Francis Fukuyama Discovers the Limits of Francis Fukuyama

Francis Fukayama came late to the party. Still, the Lord loves a prodigal, no matter his rolling in the mud with neo-conservatives before he got here:
"What was truly troubling, however, was that the collapse undermined the fundamental moral justification for material inequality in a politically egalitarian society. Basic to the legitimacy of market capitalism is the efficient market hypothesis—that is, the notion that in a truly competitive market everyone earns something close to his or her “social” rate of return. This means, in other words, that if your investment banker earns 100,000 times as much as your plumber, it’s because he or she is contributing roughly 100,000 times as much to society’s total pool of wealth.
The crisis made it glaringly obvious that the efficient market hypothesis was wrong: Oversized returns were flowing to innovative financial entrepreneurs who, in their avidity to create new and more complex financial instruments and products, were destroying rather than creating value for society as a whole."

No shit, Sherlock.

Let me get this straight; it took two wars and an economic collapse for a tenured professor to realize what my sharecropping ancestors knew in their bones?
(Link) View more John Mc Clane Sound Clips and Bruce Willis Sound Clips
Francis Fukuyama is the fellow who announced "The End of History" in 1989, after Russia lost the Cold War. This made him a lot of friends among fans of Ronald Reagan. He later explained that what he really meant was an end to interpreting history as having a goal, as Hegel, Marx and apocalyptic Christians do.
I could almost buy his equivocation, but Fukuyama's inner Pangloss never knows when to shut up: "... while earlier forms of government were characterized by grave defects and irrationalities that led to their eventual collapse, liberal democracy was arguably free from such fundamental internal contradictions." Say wha--? Democracy (or republicanism, if you prefer Latin to Greek) is chock-full of "fundamental internal contradictions"-- that's why Lincoln warned that democracies are inclined to self-destruction; why Churchill called democracy the worst except for all the others. You're a hard man indeed if you can see the dead at Fredericksburg or Wounded Knee as nothing more than a perfect system correcting itself. Call me Manichean, but I still see history as a struggle between forces of creation and destruction, Thanatos and Eros. It only takes a moment for a soldier to kill Archimedes.


I am not calling for F.F. to start wearing an IWW shirt and become a neo-socialist. I just want him to discover that there might be a reason the left feels pissed off and pissed on. And this does give me another excuse to assign the reading of Kipling's "Gods of the Copybook Headings", despite its misuse by the odious Beck, unable to recognize himself in its warnings.

I would not bother with this if Francis were just another Wanker Like Me with a blog. But this guy is a paid lecturer in the if-you-have-to-ask-you-can't-afford-it range. Francis Fukuyama has made a spectacular career out of being wrong, but being wrong in a way that flatters the masters of our world.
I'm all in favor of being wrong and making grand barroom pronouncements-- as a storyteller and a reader, I embrace six impossible things before breakfast, hoping to unearth those poetic truths that "burn like cold iron", as Lewis said of Tolkein. We bohemians (cough slackers cough) are, after all the secret legislators of the world. But when I wear a history teacher's hat, I have to answer "I don't know" a dozen times a day, puzzling innocents who think a mastery of trivia and telling anecdote is the same as knowing "everything", then try to turn the things I don't know into a problem for them, like a cat giving kittens a crippled mouse to bat around. But my foibles don't end in a body count, as Fukuyama's did when he signed William Kristol's letter urging regime change in Iraq.

It may be that a repentant Francis is trying to find his way home, to move the bead of isn't-it-pretty-to-think-so a bit closer to what is. He's just about the only neoconservative I can stand to read without gagging, certainly the only one capable of conceding that he might be wrong, and any sign of enlightenment is to be cherished-- for this thy brother was lost, and is found. So, my turn to make a pronouncement, though the thoughts of Francis Fukuyama are worth 100,000 of mine, and it's a truism the ancient Chu Yuan knew in his drowned bones: No courtier ever went broke by telling the bosses what they want to hear.

Commonplace Book: Quotations, January 2009

In the midst of winter, I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.
– Albert Camus

***
Jimmy Olsen=me. And we all have signal watches
-- unidentified comic fan, watching the inauguration

***
Friendships, like marriages, are dependent on avoiding the unforgivable.
— John D. MacDonald

***
It may dash your hopes for that nice warm feeling called Schadenfreude, but the Masters of the Universe are smarter than the people they left behind at the investment banks. Their hedge funds have blown up here and there, but unlike the investment banks, they are still very much in business. They have hurriedly pulled themselves into defensive positions inside their shells, like turtles. Their Armageddon, if any, will not come for two more days, which is to say, Tuesday, Sept. 30. Most hedge funds open up a crack on Sept. 30, Dec. 31, March 31 and June 30 to give investors the chance to “redeem” their investments, meaning take their money out.
-- Tom Wolfe

***
Bill Clinton is brooding in his hotel suite at Brown Palace Hotel, like the outcast Grendel lurking on the outskirts of the town where young Beowulf lived.
-- Maureem Dowd

***
“In this issue, Hellboy bashes in a Hillbilly Devil’s face with a consecrated shovel. Goddamn I love comic books.”
-- Chris Sims



***
"The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work."
- Emile Zola

***
“One could argue that the key Al Qaeda training for 9/11 occurred not in the Taliban’s Afghanistan but in Jeb Bush’s Florida. And in terms of terrorist planning, 9/11 would have been better avoided with an occupation of Hamburg, where most of the essential plotting for the attack occurred.”
-- Bartle Breese Bull, NY Times

***

“There go the people. I must follow them. I am their leader.”
-- Alexandre Ledru-Rollin, 1848

***
Depression and schizophrenia are diseases that distort reality, and cause great suffering in the process. Depression is a great liar. You are not a failure. You are not worthless. You are not unloved. You have been happy in the past, though you can’t remember it, and you will be happy in the future, though you cannot remember it.

