Tragos

Sloth and Heathen Folly

2007-05-29T10:03:00.000-07:00

Take up the White Man's burden--
The savage wars of peace--
Fill full the mouth of Famine,
And bid the sickness cease;
And when your goal is nearest
(The end for others sought)
Watch sloth and heathen folly
Bring all your hope to nought.

-- Kipling

I've inserted below an excerpt from an excerpt from Glenn Greenwald, in response to Tony Blair's bewilderment as to why Iraqis might not be entirely thrilled about the current occupation. This is also a good response to Bush's bewilderment about the lack of "gratitude" expressed by the people of that country. The passage cited here is from Lord Frederick Lugard:

Let it be admitted at the outset that European brains, capital, and energy have not been, and never will be, expended in developing the resources of Africa from motives of pure philanthropy that Europe is in Africa for the mutual benefit of her own industrial classes, and of the native races in their progress to a higher plane; that the benefit can be made reciprocal, and that it is the aim and desire of civilised administration to fulfil this dual mandate.

By railways and roads, by reclamation of swamps and irrigation of deserts, and by a system of fair trade and competition, we have added to the prosperity and wealth of these lands, and checked famine and disease. We have put an end to the awful misery of the slave-trade and inter-tribal war, to human sacrifice and the ordeals of the witch-doctor. Where these things survive they are severely suppressed. We are endeavouring to teach the native races to conduct their own affairs with justice and humanity, and to educate them alike in letters and in industry . . . .

As Roman imperialism laid the foundations of modern civilisation, and led the wild barbarians of these islands along the path of progress, so in Africa to-day we are repaying debt, and bringing to the dark places of the earth, the abode, of barbarism and cruelty, the torch of culture and progress, while ministering to the material needs of our own civilisation...

Towards the common goal each will advance by the methods most consonant with its national genius. British methods have not perhaps in all cases produced ideal results, but I am profoundly convinced that there can be no question but that British rule has promoted the happiness and welfare of the primitive races. Let those who question it examine the results impartially.

If there is unrest, and a desire for independence, as in India and Egypt, it is because we have taught the value of liberty and freedom, which for centuries these peoples had not known. Their very discontent is measure of their progress.

We hold these countries because it is the genius of our race to colonise, to trade, and to govern. The task in which England is engaged in the tropics--alike in Africa and in the East--has become Part Of her tradition, and she has ever given of her best in the cause of liberty and civilisation.

So, that's obnoxious enough on its own. What I find more interesting, however, is how Lord Lugard seems to be quoting (or at least paraphrasing or plagiarizing) from, of all the ironic choices, Joseph Conrad:

"And this also," said Marlow suddenly, "has been one of the dark places of the earth"...

His remark did not seem at all surprising. It was just like Marlow. It was accepted in silence. No one took the trouble to grunt even; and presently he said, very slow--"I was thinking of very old times, when the Romans first came here, nineteen hundred years ago--the other day. . . . Light came out of this river since--you say Knights? Yes; but it is like a running blaze on a plain, like a flash of lightning in the clouds. We live in the flicker--may it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling! But darkness was here yesterday. Imagine the feelings of a commander of a fine--what d'ye call 'em?--trireme in the Mediterranean, ordered suddenly to the north; run overland across the Gauls in a hurry; put in charge of one of these craft the legionaries--a wonderful lot of handy men they must have been, too--used to build, apparently by the hundred, in a month or two, if we may believe what we read. Imagine him here--the very end of the world, a sea the colour of lead, a sky the colour of smoke, a kind of ship about as rigid as a concertina-- and going up this river with stores, or orders, or what you like. Sand-banks, marshes, forests, savages,--precious little to eat fit for a civilized man, nothing but Thames water to drink. No Falernian wine here, no going ashore. Here and there a military camp lost in a wilderness, like a needle in a bundle of hay--cold, fog, tempests, disease, exile, and death--death skulking in the air, in the water, in the bush. They must have been dying like flies here. Oh, yes--he did it. Did it very well, too, no doubt, and without thinking much about it either, except afterwards to brag of what he had gone through in his time, perhaps. They were men enough to face the darkness. And perhaps he was cheered by keeping his eye on a chance of promotion to the fleet at Ravenna by and by, if he had good friends in Rome and survived the awful climate. Or think of a decent young citizen in a toga--perhaps too much dice, you know--coming out here in the train of some prefect, or tax-gatherer, or trader even, to mend his fortunes. Land in a swamp, march through the woods, and in some inland post feel the savagery, the utter savagery, had closed round him--all that mysterious life of the wilderness that stirs in the forest, in the jungles, in the hearts of wild men. There's no initiation either into such mysteries. He has to live in the midst of the incomprehensible, which is also detestable. And it has a fascination, too, that goes to work upon him. The fascination of the abomination--you know, imagine the growing regrets, the longing to escape, the powerless disgust, the surrender, the hate."

He paused.

"Mind," he began again, lifting one arm from the elbow, the palm of the hand outwards, so that, with his legs folded before him, he had the pose of a Buddha preaching in European clothes and without a lotus-flower--"Mind, none of us would feel exactly like this. What saves us is efficiency--the devotion to efficiency. But these chaps were not much account, really. They were no colonists; their administration was merely a squeeze, and nothing more, I suspect. They were conquerors, and for that you want only brute force-- nothing to boast of, when you have it, since your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others. They grabbed what they could get for the sake of what was to be got. It was just robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great scale, and men going at it blind--as is very proper for those who tackle a darkness. The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much...

Indeed. Of course, Lugard leaves out the inconvenient bits -- like, for instance, this last sentence. But, overall, the diction is similar enough to make for a compelling source study. Would, though, that Lord Lugard and George Bush had the rhetorical genius of Mr. Kurtz, because then the "peroration" might be "magnificent" enough to take us with them; but these clowns will never be able to lie so well, and none of us are stupid enough anymore to believe in anything like an "exotic Immensity ruled by an august Benevolence." No, instead, we're more likely to associate Halliburton (et al) with the Eldorado Exploring Expedition, whose

talk...was the talk of sordid buccaneers: it was reckless without hardihood, greedy without audacity, and cruel without courage; there was not an atom of foresight or of serious intention in the whole batch of them, and they did not seem aware these things are wanted for the work of the world. To tear treasure out of the bowels of the land was their desire, with no more moral purpose at the back of it than there is in burglars breaking into a safe.

A Question

2007-05-27T13:23:00.000-07:00

As Jonathan Freedland argues, in the New York Review of Books’ "George Bush's Achievement", our disaster of an administration has somehow managed to make San Francisco naïfs and Beltway insiders just and justified bedfellows. It seems that we are left with the question: what can a US citizen do now other than whine, bellow, wince and prepare to vote in 2008? Not only do we have to suffer a President who--as Philip Roth put it--isn't qualified to run a hardware store and who will veto any legislation that might actually save our country, but we also have a Democratic Congress unable to muster the courage to go after a near lame duck with a 28 percent approval rating. In other words, we are witnessing two unalterable, inexorable forces--of mindless power on one hand, and of crabbed poltroonery on the other--achieve a state of moral and political entropy to which no solution is available other than that provided by ourselves as citizens.

Environmentalists have a knack for writing and marketing 10 Things You Can Do lists. Inheritors to Thoreauean dissent might be wise to follow suit. So here we go: What, then, are the ten most effective things that we, as United States citizens, can do to put a stop to a government capsized by a moronic president, cloven-footed vice-president, gutless congress and antiquated constitution? We seek suggestions from near and far. The editorial staff here at Tragos Enterprises promises to compile an official 10-Steps list to be distributed widely in the near future.

Yours in Earnest,

C. Davis Love

Dead Letters, Dead Men: Memorial Day, 2007

2007-05-27T09:39:00.000-07:00

Dead men on the field at Gettysburg -- July, 1863

Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience, then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right. It is truly enough said that a corporation has no conscience; but a corporation of conscientious men is a corporation with a conscience. Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice. A common and natural result of an undue respect for law is, that you may see a file of soldiers, colonel, captain, corporal, privates, powder-monkeys, and all, marching in admirable order over hill and dale to the wars, against their wills, ay, against their common sense and consciences, which makes it very steep marching indeed, and produces a palpitation of the heart. They have no doubt that it is a damnable business in which they are concerned; they are all peaceably inclined. Now, what are they? Men at all? or small movable forts and magazines, at the service of some unscrupulous man in power?

-- Thoreau, Civil Disobedience

Ye are our epistle written in our hearts, known and read of all men: forasmuch as ye are manifestly declared to be the epistle of Christ ministered by us, written not with ink, but with the Spirit of the living God; not in tables of stone, but in fleshly tables of the heart.

