. Not for this week. Sanity, I crave sanity...
All right. Let's do a review. The war was supposed to bring some benefits. There would be costs, there would be benefits. Now we have a better picture of both, and we have a sense of how -- from the American perspective -- they are defined. One of the great benefits of the war was the bringing down of Saddam H. The cost, in human lives and in dollars, hasn't yet been toted up -- on the Iraqi side it may never be -- but as of today we have some feel for it.
So, the Bush administration has defined the ultimate benefit in Iraq in terms of several abstractions and one pre-war claim. The pre-war claim is that Iraqi oil will pay for the war and the American contribution to Iraq. In other words, we are spending about 150-200 billion dollars on Iraq, but we will receive that money back. The abstractions can be boiled down to: a democratic, American friendly country. Like Iran under the Shah, only with elections.
Given these baselines, we can come up with combinations of possible outcomes, assign them probabilities, and ask which one will give us both 1) the greatest benefit and 2) the best odds.
I can think of five basic combinations.
1. American troops withdraw. We leave behind a stable, American friendly democracy, that pays America back its 200 billion dollars, with interest, in a timely matter.
2. American troops withdraw. The government that is left behind is less friendly to America than Kuwait, but more friendly than Iran. It is, however, stable, and has certain democratic aspects. The 200 billion dollars is not paid back.
3. American troops leave. The American friendly democracy that is left behind tries to repay the American debt, causing a nation wide rebellion. It is overthrown by a government that is hostile to America.
4. American troops leave. Iraq is riven with conflict. The 200 billion dollars is gone. The conflict lasts for a long time, is destabilizing, and no side in it is openly pro-American.
5. American troops don't leave, but have to stay indefinitely, due to conflict. Another 100 billion dollars is spent on Iraq, but the nation is riven with conflict. Casualties mount. No stability, no democracy, and increasing harm to American forces.
One can argue that there are innumerable subsets. There are. But I imagine each one simply enriches the detail of one or another item on this list.
The problem with the Bush solution is simple. It bets everything on 1. Myself, I think one has about the same chance as Dennis Kucinich has of being the next US president.
The second option is much more possible. But humans drive their own history -- it will definitely be made impossible the more Bush bets on 1. The other three options are progressively worse for American interests. And for Iraq.
So, rationally, for our 150-200 billion dollars -- money we are not going to see again -- I'd say the reasonable thing to do is to take 2 as a scenario and try to improve it. That means ... well, it means handing power over to the Iraqi cabinet, and letting Bremer tell rotary clubs in Indiana all about his splendid plan for an Iraqi constitution. It means getting real about the money -- this money isn't coming back. It means letting the Iraqis decide what kind of economy they want -- from the contractors they hire to repair oil wells to the market system they are comfortable with. Of course, the "Iraqis" don't operate in isolation. But we should certainly not get into a situation in which there is a puppet Iraqi elite that simply obeys Americans, and thus abruptly abridges its shelf life. The commentary I've read about Iraq is truly odd -- it is as if nobody even thinks about what happens when the Americans withdraw. The Americans are not going to enforce a permanent solution to the Iraq problem -- period. The arguments are all about the chaos that will ensue if we withdraw right now, and how we have to do this, and how we have to do that... But by the force of things (ah, Lucretian phrase!) the Iraqis are the ones who will be there when the Americans are long gone. The american exit strategy better be shaped with that reality in mind.
Monday, September 08, 2003
Bollettino
Here's what we said before the war, on March 14th. It seems relevant, in the light of W.'s speech.
"Given this, here is the primer for the upcoming catastrophe:
1. Occupation is not peace. The media has defined the war as having a beginning -- when Bush declares it -- and an end -- when Saddam Hussein is dissolved. Now, the beginning, as we all know by now, has not been clear. In fact, it is unclear what Bush will declare, if we are actually engaged in warlike hostilities now, and who will be responsible for the war -- as in, you know, the marquis. Is it the UN vs. Saddam, the U.S. vs Saddam, or the Coalition of the Willing vs. Saddam? Similarily, the dissolution of Saddam ends only one phase of the war. The next phase, if the post-Saddam history of Northern Iraq is relevant, begins with squabbling between hostile factions that soon escalates into shooting. Plus, of course, with a soldiery strung out in Iraq and no central authority besides that army, the terrain and disposition of forces is ideally suited for suicide bombers.
2.You can't give what you take. As we've pointed out before, Paul Wolfowitz has testified that we intend to pay for the war with Iraq's money. At the same time, we intend to reconstruct Iraq. Those are mutually cancelling propositions. This is when the lesson of Afghanistan kicks in. There is no constituency in this country willing to see a transfer of about one hundred billion dollars to Iraq. And if the economy continues to suck, the pressure will be overwhelming to subsidize this war with the spoils.
3.A democratic government won't last if its strips the country of its wealth. Stripping, here, is pretty direct. We aren't talking fancy Swiss bank accounts. We are talking oil money going out in ways that everybody sees. If this is the American strategy, be prepared for a guerilla war.
4 The current civil society in Northern Iraq is endangered by American adventurism. Northern Iraq, and the Kurds, have become the stuff of propaganda lately. That there was no outpouring of admiration for their civil ways before 9/11 had a simple cause: for the first five years of the No Fly Zone, Kurdish factions killed each other. They also gave shelter to the PKK, a guerrilla group in Turkey that was as dirty as they come. This isn't to say that Northern Iraq hasn't made progress -- they have. They've done it in the way that progress is made -- it is a grassroots effort, and it takes security, money, and time. If the U.S. expects to 'integrate' Northern Iraq, by force, into its idea of Iraq, all of that progress will be undone.
The NPR interviewed Gordon Adams about the cost of the war a while back. Gordon Adams is some defense analyst. Here is his comment: "In Gulf War I, we paid $60 billion to fight the war. Our allies gave us back all but about $10 billion of that money. So it was--you know, Gulf War I was subsidized. Gulf War II will not be subsidized."
Here's what we said before the war, on March 14th. It seems relevant, in the light of W.'s speech.
"Given this, here is the primer for the upcoming catastrophe:
1. Occupation is not peace. The media has defined the war as having a beginning -- when Bush declares it -- and an end -- when Saddam Hussein is dissolved. Now, the beginning, as we all know by now, has not been clear. In fact, it is unclear what Bush will declare, if we are actually engaged in warlike hostilities now, and who will be responsible for the war -- as in, you know, the marquis. Is it the UN vs. Saddam, the U.S. vs Saddam, or the Coalition of the Willing vs. Saddam? Similarily, the dissolution of Saddam ends only one phase of the war. The next phase, if the post-Saddam history of Northern Iraq is relevant, begins with squabbling between hostile factions that soon escalates into shooting. Plus, of course, with a soldiery strung out in Iraq and no central authority besides that army, the terrain and disposition of forces is ideally suited for suicide bombers.
2.You can't give what you take. As we've pointed out before, Paul Wolfowitz has testified that we intend to pay for the war with Iraq's money. At the same time, we intend to reconstruct Iraq. Those are mutually cancelling propositions. This is when the lesson of Afghanistan kicks in. There is no constituency in this country willing to see a transfer of about one hundred billion dollars to Iraq. And if the economy continues to suck, the pressure will be overwhelming to subsidize this war with the spoils.
3.A democratic government won't last if its strips the country of its wealth. Stripping, here, is pretty direct. We aren't talking fancy Swiss bank accounts. We are talking oil money going out in ways that everybody sees. If this is the American strategy, be prepared for a guerilla war.
4 The current civil society in Northern Iraq is endangered by American adventurism. Northern Iraq, and the Kurds, have become the stuff of propaganda lately. That there was no outpouring of admiration for their civil ways before 9/11 had a simple cause: for the first five years of the No Fly Zone, Kurdish factions killed each other. They also gave shelter to the PKK, a guerrilla group in Turkey that was as dirty as they come. This isn't to say that Northern Iraq hasn't made progress -- they have. They've done it in the way that progress is made -- it is a grassroots effort, and it takes security, money, and time. If the U.S. expects to 'integrate' Northern Iraq, by force, into its idea of Iraq, all of that progress will be undone.
The NPR interviewed Gordon Adams about the cost of the war a while back. Gordon Adams is some defense analyst. Here is his comment: "In Gulf War I, we paid $60 billion to fight the war. Our allies gave us back all but about $10 billion of that money. So it was--you know, Gulf War I was subsidized. Gulf War II will not be subsidized."
Bollettino
We were going to do a little thoughtful post about reviewing -- which, the god of coincidence being a faithful reader of this stream of fluff, is made easier by a hook: Clive James' op ed in the Sunday NYT.
"Over the course of literary history some legitimately destructive reviews have been altogether too enjoyable for both writer and reader. Attacking bad books, these reviews were useful acts in defense of civilization. They also left the authors of the books in the position of prisoners buried to the neck in a Roman arena as the champion charioteer, with swords mounted on his hubcaps, demonstrated his mastery of the giant slalom. How civilized is it to tee off on the exposed ineptitude of the helpless?
"Back in the early 19th century, the dim but industrious poet Robert Montgomery had grown dangerously used to extravagant praise, until a new book of his poems was given to the great historian and mighty reviewer Lord Macaulay. The results set all England laughing and Montgomery on the road to oblivion, where he still is, his fate at Macaulay's hands being his only remaining claim to fame. Montgomery's high style was asking to be brought low and Macaulay no doubt told himself that he was only doing his duty by putting in the boot. Montgomery had a line about a river meandering level with its fount. Macaulay pointed out that a river level with its fount wouldn't even flow, let alone meander. Macaulay made it funny; he had exposed Montgomery as a writer who couldn't see what was in front of him."
Clive James' piece is occasioned by the now distant racket that was made in May, on the appearane of Heidi Julavits' piece, in the Believer, entitled "The Snarky, Dumbed-Down World of Book Reviewing." Since we have made almost all our money in the past year book reviewing, you would think we'd have commented in a more timely fashion about what couldn't have been more relevant to us. However, at the time we were in a constant state of sweat over Iraq, and theories of bookreviewing just didn't urge our commentating instincts. However, James' piece did send us back to Julavits. Not to her essay, so much, but to the interview in the NYObs, which was, to the detriment of the moral betterment of book reviewers everywhere, so much more fun to read.
During the course of the interview, Ms. Julavits (to use Observerspeak) morphed into a rather bizarre semblence of Jerry Lundegaard, the car salesman character in Fargo. Or at least linguistically. For instance: in her article, Ms. Julavits apparently attacked one Sam Sifton, whose review of some novel in the New York Times attracted her attention on account of its untoward snarkiness.Now this Sifton, according to the Observer, is not entirely unknown to Ms. Julavits. In fact, he was the best man at her inauspicious wedding to her first husband, who has, in another magazine, recollected in detail the vices that drove his bride from the house and from the marriage. Here is the interviewer presses Ms. Julavits on this unhappy topic:
At the mention of her personal connection to Mr. Sifton, Ms. Julavits darkened. "Unfortunately, Sam is someone whom I really, really, really like," she said, sitting up in her chair. "So if it�s not dispassionate, I guess it�s that I read that review, and I was just so upset the whole time I was reading it�and then when I saw who wrote it, it was devastating, because I respect him immensely."Ms. Julavits didn�t see her attack on Mr. Sifton as personal, but she admitted that the connections were a bit odd. "It�s definitely bizarre," she said, "but Dave Eggers is friends with Sam and whatever, so it�s all�everybody knows everybody in one way or another."
It is hard to read this without thinking of William Macy's worried face -- Macy is the guy who played Lundegaard -- and thinking of what he'd do with these lines. They are golden, these lines. Especially "Sam is someone whom I really really really like..." Ms. Julavits' way of speaking -- the Midwestern nice that wraps around a rubber dagger, or at least a bad review of a bad review -- has that Lundegaard twitchiness, that discontent. The interview includes a citation of Ms. Julavits really pouring on the harshness, taking on the negative reception accorded to Rick Moody's The Black Veil. The "cautionary underlying message" she found in Mr. Moody�s bad press�most famously, a blistering attack by Dale Peck in The New Republic�was this: "If you try to be overly ambitious and fail, you will get the heck spanked out of you. You will be mocked."
Jaa, gettin' the heck spanked out of you. It happened two years ago, over to Lake Crane I think it was, you remember Marge, when the danged dog ate the snowplow tires...
Well, our own thoughts about reviewing have not been crystalized by Julavits. Rather, we've been thinking of the malign influence of Pauline Kael. We've been thinking of resentment. We've been thinking of how the site where literature is processed -- chosen, read, discussed -- has changed over the last century from the library to the classroom. We've been thinking of crowds. Our next post will take some of this up. Or it won't
We were going to do a little thoughtful post about reviewing -- which, the god of coincidence being a faithful reader of this stream of fluff, is made easier by a hook: Clive James' op ed in the Sunday NYT.
"Over the course of literary history some legitimately destructive reviews have been altogether too enjoyable for both writer and reader. Attacking bad books, these reviews were useful acts in defense of civilization. They also left the authors of the books in the position of prisoners buried to the neck in a Roman arena as the champion charioteer, with swords mounted on his hubcaps, demonstrated his mastery of the giant slalom. How civilized is it to tee off on the exposed ineptitude of the helpless?
"Back in the early 19th century, the dim but industrious poet Robert Montgomery had grown dangerously used to extravagant praise, until a new book of his poems was given to the great historian and mighty reviewer Lord Macaulay. The results set all England laughing and Montgomery on the road to oblivion, where he still is, his fate at Macaulay's hands being his only remaining claim to fame. Montgomery's high style was asking to be brought low and Macaulay no doubt told himself that he was only doing his duty by putting in the boot. Montgomery had a line about a river meandering level with its fount. Macaulay pointed out that a river level with its fount wouldn't even flow, let alone meander. Macaulay made it funny; he had exposed Montgomery as a writer who couldn't see what was in front of him."
Clive James' piece is occasioned by the now distant racket that was made in May, on the appearane of Heidi Julavits' piece, in the Believer, entitled "The Snarky, Dumbed-Down World of Book Reviewing." Since we have made almost all our money in the past year book reviewing, you would think we'd have commented in a more timely fashion about what couldn't have been more relevant to us. However, at the time we were in a constant state of sweat over Iraq, and theories of bookreviewing just didn't urge our commentating instincts. However, James' piece did send us back to Julavits. Not to her essay, so much, but to the interview in the NYObs, which was, to the detriment of the moral betterment of book reviewers everywhere, so much more fun to read.
During the course of the interview, Ms. Julavits (to use Observerspeak) morphed into a rather bizarre semblence of Jerry Lundegaard, the car salesman character in Fargo. Or at least linguistically. For instance: in her article, Ms. Julavits apparently attacked one Sam Sifton, whose review of some novel in the New York Times attracted her attention on account of its untoward snarkiness.Now this Sifton, according to the Observer, is not entirely unknown to Ms. Julavits. In fact, he was the best man at her inauspicious wedding to her first husband, who has, in another magazine, recollected in detail the vices that drove his bride from the house and from the marriage. Here is the interviewer presses Ms. Julavits on this unhappy topic:
At the mention of her personal connection to Mr. Sifton, Ms. Julavits darkened. "Unfortunately, Sam is someone whom I really, really, really like," she said, sitting up in her chair. "So if it�s not dispassionate, I guess it�s that I read that review, and I was just so upset the whole time I was reading it�and then when I saw who wrote it, it was devastating, because I respect him immensely."Ms. Julavits didn�t see her attack on Mr. Sifton as personal, but she admitted that the connections were a bit odd. "It�s definitely bizarre," she said, "but Dave Eggers is friends with Sam and whatever, so it�s all�everybody knows everybody in one way or another."
It is hard to read this without thinking of William Macy's worried face -- Macy is the guy who played Lundegaard -- and thinking of what he'd do with these lines. They are golden, these lines. Especially "Sam is someone whom I really really really like..." Ms. Julavits' way of speaking -- the Midwestern nice that wraps around a rubber dagger, or at least a bad review of a bad review -- has that Lundegaard twitchiness, that discontent. The interview includes a citation of Ms. Julavits really pouring on the harshness, taking on the negative reception accorded to Rick Moody's The Black Veil. The "cautionary underlying message" she found in Mr. Moody�s bad press�most famously, a blistering attack by Dale Peck in The New Republic�was this: "If you try to be overly ambitious and fail, you will get the heck spanked out of you. You will be mocked."
