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The Management.

On November 19, in a front-page story, the New York Times trumpets the decline of violence in Iraq, noting that only 575 attacks on American forces and Iraqi citizens were reported in the previous week, as against 1600 in June. Michael O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institution is quoted accordingly: “These trends are stunning.”

Really.

On November 21, The Financial Times leads its World News section with a headline that dwarfs the front page: “US credits troop surge for rapid fall in Iraq violence.” This article features former Army general Jack Keane, who helped “persuade” Bush to increase troop numbers. The general echoes the Brookings academic by saying the decrease in violence is “phenomenal.” He gets expansive: “to have this dramatic a success in a short period of time, it’s unprecedented.”

Well, yeah.

Counter-insurgency operations typically take ten to twelve years to “succeed,” according to David Petraeus and his sources, and, as I have noted here before, they take at least 20 counter-insurgents for every inhabitant of the site on which the battle is waged. These numbers come from the US military, not from me. We’re nowhere near the timeline or the force strength. Is there a miracle taking place?

Perhaps. The faith-based president of the United States has been visiting various military depots—the first and last refuge of the scoundrel-in-chief—and touting the so-called surge as the big story on Iraq. Maybe he and the providential manager of the future—that would be his God, not your financial advisor—have been discussing the matter at the White House gym, and the poor mortal’s prayers have finally been answered.

I found this on an interesting blog about being a graduate student in philosophy. The whole blog is worth reading, and makes me glad I decided long ago to avoid that field. But this letter is particularly hilarious:

Herbert A. Millington
Chair - Search Committee
412A Clarkson Hall
Whitson University
College Hill, MA 34109

Dear Professor Millington,

Thank you for your letter of March 16. After careful consideration, I regret to inform you that I am unable to accept your refusal to offer me an assistant professor position in your department.

This year I have been particularly fortunate in receiving an unusually large number of rejection letters. With such a varied and promising field of candidates it is impossible for me to accept all refusals.

Despite Whitson’s outstanding qualifications and previous experience in rejecting applicants, I find that your rejection does not meet my needs at this time. Therefore, I will assume the position of assistant professor in your department this August. I look forward to seeing you then.

Best of luck in rejecting future applicants.

Sincerely,

Chris L. Jensen

Norman Mailer has died. God damn it. Mailer was of course a giant in the world of letters, one of the towering figures in contemporary literature. Or so they say. I wouldn’t really know. I’m embarrassed to admit I’ve only read one of his books, and a non-fiction one at that. And yet, it was a book that had a lasting and crucial impact on my life. Stephen King points out that writing is a form of telepathy: it’s a way for people to communicate with each other across time and space and the barriers of difference. So Norman Mailer, on a day that I really needed it, walked into my head, started talking to me, and told me how to straighten out my life. I took his advice, and it worked. I owe him a lot, and now I’ll never write that letter telling him what he did for me because now he is dead. Rest in peace, you old bastard. You never knew me, but you changed me nonetheless.

Here is a ditty that should go in the New York Times Travel Section on Sunday. I wrote it in August while in La Antigua on my laptop, and have just now figured out how to get it onto our site; there’s another to follow. The Blackwater connection is the occasion for posting them.

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Here I am back in Guatemala, La Antigua to be exact. You might ask why, and you would have a good question. It’s a more dangerous place than last year—and please don’t write in to tell me when the civil war ended—in three palpably threatening senses.

First, an election is impending (September), so all the guns are out (see the NYTimes of 8/4/07). The flag-waving candidate caravans that roll through town every day are bristling with children and weapons—sort of like the streets on any given weekday, when deliveries get made to the tiendas, but quantitatively different enough that the quality of life has changed. The ex-pats here disagree with me, but they all have horror stories about the long civil war and the cops, and, for that matter, the world they inhabited elsewhere.

Second, and more important, there are many more do-gooders in their 20s who proudly tote trust funds and holy attitudes. By day they smoke cigarettes, call donors—donors, that is, to their foundations—on their cell phones, and take up a lot of public space with their laptops (presumably communicating with other donors). I rented a room in the same hacienda that saved my life last year, for example, and found it overrun by passive/aggressive personalities from Holland, for God’s sake, whose iPods played only Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones from the Sixties.

Here I am in my kitchen, preparing to write about Alan Greenspan’s amazing memoir, watching “Morning Joe,” the replacement for “Imus in the Morning” on MSNBC, and what happens as I happily pretend to be multi-tasking?

Ken Burns comes on and breathes heavily, talks excitedly, about his new war documentary, just after the leading Democratic candidates are seen agreeing that American troops will be in Iraq until 2013.

Then Joe Scarborough, the once-conservative Congressman from Florida and new host of a radio talk show—now there’s a startling career move—and his sidemen start mumbling about war as such (“more people died in the first few hours at Normandy than in the current war in Iraq”). And the music playing over their mumbling, as the director segues toward a commercial, is Jimi Hendrix’s rendition of Dylan’s “Watchtower.”

“There must be some way outta here,” he sings. Yeah, but where am I, really? Am I still listening, as the Joker worries and the Thief says “Don’t get too excited”? There’s too much confusion—got no exit strategy.