And such trust have we through Christ to God-ward: not that we are sufficient of ourselves to think any thing as of ourselves; but our sufficiency is of God; who also hath made us able ministers of the new testament; not of the letter, but of the spirit: for the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life.

-- 2 Corinthians 3:2-6

As of today, the day before Memorial Day, the "war" in Iraq has claimed the lives of close to 4,000 men and women of the "coalition." Of these, nearly 3,500 are Americans (and 1,000 of these Americans have died in the last 12 months alone). The number of wounded is well into the tens of thousands, and the number of Iraqis, civilians, soldiers, and everything in between, is unthinkably high -- which is probably why the U.S. doesn't bother to count them. An approximate figure for the Iraqi dead, along with good statistics on American and coalition casualties, and links to wire reports confirming the numbers, can be found here.

As we noted, among the recent casualties was Lieutenant Andrew Bacevich, son of Professor Andrew Bacevich of Boston University. In today's Washington Post, Bacevich has written a powerful column, which bristles with honesty and, that truly invaluable and often invisible thing, the truth. As one blogger puts it, Bacevich's piece is "the equivalent of a hard blow to the solar plexus. It's hard even to catch your breath when you read it." Bacevich begins by recalling letters he has received -- letters blaming him for his son's death. The rationale for these accusations has become well established -- dissent, in this view, equals treason, in the form of giving "aid and comfort to the enemy":

Among the hundreds of messages that my wife and I have received, two bore directly on this question. Both held me personally culpable, insisting that my public opposition to the war had provided aid and comfort to the enemy. Each said that my son's death came as a direct result of my antiwar writings.

This may seem a vile accusation to lay against a grieving father. But in fact, it has become a staple of American political discourse, repeated endlessly by those keen to allow President Bush a free hand in waging his war. By encouraging "the terrorists," opponents of the Iraq conflict increase the risk to U.S. troops. Although the First Amendment protects antiwar critics from being tried for treason, it provides no protection for the hardly less serious charge of failing to support the troops -- today's civic equivalent of dereliction of duty.

The duty is to fall in lockstep with the discourse of the dominant culture, which, in this case, is a requirement to remain silent. The "proper" course of action, especially on the day before Memorial Day, is to "memorialize," or, as William Spanos puts it, in his reading of Melville's critique of this very same ideological problem, to "monumentalize." As the reliably repulsive Jules Crittenden says of Bacevich:

I don’t know what Bacevich’s son thought about this war, but he enlisted and became an officer after it began. Rather than honor his son’s choice and its consequences, Bacevich has decided his son was duped by a fraud that is called the United States of America.

According to Crittenden (and his insufferable ilk), the only allowable speech is the speech of reverence, which is a form of what Spanos calls "docility" -- and what Thoreau means by "undue respect for law." This drive to "fall in line" follows what is in Spanos's view the "will to monumentalize the American past," which manifests itself in an "obsessive effort to annul -- to silence -- the ambiguities that would undermine its authority -- and the national consensus on which it relies." Bacevich refuses to fall into this monumentalization, even (and perhaps especially) in the context of his son's tragic death -- one more at the hands of the "unscrupulous man in power." Instead, he thoughtfully considers "the ambiguities" of what "duty" means, and the ambiguities of the position, as father to a son who fought in a war the father opposed (in perhaps an odd reversal of the standard Viet Nam narrative), in which he found himself:

What exactly is a father's duty when his son is sent into harm's way?

Among the many ways to answer that question, mine was this one: As my son was doing his utmost to be a good soldier, I strove to be a good citizen.

And this "duty," as he found it, was to speak and write as clearly as he could to articulate his opposition to the dominant discourse, which has been saying for some time that military force may be used to remake the world in the image of America, and that what we have is a "long war" that is not only unavoidable but "winnable." Bacevich strenuously disagrees with those who propagate these views:

I believe that such notions are dead wrong and doomed to fail. In books, articles and op-ed pieces, in talks to audiences large and small, I have said as much. "The long war is an unwinnable one," I wrote in this section of The Washington Post in August 2005. "The United States needs to liquidate its presence in Iraq, placing the onus on Iraqis to decide their fate and creating the space for other regional powers to assist in brokering a political settlement. We've done all that we can do."

Not for a second did I expect my own efforts to make a difference. But I did nurse the hope that my voice might combine with those of others -- teachers, writers, activists and ordinary folks -- to educate the public about the folly of the course on which the nation has embarked. I hoped that those efforts might produce a political climate conducive to change. I genuinely believed that if the people spoke, our leaders in Washington would listen and respond.

This, I can now see, was an illusion.

What Bacevich laments here is the situation of the dead letter, the message that doesn't get through. Bacevich has been a rare commodity, a truth-teller, and as Melville knew as well as anyone, the truth is rarely well-received. Melville advocated a "ruthless democracy," something we would know little about, mainly because the idea, as he wrote to Hawthorne, is "ridiculous to men":

So, when you see or hear of my ruthless democracy on all sides, you may possibly feel a touch of a shrink, or something of that sort. It is but nature to be shy of a mortal who boldly declares that a thief in jail is as honorable a personage as Gen. George Washington. This is ludicrous. But Truth is the silliest thing under the sun. Try to get a living by the Truth -- and go to the Soup Societies. Heavens! Let any clergyman try to preach the Truth from its very stronghold, the pulpit, and they would ride him out of his church on his own pulpit bannister. It can hardly be doubted that all Reformers are bottomed upon the truth, more or less; and to the world at large are not reformers almost universally laughingstocks? Why so? Truth is ridiculous to men.

Perhaps the central problem with "the Truth" is that it is often riddled with contradiction, with ambiguity and difficulty. Spanos, a nearly devout Heideggerian (if such a phrase is permissible), suggests the truth is like the Heideggerian "nothing," with which the world will have "nothing to do." Bacevich, so far as I can tell, would probably have little or nothing to do with Heidegger, but he does seem to feel that all his writing has been for nought, that he "was doing nothing":

In joining the Army, my son was following in his father's footsteps: Before he was born, I had served in Vietnam. As military officers, we shared an ironic kinship of sorts, each of us demonstrating a peculiar knack for picking the wrong war at the wrong time. Yet he was the better soldier -- brave and steadfast and irrepressible.

I know that my son did his best to serve our country. Through my own opposition to a profoundly misguided war, I thought I was doing the same. In fact, while he was giving his all, I was doing nothing. In this way, I failed him.

How could he feel otherwise? But we will have to disagree. Bacevich has been, of course, doing something very serious and very honorable, doing his best for both his son and the rest of us by speaking the truth to power, doing what Melville said Hawthorne did: "he says NO! in thunder." And Bacevich does so, perhaps more than anywhere else, in this piece. The message may fail if the recipient will not receive it, but the sender has nonetheless upheld his end of the deal, has done what he can to fulfill his duty to himself and to others. The tragedy arises from the recipient who returns the letter unopened. Congress, even under the control of the Democrats, supposedly elected to listen to the reason emanating from the likes of Bacevich and, indeed, a majority of the American people, did just that, returned our collective letter unopened, when it capitulated again to the President, allowing for a continuation of war without end in Iraq. In response to this, Bacevich does not offer empty talking points or expedient and local critique; instead, he goes right to the heart of the matter, identifying the structural problem beneath the veneer, what Spanos calls "the dark underside of -- the shadow that belongs to -- the luminously white truth discourse of America." Here is Bacevich:

The people have spoken, and nothing of substance has changed. The November 2006 midterm elections signified an unambiguous repudiation of the policies that landed us in our present predicament. But half a year later, the war continues, with no end in sight. Indeed, by sending more troops to Iraq (and by extending the tours of those, like my son, who were already there), Bush has signaled his complete disregard for what was once quaintly referred to as "the will of the people."

To be fair, responsibility for the war's continuation now rests no less with the Democrats who control Congress than with the president and his party. After my son's death, my state's senators, Edward M. Kennedy and John F. Kerry, telephoned to express their condolences. Stephen F. Lynch, our congressman, attended my son's wake. Kerry was present for the funeral Mass. My family and I greatly appreciated such gestures. But when I suggested to each of them the necessity of ending the war, I got the brushoff. More accurately, after ever so briefly pretending to listen, each treated me to a convoluted explanation that said in essence: Don't blame me.

To whom do Kennedy, Kerry and Lynch listen? We know the answer: to the same people who have the ear of George W. Bush and Karl Rove -- namely, wealthy individuals and institutions.