Jaa, gettin' the heck spanked out of you. It happened two years ago, over to Lake Crane I think it was, you remember Marge, when the danged dog ate the snowplow tires...
Well, our own thoughts about reviewing have not been crystalized by Julavits. Rather, we've been thinking of the malign influence of Pauline Kael. We've been thinking of resentment. We've been thinking of how the site where literature is processed -- chosen, read, discussed -- has changed over the last century from the library to the classroom. We've been thinking of crowds. Our next post will take some of this up. Or it won't
Bollettino
Ah, pity the poor right wing draft dodgers. Deprived of their share of military glory, and forced to take on domestic tasks, such as bringing down a 100 grand on that first job, and fighting real hard, and successfully, at the office, to be promoted over the deadwood, they have longed, longed for their own war -- not one, mind you, where they would have to be consigned to those yucky barracks at the airport and made to eat that yucky army food (puh-leeeze), but an in and out kind of thing -- sort of like an extreme vacation. The newest status symbol isn't climbing Mount Everest any more (with the natives bearing your lap top so you can hook it up and email your friends) -- no, it is going to Iraq and reporting on the "amazing progress" we are making there.
Following in the footsteps of Donny Rumsfeld in Iraq is Max Boot, WSJ author and general authority on all things military. He's at his best telling us how we are in the midst of being stabbed in the back by the media again, while Iraq is going our way! And how did he discover this? By making a tour exclusively with an army unit. A US army unit. Here's some derring do on the part of Monsieur Boot. First, in excited tones, he announces what counterinsurgency is all about:
"The success that both divisions are having is based on a smart counterinsurgency strategy that combines carrots and sticks. Both are careful not to use indiscriminate firepower that would alienate civilians. Their raids are carefully focused so that they hit Baathist safe houses while minimizing inconvenience for and humiliation of the innocent."
Yeah, those innocent. I'm sure they are all psyched about that minimizing of inconvenience and humiliation. Those are bummers, man.
But -- oh joy! -- the second, action part of Boot's exciting Iraqi vacation comes about when he gets to go out with real men! Yes, the boys in the Marine Corps invited him along for a ride. All that working out in the gym in New York has paid off! Here, our great white hunter encounters the little brown enemy himself!
I went with the Marines' Task Force Scorpion on one such raid, in a Sunni neighborhood south of Baghdad. As we drove, three remote- controlled bombs went off on the roadside. Luckily no one was injured; the blasts missed our vehicles. The Marines immediately got out and searched for the perpetrators. One suspect tested positive for explosive residue on his hands. He was plexi-cuffed and stuck in the back of an armored vehicle next to me. A corporal asked me to cover him with a 9-millimeter pistol. I was happy to comply. The next day, the task force caught four suspected Fedayeen who had explosive devices. Through such successes, Scorpion has managed to dramatically reduce terrorism in its area."
This, of course, is a city that the belligerent crowd insists is as safe as D.C. -- you know D.C, the city where they blow up embassies and police stations and shit. Now, Boot's experience seems to be of a dramatic increase of terrorism, since it is happening, on his account, in broad daylight. But why believe your own 5 senses when you can believe the Pentagon! -- think, too, of his trembling excitement, covering the bad guy with a 9-millimeter pistol! Yes indeed, if today's new, free market army could market this as a vacation package for your alpha Wall Street male, we are in business!
Ourselves -- well, LI advises our readers to drain that drop of alpha blood in your veins. It only leads to a lifelong and dubious puerility.
Ah, pity the poor right wing draft dodgers. Deprived of their share of military glory, and forced to take on domestic tasks, such as bringing down a 100 grand on that first job, and fighting real hard, and successfully, at the office, to be promoted over the deadwood, they have longed, longed for their own war -- not one, mind you, where they would have to be consigned to those yucky barracks at the airport and made to eat that yucky army food (puh-leeeze), but an in and out kind of thing -- sort of like an extreme vacation. The newest status symbol isn't climbing Mount Everest any more (with the natives bearing your lap top so you can hook it up and email your friends) -- no, it is going to Iraq and reporting on the "amazing progress" we are making there.
Following in the footsteps of Donny Rumsfeld in Iraq is Max Boot, WSJ author and general authority on all things military. He's at his best telling us how we are in the midst of being stabbed in the back by the media again, while Iraq is going our way! And how did he discover this? By making a tour exclusively with an army unit. A US army unit. Here's some derring do on the part of Monsieur Boot. First, in excited tones, he announces what counterinsurgency is all about:
"The success that both divisions are having is based on a smart counterinsurgency strategy that combines carrots and sticks. Both are careful not to use indiscriminate firepower that would alienate civilians. Their raids are carefully focused so that they hit Baathist safe houses while minimizing inconvenience for and humiliation of the innocent."
Yeah, those innocent. I'm sure they are all psyched about that minimizing of inconvenience and humiliation. Those are bummers, man.
But -- oh joy! -- the second, action part of Boot's exciting Iraqi vacation comes about when he gets to go out with real men! Yes, the boys in the Marine Corps invited him along for a ride. All that working out in the gym in New York has paid off! Here, our great white hunter encounters the little brown enemy himself!
I went with the Marines' Task Force Scorpion on one such raid, in a Sunni neighborhood south of Baghdad. As we drove, three remote- controlled bombs went off on the roadside. Luckily no one was injured; the blasts missed our vehicles. The Marines immediately got out and searched for the perpetrators. One suspect tested positive for explosive residue on his hands. He was plexi-cuffed and stuck in the back of an armored vehicle next to me. A corporal asked me to cover him with a 9-millimeter pistol. I was happy to comply. The next day, the task force caught four suspected Fedayeen who had explosive devices. Through such successes, Scorpion has managed to dramatically reduce terrorism in its area."
This, of course, is a city that the belligerent crowd insists is as safe as D.C. -- you know D.C, the city where they blow up embassies and police stations and shit. Now, Boot's experience seems to be of a dramatic increase of terrorism, since it is happening, on his account, in broad daylight. But why believe your own 5 senses when you can believe the Pentagon! -- think, too, of his trembling excitement, covering the bad guy with a 9-millimeter pistol! Yes indeed, if today's new, free market army could market this as a vacation package for your alpha Wall Street male, we are in business!
Ourselves -- well, LI advises our readers to drain that drop of alpha blood in your veins. It only leads to a lifelong and dubious puerility.
Saturday, September 06, 2003
Bollettino
Stanley Weintraub wrote an indictment of General Macauthur in the nineties that was approvingly reviewed in the military journal, Parameters. The reviewer, General Harold Nelson, USA Ret., former US Army Chief of Military History, wrote:
"I next felt the need for a book such as this when we taught case studies in senior leadership at the War College in the 1980s. MacArthur's "genius" was predictably discovered by enthusiastic students each year, and the Inchon operation was inevitably--and appropriately--cited as key supporting evidence. Professor Weintraub does a fine job laying out the importance of MacArthur's intractable commitment to that operation as the main reason it was tried. He spares no praise where praise is deserved. But he goes beyond Inchon, questioning MacArthur's insistence on subsequent amphibious operations against the east coast of the Korean peninsula--a decision that removed combat forces from the pursuit following the liberation of Seoul and weakened UN forces available in North Korea when the Chinese intervened. He also reminds us that MacArthur surrounded himself with "yes men," was terribly vain, and pushed the careers of undeserving subordinates--hardly the traits one would seek in an ideal senior leader.
I next needed this book when I was Chief of Military History for an Army Chief of Staff who was pledging "No more Task Force Smiths." I could dig out the necessary facts and figures on the undermanning and lax training of the Occupation Forces in Japan from James Schnabel's Policy and Direction: The First Year. But that official history put most of the blame on Washington--both the politicians and the Pentagon generals. Weintraub reminds us how much MacArthur was to blame, not only with his hands-off approach to day-to-day issues related to readiness, but in the bluff and bluster he put into his briefings when men such as Army Chief of Staff General Joseph Lawton Collins came to visit his command. Schnabel emphasizes the optimistic reports Collins filed when he returned to Washington. Weintraub reminds us that Collins had been a major when MacArthur was Army Chief of Staff, and that General of the Army Omar N. Bradley, ostensibly MacArthur's boss as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had been promoted to lieutenant colonel during those years. He also reminds us that MacArthur "never materialized at field exercises, where pampered and poorly trained garrison soldiers could not figure out how to erect tents, break down a rifle, assemble chow wagons, or maintain themselves in any way without indigenous assistance." Thank God the Army wasn't saddled with any superannuated five-star generals unwilling to be team players when we were saying "No more Task Force Smiths."
Well, one wonders what the future historian will say about Donald Rumsfeld. The Macarthur comparison is apt -- the same vanity, the same play to a certain reactionary crowd, the same court behavior. The yes men, now, are the strategists like Wolfowitz and Feith. And the same utter contempt for anyone who contradicts the faith. One of the many disturbing things about the long Democrat somnolence is that there are no cries for Bush to fire Rumsfeld. Surely if ever a man deserved to be fired, it is a man who has taken upon himself to usurp the function of the state department; whose personal pique at our Atlantic allies is now costing us perhaps an extra billion dollars per week, and probably more; whose ingenuity in stirring up the Macarthur strain in our culture has proven wholly pernicious to any sensible discussion of American interest and strategy in Iraq.
Rumsfeld and his minions are uncomfortably caught between their propaganda and reality. The official line is that the occupation is on course. If that official line were right, Rumsfeld's plan -- diminishing the US troop committment ot 30,000 this month -- would have been implemented. But even the most delusional Pentagon player has dropped that item from the agenda. The other reality -- the financial one -- is looming. No doubt Bush's speech will gingerly prepare the ground for the 60 billion dollar request from Congress. Again, if the progress were 'remarkable" -- as Rumsfeld likes to say -- the oil revenues would already be flowing in at the estimate the Pentagon liked to give in the pre-war period. That estimate was widely accepted at the time -- a sign of that the Pentagon's delusions had become the establishment's -- but it is now obvious that they were nearer lies than mistakes.
It is hard to imagine any "progress" in Iraq as long as it is in the hands of Donald Rumsfeld. It isn't that LI expects Bush to replace him with Susan Sontag. But McCain would be nice.
Of course, given Bush's feeling about McCain, Sontag might be more likely.
Unfortunately, the editorialist's well meaning opinion, that we should be sending more troops to Iraq, is like so many editorialist's opinions: a blandness wrapped around a hollowness. What are these troops to do? If there is a real guerilla war happening in Iraq -- and by now, I think it is obvious there is one -- the troops should be smothering the resources that sustain that war. That means sealing the borders, and it means interdicting the network of small internal forces. To do that wouldn't just require a little increase in American forces -- it would probably take at least 300,000 more.
No, Iraq is not going to regain its sovereignty with 400,000 or even 100,000 American troops roaming around in it. Perhaps a multi-national force would have squelched the beginnings of the guerilla war, but it seems to me that that force is going to face the same problem that the American forces face presently.
The only force that can really face the guerillas is an Iraqi force. The number of soldiers needed to deny insurgent groups resources is about equal to the number disbanded at the end of the war by Rumsfeld's deputy, Bremer. Bremer's decision, a compound of ignorance and hubris, is now blowing back on us. The idea that we are going to change the direction of Iraq in D.C., which is still current in both the belligerent and anti-war camps in this country, is simply false.
It hurts to agree with retired military men -- especially when they have names straight out of Doctor Strangelove -- but the WP article on the coming request for 50 to 60 billion dollars (which will undoubtedly mean 70 to 80 billion dollars -- it is how the Bush administration does its money) ended with these two grafs.
"In a sign of growing friction between Bush and the military establishment, retired Marine Lt. Gen. Paul Van Riper, a Gulf War commander, said in an interview during the meeting in Arlington that he is hearing an unprecedented amount of concern among retired officers over how the Bush administration has handled Iraq.
"Their criticism focused on Rumsfeld, he added."I've never seen so such discontent among the retired community," Van Riper said. Last week, he said, he was at a breakfast with eight retired generals at which one asked about Rumsfeld, "When are they going to get rid of this guy?""
Indeed.
PS -- The Boeing vote has been delayed, per our post on Darleen Druyun. The WP has reported that an alternative lease plan is being considered.
Stanley Weintraub wrote an indictment of General Macauthur in the nineties that was approvingly reviewed in the military journal, Parameters. The reviewer, General Harold Nelson, USA Ret., former US Army Chief of Military History, wrote:
"I next felt the need for a book such as this when we taught case studies in senior leadership at the War College in the 1980s. MacArthur's "genius" was predictably discovered by enthusiastic students each year, and the Inchon operation was inevitably--and appropriately--cited as key supporting evidence. Professor Weintraub does a fine job laying out the importance of MacArthur's intractable commitment to that operation as the main reason it was tried. He spares no praise where praise is deserved. But he goes beyond Inchon, questioning MacArthur's insistence on subsequent amphibious operations against the east coast of the Korean peninsula--a decision that removed combat forces from the pursuit following the liberation of Seoul and weakened UN forces available in North Korea when the Chinese intervened. He also reminds us that MacArthur surrounded himself with "yes men," was terribly vain, and pushed the careers of undeserving subordinates--hardly the traits one would seek in an ideal senior leader.
I next needed this book when I was Chief of Military History for an Army Chief of Staff who was pledging "No more Task Force Smiths." I could dig out the necessary facts and figures on the undermanning and lax training of the Occupation Forces in Japan from James Schnabel's Policy and Direction: The First Year. But that official history put most of the blame on Washington--both the politicians and the Pentagon generals. Weintraub reminds us how much MacArthur was to blame, not only with his hands-off approach to day-to-day issues related to readiness, but in the bluff and bluster he put into his briefings when men such as Army Chief of Staff General Joseph Lawton Collins came to visit his command. Schnabel emphasizes the optimistic reports Collins filed when he returned to Washington. Weintraub reminds us that Collins had been a major when MacArthur was Army Chief of Staff, and that General of the Army Omar N. Bradley, ostensibly MacArthur's boss as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had been promoted to lieutenant colonel during those years. He also reminds us that MacArthur "never materialized at field exercises, where pampered and poorly trained garrison soldiers could not figure out how to erect tents, break down a rifle, assemble chow wagons, or maintain themselves in any way without indigenous assistance." Thank God the Army wasn't saddled with any superannuated five-star generals unwilling to be team players when we were saying "No more Task Force Smiths."
Well, one wonders what the future historian will say about Donald Rumsfeld. The Macarthur comparison is apt -- the same vanity, the same play to a certain reactionary crowd, the same court behavior. The yes men, now, are the strategists like Wolfowitz and Feith. And the same utter contempt for anyone who contradicts the faith. One of the many disturbing things about the long Democrat somnolence is that there are no cries for Bush to fire Rumsfeld. Surely if ever a man deserved to be fired, it is a man who has taken upon himself to usurp the function of the state department; whose personal pique at our Atlantic allies is now costing us perhaps an extra billion dollars per week, and probably more; whose ingenuity in stirring up the Macarthur strain in our culture has proven wholly pernicious to any sensible discussion of American interest and strategy in Iraq.
Rumsfeld and his minions are uncomfortably caught between their propaganda and reality. The official line is that the occupation is on course. If that official line were right, Rumsfeld's plan -- diminishing the US troop committment ot 30,000 this month -- would have been implemented. But even the most delusional Pentagon player has dropped that item from the agenda. The other reality -- the financial one -- is looming. No doubt Bush's speech will gingerly prepare the ground for the 60 billion dollar request from Congress. Again, if the progress were 'remarkable" -- as Rumsfeld likes to say -- the oil revenues would already be flowing in at the estimate the Pentagon liked to give in the pre-war period. That estimate was widely accepted at the time -- a sign of that the Pentagon's delusions had become the establishment's -- but it is now obvious that they were nearer lies than mistakes.