Am I in that unfortunate place where the “Good War” returns just in time to redeem the “current” war, which is indefensible on any grounds? Am I in that inconceivable place where the leading Democratic candidates get “realistic” about ending this war—thus repudiating the constituency that might elect one of them, and giving the Republican warmongers a way to claim that the Democrats don’t have a practical alternative to their own immoral inertia?

The catastrophe that is Iraq makes me feel so isolated, so lonely, so desperate, that I look forward to teaching—to being in a classroom with sentient beings who despise the world they have inherited from the charlatans and criminals who still run it. Don’t kid yourself. Students are real political these days, but, like us so-called grown-ups, they know their reality doesn’t intersect with the bullshit they hear on the so-called news shows.

What is to be done? I’d assassinate someone if I thought that would do any good. OK, I’d train and I’d try. But are the Democrats any better than the Republicans these days? Hell, Robert Gates, the Secretary of Defense, has renounced permanent bases in Iraq (Wall Street Journal 9/19/07, A3ff.). Have the Democrats?

No, the Democratic candidates, particularly the front-runners, keep saying we’ll have to be there for—what?—a very, very long time. As Gideon Rachman points out in his Financial Times column of 9/18/07, the differences between the parties on foreign policy, even on Iraq exit strategies, are almost impossible to decipher.

The surreal quality of our situation is such that the Republicans can throttle legislation that supports the physical and mental integrity of our troops—legislation that gives Soldiers and Marines leave time equal to their tours in combat—and trumpet their opposition to the Democrats as a “strategy for success.” That’s fightin’ Joe Lieberman’s locution (New York Times 9/19/07, A1) How, where, and when can we locate this “success”?

I start this new “market confidential”—clearly, I should circulate a newsletter for all you eager investors out there—on the eve of the Fed’s meeting to decide on interest rates.

The big question in the financial press is 25 or 50 basis points, that is, should the central bank reduce the federal funds rate to 5.00% or 4.75%? The lower figure would have to be accompanied by a statement suggesting the Fed’s willingness to do more if the economy falters, because traders have already incorporated some measure of rate reduction into their calculations on the near term.

The higher figure would have to be the last word, because the resurgence of inflation already appears on the economic horizon—the fall of the dollar and the slowdown in the pace of globalization due to lower consumer spending by Americans will combine, it seems, to raise the price of imports—and the Fed can’t retain its legitimacy unless it vows, constantly, to fight inflation.

Or can it? Martin Feldstein, of all people—he’s the Harvard/NBER economist who fabricated the statistical correlation between high taxation and low investment rates which validated the supply-side argument back in the early 1980s—thinks we should discount the threat of inflation and address the threat of recession. He’s worried that the global economy is at risk because the mortgage market debacle and its unruly offspring will reduce consumer confidence and spending in the US.

I’m starting to work on a new design for the site. I got it in my head a while back that it would be fun to try and make this a “community” blog again, and after haggling with Jim for a while we seem to have agreed that its worth a try. Quite a few really smart people read the site from time to time, and I’m hoping we can convince some of them to post material every once in a while. I’ve got some ideas, but I’d love to hear people’s suggestions as well — what sorts of blogs do you read, if any? Do you read Crooked Timber, or any other “academic” blogs? How do you think we can make this site into more of a “community,” and do you think its worth the effort? Are there particular features I should be thinking about? I’m not sure how long it will take for me to put this together, but if you have ideas or suggestions please let me know. Thanks.

I love reading economists when they write as journalists: the numbers recede, and stories get told. I also love reading White House staffers when they pose as policy-makers, especially when they agree with me—as, for example, on August 31st, when an anonymous official explained the president’s plan to help strapped homeowners: “You can’t solve the problems in the financial markets unless you can make some progress on the retail end of it.”

Translation? If we don’t bail out consumers, all hell breaks loose. The trickle-down theory that informs anti-Keynesian, supply-side economic theory, not to mention tax cuts for the rich, is thus renounced by the Whited Sepulchre itself.

Put it another way. The causative vector of growth hitherto drawn by the Bush administration, among other centers of power, is thus reversed, so that consumers, not investors, become the agents of future growth. Not only that, they—that would be us consumers—now become the bearers of financial stability, and, consequently, price stability.

Who knew? I did, as I tried to demonstrate in previous posts to this site.

Why don’t the economists? Am I so much smarter than they are? Not a chance. No, it’s because they learned too much in graduate school. They can’t acknowledge new realities—“novel facts,” as William James called them—because their theories exclude them. And they won’t be able to acknowledge these new realities until we witness the kind of paradigm shift that reinstates Keynes.

I see earthquakes and lightning, as John Fogerty put it back in the day—bless his heart, the two songs he did in the pregame show for the 2004 Super Bowl were “Fortunate Son” and “Bad Moon Rising,” both addressed to the Whited Sepulchre and its attendant atrocities, including a war in Iraq that was just then getting complicated by Moktada al-Sadr and his popular movement against the American occupation.

The plates are moving beneath our feet, and we’re still standing around talking about benchmarks. Let’s try instead to see the earthquakes coming as we feel these techtonic shifts.

We used to say that we shouldn’t be in the middle of a civil war. Hell, right-wing nuts used to say the same thing. Now we’re all happy with what has happened in southwestern Anbar province, for god’s sake, where the Sunni tribal leaders are lining up to help us fight the local “war on terror.” Now we’re happy that the military of the United States, mainly the Marine Corps down there in Anbar, has equipped the Sunnis to hang tough against the Shi’ite militias who have pretty much conquered both Baghdad and the southern provinces where the British used to roam.

