We Reserve The Right To Fuck Your Shit Up

You may recall that last year an alliance of Muslim types more or less took over Somalia, then as ever one of the most thoroughly wretched places on earth, and managed to impose something distinctly resembling order, which the so-called transitional government had been distinctly unable to do, or perhaps uninterested in doing. This is no brief for imposed order through theocratic repression, but let's recall as well that this alliance of "Islamic courts" was already established regionally and seemed to enjoy the general approbation of the population during its brief tenure. Then the three most dispiriting words in this world of nominally sovereign nations: Here comes America! Using Ethiopian ground forces as proxies, the Islamic courts were whooped out of the country, and the transitional government returned, bringing with it the traditional weather for transitional Somalia, hails of gunfire.

This is just a reminder that the American imperium doesn't consist of Iraq alone.

Property, the American Dream

The subject of the week for the pro-empire, anti-war Donkle blogosphere has been the dauphin's late-breaking articulation of America's from-the-outset intention to stay in Iraq forever, occupying an archipelago of fortified bases and a principality in the middle of Baghdad, "projecting force" throughout the region and, in the Responsible Liberal's favored articulation, "preventing genocides" and "responding to contingencies." This plan has been perfectly clear and openly acknowledged since the eve of the invasion, but as is the habit of any commentator on Americna politics who aspires to that holy grail, Respectability, the plain fact of it had to be ignored until some high official--in this case, el jefe himself--stumblebummed himself into a public metaphor of unusual vacuity and unusual clarity, in this case, calling Iraq Korea. "Why, we've been there for fifty years!" went up the astonished cries in Donkledom, though for the same fifty years every one from Gore Vidal to Chalmers Johnson to Pat "Fucking" Buchanan has noted that Imperial America maintains exactly these sorts of indefinite presences in almost every country in the world, differing in size but not essential character, with the original impetuses and justifications for their construction long-since evaporated.

This clarifies a point I have tried, with varying degrees of success, to make all along: that if you don't accept the basic tenets of the imperial critique, you will remain mystified by America's actions abroad. You will in particular remain mystified by the accommodationist actions of the nominal opposition. There is altogether too much disappointment and cloth-rending at the failure of Democrats to act decisively, or at least loudly, to withdraw from Iraq. To have expected, even to have hoped wildly, that they might was to engage in an elementary analytical failure. To view Iraq as a singular conflict, an act of foreign policy distinct from others, or even to view Iraq and Afghanistan as twined portions of a singular (even if singularly in error) policy of War on Terror, is to be blind to what Iraq actually is. Michael Scheuer, the unfortunately bloodthirsty ex-CIA administration critic, comes closer than most when he speaks of a global insurgency. Iraq is a hot spot; it is indeed the central front of a war, but not, as goes the claim, "the central front of the War on Terror," a model which, with typical arrogance, makes the United States the central, motivating actor and, despite defensive claims, the active protagonist, riding out to slay dragons. Iraq is where by both accident and design resistance to the further garrisoning of the world by the United States is occuring. From native Sunni insurgents to whatever foreign guerillas there may be, those seeking to undermine the American project in Iraq understood from the very outset that we planned to stay. That's what they're seeking to disrupt.

Here is the litmus test for a so-called antiwar politician. Does he talk about withdrawing or redeploying from Iraq specifically, or does he talk about beginning to dismantle the global military outposts of the United States. If it isn't the latter, than he isn't antiwar. There are somewhere between 700 and 1,000 American military sites around the world. Foreswearing a few new ones in Iraq in order to fortify Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan is gestural, but empty.

"Don't let me catch you smoking," Mrs. Smith told Johnny. "Now run down to the store and pick Mommy up two packs of Capris."