It is hard to imagine any "progress" in Iraq as long as it is in the hands of Donald Rumsfeld. It isn't that LI expects Bush to replace him with Susan Sontag. But McCain would be nice.
Of course, given Bush's feeling about McCain, Sontag might be more likely.
Unfortunately, the editorialist's well meaning opinion, that we should be sending more troops to Iraq, is like so many editorialist's opinions: a blandness wrapped around a hollowness. What are these troops to do? If there is a real guerilla war happening in Iraq -- and by now, I think it is obvious there is one -- the troops should be smothering the resources that sustain that war. That means sealing the borders, and it means interdicting the network of small internal forces. To do that wouldn't just require a little increase in American forces -- it would probably take at least 300,000 more.
No, Iraq is not going to regain its sovereignty with 400,000 or even 100,000 American troops roaming around in it. Perhaps a multi-national force would have squelched the beginnings of the guerilla war, but it seems to me that that force is going to face the same problem that the American forces face presently.
The only force that can really face the guerillas is an Iraqi force. The number of soldiers needed to deny insurgent groups resources is about equal to the number disbanded at the end of the war by Rumsfeld's deputy, Bremer. Bremer's decision, a compound of ignorance and hubris, is now blowing back on us. The idea that we are going to change the direction of Iraq in D.C., which is still current in both the belligerent and anti-war camps in this country, is simply false.
It hurts to agree with retired military men -- especially when they have names straight out of Doctor Strangelove -- but the WP article on the coming request for 50 to 60 billion dollars (which will undoubtedly mean 70 to 80 billion dollars -- it is how the Bush administration does its money) ended with these two grafs.
"In a sign of growing friction between Bush and the military establishment, retired Marine Lt. Gen. Paul Van Riper, a Gulf War commander, said in an interview during the meeting in Arlington that he is hearing an unprecedented amount of concern among retired officers over how the Bush administration has handled Iraq.
"Their criticism focused on Rumsfeld, he added."I've never seen so such discontent among the retired community," Van Riper said. Last week, he said, he was at a breakfast with eight retired generals at which one asked about Rumsfeld, "When are they going to get rid of this guy?""
Indeed.
PS -- The Boeing vote has been delayed, per our post on Darleen Druyun. The WP has reported that an alternative lease plan is being considered.
Tuesday, September 02, 2003
Bollettino
Various conservatives and Bushites have claimed that too much attention has been paid to pot shot casualties in Iraq. Actually, this is not new -- in Frank Bruni's biography of George W., he shows that Bush sr. went on a 'fact finding' tour of Vietnam in the sixties and came back with the same conclusion -- that basically, difficulties in South Vietnam were being exaggerated. Now, partly this is just the prejudiced eye. And partly it is a fact about modern guerilla warfare -- it operates in eerie synch with the everydayness. Because the kind of warfare that finds its main grammatical component in the 'battle' has tended towards total war, those who have been trained in that tradition simply don't understand the partial war of the guerilla. Shops are open in the cities, electricity runs, most of the time. The observer can rent a car, drive around. However, guerilla wars do not bring with them less casualties than total wars. They bring with them a different kind of casualty ratio -- since the aim is to incrementally break the opponents spirit, the means -- the sudden interjection of violence, and the equally sudden disappearance of the guerilla force. While warfare has always produced more wounded than dead, in guerilla warfare, the numbers of the dead can be, for periods of time, nugatory. The thing to look for is an increasing amount of wounded. This is happening.
The Washington Post has a belated piece on the astonishing injury counts US forces are sustaining in Iraq. It was a surprise to me that last week, 55 American soldiers were wounded. That is a major figure -- it is a Vietnam type figure. The whole article, which also discusses how the military is trying to de-emphasize the nature of the violence it is experiencing in this occupation, is definitely worth reading.
Now, onto Titus Andronicus.
There's an article in the NYT outlining the book by Brian Vickers that makes the case for co-authorship in five of Shakespeare's plays. The case seems reasonable, and was reached through the standard textual editing procedure:
"Examining factors like rhetorical devices, polysyllabic words and metrical habits, scholars have been able to identify reliably an author of a work or part of a work, even when the early editions did not give credit."
Reliably, here, is a weasel word, since we are not talking about a procedure that refers to some standard. It isn't as if someone, reading the Two Noble Kinsmen, said, hey, this sounds like Shakespeare, and then the ms was discovered with the Bard's handwriting. Not that there aren't sensibilities so fine that such a thing is unthinkable -- but there's no sensibility so fine that you could use the word "reliable," At this point, we edge into those criminological pseudo-sciences that are so popular on TV, and so pernicious in court. Vicker's procedure builds on itself. In other words, we are talking about connoiseurship, not science. What is unreasonable about the article is the imputation that doubts about the standard textual editing procedure are always motivated by some heady romantic sense of the individual author:
"Professor Vickers's book also gives a good sense of the opposing forces in the co-authorship debate. On one side are scholars who use ingenious methods to dissect a text for clues to co-authorship. On the other are so-called conservators, who ridicule those efforts and want no deviation from the idea that the entire canon was written by a solitary genius."
Actually, you can think that the texts were co-authored from other, extra-textual cues, and still doubt in specific instances that the case for, say, Titus Andronicus being "two-fifths" George Peele are overwhelming. For a discussion of the attribution to Peele, here's a link.
Various conservatives and Bushites have claimed that too much attention has been paid to pot shot casualties in Iraq. Actually, this is not new -- in Frank Bruni's biography of George W., he shows that Bush sr. went on a 'fact finding' tour of Vietnam in the sixties and came back with the same conclusion -- that basically, difficulties in South Vietnam were being exaggerated. Now, partly this is just the prejudiced eye. And partly it is a fact about modern guerilla warfare -- it operates in eerie synch with the everydayness. Because the kind of warfare that finds its main grammatical component in the 'battle' has tended towards total war, those who have been trained in that tradition simply don't understand the partial war of the guerilla. Shops are open in the cities, electricity runs, most of the time. The observer can rent a car, drive around. However, guerilla wars do not bring with them less casualties than total wars. They bring with them a different kind of casualty ratio -- since the aim is to incrementally break the opponents spirit, the means -- the sudden interjection of violence, and the equally sudden disappearance of the guerilla force. While warfare has always produced more wounded than dead, in guerilla warfare, the numbers of the dead can be, for periods of time, nugatory. The thing to look for is an increasing amount of wounded. This is happening.
The Washington Post has a belated piece on the astonishing injury counts US forces are sustaining in Iraq. It was a surprise to me that last week, 55 American soldiers were wounded. That is a major figure -- it is a Vietnam type figure. The whole article, which also discusses how the military is trying to de-emphasize the nature of the violence it is experiencing in this occupation, is definitely worth reading.
Now, onto Titus Andronicus.
There's an article in the NYT outlining the book by Brian Vickers that makes the case for co-authorship in five of Shakespeare's plays. The case seems reasonable, and was reached through the standard textual editing procedure:
"Examining factors like rhetorical devices, polysyllabic words and metrical habits, scholars have been able to identify reliably an author of a work or part of a work, even when the early editions did not give credit."
Reliably, here, is a weasel word, since we are not talking about a procedure that refers to some standard. It isn't as if someone, reading the Two Noble Kinsmen, said, hey, this sounds like Shakespeare, and then the ms was discovered with the Bard's handwriting. Not that there aren't sensibilities so fine that such a thing is unthinkable -- but there's no sensibility so fine that you could use the word "reliable," At this point, we edge into those criminological pseudo-sciences that are so popular on TV, and so pernicious in court. Vicker's procedure builds on itself. In other words, we are talking about connoiseurship, not science. What is unreasonable about the article is the imputation that doubts about the standard textual editing procedure are always motivated by some heady romantic sense of the individual author:
"Professor Vickers's book also gives a good sense of the opposing forces in the co-authorship debate. On one side are scholars who use ingenious methods to dissect a text for clues to co-authorship. On the other are so-called conservators, who ridicule those efforts and want no deviation from the idea that the entire canon was written by a solitary genius."
Actually, you can think that the texts were co-authored from other, extra-textual cues, and still doubt in specific instances that the case for, say, Titus Andronicus being "two-fifths" George Peele are overwhelming. For a discussion of the attribution to Peele, here's a link.
Monday, September 01, 2003
Bollettino
In January, Counterpunch's co-editor, Jeffrey St. Clair, wrote an article about Darleen Druyun. Druyun was an acquisitions official for the Air Force. She called herself the Godmother of the C-7, a Boeing aircraft that was perfectly expensive and unnecessary, and thus just the thing to order 100 billion dollars worth of. Except that 100 billion dollars is nothing if you can maximize it by, say, renting the aircraft to the Pentagon. As St. Clair pointed out, Druyun, who served under Clinton as well as Bush, did her best for Boeing. In my father's house are many rooms, Jesus said; a similar principle holds for Boeing with regards to Defense Department employees. As St. Clair reported, Druyun cashed in her chips, resigned from the Pentagon,and floated into a perth at Boeing:
Now she's [Druyun's] stalking bigger game: missile defense, a multi-billion dollar bonanza for defense contractors, with Boeing at the head of the trough."Ms. Druyun is now officially an employee of the company whose interests she so ardently championed while she was supposedly representing the interests of the taxpayers," says Danielle Brian, executive director of the Project on Government Oversight. "This is one of the most egregious examples of the government revolving door in recent memory."Of course, plucking operatives from the halls of the Pentagon is nothing new for Boeing. Over the years, the company has festooned its corporate board and the halls of its lobby shop with a bevy of top brass.Recently, Boeing's board has boasted both former Defense Secretary William Perry and John M. Shalikashvili, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In 2001, Boeing also hired Rudy de Leon, Clinton's Deputy Secretary of Defense, to run its Washington office. Although De Leon is known as a proud hawk and a masterful dealmaker, his hiring may have been a rare misstep for Boeing, since congressional Republicans howled that the company should have picked one of their own from the Pentagon's rolls.
Druyun's patriotic work in behalf of Boeing is now getting a little scrutiny. The story is in U.S. News, it is in Forbes, and it is in the Washington Post. Alas, the WP, DC's paper, is so weak about it that their report misreports Druyun's name, Darleen, as "Darlene." The deal of spending an extra 5 billion dollars renting supplier planes from Boeing through a financial entity controlled by Boeing has aroused the curiosity, and even the wrath, of a Senate Committee chaired by Bush's nemesis, Senator McCain. The committee has released certain documents:
"The documents also illustrate the integral role that Darlene Druyun, now a senior Boeing executive, played in formulating the lease deal while she was the Air Force's principal deputy assistant secretary for acquisition and management. In one exchange Boeing officials questioned how a change in the lease terms could provide Druyun "political cover. She apparently understands that this may not be the best business case.
"Committee investigators want to know whether Druyun improperly told Boeing that its competitor, Europe's Airbus Industrie, had submitted a bid of $5 million to $17 million lower per plane. An April 2002 e-mail exchange between two Boeing officials, which said Druyun had given the information to Boeing, was turned over to the Defense Department inspector general's office, a congressional source said.Boeing denied that it received proprietary information, and a spokesman for the inspector general's office declined to comment on whether it had begun an inquiry. Aircraft prices are widely available on the Internet, and the e-mail was distributed after the Air Force announced that it would negotiate a deal with Boeing, so the information did not help formulate their initial bid, industry officials said."
A story in Forbes about this same incident refers to US News, which has gone to some length to report on what should be a major scandal. Still, even the US News dares not tell the public what St. Clair revealed in January -- that not only are we dealing with greedy pigs, but that the greedy pigs are selling low quality goods. In other words, the aircraft could potentially endanger the lives of the soldiers this administration loves to death -- when it is photo op time.
Here's how stinky the deal is:
"Such complicated financing was alien to Air Force officials. Boeing's documents make clear that in crafting the financing plan, the Air Force played student to its contractor. "The USAF clearly does not understand financing and has asked for our help to educate them (in layman's terms)," wrote Robert Gordon, the vice president of Boeing Capital Corp., in an E-mail message in December 2001. Indeed, Gordon noted, an Air Force general "made a special comment to thank Boeing for all its work over the past months to try and help this leasing proposal make sense" to the government.
Investigators with the Commerce Committee, however, are not as awestruck. They are examining the financial vehicle that's the linchpin of the deal. "It's an Enron-like entity," says McCain. For one thing, U.S. News finds, there is a built-in conflict of interest in the arrangement because, documents indicate, it gives Boeing oversight of its own deal. Boeing and the Air Force have sold the deal to Congress as a way to save money, but lease terms mean it's impossible to say today how much the government will pay tomorrow. Actual lease payments will be set as planes are delivered, and if interest rates rise more than expected, the government's costs will go up. Boeing's price will also be adjusted up for inflation; Boeing says that's standard procedure. One clause requires the Air Force to pay more if its new tankers spend too much time in the air; the Air Force says the service has negotiated far more flight hours than it will use. Still, Boeing and the Air Force can't shake the criticism that taxpayers are the losers. Last week, the Congressional Budget Office weighed in, saying that leasing the 100 planes will cost as much as $5.6 billion more than if they had been purchased. Boeing rejects the findings as flawed."
According to Druyan's official biography, she started out in D.C. as the procurements person for NASA. In other words, she's been raised in the finest school of boondoggling in the country. A natural, then, to suck up the gravy at Boeing. While it is nice that the mainstream press is coming to this story at the last minute, we do wonder why they couldn't have leaped in January. Or would that have sounded, hmm, unpatriotic?
In January, Counterpunch's co-editor, Jeffrey St. Clair, wrote an article about Darleen Druyun. Druyun was an acquisitions official for the Air Force. She called herself the Godmother of the C-7, a Boeing aircraft that was perfectly expensive and unnecessary, and thus just the thing to order 100 billion dollars worth of. Except that 100 billion dollars is nothing if you can maximize it by, say, renting the aircraft to the Pentagon. As St. Clair pointed out, Druyun, who served under Clinton as well as Bush, did her best for Boeing. In my father's house are many rooms, Jesus said; a similar principle holds for Boeing with regards to Defense Department employees. As St. Clair reported, Druyun cashed in her chips, resigned from the Pentagon,and floated into a perth at Boeing:
Now she's [Druyun's] stalking bigger game: missile defense, a multi-billion dollar bonanza for defense contractors, with Boeing at the head of the trough."Ms. Druyun is now officially an employee of the company whose interests she so ardently championed while she was supposedly representing the interests of the taxpayers," says Danielle Brian, executive director of the Project on Government Oversight. "This is one of the most egregious examples of the government revolving door in recent memory."Of course, plucking operatives from the halls of the Pentagon is nothing new for Boeing. Over the years, the company has festooned its corporate board and the halls of its lobby shop with a bevy of top brass.Recently, Boeing's board has boasted both former Defense Secretary William Perry and John M. Shalikashvili, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In 2001, Boeing also hired Rudy de Leon, Clinton's Deputy Secretary of Defense, to run its Washington office. Although De Leon is known as a proud hawk and a masterful dealmaker, his hiring may have been a rare misstep for Boeing, since congressional Republicans howled that the company should have picked one of their own from the Pentagon's rolls.
Druyun's patriotic work in behalf of Boeing is now getting a little scrutiny. The story is in U.S. News, it is in Forbes, and it is in the Washington Post. Alas, the WP, DC's paper, is so weak about it that their report misreports Druyun's name, Darleen, as "Darlene." The deal of spending an extra 5 billion dollars renting supplier planes from Boeing through a financial entity controlled by Boeing has aroused the curiosity, and even the wrath, of a Senate Committee chaired by Bush's nemesis, Senator McCain. The committee has released certain documents:
"The documents also illustrate the integral role that Darlene Druyun, now a senior Boeing executive, played in formulating the lease deal while she was the Air Force's principal deputy assistant secretary for acquisition and management. In one exchange Boeing officials questioned how a change in the lease terms could provide Druyun "political cover. She apparently understands that this may not be the best business case.