Now we talk about military progress, you know, “on the ground,” even though relative quiet in Baghdad—and I do mean relative—is a function of the Mahdi Army’s stand down. Why do we talk this way, and in doing so give William Kristol, the original sponsor of the so-called surge, another purchase on our imaginations, not to mention our children’s lives?

Pragmatism, Nihilism, and Democracy, also Joe, Colin, and Nathan will have to wait for a few days, while I sort out the future of capitalism. I’m not attempting to be arch. There is a direct link between political economy and pragmatism, which, in my view, must move us toward a nihilism that accepts administered markets as the predicate of selfhood as such. But let me note that I defined nihilism quite succinctly at p. 30: “the ability to make truth claims in the absence of ‘the subject’ or the homogeneity of ‘character’ or the modern individual, and the will to believe in the absence of all authenticity or ‘objective reality’ or ‘non-human truth.’” Again, nihilism is not nothingness unless measured by the standard of modern subjectivity, a standard that none of the participants in this debate could endorse.
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Herewith an update on the credit crunch, which many well-placed financial analysts see as a potential crisis. I doubt it will degenerate to that extent, but nobody pays me to look after their assets. The people who do get paid for it are treading very carefully these days—hedging their bets, as it were, even the most bearish among them.

I propose an update in two senses. First, I’ll do some history of crisis management and central banking, and then I’ll offer some, er, speculation on the near term causes and effects of the Fed’s agenda, as interpreted by Martin Wolf and certain lesser lights at FT and The New York Times.

Upon reading Jim’s reply to my last post I suddenly found myself thrust into an unpleasant state of self-questioning. Am I really suffering from ontological panic? Perhaps I am! My God, the horror of it! But then, after a brief nap and a few moments of reflection, I came to my senses. No, I don’t suffer from ontological panic. My response to his piece grows out of other ailments: an overly contrarian nature, perhaps, and a restless spirit. And, as I said, a certain degree of boredom. More on that in a bit. In any event, its true. I do understand “facts” as having a certain degree of solidity that persists over time. Guilty as charged. What’s worse, I believe in God, in nature, in historical truths, in astrology, in witchcraft, in true love, in destiny (from a Chinese medical perspective), and in various other things and forces that shape our lives, some of which I believe exist outside of us in a grand sort of way that I like to call metaphysical, and some of which I don’t, but all of which I believe exert constraints on us, or at least some of us, some of the time. I’ll start off by offering an overview of where I am intellectually with this stuff, then move on to a restatement of my interpretation of Dewey’s view of scientific practice, and then try and wrap it all up in what might be a surprising way. I’m not going to get to everyone’s questions — this post is too damn long already, and I have real work I’m supposed to be doing, but I think this should shed some light on where I think Jim and I disagree, and perhaps contribute something to the ongoing conversation.

I don’t know about you, but watching the markets get crazy has been great fun for me. Once upon a time I wrote a book on the origins of the Fed, so every time I read about the “moral hazard” involved in bailing out insolvent lenders—or borrowers—I have to laugh. This hazard lies in thwarting the logic of the market, according to the old-school economists and journalists who preach it.

If you violate this logic—if you don’t let the market cleanse itself of imprudent investors, mere speculators, and the like—you have validated precisely what the market should be punishing. You have not let the market do its anonymously moral work of enforcing a transparent relation between honest effort and legitimate reward.

In a corporate age of globally administered markets and prices, this is a pretty flimsy argument, of course, but it keeps surfacing in the Financial Times, and even in Paul Krugman’s op-ed of August 17 in The New York Times, where the distinction between speculative lenders and hard-working borrowers is pushed to its logical conclusion. I still like the piece because he introduces a comparison between third-world debtors and strapped mortgage holders here in the good old USA; but the market is not a moral calendar, no matter how well-regulated.

I’ve been out of the country for two weeks, and not paying much attention to the blog. Got the crap scared out of me in Guatemala, which is, on the whole, a good thing. More of that later. Right now I’d like to respond to Joe Gabriel’s critique of a paper that has not been posted here—although shoot, why shouldn’t I just go ahead and do that? The paragraphs are long and the arguments are difficult, that’s why.

But I’ll go ahead and post it anyway, and y’all can have as much fun with it as I did. It’s a piece I did at the request of John Stuhr, a philosopher at Vanderbilt, whom some of you might know as the editor of a collection on “Classical American Philosophy.” Stuhr is editing a centennial volume on Pragmatism to be published by Indiana University Press; the contributors include Bruce Wilshire and Ross Posnock as well as me.

On to Joe. I am grateful for his magnificent misreading. I’m sure it will be reproduced in the responses to the Stuhr volume, and, to tell you the truth, it was adumbrated at the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy meeting last March, where my remarks elicited courteous revulsion (but maybe because I’m a mere historian).