Money buys access and influence. Money greases the process that will yield us a new president in 2008. When it comes to Iraq, money ensures that the concerns of big business, big oil, bellicose evangelicals and Middle East allies gain a hearing. By comparison, the lives of U.S. soldiers figure as an afterthought.

Memorial Day orators will say that a G.I.'s life is priceless. Don't believe it. I know what value the U.S. government assigns to a soldier's life: I've been handed the check. It's roughly what the Yankees will pay Roger Clemens per inning once he starts pitching next month.

Money maintains the Republican/Democratic duopoly of trivialized politics. It confines the debate over U.S. policy to well-hewn channels. It preserves intact the cliches of 1933-45 about isolationism, appeasement and the nation's call to "global leadership." It inhibits any serious accounting of exactly how much our misadventure in Iraq is costing. It ignores completely the question of who actually pays. It negates democracy, rendering free speech little more than a means of recording dissent.

This is not some great conspiracy. It's the way our system works.

The corrupted structure of our institutions negates democracy itself. This is how the Law erases the people for whom it supposedly exists. The Law rejects the letters sent to it -- letters sent in the name of Justice. Just ask Kafka, whose famous supplicant spent his life in devout docility before the law, only to have the door slammed in his face as he died. So what are the options? We are either reduced to silence or continue shouting -- or writing -- into a seemingly indifferent void. I believe (and I hope) that Bacevich is not like Melville's Pierre, who is turned to stone (as his name suggests) by the state of a world which rejects him (and which he rejects), but like Melville himself, even (or perhaps especially) if he becomes like the "exhausted Melville" Frederick Busch has described:

And so we come to the exhausted Melville of 1852. He begins to speak -- it is nearly impossible, still, for him to be silent -- of what obsesses him: the failure of crucial messages to get through.

Bacevich's message is crucial, yet, currently, the message as message fails to get through. The repeated failure of the message, then, may be seen to become something else -- the message of the undelivered message, the message of the failure of messages. At the end of Bartleby, the narrator laments the sad story of his former copyist, as he hears it through some unidentified source, long after the fact. Bartleby, he has heard, was once a clerk in the "Dead Letter Office at Washington." It is surely significant that these letters are not only dead, but dead in Washington, just as the voice of the people, in the form of our votes and writings, seems to likewise be dead on arrival in that city. The Law kills letters as vehicles of meaning, or, in a different register, vehicles of spirit. Letters as written documents are reduced to individual letters, material things devoid of significance, just as Bacevich notes that "free speech" is reduced to a "means of recording dissent," as opposed to a cause from which we might expect an effect. These letters, meant to convey something, end up conveying nothing, and thus lose their value as messages:

Dead letters! does it not sound like dead men? Conceive a man by nature and misfortune prone to a pallid hopelessness, can any business seem more fitted to heighten it than that of continually handling these dead letters, and assorting them for the flames? For by the cart-load they are annually burned. Sometimes from out the folded paper the pale clerk takes a ring -- the finger it was meant for, perhaps, moulders in the grave; a bank-note sent in swiftest charity -- he whom it would relieve, nor eats nor hungers any more; pardon for those who died despairing; hope for those who died unhoping; good tidings for those who died stifled by unrelieved calamities. On errands of life, these letters speed to death.

Melville wrote this two years after Moby-Dick sank like the Pequod itself. Moby-Dick was itself a dead-letter, delivered by a poet-prophet who takes on, among his other guises, the voice of the messengers from the Book of Job: "And I only am escaped alone to tell thee." But to tell whom? It was to tell us, whoever we were then; Melville was a prophet for America, whose variously formed admonitions could have served, in their way, as a potent series of arguments not only against the political atrocities of his own day, but of ours. His messages, even today, have a hard time getting through to anyone -- but they are still here, still in circulation. And Bacevich, who writes and speaks the truth, sends out similar messages.

This Memorial Day we lament the thousands of senselessly murdered human beings in Iraq and in our own country. Lt. Bacevich, so long as we can remember him rightly, not simply as material -- as neither what Tim O'Brien called "some small bit of rectitude...salvaged from the larger waste," nor the stuff out of which we monumentalize our ambiguous history -- but as an emblem of the ongoing pursuit of Justice over expediency, can be reincorporated into the letters we send as spirit. Such letters are never dead.

Another Diabolical Plot Foiled

2007-05-23T14:56:00.000-07:00

This time, the intrepid crusaders protecting our "freedom" have nabbed Rafiq Abdus Sabir, a physician from New York, who supposedly "agreed to treat al-Qaida fighters." Leaving aside the fact that, according to the Hippocratic Oath, a physician is required to treat, in the memorable phraseology of Major Kong, "ever' last one of you, regardless of your race, color, or your creed," there are other troubling details in this case. As I've mentioned in various other contexts, I'm no expert -- but this situation sounds a lot like entrapment. The FBI invented the crime here, devised the conspiracy out of thin air; and what a conspiracy it was: a doctor agreeing to treat patients. Now, this Doctor Sabir is clearly no candidate for the cast of ER. He has problems and probably objectionable politics. But like so many other "terrorism" cases, this one doesn't seem to be all that terrifying. Which Americans, precisely, was this terrorist going to kill? And which "al-Qaida fighters," precisely, was he going to treat anyway? (And, we should remember, whoever this "al-Qaida" is, it is not the same group that devised the 9/11 attacks -- but who's counting?) This whole thing is absurd. Now he faces 30 years in prison. It's no wonder that, "When the verdict was read, Sabir looked straight ahead." That little couplet sums up the options for a man who just had his life erased by the Law.

Now, I don't know which is more disturbing: this obvious case of entrapment, or the fact that a Google News search on the terms "Rafiq Abdus Sabir entrapment" comes up today with zero results.

There's your War on Terrorism on a stick.

Whales in the News

2007-05-21T14:43:00.000-07:00

And thus, though surrounded by circle upon circle of consternations and affrights, did these inscrutable creatures at the centre freely and fearlessly indulge in all peaceful concernments; yes, serenely revelled in dalliance and delight. But even so, amid the tornadoed Atlantic of my being, do I myself still for ever centrally disport in mute calm; and while ponderous planets of unwaning woe revolve round me, deep down and deep inland there I still bathe me in eternal mildness of joy.

-- Melville, Moby-Dick (Chapter 87: "The Grand Armada")

Zachary Williams, 9, a visitor on Sunday who claimed his father has been “obsessed” with the whales, seemed unimpressed. “I could be watching this on TV right now,” he said.

Courtney Williams, 11, Zachary’s sister, conceded that she might have made other plans for the day: “I could be shopping at the mall and getting my nails done.”

But their father, Greg Williams, 43, said, “They don’t know yet how cool this is. I told them it may seem boring now, but 20 years down the road, they’ll be able to say, ‘I saw the whales.’”

-- New York Times, 21 May 2007

Ishmael's meditation is prompted by the vision at the inner sanctum of The Grand Armada, a pod of whales by which the whale hunters have been encircled. The inner ring consists of what Ishmael calls "the women and children of this routed host," and the strange tranquility of the scene, amidst the carnage of the whale hunt, inspires a kind of wonder in the whaleman; and the chapter, placed as it is amidst the carnage of the novel, inspires a similar feeling in the reader.

Ishmael says, "Some of the subtlest secrets of the seas seemed divulged to us in this enchanted pond," and as they gaze into the pool they are themselves enchanted, stunned into an entirely unprofitable state of inaction. The whales approach the boat as if unafraid, entering into a relation uncommonly found between whales and whalers. Ishmael wonders at the causes of this domesticity, and records the unusual interaction of predator with prey:

Now, inclusive of the occasional wide intervals between the revolving outer circles, and inclusive of the spaces between the various pods in any one of those circles, the entire area at this juncture, embraced by the whole multitude, must have contained at least two or three square miles. At any rate- though indeed such a test at such a time might be deceptive- spoutings might be discovered from our low boat that seemed playing up almost from the rim of the horizon. I mention this circumstance, because, as if the cows and calves had been purposely locked up in this innermost fold; and as if the wide extent of the herd had hitherto prevented them from learning the precise cause of its stopping; or, possibly, being so young, unsophisticated, and every way innocent and inexperienced; however it may have been, these smaller whales- now and then visiting our becalmed boat from the margin of the lake- evinced a wondrous fearlessness and confidence, or else a still becharmed panic which it was impossible not to marvel at. Like household dogs they came snuffing round us, right up to our gunwales, and touching them; till it almost seemed that some spell had suddenly domesticated them. Queequeg patted their foreheads; Starbuck scratched their backs with his lance; but fearful of the consequences, for the time refrained from darting it.