"Committee investigators want to know whether Druyun improperly told Boeing that its competitor, Europe's Airbus Industrie, had submitted a bid of $5 million to $17 million lower per plane. An April 2002 e-mail exchange between two Boeing officials, which said Druyun had given the information to Boeing, was turned over to the Defense Department inspector general's office, a congressional source said.Boeing denied that it received proprietary information, and a spokesman for the inspector general's office declined to comment on whether it had begun an inquiry. Aircraft prices are widely available on the Internet, and the e-mail was distributed after the Air Force announced that it would negotiate a deal with Boeing, so the information did not help formulate their initial bid, industry officials said."
A story in Forbes about this same incident refers to US News, which has gone to some length to report on what should be a major scandal. Still, even the US News dares not tell the public what St. Clair revealed in January -- that not only are we dealing with greedy pigs, but that the greedy pigs are selling low quality goods. In other words, the aircraft could potentially endanger the lives of the soldiers this administration loves to death -- when it is photo op time.
Here's how stinky the deal is:
"Such complicated financing was alien to Air Force officials. Boeing's documents make clear that in crafting the financing plan, the Air Force played student to its contractor. "The USAF clearly does not understand financing and has asked for our help to educate them (in layman's terms)," wrote Robert Gordon, the vice president of Boeing Capital Corp., in an E-mail message in December 2001. Indeed, Gordon noted, an Air Force general "made a special comment to thank Boeing for all its work over the past months to try and help this leasing proposal make sense" to the government.
Investigators with the Commerce Committee, however, are not as awestruck. They are examining the financial vehicle that's the linchpin of the deal. "It's an Enron-like entity," says McCain. For one thing, U.S. News finds, there is a built-in conflict of interest in the arrangement because, documents indicate, it gives Boeing oversight of its own deal. Boeing and the Air Force have sold the deal to Congress as a way to save money, but lease terms mean it's impossible to say today how much the government will pay tomorrow. Actual lease payments will be set as planes are delivered, and if interest rates rise more than expected, the government's costs will go up. Boeing's price will also be adjusted up for inflation; Boeing says that's standard procedure. One clause requires the Air Force to pay more if its new tankers spend too much time in the air; the Air Force says the service has negotiated far more flight hours than it will use. Still, Boeing and the Air Force can't shake the criticism that taxpayers are the losers. Last week, the Congressional Budget Office weighed in, saying that leasing the 100 planes will cost as much as $5.6 billion more than if they had been purchased. Boeing rejects the findings as flawed."
According to Druyan's official biography, she started out in D.C. as the procurements person for NASA. In other words, she's been raised in the finest school of boondoggling in the country. A natural, then, to suck up the gravy at Boeing. While it is nice that the mainstream press is coming to this story at the last minute, we do wonder why they couldn't have leaped in January. Or would that have sounded, hmm, unpatriotic?
Wednesday, August 27, 2003
In Shestov�s In Job�s Balance, there is an essay on Tolstoy�s latter writings. LI wants to say there is a brilliant essay on Tolstoy�s latter writings, but one of the effects of the essay is to cast in doubt such unthinking terms as �brilliant.� It is just this kind of flattery, that critical blank of praise, which is a way of turning the reader aside, keeping him from entering the empty room at the heart of the heart of it all. Modern criticism, after all, originated in the royal courts, or at best among the circle around powerful families in Italian city states � and it still retains a lot of the courtier�s arts. Why else do critics feel called upon to praise, to like, or to dislike? It is a way of reconstituting the circle around the patron.
So I won�t say use the word "brilliant." I will say this: Shestov is a philosopher � and hence, a writer of death threats. This essay is one of them.
He quotes a letter written to Tolstoy by Dostoevsky�s official biographer. It is a scalding passage, and I�m going to quote it in full:
There is a firmly established tradition in literature, which is to show to the reader only the good side of a great man's existence. The "lower" truths are of no use to us; what can we do with them? We are convinced that truths are not necessary to us for their own sakes, but only in so far as they can help us to action. This is the position taken up, for example, by Strakhov in writing Dostoevsky's biography, as he himself admits in a letter to Tolstoy which was only published in 1913.
"All the time that I was writing I had to struggle against a feeling of disgust which kept rising in me. I tried to stifle my evil thoughts. Help me to get rid of them! I cannot look upon Dostoevsky either as a good or a happy man. He was malicious, envious, and debauched. Throughout his whole life he was a prey to passions which would have rendered him miserable and ridiculous if he had not been so clever and so wicked. I remembered these feelings vividly while I was writing his biography. In Switzerland once he treated his servant so abominably in my presence that the man could stand it no longer and cried out, "But I am a man too!" I remember how these words struck me as reflecting the ideas of a free Swiss on the rights of man, and addressed to one who was for ever preaching to us about humanist feelings. Such scenes occurred frequently, he was unable to control his bad temper. Many times I answered his ravings with silence, when he burst out suddenly and often perversely, like an old woman; but once or twice I did break out and say very disagreeable things to him.
But he always got the better of ordinary people, and the worst of it was that he enjoyed it and never genuinely repented of his bad behaviour. He liked wickedness and gloried in it. Vistovatov (a professor of Dorpat University) told me how he had boasted to him of having seduced in her bath a little girl who had been brought to him by her governess. Among the characters of his books, the ones most like him are the hero of The Notes from Underground, Svidrigailov, and Stavrogin. Katov refused to publish one of the scenes with Stravrogin (the rape, etc.), but Dostoevsky read it aloud here to a large company of people. With all this, he was inclined to sickly sentimentality, and exalted humanitarian dreams, and it is these dreams, his literary gifts, and his tenderness of heart which endear him to us. In fact, all his novels are an attempt to exonerate their author; they show that the most hideous villainy can exist in a man side by side with the noblest feelings. This is a little commentary to my biography; I could describe that side of Dostoevsky's character; I remember many other incidents even more remarkable than those which I have quoted; my story would have been more genuine; but let the truth perish; let us go on exhibiting the beautiful side of life, just as we always do on every occasion."
I do not know if in the whole of literature there are many documents more valuable than this. I am not even sure whether Strakhov himself really understood the meaning and significance of what he admitted to Tolstoy. Many men in recent times have declared that a lie is better than the truth. Oscar Wilde and Nietzsche have said it, and even Pushkin declares that "The lie which elevates us is dearer to us than a legion of base truths ". But they were all addressing the reader, teaching him. Strakhov is quite simply and sincerely making a confession, and this gives his words a special force and significance. It is probable that this letter produced a great impression on Tolstoy, who was just then finding the burden of the conventional lie very hard to bear, and burned with the desire to purify himself by a full confession. For he himself was one of the priests of the supreme lie, and how beautiful and beguiling that lie was!�
The supreme lie is a certain form of literature, which reflects a certain form of life. This life is, for lack of a better term, ultimately hedonistic. Life is about happiness � about the world we share with others -- not about death. Death, Shestov thinks, is the collapse of the world we share with others into the terrible singularity of the world we can�t share with others � the world of the self that smothers us. Shestov choses to make his point about Tolstoy�s uneasy consciousness of this second world by concentrating on one of his fragment � a little known story entitled, after Gogol, Diary of a Madman.
�Among Tolstoy's posthumous works there is a short, unfinished story called The Diary of a Madman. The subject is very simple. A rich landowner, having learned that an estate was for sale in the province of Penza, makes up his mind to go down, have a look at it and buy it. He is very pleased about it; according to his calculations, he will be able to buy it at a very low figure, almost for nothing. Then, suddenly, one night at an hotel on the way, without any apparent reason, he is seized by a horrible, insufferable anguish. Nothing in his surroundings has changed, nothing new has happened, but until now everything had always inspired him with confidence, everything had seemed to him to be normal, necessary, well - regulated, soothing; he had felt the solid earth beneath his feet and reality on all sides of him. No doubt, no questions! Nothing but answers! Then suddenly, in an instant, in the twinkling of an eye, everything is transformed as though by a magic wand. Peace, answers, the solid earth, consciousness of right, and the easy feeling of lightness, simplicity and certainty which springs from this � all suddenly disappear. Around him are nothing but looming questions with their inevitable train of importunate anxiety, of doubt, and senseless, gnawing, invincible terrors. The ordinary means by which these painful thoughts are usually routed are completely ineffectual.
"I tried to think of things which interested me; of the acquisition of the estate, of my wife. Not only did I find nothing pleasant in these thoughts, but they were all as nothing to me. The horror of my wasted life overshadowed everything. I tried to go to sleep. I lay down, but no sooner was I on my bed than terror roused me again. And anxiety! An anxiety like one feels before one is going to be sick, but it was moral. Fear, anguish - we think of death as terrible, but when we look back upon life, it is the agony of life which overwhelms us! Death and life seemed in some way to be confounded with one another. Something tore my existence to rags, and yet could not succeed in tearing it completely. I went once more to look at my fellow-sleepers; I tried again to get to sleep; but terror was ever before me, red, white, and square. Something was tearing, but it still held."
Thus Tolstoy pitilessly strips himself before our eyes. There are few writers who show us truths like these. And if one wants, if one is able to see this truth - for even naked truth is not easy to see - then a whole series of problems arise which are out of all relation with our ordinary thoughts. How are we to apprehend these groundless terrors which so suddenly appeared, red, white, and square?�
Next post, if we can do it, will explore just that question.
So I won�t say use the word "brilliant." I will say this: Shestov is a philosopher � and hence, a writer of death threats. This essay is one of them.
He quotes a letter written to Tolstoy by Dostoevsky�s official biographer. It is a scalding passage, and I�m going to quote it in full:
There is a firmly established tradition in literature, which is to show to the reader only the good side of a great man's existence. The "lower" truths are of no use to us; what can we do with them? We are convinced that truths are not necessary to us for their own sakes, but only in so far as they can help us to action. This is the position taken up, for example, by Strakhov in writing Dostoevsky's biography, as he himself admits in a letter to Tolstoy which was only published in 1913.
"All the time that I was writing I had to struggle against a feeling of disgust which kept rising in me. I tried to stifle my evil thoughts. Help me to get rid of them! I cannot look upon Dostoevsky either as a good or a happy man. He was malicious, envious, and debauched. Throughout his whole life he was a prey to passions which would have rendered him miserable and ridiculous if he had not been so clever and so wicked. I remembered these feelings vividly while I was writing his biography. In Switzerland once he treated his servant so abominably in my presence that the man could stand it no longer and cried out, "But I am a man too!" I remember how these words struck me as reflecting the ideas of a free Swiss on the rights of man, and addressed to one who was for ever preaching to us about humanist feelings. Such scenes occurred frequently, he was unable to control his bad temper. Many times I answered his ravings with silence, when he burst out suddenly and often perversely, like an old woman; but once or twice I did break out and say very disagreeable things to him.
But he always got the better of ordinary people, and the worst of it was that he enjoyed it and never genuinely repented of his bad behaviour. He liked wickedness and gloried in it. Vistovatov (a professor of Dorpat University) told me how he had boasted to him of having seduced in her bath a little girl who had been brought to him by her governess. Among the characters of his books, the ones most like him are the hero of The Notes from Underground, Svidrigailov, and Stavrogin. Katov refused to publish one of the scenes with Stravrogin (the rape, etc.), but Dostoevsky read it aloud here to a large company of people. With all this, he was inclined to sickly sentimentality, and exalted humanitarian dreams, and it is these dreams, his literary gifts, and his tenderness of heart which endear him to us. In fact, all his novels are an attempt to exonerate their author; they show that the most hideous villainy can exist in a man side by side with the noblest feelings. This is a little commentary to my biography; I could describe that side of Dostoevsky's character; I remember many other incidents even more remarkable than those which I have quoted; my story would have been more genuine; but let the truth perish; let us go on exhibiting the beautiful side of life, just as we always do on every occasion."
I do not know if in the whole of literature there are many documents more valuable than this. I am not even sure whether Strakhov himself really understood the meaning and significance of what he admitted to Tolstoy. Many men in recent times have declared that a lie is better than the truth. Oscar Wilde and Nietzsche have said it, and even Pushkin declares that "The lie which elevates us is dearer to us than a legion of base truths ". But they were all addressing the reader, teaching him. Strakhov is quite simply and sincerely making a confession, and this gives his words a special force and significance. It is probable that this letter produced a great impression on Tolstoy, who was just then finding the burden of the conventional lie very hard to bear, and burned with the desire to purify himself by a full confession. For he himself was one of the priests of the supreme lie, and how beautiful and beguiling that lie was!�
The supreme lie is a certain form of literature, which reflects a certain form of life. This life is, for lack of a better term, ultimately hedonistic. Life is about happiness � about the world we share with others -- not about death. Death, Shestov thinks, is the collapse of the world we share with others into the terrible singularity of the world we can�t share with others � the world of the self that smothers us. Shestov choses to make his point about Tolstoy�s uneasy consciousness of this second world by concentrating on one of his fragment � a little known story entitled, after Gogol, Diary of a Madman.
�Among Tolstoy's posthumous works there is a short, unfinished story called The Diary of a Madman. The subject is very simple. A rich landowner, having learned that an estate was for sale in the province of Penza, makes up his mind to go down, have a look at it and buy it. He is very pleased about it; according to his calculations, he will be able to buy it at a very low figure, almost for nothing. Then, suddenly, one night at an hotel on the way, without any apparent reason, he is seized by a horrible, insufferable anguish. Nothing in his surroundings has changed, nothing new has happened, but until now everything had always inspired him with confidence, everything had seemed to him to be normal, necessary, well - regulated, soothing; he had felt the solid earth beneath his feet and reality on all sides of him. No doubt, no questions! Nothing but answers! Then suddenly, in an instant, in the twinkling of an eye, everything is transformed as though by a magic wand. Peace, answers, the solid earth, consciousness of right, and the easy feeling of lightness, simplicity and certainty which springs from this � all suddenly disappear. Around him are nothing but looming questions with their inevitable train of importunate anxiety, of doubt, and senseless, gnawing, invincible terrors. The ordinary means by which these painful thoughts are usually routed are completely ineffectual.
"I tried to think of things which interested me; of the acquisition of the estate, of my wife. Not only did I find nothing pleasant in these thoughts, but they were all as nothing to me. The horror of my wasted life overshadowed everything. I tried to go to sleep. I lay down, but no sooner was I on my bed than terror roused me again. And anxiety! An anxiety like one feels before one is going to be sick, but it was moral. Fear, anguish - we think of death as terrible, but when we look back upon life, it is the agony of life which overwhelms us! Death and life seemed in some way to be confounded with one another. Something tore my existence to rags, and yet could not succeed in tearing it completely. I went once more to look at my fellow-sleepers; I tried again to get to sleep; but terror was ever before me, red, white, and square. Something was tearing, but it still held."
Thus Tolstoy pitilessly strips himself before our eyes. There are few writers who show us truths like these. And if one wants, if one is able to see this truth - for even naked truth is not easy to see - then a whole series of problems arise which are out of all relation with our ordinary thoughts. How are we to apprehend these groundless terrors which so suddenly appeared, red, white, and square?�
Next post, if we can do it, will explore just that question.
Monday, August 25, 2003
Bollettino
WP's article, today, on the death of writing systems is a bit incoherent.
The article's theme is hearteningly democratic. A writing system -- for instance, Sumerian cuneiform -- dies out because there are too many restrictions on its use. That, at least, is the finding of a certain group of scholars:
"The collaboration among Houston, University of Cambridge Egyptologist John Baines and Assyriologist Jerrold S. Cooper of Johns Hopkins University began at a meeting that Houston hosted earlier this year to discuss the origins of writing. What resulted was "Last Writing," an essay on script death published recently in the British journal Comparative Studies in Society and History. Its basic conclusion: Writing systems die when those who use them restrict access to them."
. But its instances seem to cast that theory into doubt. Since "Both Egyptian and cuneiform survived for 4,000 years, a millennium longer than the Latin alphabet that Westerners use today, and both died in the early centuries of the Christian era after long declines," one has to wonder whether the extinction thesis of restricted use -- with its implication of rarity of users -- is a prime cause, or the result of some other factor. If, in fact, the long decline is defined, in fact, by rarity of users -- so that, by definition, access to the writing system is restricted. For if the Egyptian system lasted 4,000 years with the same level of restriction over time -- that is, with about the same number of rare users -- then it's death is not due to the restriction of access, but is caused by some concerted attack, conceptual, linguistic, or otherwise, on those users. If it had more users in the course of its functioning, and less users over time during its decline, this would essentially make the WP assertion nonsensical. It is like explaining that fire burns because it is hot.
