Redlegs Masticate

Connect the Dots

Inspired by the life and death of Robert McNamara, US Secretary of State 1961-68.  There was one quote that stood out in the various obituaries appearing the other day.  "How could we have failed to ask the tough questions about how important Vietnam was from a national security standpoint(i.e., questioning the "domino theory")?  Then the litany of lugubrious mental machinations endemic in the "art" of politics since the dawn of the State and even before begin their incessant chiming:  Blind obedience. Groupthink.  The President must be pleased.  If there is a conflict between pleasing the President and telling it like it is, telling it like it is is expendable.  There's a new term for all this:  Cognitive Regulatory Capture.  Paul Krugman used it the the other day on Charlie Rose to describe the mindset of those who failed to act to head off the ongoing economic disaster.  But it's really just another of the myriad and intensifiying variations on the general military protocol.  

Today there was a show on Chicago Public Radio featuring the author of a new book about the way the current administration is handling the legal issues stemming from the previous administration's activites after Sept. 11, 2001.  The author interviewed is Jane Meyer, author of The Dark Side: The Inside Story of the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals.  The upshot is that the Obama adminstration is doing very little to make any kind of redress of the outrages (I use the term advisedly) perpetrated by the Bush administration in the 2001-05 period.  The arguments have an eerie familiarity to them:  Even though the Nuremburg Trials established as a matter of international record that the excuse of obeying orders is not valid, the administration is making recourse to arguments which make a mockery of this essential precept.  They are saying: We don't want to prosecute theose in the CIA that enabled torture because the rules which were in effect, the bogus ones concocted by the Bush adminstration legal jackals, were considered legally sound at the time by a bunch of criminals and deranged fools and so these guys are off the hook.  Cognitive Regulatory Capture.  Is there anyone who can formulate coherent thoughts any more who is not in thrall to this madness?   The ultimate question has to be, how far do we have to go to really get ouside the system which legislates this madness?  They are all protecting each other. Obama protects Cheney.  Panetta protects the CIA.  No inquiries will be made of any substantive nature.

Maybe now some of the liberals will begin to see that they've once again been taken in.  The system is beyond redemption.  I know that's a rather sweeping statement.  But look at the evidence.  Archimedes said that if he had a place to stand, he could move the entire earth under his own power as a single human being with his magic instrument, the fulcrum.  I like the metaphoric implications of this idea. Naturally many would maintain that in the realm of social relations, there is no such place, just as there is no such place in the heavens.  Many deluded people claim that they have found such a place, only to be proven mistaken.  The devil is in the details, and there are many to enumerate.  One starts with the notion that there is something in the liberal mindset, inherent in Mills', Locke's, Bentham's and Rousseau's vision of the body politic that necessitates outcomes which belie the original intent of providing a framework for the maximization of freedom. There is some good research along these lines, some of which I have discussed in these pages.  But I feel that what is needed is something not imbued with the various landmarks which dominate leftist political thinking today.  Foucault, Levi-Strauss, Levinas, Adorno, Zizek.  There is so much murkiness here.  We can't afford that any more.  

A Begrudging Acknowlegement of Reality

It's funny to watch the behavior of US investors in the stock market.  One gets the impression they're all constantly on a triple dose of crystal meth; scoundrels like Paulson or Geithner make some reference to the beginning of green shoots and they throw their money down like the financial debacle was all just a bad dream.  And now, for rather vague reasons, it seems to them as though the promises of recovery have been premature.  They're blaming the North Korea instability and the Iran election, but these can't be that much on people's minds.  It's hard to imagine a scenario with minimal plausibility where Kim of the DPRK would really do anything that would trigger some sort of military response.  And Iran is Iran, the bluster and the posturings swell and recede but the hotheads are in decline in US foreign policy circles and Iran's president is at all times constitutionally weak anyway.  No, its the structural weaknesses here that count. Banking has merely been propped up; at the very least what is needed is a return to the banking practices in force before 1995.  This is Paul Krugman's point, and it will dawn on people in the coming months that we've just been rearranging the deck chairs these last few months.  It's really the end of an era, one that began with the demise of the liberal mindset in the aftermath of the Iran hostage crisis.  And that debacle came on the heels of the greatest constitutional crtisis in American history, of course.  As a nation (that infernal term again), we have not recovered from this crisis.  Blind Obedience, as John Dean termed it--but it's encoded in the structure of the governmental apparatus at the highest levels.  We have the opportunity to look at a very deep level of the structure of poltical liberalism now, since examination at levels not so deep has not yielded much to help us out of our deep malaise, one that goes to the heart of the Western dream.  Modern man is still just as much at a loss as he was at the outset of the last century.  Moreso.  Sprituality is calling to us, but which sprituality?  To return to the Christian ideal is impossible.  The other prominent religions seems fatuous and ill-fitting. Only a radically new formulation can be of service now.  

