Culture (or Lack Thereof) Friday! -- Marty Peretz Edition!

My idea of a good picture is one that's in focus and of a famous person.

-Andy-

Having slain Arabs and laid waste to Edward Said, Martin Peretz spies with his little eye the recent, astonishingly successful sale of works by Andy Warhol at Christie's. Marty is not pleased. We are not surprised.

Martin "my tastes go to gold ground Siena and early impressionists" Peretz can't for the life of him decipher why the mass production by an American artist avowedly devoted to capital of a Communist dictator avowedly opposed to capital but equally committed to mass production, including of his own image, would be considered "ironic and paradoxical."

"But it's not only that I don't like what Warhol paints," he whines, "I also don't like what Warhol says."

Andy replies:

"A woman asked me what I like. That's how I started painting money."

Thoughts at the End of the Week

Via Stop Me Before I Vote Again, I see that buyer's remorse is already setting in, although along the Eschatonian-Kossian axis one finds mostly grumbling that The Media has so-far inadequately kowtowed to the newly ascendent Donkle.

Steny Hoyer won because he's a corrupt money man who sloshed hundreds of thousands into house races around the country, but he's not as corrupt as Jack Murtha, who like so many Democrats opposes this foreign intervention principally because it has degraded the capacity of the US Military to engage in Donk-favored interventions elsewhere. Elsewhere and otherwise, La Nan wants to put an impeached ex-judge in charge of Defense, although to be fair: better a crook than GI Jane Harmon, the presumptive winner of that internecine battle.

Above it all, the dauphin is in Vietnam, appropriately enough, telling people that "the American experience in Vietnam contained lessons for the war in Iraq. Chief among them . . . 'we’ll succeed unless we quit.'"

Hunter Thompson killed himself just in time. "When will it end, oh Lord, when will it end?"

How I Feel About America in One 60s Existential Spy Series Credit Sequence

Papieren bitte. Again. Or, Goodbye to Berlin.

The story of the student who was tortured by UCLA police is making the rounds. Much commentary focuses on the general issue of official brutality, or on the increasing militarization of police (even, apparently, university police), or on the genuine awfulness of Tasers, whose presumptive non-lethality (although they are, or can be in too many cases, lethal) engenders misuse by trigger-happy cops.

All of this is good and valid, and I have nothing substantive to add on any of these notes.

I popped over to UCLA's website to read the official statement, though:

Statement from UCLA Acting Chancellor Norman Abrams About Incident at Powell Library

University police are investigating an incident late last night in which police took a student into custody at Powell Library. Investigators are reviewing the incident and the officers' actions. The investigation and review will be thorough, vigorous and fair.

The safety of our campus community is of paramount importance to me. Routinely checking student identification after 11 p.m. at the campus library, which is open 24 hours, is a policy posted in the library that was enacted for the protection of our students. Compliance is critical for the safety and well-being of everyone.

The National ID issue has been much in the news lately, between the various Terror!™ boondoggles and Republican projects to decrease voter turnout among undesirables, by which they mean those demographically disinclined to vote for the Republican half of the War Party. The UCLA incident shows in microcosm why universal identification is such a dangerous idea for a free society.

The necessary, logical end of any universal identification scheme is that failure to produce identification becomes, in and of itself, a criminal act. The Acting Chancellor summarizes nicely: "Compliance is cricital." Every repressive modern society has empowered its police to make arbitrary arrests under the rubric of "your papers aren't in order."

Note also when you watch the video of "the incident" that while officers repeatedly attack the student for failing to identify himself properly, they repeatedly ignore calls for their own names and badge numbers.

"None of your goddamn business" is a human right.

And the Winner Is . . .

Steve Clemons at the Washington Note has published the list of new Committee chairs in the Senate. The disintegrating dreams of progressive adherents to the Donkle catechism continues apace. Our new Reich Minister for Führer and Fatherland:

HOMELAND & GOVERNMENT AFFAIRS -- Joseph Lieberman

You can take the man out of the party, but ya can't take the party . . . Or . . .

Angelus Novus

In order to be clear:

Between 2 percent and 5 percent of Iraq's 27 million people have been killed, wounded or uprooted since the Americans invaded in 2003, calculates Anthony H. Cordesman of the Center for International and Strategic Studies.