In evolutionary terms, one has to wonder about the counter-case: what benefit accrues to the system by restricting access? It might be that the initial flood of Greek culture into Egypt, after Alexander's invasion, would have displaced even a more widespread writing system -- and that the very restrictedness and prestige of the welders of the older system preserved it.
So, given these weirdnesses in the article, we looked around to see if we could find other reports on Houston, Baines and Cooper's study. Here's the Brigham Yount U. news release (Houston is a BYU scholar):
"Changes in writing systems mirror larger changes that take place, not because of technological 'advances,' but because of feelings about the associations of past kinds of communication,� said Stephen Houston, Jesse Knight university professor of anthropology at Brigham Young University. �This is a new take on communicative 'technologies' -- that they are completely saturated with cultural values and conditioned by history.�
"Houston, a Maya expert, was joined by Oxford Egyptologist John Baines and Johns Hopkins� Jerrold Cooper, who studies cuneiform. Their study is reported in the new issue of Comparative Studies in Society and History, published by Cambridge University Press.
This a brilliant paper by three experts in two ancient scripts of the Old World and one of the New,� said Michael Coe, professor emeritus of anthropology at Yale and author of the bestselling Breaking the Maya Code. �Until now, no one has analyzed the deaths of these scripts from a comparative perspective. As for the Maya writing system itself, only Stephen Houston could have covered such a complex subject in such a convincing way. This is probably the world's most difficult script, and Professor Houston has been in the forefront of its ongoing decipherment.�
Here, there's no mention of restriction of access. In other words, the progressive thesis, which is what the research tends to dispute, is sustained, under a different form, by the WP article, in contradiction to the very study upon which it is reporting. A Derridean would expect no less. Because the writers of the WP article can't give up the thesis that writing systems "progress," with those that are technologically superior succeeding those that are inferior, the WP article distorts the whole point of the Houston, Baines and Cooper study.
Hmm. One could make extensive analogies to other WP distortions, of late, about Middle Eastern cultures. But one won't.
WP's article, today, on the death of writing systems is a bit incoherent.
The article's theme is hearteningly democratic. A writing system -- for instance, Sumerian cuneiform -- dies out because there are too many restrictions on its use. That, at least, is the finding of a certain group of scholars:
"The collaboration among Houston, University of Cambridge Egyptologist John Baines and Assyriologist Jerrold S. Cooper of Johns Hopkins University began at a meeting that Houston hosted earlier this year to discuss the origins of writing. What resulted was "Last Writing," an essay on script death published recently in the British journal Comparative Studies in Society and History. Its basic conclusion: Writing systems die when those who use them restrict access to them."
. But its instances seem to cast that theory into doubt. Since "Both Egyptian and cuneiform survived for 4,000 years, a millennium longer than the Latin alphabet that Westerners use today, and both died in the early centuries of the Christian era after long declines," one has to wonder whether the extinction thesis of restricted use -- with its implication of rarity of users -- is a prime cause, or the result of some other factor. If, in fact, the long decline is defined, in fact, by rarity of users -- so that, by definition, access to the writing system is restricted. For if the Egyptian system lasted 4,000 years with the same level of restriction over time -- that is, with about the same number of rare users -- then it's death is not due to the restriction of access, but is caused by some concerted attack, conceptual, linguistic, or otherwise, on those users. If it had more users in the course of its functioning, and less users over time during its decline, this would essentially make the WP assertion nonsensical. It is like explaining that fire burns because it is hot.
In evolutionary terms, one has to wonder about the counter-case: what benefit accrues to the system by restricting access? It might be that the initial flood of Greek culture into Egypt, after Alexander's invasion, would have displaced even a more widespread writing system -- and that the very restrictedness and prestige of the welders of the older system preserved it.
So, given these weirdnesses in the article, we looked around to see if we could find other reports on Houston, Baines and Cooper's study. Here's the Brigham Yount U. news release (Houston is a BYU scholar):
"Changes in writing systems mirror larger changes that take place, not because of technological 'advances,' but because of feelings about the associations of past kinds of communication,� said Stephen Houston, Jesse Knight university professor of anthropology at Brigham Young University. �This is a new take on communicative 'technologies' -- that they are completely saturated with cultural values and conditioned by history.�
"Houston, a Maya expert, was joined by Oxford Egyptologist John Baines and Johns Hopkins� Jerrold Cooper, who studies cuneiform. Their study is reported in the new issue of Comparative Studies in Society and History, published by Cambridge University Press.
This a brilliant paper by three experts in two ancient scripts of the Old World and one of the New,� said Michael Coe, professor emeritus of anthropology at Yale and author of the bestselling Breaking the Maya Code. �Until now, no one has analyzed the deaths of these scripts from a comparative perspective. As for the Maya writing system itself, only Stephen Houston could have covered such a complex subject in such a convincing way. This is probably the world's most difficult script, and Professor Houston has been in the forefront of its ongoing decipherment.�
Here, there's no mention of restriction of access. In other words, the progressive thesis, which is what the research tends to dispute, is sustained, under a different form, by the WP article, in contradiction to the very study upon which it is reporting. A Derridean would expect no less. Because the writers of the WP article can't give up the thesis that writing systems "progress," with those that are technologically superior succeeding those that are inferior, the WP article distorts the whole point of the Houston, Baines and Cooper study.
Hmm. One could make extensive analogies to other WP distortions, of late, about Middle Eastern cultures. But one won't.
Sunday, August 24, 2003
Bollettino
The NYT has a nice story about the peaceful coexistence between Americans and Iraqis in the city of Diwaniya
"As the area around Baghdad endured a week of repeated violence, a happier scene unfolded in this city, a two-hour drive to the south.
American soldiers, without helmets or flak jackets, attended graduation ceremonies of the Diwaniya University Medical School. At ease with the Iraqi students and their parents, the American marines laughed, joked and posed in photographs. One by one, the students walked up to thank them, for Marine doctors had taught classes in surgery and gynecology and helped draw up the final exams.
"We like the Americans very much here," said Zainab Khaledy, 22, who received her medical degree last Sunday. "We feel better than under the old regime. We have problems, like security, but everything is getting better."
In goes on in this vein for quite a while, making Diwaniya seem like a candidate for Forbes One Hundred Best Cities to Work In. No attacks on friendly American GIs, no anti-American grafitti on the walls, the lion lying down with the lamb, etc.
Yet according to Spanish new agencies, the a military base located in this 'relatively peaceful' city in which Spanish soldiers are being trained was attacked just two days ago. 19 mortar shells were lobbed into the camp. Perhaps the NYT reporter doesn't pay attention to the papers owned by the NYT Company, because the story is up on the International Herald Tribune website. Alas, it is in pdf. Still, it does make you wonder who is in wonderland, here. At the very least, I think that the editors of Forbes would hesitate to recommend a city as Great to Work In that was subject to occasional mortar bombardments.
The NYT has a nice story about the peaceful coexistence between Americans and Iraqis in the city of Diwaniya
"As the area around Baghdad endured a week of repeated violence, a happier scene unfolded in this city, a two-hour drive to the south.
American soldiers, without helmets or flak jackets, attended graduation ceremonies of the Diwaniya University Medical School. At ease with the Iraqi students and their parents, the American marines laughed, joked and posed in photographs. One by one, the students walked up to thank them, for Marine doctors had taught classes in surgery and gynecology and helped draw up the final exams.
"We like the Americans very much here," said Zainab Khaledy, 22, who received her medical degree last Sunday. "We feel better than under the old regime. We have problems, like security, but everything is getting better."
In goes on in this vein for quite a while, making Diwaniya seem like a candidate for Forbes One Hundred Best Cities to Work In. No attacks on friendly American GIs, no anti-American grafitti on the walls, the lion lying down with the lamb, etc.
Yet according to Spanish new agencies, the a military base located in this 'relatively peaceful' city in which Spanish soldiers are being trained was attacked just two days ago. 19 mortar shells were lobbed into the camp. Perhaps the NYT reporter doesn't pay attention to the papers owned by the NYT Company, because the story is up on the International Herald Tribune website. Alas, it is in pdf. Still, it does make you wonder who is in wonderland, here. At the very least, I think that the editors of Forbes would hesitate to recommend a city as Great to Work In that was subject to occasional mortar bombardments.
Saturday, August 23, 2003
Bollettino
John Gray wrote an essay on Conrad in New Statesman recently. Gray, who is a conservative who has realized that the logic of his position allies him with the forces of the left's anti-globalist wing, is a philosopher for whose writings on John Stuart Mill I have a lot of respect. However, as a literary critic, there are problems with old Gray. He is properly appreciative of Secret Agent -- with which view I wholeheartedly concur -- but his explanation for why Conrad's approach to power -- a form of therapeutic nihilism -- is suddenly looking more sophisticated than that of 20th century writers doesn't seem quite right. "Conrad is our contemporary because, almost alone among 19th-and 20th-century novelists, he writes of the realities in which we live." Almost alone? I don't think so. In fact, I don't think this could be so -- since the way we live now is built on the way we lived then, just like a coral reef is built on succeeding generations of exoskelotal martyrs. Gray has decided to make a decent point -- that Conrad's novel, Secret Agent, is suddenly, through no intention of Conrad's, relevant to today's politics -- through an exaggerated point.
This is a poor way to go about making a point. Here's a quote that shows how off base he is:
"It is no accident that nothing approaching a great political novel appeared in the last decades of the 20th century. The shallow orthodoxies of the time were not propitious. Not only the right, but also the centre left, had made a sacred fetish of science - not, as in The Secret Agent, the science of astronomy, but the decidedly shakier discipline of economics. Practically every part of the political spectrum accepted the ridiculous notion that the secret of unending prosperity had been found. Free markets, balanced budgets, the correct supply of the correctly measured money, a judicious modicum of state spending - with such modest devices, the riddle of history had at last been solved.
The savants who announced the end of history took for granted that the globalisation of markets would lead to peace. They did not notice that savage wars were being fought in many parts of the world. The economists who bored on about a weightless economy, which had dispensed with the need for natural resources, contrived to pass over the 20th century's last big military conflict, the Gulf war, which was fought to protect oil supplies. None of this mattered much so long as the boom continued, and the illusion of peace was preserved. But the price of living on these fictions was a hollowing-out not only of politics, but also of literature. It is a telling fact about the closing decades of the 20th century that the closest approximation to a notable political novel was probably The Bonfire of the Vanities."
Gray also reveals that the political ideologies of the twentieth century were evolutionist, and disbelievers in a predetermined historical path. He includes Marxism in this statement, which shows that he has (perhaps happily) forgotten most Marxist writings from the 20s to the 50s.
So, is there a great political novel that defies Gray's assertion? Problem: what great political novel has been written in the past ten years.
Answer: I immediately think of Nicholas Shakespeare's The Dancer Upstairs.
There is an essay on Bold Type about the initial seed for Shakespeare's novel. Conrad comes to mind because he possessed a (fairly commonplace) writerly contempt for bourgeois rationality, and a (fairly modern) admiration for the heroic act -- that is, as it emerges from the outlier bourgeois character -- and those moods are certainly involved in the novel that Shakespeare wrote, and the real political events -- namely, the rise and fall of the Sendero Luminoso -- that underpin it.
Gray, who is a philosopher and was trained, I suppose, in Britain's analystic tradition -- where the sentence I need my umbrella, it is raining, is subject to book length scrutiny -- must feel that, on the literary front, he can break out. But there's no reason to become sloppy.
Here is the beginning of Shakespeare's essay:
About ten years ago a young boy holding a satchel wandered into Lima's Crillon Hotel and after only a few hesitant steps across the opulent lobby exploded into a thousand bloody pieces. This was not an isolated incident. Already dogs had been strung from the city's lampposts; in a crowded Andean market a donkey blew up, causing appalling wounds to the Indian shoppers; and in Chimbote a terrified duck dragged a home-made bomb into the telephone exchange. But I date the moment of my obsession to that schoolboy suicide. Who had sent him?
The question chafed much more than a piece of grit in the shoe. I wanted to understand the character lurking behind these actions. Yet it was hard to discover anything. An utter secrecy pervaded the revolutionaries--for that is who they turned out to be. When they entered a village to cut the throats of government representatives, they wore balaclavas. But underneath their masks they could be anyone. One man, an American married to a beautiful, carefree model from Cuzco, told me how he had looked up from his dinner plate to see his wife's face on television. "She was listed among the most wanted guerrillas."
John Gray wrote an essay on Conrad in New Statesman recently. Gray, who is a conservative who has realized that the logic of his position allies him with the forces of the left's anti-globalist wing, is a philosopher for whose writings on John Stuart Mill I have a lot of respect. However, as a literary critic, there are problems with old Gray. He is properly appreciative of Secret Agent -- with which view I wholeheartedly concur -- but his explanation for why Conrad's approach to power -- a form of therapeutic nihilism -- is suddenly looking more sophisticated than that of 20th century writers doesn't seem quite right. "Conrad is our contemporary because, almost alone among 19th-and 20th-century novelists, he writes of the realities in which we live." Almost alone? I don't think so. In fact, I don't think this could be so -- since the way we live now is built on the way we lived then, just like a coral reef is built on succeeding generations of exoskelotal martyrs. Gray has decided to make a decent point -- that Conrad's novel, Secret Agent, is suddenly, through no intention of Conrad's, relevant to today's politics -- through an exaggerated point.
This is a poor way to go about making a point. Here's a quote that shows how off base he is:
"It is no accident that nothing approaching a great political novel appeared in the last decades of the 20th century. The shallow orthodoxies of the time were not propitious. Not only the right, but also the centre left, had made a sacred fetish of science - not, as in The Secret Agent, the science of astronomy, but the decidedly shakier discipline of economics. Practically every part of the political spectrum accepted the ridiculous notion that the secret of unending prosperity had been found. Free markets, balanced budgets, the correct supply of the correctly measured money, a judicious modicum of state spending - with such modest devices, the riddle of history had at last been solved.
The savants who announced the end of history took for granted that the globalisation of markets would lead to peace. They did not notice that savage wars were being fought in many parts of the world. The economists who bored on about a weightless economy, which had dispensed with the need for natural resources, contrived to pass over the 20th century's last big military conflict, the Gulf war, which was fought to protect oil supplies. None of this mattered much so long as the boom continued, and the illusion of peace was preserved. But the price of living on these fictions was a hollowing-out not only of politics, but also of literature. It is a telling fact about the closing decades of the 20th century that the closest approximation to a notable political novel was probably The Bonfire of the Vanities."
Gray also reveals that the political ideologies of the twentieth century were evolutionist, and disbelievers in a predetermined historical path. He includes Marxism in this statement, which shows that he has (perhaps happily) forgotten most Marxist writings from the 20s to the 50s.
So, is there a great political novel that defies Gray's assertion? Problem: what great political novel has been written in the past ten years.
Answer: I immediately think of Nicholas Shakespeare's The Dancer Upstairs.
There is an essay on Bold Type about the initial seed for Shakespeare's novel. Conrad comes to mind because he possessed a (fairly commonplace) writerly contempt for bourgeois rationality, and a (fairly modern) admiration for the heroic act -- that is, as it emerges from the outlier bourgeois character -- and those moods are certainly involved in the novel that Shakespeare wrote, and the real political events -- namely, the rise and fall of the Sendero Luminoso -- that underpin it.
Gray, who is a philosopher and was trained, I suppose, in Britain's analystic tradition -- where the sentence I need my umbrella, it is raining, is subject to book length scrutiny -- must feel that, on the literary front, he can break out. But there's no reason to become sloppy.
Here is the beginning of Shakespeare's essay:
About ten years ago a young boy holding a satchel wandered into Lima's Crillon Hotel and after only a few hesitant steps across the opulent lobby exploded into a thousand bloody pieces. This was not an isolated incident. Already dogs had been strung from the city's lampposts; in a crowded Andean market a donkey blew up, causing appalling wounds to the Indian shoppers; and in Chimbote a terrified duck dragged a home-made bomb into the telephone exchange. But I date the moment of my obsession to that schoolboy suicide. Who had sent him?