It is a rare moment in the novel, and in the "fishery" at large, when a whaleman refrains from "darting it." Indeed, a few chapters later, the second mate Stubb will abandon a human being overboard before giving up the chase. To the black deckhand Pip, who will, against explicit instructions, jump from the boat and be left behind, Stubb offers a business-minded warning:

Stubb suddenly dropped all advice, and concluded with a peremptory command "Stick to the boat, Pip, or by the Lord, I won't pick you up if you jump; mind that. We can't afford to lose whales by the likes of you; a whale would sell for thirty times what you would, Pip, in Alabama. Bear that in mind, and don't jump any more." Hereby perhaps Stubb indirectly hinted, that though man loved his fellow, yet man is a money-making animal, which propensity too often interferes with his benevolence.

Among other things, Moby-Dick is an extended meditation on this "interference." In another scene, Melville turns himself up to eleven to paint a most horrifying picture of American capitalism, one which threatens to devour everything in its path, and, in the process, burn itself up from the inside. The chapter is called "The Try-Works," and the action is the burning of the body of the whale, boiling it down into oil. The scene condenses the multiple forms of violence in the novel into a single, all-consuming explosion, right in the center of the ship, which plows on indifferently into the “blackness." Before the fire dance the "Tartarean shapes of the pagan harpooneers":

As they narrated to each other their unholy adventures, their tales of terror told in words of mirth; as their uncivilized laughter forked upwards out of them, like the flames from the furnace; as to and fro, in their front, the harpooneers wildly gesticulated with their huge pronged forks and dippers; as the wind howled on, and the sea leaped, and the ship groaned and dived, and yet steadfastly shot her red hell further and further into the blackness of the sea and the night, and scornfully champed the white bone in her mouth, and viciously spat round her on all sides; then the rushing Pequod, freighted with savages, and laden with fire, and burning a corpse, and plunging into that blackness of darkness, seemed the material counterpart of her monomaniac commander's soul.

To emphasize the omnivorous consumption of the whale-ship, and the potentially autocannibalistic nature of imperial capitalism, Ishmael points that the whale burns by his own fuel, over a fire fed with the same body that boils in the pot:

Like a plethoric burning martyr, or a self-consuming misanthrope, once ignited, the whale supplies his own fuel and burns by his own body. Would that he consumed his own smoke! for his smoke is horrible to inhale, and inhale it you must, and not only that, but you must live in it for the time. It has an unspeakable, wild, Hindoo odor about it, such as may lurk in the vicinity of funereal pyres. It smells like the left wing of the day of judgment; it is an argument for the pit.

The body of the whale suffers the violence of the profit principle. Both pre- and post-mortem, the body is slashed and torn, dismembered and ultimately distilled to a liquid "to fill men's lamp feeders." I think of all this today, as currently dozens of human bodies a day are scorched and destroyed, and barrels of human blood poured into the desert for something that at least has something to do with the price of oil, because once again we are reminded of the blood behind the commodity by the wounds of a whale. For the second time in recent months, wayward whales have wandered up river: first, a lone whale in the East River, lingering near that putrid, festering wound in Long Island called the Gowanus Canal; and now, a cow and calf -- the women and children of a routed host -- ninety miles off course, swimming in the "fresh" water of the Sacramento River. These whales are wounded, gashed by propeller blades, which may have had something to do with their disorientation. Nobody knows, of course, what these whales may be thinking:

“We don’t know why they came up the river, or why they are moving down,” Ms. Fees said. She later added, “As you can see, they are making their own decisions, and we are just trying to keep up with them.”

Ishmael, in the course of his cetological investigations, speculates about the strange and unpredictable movements of traumatized whales:

It may be but an idle whim, but it has always seemed to me, that the extraordinary vacillations of movement displayed by some whales when beset by three or four boats; the timidity and liability to queer frights, so common to such whales; I think that all this indirectly proceeds from the helpless perplexity of volition, in which their divided and diametrically opposite powers of vision must involve them.

The whale is thus beset by two problems: the men who hunt her, and her eyes which do not allow her to see like a man. The whale, confronted with mankind -- that species, "Earthlings," that Vonnegut's Billy Pilgrim called "the terrors of the Universe" -- is subject to "queer frights," a "helpless perplexity of volition," and thus "extraordinary vacillations of movement." The Grand Armada strikes wonder in the whalemen because they are not flailing in terror, they are not simply acting the prey to the predator, the product to the consumer. For a brief moment, these whales who sniff and touch the boats, who sort of look at but really look just beyond the men who look at them, force these men to see them as whales, not product, as awe-inspiring, inappropriable otherness, the secret of secrecy itself. This kind of wonder is often inspired by the appearance of the animal in our paths. In Michael Mann's incredible 2004 film Collateral, the entire absurd and bloody human project seems to come to a halt as a coyote, presumably chased from his habitat by human encroachment, encroaches on the human, crossing in front of the cab, which carries inside it a contract killer, and forcing its driver to slam on the brakes. In her poem "The Moose," Elizabeth Bishop distills what I think is the essence of these strange encounters:

Now, it's all right now
even to fall asleep
just as on all those nights.
--Suddenly the bus driver
stops with a jolt,
turns off his lights.

A moose has come out of
the impenetrable wood
and stands there, looms, rather,
in the middle of the road.
It approaches; it sniffs at
the bus's hot hood.

Towering, antlerless,
high as a church,
homely as a house
(or, safe as houses).
A man's voice assures us
"Perfectly harmless. . . ."

Some of the passengers
exclaim in whispers,
childishly, softly,
"Sure are big creatures."
"It's awful plain."
"Look! It's a she!"

Taking her time,
she looks the bus over,
grand, otherworldly.
Why, why do we feel
(we all feel) this sweet
sensation of joy?

But, as with The Grand Armada, this sensation is fleeting, transitory -- almost to the point of nonexistence. The bus drives on:

"Curious creatures,"
says our quiet driver,
rolling his r's.
"Look at that, would you."
Then he shifts gears.
For a moment longer,

by craning backward,
the moose can be seen
on the moonlit macadam;
then there's a dim
smell of moose, an acrid
smell of gasoline.

The animal out of place reminds us that it is really we who are out of place. The wounded body of the whale is the emblem of the wound we inflict on the world. And like the acrid smell of gasoline, the smell of the burning whale is horrifying because it is human. Like the mass burning of battle dead, "it is an argument for the pit."

I'll leave off with one last example of the otherworldly entrance of the animal into our world -- a fine poem by a regular reader, which surely will be forthcoming in a far more reputable publication than this one. The subject of the poem is the discovery in China, a year or two ago, of a fossilized winged dinosaur, which our poet rightly calls, the "Dinobird":

Mei long

1.

twenty inches of sleeping death
the dinobird belonged to
the Liaoning province
before it was empired
belonged
on the day it was burned

head under wing, a
goose spine in full repose
the figure wrought
persistent design
amid tumbling ashy folds

this piece to coal
this piece to bone

today the bird was found

2.

You ask me how it felt to uncover
the fantastic sleeping bird.

A great white shark
circled my boat once.

I could not shut my eyes.

What Cares Ahab?

2007-05-17T08:03:00.000-07:00

Captain Ahab: The Decider

But look ye, the only real owner of anything is its commander...

-- Ahab

In Chapter 109 of Moby-Dick, Starbuck, the so-called conscientious first-mate of the Pequod, confronts the monomaniacal Captain Ahab. The barrels of oil in the hold -- the commodity they are obliged to return to the owners and, as it were, the "American People" -- have begun to leak, and Starbuck suggests they stop the ship to repair the damage and save the precious cargo. Ahab, with downright G.W. Bushian petulance, says, "Fuck the people!" Here is the exchange:

"What will the owners say, sir?"

"Let the owners stand on Nantucket beach and outyell the Typhoons. What cares Ahab? Owners, owners? Thou art always prating to me, Starbuck, about those miserly owners, as if the owners were my conscience. But look ye, the only real owner of anything is its commander; and hark ye, my conscience is in this ship's keel.-- On deck!"

"Captain Ahab," said the reddening mate, moving further into the cabin, with a daring so strangely respectful and cautious that it almost seemed not only every way seeking to avoid the slightest outward manifestation of itself, but within also seemed more than half distrustful of itself; "A better man than I might well pass over in thee what he would quickly enough resent in a younger man; aye, and in a happier, Captain Ahab."

"Devils! Dost thou then so much as dare to critically think of me?-- On deck!"

"Nay, sir, not yet; I do entreat. And I do dare, sir- to be forbearing! Shall we not understand each other better than hitherto, Captain Ahab?"

Ahab seized a loaded musket from the rack (forming part of most South-Sea-men's cabin furniture), and pointing it towards Starbuck, exclaimed: "There is one God that is Lord over the earth, and one Captain that is lord over the Pequod.-- On deck!"