-- Dick Cavett

***
“I think we’ve remained fixed on 1968 because it feels like where we missed our turn and went down the wrong road… And on some level, I think we blamed everything that went bad after that on those two deaths. Just before he was assassinated, Bobby Kennedy was asked when he thought the country would be ready to elect a black president. He said, “Forty years. 2008.” RFK was right on the nose. Barack Obama is not Martin Luther King, and he’s not Bobby Kennedy, but you’d have to be emotionally tone-deaf to miss the fact that he reminds boomers of both of those fallen leaders. That had to be part of the reason that this election created such elation in the population. It felt as if we were going back to that missed turn, and starting down the right road at last.

-- Bill Flanagan, CBS Sunday Morning

I Ain't Seen the Like Since...

I didn't realize just how happy I was until I arrived at my friends' house and opened that first Guinness, with Rachel Maddow and the BBC interviewing survivors of the Little Rock Nine, and the joint realization that this is the first time in my lifetime that the guy I wanted to be president actually won. Sure, I voted for Clinton (Damn Near Republican) and went door-to-door for whoever was running against the Shrub, but this time...

Working with schoolchildren all day, with the inauguration on in the background, one tries to be a voice of moderation, explaining the process, asking leading questions, supplying the humorous anecdote: Andrew Johnson showing up drunk for his inauguration, William Henry Harrison (the Indian killer) literally talking himself to death by droning on for two hours in an icy rain. But children, for all their enthusiasm, don't get it. Being but strangers to this world, they recognize that it's "important", but they can't be expected to understand that there's anything unusual about today's events. If this day was going to be truly savored, it needed to be shared with adult friends.

The gore-crow of the Bush administration has finally taken its beak from out my heart. Complete sentences were spoken. Thomas Paine was quoted. The King James Bible was invoked. The wicked were politely admonished. My favorite was the benediction by the Reverend Joseph Lowery (co-founder of the SCLC with M.L. King) who with a twinkle in his eye, went beyond the lyrics of "Lift Every Voice and Sing" to end with a paraphrase of the bluesman Big Bill Broonzy:


But it wasn't just about seeing John Lewis and wondering what was going on in his scarred head, or seeing the cover painting of The Nation and tearing up when I realized that was Emmett Till and the four little girls killed in Birmingham standing on the podium with Obama. When Pat said there was a weight off her shoulders, I recognized there was a childlike element to my happiness; it felt like... when I was 10 or 11 years old... like that moment in Amazing Spider-Man #33...

Who Do You Think You Are, Diamond Jim Brady?

I've heard the name "Diamond Jim" Brady since I was very small. I just knew it meant someone with a lot of flash and easy money. No idea how my family would have heard of him; their references to "Coxey's Army" made more sense.
When I could read my animal books for myself, his name would show up in chapters about the passenger pigeon and the bison, as an example of the gaslight glutton who would eat whole boxcars of birds, or dine on buffalo tongue while the rest of the animal went to waste.
In my adult life, he shows up in Jim Harrison's food writing as a troubling, ambiguous figure-- was he glutton, or gourmand? And I still use his name to admonish the young against flash spending (do as I say, not as I do), although it turns out that it was Robert Mitchum, not Diamond Jim, who told his new bride, "Stick with me me, Baby, and you'll be fartin' through silk." (She did.)
Now there's a very entertaining article by some guy named David Kamp sorting out fact from fiction in the case of Diamond Jim's legendary gluttony. I didn't know that Diamond Jim kept company with Lillian Russell. Or that the Urological Institute at John Hopkins is named after him. Being as I am already fond of reading about La Belle Époque in Paris (let me recommend Elegant Wits and Grand Horizontals by Cornelia Otis Skinner), this inspires me to track down a book by H. Paul Jeffers called Diamond Jim Brady : Prince of the Gilded Age.

Japan's Longest Day: Wishful Thinking, and Mass Murder from a Plane Named After the Pilot's Mother

It's the anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and I've little to add to the library of meditation on what it all means-- except that if you've never read Japan's Longest Day the English translation of research done by Kazutoshi Hando and The Pacific War Research Society, it will remove any hope that the Japanese government would have surrendered without the bombing. Indeed, the book makes clear that the hawks in control of the Japanese government had no intention of stopping even after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, even when they themselves admitted that the war was lost.
The people of the United States have a knack of forgetting our own talent for mass murder while scolding other nations for their bestial habits, and it may be that shame over the treatment of Africans and the aboriginals creates a chink in our mental armor when it comes to thinking about World War Two. It's an easy hit to make Americans flinch when playing poker over the development of nuclear weapons.
It was the hope of Leo Szilard and others at the time that Japan would surrender if the power of the weapon was demonstrated on an abandoned island. Truman-- funny how he never pretended that his "advisors" were somehow responsible for anything more than advice in making his decision-- was working with the facts of what had just happened on Okinawa (more people died on Okinawa than at Hiroshima and Nagasaki) and appeared certain to happen on the mainland. Szilard and a generation of physicists after him moved into biology and peace activism after the bombs were dropped, and now biology and recombinant DNA are on the brink of creating an extinction-level weapon just as splitting the atom did.
This is going to call for more sophistication than the wishful thinking shown by doves and hawks, who seem to recite two extremes: that we can force everyone to love us by bombing people who don't love us, or that we make everyone love us by appealing to their higher nature even if they wish us harm. But technology outruns social evolution. "We are as gods," as Stewart Brand said, "and we might as well get good at it."