The question chafed much more than a piece of grit in the shoe. I wanted to understand the character lurking behind these actions. Yet it was hard to discover anything. An utter secrecy pervaded the revolutionaries--for that is who they turned out to be. When they entered a village to cut the throats of government representatives, they wore balaclavas. But underneath their masks they could be anyone. One man, an American married to a beautiful, carefree model from Cuzco, told me how he had looked up from his dinner plate to see his wife's face on television. "She was listed among the most wanted guerrillas."
Thursday, August 21, 2003
Peter Avdeev, the peasant soldier in Tolstoy�s novella, Hadji Murad, is shot in a small clash with a bunch of Chechens. He is taken to an infirmary, a doctor probes his wound for the bullet and fails to extract it (although he does, insanely, plaster the wound), and Avdeev lies there with an astonished look on his face, so that he doesn�t recognize his comrades when they come to visit him. Then he does. Then the commander comes in, Avdeev asks for a candle, has trouble gripping it with his stiffening fingers, and dies. As the finishing touch on this little miniature of the casual cruelty of irregular war, Tolstoy writes that the death was announced like this:
"23rd Nov. -- Two companies of the Kurin regiment advanced from the fort on a wood-felling expedition. At mid-day a considerable number of mountaineers suddenly attacked the wood- fellers. The sharpshooters began to retreat, but the 2nd Company charged with the bayonet and overthrew the mountaineers. In this affair two privates were slightly wounded and one killed. The mountaineers lost about a hundred men killed and wounded."
Of course, Avdeev doesn�t even rank the mention of his name, the attack of the mountaineers was, in truth, the firing of one bullet at the wood fellers, the charge never happened, and the mountaineers comprised a force of maybe twenty, of which none were hit � or none that Tolstoy records.
The military hasn�t changed, has it?
We are returning from Portland. We saved our sanity in Portland by ignoring the news, and the Internet, and concentrating on how to describe the characters in the novel we are writing. The news boomed idiotically in the background, with various of the important bigwigs who got us into Iraq warning that we have to stay in there, as though it was self-evidently in our interest to be involved in the same kind of warfare that Israel has been involved in for the last twenty years, or that ripped Lebanon apart. Etc. The amazing blindness to anything remotely resembling American interest is, perhaps, the thing that distinguishes Bush�s Potshot War from wars in the past. It isn�t that America is becoming an imperial power � it is that Bush�s men assumed that becoming an imperial power meant writing an article in Foreign Affairs saying that we are one, god dammit.
"23rd Nov. -- Two companies of the Kurin regiment advanced from the fort on a wood-felling expedition. At mid-day a considerable number of mountaineers suddenly attacked the wood- fellers. The sharpshooters began to retreat, but the 2nd Company charged with the bayonet and overthrew the mountaineers. In this affair two privates were slightly wounded and one killed. The mountaineers lost about a hundred men killed and wounded."
Of course, Avdeev doesn�t even rank the mention of his name, the attack of the mountaineers was, in truth, the firing of one bullet at the wood fellers, the charge never happened, and the mountaineers comprised a force of maybe twenty, of which none were hit � or none that Tolstoy records.
The military hasn�t changed, has it?
We are returning from Portland. We saved our sanity in Portland by ignoring the news, and the Internet, and concentrating on how to describe the characters in the novel we are writing. The news boomed idiotically in the background, with various of the important bigwigs who got us into Iraq warning that we have to stay in there, as though it was self-evidently in our interest to be involved in the same kind of warfare that Israel has been involved in for the last twenty years, or that ripped Lebanon apart. Etc. The amazing blindness to anything remotely resembling American interest is, perhaps, the thing that distinguishes Bush�s Potshot War from wars in the past. It isn�t that America is becoming an imperial power � it is that Bush�s men assumed that becoming an imperial power meant writing an article in Foreign Affairs saying that we are one, god dammit.
Wednesday, August 06, 2003
Bollettino
LI recently had a discussion with an engineer during the course of which the subjects of God and mathematics were raised. Not for the first time, LI was struck by the difference in what mathematics means for us, and what it means for engineers. Engineers take mathematics to be primarily the efflorescence of that domain of knowledge that deals with discrete units and their relationships. Numeration, in other words, is the primary element of the mathematical. But for LI, mathematics defined by a set of functions (the variable, Successor of, etc.), a set of definitions, and a set of axioms. Our engineering friend was claiming that everything wasn�t mathematically determined. Her point was that LI held to a view similar to Quine�s � a sort of neo-Pythagorianism, in which everything eventually dissolves into number.
Now, we do think there is something to be said for the idea that, theoretically, everything can be translated into mathematics. But we also see logical faults with that view, starting with the term �everything,� which seems semantically dependent on the �All� of set theory. In other words, our proposition is invalid to the extent that it assumes what it wants to claim. Goedel�s work shows that there are limits to the All within mathematics. In the set of All statements generated by mathematics, at least one of them is unproveable � that which asserts the closure of the system. However, there�s nothing in Goedel that addresses the question of the complete translatability of assertions about the world into mathematics. In other words, there�s nothing to guide us in contemplating the possibility of a non-mathematical All. Such an All would, we think, be something like Spinoza�s God. This God, by the way � and any other God � is limited by mathematics, too: even God can�t count the uncountable numbers. Omniscience, in other words, has been quietly proven, in Western culture, over the past two hundred years, to be a characteristic that is not possessed by any intelligence � that, in fact, contradicts intelligence. For almost fourteen hundred years, omniscience was the great constitutive principle of European thought � it is funny how quietly it crumbled. In a sense, Darwin, Newton, and Einstein are reconcilable with the patriarchal God of Jerusalem � but Cantor, Goedel, and Bohr aren�t. Our hypothetical, non-mathematical All can�t know All about itself, and remain an All. It is as if God were some great egg, a Humpty Dumpty, who can only exist when he has his great fall, The Divine moment is just that moment of contact, when the shell is forever broken.
LI recently had a discussion with an engineer during the course of which the subjects of God and mathematics were raised. Not for the first time, LI was struck by the difference in what mathematics means for us, and what it means for engineers. Engineers take mathematics to be primarily the efflorescence of that domain of knowledge that deals with discrete units and their relationships. Numeration, in other words, is the primary element of the mathematical. But for LI, mathematics defined by a set of functions (the variable, Successor of, etc.), a set of definitions, and a set of axioms. Our engineering friend was claiming that everything wasn�t mathematically determined. Her point was that LI held to a view similar to Quine�s � a sort of neo-Pythagorianism, in which everything eventually dissolves into number.
Now, we do think there is something to be said for the idea that, theoretically, everything can be translated into mathematics. But we also see logical faults with that view, starting with the term �everything,� which seems semantically dependent on the �All� of set theory. In other words, our proposition is invalid to the extent that it assumes what it wants to claim. Goedel�s work shows that there are limits to the All within mathematics. In the set of All statements generated by mathematics, at least one of them is unproveable � that which asserts the closure of the system. However, there�s nothing in Goedel that addresses the question of the complete translatability of assertions about the world into mathematics. In other words, there�s nothing to guide us in contemplating the possibility of a non-mathematical All. Such an All would, we think, be something like Spinoza�s God. This God, by the way � and any other God � is limited by mathematics, too: even God can�t count the uncountable numbers. Omniscience, in other words, has been quietly proven, in Western culture, over the past two hundred years, to be a characteristic that is not possessed by any intelligence � that, in fact, contradicts intelligence. For almost fourteen hundred years, omniscience was the great constitutive principle of European thought � it is funny how quietly it crumbled. In a sense, Darwin, Newton, and Einstein are reconcilable with the patriarchal God of Jerusalem � but Cantor, Goedel, and Bohr aren�t. Our hypothetical, non-mathematical All can�t know All about itself, and remain an All. It is as if God were some great egg, a Humpty Dumpty, who can only exist when he has his great fall, The Divine moment is just that moment of contact, when the shell is forever broken.
Saturday, July 26, 2003
Bollettino
Since I am working on a novel, I am reading novels. Novelist sum, ergo I steal. For some reason, I've decided to give myself a dose of Conrad, since my novel is about politics and murder. But I've also been treating myself to Raymond Queneau's Le Chiendent. This was translated as "The Barking Tree" a long time ago. Recently, NYRB re-issued it as witchgrass -- since that variety of plant is what Chiendent literally means. Barbara Wright's intro to the book is here.
Here, according to Wright, is how the book germinated:
He [Queneau] has described how, on his voyage to Greece: "I had taken Descartes'
Discourse on Method with me, so I decided to translate it into spoken French. With this idea in mind I began to write something which later became a novel called
Le Chiendent. You will find a good deal of popular language in it, but also a
few efforts in the philosophical sense, I seem to remember."
That seem to remember is good. When Sartre, in La Nausee, writes about a tree trunk, he is treading in R.Q.'s footsteps, except that Sartre cannot find his trees and things in general funny. Queneau is one of the great comic writers. Those people, and there are all too many of them, who think that French literature has no sense of humor have never read Le Chiendent. They probably wouldn't make sense of it anyway.
How does Descartes work, as a platform for the novel? The famous idea that existence can be deduced from thought -- since thought presumes thinking, thinking presumes a thinker, a thinker presumes a quelconque -- becomes a sort of science fiction in R.Q. Etienne Marcel is your regular on the subway train -- into work at seven, out of work at six. In R.Q.'s vision, he is merely one of a world of shadows, until one day he stands in front of a shop window.
"Already in this first book there is much that in retrospect can be seen as typical Queneau; the accident which is to transform Etienne's life is not something noble, magnificent, transcendental: it is merely the ridiculous sight of two little rubber ducks swimming in a shop window-in a hat. To prove that the hat is waterproof.
This, and particularly the fact that he discovers that the little ducks have been there for two years without his noticing them, is enough to start Etienne off on a metaphysical journey and a new life-in which outwardly, however, nothing is changed.
The effect of the little ducks is reinforced by something equally banal, but which this time has consequences not so much in the domain of mind as in that of matter. From his commuter's train, Etienne notices in the desolate suburbs north of Paris a hut which has CHIPS (i.e. , French fries) written up on it in large letters. When he decides to visit this forlorn place, for no reason, he there meets several people who are to have a vital importance in his life. The other objects that Queneau chooses to set Etienne off on his meditations on appearance and reality, and on the further train of reflections in which he becomes so passionately involved, are also no more world-shattering than an ordinary potato peeler and a hard-boiled egg cutter."
The "no reason" underlined by Wright is an allusion, probably clearer at the time than now, to Gide. And in fact Gide's best novel, Les Caves du Vatican, has just this kind of plot. A blank in life -- the gratuitous act, the non-reason -- is an invitation to reasons and highly motivated acts. Society abhors a vacuum. More than that -- give society a vacuum, and it will give you back a vacuum cleaner. The sovereignty of non-sense, which Bataille, Queneau's friend, found so glorious, comes down to earth in R.Q. with a crash.
Wright has another essay that profiles Queneau's entire life and work in Context.
Finally, for those who are unafraid to risk the sometimes recondite corners of the French dictionary, there's a remininscence of Queneau during the resistance in Magazine-litteraire.
It's by Jean Lescure, who published a magazine, the Messenger, during the occupation. It's in that Magazine that some of the first Exercises de style appeared. Or is it the Batons chiffres poems? Ourselves, we think the fey, pataphysical side of Queneau has been overdone by his readers. He was far more than an amateur of the kind of things you get sick of reading Carroll's Sylvia and Bruno. But here's an interesting graf:
"Ces mots et ce qu'ils pouvaient faire de la po�sie (tout autant que ce que la po�sie pouvait en faire) occupaient nos conversations - bien plus que les � id�es � que Bataille agitait tous les mardis soirs chez lui, dans le Coll�ge de sociologie qu'il avait plus ou moins r�veill� et qui r�unissait donc Queneau, Leiris, Blanchot, Fardoulis-Lagrange, Ubac, Fr�naud et moi. C'�tait le temps o� Georges lisait obstin�ment Nietzsche, et nous administrait hebdomadairement les �blouissantes r�flections de ses lectures (� quoi nous cessions de comprendre quoi que ce soit au bout d'une demi-heure, mais qu'il suffisait � Blanchot de reprendre, du fond de son fauteuil, pour qu'en trois minutes tout redevienne lumineux, riche et nous autorise � un d�part repu)."
"These words (of a poem quoted in the above graf-R.) and what they could do to poetry (or what poetry could do to them) occupied our conversations -- much more than the 'ideas" that Bataille agitated every Tuesday at his (RQ'S) office, in the College of Sociology that he had more or less re-animated and which united Queneau, Leiris, Blanchot, Fardoulis-Lagrange, Ubac, Frenaud and myself. At this time Georges was obstinately reading through Nietzsche, and he administered a weekly dose of the spendiferous reflections resulting from his reading (which we ceased to understand period at the end of a half hour, but which were sufficient for Blanchot to reconstitute them, from the bottom of his drawer, in three minutes in order that they become luminous, rich, and left us feeling justly satiated."
Since I am working on a novel, I am reading novels. Novelist sum, ergo I steal. For some reason, I've decided to give myself a dose of Conrad, since my novel is about politics and murder. But I've also been treating myself to Raymond Queneau's Le Chiendent. This was translated as "The Barking Tree" a long time ago. Recently, NYRB re-issued it as witchgrass -- since that variety of plant is what Chiendent literally means. Barbara Wright's intro to the book is here.
Here, according to Wright, is how the book germinated:
He [Queneau] has described how, on his voyage to Greece: "I had taken Descartes'
Discourse on Method with me, so I decided to translate it into spoken French. With this idea in mind I began to write something which later became a novel called
Le Chiendent. You will find a good deal of popular language in it, but also a
few efforts in the philosophical sense, I seem to remember."
That seem to remember is good. When Sartre, in La Nausee, writes about a tree trunk, he is treading in R.Q.'s footsteps, except that Sartre cannot find his trees and things in general funny. Queneau is one of the great comic writers. Those people, and there are all too many of them, who think that French literature has no sense of humor have never read Le Chiendent. They probably wouldn't make sense of it anyway.
How does Descartes work, as a platform for the novel? The famous idea that existence can be deduced from thought -- since thought presumes thinking, thinking presumes a thinker, a thinker presumes a quelconque -- becomes a sort of science fiction in R.Q. Etienne Marcel is your regular on the subway train -- into work at seven, out of work at six. In R.Q.'s vision, he is merely one of a world of shadows, until one day he stands in front of a shop window.
"Already in this first book there is much that in retrospect can be seen as typical Queneau; the accident which is to transform Etienne's life is not something noble, magnificent, transcendental: it is merely the ridiculous sight of two little rubber ducks swimming in a shop window-in a hat. To prove that the hat is waterproof.
This, and particularly the fact that he discovers that the little ducks have been there for two years without his noticing them, is enough to start Etienne off on a metaphysical journey and a new life-in which outwardly, however, nothing is changed.
The effect of the little ducks is reinforced by something equally banal, but which this time has consequences not so much in the domain of mind as in that of matter. From his commuter's train, Etienne notices in the desolate suburbs north of Paris a hut which has CHIPS (i.e. , French fries) written up on it in large letters. When he decides to visit this forlorn place, for no reason, he there meets several people who are to have a vital importance in his life. The other objects that Queneau chooses to set Etienne off on his meditations on appearance and reality, and on the further train of reflections in which he becomes so passionately involved, are also no more world-shattering than an ordinary potato peeler and a hard-boiled egg cutter."
The "no reason" underlined by Wright is an allusion, probably clearer at the time than now, to Gide. And in fact Gide's best novel, Les Caves du Vatican, has just this kind of plot. A blank in life -- the gratuitous act, the non-reason -- is an invitation to reasons and highly motivated acts. Society abhors a vacuum. More than that -- give society a vacuum, and it will give you back a vacuum cleaner. The sovereignty of non-sense, which Bataille, Queneau's friend, found so glorious, comes down to earth in R.Q. with a crash.