A while back Jim did me the favor of forwarding a draft of an essay he wrote titled “Pragmatism, Nihilism, and Democracy: What is Called Thinking at the End of Modernity?” It’s a truly brilliant piece, and I benefited tremendously by working through it in my own ponderous, thick-headed way. After far too many cups of coffee and far too many moments rummaging around in various books that didn’t have anything to do with what I was trying to say, however, I finally decided that I think that the piece is incorrect in its conclusions. What follows is my response. I’m not sure how much sense it will make if you haven’t read the draft (or even if you have, alas), but you may find it amusing if arguing about Dewey and James and epistemology and the meaning of corporate capitalism is your sort of thing. My response should be considered tentative at best; I’m very interested in getting feedback on it, and I won’t mind being told that I’m full of crap. I’m posting it because I told myself I would, because the idea of doing so is the only thing that got me to write it, and because writing it has been valuable. I made a promise to my muse, in other words, and as Norman Mailer pointed out in his wonderful and infuriating set of essays on writing, The Spooky Art, you break promises to your muse at your peril.

Last July I stayed for a week in a “Student House” in La Antigua, Guatemala, the new capital of Spanish Language Schools in Central America (there are now more than 100 of them in a space that is nine by nine city blocks). Couldn’t take it for any more than that—not at my age, not with a room off the kitchen, el bano outside, eleven people at a median age of 25, most of them insufferable do-gooders already desperate to redeem themselves—but it was a nonetheless fascinating experience.

For me, that experience centered on the sounds of the place: “sentence sounds,” to be sure, as Robert Frost called them, the kind that tell you what the conversation is about even though you’re not understanding the words being spoken; but mostly the pat-pat-pat of tortilla shaping that started at 10:30 and lasted until 3:00, sometimes 4:00, when 100 pounds of dough ground from 90 pounds of boiled corn were finally gone.

Every day. Most of the tortillas thus produced are sold from the store at the front of the “Student House” (the rest are used to feed the student residents). It’s a booming business.

I couldn’t resist this ridiculously labor-intensive process, so I started taking pictures of its stages, as a way of grasping a truly artisanal yet entirely female form of work. Can’t post those pictures without scanning and all that, but I can tell you the story behind them.

[Note: A good introduction to Rorty and his legacy is by Lithium Cola in a recent diary over at Daily Kos]

Richard Rorty died last Friday in California at the age of 75. He was a philosopher, to be sure, but all his work since Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) is one long petition to historians, particularly, to learn something from the demolition of metaphysics accomplished by the original pragmatists—not to mention their distant echoes in Wittgenstein and Heidegger—and, accordingly, to take the rhetorical effect and political consequences of historical narratives seriously. He took the linguistic turn at full speed, and urged us to follow his example.

I wish we would, and quickly. But we won’t, and it’s a shame. Us historians don’t want to be bothered with post-structuralist questions about what we do after we’ve excavated the archive. For example, we say that Judith Butler is interesting as a theorist, but we always go on to say that she can’t help us “do history.” We say the same thing about Rorty. We’re wrong.

For he was the philosopher who insisted that “the moral justification of the institutions and practices of one’s group”—whatever it may be—“is mostly a matter of historical narratives (including scenarios about what is likely to happen in certain future contingencies) rather than philosophical metanarratives.”

This moral justification would be our cultural function as historians, no?

I wrote this, what, “memorandum,” back in December, having been inspired by conversations–OK, arguments–with my friends Steven Lawson and James Oakes. The latter’s great book, The Radical and the Republican (Norton), about Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, had just come out, and I asked him out to Rutgers for a talk, sure enough, but also to lecture to my 100-level survey course that met at 8:10 AM the next day. It was a great morning for the students, and for me. At the CUNY Grad Center, Jim doesn’t have to deal with undergraduates; but he wowed mine. It was electrifying. He’s now writing a book about the experience of emancipation which I can’t wait to read.

The other back story–why would one write 20 pages about Lincoln?–is a play that was performed in New York last September, when I was starting to teach the survey class at that rude hour. Called “Enough is Enough,” it was an impassioned and brilliant plea to let go of Massa Lincoln and his various myths. It was written by an accomplished playright, Joe Sutton, whose works have been produced from Seattle to Houston to the Big One. He interviewed me as part of his research because his wife and mine are old friends, and I’m the historian, after all.

I was flustered during the interview because Joe kept probing, kept quoting, and I kept citing “historical context.” A very unsatisfying but a very illuminating afternoon. My frustrations with both the interlocutor and the respondent–that would be the hapless me–are, I hope, on display here.

The Vietnam analogy is dangerous ground for supporters of the so-called surge in Baghdad and the larger war in Iraq, for three obvious reasons. First, sending more and more American troops did not work in Indochina. Why should we believe it will work in the Middle East?

Second, the “Vietnamization” of the military conflict—remember, this was Nixon’s “big idea”—didn’t work any better, because the political inclinations and the ethnic loyalties of the indigenous people were so divided as to make a merely military solution impossible.

Believing that such a solution was possible made military defeat, rather than a diplomatic endgame, inevitable, and so made the subsequent slaughter in Indochina possible. In other words, the lesson of the Korean War was lost in the ideological shuffle of the late Cold War.

Let me be as candid as I can be here: We armed the Khmer Rouge by (a) pretending that we could beat the Commies on the battlefield and bombing Cambodia—not to mention North Vietnam—back to the Stone Age, and then (b) admitting we didn’t have the military force on the ground to back the bluff. The armed forces of the US were broken by 1972, and everybody knew it.

