Neda

"I don't understand the meaning of dispatching police forces and security agents to surround those who want to mourn," said Karoubi. "Neda was an innocent girl who was not even active politically," said one mourner. "I'm relieved to see Mousavi here. He's a brave guy who has showed that he's not going to step back and is with his own people. He is our real president." - Guardian

Someone is coming,
someone is coming,
someone who in his heart is with us,
in his breathing is with us,
in his voice is with us,

someone whose coming
can't be stopped
and handcuffed and thrown in jail,
someone who's been born
under Yahya's old clothes,
and day by day
grows bigger and bigger,
someone from the rain,
from the sound of rain splashing,
from among the whispering petunias.
someone is coming from the sky
at Tupkhaneh Square
on the night of the fireworks
to spread out the table cloth
and divide up the bread
and pass out the Pepsi
and divide up Melli Park
and pass out the whooping cough syrup
and pass out the slips on registration day
and give everybody hospital
waiting room numbers
and distribute the rubber boots
and pass out Fardin movie tickets
and give away Sayyed Javad's
daughter's dresses
and give away whatever doesn't sell
and even give us our share.
I've had a dream.
- From Someone who is not like anyone by Forough Farrokhzad, trans. by Michael Hilman

Dead Horses

I have always had a soft spot for Frederick Engels. In spite of the man’s obvious gifts, he will forever be the annotation to his friend Marx: the follower, the supporter, the man on whom Marx depended, the man whose own writings are folded into Marx’s. It was his fate to be a part of another man’s gigantic whole.

But the part speaks. In fact, Engels wrote well. He thought not only in terms of the categories Marx so laboriously forged, but also in terms of the philosophy he studied in his youth – thus the odd flotsam of natural philosophy that float to the surface of his works from the 1880s, like the Dialectic of Nature, works that have been viewed, alternately, as embarrassing anachronisms or illuminations of … Marx.

I was reading Keith Thomas’ Man and the Natural world last night. Thomas quotes a passage from Engels that I had to look up, so I did this morning. It is from the Dialectic of Nature:

“Comparison with animals proves that this explanation of the origin of language from and in the process of labour is the only correct one. The little that even the most highly- developed animals need to communicate to one another can be communicated even without the aid of articulate speech. In a state of nature, no animal feels its inability to speak or to understand human speech. It is quite different when it has been tamed by man. The dog and the horse, by association with man, have developed such a good ear for articulate speech that they easily learn to understand any language within the range of their circle of ideas. Moreover they have acquired the capacity for feelings, such as affection for man, gratitude, etc., which were previously foreign to them. Anyone who has had much to do with such animals will hardly be able to escape the conviction that there are plenty of cases where they now feel their inability to speak is a defect, although, unfortunately, it can no longer be remedied owing to their vocal organs being specialised in a definite direction.”

The idea that dogs and cats feel their inability to speak strikes me as so marvelously mysterious, such an odd and overlooked insertion into the vast Gulf Stream of Marxism, that surely it should be pointed to and pondered. This was written in the same decade that another philosopher actually heard a horse speak, in Turin. The horse, it seems, contained the spirit of Richard Wagner. The philosopher, of course, is Friedrich Nietzsche.

Tocqueville speaks of the historians task as a ‘descent into the tomb” – and among those things that stir in the tomb of the nineteenth century, and have no correspondent in our own lives, is the heavy reliance of the whole of urban civilization on the horse. In fact, that use of the horse goes on well up through the 20th century, with the greatest mobilization of horses in any war occurring, as a matter of fact, in WWII. In Ice Horses, one of Malaparte’s semi-fictional accounts of the war from the Axis side in his book, Kaput, he reports on going with a group of soldiers to Lake Ladoga, in Finland, in the spring of 1943, to chop out of the ice a thousand horses frozen there after escaping from a fire in a battle in 1942.

“The lake looked like a vast sheet of white marble on which rested hundreds and hundreds of horses’ heads. They appeared to have been chopped off cleanly with an axe. Only the heads stuck out of the crust of ice. And they were all facing the shore. The white flame of terror still burnt in their wide-open eyes. Close to the shore a tangle of wildly rearing horses rose from the prison of ice.”