I admit that I am enjoying the latest round of American-Russian eye-poking. American officials make officious pronouncements about their disappointment in this or that back-sliding in Russia's always-hypothetical committment to democracy, and then Vladimir Putin gets the opportunity to make more veiled references to the creeping National Socialization of American government and the Lebensraumian undertones of the "fighting them there so we don't fight them here" formulation of the "long war." Vladimir Putin is a vastly more appropriate foil to President Bush than bin Laden or Hussein, who oblige (or obliged) the millennarian tradition in America by sounding apocalyptic. Bush and Putin are respectively the Benedick and Beatrice of world leaders. Bush is tempermental and unpleasant, but having seen a soul, he falls uncertainly in love, while Putin quips and jibes. Eventually, though, one or other will swoon, and then we're all really in trouble.

Scarlatti Thursday

An afternoon of meetings compels me to make you listen to Scarlatti.

Here is Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli playing a b-minor sonata on the piano:


Martha Argerich playing a d-minor:

Look Over There . . . A Baseball!

Although Los LonleyNetroots are forever ignoring the plain talk of liberalism's leading lights and the doyens of Donkledom, big-deal Democrats and liberal mouthpieces in the news media are actually pretty honest about what exactly Democratic-party liberalism is. The Democrats are don't-rock-the boat, corporatist, managerial internationalists who feel marginally more guilty about Jim Crow than the not-so-Other side. They reject the critique of empire. They are inclined to state capitalism in which government regulates, subsidizes, and, in the form of individual politicians and political parties, is subsidized by business arranged on a corporate model. They take as given the primacy of American interests in global affairs, and their foreign policy principles are dedicated to the maintenance of that primacy, if with greater "competence" and more circumspection than the current junta is capable of. Soi-disant progressives will howl protest and point to the majority that they claim as their ideological representatives in Washington, but the Democrats aren't coy on these points. Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Harry Reid, hell, even Barney Frank--the leaders and stars of the Democratic Party don't dissemble on the basic principles. They stand for an Albrightian policy of standing higher, seeing farther. They stand for modest redistribution of wealth in order to keep the lower orders in order. They stand for the national security apparatus.

Now, the GOP stands for the same basic principles except with more torture and less accommodation for the past injustices to black folk. They're more willing to openly espouse torture and imperial skullduggery, but that's a difference of refinements, not of content. Nevertheless, they too represent state capitalism, state surveillance, American primacy, government ubiquity. Except, of course, in the mind of George F. Will, an empty auditorium where the ghost of Barry Goldwater offers broad encomiumns to the spirit of '76, the repeal of the Sixteenth Amendment, and the necessity of pulling our boys back from whatever foreign land they occupy so that we may safely nuke it without risking American lives. Will still believes that there is a constituency for something called "limited government" in this land, and there may yet be one or five of us, but we do not call "conservativism" home. Conservativism represents a scolding concern with sexual proclivites, an idolatrous reverence for police and military authority, a farcical opposition to any science that fails to conform with the three-thousand-year-old bedtime stories of a bunch of desert nomads who had not yet invented the wheel-and-axle, a rah-rah nativism for the just folks, a rhetorical stew of economic populism and corporate welfarism, and a bold program to expand the agency of government into every private aspect of citizens' lives under the damned guise of Security. Every time a self-named conservative gets into office, the powers of government, the expense of government, and the size of government expand as if impregnated with an active yeast. George W. Bush, whom Washington chatterers keep assuring us is The Most Conservative President Ever has spent eight years centralizing authority, creating new and expanded bureaucracies, hopping off on foreign adventures, ramping up expenditures. We could call it abberrational and write him off as a closet liberal but for the fact that Reagan did the same; that Nixon did the same. And we're to believe that because of school vouchers, a program through which the government can subsidize public and private education, or Health Savings Accounts, through which the already Totally Fucked risk-pool insurance model for health care gets further fucked through the removal of low-risk individuals, Republicans offer a breath of freedom? Sing me another song, Shaharazade.

Lest you think Will is serious and deluded rather than just a bad liar, though, the closer gives away the farm:

Conservatism is realism, about human nature and government's competence. Is conservatism politically realistic, meaning persuasive? That is the kind of question presidential campaigns answer.