We have similarly armed the terrorists and the militias in Iraq by pretending that we can win on the battlefield—wherever it might be—instead of acknowledging that a military solution is inconceivable, there as elsewhere, and admitting, accordingly, that our troops have already been pushed to the point of physical and psychological exhaustion.

Herewith Andrew Livingston’s meditation on Heinrich Boll’s story, “Wanderer, kommst du nach Spa…” This Livingston, my brother, knows whereof he speaks because he teaches German, and has been teaching this story for many years. I’m honored to post it. On the occasion of his 50th birthday, I said, “This is the guy you want next to you in the church choir, in a bar fight, in the basement playing guitar, in the driver’s seat when you’re drunk, in the negotitation with the school board, in the settlement of your union grievance, in your vision of a future that includes all of us. Also in the kitchen, chopping.” He was embarrassed. But he can play.

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Absurdity to the reader, the viewer. An incredible story nonetheless, since the characters know a single vector for their lives, and fulfill it. The film 300 and Heinrich Böll’s short story Wanderer, kommst du nach Spa… [Stranger, should you come to Spa…] have more in common than just the literary effect. The unfinished inscription refers directly to Leonidas and his men, model and metaphor for another time and culture.

The NSDAP, and Hitler as leader, used the example of the Spartan “army,” expecting that German soldiers stand fast where they stood on conquered land—no retreat. Military historians would probably agree the world is fortunate that Wehrmacht generals heeded the orders from their commander in chief.

I heard the news last week as I was laying in bed playing with my four-month old son. Claudia came in the room and told me that an acquaintance of mine named Heather had given birth to a baby. After returning home from the hospital Heather had begun to hemorrhage, and soon she was dead. I kept bouncing Jacob up and down on my stomach for a minute, then got up and began to comfort my wife. Claudia is an acupuncturist, and she had treated Heather for infertility, helping her conceive this child who now had no mother.

My post to ProgressiveHistorians.com and to Daily Kos got me thinking. Or meandering. Anyway, here is what happened in that weird space.

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You’re a sailor waiting at Kronstadt,
Wondering if they really mean it.

The commissars are coming to kill you
And your comrades who stood with you in this twilight of dreams,
This ending of their beginnings,
Are asking you if they really mean it.

You knew before they did, how it would end,
You knew before they did, before it mattered.

You know they really mean it.

So you say, “Yes, they mean it.
Their world does end ours.
But it is a better world, for all of us.
It is a world without hunger and crime and conflict.
It is the world we’ve always said we wanted—in our prayers and our dreams and our programs.”

But now it is here, just beyond these wasted hulls,
Waiting for us to decide on that new world.

“Yes,” you say, “it comes with new armament,
And we can’t escape it, we can’t even face it,
Unless we are willing to die.”

They turn toward each other, and you look elsewhere,
On to another horizon.

And so ends that beginning, this dream of ending,
And now you meet your maker, another intellectual
With more energy than you.

He’s not a god, he’s not a monster,
He’s just a good student with the best of intentions.

Here is a weirdly plaintive song that happened to me a couple of weeks ago, while reading a short story by Heinrich Boll, a novelist who started out in the Wehrmacht. The story is called “Stranger, Bear Word to the Spartans We…” and is told by a dismembered young soldier who knows the triage station is his old gymnasium—the pictures and the statues tell him so—but doesn’t know he’s lost all his limbs except for the left leg. Toward the end he says, “It was still there, the Thermopylae inscription we had had to write. . . .” Still there, that imperative. All else gone?

My brother, who teaches this story to his German classes out there in darkest Illinois, will soon be posting on Boll as well as advertising his new CD. Meanwhile, try this on. Just don’t get autobiographical.

It’s Am-G-D except at the break and the bridge. G happens on the third syllable of each line; down strokes welcome.

Lay me down with the wounded,
Lay me down with the dead

Let me die with my brothers,
Let me die with my friends

Tell me how you will write this,
Tell me how I will die

I’m the one with the weapons,
But you’re the one who can lie

BREAK, D-Am-G-D

Cover me with my blanket,
Cover me with your eyes

Remember me as I told you
You have no right to cry

My apologies for the sloppy post entitled “Social Amnesia.” Too many typos, ye gods, and two paragraphs gone missing. I blame the copy editor—that would be me—and have punished him proportionately. Docked his pay, put him on probation, even told him he’s now at risk of getting sacked. No excuses, man.

Herewith a clean version of authorial intention. Whoa, that almost rhymes, I should found a new school of criticism. Or write a song, maybe. After the New Criticism, what? Just sing?

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Chaos. Civil War. Regional strife or Iranian hegemony in the Middle East. American credibility impaired in the eyes of the world. Terrorists emboldened enough to strike “the homeland.”

These are the supposed consequences of a phased withdrawal of US troops from Iraq. Let us take a page from John Murtha’s book and ask why we should believe these dire predictions offered by Bush, Cheney, Gingrich, Perle, Frum, Kristol, & Co. Have these people been right about anything since September 2002—or, for that matter, since August 2001, when they chose to ignore all kinds of warnings about impending attacks on the US?

WMD. Nucelar capacity, mushroom clouds. Al Qaeda connection. And so on: you know the list. These people have never come close to the truth about Iraq, so why do we take them seriously now?

Because that was then and this is now. Why should we worry about the past when we’ve got important work to do in the present?