The Inklings Must Be Beginning By Now

How powerful is the military-industrial complex?  This question is now being answered anew in the aftermath of the latest US change in administrations.  They called Barack Obama a liberal a year ago. So many liberals thought they really had a highly-placed spokesperson after decades of drought.  The inklings of something different being fashioned in US domestic and foreign policy than what any good liberal might reasonably expect to happen must be dawning on them by now.  I believe the ACLU is well on the way towards jumping ship, the good ship Obama.  The ACLU are liberals, isn't that right? They are seeming quite far to the left of Obama and his adminstration lately.  It started out like some things really might be beginning to change.  But, to cite the latest disturbing example of Obam's turn to the far right, with the adminstration's announcement of the resumption of the military tribunal system it's clear that the Guantanamo closing is certanly not going to happen anywhere near the January 2010 projected date, if at all.  The people that were saying that Obama is more akin to a public relations spin on the same old politics than a turning of the page to a new era in American political reality are starting to sound prophetic.  The atrocity of the May 4 bombings in Afghanistan sure look like more of the same from our old pals directing the military-industrial nightmare of the post-1947 period.  Even fifty years ago the writer Robert Lebel could write, concerning the dead weight of social history, that "everything tells us a fundamental break is needed."  The key question then becomes a break at what level? and this is where real audacity is called for, the audacity to dive deep enough to find the place where we are able to cut off the animating force of the beast.  The break needed, it is stated, is at the level of time. One looks to discover a psychological realm where "the crude vibrations of social time" no longer have valence. Of course this is a fundamental indictment of Homo economicus. This time-shift would occur at a level underneath the scope of political liberalism, underneath the law, underneath capitalism. Some have said that the present moment has witnessed the last gasp of large-scale capitalism, but Obama's attempt at the preservation of the banking system essentially as it has been for the last decades belies this supposition.  It's already apparent that this machinery, the machinery of the military-industrial complex, cannot be reformed.  It must be stopped in its tracks. 

Humoresque

Or, Inside the Musical Personality.  Clifford Odets' dense screenplay can't really be grasped before one views this 1946 movie several times, maybe dozens.  Of course the best thing about this film is its atmosphere of sado-masochistic fun and the free play of imagination, albeit a playfulness exercised within limits that many would today deem old-fashioned.  We have our embodied exemplars of the Great Abstract Themes such as the Tradesman, the Artist, the Wise Mother, the Girl Next Door, and most notably, the Sophisticated Fallen Woman, played to the hilt of the hilt by Joan Crawford at the very height of her phallic grandeur. In these days of the muddying of the High and the Low in the culture wars, this screenplay behaves as if this erasure never existed, which is its strength and its weakness.  And indeed, in 1946 it was not nearly as apparent as it is now that one needed to pay attention to this attempt at the erasure of the high-low cultural boundary, begun as it was in the early days of the century but still confined to a rather rarified cultural subset.  A nod to Dada would have muddied the waters here; the story has to hinge on the unbridgable gap between Art and Commerce, between Virtue and Profligacy, between refinement and crudeness, between spiritual poverty and the nobility of desert.  But Paul Boray, the violinist who is the film's protagonist, played with verve and believability by John Garfield, is obviously no Percy Dovetonsils.  Rather, he stands halfway between the persona of the Prizefighter and the Virtuoso, and pulls it off.  