Ah, yes. The questions of government's competence, its proper scope, the reasonable extent of the public sphere: these are best settled by a billion-dollar quadrennial advertising campaign in which a gaggle of ambition addicts try to out-jaw each other on the question of America: How Great Are We? And How Much Greater Will I Make Us? Every presidential campaign is an escalating series of rhetorical commitments to government action with bad rock n' roll for theme music, flags, and baseballs tossed on a tarmac. The primary process prunes ideals state-by-state, "News Analysis" by news analysis, until at last two towering ids dive into the pool of campaign funds and battle over who will spend the most money even as he gives it back to you, America. Remeber when George W. Bush used to say that by cutting taxes he was going to raise government revenues? If you listen closely, you hear both the comforting lie and the expansive intent.

Taste

As a ha-ha-homosexual and tastemaker to three or four people on the internet, I'm obliged to point out that Tom Engelhardt has erred in his critique--a rarity, to be sure. The problem with the Holy See of the Lord Jesus of the U.S. of A. currently going up in Baghdad is neither its size, nor its price-tag, nor its blank repetition of all the garrisoned follies noted by Chalmers Johnson in The Sorrows of Empire. The problem is that the new American Embassy is so ungodly ugly.

The language of architectural history and criticism is totally inadequate to describe the awfulness of this three-dimenstional grafitti. It's as if the fantasy-modernism of Idi Amin's grands projets met with the golden age of the American shopping mall, bought her a few drinks, and forgot to use a rubber. It's as if every 1960s libarary and post-office in the midwest contributed a yellow brick and flat-roofed addition for the good of the war effort. It's as if every campus dining hall for the last fifty years took a boat to Basra and then floated up-river through the reeds. It's as if every building were conceived in Legos and executed on the same cheap autoCAD program that they use in the kitchen section of Home Depot. Baghdad, one of the most ancient human habitations in the world, had already been wrecked by the era of Ba'athism, which brought both bland Sovietism to the masses and Las Vegasesque monumentalism to the tacky enclaves of wealth and power. Now the place has basically been burnt and bulldozed by the American invasion and its aftermath, and in response we will permanently enscone a suburban office park populated by expanded high-school gymnasiums. The French filled their colonies with wrought iron balconies and graceful windows; the British conquered the world for pleasant clubs with wide verandas. America traipses in to build blast walls and fill them with state-school dormitories.

Hey Ya

My favorite genre of urban daily opeditorializing is the occasional essay in which some thoroughly bon chic, bon genre minority factotum of establishmentarian thought heaps opprobrium on fellow minoritites. Caitlin Flanagan performed a similar task for The New Yorker, where at least you could enjoy her phony, reactionary artifice as a break from the windy-beach anodynity of, say, Ian McEwan's penisless contemplaphiles. All editorialists in this vein aspire to her aplomb, as each seeks to recriminate their own human category for failing to overcome historic wrongs, systemic discrimination, or merely the basic absurdity of the mainstream with the go-along alacrity of the author. This weekend someone named Thomas Chatterton Williams, whose writing is every bit as smarmy, grating, and self-superior as his Thackeraian name, explains to us, in the immortal formulation of Chris Rock, that there is a difference between black people and niggers. Let us all now wander the streets, blinking in shock.

The argument is familiar: hip-hop is "misogynistic, violent and nihilistic." (It's actually materialistic, which is a polar opposite of nihilism, but who's counting?) From East Side to West Side to the Dirty South. A more sensitive cultural observer, or at least a critic who's managed to unclench his buttcheeks and laugh a little, might look at hip-hop and note that fucks aside it has much in common with pop-culture aspirationalism throughout the centuries, that bling and a Benz aren't terribly far from the Beach Boys squealing "fun fun fun till my Daddy takes the T-Bird away," that Cristal isn't that far from Van Morrison crooning "it stoned me to my soul," and that violence and misogyny are nothing new in music. Good lord, man, have you never seen Lucia di Lammermoor? And so we arrive at the real counterargument to the aesthetic products of hip-hop culture: not that it is novel in its striving or brutality, but that it's just noise what they listen to these days, these damned kids. That's not critique. That's "Get off my lawn!"