Chaos. Civil War. Regional strife or Iranian hegemony in the Middle East. American credibility impaired in the eyes of the world. Terrorists emboldened enough to strike “the homeland.”

These are the supposed consequences of a phased withdrawal of US troops from Iraq. Let us take a page from John Murtha’s book and ask why we should believe these dire predictions offered by Bush, Cheney, Gingrich, Perle, Frum, Kristol, & Co. Have these people been right about anything since September 2002—or, for that matter, since August 2001, when they chose to ignore all kinds of warnings about impending attacks on the US?

WMD. Nucelar capacity, mushroom clouds. Al Quaeda connection. And so on: you know the list. These people have never come close to the truth about Iraq, so why do we take them seriously now?

Because that was then and this is now. How many times have you seen an anti-war Democrat silenced by the following rhetorical questions? Don’t we have some responsibility to the Iraqis (and the region) now that we’re there? Wasn’t Colin Powell correct to say, “you break it, you own it”? How can we just pick up and leave?

The logic seems to be that the past has nothing to do with the present. Yes, well, we were wrong about the rationale for invasion back then, but that mistake has nothing to do with the choices we have to make in the here and now. Yes, the occupation was bungled, but that mistake is already over, and has nothing to do with our strategic options today. We must now “succeed” in Iraq—we must have “victory.”

Editor’s Introduction

This is a piece by Justin Hart, an assistant professor of history at Texas Tech, formerly a graduate student at Rutgers who wrote his dissertation under the direction of Lloyd Gardner, arguably the greatest living diplomatic historian. It is an outgrowth of the dissertation–soon, we hope, to be a book–in which Justin argued that since the 1940s, US diplomats and their intellectual associates have been trying to “import the social question” via cultural politics, thus reversing Thomas McCormick’s famous formulation in China Market (1962) .

My hope is that the essay here reprinted with permission from Historically Speaking, the magazine of The Historical Society, and Justin’s forthcoming book, will persuade us to rethink the Left’s role in American imperialism and the Cold War. My hope is that, having read Hart’s work, we will no longer be able to exempt or absolve ourselves, as leftists, from the realities of world power. For that is when we can begin to speak the truth. To power.

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The Poetry of US Foreign Policy

The intellectual contributions of Archibald MacLeish (1892-1982) to American public life are overdue for a reassessment. Certainly, he is still known to millions of Americans above a certain age as the three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and playwright whom the New York Times once dubbed “the most influential poet writing in America today.”

This morning I went shopping for basics—onions, garlic, dill, jalapenos. I drove, of course. How else do you get to the grocery store? There was nothing to cook with in the kitchen where I sat taking notes on Noel Carroll’s Philosophy of Horror, and I wanted to make my daughter’s favorite dish—she’s finished her sophomore year and is back home—which is an adaptation of a recipe I remember, sort of, from a soy sauce jar bought almost forty years ago in DeKalb, Illinois, where I was in graduate school learning how to be a revolutionary.

I know, reading Marx doesn’t prepare you for the role, and neither does reading recipes.

Nor does reading Noel Carroll, an extremely frustrating writer who keeps doing the right (dialogical) thing by foregrounding all the possible alternatives to his “comprehensive theory” of horror.

It’s a chicken dish: equal parts soy sauce, white wine, water, and—sorry—ketchup mixed with at least two medium onions. Let that sit all day, and at about 5:00 skin the chicken thighs, dredge them in flour laced with pepper and paprika, then fry them in olive oil with at least three cloves of garlic. When nicely browned, pour the soy sauce mixture over the chicken, bring to a boil, turn the heat way down and cover the pan, cook for about 45 minutes. When you want to serve it, throw in about a pound of sliced mushrooms, simmer for five minutes. Ta da. It’s good over rice or noodles or nothing at all.

I found this video while spending some of my supposedly precious free time surfing on www.youtube.com — a truly addictive site, if by addiction we mean the onset of an uncontrollable habit with negative personal consequences. I’m sure the damn thing has totally screwed up my dopamine levels.

Anyway, Jim asked me why the hell I posted it. Here’s my answer:

Stomach aches, global warming, George Bush, crying babies, government corruption, tornadoes in Kansas, bureaucratic idiocy, Iraq, achy joints, broken hearts, bad television shows, clogged nasal passages, crappy consumer products, the high price of gas, domestic disputes, Iraq, angry neighbors, inaccurate water bills, the imminent collapse of the fishing industry, poor scholarly standards, the death of honeybees, rotten fruit, scientific fraud, the falling dollar, carpel tunnel syndrome, job rejection letters from crappy schools, excessive desire and lack of same, the housing market, Iraq, hungry ghosts, tensions between unity and diversity, the homeless guy I see walking around my neighborhood collecting cans and stray cigarette butts, abandoned cats, mold, creeping fascism, and pesticides.

Not to mention, flabby stomaches, bad techno, structural inequality, Mitt Romney, and inarticulate longings of all sorts. And broken hearts. Did I mention broken hearts? And Iraq.

Talk about textbook examples! Take a look at paragraph 6 of my last post on “300.” Oh, never mind. Here’s what I wrote: “I love horror and action movies even when—no, especially when—they reduce me to that abject state of helpless fright but keep me hoping for the restoration of my.”

My what??!!