Such are not the scenes of affection between man and his close circle of beasts that Engels was thinking about. And in fact, when scientists go on about “intelligence” – by which, of course, they mean, as the Greeks once meant, logos, human intelligence – they tend to downgrade the pussy cat and the lapdog in favor of the porpoise and the sperm whale. At the same time, who can deny the good ear of the dog, cat, or horse? An ear that is not shared by the human, who guesses at barks and meows and whinnies. Although, to be fair, this odd communicative couple of pet and petowner does seems to transcend the merely lexical, and speak to one another heart to heart. But it is not just of pets that Engels is speaking, but of his day to day experience of horses. The horse in the city was to Engels, naturally, what the car in the city is to us. Although I suspect the horse will return as the cities burn down and we discover that our massive betrayal of the atmosphere, our offering to the heavens of four hundred million years of organic matter, creates an unbearable world in which our children’s children will die, shaking their fist at this generation of world class vipers.

Elisabeth de Fontenay calls attention, in her essay on Philanthropia and the animal in the Greco-Roman world, to a passage in Plutarch’s life of Cato in which Plutarch ponders a duty that is not a duty – the duty towards the beast. A thing that is without law, and yet not without love – and towards which we express either our humanity by going beyond the law, or our inhumanity by adhering strictly to the letter of the law.

“Yet certainly, in my judgment, it marks an over-rigid temper for a man to take the work out of his servants as out of brute beasts, turning them off and selling them in their old age, and thinking there ought to be no further commerce between man and man than whilst there arises some profit by it. We see that kindness or humanity has a larger field than bare justice to exercise itself in; law and justice we cannot, in the nature of things, employ on others than men; but we may extend our goodness and charity even to irrational creatures; and such acts flow from a gentle nature, as water from an abundant spring. It is doubtless the part of a kind-natured man to keep even worn-out horses and dogs, and not only take care of them when they are foals and whelps, but also when they are grown old. The Athenians, when they built their Hecatompedon, turned those mules loose to feed freely which they had observed to have done the hardest labour. One of these (they say) came once of itself to offer its service, and ran along with, nay, and went before, the teams which drew the wagons up to the acropolis, as if it would incite and encourage them to draw more stoutly; upon which there passed a vote that the creature should be kept at the public charge even till it died. The graves of Cimon's horses, which thrice won the Olympian races, are yet to be seen close by his own monument. Old Xanthippus, too (amongst many others who buried the dogs they had bred up), entombed his which swam after his galley to Salamis, when the people fled from Athens, on the top of a cliff, which they call the Dog's Tomb to this day. Nor are we to use living creatures like old shoes or dishes and throw them away when they are worn out or broken with service; but if it were for nothing else, but by way of study and practice in humanity, a man ought always to prehabituate himself in these things to be of a kind and sweet disposition. As to myself, I would not so much as sell my draught ox on the account of his age, much less for a small piece of money sell a poor old man, and so chase him, as it were, from his own country, by turning him not only out of the place where he has lived a long while, but also out of the manner of living he has been accustomed to, and that more especially when he would be as useless to the buyer as to the seller. Yet Cato for all this glories that he left that very horse in Spain which he used in the wars when he was consul, only because he would not put the public to the charge of his freight. Whether these acts are to be ascribed to the greatness or pettiness of his spirit, let every one argue as they please.”

Baker on the Kindle

I’ve always loved Nicholson Baker’s feel for the object-ness of reading. He has a hunter’s sensitivity for detritus and marginalia, as though he were advancing through a cluestrewn landscape towards some primal scene in which the object becomes sense. Thus, his essays on the library index card, or the holocaust of old newspapers (which are being microfilmed and torn up) appeal in the way Freud’s case studies appeal, with the sideglance, the thing hardly said at all, the dream, followed up by an exacting, exacerbated consciousness towards the moment of recovery. In Baker’s case, it is the recovery of the whole sensual range of the first, magical reading experience – which, in the life of a reader, has the same status as the first sexual experience. Baker fastens this curious gaze upon the other minutia of the world as well – upon bobby pins and the sprockets of filmstrips, for instance. He seems to be aiming at making visible that vertiginous shift between the visible and the readable, making literature out of the impossible capture of the world by literature.