Thomas Chatterton Williams:

The historian Paul Fussell notes that for most Americans, it is difficult to "class sink." Try to imagine the Chinese American son of oncologists--living in, say, a New York suburb such as Westchester, attending private school--who feels subconsciously compelled to model his life, even if only superficially, on that of a Chinese mafioso dealing heroin on the Lower East Side. The cultural pressure for a middle-class Chinese American to walk, talk and act like a lower-class thug from Chinatown is nil. The same can be said of Jews, or of any other ethnic group.

I'm not sure how to say this with racial sensitivity, but the reason that "the Chinese American son of oncologists . . . in Westchester" isn't imitating triad gangsters and Jewish kids aren't imitating, say, usuring sephardic blood-drinkers is that Jewish kids and Chinese kids and Japanese kids and Indian kids are immitating what they percieve as black "aesthetic sensibility and self-image . . . from the street up." You heard it here first, folks: kids in Westchester are wearing side-cocked baseball caps and XXL white tee-shirts.

There are plenty of facile, academized notions about insurmountable, endemic inequality that, in a perverse way, deny agency to their subjects, treating real people and real communities as hopelessly anomic, buffetted by historic forces, unable to marshall their own resources to advance, succeed, prosper, progress. That's a kind of paternalism that populates too many critical communities and should be combatted. But the opposing notion that blacks, for instance, have squandered and frittered their collective energies on diamond teeth, fancy cars, and big booty is equally insulting because it's equally shallow. Here is a universalism about mass commercial culture, regardless of the originating racial group: it is crass, vapid, abusive, uncontemplative, thoughtless, offensive, tasteless. But scratch the surface or peer into the cracks and a million other artists operating on the second and third and fourth and thousandth tier of popular success are creating great and vital work. Thomas Chatterton Williams might hear them but for the deafening volume of his own humbugs.

Gored

Al Gore is a militarist, apologist for empire, and, until recently, one of the great propogandists for America's decade-long war on Iraq. I am not, in other words, a fan. Nor am I prey to any abiding sense of rhetorical fairness, as anyone who reads this little blog knows. Nevertheless, this is odd:

The Assault on Reason is, like much of what Gore has said over the years, essentially truthful. It is also the apparent product of a man desperate to display his erudition at every possible moment, appropriate or not. Virtually every major figure in the history of political theory turns in a cameo appearance, often making the same point someone else just made. Within the space of a few pages, we are treated to the wisdom of Louis Brandeis, Thomas Jefferson, Edmund Burke, John Donne, the German philosopher Jurgen Habermas and the Roman rhetorician Lactantius. One begins to wish that Bartlett's Quotations had gone out of print.

The book in review is titled The Assault on Reason, and it evidently deals with what Gore percieves (and who can argue?) as the decline of the value of reason and rationality in the public sphere. I haven't read the "few pages" in question here, and I can't say I quite see how Lactantius fits in, but doesn't it seem that Brandeis, Jefferson, Burke, Donne, and (especially) Habermas are not only germane, but central to the discussion? Am I mistaken, or are these not some of the central thinkers and writers on the very issues in question, which are the intersections of reason, faith, and government?

This isn't to say that the reviewer's accusations of pedantry are inaccurate. They're probably true. But to criticize a man who's tried to write a scholarly book for its efforts toward scholarly citation suggests a fellow critic more comfortable with the assertional stylings of Ann Coulter and the Godless crowd.

He Dead

Sir Richard Cohen regrets that King Leopold's methods in the Congo cause some to question the Queen's civilising mission in Africa.

Injuns Shoot Back

One week after the Sept. 11 attacks, [Sgt. David Saftsrom] walked into a recruiter’s office and joined the Army.