This is performative speech act, a Freudian slip, if ever there was one. For I am reenacting the “anxiety of insufficiency” by naming it, or rather by demonstrating my inability to name what I want restored.

I’m unconsciously announcing, specifying, and displaying the lack that is the defining condition of subjectivity as such.—and so I’m unintentionally abiding by Kaja Silverman’s programmatic principle: “Renegotiating our relation to the Law of Language would thus seem to hinge first and foremost upon the confrontation of the male subject with the defining conditions of all subjectivity, conditions which the female subject is obliged compulsively to reenact, but upon the denial of which traditional masculinity is predicated: lack, specularity, and alterity.”

Or not. Maybe I’m traditionally masculine after all. If so, my daughter will be pleased.

I’m also unintentionally arguing with David Savran. My abjection would suggest that the dissolution or “shattering” of the male ego is easily accomplished by the masochistic violence of horror, action, and war movies in the last 30 years. The question that remains—Savran’s question—is, what ego is reconstituted in the aftermath of this momentary lapse?

David Denby, who has way too much taste for his own good, ends his New Yorker review (4/16/2007) of “Grindhouse” as follows: “Tarantino and Rodriguez assume that we’ll relish the movie’s violence or shrug it off as play, as they do, but not everyone in the audience will want his enjoyment of it taken for granted that way—the mashed and maimed bodies leave depressing images in the mind and, at this moment in history, carry terrible associations. The two men love movies, love movie culture, love audiences, but how can you accept a love that expresses itself obsessively with an assault on the human body?”

David Remnick has to reassign Denby. Sending him to review “Grindhouse” is like sending Hilton Kramer to interview Karen Finley.

But let us notice three things about Denby’s sad conclusion, on the assumption that bad critics, like bad movies, might tell us more about our culture than the good ones. First, notice the slippage from “his enjoyment” to “the mind.” This is a textbook example of how the transcendental ego, the epistemological subject, the humanist self—call it what you will—still gets casually and unconsciously coded as male. David Denby’s aesthetic judgment, his “enjoyment,” stands in here for “the” mind as such, as if we know that the consciousness posited by western metaphysics resides in an uncontested, trans-historical man of reason.

The horrors of this war are certainly clear to readers of this blog, but many of us may not personally know people directly impacted by this disaster. In one sense, of course, we are all directly affected by this war as the consequences of this monumental folly play themselves out in the drama that is our nation and our world; in another sense, however, many of us are strangely distant from the material and psychic consequences of this failed imperial project. Moveon.org is organizing a campaign to highlight the costs of the war on the families and soldiers who have done their nation’s bidding. We’ll post some of these videos on this blog, but we also encourage you to go and watch them all. These are stories that deserve to be heard if we are to understand the consequences of what we have created. These are stories that deserve to be heard as we work to create a world in which supporting the troops means more than simply sending them off to perform our violence for us.

You can find the videos: here.

VideoVets: Rose Forrest

Yesterday I sat, as usual, through three hours of TV political talk, from George Stephenapoulos (ABC), Tim Russert (NBC), and Chris Wallace (Fox), on towards Wolf Blitzer (CNN), 10:00 to 1:00. Speaking of masochism—it’s true, I haven’t finished with “300” and its masochistic magnificence—how does anybody put herself through this kind of torture?

The most outrageous, indeed unspeakably insane things I heard were from Newt Gingrich, Brit Hume, and William Kristol.

Newtie boy told young George that in states like Mississippi, which don’t exclude guns from college campuses, atrocities such as at Virginia Tech have been avoided because, you see, students are able to go out to their cars, arm themselves, and foil the perpetrator with real weaponry.

For example, Newt said, if that poor old Holocaust survivor had been packing a gun, the shooter wouldn’t have been able to enter the classroom and kill all those students. He’d be dead because the professor would have killed him first. Uh huh. Oh, and liberals are to blame because they tolerate everything.

Makes a lot of sense, don’t it? Where does such insanity come from? It comes from best-selling and intellectually respectable sources such as Robert Bork, our “finest legal mind” according to William the “Riverboat Queen” Bennett, formerly drug czar, Education secretary, and all around scold of Bill Clinton. No, really. Bennett’s blurb for Bork’s 1996 book, Slouching Toward Gomorrah, makes it sound like a masterpiece of pornography: “A brilliant and alarming exploration of the dark side of contemporary American culture.”

Where are we with this movie? I’m going to see it again today, but let’s prepare me, OK? Think of what follows as cramming for an exam.

Here’s a movie about regeneration through violence done to sons—that would be the first 30 minutes—and also to fathers. It is a movie about regeneration through violence done to males who are beaten, scourged, mutilated, violated, and penetrated first by their own people, hell, their own parents, and then by the bad guys, who happen to be from a colored world so far elsewhere that it becomes positively Asian.

Support Our Troops? Is that what we’re supposed to be thinking on the way out of the theater? Well, yes, the American military of our time and place, an all-volunteer Army, is comparable to these Spartans, if we are to believe Thomas Ricks, who wrote a book called Making the Corps (1997) in which he demonstrated the profound alienation of young Marines—dutiful, virtuous, communitarian men ready to sacrifice individual agendas to the greater good of the platoon, the mission, the Corps—that is, their alienation from civilian life, where “school sucks,” where everyone is out for himself and no one has any use for tradition or has any respect for others.