Plus, he is a curious kind of Luddite. He is not a Luddite who wants to abolish technology. He is a Luddite who is overwhelmed by the beauty – the gigantic waste of beauty – wrought by past technology. The total product of the everyday created by media – which surrounds us as the shell surrounds an oyster, our unconscious product in which we move and filter – fascinates him.

Given the writer he is, he had to be fascinated by Kindle. The resulting New Yorker article is the only Kindle article I’ve read all the way through.

Since I read a great deal on the Internet, I have failed to understand the hullabaloo over an ersatz book. For instance: I’m reading, at the moment, Foucault’s essay, Ceci n’est pas un pipe. I’m reading it in the Dits et écrits I, which I downloaded from Scribd, where it exists in a limbo of legality. In many ways I prefer to read it on the screen – I can change size of the type, for instance. As I don’t have any reading glasses – I lost my prescription reading glasses in December – I like to read with bigger type. Admittedly, the light of the screen is a smallscale, constant shock to my retina; on the other hand, I can read through my regular glasses if I make the print big enough.

But more than that – I can cut and paste. I can take a passage in French, paste it to another screen, and translate it. And in so doing I get into the very entrails of the prose, as if I were not simply a reader, but a sibyl.

And that is of course not all. I can take a word, phrase, or theme and search Google Books for it. And if, as often happens, someone wrote about it before 1922, I can download whole texts. And if, as often happens, someone wrote about it after 1979, I can often read excerpts of texts. Or I can go to archive.org and see if this evokes any echo in that rather bizarre collection of digitalized media. And the finds in archive org, that convocation of American and Canadian libraries spiced up by the million book project and other oddball enthusiasms, has allowed me to find many things that I’d have to go to a university library to find. By diligently searching for it, I was able to find Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen in Archive.org. And again, I am able to cut and paste, although from a reader document, which is a different kind of experience.

In Baker’s essay, he quotes many approving comments about Kindle. Some of them are from my companeros, the public library crowd. All library patrons have to deal with the fact that books are eaten over, sneezed on, left out in the rain, subject to a baby’s tearing hands, or the vandal’s scissors. Books tend to come off the glue that holds them to the spine. I just finished, for instance, The Grotesque, Patrick McGrath’s novel, and I inflicted on it a few bent page corners, which I smoothed out – but they leave their mark. I go through this book and it is not pure wilderness – others have visibly gone through before me. Nobody has spilled anything on it, but it has a loose feel, as though it is reaching its limit of openability. And then of course there is the library look of the book. It has a transparent plastic jacket over the book cover, and a ribbon runs across the bottom saying Austin Public Library. It is not a book I have bought. Reading it in a public place means that anybody can see I have not done the American thing and bought the book, nor am I a student. There is a light stigma on the library book user – it is as if we bear a slight family resemblance to the trash diver.

One thing Baker misses in his article, here, when talking of Kindle’s great success among romance readers:

“E-romances don’t fully explain the Kindle’s success—and the kind of devotion that it inspires. To find out more, I went to Freeport, Maine, to talk to Eileen Messina, the manager of the British-imports store just across from L. L. Bean. Messina, a thoughtful, intelligent woman in her thirties, has all kinds of things on her Kindle, including “Anna Karenina,” Murakami’s “Kafka on the Shore,” books by Dan Simmons and Abraham Verghese, and the comic novel “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.” She is so happy with it that she has volunteered, along with about a hundred others, to show it off to prospective purchasers, as part of Amazon’s “See a Kindle in Your City” promotion. Her Kindle was in her purse; she’d crocheted a cover for it out of green yarn. In the past, she said, she’d taken books out of the library, but some of them smelled of smoke—a Kindle book is a smoke-free environment.”