Grind House Gramm

In the world view of kindergarten teachers and Irish Setters, you can find something to like about almost everyone. If I ever find myself in Hell next to G.W. Bush, and there are Secret Service agents nearby, we could limit our conversation to Scotty dogs Barney and Beasley and get along fine. Ann Rule says Ted Bundy was charming in person. And now I find that McCain financial advisor and cartoon turtle Phil Gramm and I share a love for the B-movie queens.

In 1973 (ah youth), Gramm's brother-in-law, George Caton, collected a $15,000 check from Gramm to invest in the drive-in epic Truck Stop Women: "No Rig Was Too Big For Them To Handle." Aficionados will agree that any movie starring Claudia Jennings would be considered an "A" ticket so far as B-movies go.

Alas, Gramm was too late to get in on the Claudia Jennings project, but the next year he invested $15,000 in something called Beauty Queens, never produced. Instead director Mark Lester made Tricia's Wedding an R-rated nightmare involving LSD in the punchbowl at Tricia Nixon's wedding and starring renowned San Francisco drag queens The Cockettes.

Gramm invested another $7,500 in the sequel, a satire of the Nixon White House called White House Madness with a naked Richard Nixon strolling through the White House, presumably talking to the paintings with a worried Henry Kissinger at his elbow. Ah, the dreams of youth-- for me, the great scream queens of Hammer Films, for Senator Gramm, a transvestite Tricia Nixon on acid...

"My God! She makes us die happy." (from One who has Fought and Bled)

A day when so many bloviate about "sacrifice" ought to be a day when we refuse to tolerate waste. Here's a thought for Memorial Day: how about a day of remembrance with, the gods forfend, "nuance"? A day that lets us pause a moment for the men waiting on Little Round Top or in the forest of Ardennes, but also a day when we don't tolerate lies about war, or lie to ourselves about the senseless waste of Fredericksburg or My Lai or the Somme.

The following letter by "A Little Mother" appeared in Britain during World War One, and was widely circulated as genuine. Though now considered the work of a propagandist, the responses praising it appear to be genuine. In The Great War and Modern Memory (one of those world-shifting books that everyone should read at least once) historian and combat veteran Paul Fussell says the “testimonials earned by this famous letter suggest a society for which the only accurate term would be 'sick'”.

***
A MOTHER'S ANSWER TO 'A COMMON SOLDIER'
by "A Little Mother"

A Message to the Pacifists A Message to the Bereaved
A Message to the Trenches
(Owing to the immense demand from home and from the trenches for this letter, which appeared in The Morning Post, the editor found it necessary to place it in the hands of London publishers to be reprinted in pamphlet form, seventy-five thousand copies of which were sold in less than a week direct from the publishers.)
Extract from a letter from Her Majesty
The Queen was deeply touched at the "Little Mother's" beautiful letter, and Her Majesty fully realizes what her words must mean to our soldiers in the trenches and in hospitals.

To the Editor of The Morning Post:

Sir,--As a mother of an only child--a son who was early and eager to do his duty--may I be permitted to reply to Tommy Atkins, whose letter appeared in your issue of the 9th instead? Perhaps he will kindly convey to his friends in the trenches, not what the Government thinks, not what the Pacifists think, but what the mothers of the British race think of our fighting men. It is a voice which demands to be heard, seeing that we play the most important part in the history of the world, for it is we who 'mother the men' who have to uphold the honour and traditions not only of our Empire but of the whole civilized world.
To the man who pathetically calls himself a 'common soldier,' may I say that we women, who demand to be heard, will tolerate no such cry as 'Peace! Peace!' where there is no peace. The corn that will wave over land watered by the blood of our brave lads shall testify to the future that their blood was not spilt in vain. We need no marble monuments to remind us. We only need that force of character behind all motives to see this monstrous world tragedy brought to a victorious ending. The blood of the dead and the dying, the blood of the 'common soldier' from his 'slight wounds' will not cry to us in vain. They have all done their share, and we, as women, will do ours without murmuring and without complaint. Send the Pacifists to us and we shall very soon show them, and show the world, that in our homes at least there shall be no 'sitting at home warm and cosy in the winter, cool and "comfy" in the summer'. There is only one temperature for the women of the British race, and that is white heat. With those who disgrace their sacred trust of motherwood we have nothing in common. Our ears are not deaf to the cry that is ever ascending from the battlefield from men of flesh and blood whose indomitable courage is borne to us, so to speak, on every blast of the wind. We women pass on the human ammunition of 'only sons' to fill up the gaps, so that when the 'common soldier' looks back before going 'over the top' he may see the women of the British race at his heels, reliable, dependent, uncomplaining.

The reinforcements of women are, therefore, behind the 'common soldier'. We gentle-nurtured, timid sex did not want the war. It is no pleasure to us to have our homes made desolate and the apple of our eye taken away. We would sooner our lovable, promising, rollicking boy stayed at school. We would have much preferred to have gone on in a light-hearted way with our amusements and our hobbies. But the bugle call came, and we have hung up the tennis racquet, we've fetched our laddie from school, we've put his cap away, and we have glanced lovingly over his last report, which said 'Excellent'--we've wrapped them all in a Union Jack and locked them up, to be taken out only after the war to be looked at. A 'common soldier', perhaps, did not count on the women, but they have their part to play, and we have risen to our responsibility. We are proud of our men, and they in turn have to be proud of us. If the men fail, Tommy Atkins, the women won't.

Tommy Atkins to the front,
He has gone to bear the brunt.
Shall 'stay-at-homes' do naught but snivel and but sigh?
No, while your eyes are filling
We are up and doing, willing
To face the music with you--or to die!