"This is civil war," he said.

I thought I would quote from yesterdays one-troop, two-troops, red-troop, blue-troop session in the Capitol, but it was too Seussical for excerptation. Although he's a war criminal, I almost feel badly for General John Abizaid, who sat for hours as a scapegoat for a lame duck president who nonetheless rules the foreign policy roost like a Connecticut Bourbon. The dauphin has only contributed to the scapegoating be endlessly locating the source of all decisions in Iraq in the "generals on the ground," leaving the poor sons of bitches to dangle in front of an ineffectual congress trying alternately to get a military man to disavow a policy he did not make or support purported strategic changes that he has no power to approve or deny.

I declare the word of the day to be esclation. A couple of days ago in a comment thread at Jim Henley's Unqualified Offerings, a commenter called Uncle Kvetch wrote:

Every day it feels a little more like 1966.

And Iraq looks a little more like Vietnam.

And Hillary looks a little more like Hubert Humphrey.

We are so screwed.

Today's Times expands convincingly on those thesis.

Speaking of theses, I'm inevitably reminded of that famous passage from Walter Benjamin's "Theses on the Philosophy of History":

A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

It is a misconception to believe that there exists a debate divisible into pro- and anti-war, at least so far as our government is concerned. Those of us who truly oppose the war, and there are very few of us, see "one single catastrophe," whereas the rest of the participants in the dishonestly named "debate" percieve--and seek to own--a chain of events, whose progress from one point to the next supports or indicts a policy, whatever that policy is, and the policy itself is no more or less than the initiation and execution of a new progression whose claimed purpose is extrication from a catastrophe that most see not as unitary but as incidental and discrete, a momentary result of poor planning or poor execution or poor concept.

When I say that there are very few who truly oppose this war, I mean that I do not include among true war supporters the majority of supposed dissenters who insist on the historical peculiarity of the Iraqi conflict. The less quoted but perhaps more relevant portion of Benjamin's essay is just prior to his paragraph on the Angelus Novus:

The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the "state of emergency" in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight. Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency, and this will improve our position in the struggle against Fascism. One reason why Fascism has a chance is that in the name of progress its opponents treat it as a historical norm. The current amazement that the things we are experiencing are "still" possible in the twentieth century is not philosophical. This amazement is not the beginning of knowledge--unless it is the knowledge that the view of history which gives rise to it is untenable.

There is an argument that those of us who advocate for withdrawing immediately and swiftly from Iraq are also presenting a mere prescriptive: that withdrawal, too, is a kind of policy. That is probably true. Likewise, it is true that we falsely name this withdrawal as a kind of progress, even though it's perfectly clear that the piling-up of wreckage will continue with or without our presence in Iraq.

But the eggs are scrambled, so to speak, and that's a process you can't undo. The crime was committed. The wreckage can't be unpiled. The catastrophe is. It is only the realization that even in escape there is no escaping what we've done that will buffer the gale blowing us backwards.

UPDATE: That's escalation, you jerk.

More Donkle Disappointment

Our old friend Kos is "not afraid of money." It all has something to do with running a Chevron ad and getting some back-bitching from the capillary branches of the netroots. Kos fires back: "bottom line is that I won't cry if Chevron or anyone else wants to help fund the rise of a professional netroots activist class." If he means this seriously, then it's plain that while Kos may not be afraid of money, he doesn't know very much about it. Although I cannot claim to know the thoughts of men, I know a thing or two about business operations, and I can assure everyone that Chevron is not interested in "the rise of a professional netroots activist class," except insofar as Chevron will feature in their ads and not in their, ahem, netroots activism.

Kevin Drum, writing about the same post, says:

I'm not sure what to make of all this. In fact, the reason I mention it frequently is that I keep hoping someone will get inspired by the suggestion and go off to write a shrewd and perceptive piece about the phenomenon. So far, nobody has.