Messina is being discrete. Those of us who have worked at used book stores know the distinct, awful smell of romance paperbacks, a heavy, depressing mixture of perfumes and cigarette smoke. More than any other genre, romance novels are bought and traded en masse. They receive an amazing amount of circulation – more than is given to, say, that old two volume set of Husserl’s Logische Untersuchungen that has been in a corner in the Philosophy and Esoterica section forever. This volatility greatly increases the chance that the Harlequin will, like a dust speck in the sky, gradually accumulate around itself a miasmatic cloud of extraneous materials. The life cycle of the Harlequin would have made an excellent plot line for one of those Enlightenment philosopher-pornographers, who would trace the experience of a flea, or a sofa. Except of course that the seductions might be much more downbeat – especially in comparison to the seductions contained in the books themselves.

a Thought from Adorno

“Vice President – Advice to intellectuals: -don’t let yourself be represented. The fungibility of employments and humans and the belief derived from this, everyone must do everything, proves to be a chain around our feet within presently existing conditions. The egalitarian idea of representability is a fraud, if it is not supported by a principle of the ability to impeach and the responsibility before the rank and file. He is the most powerful who has to do the littlest possible himself, and can burden to the greatest extent possible those in whose name he functions and whose benefits he pockets. It seems like collectivism and is in reality only amour propre, one proves to be an exceptional laborer by the ability to manage others. In material production, of course, representation is materially instantiated. The quantification of the labor process tendentially degrades the difference between that done by the general director and that done by the man taking care of the gasoline station. It is a pitiful ideologiccal belief that there is more intelligence, experience, even education needed to run a trust under current conditions than to read a manometer. But as this ideology is stubbornly clung to in material production, the mind submits to the opposite fact. Thus the univeritas literarum is thrown by this doctrine to the dogs, to the equality of all in the Republic of Science, since everyone is not simply put in charge of everyone else, but also is supposed to be enabled to do just as well what everyone else does. Representability subjects the mind to this same procedure as things are submitted to exchange. The incommensurable is excluded.” (My translation)

This is a nice bit from Minima Moralia. It gets to the difference between our present feudalism, with the position of the wealthy supported by the fires of the incredibly rancid populism of a middle management class in the throes of its own obsolescence, and the feudalism of the past. Aspirational equality disguises the inequality of economic circumstances; while the politics within organizations is all about exhausting the energy for and interest in politics.

Gaia is a gambler

In “Paleontology”, one of the essays in The bad demiurge, Emile Cioran writes with his customary relish for the philosophically macabre of a tour of a natural history museum which impressed him with its display of skeletons:

“There is no place that puts the whole fact of the past in your face better. The possibility seems inconceivable or crazy. One has the impression there that the flesh is eclipsed from the beginning, that it could have never existed, that we can exclude the possibility that it was nailed to these bones so solemn, so imbued with themselves. It appears like an imposture, a trick, like a disguise that didn’t cover anything. And wasn’t it just that? And if it still is valueless, how does it succeed in inspiring either repulsion or terror in me? I’ve always felt a predilection for those obsessed by its nullity, and who made a great clamor about it: Baudelaire, Swift, the Buddha… It, so evident, is however an anomaly; the more one considers it, the more one turns away with disgust, and, weighing all these things, one gravitates towards the mineral, one petrifies oneself. Just to support the view of it or the idea, more is required than courage: it is cynicism that one needs. We deceive ourselves about its nature when we call it, with a Father of the Church, nocturnal; that also does it too much honor; it is neither strange nor shadowy, it is perishable to the point of indecency, to the point of madness, it is not only the seat of illnesses but is an illness itself, an incurable nothingness, a fiction degenerated into a calamity.” [My very free translation]

It is too bad Peter Ward seems not to be the type to read philosophers – this would make an excellent epitaph for his book, the Media Hypothesis.

I’m reviewing Ward’s book and another for the Austin Statesman. It is one of those cases in which I have to kick against the pricks, here – the pricks of the newspaper style. For the Medea Hypothesis is one of those rare books that, utterly wrong in itself, suggests, in spite of the the author’s rigorously missed opportunities, a truly interesting theory. The theory, as I was telling my friend, Mr. T. in NYC, of Gaia the Gambler.