Women are created for the purpose of giving life, and men to take it. Now we are giving it in a double sense. It's not likely we are going to fail Tommy. We shall not flinch one iota, but when the war is over he must not grudge us, when we hear the bugle call of 'Lights out', a brief, very brief, space of time to withdraw into our secret chambers and share with Rachel the Silent the lonely anguish of a bereft heart, and to look once more on the college cap, before we emerge stronger women to carry on the glorious work our men's memories have handed down to us for now and all eternity.
Yours, etc.,
A LITTLE MOTHER


Testimonials:

"Florence Nightingale did great and grand things for the soldiers of her day, but no woman has done more than the "Little Mother", whose now famous letter to The Morning Post has spread like wild-fire from trench to trench. I hope to God it will be handed down in history, for nothing like it has ever made such an impression on our fighting men. I defy any man to feel weak-hearted after reading it...My God! she makes us die happy." (One who has Fought and Bled)

"The "Little Mother's" letter should reach every corner of the earth--a letter of the loftiest ideal, tempered with courage and the most sublime sacrifice." (Percival H. Monkton)

"I have lost my two dear boys, but since I was shown the "Little Mother's" beautiful letter a resignation too perfect to describe has calmed all my aching sorrow, and I would now gladly give my sons twice over." (A Bereaved Mother)

***
This would all be academic and quaint were it not that we again live in a time when to question the morality of any war is apparently a breach of good manners on television, though every other subject is fit for company. After all, as Dr. Johnson cynically observed, "Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier, or not having been at sea", and the war lovers have bullied almost every journalist and politician in the United States into seeing things their way. In 2008, it is better to throw a hundred soldiers into a meat grinder than to question those patriots' wisdom in sacrificing themselves For the Benefit of Mother War, that sow who eats her own babies. Me, I'll leave the last word to a “shell-shocked” Siegfried Sassoon:

You love us when we're heroes, home on leave,
Or wounded in a mentionable place.
You worship decorations; you believe
That chivalry redeems the war's disgrace.
You make us shells. You listen with delight,
By tales of dirt and danger fondly thrilled.
You crown our distant ardors while we fight,
And mourn our laurelled memories when we're killed.
You can't believe that British troops "retire"
When hell's last horror breaks them, and they run,
Trampling the terrible corpses, blind with blood.
O German mother dreaming by the fire,
While you are knitting socks to send your son
His face is trodden deeper in the mud.


... Like the old man in Twain’s The War Prayer -- of whom the crowd declared “there was no sense in anything he said”-- Sassoon’s friends had to conspire together to have him declared mentally incompetent, in order to save him from being shot for treason.

The Mandate of a Mad Heaven, or the Whim of a Malign Thug

My friends find me almost mute about the earthquake in China, odd considering my interest in Chinese history, and my need to alert the world to the fall of the smallest sparrow. The best coverage has been that of Melissa Block on NPR, a story I'm sure she would rather have lived without seeing. This was a sad case of being the right person in the wrong place at the right time: Block and Robert Siegel were in China for the Olympics, and Block herself was interviewing a Chinese Christian about his flock in the west of China when the towers began to shake. The next day she had to watch mothers and fathers identify the bodies of their dead children, and on into the night with rain falling and candles flickering around small bodies as families burnt offerings for the dead, paper money and incense and firecrackers, and paper toys if they had them, in the old tradition. This was not ambulance chasing; just being there and bearing witness. Siegel himself was covering a makeshift emergency rom where the doctors had gone days without sleep, mentioned his own daughters safe at home, and learned that the doctor he was interviewing, up to his elbows in another patient, had lost his twenty-six-year-old daughter in the quake. Who must do the difficult things? goes the proverb, He who can.

The Lisbon earthquake and tsunami back in 1755 was one of the events that fed the Enlightenment and led people like Voltaire to question the blinkered praise of a merciful God:
Unhappy mortals! Dark and mourning earth!
Affrighted gathering of human kind!
Eternal lingering of useless pain!
"If God's up there," Dr. Lecter tells Clarice Starling about church collapses, in his role as the demon who always puts a little bit of truth in the lies he tells, "He just... loves... it." And Voltaire's Candide watched the tsunami murder the innocent while the wicked bobbed like corks, and forever after considered themselves as blessed by God. If ever you wonder how the Bush administration sleeps at night, there's your answer: their friends and children didn't die, and yours did.

One of the early commentators on the Chengdu tragedy mentioned the "Mandate of Heaven", an ancient homily that says every dynasty in China survives only so long as it has the clear approval of the Powers that Be-- that is, so long as a dynasty keeps winning, then God must approve. The fellow who mentioned the Mandate caught some flack later on, usually along the line that China is a modern country now and doesn't believe in such superstition any more, but I think they missed the point he was making. The influence of natural disaster on the Mandate of Heaven has always been a practical one: regimes that do a good job of coping with natural disasters do well, and those who fail to take care of the people in a crisis soon find the ship of state beset on all sides by a sea of angry humanity. Apparently, the Chinese regime is doing the best anyone could ask for, for its own people at least (although one wishes the political wing would use its influence in Burma to kick the Myanamar generals' ass up around their ears). In Chengdu, the complaints and anger have been directed at lax building codes and local corruption that led to collapses, while the government in Beijing is still very much in charge.

Beijing says it wants to rebuild in two years, and probably means it, which would be rather ironic, considering the clusterfuck that the ideology of laissez-faire capitalism visited on Louisiana and the Gulf Coast after a couple of hurricanes. Here's a prayer for Sichaun Province, and keep a prayerful eye on friends near San Francisco and Saint Louis on the San Andreas and New Madrid fault lines. There's enough old Baptist left in me to wonder if some worse thing, some greater sorrow, was avoided, but Portugal's prime minister probably said it best in 1755, and quieted the philosophers and the preachers: "We will bury the dead and take care of the living."