“You guys want to start a fight in my backyard, I got something for you,” he recalls thinking at the time.

Now imagine you're a kid, a prodct of the American public school system, a good student--perhaps even an excellent one--but by no means the rare auto-didactic type who goes off to read history on his own. You read the Times for "current events" in your government class. You're pretty sure that Vietnam was bad, but your knowledge of it is filmic, because your history and government classes never make it as far as the seventies (or the fifties, as the case may be). You have never heard of the American occupation of the Phillipines. You understand isolationism as an aberrational interwar policy--like Prohibition. You were born during the Reagan presidency, but can't remember it. You have no context for understanding the Cold War--what it was, who were its participants, how conflicts like Vietnam were part of it. It's not just that you don't possess deep knowledge of the counternarrative to the official history of the Cold War. You don't even know the normative, standard, patriotic history of the era, beyond a few film clips and a general understanding that the Soviet Union had a lot of nukes too. The first war that you can recall was the Gulf War, and what you recall there was a general sense of victoriousness. You've heard of Iran-contra, but you don't know what it was. You've heard the three Presidents you remember--Old Bush, Clinton, Young Bush--say how terrible a tyrant is Saddam Hussein, but you've never heard of the Iran-Iraq War and you don't know that the United States supported Hussein throughout the eighties, nearly to the moment of the Gulf War. You've never heard of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. You don't know that Israel has nuclear weapons--actually, you don't know anything about Israel, excepting a vague sense that it's sort of like a European country, maybe, more than it's like a Middle Eastern one. You don't know anything about Saudi Arabia, the Gulf emirates, modern Egypt, the Lebanese Civil War, the Partition of India and Pakistan, the Islamic Revolution in Iran. Again, it's not just that you lack a meaningful counternarrative to recieved history; you don't even know the received history.

You could not know all these things and still be an overachieving student, a good and responsible kid with a bright future at a good college, or, if you and your family were militarily inclined, a stellar military career.

This is the context in which the David Safstroms of the world joined the army. Forget all the carping about the lowered standards for military enlistment in order to meet recruiting goals made impractical by a now-unpopular war. Consider instead that in the period immediately following 9/11, a nation and its soldiers reacted in grievous error not because they necessarily lacked the cognitive apparatus to understand what had occured and what would occur, but because they lacked the most rudimentary information about their own history, the history of the contemporary world, or the place of the United States in that history. It's not insulting to David Safstrom--because it's not his fault--to say that when he joined the military, believing that some They had "started a fight in his backyard," he didn't know anything about anything. He lacked the most basic information through which he might evaluate the momentous events all around him. In this regard, he was like most Americans.

Off he goes to war, understanding only that his home was attacked, never considering that he was now engaging in a reciprocal attack on someone else's home. When told later that his mission was not retaliatory but democratic and humanitarian, he was easily able to adapt, because he's a bright kid and a good soldier, but it didn't occur to him (and still doesn't, clearly) that regardless of what he called it or how he defined its goals, he was involved in the conquest and occupation of a foreign country. As a letter-writer put it to C&L:

[T]he Injuns shoot back. It happened at Little Big Horn, it happened in Vietnam and it's happening now.

I mean, for Christ's sake, if there were a foreign army kicking down doors in LA, we'd all be f*&king insurgents.

This points to a curious paradox in our current discourse. On one hand, terrorism is proposed as an existential threat; the Iraqi insurgents will "follow us home"; we're "fighting them over there so we don't have to fight them here. On the other hand, the idea of "a foreign army kicking down doors in LA" is an entirely meaningless hypothetical for the majority of Americans, who are simulataneously so steeped in American exceptionalism and so deprived of historical context that any proposition of American actions abroad being reciprocated in America is quite literally unimaginable. The irony is that one of the great cultural touchstones for American conservatives imagines precisely such a scenario. Alas, that was in 1984, which in the American reckoning of time might as well be BC.