Wright has another essay that profiles Queneau's entire life and work in Context.
Finally, for those who are unafraid to risk the sometimes recondite corners of the French dictionary, there's a remininscence of Queneau during the resistance in Magazine-litteraire.
It's by Jean Lescure, who published a magazine, the Messenger, during the occupation. It's in that Magazine that some of the first Exercises de style appeared. Or is it the Batons chiffres poems? Ourselves, we think the fey, pataphysical side of Queneau has been overdone by his readers. He was far more than an amateur of the kind of things you get sick of reading Carroll's Sylvia and Bruno. But here's an interesting graf:
"Ces mots et ce qu'ils pouvaient faire de la po�sie (tout autant que ce que la po�sie pouvait en faire) occupaient nos conversations - bien plus que les � id�es � que Bataille agitait tous les mardis soirs chez lui, dans le Coll�ge de sociologie qu'il avait plus ou moins r�veill� et qui r�unissait donc Queneau, Leiris, Blanchot, Fardoulis-Lagrange, Ubac, Fr�naud et moi. C'�tait le temps o� Georges lisait obstin�ment Nietzsche, et nous administrait hebdomadairement les �blouissantes r�flections de ses lectures (� quoi nous cessions de comprendre quoi que ce soit au bout d'une demi-heure, mais qu'il suffisait � Blanchot de reprendre, du fond de son fauteuil, pour qu'en trois minutes tout redevienne lumineux, riche et nous autorise � un d�part repu)."
"These words (of a poem quoted in the above graf-R.) and what they could do to poetry (or what poetry could do to them) occupied our conversations -- much more than the 'ideas" that Bataille agitated every Tuesday at his (RQ'S) office, in the College of Sociology that he had more or less re-animated and which united Queneau, Leiris, Blanchot, Fardoulis-Lagrange, Ubac, Frenaud and myself. At this time Georges was obstinately reading through Nietzsche, and he administered a weekly dose of the spendiferous reflections resulting from his reading (which we ceased to understand period at the end of a half hour, but which were sufficient for Blanchot to reconstitute them, from the bottom of his drawer, in three minutes in order that they become luminous, rich, and left us feeling justly satiated."
Thursday, July 24, 2003
Bollettino
Dis.sense is a German site. This month, they are emphasizing doing nothing -- Nicht-tun. And as part of that theme, someone translated Kasimir Malevich's legendary essay on laziness into German. Well, yours truly has translated the first part of it into English. Enjoy.
Laziness as the actual Truth of Mankind
Work as an instrument to reach truth
Philosophy of the socialistic Idea
It has always made a strange impression on me to hear or read some family member or bureaucrat making a contemptuous remark about laziness. �Laziness is the mother of all vices� � which is how the collective wisdom of humanity and all peoples has branded this particular style of human activity. But for myself, I�ve always been of the opinion that this condemnation of laziness is unfair. Why is work so great? Why is it elevated to the throne of praise and fame, while laziness is forced to sit in the pillory and all the lazy are shamed and have to wear the burden of viciousness; meanwhile the laborious are covered with fame, given presents and feasted? To me, it has always seemed like this is the exact opposite of what should happen. Work has to be cursed, as it has come down to us from the legend of Paradise, and laziness should be that towards which all humanity has to strive. Somehow, this has developed quite otherwise in real life. It�s this �otherwise� I want to concentrate on. And since every clarification must employ marks and occasions and every decision and logical conclusion rests on these marks, in this essay I will go over them and illuminate their connection to one another in order to reach the goal that is truly hidden in the word �laziness.�
With many words, the truth is hidden, and can�t be dug up. It seems to me that man rarely handles the truth and that when he does, he�s like a cook, who cooks many different things in many different pots. Now, it is certainly true that every pot has its own proper lid, yet out of pure distraction the cook bangs around pots and covers them with random lids until he finally forgets what is contained in each pot. I think that something like this has happened with laziness � many words and truths are covered with lids until nobody knows what is found under the lids. On one lid it stands written, �laziness is the mother of vice.� Now, they take that lid and they cover up some random pot and think that they�ve captured scandal and vice in it. Of course, it is self-evident that the word �Faulheit (laziness, from Faul, foul � R.),� if it implies some human circumstance, is very dangerous, but what is there that is dangerous for humans throughout the world? One has to think that laziness implies the death of �being� �i.e. of men, whose exclusive salvation resides in production and labor. If man is no longer active, whole countries will die, death will threaten whole peoples. It�s clear that this circumstance, as the circumstance of corruption, will have to be prosecuted. So, in order to escape death, man has brilliantly come up with a lifeform in which all must work and no one is allowed to be a bum. That�s the reason that the socialistic system that leads to communism, struggling against all previous systems, brings all of humanity into the single way of labor, and leaves behind all bums. This is the meaning of the most pitiless of all laws in the most humane of all systems: he who doesn�t work, doesn�t eat. This is also why the communist system prosecutes capitalism, because the capitalist encourages the bum and because the ruble definitely leads to laziness. So in the socialist system God�s curse, i.e. labor, receives the highest blessing. Under the blessing of communism, everyone gets to work, otherwise they starve. But even this point is hidden in the system of laboriousness. The point is that man in all other systems would never feel the nearness of this all-encompassing death, and would never see, that in production lies not only the general, but also the particular good. In the collective labor system, however, death stands before each, and each has only one task; through labor, and the products of labor, to save himself. Otherwise, as said, the threat of hunger. This socialistic system of labor aims, in its natural, unconscious processes at bringing all of mankind to work, in order to improve productivity and preserve security and strengthen humanity and through the increased level of productivity to assure human existence. Naturally this system, that bothers not just about the particular individual, but about all of humanity, is absolutely right. Exactly as the capitalist system guarantees the right and the freedom to work, bringing about the increase of money in the bank, in order to secure laziness in the vague future. That presumes that the ruble is one of those signs that that seduces us because it promises that which everyone dreams of: the happiness of laziness. In fact, that is the meaning of the ruble, the ruble is in itself nothing other than a little piece of laziness. He who collects the most little pieces will luxuriate longer in laziness. The ideologues who worry about all the people imagined this cause and effect in their consciousness and were therefore always unanimous that laziness is the mother of all vices. But in their unconsciousness, the Other exists: the wish to make all equal in labor, or otherwise said, the wish for all to be equally lazy. So what cannot be achieved in the capitalist system can be achieved in the communist system. Yet the capitalist and the communist are both bothered by the same thing: achieving the only truly human state, which is laziness. In the deep unconscious of the system is hidden exactly this truth. But for some reason, this truth has never really been grasped. There has never been a labor system that announces the solution to mankind�s problem thusly: �the truth of your striving is the way to laziness.� Instead, we find everywhere those dreary reminders of the virtue of labor, and the implication that labor is unavoidable, and it is impossible to lay it aside, and in fact this goal is what the socialist system has in mind to reach through labor, taking the burden of vice, hour by laborious hour, off the shoulders of all humanity. The more people who work, however, the less hours of work there will be. And so more time will remain left over for idleness.
Dis.sense is a German site. This month, they are emphasizing doing nothing -- Nicht-tun. And as part of that theme, someone translated Kasimir Malevich's legendary essay on laziness into German. Well, yours truly has translated the first part of it into English. Enjoy.
Laziness as the actual Truth of Mankind
Work as an instrument to reach truth
Philosophy of the socialistic Idea
It has always made a strange impression on me to hear or read some family member or bureaucrat making a contemptuous remark about laziness. �Laziness is the mother of all vices� � which is how the collective wisdom of humanity and all peoples has branded this particular style of human activity. But for myself, I�ve always been of the opinion that this condemnation of laziness is unfair. Why is work so great? Why is it elevated to the throne of praise and fame, while laziness is forced to sit in the pillory and all the lazy are shamed and have to wear the burden of viciousness; meanwhile the laborious are covered with fame, given presents and feasted? To me, it has always seemed like this is the exact opposite of what should happen. Work has to be cursed, as it has come down to us from the legend of Paradise, and laziness should be that towards which all humanity has to strive. Somehow, this has developed quite otherwise in real life. It�s this �otherwise� I want to concentrate on. And since every clarification must employ marks and occasions and every decision and logical conclusion rests on these marks, in this essay I will go over them and illuminate their connection to one another in order to reach the goal that is truly hidden in the word �laziness.�
With many words, the truth is hidden, and can�t be dug up. It seems to me that man rarely handles the truth and that when he does, he�s like a cook, who cooks many different things in many different pots. Now, it is certainly true that every pot has its own proper lid, yet out of pure distraction the cook bangs around pots and covers them with random lids until he finally forgets what is contained in each pot. I think that something like this has happened with laziness � many words and truths are covered with lids until nobody knows what is found under the lids. On one lid it stands written, �laziness is the mother of vice.� Now, they take that lid and they cover up some random pot and think that they�ve captured scandal and vice in it. Of course, it is self-evident that the word �Faulheit (laziness, from Faul, foul � R.),� if it implies some human circumstance, is very dangerous, but what is there that is dangerous for humans throughout the world? One has to think that laziness implies the death of �being� �i.e. of men, whose exclusive salvation resides in production and labor. If man is no longer active, whole countries will die, death will threaten whole peoples. It�s clear that this circumstance, as the circumstance of corruption, will have to be prosecuted. So, in order to escape death, man has brilliantly come up with a lifeform in which all must work and no one is allowed to be a bum. That�s the reason that the socialistic system that leads to communism, struggling against all previous systems, brings all of humanity into the single way of labor, and leaves behind all bums. This is the meaning of the most pitiless of all laws in the most humane of all systems: he who doesn�t work, doesn�t eat. This is also why the communist system prosecutes capitalism, because the capitalist encourages the bum and because the ruble definitely leads to laziness. So in the socialist system God�s curse, i.e. labor, receives the highest blessing. Under the blessing of communism, everyone gets to work, otherwise they starve. But even this point is hidden in the system of laboriousness. The point is that man in all other systems would never feel the nearness of this all-encompassing death, and would never see, that in production lies not only the general, but also the particular good. In the collective labor system, however, death stands before each, and each has only one task; through labor, and the products of labor, to save himself. Otherwise, as said, the threat of hunger. This socialistic system of labor aims, in its natural, unconscious processes at bringing all of mankind to work, in order to improve productivity and preserve security and strengthen humanity and through the increased level of productivity to assure human existence. Naturally this system, that bothers not just about the particular individual, but about all of humanity, is absolutely right. Exactly as the capitalist system guarantees the right and the freedom to work, bringing about the increase of money in the bank, in order to secure laziness in the vague future. That presumes that the ruble is one of those signs that that seduces us because it promises that which everyone dreams of: the happiness of laziness. In fact, that is the meaning of the ruble, the ruble is in itself nothing other than a little piece of laziness. He who collects the most little pieces will luxuriate longer in laziness. The ideologues who worry about all the people imagined this cause and effect in their consciousness and were therefore always unanimous that laziness is the mother of all vices. But in their unconsciousness, the Other exists: the wish to make all equal in labor, or otherwise said, the wish for all to be equally lazy. So what cannot be achieved in the capitalist system can be achieved in the communist system. Yet the capitalist and the communist are both bothered by the same thing: achieving the only truly human state, which is laziness. In the deep unconscious of the system is hidden exactly this truth. But for some reason, this truth has never really been grasped. There has never been a labor system that announces the solution to mankind�s problem thusly: �the truth of your striving is the way to laziness.� Instead, we find everywhere those dreary reminders of the virtue of labor, and the implication that labor is unavoidable, and it is impossible to lay it aside, and in fact this goal is what the socialist system has in mind to reach through labor, taking the burden of vice, hour by laborious hour, off the shoulders of all humanity. The more people who work, however, the less hours of work there will be. And so more time will remain left over for idleness.
Wednesday, July 23, 2003
Bollettino
The best account of Saddam's boys brief and one hopes brutish life in the ruins of the country they beset like Biblical locusts is by Patrick Cockburn, in the New Zealand Herald.
"Neither Uday nor Qusay, the sons of Saddam Hussein, were cut out to be resistance leaders. They were brought up in luxury. While other Iraqis were living in poverty in the 1990s Uday still employed two pastry cooks as part of his personal staff. Not surprisingly, if American claims about their deaths are correct, they were discovered in a large mansion in Mosul.
"In so far as Saddam Hussein ever trusted anybody he trusted his two sons, Uday, a sadistic playboy, and Qusay, more studious but equally violent. Both were entirely dependent on their father. They never contradicted him, restrained him or had any ideas of their own."
And here's an item typical Uday's beastliness:
"Uday, in particular, was even more loathed by Iraqis than Saddam himself. Uday was always physically the most striking of the two brothers. His enormous staring brown eyes dominated his face and he usually had five days' growth of beard. In a photograph taken in 1977, when he was 13, he wears a loud striped jacket and an enormous black bow tie. The impression is of somebody trying to assert his personality against almost overwhelming odds. Although he seldom turned up for lessons, Uday learned fluent English. Before the beginning of the Iran-Iraq war in 1980 he even had ambitions to study nuclear physics in the United States. But he also told school friends that his father took him to attend torture sessions "to prepare him for the tasks ahead". Uday's first serious political role was as head of the Iraqi Olympic Committee, which replaced the Ministry of Youth. Housed inside a building which, with machine-gun turrets guarding its walls, resembled a fortress. It even had its own jail. He swiftly showed that he had a uniquely brutal approach to Iraqi sportsmen who failed him. They were jailed, beaten on the feet and spectators could tell who had been punished because the player-prisoners had their heads shaved."
Alas, the American press is treating their deaths as though this was the next to last lap in the War. Saddam's death is to follow, according to the press, and then the attacks on Americans will stop. We think this is an interesting turn about from a mere two weeks ago, when the attacks were non-coordinated epiphenomena, much like the images a man gets in his head just before falling to sleep.
We doubt, however, that such headlines as the one in the LA Times (usually much better about reporting the news)
"Sons' Deaths a Turning Point in Campaign:
U.S. assault is likely to weaken motivation and perhaps coordination of Iraqi resistance as well as change the subject in Washington, or the NYT's
With Hussein's Heirs Gone, Hopes Rise for End to Attacks
By ERIC SCHMITT and THOM SHANKER
are going to look very good two week's from now.
That the news is being cast as being happy for the Republicans and unhappy for the Democrats is very bad news for the Dems, and it is surprising that they don't know that. We can all raise our Khalashnikov's in the air and shoot to celebrate the butchering of these men. Although LI does believe that there is something suspect in celebrating the agony visited against any human being, let's face it: Uday and Qusai never deserved celebration in life so much as they do in being done to death.
On the ground, however, in Iraq, we doubt this is going to make the massive amount of firepower in the hands of individuals pissed, to say the least, at Americans seem less like firing. Because the American media is addicted to dualisms, it has cast the resistance in Iraq as a struggle between Saddam and his old foe, Uncle Sam. But of course the resistance in Iraq has numerous motives and numerous backers, many of whom have explicitly disavowed the loser of Baghdad.
As if to underline this, two Americans were killed today, according to the BBC, and seven were injured. This makes the heaviest cluster of American deaths since the War itself.
...
It is an interesting question. How do you celebrate the death of evil men? In the Book of Kings, Jezebel operates much like Uday did, stealing Naboth's vineyard, killing the good, partying with the wicked and such. The word of the Lord comes to who the word of the Lord usually comes to -- the insane beggars on the street corners -- and they proclaim that Jezebel will be eaten by dogs. This is how her end came, according to 2 Kings 9
"9:30 And when Jehu was come to Jezreel, Jezebel heard [of it]; and she painted her face, and tired her head, and looked out at a window. 9:31 And as Jehu entered in at the gate, she said, [Had] Zimri peace, who slew his master? 9:32 And he lifted up his face to the window, and said, Who [is] on my side? who? And there looked out to him two [or] three eunuchs. 9:33 And he said, Throw her down. So they threw her down: and [some] of her blood was sprinkled on the wall, and on the horses: and he trode her under foot. 9:34 And when he was come in, he did eat and drink, and said, Go, see now this cursed [woman], and bury her: for she [is] a king's daughter. 9:35 And they went to bury her: but they found no more of her than the skull, and the feet, and the palms of [her] hands. 9:36 Wherefore they came again, and told him. And he said, This [is] the word of the LORD, which he spake by his servant Elijah the Tishbite, saying, In the portion of Jezreel shall dogs eat the flesh of Jezebel: 9:37 And the carcase of Jezebel shall be as dung upon the face of the field in the portion of Jezreel; [so] that they shall not say, This [is] Jezebel."