Roll Over, Clovis, or: Kilroy Was Here, Used the Facilities, Nobody Go In There for a While

For a long time (by my standards, not the Earth's) the Folsom point was the oldest evidence of human arrival in America, so rare they're expertly forged by flintknappers and sold as genuine. Then the Clovis culture with their fluted points (sounds un-American, downright effete) pushed the calendar back even farther. Oh, there are 15,000 year-old settlements in Chile, 14,000 year-old butcher's marks on mammoth bones in Wisconsin, 18,000 year old artifacts in Pennsylvania-- but there's always the danger that artifacts can be "seeded" on an archeological site (see Tony Hillerman's mystery novel, Dance Hall of the Dead.)

Now archeologists have irrefutable proof that human beings strode the American continent at least 1,000 years before Clovis: a fossilzed turd.

The coprolites from Paisley Caves in Oregon date at 12,500 BCE. The traces of DNA concealed therein are related to Native Americans and come originally from East Asia. It might be my years of working in a hospital, or hanging out too much with a gastro-enterologist, but I find it funny that our arrival on any landscape-- cue the Hollywood backlighting and inspirational music-- would be marked not by a pyramid or a handprint but by our most humbling shared experience. Now that's a closing shot that might have saved Zardoz.

He Made a Desert, and Called It Peace: The Bush Success Story

So Bush went to the Middle East, where I presume they hid the breakables before showing him the sights. The world clenched its cheeks-- if you thought things couldn't get worse, imagine 300 more days of this president with a bad case of Jerusalem Syndrome .

Never got closer to what's left of Iraq than Arifjan Base in Kuwait, to meet with General Petraeus and the US ambassador in Iraq. Auferre, trucidare, rapere, falsis nominibus imperium;. atque, ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant... But James Wolcott's column in the February Vanity Fair (overlook the ads, celebrities and royals that pay the bills, the rest of the magazine is terrific) ponders a terrible premise:

What if things really are exactly as Bush could wish? We judge him a failure only on the basis of common humanity and decency, from a limited point of view that says torture is a bad thing, war profiteering a sin, deception in democracy is a crime, and his callow waste of soldiers and civilians is a curse. It's somebody else's kid that got killed, not his, nor any of his inner circle-- and in his selective Christianity, that's pure profit, gain without pain.

For all the troubles stirred up by global warming, the Arctic land rush it's inspiring will mean untold profits for Bush's cronies. Was Hurricane Katrina an unmitigated disaster, or a masterful lesson in laissez faire urban renewal? The ruination of the American economy means a desperate work force scrabbling for Third World wages, and the end of the labor movement: increased profits for Bush's friends, and perdition to his enemies. The regulatory bureaucracy in Washington, a Progressive-era attempt to to ameliorate the excesses of capitalism, is now packed with Bush appointees. If you are Grover Nyquist, who wants to drown governmnent in a bathtub, or a Reagan-era Randite who views regulation as the invention of mental midgets trying to chain the entrepreneurial ubermensch, then the Bush era has been a success.

It was a mistake to invade Iraq...? But from Bush's point of view, he now has boots on the ground in the third largest oil reserve in the world, and they ain't leaving any time soon. This week he made explicit his intention to build permanent American military bases in Iraq. This makes him a success in certain quarters, and within that circle of friends, he need never feel the sting of the pain he's caused to millions. It's barbecues and backslapping for George, maybe a stint as baseball commissioner.

George Bush was, is, and always will be a selfish creature who takes what he wants without counting the cost, then employs a legion of courtiers to make sure that someone else pays for the party. No wonder he still swaggers.

After the Spartans, What Then?

Here's another of my free-for-the-asking dissertation proposals for a degree I have no time to pursue. Reconstruction is an oft-neglected period in teaching American history, but not, at least, a complete blind spot. It's obvious to all that we're still living with the after-effects of chattel slavery in the United States and the Americas (Haiti? My God.) So what happened in Laconian Greece between the helots and the Spartans after the collapse of the Spartan system?

There was a ratio of seven or eight helot slaves to every Spartan, most of them captured from the neighboring state of Messenia. The Spartans submitted themselves to mental slavery and unmatched discipline because if they ever relaxed for a moment, the helots would make a play for their own freedom and start chewing Spartan throats. Think of police policies in the apartheid government of South Africa, or the weird mix of complacency and savagery exhibited by the ruling class of the ante-bellum South. There was even a policy of state-sponsored terrorism, turning Spartan youths loose on the helots as werewolves to cull and intimidate the flocks. These policies were rationalized by a constant repetition of Spartan sacred beliefs, as in Ronald Reagan's proxy war on "Red" peasants and nuns in Central America, or the Taliban's current war on free women.

All this is well-plowed ground, but I don't know of any deep study on what happened in Laconia after the Spartan slave state collapsed. How long did it take before the Spartans and the Messenians and the other captive states forgave and forgot, and saw themselves as Greek? Were there "different" expectations for freed helots and the grandchildren of Spartan slavers? Were there sexual tensions-- you know those helots fuck all the time, while dignified Spartans do it in the dorm...? Could you still start a fight in Alexander's army by yelling, "Hey, helot!" in the chow line? Were there Messenians who adopted the Spartan system, like those European peasants who came to America and set themselves up with their own baronial manors?

There are questions of identification, those signals of dress or speech or physical appearance that humans use to distinguish class and origin. It hasn't been that long since Germans were measuring noses and American eugenicists were sterilizing defectives, and Barack Obama still causes confusion in television editorialists. Romans mouthed pieties about ancestry, and tattooed their slaves and criminals, but after a century or two, wealthy commoners bought their way into the elite. Early American capitalists tried enslaving Indians, poor whites and Irishmen, but the pesky things kept slipping off and disappearing into a crowd. Then enterprising Dutchmen and Portugese dropped off some African prisoners, and hey presto!: by 1662, melanin is declared to be the mark of hereditary slavery, with all the attendant grief that follows. In ancient Laconia, were there physical differences, due to differences in diet, sun exposure, health care or lifestyle, that signalled "former master" or "ex-slave" to the casual observer? It must have been like being held prisoner by a heavily armed aerobics class.