On of the most fascinating things about this movie is the use of the music to reflect the emotional states, not only of the protagonists, but of the movement of the story as a whole.  Dvorak's "Humoresque" no. 7 is of course the theme which opens the movie and appears several more times, but the narrative is in a very real sense "launched" by Sidney Jeffers/Oscar Levant playing Gershwin's third of the Three Preludes: Allegro ben ritmato e deciso which begins in Jeffers' garret and segues into Helen Wright's Park Avenue digs oh-so-smoothly.  From here the prizefighter/violinist stuns his jaded audience of sophisticates with Sarasate's Zigeunerweisen, perhaps the ultimate tour de force of the virtuoso violinist's repetoire. "Bad manners, the unmistakable sign of talent", says Helen Wright after her attempt to put him off balance with a few light verbal jabs which he doesn't accept graciously.  "Why did she ride him like that?" asks one of the hangers-on of her feckless husband. "Oh, she's merely getting interested" is his nonchalant reply.  Verily, this exchange has the ring of truth to it.  This is life among the leisure class with a lot of money and a little education, inklings of la vie boheme, as Jeffers himself observes as he characterizes the Wrights' parties beforehand.  Later in the film we go into high gear with a reworking of the famous themes of Bizet's Carmen, Franz Waxman's Carmen Fantasie, which sounds all too flashy to my ears which cringe at such musical egotism. One wishes for the Bizet's original scoring to appear in its stead, sans lead violin.  And then we are treated to a remarkable sequence in which all the principal players, Boray, Helen, Boray's old girlfriend, his mother and father and brother and sister, all witness Wright's orgasmic transformation in concert, brought about by the strains of Lalo's Symphonie Espagnole, enough to drive Paul's old girlfriend into the rain-soaked streets.  

But this is as nothing compared to the finale which defines the heights of Hollywood melodrama.  Of course, it's Wagner's Liebestod which provides the musical setting for the high tragedy which unfolds as inevitably as one day follows another.  Boray and Helen have just had tempestuous exchanges which have affirmed that each are equally trapped in playing out narcissistic complexes to the exclusion of any meaningful communication with each other.  He's married to his music, even though he says he wants to marry her; she...well she has come to believe in the futility of her faithless ways, and disbelieve in her ability to ever transcend them, and in the midst of proclaiming to him her undying love, we see on her face doubts, grave doubts about her ability to step outside of her baser self and be a real helpmate for Paul.  And so.. as the Liebestod reaches its emotional climax, she walks outside her seaside retreat to the shore, and plunges into the oncoming waves, never to return in this life.  

Paul goes on though. Even though presently devastated, he can already, only hours after finding out about her death at the scene, proclaim to his cohorts that they need not worry about what will happen to him, he will return, and return soon, to the violin and concertizing.  For he truly is married to his music and will have no other mistresses.  The artist resigns himself to remain forever trapped in his house of mirrors.  

a=a

One bone (femur) equals one bone (lemur).  One HAL 9000 computer on steroids equals one HAL 9000 computer on acid.  One Rod Blagojevich playing pat-a-cake in Chicago equals one Rod Blagojevich walking on hot coals in Kuala Lumpur. One 1930 US dollar equals 15 2009 US dollars. One especially signifcant Max Ernst painting equals 100 Damien Hirst steer slices encased in lucite.  One Dennis Hopper vote for the Republican Party equals 10 votes by Ron Paul for the Rev. Carl McIntyre.  One velvet painting of Elvis equals one vomit session in Madonna's equestrian stable.  One search for an honest man by ancient greek philosophers equals 10 teleplays by Gary Coleman.  One idealized Renaissance courtier equals 10 guys dresssed as women to escape the sinking of the Titanic.  Fifteen people all claiming to be Burt Convy have the same value as Burt Reynolds imitating Sylvester Stallone playing Rambo.  One walk through Paris in 1924 which lasts eight hours starting at 2 am with Andre Breton and Francis Picabia equals one successful date with Jayne Mansfield at the time she acted in The Girl Can't Help It. One drug test for the US Government equals several anecdotal accounts of date-rape by Paris Hilton.  