For an instant in the flashing eyes of the mate, and his fiery cheeks, you would have almost thought that he had really received the blaze of the levelled tube. But, mastering his emotion, he half calmly rose, and as he quitted the cabin, paused for an instant and said: "Thou hast outraged, not insulted me, sir; but for that I ask thee not to beware of Starbuck; thou wouldst but laugh; but let Ahab beware of Ahab; beware of thyself, old man."

I thought of this passage after watching the testimony of former Deputy Attorney General James Comey. His testimony is truly shocking, and must be seen to be believed. I recommend watching the entire video, which is posted at Crooks & Liars.

Comey tells us the following:

1) Bush sent two of his goons to John Ashcroft's hospital room, to compel the Attorney General to abandon his judgement and circumvent the authority of the legally acting Attorney General (Comey, who was sitting right there in the room) to sign off on "a program" (NSA wiretapping), which the DOJ had at this point deemed to be illegal.

2) The wiretapping program evidently included (and, presumably, still includes) far wider-reaching surveillance than that to which the administration has admitted.

3) The administration went ahead and re-authorized the program anyway, over the objections of the DOJ. Allow me to repeat that: Bush and his goons re-authorized a program that was considered illegal by his own Department of Justice -- a department headed not by Harry Reid, Nacy Pelosi, or any other terrorist supporters, but by John Ashcroft.

It goes without saying that all of this should inspire an open democracy with horrified indignation. The behavior is criminal and authoritarian, more proper to cosa nostra than nostra patria. For more thorough and professional analyses of legal issues here, please see the posts by Anonymous Liberal (here and here), Glenn Greenwald (who has done a series of comprehensive posts on this matter), and Marty Lederman. Though it is true that, in the end, Bush and his minions may only end up sinking themselves (Bush beware of Bush), it's best to remember that Ahab, in the end, is not the only one who pays for his transgression. Here's hoping Chuck Schumer has brasser balls than Starbuck.

Out sick? Out of luck.

2007-05-15T13:41:00.000-07:00

Today in the NYT, Bob Herbert on yet another feature of the American workplace that only the well-enough-to-do can well afford to ignore. In case you don't have the subscription service "TimesSelect," the whole column is included below. For more information on the Kennedy-DeLauro bill (The Healthy Families Act) mentioned in Herbert's colum, see this press release. Some important and disturbing facts from the latter:

The Healthy Families Act would guarantee workers seven paid sick days a year. This would benefit 66 million Americans: 46 million would gain access to paid sick days; 19 million would gain paid sick days for leave for doctors’ visits and family care; and 1 million Americans would gain additional paid sick days.
Americans strongly support paid sick days. The vast majority of Americans believe that working men and women deserve time off to balance their work responsibilities with their own, and their families’ medical needs. Unfortunately, too often the reality for American workers falls short of our rhetoric about family values....
Nearly half of American private-sector workers do not have paid sick days. Only one in three has paid sick days for doctors’ appointments.

The need is particularly urgent among lower-wage workers. In the lowest quarter of wage earners, 79 percent of workers have no paid sick days.

And here's Herbert's column:

The Right to Paid Sick Days

By BOB HERBERT

It sounds reasonable: seven paid sick days a year. Why should you have to lose a couple of days pay, or maybe even your job, because you had the misfortune to catch the flu?

And it certainly seems unreasonable to penalize an employee in good standing who misses a day or two of work to care for a child who is ill or has met with a serious accident.

After all, this is the 21st century.

The reality, for a surprising percentage of the U.S. population, is more like the 19th century. Nearly half of all full-time private sector workers in the U.S. get no paid sick days. None. If one of those workers woke up with excruciating pains in his or her chest and had to be rushed to a hospital — well, no pay for that day. For many of these workers, the cost of an illness could be the loss of their job.

The situation is ridiculous for those in the lowest quarter of U.S. wage earners. Nearly 80 percent of those workers — the very ones who can least afford to lose a day’s pay — get no paid sick days at all.

I recently spoke with Bertha Brown, a home health aide who lives in Philadelphia and has two young daughters. She makes $7 an hour caring for people who are ill or disabled. “I feed them and dress them,” she said. “And if they have to be changed, I do all that.”

She has worked for the better part of two decades without ever being paid for a sick day. And her wages are so low she can’t afford to lose even a day’s pay. “If I get sick, I work sick,” she said. “I cover my nose and my mouth with a mask to keep my clients from getting sick.”

Food service workers are among those least likely to get paid sick days. Eighty-six percent get no sick days at all. They show up in the restaurants coughing and sneezing and feverish, and they start preparing and serving meals. You won’t see many of them wearing masks.

There’s an effort under way to change this picture. A growing number of organizations and activists are lining up behind proposed federal legislation that would give most workers the right to seven paid sick days annually to take care of their medical needs or those of their families. The legislation, sponsored by Senator Edward Kennedy and Representative Rosa DeLauro, would require employers with 15 or more workers to provide the sick days.

Among the organizations pushing for paid sick days is the Public Welfare Foundation in Washington, which recently approved a $1 million “special initiative” on the issue. Deborah Leff, the foundation’s president, noted that it’s the poorest workers who most often are forced to choose between going to work sick or losing a day’s pay, and that a disproportionate number of those workers are women — many of them with children.

“At least 145 countries have paid sick days,” said Ms. Leff. “The United States is the only industrialized country lacking such a policy. Our goal is to change that.”

An overwhelming majority of Americans favor paid sick days for full-time workers. One poll showed that 95 percent of workers find it “unacceptable” for employers to deny sick days to workers. But the Kennedy-DeLauro legislation is facing a tough road.

As one might imagine, the industries that would be affected are ice-cold to the idea.

The response of Cracker Barrel Old Country Store to my inquiries on this issue is illustrative. A spokeswoman said in an e-mail message: “Because employees working in the restaurants have flexible schedules, they can schedule doctors’ appointments and other appointments that sick leave and personal time are generally used for at times when they are not working.

“If employees need to miss a shift due to illness, there are generally many opportunities to make up that lost shift later in the week, or the next week.”

That is the kind of workplace policy that prompts Debra Ness, the president of the National Partnership for Women and Families, to note that “for millions of workers, getting sick can mean the beginning of an economic disaster.”

Allowing a worker to recuperate from an illness, or take care of a sick child, without suffering undue economic hardship should be a matter of basic humanity and fundamental decency. It should not be politically controversial in a country that considers itself the most advanced on the face of the earth, and that babbles incessantly about the importance of family values.

Another Fallen Soldier

2007-05-15T09:13:00.000-07:00

Our condolences go out today to Boston University Professor, Andrew Bacevich, whose son Andrew, a First Lieutenant in the U.S. Army, died yesterday as the result of a bombing in Iraq.

Thanks to the "surge" undertaken by the Bush Administration, the death toll for U.S. forces will soon enough reach 4000. This is bad enough on its own. However, as Professor Bacevich -- a West Point graduate, a retired Army Lt. Colonel, and a staunch opponent of the war since its "conception" -- has eloquently argued, no matter how terrible the specific consequences of this ridiculous adventure may become, we must not lose sight of the "pernicious" structural problems that underlie it, specifically the so-called "Bush Doctrine" of "preventive war." This doctrine, which is a close relative to the many ideological impositions described by Naomi Wolf, in the article to which JPL linked below, is entirely insupportable. It is, as Bacevich says, "immoral, illicit, and imprudent," and is a serious affront to American principles and international law. Here is Bacevich, from a March 1st Op-Ed piece, in which he laments the costs already accrued, and warns against the potential costs of allowing such a doctrine to stand as policy:

Today, Iraq teeters on the brink of disintegration. The war's costs, already staggering, continue to mount. Violence triggered by the US invasion has killed thousands of Iraqi civilians. We cannot fully absolve ourselves of responsibility for those deaths.

Our folly has alienated friends and emboldened enemies. Rather than nipping in the bud an ostensibly emerging threat, the Iraq war has diverted attention from existing dangers (such as Al Qaeda) while encouraging potential adversaries (like Iran) to see us as weak.

The remedy to this catastrophic failure lies not in having another go -- a preventive attack against Iran, for example -- but in acknowledging that the Bush Doctrine is inherently pernicious. Our reckless flirtation with preventive war qualifies as not only wrong, but also stupid. Indeed, the Bush Doctrine poses a greater danger to the United States than do the perils it supposedly guards against.

We urgently need to abrogate that doctrine in favor of principles that reflect our true interests and our professed moral values. Here lies an opportunity for Congress to make a difference.