There's enough Laconian lacunae here to keep a grad student busy for the rest of their crabbed lives. For my part, I intend to start writing a multi-generational series that follows the DNA of a helot family from their capture in 720 BC through Spartacus' revolt to Wat Tyler, Nat Turner's Rebellion, Coxey's Army, and beyond, perhaps in the hard-boiled style of My Gun is Quick, entitled I Carry a Grudge.

A Brief History of Collateral Damage

A lot of civilians are being killed in this crazy little thing that Bush calls a war. The U.S. military is measuring out other people's lives with coffee spoons. If an American soldier risks killing civilians, up to thirty deaths are acceptable, so long as the strike was against military targets. In the Iraqui war, which even its most ardent lovers admit cannot be "won" by military means, thirty civiian deaths would be counterproductive, if those thirty corpses leave one or two very angry survivors; certainly if my own loved ones were killed by a well-groomed aviator listening to headphones, I'd be dead or in Guantanamo before i'd stop hunting. Why do we expect better behavior from the fellaheen than we do from outrselves?

Time was, with a sword in one hand and a pistol in the other, you could see the face of the poor bastard you shot, and be sure of your mark. War sure has gone downhill since Napoleon's brother added state terror to his conquest of Spain, and the outgunned Spanish responded with tactics that were given the name guerilla, "little war". The French hussars thought a little shock and awe would cow the Spanish into submission, and of course it did-- only for so long as they kept the eye on weeping fathers and screaming women. The moment the big guy's back was turned, survivors started thinking up homespun ways to make a technologically superior force die very slowly, and very old.

This is a fundamental problem in the use of air force and massive strikes that has never been publically debated in a society that claims to have civilian control of its military. its origins lie in the biplane-era theories of an Italian aviator, Giulio Douhet, who thought you could bomb an enemy into submission by destroying his infrastructure and taking civilian lives. They thought he was a crank during the First World War, even court-martialed and threw him in jail, but starting in the 1920s, when The Command of the Air was published, he found an audience, with Guernica the first experiment.

The first part of Douhet's theory-- that you could destroy an enemy's war-making infrastructure from the air, and force him to surrender-- proved to be true as far as Germany was concerned. In Japan, the atomic bomb forced Japanese civilians to force the emperor to force the military to surrender-- but a close examination, as in the Pacific War Research Society's Japan's Longest Day, proves, beyond the wishful thinking of my gentle pacifist brethren, that the Japanese military was still not going to surrender even after Nagasaki. It was our good luck and a civilian revolt against the samurai generals in charge that forced the emperor to concede. The second half of Douhet's premise has never been openly debated, except in our war colleges. It may be that American civilians, seeing their military adventures as fundamentally altruistic, cannot imagine there would be any organized revenge for an accidental killing.

The 14 Japanese researchers that make up the Pacific War Research Society must be lonely men, since so much of their work puts the lie to dearly held cliches on both sides of the Pacific. You might even find out that the Japanese were working on their ownatomic bomb project at Hungnam, Korea, under Yoshio Nishina at the Imperial Japanese Army's Riken Institute.

In the case of Vietnam, the infrastructure was bombed "back to the Stone Age" many times over, with neutral Cambodia and Laos bombed for good measure, but it did not yield the results described by the Douhet: the Vietnamese simply hunkered down and toughened their resolve. The Luftwaffe could have told them that; Hitler's bombing of Britain did nothing to "weaken the resolve" of the civilian population, but only pissed everyone off and made Arthurian legends out of the teenagers who went up in Spitfires during the Battle of Britain, the firemen memorialized near St. James Cathedral, and Winston Churchill's sad guilty poking through the ashes of Canterbury.

And what is the emotional effect of modern American air power, for those unlucky enough to be standing under it? Are their first thoughts, "Gosh, we'd better surrender", or "Come close enough, you bastard, and I'll put a Stone-Age cap in your high-tech ass"? American audiences, who gasp at the atrocities inflicted on downed Americans in Somalia, apparently lack the imagination to see a Blackhawk helicopter from the Somali's point of view. Americans want always to be loved, and always perceive themselves as acting out of good will, like the Abominable Snowman hugging Bugs Bunny, and are always astonished, hurt, and then angry when they face rejection by the other.

If we are willing to as the Romans did, "make a desert and call it peace", then bombing and collateral damage will suffice; but there are no guarantees about what happens later, when the few survivors grow to manhood.

plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

"And people altered, at their pleasure, the customary significance of words to suit their deeds: irrational daring came to be considered the "manly courage of one loyal to his party"; prudent delay was thought a fair-seeming cowardice; a moderate attitude was deemed a mere shield for lack of virility, and a reasoned understanding with regard to all sides of an issue meant that one was indolent and of no use for anything. Rash enthusiasm for one's cause was deemed the part of a true man; to attempt to employ reason in plotting a safe course of action, a specious excuse for desertion."

Thucydides on the Peloponessean War, 431 BC- 404 BC
(thanks to I Cite for noticing this first)

LIMBO LOWER NOW

Niels Bohr finally told Einstein "stop telling God what to do", and the government of the Church of Rome is thinking about letting God do what he wants with the souls of unbaptized children. This would make Christian doctrine at least as merciful as some Aboriginal clans who believe the souls of miscarried or stillborn children are transmigrated as koala bears.