Fix Dereliction Needle for Exploratory Nobility

Nobility need not be only a preoccupation for the elite.  A leet might only want exploratory needles, not sharp ones.  We watch Vanessa Redgrave dance her uninhibited dance, supremely erotic without being vulgar, in "Isadora", knowing that Madonna will be insanely jealous. Mollymauk can only get away with lamenting the utter vulgarity of our time while safely ensconsed in the slammer, not while poisoning the athletic husband of his enamorata.  "Alan--don't you know these are supposed to be dirty?"  If only the year 1200 had not occurred, we might not be so confused about the nature of nobility.  Before this time, the notion of inherited nobility was far from an established social reality. But how does one determine the proper qualifications for a nobility of merit?  Dante thought that riches were inherently ignoble.  But the abhorrence of luxury espoused by the Catholic Church for centures didn't apply to the Pope.  We look at the views of Marguerite Porete and sadly shake our heads.  Must we really annihilate the self to reach the antinomian state where the Law no longer applies?  I want to reach it with my will intact!  Good thing I took the Krell Brain Boost twenty years ago or my efforts in this vein would have amounted to nothing, poor as they have been.  At this juncture a new incarnation of the Brethren of Free Spirits which embodies this idea of an antinomianism with the will intact, antithetical in this form to Marguerite and the medieval Christian community as a whole, seems unlikely.  But after all we may understand the Distant Mirror of the end of the fourteenth century to parallel our own time even better than it paralleled that moment 30 years ago when Tuchman's book first appeared.    Download FixDereliction

A New Summers in America

Lawrence Summers, former foot-in mouth commentator on (a) man's inherent superiority in the field of science and now the head of the Obama administration's National Economic Council, boldly steps forward in a new attempt to stem our national crisis of confidence:  (almost quote) "have faith, dear consumers. The only thing we have to fear is fear itself."  That, and not having anything to eat, and not being able to pay the rent or mortgage...The paradox of thrift--spend more to get more (oh yeah, this "more" is only for those 1% of Americans at the top of the economic ladder, not you, lowly serf, but go along with it anyway...)!! what goes around comes around!  Pay it forward!!  Eat your tail and chances are any regurgitation effected within the prescribed six-week period will be redeemable at a savings and loan institution near you!!  As we all know the challenge is to "create confidence without its leading to unstable complacency" and "while the problem was caused by excessive complacency and excessive optimism, what we need today is more optimism and more confidence." Somebody tell this guy that authentic confidence grows organically from realistic beliefs about innate capacities and not from blind faith in a positive outcome without sufficient evidence. One notes that there is such a thing as excessive fear, and yet, to fail to be duly protective of one's basic resources seems the height of foolhardiness. But that attitude is inherent in our form of large-scale capitalism. If only this crisis in confidence could lead to something a little different:  a reconfiguration of our collective expectations on what sound economics is. To be specific:  a fundamental change in the basic attitudes of consumerism which only cut us off from our basic selves anyway.  

Yucca Mountain Funding Cut

That is an interesting development.  One can now reasonably hope that this represents the death blow to the nuclear energy industry as a whole.  Concerns about where we might get our energy if this happens pale before the awful realities of nuclear waste.  We are speaking of periods ranging between 100,000 and one million years or more. It is folly to imagine that a solution can be found to accommodate this time frame. Planners have been blinded by the focus on sheer need.  Moreover, since this hard truth must now dawn on all inhabitants of the planet in a very short time, a subsequent hard truth will also have to be acknowedged: energy consumption worldwide, energy created by all existing industrial technologies, must be cut dramatically as soon as possible.  It looks like it might happen the hard way anyway.  One gets the feeling that a fever dream of sixty years duration is ending...but waking from it may not be very pleasurable.

Justice Department memos and the Truth Commission

Well, it's not exactly unexpected.  But to see the evidence of the erosion of freedoms as codified in Justice Department protocol is a bit stunning. On Oct 23, 2001, we now learn, the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States effectively disappeared.  (What is its status even now?)  John Yoo, I remember him from those appearances on TV around that time.  In this memo, he and his cohort, Robert Delahunty, assert that the Fourth Amendment's prohibition of unreasonable search and seizure couldn't be used to restrain domestic military operations.  Their positioning in the obscure DOJ Office of Legal Counsel assured their opinion would be employed to maximum effect by the Bush administration. "It [the Oct 23 memo] essentially says that war is a blank check for the president, not only on foreign battlefields, but also inside the United States," says Jameel Jaffer, the director of the ACLU's National Security Project.  But this is hardly the first appearance of excesses critics have laid at the doorstep of what has come to be called "The Imperial Presidency".  