Civilians are clueless hedonists from their military standpoint. They look just like those effeminate Athenians of “300,” who haven’t been through the terrifying boot camp that is Spartan boyhood.

300 Being Beaten, Part III

Before we get back to the movie at, er, hand—that would be the big one, “300,” the most remarkable glorification of male masochism I have ever seen—let’s revisit Dr. Freud’s views on the matter, and then converse with his most brilliant interlocutors of late—they would be Carol Clover, David Savran, and Kaja Silverman. Our Greek chorus, and how appropriate for the period in question, will be the answer to everything, Judith Butler.

OK, the texts typically deployed when the question of masochism gets raised, usually by film critics and social theorists, are “’A Child is Being Beaten’: A Contribution to the Study of the Origin of Sexual Perversion,” originally published in English translation in 1920, reissued in 1924, now housed in the Standard Edition, vol. 17: 177-203, and “The Economic Problem of Masochism,” originally published in English the year of its composition, 1924, now housed in SE, vol. 19: 157-70.

It’s risky to summarize our Austrian Other, of course, because he’s always willing to contradict himself (see the “Wolf Man” case in vol. 17: 3-122, esp. 57-60, 120 n. 1), and even to make shit up. For example, Freud maps out three phases of the beating fantasy, the primal scene of masochism—in which it is always The Father who is doing the beating—and says that the second phase, when the narrator/patient adopts the first person (“I am being beaten,” not another child), “is the most important and the most momentous of all.” And then he reminds us that such primal scenes are narrative constructions after, or rather before, the fact: “But we may say of it in a certain sense that it has never had a real existence. It is a construction of analysis, but it is no less a necessity on that account.” [SE 17, 185]

Whay indeed? What kind of typo is that? I’m very disappointed in my editor, and that would be me.

But the question remains: Why is male sexuality in the movies of our time so insistently masochistic? Why are so many boys being beaten? And how does “300” intensify and magnify this weird tendency?

Freud himself was pretty clear about the sexual consequences of masochism, especially when pondering the difference between the female and the male versions. For example, from “’A Child is Being Beaten’”(1920): “In the case of the girl what was originally a masochistic (passive) situation is transformed into a sadistic one by means of repression, and its sexual quality is almost effaced. In the case of the boy the situation remains masochistic, and shows a greater resemblance to the original phantasy with its genital significance [there are three stages in the fantasy according to Freud’s clinical observations, but only in the second stage does the patient/narrator use first person pronouns, and only in the male variations does the “feminine” or passive posture remain constant] . . . The boy evades his homosexuality by repressing and remodeling his unconscious phantasy [of being beaten, penetrated, by his father]: and the remarkable thing about his later conscious phantasy [when divulged to the analyst] is that it has for its content a feminine attitude without a homosexual object-choice.” (SE 17, 199)

‘A Child is Being Beaten’

That is the title of Freud’s famous essay on masochism. To judge from “300,” the blockbuster movie my daughter has already seen twice, the person who worried about that child is multiplying to the point of absurdity—maybe fecundity—in the American imagination. I haven’t seen any of the “Saw” franchise, but the violence done to male bodies in “300” is truly extravagant, always urgent, and ultimately satisfying, largely because it is so beautifully rendered.

In this movie, a founding narrative set in ancient Greece, all the children get beaten, and it’s a good thing they do. Otherwise they wouldn’t be tough enough to beat off—oops—the heathen Asian horde led by slimy Persians and their colored, misshapen, misguided, or disguised allies.

Or are they slaves? It’s never clear. But elephants and ninjas on the battlefield, also sexuality perversity conveyed by belly dancing and tonguely gyration in the tents of the tyrant Xerxes, would suggest that the motives of the profoundly foreign enemy are probably not pure.

The story is simple, like most founding narratives. The choice offered by the Persian emissary to Leonidas, the Spartan king, is clear: Surrender and live luxuriously, perhaps as the suzerain of Acadia, or fight and die horribly, knowing your women and children will be enslaved when Xerxes, the head of an army of millions, inevitably wins. The king, played admirably, melodramatically, memorably, and most loudly by Gerard Butler, chooses, as per his queen’s wishes, to fight and die horribly.

Notes for a Talk at the “Walk-Out Against the War” of March 20, 2007 at Rutgers University

Well, here we are at the Vietnam Memorial, which reminds us, without gruesome statuary, of another war justified in the most specious ways. You will note that the fallen Rutgers grads take the shape of falling dominoes in this sculpture: it is brilliant testimony to, it is abstract but effective embodiment of, the human, bodily cost of that longest war.

Today I am supposed to address the University’s complicity in this new war, the one we fight against terror on all fronts. I would like to do so, but I don’t know how. Of course this university is complicit in this war. How could it not be? The university as such is the central, pivotal, indispensable institution of our time. And we, all of us here in this space, are constituents of the university, and as such we, too, are complicit in this war.

That is not a complaint, that is not even a criticism. It’s a fact. The trail of the serpent is everywhere, as Emerson, then James put it. We could get all Foucauldian about it and quote Judith Butler: “The juridical structures of language and politics constitute the field of power; hence there is no position outside of this field, but only a critical genealogy of its own legitimating practices. As such, the critical point of departure is the ‘historical present,’ as Marx put it.” Or we could just get used to the fact that there is no way to abstain from our world—only ways to change it.