Closing down the Limbo of Children is a good thing, but so was the theory's original intent. The Limbo of Children was built in the human imagination by people like Peter Abelard in an attempt to mitigate the cruelty of medieval Christianity. It was a time of absolutes, and the construction of Limbo eased human suffering for mothers and fathers who thought their lost lambs were burning in Hell because they hadn't been baptized.

Limbo is an easy target for the goyim to make fun of, but I have a sentimental attachment for the Limbo of the Fathers, the supposed home of the virtuous pagans who were born, lived and died before the time of Christ. They rest "in Abraham's bosom", with the possible exceptions of Shakespeare's Falstaff and myself, who will sleep in Arthur's.

That first generation of Christians had a problem, as if the Romans weren't enough. If knowledge of Christ was a ticket to Heaven, what about their beloved grandparents, dead these many years, who wouldn't know a Christian from Adam? If you love your grandma, you wouldn't want to see her roasting in Hell with Nero...? The "Virtuous Pagans" teaching solved this psychological problem, and reconciled Heaven with the pagans' Elysian Fields. Imagine the day care, with babies swaddled by Aristotle, toddlers dawdled on the knees of Odysseus-- it would resemble the school of Chiron the Centaur, who taught the Greek heroes on Mount Pelion.

(The Harrowing of Hell, the story of Jesus rescuing the Virtuous Souls of antiquity from the maw of Death, is a later medieval construct that would make a smashing film. If Titian kept painting, I imagine there must be a "Rescue of Spartacus by Christ", which shows the trained warrior and the carpenter comparing scars.)

The Roman Catholic Church, which takes more time to turn around than an ocean liner (just ask Francis of Assisi or John XXIII) is not so much a medieval institution as a cautionary example of the perils of success. That Roman fortress, full of climbers, corruption, and holier-than-thou politicians, has almost no relationship to the human problems of the parish priest. The pedophile scandal shows (again!) how easy it is to hide in a bureaucracy. Still, I suspect that the Vatican's study of theology-- and I'm speaking as a believer-- is not entirely a wasted effort. Theology has been an attempt by the human mind to negotiate our understanding of the unreadable Universe we find ourselves in, and if humans look silly trying to parse the meaning of a disaster or whether God worries about our sex lives, whaddya gonna do? There are some howlers in old Psychology and Physics textbooks as well.

Generational Touchstones: "Which Side Are You On"?

Elegant Wits and Grand Horizontals, an entertaining book by Cornelia Otis Skinner about "La Belle Epoque" of Paris in the 1890s, notes that duels in that era had been comic opera affairs, with duels fought over journalists' reputations, whether Sarah Bernhardt was slender or skeletal or whether Hamlet should be blonde or brunette. It was the Dreyfuss Affair, when Captain Alfred Dreyfuss was falsely accused of treason and sentenced to life on Devil's Island that "split the nation into two warring camps breaking up lifelong friendships and causing bitter family rifts that were hardly healed before the outbreak of the First World War." The split went far beyond whether Dreyfuss was innocent or guilty, beyond anti-Semitism and chauvinism and the divisions of "left" and "right" in France and extended into personal awareness of where one stood in the world.

In this country, there were defining splits between those who volunteered to fight the fascists in Spain and those who called them "prematurely anti-fascist" in the 1950s, right-wing code for a Communist sympathizer. The left itself split over Stalin's perversion of Marxism and the non-aggression pact between the Soviets and the Nazis, proving that conservatives don't have a monopoly on turning a blind eye to atrocity.

My own generation, lucky, feckless bastards, too young for Vietnam and too old for Iraq, had no greater moral choice than whether they dropped acid during their cousin's wedding in the seventies or embraced cocaine and designer jeans in the eighties, whether they voted for Reagan or thought Oliver North should be in jail. Of the great temptations of easy sex or recreational drugs and our last two presidents, one was a poor boy who chased tail and didn't inhale, and the other a rich boy who spent his salad years getting high. I leave it to the reader which pursuit was more destructive of the body politic.

I suspect that the current culture war might one day be divided between those who embrace advertising and consumerism, and the wars for oil, exploitation of labor and media manipulation that make that world view possible, and those who still dream of making a better world in empirical fact and not just rhetoric. In the swirl and confusion it is difficult to articulate these divisions, but we know by instinct the real turtle and the mock.

Huxley's Brave New World, with its masses directed by "feelies" and "soma", may have been even nearer the mark than Orwell. Call it the difference between those who drink the Kool-aid willingly and those who can take it or leave it alone. Which side are you on?

Turdblossom, Meet the Original "Shit in a Silk Stocking"

Whenever I am tempted to despair at the worldly success of men like Karl Rove, I shall remind myself that President Bush's beloved "Turdblossom" is only at the top of the heap for a few months more, 657 days at this counting. Thoreau tells us to "read not the times, but the eternities", and a look at the career of the 19th century diplomat Talleyrand shows us that the Bush minions are mere amateurs, and failed amateurs at that, when it comes to kissing up to power, squeezing out the profits, then dropping your patron like a used wrapper and ducking out the back door a moment before the cops arrive. An excellent profile of Talleyrand here at The New Criterion inspired these reflections.

Rove is despised by two-thirds of the country, and hangs on to power only by the indulgence of his boss and staying a step ahead of the hounds. Talleyrand, by comparison, kept the mass of men bamboozled as to his true motives, and even on the occasions when he had to skip town, never missed a meal or a paycheck-- then switched sides and was back in business with the same people who'd been calling for his head.

Napoleon called him "shit in a silk stocking", which outdoes "Turdblossom" as a lasting sobriquet. Talleyrand could take a bite out of your donut and be wiping the powdered sugar from his lips while asking with a straight face, "Donut? What donut?"