There has been an ongoing constitutional crisis concerning the powers of the presidency from the very beginning.  I ask the reader to procure a copy of the document known as the Constitution of the United States of America and examine it carefully.  Elbridge Gerry, who attended the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787, and subsequently became Governor of Massachusetts and the 5th Vice President of the United States put it succinctly when he said of the proposed document that he had strenuous objections, in part based on the fact that "the executive is blended with, and will have an undue influence over, the legislative, and that the judicial department will be oppressive."  The problems in this constitution were already apparent to those of a libertarian mindset from the very outset.  Those who still place their faith in the integrity of the document will point to clauses which authorize Congress, and only Congress, to declare war.  But real-world events have demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt that if the President wants a war, and he can sufficiently marshall the bucking bronco of public opinion, Congress can do nothing to stop him.  We must accept that there is something inherent in the document that legislates contradictory outcomes, with the contradiction being resolved in every substantive case in favor of the presidency.  And if the Presidency was too strongly fashioned 220 years ago, subsequent developments have only exacerbated this original state of affairs.  But that is also a function of power---once it gets a little foothold, its foothold gets bigger until decisively checked by an outside force.  

Which brings me to Patrick Leahy's proposed Truth Commission.  If it goes forward, what will it be really? The Obama administration has gone on record as being in a sort of mild opposition to this initiative. They have expressed a wish to "move on" without, it seems, any deep examination of the improprieties of the 2001-08 period.  Such an examination would have the potential to be divisive, to say the least.  If such stuff as the CIA and Justice Department memos released in the last few days have caused shudders of disbelief in certain sectors of the punditocracy and even the general public, just think what the reaction might be if things much worse than even these bombshells were revealed.  Ford pardoned Nixon in '74 because he thought the country couldn't withstand a presidential trial, and another exhumation of outrages at this juncture would be perhaps even more rending of the "national fabric" than that one would have been.  But Leahy's provision of immunity has the appearance at this juncture of providing a way for the center-left elements in government to continue with certain Bush initiatives, a bit more sotto voce perhaps, but with some real substance nonetheless, under cover of having thrown strong light on past abuses, and then being able to maintain that this administration will be able to avoid repeating such abuses through having had such an examination.  One thinks of the 9/11 Commission as a parallel.  It could hardly be maintained that it was resolute in revealing all that went on in the government before 9/11.  We are likely to see a virtual repeat of this effort here.  Perhaps the truth can be arrived at without leaving open the door to prosecution.  But skepticism seems warranted.

 

Facebook: read the fine print, either version

It won't matter if they go back to the earlier TOS.  Either way, Facebook represents the true nature of the collection power and ultimate intention behind the DoD/CIA core of the Internet.  You have bought into something which can hurt you severely, individually and collectively. How can such suspension of critical faculties gain such a strong foothold?  We have a name for it here in Luddistan, it's Techno-Dazzle.  Are you Techno-dazzled? How could you not be? The technology is truly amazing.  But recognizing one's condition as dazzlement can introduce into those softening brains a modicum of skepticism.  We desperately need to strengthen the spirit of critique in our "postmodern" culture, even the "avant-garde" of which has stopped trying to find another way.  What's so bad about feeling good?  Nothing, if there's no problem.  It's the broads, isn't it? What an irony!  I mean, a technology that's so aggressively male, taken up by women with such enthusiasm.  But it's the age-old story.  Civilization was invented to impress girls.  If it wasn't for girls, we'd all still be living in caves.  That's what Orson Welles said. Consider the cell phone. They're always calling you to see where you are.  Not me, since I've yet to procure one, but my more unfortunate brothers.  It makes them insecure to feel like there's even a minuscule chance you're off your leash. Who's a more enthusiastic user of the cell phone than an eighteen-year-old girl?  BlogBonus! Two subjects for the price of one!  Next is a report on the next twenty-five years at a remove of nearly a half-century via Look magazine, Jan 16, 1962. Remember? I'm sure this very issue was in my house when I was a boy of seven.  They've got comments by Lewis Mumford, Will Durant, Reinhold Niebuhr, JFK. Freedom will diminish, they say. Even then the writing was on the wall.