Ask and ye shall receive, Kevin. In fact no shrewdness or particular perception is required. Markos Moulitas is going to create a Republican think tank, but for Democrats: a corporate-funded talking-points producer with "fellows" (the quotation marks are Kos' hisselfs) cranking out Dem-friendly "research" that's long on pull quotes and short on footnotes. He says it plain as day. It's part of the long Democratic obsession with so-called movement conservativism, their belief that their ongoing electoral weakness was the result of a vast plan, hatched in a sort of American Conservative Wansee Conference with Barry Goldwater playing the role of a very dumb Reinhard Heidrich, in which the institutions of a final conservative victory were created, the seeds planted, the framing framed, and so on and so forth.

Well give the Donkle his due: in Markos the Party has its perfect empty vessel, a hack who by his own admission doesn't much give a damn about the politics of the candidates he advocates for office, so long as they call themselves Democrats. Washington already has plenty such people, so why not one more? This, friends, is what they're calling progressivism. These bloggers flatter themselves for "crashing the gates," though one notes that their electoral record is spotty and their boy Lamont got crushed so badly that if it had been little leage they'd have called the game in the fifth inning to save the kid some embarrassment. What they really want is the very insiderdom they rail about. What, after all, is behind the gates but the winding drive to the castle? Antonia Gramsci, whereforth art thou? That's really the story of the Democratic gate-crashers: they are aspiring political operatives who have convinced themselves through a series of bowlderized McLuhanian mental gyrations that their medium obviates their message.

But the Democratic bloggers, especially Kos with his dreams of a libertarian-Democratic praxis, are no different from the infamous "small government conservatives," say, in their unusual belief that they will make fundamental changes without changing any fundaments. Both sides are essentially statist: they advance marginally different dispensations of government expenditure, while retaining the old verities and pieties about such things as The Two-Party System® and The Troops®. What they call bites are just nibbles around the edges. They wish to replace certain holders of government sinecures with new tenures, and to steer corporate monies and lobbying hires toward their side of the aisle. They both advance the same American exceptionalism, and although the Democratic bloggers often call themselves antiwar, here is their mobbed-up Majority Leader on their radical peace agenda:

To that end, he said, one of the first acts of the new Democratic Congress will be a $75 billion boost to the military budget to try to get the Army's diminished units back into combat shape.

Democrats will not try, Reid pledged, to play the strongest hand they have -- using Congress's power of the purse to starve the war effort of money and force the president to move. Such an effort would only elicit a veto from Bush. But he said Democrats will marshal their newly acquired power -- in hearing rooms and on the Senate floor -- to stoke public opinion and drive the debate.

Where will they drive that debate, other than deeper into the mud, or the sand, as is appropriate? Even after overwhelmingly supporting the war in the first place, as a minority party the Donkle could at least claim a variety of plausible deniability where Smackdown:Iraq was concerned. Sure they were sleeping in shit, but it was not their own. Now, of course, it is their own, and "one of the first acts . . . will be a $75 billion boost to the military budget."

Why, if this is the antiwar party, are they making their first order of business preparing more soldiers for combat? How is the "new party of fiscal responsibility" proposing to start its term with a huge increase an already half-trillion-dollar budget?

Because it is neither.

UPDATE: That's AntoniO Gramsci. Nijinski, Nijinska, let's call the whole thing off.

Drowning

Gregory Djerejian looks to the Iraq Conventional Wisdom Group to provide political cover for a "final push" in Iraq, involving all sorts of goodies for consumption in America, from increased troops to regional diplomacy to European involvement to a "Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more" effort to take the streets of Baghdad. We should disabuse ourselves of the more common "retake." It was never tooken to begin with.

Jim Henley says "Woah!" and yanks the reins:

Greg Djerejian and the centrist policy tendency he represents still haven’t absorbed that Iraq’s political contenders interpret the occupation as damage and route around it. There is lethal fratricide in Iraq because there is violent disagreement about the appropriate nature of the state. The stakes are huge and the historical record is dire. “30,000-50,000 additional” non-Arabic speakers in mirrorshades and body armor can not effect a permanent change in that problem.

The emphasis is mine.

Of that "violent disagreement," and of the American response to it, Djerejian has this to say:

In short, a final and convincing attempt to stabilize Iraq, via a combination of autonomy devolving to the regions but with powers related to border control, national defense, oil revenue sharing, and foreign policy all remaining the province of a sitting national government in Baghdad--one strongly backed by the collective might of the international community--must be seriously considered (to include a convincing road-map for the regions to move towards greater centralization at a future date, of which more another time). This will require troop increases in the Baghdad area (but with the introduction of benchmark concepts as palliative for Democrats) which, make no mistake, will be difficult to ask the American people—exhausted by three plus years of war and increasingly uncertain of Iraq's broader utility in the war on terror (itself a concept in need of a significant rethink).