He did get off some good lines about power, politics and human nature:

"War is too serious to be left to military men."

"They [the aristocracy] remember everything and learn nothing."


Apt to our purpose today, "I am more afraid of an army of 100 sheep led by a lion than an army of 100 lions led by a sheep."

and out-Roving Rove, “Since the masses are always eager to believe something, for their benefit nothing is so easy to arrange as facts.”

... But never forget he was a shitheel, through and through, who got a lot of other people killed and profited enormously to the end of his days. He died in bed aged eighty-three, still collecting paychecks from both sides. Like Meyer Lansky, Talleyrand was a successful gangster, unlike the flashier failures like Capone and Napoleon, who both made headlines but died in prison with the clap.

I Miss Eleanor Roosevelt Tonight

Isn't there a German phrase that means homesickness for a place you've never been? I miss Eleanor Roosevelt tonight. Her column, "My Day" appeared in hundreds of newspapers and apparently Max Gaines (father of William Gaines, later to become publisher of EC and MAD) wrote her and asked if she would like to write something for the comics. It was a young medium with a lot of chutzpah. She turned him down, but sent this statement instead.
She visited Appalachia and paid attention to what the children were wearing. She shook hands with a black man. When she inspected hospitals during the war, she spent a 12 hour day and visited with every wounded soldier. She visited prisons. Once when she was at a federal penitentary in Baltimore, FDR asked where Eleanor was. “She’s in prison,” he was told. “I’m not surprised,” FDR said. “But what for?”
In 1958, when she was 74, the Ku Klux Klan announced a $25,000 bounty on her head. She'd been invited to teach non-violent civil disobedience for a civil-rights workshop at a school in Tennessee. There was no Secret Service or police escort, and the FBI told her they couldn't protect her. So she and another old white lady, aged 71, drove through the night with a loaded pistol on the car seat between them. There are times when you can get much farther with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word alone. This wasn't just FDR's widow, this was Theodore Roosevelt's niece, after all, and hadn't she told the children to train themselves in honesty, self reliance, and the ability to meet any situation?

Max Gaines died in 1947 in a boating accident. He was credited with saving a boy's life when he threw his friend's son behind him just as they were struck by another boat.

How Can I Think, With a Mind Full of Monkeys with Blue Faces?

I've never seen these jumping monkeys from Thera before, but I know them well. Thera was an island that exploded around 1600 BC, in a volcanic blast four or five times larger than Krakatoa. The Therans must have evacuated after a series of warning earthquakes-- no one's ever found any bodies or small possessions under the ash-- but the tsunamis would have followed them and probably wiped out the Minoan culture on Crete and the surrounding islands. Krakatoa produced tsunamis at least 100 feet high that killed more than 30,000 people, and I don't want to think about the wall of water after the explosion on Thera.

They call it Santorini nowadays, southeast of Greece and about 75 km north of Crete. Nine hundred years later, Plato describes the islands of Atlantis as a series of concentric circles, which fits the circular archipelago and caldera at Santorini today.

There's a phrase that plays in my head from Logan Pearsall Smith whenever I can't write, can't draw, and can't get anything done except pick and worry over my failures like a monkey looking for fleas. The mind is a monkey, as the Buddhists say, the monkey being "the animal with a thousand hands", always grabbing, never satisfied, and never accomplishing anything because of its short attention span.
"What do I think?" I evasively echoed, and then, carried away by the profound and melancholy interest of this question: "Think?" I queried, "do I ever really think? Is there anything inside me but cotton wool? How can I, with a mind full of grey monkeys with blue faces, call myself a Thinker?"
All Trivia, by Logan Pearsall Smith, 1902.

The Happy Death of Children

I'm reading Mozart's Women by Jane Glover, and came across this letter by his father Leopold, describing his daughter's fight with intestinal typhoid: "Whover could have listened to the conversations which we three, my wife, myself and my daughter, had on several evenings, during which we convinced her of the vanity of this world and the happy death of children, would not have heard it without tears." Maria Anna survived, living to be 79-- but at least five other Mozart children died in infancy. Has anyone done any research on the theology taught to chldren during an era of high mortality? In our age, a child's first experience with death is often that of an elderly relative, but in the 18th century it seems more of them would be exposed to the loss of playmates and their younger brothers and sisters. How much of what the parents told them, about littlest angels and tender souls too good to live, was passed on for the parent's comfort and how much to comfort a frightened child? "If I should die before I wake..."

Jefferson's Koran

Radio talk show bigots, Congressman Moore from Virginia and-- to CNN's eternal shame-- Glenn Beck all threw a hissy fit because Congressman Keith Ellison of Minnesota wanted to take the oath of office with his hand on the Koran.

This controversy is nonsense, manufactured smoke and fury to create a controversy where none exists. The sixth article of the Consttution clearly states that there can be no religious test for holding office in the United States. Congressmen en masse raise their right hands and swear to defend the Constitution without any books at all-- their courtroom pose, with their left hand on a sacred book of some kind, is generally an after-the-oath photo opportunity. John Adams himself placed his hand on a law book instead of a Bible. I'm not sure what I would use-- The Once and Future King? A copy of Rumi? Walden? I Go Pogo?

So hurrah to Congressman Ellison for coming up with a bit of political jiu-jitsu that shames the bigots: he asked the Library of Congress to borrow Thomas Jefferson's personal copy of the Koran. The 1734 translation by George Sale was the first English translation of the Koran directly from Arabic. It was one of the books purchased from Jefferson to replace those burned by the British during the War of 1812.

Virgil Goode told Fox News "I wish more people would take a stand and stand up for the principles on which this country was founded." Goode represents Albemarle County in Virginia, the birthplace of Thomas Jefferson.