Now that is a pretty thorough desecration. We especially like the palms of the hand thing. The Lord was working in his metaphysical poet mode, obviously.
When Plutarch is comparing the deaths of Marcellus, a Roman Consul and Pelopidas, a tyrant, he writes:
"I cannot commend the death of either of these great men; the suddenness and strangeness of their ends gives me a feeling rather of pain and distress."
Marcellus was the commander of the forces who took Syracuse and killed Archimedes. He was finally brought down by Hannibal, who ambushed him:
Upon signs received from him, the men that were placed in ambush stirred not till Marcellus came near; and then all starting up in an instant, and encompassing him from all sides, attacked him with darts, struck about and wounded the backs of those that fled, and pressed upon those who resisted. These were the forty Fregellans. For though the Etruscans fled in the very beginning of the fight, the Fregellans formed themselves into a ring, bravely defending the consuls, till Crispinus, struck with two darts, turned his horse to fly away; and Marcellus's side was run through with a lance with a broad head.
As for Pelopidas, tyrant of Thebes, I believe, he was slain in battle with Alexander, challenging him on the field even as he was pierced with darts and arrows.
Perhaps, after Jezebel, the most iconic death was suffered by Heliogabalus.
Heliogabalus was an Uday kind of guy. Here's his idea of a great party, according to his biographer Lampidus:
"He had the custom, moreover, of asking to a dinner eight bald men, or else eight one-eyed men, or eight men who suffered from gout, or eight deaf men, or eight men of dark complexion, or eight tall men, or, again, eight fat men, his purpose being, in the case of these last, since they could not be accommodated on one couch, to call forth general laughter. He would present to his guests all the silver-plate that he had in the banqueting-room and all the supply of goblets, and he did it very often too. He was the first Roman emperor to serve at a public banquet fish-pickle [Garum was a preparation made from the entrails of fish, particularly the mackerel, which were salted down and allowed to ferment. The liquid thus formed was called garum. -- DM] mixed with water, for previously this had been only a soldier's dish -- a usage which later was promptly restored by Alexander. He would propose to his guests, furthermore, by way of a feat, that they should invent new sauces for giving flavour to the food, and he would offer a very large prize for the man whose invention should please him, even presenting him with a silk garment -- then regarded as a rarity and a mark of honour. On the other hand, if the sauce did not please him, the inventor was ordered to continue eating it until he invented a better one. Of course he always sat among flowers or perfumes of great value, and he loved to hear the prices of the food served at his table exaggerated, asserting it was an appetizer for the banquet."
And this is how Lampidus describes his end:
The prophecy had been made to him by some Syrian priests that he would die a violent death. And so he had prepared cords entwined with purple and scarlet silk, in order that, if need arose, he could put an end to his life by the noose. He had gold swords, too, in readiness, with which to stab himself, should any violence impend. He also had poisons ready, in ceraunites and sapphires and emeralds, with which to kill himself if destruction threatened. And he also built a very high tower from which to throw himself down, constructed of boards gilded and jeweled in his own presence, for even his death, he declared, should be costly and marked by luxury, in order that it might be said that no one had ever died in this fashion. But all these preparations availed him nothing, for, as we have said, he was slain by common soldiers, dragged through the streets, contemptuously thrust into sewers, and finally cast into the Tiber.
Sic semper tyrannis, what?
The best account of Saddam's boys brief and one hopes brutish life in the ruins of the country they beset like Biblical locusts is by Patrick Cockburn, in the New Zealand Herald.
"Neither Uday nor Qusay, the sons of Saddam Hussein, were cut out to be resistance leaders. They were brought up in luxury. While other Iraqis were living in poverty in the 1990s Uday still employed two pastry cooks as part of his personal staff. Not surprisingly, if American claims about their deaths are correct, they were discovered in a large mansion in Mosul.
"In so far as Saddam Hussein ever trusted anybody he trusted his two sons, Uday, a sadistic playboy, and Qusay, more studious but equally violent. Both were entirely dependent on their father. They never contradicted him, restrained him or had any ideas of their own."
And here's an item typical Uday's beastliness:
"Uday, in particular, was even more loathed by Iraqis than Saddam himself. Uday was always physically the most striking of the two brothers. His enormous staring brown eyes dominated his face and he usually had five days' growth of beard. In a photograph taken in 1977, when he was 13, he wears a loud striped jacket and an enormous black bow tie. The impression is of somebody trying to assert his personality against almost overwhelming odds. Although he seldom turned up for lessons, Uday learned fluent English. Before the beginning of the Iran-Iraq war in 1980 he even had ambitions to study nuclear physics in the United States. But he also told school friends that his father took him to attend torture sessions "to prepare him for the tasks ahead". Uday's first serious political role was as head of the Iraqi Olympic Committee, which replaced the Ministry of Youth. Housed inside a building which, with machine-gun turrets guarding its walls, resembled a fortress. It even had its own jail. He swiftly showed that he had a uniquely brutal approach to Iraqi sportsmen who failed him. They were jailed, beaten on the feet and spectators could tell who had been punished because the player-prisoners had their heads shaved."
Alas, the American press is treating their deaths as though this was the next to last lap in the War. Saddam's death is to follow, according to the press, and then the attacks on Americans will stop. We think this is an interesting turn about from a mere two weeks ago, when the attacks were non-coordinated epiphenomena, much like the images a man gets in his head just before falling to sleep.
We doubt, however, that such headlines as the one in the LA Times (usually much better about reporting the news)
"Sons' Deaths a Turning Point in Campaign:
U.S. assault is likely to weaken motivation and perhaps coordination of Iraqi resistance as well as change the subject in Washington, or the NYT's
With Hussein's Heirs Gone, Hopes Rise for End to Attacks
By ERIC SCHMITT and THOM SHANKER
are going to look very good two week's from now.
That the news is being cast as being happy for the Republicans and unhappy for the Democrats is very bad news for the Dems, and it is surprising that they don't know that. We can all raise our Khalashnikov's in the air and shoot to celebrate the butchering of these men. Although LI does believe that there is something suspect in celebrating the agony visited against any human being, let's face it: Uday and Qusai never deserved celebration in life so much as they do in being done to death.
On the ground, however, in Iraq, we doubt this is going to make the massive amount of firepower in the hands of individuals pissed, to say the least, at Americans seem less like firing. Because the American media is addicted to dualisms, it has cast the resistance in Iraq as a struggle between Saddam and his old foe, Uncle Sam. But of course the resistance in Iraq has numerous motives and numerous backers, many of whom have explicitly disavowed the loser of Baghdad.
As if to underline this, two Americans were killed today, according to the BBC, and seven were injured. This makes the heaviest cluster of American deaths since the War itself.
...
It is an interesting question. How do you celebrate the death of evil men? In the Book of Kings, Jezebel operates much like Uday did, stealing Naboth's vineyard, killing the good, partying with the wicked and such. The word of the Lord comes to who the word of the Lord usually comes to -- the insane beggars on the street corners -- and they proclaim that Jezebel will be eaten by dogs. This is how her end came, according to 2 Kings 9
"9:30 And when Jehu was come to Jezreel, Jezebel heard [of it]; and she painted her face, and tired her head, and looked out at a window. 9:31 And as Jehu entered in at the gate, she said, [Had] Zimri peace, who slew his master? 9:32 And he lifted up his face to the window, and said, Who [is] on my side? who? And there looked out to him two [or] three eunuchs. 9:33 And he said, Throw her down. So they threw her down: and [some] of her blood was sprinkled on the wall, and on the horses: and he trode her under foot. 9:34 And when he was come in, he did eat and drink, and said, Go, see now this cursed [woman], and bury her: for she [is] a king's daughter. 9:35 And they went to bury her: but they found no more of her than the skull, and the feet, and the palms of [her] hands. 9:36 Wherefore they came again, and told him. And he said, This [is] the word of the LORD, which he spake by his servant Elijah the Tishbite, saying, In the portion of Jezreel shall dogs eat the flesh of Jezebel: 9:37 And the carcase of Jezebel shall be as dung upon the face of the field in the portion of Jezreel; [so] that they shall not say, This [is] Jezebel."
Now that is a pretty thorough desecration. We especially like the palms of the hand thing. The Lord was working in his metaphysical poet mode, obviously.
When Plutarch is comparing the deaths of Marcellus, a Roman Consul and Pelopidas, a tyrant, he writes:
"I cannot commend the death of either of these great men; the suddenness and strangeness of their ends gives me a feeling rather of pain and distress."
Marcellus was the commander of the forces who took Syracuse and killed Archimedes. He was finally brought down by Hannibal, who ambushed him:
Upon signs received from him, the men that were placed in ambush stirred not till Marcellus came near; and then all starting up in an instant, and encompassing him from all sides, attacked him with darts, struck about and wounded the backs of those that fled, and pressed upon those who resisted. These were the forty Fregellans. For though the Etruscans fled in the very beginning of the fight, the Fregellans formed themselves into a ring, bravely defending the consuls, till Crispinus, struck with two darts, turned his horse to fly away; and Marcellus's side was run through with a lance with a broad head.
As for Pelopidas, tyrant of Thebes, I believe, he was slain in battle with Alexander, challenging him on the field even as he was pierced with darts and arrows.
Perhaps, after Jezebel, the most iconic death was suffered by Heliogabalus.
Heliogabalus was an Uday kind of guy. Here's his idea of a great party, according to his biographer Lampidus:
"He had the custom, moreover, of asking to a dinner eight bald men, or else eight one-eyed men, or eight men who suffered from gout, or eight deaf men, or eight men of dark complexion, or eight tall men, or, again, eight fat men, his purpose being, in the case of these last, since they could not be accommodated on one couch, to call forth general laughter. He would present to his guests all the silver-plate that he had in the banqueting-room and all the supply of goblets, and he did it very often too. He was the first Roman emperor to serve at a public banquet fish-pickle [Garum was a preparation made from the entrails of fish, particularly the mackerel, which were salted down and allowed to ferment. The liquid thus formed was called garum. -- DM] mixed with water, for previously this had been only a soldier's dish -- a usage which later was promptly restored by Alexander. He would propose to his guests, furthermore, by way of a feat, that they should invent new sauces for giving flavour to the food, and he would offer a very large prize for the man whose invention should please him, even presenting him with a silk garment -- then regarded as a rarity and a mark of honour. On the other hand, if the sauce did not please him, the inventor was ordered to continue eating it until he invented a better one. Of course he always sat among flowers or perfumes of great value, and he loved to hear the prices of the food served at his table exaggerated, asserting it was an appetizer for the banquet."
And this is how Lampidus describes his end:
The prophecy had been made to him by some Syrian priests that he would die a violent death. And so he had prepared cords entwined with purple and scarlet silk, in order that, if need arose, he could put an end to his life by the noose. He had gold swords, too, in readiness, with which to stab himself, should any violence impend. He also had poisons ready, in ceraunites and sapphires and emeralds, with which to kill himself if destruction threatened. And he also built a very high tower from which to throw himself down, constructed of boards gilded and jeweled in his own presence, for even his death, he declared, should be costly and marked by luxury, in order that it might be said that no one had ever died in this fashion. But all these preparations availed him nothing, for, as we have said, he was slain by common soldiers, dragged through the streets, contemptuously thrust into sewers, and finally cast into the Tiber.
Sic semper tyrannis, what?
Tuesday, July 22, 2003
Bollettino
Good news from Iraq about the death of the meat machine�s brats, Uday and Qsay. They were killed in a firefight, the radio is reporting. Patrick Cockburn, in Out of the Ashes, has a wonderful account of the attempted assassination by two Iraqi students of the miserable Uday � the man who played the part of Iraq�s subdeb Beria.
There�s a story in the WP about the revivification of the Peace movement. It is coalescing around, natch, the Bush lies. We are happy about the dogging of Bush; we are unhappy that the peace party wants to jump into the past with both of its boots on, however. The real problem right now is the War in Iraq, and how to extract the U.S. from its occupation of same. We think it is a big mistake to show no concern a., for the American troops that have been essentially shanghaied there, and b., to let the Bush agenda there get a simple pass. We�ve reached a moment in which pressure can make a difference: the administration is starting, vaguely, to look for an exit strategy � although of course the purebloods still want to invade Syria and Iran, privatize Iraq, and make the place into a sort of Chili on the Tigris. Still, no way the troop overstretch, plus the huge costs of this operation, can be ignored much longer. Which means the Bushies have a real interest in turning to the U.N. And a real interest in making the Governing council, which is admittedly as Governing as the three stooges at this point, into a real administrative body. That is all to the good � Chalabi has been essentially blocked as the Wolfowitz cat�s paw in the country, the mainstream Shi�ite establishment, at least if the reports in the Western press are even half right, is amenable to a secular government, and the mistake of dissolving the army and, as a corollary, Bremer�s laughable plan to replace it with a force of 40,000 soldiers is slowly dawning on the brilliant minds in D.C.
Of course, probabilities are that we are set for disaster, given the past records of the Pentagon people who have been running the show. They seem to think this is all about securing concord between an expansionist Israel and a free enterprise powered group of reconstructed nations � Syria, Iraq and Iran. That plan is ridiculous, and its pursuit is certainly dubious from the standpoint of American interests.
Still, the dogging of Bush is an essential part of injecting a heady breath of reality into the councils of an administration that is peculiarly insulated from it.
Oh, and by the way -- check out Juan Cole's blog. Cole is a history professor who actually knows something about the Middle East. His blog reports the latest casualties, and the latest gossip, from Iraq. Very interesting stuff.
Good news from Iraq about the death of the meat machine�s brats, Uday and Qsay. They were killed in a firefight, the radio is reporting. Patrick Cockburn, in Out of the Ashes, has a wonderful account of the attempted assassination by two Iraqi students of the miserable Uday � the man who played the part of Iraq�s subdeb Beria.
There�s a story in the WP about the revivification of the Peace movement. It is coalescing around, natch, the Bush lies. We are happy about the dogging of Bush; we are unhappy that the peace party wants to jump into the past with both of its boots on, however. The real problem right now is the War in Iraq, and how to extract the U.S. from its occupation of same. We think it is a big mistake to show no concern a., for the American troops that have been essentially shanghaied there, and b., to let the Bush agenda there get a simple pass. We�ve reached a moment in which pressure can make a difference: the administration is starting, vaguely, to look for an exit strategy � although of course the purebloods still want to invade Syria and Iran, privatize Iraq, and make the place into a sort of Chili on the Tigris. Still, no way the troop overstretch, plus the huge costs of this operation, can be ignored much longer. Which means the Bushies have a real interest in turning to the U.N. And a real interest in making the Governing council, which is admittedly as Governing as the three stooges at this point, into a real administrative body. That is all to the good � Chalabi has been essentially blocked as the Wolfowitz cat�s paw in the country, the mainstream Shi�ite establishment, at least if the reports in the Western press are even half right, is amenable to a secular government, and the mistake of dissolving the army and, as a corollary, Bremer�s laughable plan to replace it with a force of 40,000 soldiers is slowly dawning on the brilliant minds in D.C.
Of course, probabilities are that we are set for disaster, given the past records of the Pentagon people who have been running the show. They seem to think this is all about securing concord between an expansionist Israel and a free enterprise powered group of reconstructed nations � Syria, Iraq and Iran. That plan is ridiculous, and its pursuit is certainly dubious from the standpoint of American interests.
Still, the dogging of Bush is an essential part of injecting a heady breath of reality into the councils of an administration that is peculiarly insulated from it.
Oh, and by the way -- check out Juan Cole's blog. Cole is a history professor who actually knows something about the Middle East. His blog reports the latest casualties, and the latest gossip, from Iraq. Very interesting stuff.
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