The fifth anniversary of President Bush's West Point speech approaches. Prior to that date, Democratic leaders should offer a binding resolution that makes the following three points: First, the United States categorically renounces preventive war. Second, the United States will henceforth consider armed force to be an instrument of last resort. Third, except in response to a direct attack on the United States, any future use of force will require prior Congressional authorization, as required by the Constitution.

The legislation should state plainly our determination to defend ourselves and our allies. But it should indicate no less plainly that the United States no longer claims the prerogative of using "preemptive, unilateral military force when and where it chooses."

Declaring the Bush Doctrine defunct will not solve the problems posed by Iraq, but it will reduce the likelihood that we will see more Iraqs in our future. By taking such action, Congress will restore its relevance, its badly tarnished honor, and its standing in the eyes of the American people.

Bacevich and his son, unlike the President, both served in the military in combat situations. Now, I've never thought military service ought to be any kind of litmus test for viability as a maker of policy. But the childish snickering and faux-somber tones of admonition that so often accompany Bush's proclamations certainly do make one wish that the current "Commander-in Chief," as he is so fond of calling himself, had at least had some experience in life that would demonstrate to him that this isn't all just some kind of game.

Cash Cow

2007-05-13T15:51:00.000-07:00

With respect to the issues JPL has raised below, I recommend to all of you this video:

As Vonnegut said, this current war is doing nothing but making billionaires out of millionaires, and trillionaires out of billionaires. Viewer beware: the facts and figures you will find here are deeply disturbing.

Later on, I will post some excerpts from a piece I just wrote on Moby-Dick, a novel that's visionary in many ways, but particularly so in its estimation of what the profit principle, given free rein, does to anyone and everything in its path.

Sapere Aude!

2007-05-12T10:02:00.000-07:00

Don't worry be happy was a number one jam; Damn if I say it you can slap me right here...; What we got to say: power to the people no delay; To make everybody see; In order to fight the powers that be....

-- Public Enemy, "Fight the Power" (Fear of a Black Planet)

One of the courses that I have been teaching this semester is "Introduction to Ethical Thinking." A central focus of the course has been the idea that acting ethically -- i.e., rightly -- requires much more than merely correctly responding to what we know about the world; it also requires seeking new knowledge and responding correctly to what we discover. We are responsible for a great deal more than we know. Our actions and failures to act have far-reaching consequences many of which are typically not in direct view, and many of which our culture in particular systematically obscures. Since being aware of these relations of responsibility is a necessary precondition for ethical life, acting rightly requires combating such obscuration. So, "Don't worry, be happy?" No: thus sing sirens. If I say it, slap me right here. Our task instead? "To make everybody see."

One way to begin thinking about this is in terms of the hidden costs of the comforts and practices that we take for granted. The ritual consumption of mass-produced animal products is one such practice, a practice whose hidden costs, in terms of the suffering of sentient creatures, environmental destruction, and long-term economic debilitation, are all but excluded from public view -- and quite deliberately so. (See the introduction to the recent book by Peter Singer and Jim Mason, The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter, overall a highly recommended read.) But what I'm mainly thinking about today is poverty. Below I've pasted Bob Herbert's NYT column from today, which challenges the wealthy to accept Kant's (and Chuck D's) challenge: to dare to know (sapere aude!) on just what their wealth depends.

The Millions Left Out

By BOB HERBERT

The United States may be the richest country in the world, but there are many millions — tens of millions — who are not sharing in that prosperity.

According to the most recent government figures, 37 million Americans are living below the official poverty threshold, which is $19,971 a year for a family of four. That’s one out of every eight Americans, and many of them are children.

More than 90 million Americans, close to a third of the entire population, are struggling to make ends meet on incomes that are less than twice the official poverty line. In my book, they’re poor.

We don’t see poor people on television or in the advertising that surrounds us like a second atmosphere. We don’t pay much attention to the millions of men and women who are changing bedpans, or flipping burgers for the minimum wage, or vacuuming the halls of office buildings at all hours of the night. But they’re there, working hard and getting very little in return.

The number of poor people in America has increased by five million over the past six years, and the gap between rich and poor has grown to historic proportions. The richest one percent of Americans got nearly 20 percent of the nation’s income in 2005, while the poorest 20 percent could collectively garner only a measly 3.4 percent.

A new report from a highly respected task force on poverty put together by the Center for American Progress tells us, “It does not have to be this way.” The task force has made several policy recommendations, and said that if all were adopted poverty in the U.S. could be cut in half over the next decade.

The tremendous number of people in poverty is an enormous drag on the U.S. economy. And one of the biggest problems is the simple fact that so many jobs pay so little that even fulltime, year-round employment is not enough to raise a family out of poverty. One-fifth of the working men in America and 29 percent of working women are in such jobs.

Peter Edelman, a Georgetown law professor who was a co-chairman of the task force, said, “An astonishing number of people are working as hard as they possibly can but are still in poverty or have incomes that are not much above the poverty line.”

So the starting point for lifting people out of poverty should be to see that men and women who are working are adequately compensated for their labor. The task force recommended that the federal minimum wage, now $5.15 an hour, be raised to half the average hourly wage in the U.S., which would bring it to $8.40.

The earned-income tax credit, which has proved very successful in supplementing the earnings of low-wage working families, should be expanded to cover more workers, the task force said. It also recommended expanded coverage of the federal child care tax credit, which is currently $1,000 per child for up to three children.

A crucial component to raising workers out of poverty would be an all-out effort to ensure that workers are allowed to form unions and bargain collectively. As the task force noted, “Among workers in similar jobs, unionized workers have higher pay, higher rates of health coverage, and better benefits than do nonunionized workers.”

In a recent interview about poverty, former Senator John Edwards told me: “Organizing is so important. We have 50 million service economy jobs and we’ll probably have 10 or 15 million more over the next decade. If those jobs are union jobs, they’ll be middle-class families. If not, they’re more likely to live in poverty. It’s that strong.”

The task force made several other recommendations, including proposals to ease access to higher education for poor youngsters, to help former prisoners find employment, to develop a more equitable unemployment compensation system, and to establish housing policies that would make it easier for poor people to move from neighborhoods of concentrated poverty to areas with better employment opportunities and higher-quality public services.

Mr. Edelman, an adviser on social policy in the Clinton administration, stressed that there is no one answer to the problem of poverty, and that in addition to public policy initiatives, it’s important to address the “things people have to do within their own communities to take responsibility for themselves and for each other.”

But he added, “It is unacceptable for this country, which is so wealthy, to have this many people who are left out.”

Why it's OK to use the 'F'-word: some cautionary tales

2007-05-11T11:05:00.000-07:00

Naomi Wolf has written a compelling piece entitled "Fascist America, in 10 Easy Steps" in which she argues that a quick look at twentieth century transformations of democratic systems into dictatorships reveals a pattern that is evident, in nascent but undeniable form, today in the United States. Here is a particularly significant excerpt:

…[M]ost Americans do not realise that since September of last year - when Congress wrongly, foolishly, passed the Military Commissions Act of 2006 - the president has the power to call any US citizen an "enemy combatant". He has the power to define what "enemy combatant" means. The president can also delegate to anyone he chooses in the executive branch the right to define "enemy combatant" any way he or she wants and then seize Americans accordingly.

Even if you or I are American citizens, even if we turn out to be completely innocent of what he has accused us of doing, he has the power to have us seized as we are changing planes at Newark tomorrow, or have us taken with a knock on the door; ship you or me to a navy brig; and keep you or me in isolation, possibly for months, while awaiting trial….

We US citizens will get a trial eventually - for now. But legal rights activists at the Center for Constitutional Rights say that the Bush administration is trying increasingly aggressively to find ways to get around giving even US citizens fair trials. "Enemy combatant" is a status offence - it is not even something you have to have done. "We have absolutely moved over into a preventive detention model - you look like you could do something bad, you might do something bad, so we're going to hold you," says a spokeswoman of the CCR.

Most Americans surely do not get this yet. No wonder: it is hard to believe, even though it is true. In every closing society, at a certain point there are some high-profile arrests - usually of opposition leaders, clergy and journalists. Then everything goes quiet. After those arrests, there are still newspapers, courts, TV and radio, and the facades of a civil society. There just isn't real dissent. There just isn't freedom. If you look at history, just before those arrests is where we are now.

A Hunger Artist

2007-04-24T20:12:00.000-07:00

At the end of Franz Kafka's story, "A Hunger Artist," a starving man decreases in size to the point that he vanishes into the straw bedding of the circus cage in which he has performed his otherwise uninterrupted act. This, in any case, is one way to read it. That is to say: the hunger artist does not die in the story, though the story tempts us to say as much. Thus, too, Kafka's breakthrough story, "The Judgment," which ends when the protagonist leaps off a bridge and

Precisely.