As mentioned, some ideas will appeal better to Democrats, others to Republicans. But the broad center of American society likely realizes that a rapid-fire withdrawal from Iraq will lead to a massive, full-blown civil war that will lead to the deaths of hundreds of thousands more Iraqis, perhaps even ultimately millions. Can America allow that country to erupt into total chaos?

The more appropriate question: Does America have any choice?

That is something else that centrist thought has never accommodated: that the American invasion of Iraq created an inevitable conclusion in the "massive, full-blown civil war" that rears its head in America as the evitable end we are morally obligated to prevent. All the wishful thinking of the Djerejians in this country, who cast their coins into the fountain hoping for a decent end that mitigates to some degree--or even entirely--the moral crime we committed by invading Iraq in the first place, is for naught. Gregory Djerejian seems to be a good and decent man who genuinely regrets the violence and suffering in Iraq and who, at very least, has the moral decency to claim the obligation to diminish that suffering. What he cannot admit is that it is an obligation to futility. The crime has already been committed: the United States engaged in aggressive war against a sovereign state. We broke the political bonds that held Iraq together. Were those bonds coercive? Yes, but what state is not bound by coercion? Now the Iraqis will fight a civil war to determine who will bind together a new state, if anyone, and probably by force and violence, as before. The American line is that we support the elected, legitimate Iraqi government and that the violent elements in Iraq seek to overthrow that government and toss us out. In fact we have thrown our support behind one particular collection of factions, which are neither independently nor collectively legitimate. Legitimacy comes from the approbation or acceptance of the population. Even if acceptance can only be gained through violent repression, it remains a fundament of government.

Currently in Iraq there is no legitimate monopoly on the use of force; it belongs to everyone and no one. The Iraqis will fight a civil war, and it will be a bloody one--perhaps a very long one as well. America, of course, is culpable in that conflict. We broke the dam that held back the waters. Now we hope to haul some of the drowning onto a raft and claim, as we row away, that we saved them from the worse flooding to come.

Oh Good God

Saith The New York Times:

Even before it is finished, the study group's report is seen by many as having huge stakes. It could give the Democratic and Republican parties a chance at consensus--or at least a tenable framework for agreement--after an election that gave Democrats congressional control and reshaped Bush's final two years in office.

Well, gracious, thank goodness for all that.

Several years ago the country waited with what passes for bated breath in this mouthbreathing land for the so-called 9/11 Commission Report even though it was perfectly plain before the composition of the commission was announced what the final results would be: a mildly critical but predominantly exculpatory history of events in the "mistakes were made" mold of all post hoc Washington thought, appended in an equally Washingtonian mold with a series of proposals premised on the discreditable notion that the "problem," such as it was, was a failure of Washington's transient residents to apprehend the irrational depths of hatred carried by our enemies. That report never suggested that perhaps at fundamental fault are the foreign policies of the American government, or, as the old saying went, the "bipartisan foreign policy establishment."

Now we're once again playing the surprise-me game, this time imagining that the bespoke caucasian gentlemen, not a-one of 'em who speaks a lick of Arabic or knows a souk from a Sunni, will provide anything other than a mildly critical but predominantly exculpatory history of events in the "mistakes were made" mold . . . The Times, always good for a bit of elite consensus, spills the beans on the "huge stakes" at . . . stake: "consensus . . . after an election that gave Democrats congressional control." The purpose of the Study Group, in realspeak, is to do precisely what every Washington panel is empowered to do: sling a little both ways, point to a few boo-boos, and come to a consensus conclusion for the purposes of domestic consumption.

The Study Group will say that mistakes were made in Iraq, especially in the early days of occupation, but now that we're there, we have a "responsibility" to success or victory, however you want to put it. They will say that the Iraqi government must "stand up" and that as they do say, Americans can stand down. They will endorse the beginnings of a withdrawal of American troops, but they will resist and mildly decry "artificial timelines," deferring like everyone else to "the generals on the ground." They will, in other words, provide a pretext under which Democrats can continue asking for drawdowns and Republicans can keep yapping about "winning" and everyone, everyone, everyone can say at the end of the day, "Well, we acted upon the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group."