Gaia as a theory of the earth as a whole, living system (an insight that now hides itself under several other names – Earth systems science, geophysiology – in order not to bear the cross of New Age enthusiasm) stems from a radical insight. This insight sounds like a truism. For the earth or any planet to be habitable, it has to be made habitable. If, for instance, we humans colonized the moon, we would have to make the moon habitable for us humans. We would have to devise some way of maintaining a breathable atmosphere and a consistently liveable temperature. We would have to protect ourselves from the noxiousness of the Moon’s atmosphere, and other unexpected Lunar features.

Gaia theory began, at first, with this insight and postulated the earth as one unified living system. The earth is not only inhabited, but it has been inhabited by the same kind of life form, one based on DNA, for 3.5 billion years. Uninteruptedly. Thus, the Gaian notion was that during this span of time, living organisms created negative feedbacks to balance the temperature, to reduce the salinity of the oceans, to enclose noxious chemicals, etc.

Building the structure of Gaia on negative feedbacks now seems wrong. Peter Ward’s book is built on the opposite idea, which he calls the medea hypothesis. The hypothesis is that life is suicidal. Ward is an expert in mass extinctions, and he seems, like Kurz in The Heart of Darkness, obsessed with the horror, the horror of paleontology.

He is so obsessed that he doesn’t see that he can’t possibly be right. For one thing, he wrote the book. For another, I read it. Neither of those things would have been possible if a true Medea event had happened on this earth.

He goes wrong in two ways, both of them very, very instructive for replacing the original, one system Gaian model. First, Ward doesn’t seem to understand his own hypothesis. As in bowling, there is a world of difference between a strike and a split. A strike knocks out all nine pins. A true Medea event would have interrupted the line of DNA life. It would have brought it to a close. Looking back, we would have seen that life had to start all over again (forgive the intentionalist language, which posits ‘life’ as an agent. All this means is that the primal soup in which we think the DNA/RNA system was set up would have had to commence all over again, after a true Medea event, in order for us to explain our own existence here.) Second, Ward doesn’t understand the essential principle of the Gaia hypothesis. It is that the planetary measure of the success of an inhabited planet is inhabitability. Ward comes up with a metric for the success of ‘life’ – a very different, and very irrelevant, issue. His two measures are biomass and bio-diversity. Now, to return to my bowling image for a moment, what a missed Medea event is about is not the diminishment of biomass or bio-diversity per se – although these may always accompany it. What it is about is knocking out habitats.

And if one begins to think in terms of habitats, then it becomes clear what is wrong with Gaia theory. It is not that the earth is one system, under a homeostasis created by the bio-sphere. It is, rather, that the earth is one system composed of a modular network of habitats.

Ward, rightly, points out that within a closed system, live forms will use up resources and die as the result of their own wastes. On a perfectly blank planet, one would expect to see life die out for just this reason. So, how does ‘life’ get around this problem?

The answer is in the missed Medean events. Many of them – for instance, the release of oxygen in the atmosphere – had definite biotic drivers. And the changes wrought were such that they extinguished many, many life-forms – perhaps as many as ninety percent during the period of extreme cold called snowball earth. But it isn’t the life forms that count here, it is the habitats. The evolution of the system seems to have been towards the one design that could ‘trick’ the limitations of living on one planet, which would be to create a patchwork of habitations. These habitations are semi-closed to each other insofar as the living forms that have colonized one might well die on another. But at no point do they all die – because they are various enough that planetary ‘switches’ from one dominant regime to another do not switch to a regime that is good for none. This hugely important point cries out, like a ghost, in Ward’s book; he ignores it, intent on knocking down Gaia, a concept and name that obviously irritates the hell out of him.

That there would be a patchwork of habitats makes much more sense of the fact that life, (and as far as we know, any life) is subject to natural selection. This means that there is always some noxious habitat on the edge of a dominant habitat that is being colonized by some life form. If there were no evolution, there’d be no patchwork of habitats; and if there was no patchwork of habitats, there’d be no Gaia.