There is today a hunger artist on the steps of the Sudanese Embassy in Washington. Or at least there was on April 14th. Perhaps he's now dead, or if anything just infinitely small. As The Washington Post writes,

...he has no illusions that his lone protest will make a difference. "I'm here because my brothers and sisters are being killed. It's not my responsibility what others do. It's only my responsibility what I do. I can do nothing less in the face of this atrocity." He pauses to swallow his welling tears. "I wish I had thousands of lives to give. But I have mine and this is how I choose to spend it."

What Kafka understood is that the infinitely small embrace everything, and that the sized, the ambitious, consume themselves. A hunger artist is patience, and patience is raw compassion (Mitglied). A hunger artist says, "There is nothing here worth eating."

Bon appetit.

Exhumation

2007-04-17T18:31:00.000-07:00

The Bunker Hill Monument, Charlestown, Massachusetts

In the spirit of disappearing documents and administrative amnesia, I celebrated Patriot’s Day by examining two texts that, conversely, illuminate history by reconsidering and revising official records and autobiography.

We now know that during his testimony on Thursday, Alberto Gonzales will attempt to ease our minds about a series of events that “certainly was not in any way an attempt to mislead the American people.” Thus repentant, he will clarify:

I also recall Mr. Sampson mentioning career prosecutor Deborah Rhodes for San Diego in the event of a vacancy. I do not recall my response or any other discussion. Nor do I recall the timing of when this was raised with me. Although these names were mentioned to me, I do not recall making any decision, either on or before December 7, 2006, about who should replace the U.S. Attorneys who were asked to resign that day.

Naturally. That so many statements like this one have been formulated with the expectation of eliciting anything less than indignation in its audience is a sad commentary on the amount of credit typically given to the American public. We could spend lifetimes attempting to catalogue official efforts to bury all but this country’s didactic history—the slogan, the idol, the anecdote—which Melville, true to form, succeeds in suggesting by dedicating Israel Potter to no less towering an emblem than "His Highness The Bunker-Hill Monument."

That novel, a fictionalized account of one Revolutionary War veteran's actual experiences, relays the hardships of its title character, an American soldier who is captured as a prisoner of war and spends five decades exiled in Britain. Eventually able to return home after so many years of extreme poverty, he meets no traces of family, friends, pension or remembrance.

William Carlos Williams also opted to resurrect real documents and rewrite segments of national history throughout In the American Grain. He finds the source of America's disengagement in lingering Puritanical "seeds" in our psyche, which have always caused individuals to shrink, terrified, before all things immense, whether the "New World" wilderness, religious edicts, or, for later Americans, the "giants" of our own mythology. Giving credence to his own method, he reproaches the tendency to treat history as something that will shatter at the human touch. He criticizes all efforts to “boast of our saving, stabilizing Constitution in dread, as of a glass heart, fiercely aligning ourselves in its defense as if it were something else than a mechanical shift.” Noting the accumulation of references to infinitesimal containment throughout his collection, one begins to believe that, for Williams, the image of the ostensibly liberated but helplessly “huddled masses” must have been the most accurate rendering of a national portrait.

Ever willing to sustain his unrequited love for the “red ribbons and spangles, like upspringing tongues, and sparkles of flame,” Melville's Israel repeatedly demonstrates Williams' concept of self-incarceration. Trapped in Britain, he continues to serve America unofficially, even after “all visions but those of eventual imprisonment or starvation vanished.”

The most explicit ramification of such loyalty occurs during his time as a covert courier between American sympathizers in Britain and an alliance in Paris. Having successfully returned to Britain, messages intact, he is led into temporary hiding in a secluded closet of his host’s mansion. Several days in this solitary confinement pass without word or additional supplies from his caretaker (who, we later learn, has died, along with all living knowledge of Israel’s location), during which “the sense of being masoned up in the wall, grew, and grew, and grew upon him.” With such masonry, Melville sacrifices Israel not merely to the physical terrors of space, but into the historical “origin of the cell” itself. We learn that, upon Israel’s arrival, the host had explained the chamber's prior use by the Templars as a holding cell for dissidents:

A small hole, of the girth of one’s wrist, sunk like a telescope three feet through the masonry into the cell, served at once for ventilation, and to push through food to the prisoner. This hole opening into the chapel also enabled the poor solitaire, as intended, to overhear the religious services at the altar; and, without being present, take part in the same. It was deemed a good sign of the state of the sufferer’s soul, if from the gloomy recesses of the wall was heard the agonized groan of his dismal response.

It was “with this history ringing in his brain” that the unsung and exiled Bunker Hill veteran, as invisible as those heretical predecessors but without the safety of screaming out in remorse or retraction, “lifted himself convulsively from the floor, as if vast blocks of stone had been laid on him; as if he had been digging a deep well, and the stonework with all the excavated earth had caved in upon him.”

Williams would surely agree that Israel exemplifies the unpalatable leftovers of what America, “in its hour of excitement…had promised, its declarations, its pronouncements, its Patrick Henry speeches.” He often asks us to consider whether these gift-wrapped premises of patriotism were “just expedients of war to spur to battle or was it serious?” That question, posed today, is of obvious relevance and Williams places substantial culpability on the American public for almost aspiring to historical ignorance. He sees it as no less than

an extraordinary phenomenon that Americans have lost the sense, being made up as we are, that what we are has its origin in what the nation in the past has been; that there is a source in AMERICA for everything we think or do; that morals affect the food and food the bone, and that, in fine, we have no conception at all of what is meant by moral

And the problem, “made up as we are,” is, once again, Puritanical smallness. Those original, ceaselessly compacting individual "seeds" continue to shrivel in response to the terrifying "greatness" of our own mythology. Williams is certain that the Israel Potters will, of habit, be stifled by the Ben Franklins, the John Paul Joneses and Ethan Allens of America—all figures that one or both authors treated in the works discussed here. As he sees it, Americans, like the earliest Puritans, have not demonstrated a willingness to truly “penetrate there to see what was contained,” during those first embellished days in the “New World” and thereafter. With the exception of periodic Melvilles, Williams is convinced that, collectively, we are content to look forward, to find faith in the dream of American progress

and that this rudeness rests all upon the unstudied character of our beginnings; and that if we will not pay heed to our own affairs, we are nothing but an unconscious porkyard and oilhole for those, more able, who will fasten themselves upon us...

Just as we are often unaware of causes, each time one of America’s historical badges—person, place, thing, tragedy, etc.—is referenced in support of some new idea,

This is fixed in us without realization of the EFFECT that such a story, such a tradition, entirely the product of the state of mind that it records, has had upon us and our feeling toward the country. We scarcely know that there can be EFFECTS

Rhetorical bullying aside, Williams nonetheless helps us here by sharing Melville’s concern for the “EFFECTS” of erroneous, dead history and selective memory on individuals buried--as discussed in the two preceding posts--by the State. Both writers suggest the ease with which we seem to allow ourselves to be edited out of reality, much like the utterly forgotten Israel finally succumbs to his exile and is hired to create bricks similar to those that once threatened him with entombment. His physical escape from that earlier incident is ultimately not a triumphant one, as Melville assures us that “men and bricks were equally of clay.” Settled in this new task, Israel's poverty, failure and abandonment have conditioned him to fall in rhythm with the work and

this continual, violent, helter-skelter slapping of the dough into the moulds, begat a corresponding disposition in the moulder, who, by heedlessly slapping that sad dough, as stuff of little worth, was thereby taught, in his meditations, to slap, with similar heedlessness, his own sadder fortunes, as of still less vital consideration.

Williams likewise returns to his image of the blissfully microscopic man encapsulated by “austere and limpid history,” which operates “blind to every contingency, mashing Indian, child and matron into one safe mold.” Melville offers a small window of opportunity to all “reckless” individuals convinced of their historical inferiority, assuring them that “their vice was like that weed which but grows on barren ground; enrich the soil, and it disappears.”

Seventy years later, Williams would find this ground still unfertilized, mildly incubating those imploding Puritan seeds. Over eighty years after that--Gonzales:

I have taken these important steps to provide information for two critical reasons: (1) I have nothing to hide, and (2) I am committed to assuring the Congress and the American public that nothing improper occurred here. The sooner all the facts are known, the sooner we can all devote our exclusive attention to our important work--work that includes protecting the American people from the dangers of terrorism, violent crime, illegal drugs, and sexual predators.

More diversion and misdiagnoses, seeds quaking as long as habit permits.