We can all rest assured that the likelihood of the last American leaving that smashed and unhealable nation will now board a helicopter from a rooftop. Sooner, let us hope, rather than later.

Bequest

Bob Kagan and Bill Kristol are back with a new More Troops! editorial in The Weekly Standard. We are after success in Iraq, which is stability in Iraq, which is . . .

The graver concern, in fact, is that

"The president has two years to turn things around and leave a viable Iraq to the next president."

A viable Iraq from George and a decent china pattern from Laura. Are Americans now so boundlessly violent and arrogant that "the central question" facing a president is his bequest of a half-conquered, shattered nation to the next baby-kissin', glad-handin', g-droppin' chief commanding officer executive in chief of the United States?

Yes.

Asses/Assess

And as Americans and others weighed the impact of the freshly elected Democratic majority, the party’s leaders sought to send reassuring signals that they planned change but no abrupt policy lurches.

The top Senate Democrat, Harry Reid of Nevada, said that while his fellow lawmakers would re-examine a tax structure that they say unfairly favors the wealthiest, they did not plan to do so for at least six months to a year.

Howard Dean, the Democratic national chairman, even cautioned against expecting the tax cuts that many Democrats say they want for the middle class. The Democrats support a budget-balancing approach, he said, asserting that the federal budget deficit has been understated by $100 billion.

Mr. Reid also said the monitoring of some Americans’ phone calls might be a necessary part of the fight against terrorism, “We must do it within the confines of the Constitution,” he said, presumably pointing to new efforts to restrict the government’s controversial surveillance programs.

Even I did not expect the election-fattened Donkle to waddle onstage and actually tell its ardent supporters, including the self-fabled netroots, to kindly get fucked. But there it is.

It’s a particularly fitting irony that the Senate, whose surprise turning was the sparkler on the Democratic cake, will now be in the hands of a crytofascist land speculator who makes it the first order of business to play the enemies-within card and then takes the table with a daring opposition to “fixed timetables for withdrawal.” (Remember, eager Dems, if it isn’t fixed, it isn’t really a timetable.)

Let’s all agree that it will be great fun to hear what our new peers of the realm have to say about the drug war.

The Times article is a good reminder that although they’re more ostentatious about it, the Republicans aren’t the only ones wearing the crazy suit. Howard Dean takes an opportunity in the national media to muse that Iraqi Kurdistan, stripped of the American protectorate, will face a Turkish blitzkrieg of some sort or other, an Ottoman resurgence if you will, like a batty nonagenarian misremembering the dangerous “sick old man of Europe.” It would be, he says, the worst thing that could happen, the sort of statement that’s sure to give rise to some excellent gallows humor in Baghdad. Somewhere the Arab Woody Allen is shrugging his shoulders, holding his palms up to the air, and saying, “Worse? How could it be worse!?”

As for “middle-class tax cuts,” it’s a lovely sentiment that the Democrats want to balance budgets, but I see no indication that they intend to move in anything but the direction of more spending and the diminishing returns of seeking “new sources of revenue.” We do, after all, have a military that costs half a trillion dollars a year at least, and clearly that’s not working out precisely as planned. If they really wanted to make a splash, they could disband the Ministry for the Security of the Fatherland, but then, as the Demotronic bloggers endlessly remind us, it was the Donkle who proposed the ministry in the first place, before the nasty conservatives stole their idea. It is, instead, the Democratic proposal “to immediately enact all the proposals of the 9/11 commission.” That, you’ll recall, was the blue-ribbon panel who chatted up government officials for a while before running into Tom Sawyer and taking up the whitewash. Because federales inspecting every box and orifice entering America is a fitting complement to those civil liberties we keep hearing the Dems are better on.

It is true that at this late stage of the American empire, all that’s left to us is to laugh. My most fervent hope is that the venal gang of Asses will hold onto the wheel even as we drive toward the cliff. A little late-empire decadence will soften the fall nicely, and the decadence, at very least, is more likely under a Vegas crook than a Tennessee healer.