Baggage

2007-04-16T11:28:00.000-07:00

I am taking the discussion up again immediately where it last left off:

When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

What happens after the speaker’s body is washed out of the turret? What happens, I mean to say, to those of our dead, the ones returning every day from our own country’s war machine? My attention was recently focused on just this subject by a segment I heard on NPR. This segment dealt with the precise details of bringing home the body of a soldier who was killed in Iraq. Should you want to hear it, go here:

http://www.here-now.org/shows/2007/04/20070410.asp

To summarize, John Holley’s son, Matthew, was killed by a roadside bomb in Iraq in 2005. In his attempts to prepare for Matthew’s body’s arrival, Holley discovered that it was to be transported in the cargo hold of a commercial jet and unloaded with a forklift by members of the airport ground crew. Holley found, also, that he would be "picking his son up" at a warehouse in a cargo area. Though it’s been quoted in every interview I have since read about the situation, I can’t help but repeat the words of an airline executive who told Holley that commercial jet liners were the "most expeditious way" to bring the dead back to America. Without ceremony, I would add, without an honor guard, without any real acknowledgment of loss.

As if a body were a piece of baggage.

Now a body, we all feel instinctively, is decidedly not a piece of baggage. The need to bury one’s dead, and not just to bury them but to have some kind of funeral rites, is something of a constant among otherwise disparate cultures. It was this need that brought Antigone to her eventual demise and that forced Priam to beg his son’s body of Achilles. The body is the ultimate confirmation of death; it is, in fact, an obligation to acceptance. Seeing is believing. And it was my instinctive feeling of recoil upon hearing this story that brought me back to the idea that war and the state turn agents into instruments. I would only add that instruments, once defunct, have now become baggage, something burdensome to those responsible for its transport, something to be disposed of expeditiously.

As it turns out, Holley is a veteran of the Vietnam War and was dismayed at the way in which his son’s remains were to be brought home. He contacted his representatives and fought to have an honor guard escort the body at the airport. Following his own son’s funeral he turned his attention to other returning soldiers and eventually congress passed a law requiring that remains be flown on a military contracted aircraft with an escort and an honor guard. Only now, years into the war is this coming to our attention.

Since I heard John Holley speaking on NPR, I have read that not all military remains were treated in this manner and that the story misrepresents the truth. The problem is this: it doesn’t matter how many individuals have been transported as baggage. This kind of response is irrelevant and inappropriate. What is there to say of a nation that brought home any of its fallen soldiers without ceremony, without honor. And I’m not talking here about honoring the dead in words because I think there has been plenty of that; there has been plenty of talk of heroism, there have been plenty of public statements about our losses, many public expressions of sorrow. I am talking here about dead bodies. The actual, physical, grotesque detail of their transport. When it came to the rites and acknowledgment bereaved families needed to make sense of their first confrontation with the truth of a dead body, where were they symbolic gestures then?

Ismene:
At least do not speak of this act to anyone else;
bury him in secret; I will be silent, too.
Antigone:
Oh, oh, no! Shout it out. I will hate you still worse
for silence– should you not proclaim it,
to everyone.

Agents & Instruments

2007-04-13T14:18:00.000-07:00

Bodies falling into the state -- Karbala, Iraq: October, 2006

It came into him, life; it went out from him, truth.

- Emerson

In went water and loaves of black-bread and sausage and cheese, and out came shit and piss and language.

- Vonnegut

I'm convinced there's a dark and ironic parallel between these quotes, but I will leave it to the logicians to sort out the syllogism. Today in our class on Slaughterhouse-Five, we spent some time dwelling and discoursing upon the relations, as we can observe them in Vonnegut and Melville, between language and excrement, metaphysics and physics, all our grand ideas and exotic intentions and the bare and brutal facts that all of these reside in nothing more than a delicate assemblage of what Vonnegut calls "wires" and "tubes," blood and guts and shit. At one point in Slaughterhouse-Five, two American scouts pause to contemplate the problem this way:

One scout hung his head, led spit fall from his lips. The other did the same. They studied the infinitesimal effects of spit on snow and history.

Captain Ahab illustrates the futility of both spit and speech by conflating them at the end of Moby-Dick: "For hate's sake," he says to the (presumably) uncomprehending whale, "I spit my last breath at thee."

I wrote extensively about these two texts yesterday, so for today I'll depart only slightly to another one with strong intertextual associations to Vonnegut. Many books appear in Slaughterhouse-Five, some real, some imagined. The one I'd like to look at is a real one: Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage -- a novel Crane thought of as an extended psychological portrayal of fear.

This seems like a fairly apt description, but what interests me at present is the insistence on the image of the machine, which places Crane's book in direct association with the passages from Thoreau and Vonnegut we looked at yesterday. Coming back upon the battle from which he recently tried to run, Crane's Henry is suddenly drawn, as if by a kind of magnetism, to the operation of the massacre machine:

The battle was like the grinding of an immense and terrible machine to him. Its complexities and powers, its grim processes, fascinated him. He must go and see it produce corpses.

That final line might as well have been written by Vonnegut. A few moments on, the machine is imbued with language, which rises in competition with the agonized voices of its human fuel:

With the courageous words of the artillery and the spiteful sentences of the musketry mingled red cheers. And from this region of noises came the steady current of the maimed.

And a few more lines on, the Vonnegutian reduction of life to digestion is complete:

One was marching with an air imitative of some sublime drum major. Upon his features was an unholy mixture of merriment and agony. As he marched he sang a bit of doggerel in a high and quavering voice:
"Sing a song 'a vic'try,
A pocketful 'a bullets,
Five an' twenty dead men
Baked in a -- pie.'

Vonnegut wrote his way through all the wars that followed the one that tried to bake him in a pie. In concluding Slaughterhouse-Five, he returns to the frame story of the present:

Robert Kennedy, whose summer home is eight miles from the home I live in all year round, was shot two nights ago. He died last night. So it goes.

Martin Luther King was shot a month ago. He died, too. So it goes.

And every day my Government gives me a count of corpses created by military science in Vietnam. So it goes.

He had similar things to say about the current experiments taking place in the field of "military science." The production of corpses, from the time of Henry Fleming, through the irregular time of Billy Pilgrim, to the outright moral grotesquerie of recent "policy," has continued apace, with no signs of slowing up for anybody. As Vonnegut would say, it's simply the continuation of the long and illustrious history of the human experience. In all of these examples "man" appears as a kind of digesting machine, made specially to digest himself, reducing himself to pure matter, to be either washed from the ball-turret, or blowtorched where he lies. Vonnegut reported on this particular style of expedient "mopping up" in the conclusion to his novel. He calls the retrieval of the dead in Dresden, carried out by the prisoners of war, of which he was one, the process of "corpse mining":

There were hundreds of corpse mines operating by and by. They didn't smell bad at first, were wax museums. But then the bodies rotted and liquefied, and the stink was like roses and mustard gas.

So it goes.

The idea of digestion is not just some whim of mine: the description of this stink, the smell of "roses and mustard gas," is Vonnegut's preferred formulation for the smell on the breath of a drunken man. It sickens the women the drunk men try to kiss, as it does his Maori co-worker in the corpse mine, tearing him to pieces from the inside:

The Maori Billy had worked with died of the dry heaves, after having been ordered to go down in that stink and work. He tore himself to pieces, throwing up and throwing up.

So it goes.

So a new technique was devised. Bodies weren't brought up any more. They were cremated by soldiers with flamethrowers right where they were. The soldiers stood outside the shelters, simply sent the fire in.

Somewhere in there the poor old high school teacher, Edgar Derby, was caught with a teapot he had taken from the catacombs. He was arrested for plundering. He was tried and shot.

So it goes.

I include the final lines because they wrap up his narration as I'd like to wrap up the post. Edgar Derby, the poor old English teacher, is the one who, while Billy lay insane in his bed in the prison camp, sat by his bedside, reading The Red Badge of Courage. Edgar, like so many others, has his body torn to pieces. Here's how Henry, the witness to the destruction, sees the procession of such bodies, a procession, like the one described in Thoreau, which he joins:

The youth joined this crowd and marched along with it. The torn bodies expressed the awful machinery in which the men had been entangled.

Their bodies are caught in the machinery -- the machinery of the war, the state, the long history of carnage. This is the machinery Thoreau says must be broken with these bodies, lest it continues to break us, continues transforming men from, as Ahab would put it, agents to instruments -- instruments that when they wear out are burned into dust or, as Randall Jarrell famously put it, washed away with a hose. I'll leave off with Jarrell, in full -- a poem which, as I've said elsewhere, sums up the problem with the greatest precision:

From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.