Although I have not seen this particular model in the literature that I have hastily been reviewing, I predict that Gaia’s future is in understanding the modularity of the living system. This makes Gaia much less a mother, and much more a hedger. Gaia is a gambler.

Kill the poor

IT spotted an excellent quote yesterday. It was from a report on the state of education in the UK:

“Milburn's findings will be controversial in some parts of government, reawakening divisions over how to present a planned election crusade to reduce class divides. It will be seen as reinforcing the argument from John Denham, the new communities secretary, earlier this month that Labour must not become merely a party of the poor.'”

In the Cold War culture, there was a tendency on both the right and among the New Left to transform the Marxism into something it had never been: a philosophy agitating for the ‘poor’. You can see this transformation operating systematically in Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution. Arendt pretty much leaves Marx's sociology and economics on the cutting floor, and consistently substitutes the term ‘poor’ for the the term 'working class'. She does this to the point, almost, of absurdity. For instance:

“The idea that poverty should help men to break the shackles of oppression, because the poor have nothing to lose but their chains, has become so familiar through Marx’s teachings that we are tempted to forget that it was unheard of prior to the actual course of the French Revolution.”

Of course, Marx never appealed to the poor to break their chains, because such a statement would be absurd. He appealed to the workers of the world. He appealed to the working class, the proletariat. He appealed to them partly because, unlike the poor, an amorphous social class and condition, the working class is united by a common social element: they work. Thus, they can, for instance, stop work – strike. Marx did not just think that exploitation kept the working class poor; he felt that it kept the bourgeoisie rich – that the workers produced the wealth that the rich appropriated. Of course, this relationship is obliterated by the use of the word poor. By such means, Marxism becomes a sort of rabid Christianity.

It would be unfair to say that Arendt doesn’t see this point in part – she does speak of how, through the Marxist gaze, poverty is revealed as an social artifice, rather than a product of natural scarcity. But she doesn’t say that, through the Marxist gaze, the wealthy are revealed not as the creators of wealth, but the beneficiaries of wealth created by others. So curiously averse was Arendt to the class categories that Marx used that she just can’t get herself to write them down. Hence, the transition from proletariat to poor, as if these were synonymous categories.

As it happened, this switch is at the heart of Cold War capitalist ideology. It was a happy invention, since not only could the New Left become a moral force – on its long march to creating a generation of jowly moral entrepreneurs, pundits, who can, for instance, deploy their righteousness as they did in 2003 to browbeat anybody opposed to the invasion of Iraq as enablers of the little Hitler himself, Saddam H. – but it set the terms for state social insurance as a question of helping “the least fortunate.” Thus, that social insurance massively supports and sustains the middle class, which would collapse without it, shifted its markers in time for the financialization of capitalism - that structure that depended on the influx of money from pensions, mutual funds, and the whole panoply of tax exempt investment schemes to float the equities market. Thus, we had to privatize social security. Thus, we had to come down hard and stern on “middle class entitlement”, a sort of corrupt milking of the state by people who could easily ‘make it on their own.’ By making social insurance all about the poor, one could then present these “entitlements’ as somehow leaching off the poor, or even taking from them – the poor poor! Which, rhetorically, is a more successful strategy than saying that they are taking from the rich – a truth devoutly to be hidden.

It took almost seventy years to build up a system in which social insurance of various kinds was able to produce a robust middle class. It has taken some thirty years to debauch it, and the result, predictably, is that the middle class is collapsing. This, of course, is a disaster for which we can ascribe, in the UK, an architect – Nu Labour. To read the warm stream of piss that flows, now, on command out of the mouths of Nu Labour drudges – see here and here – is to feel that Nu Labour should play to its strengths, and rename itself the water sports party. That, at least, would make its upcoming, well deserved annihilation more fun.

sunday thoughts on the secret crime

Unfortunately for my blogs, and fortunately for my landlord, lately I've been overwhelmed with editing work so that I have neither the time nor the brain cells to hatch any coherent prose on my own. This is too bad, as on Limited Inc I am in the midst of trying to do a delicate and complicated reading of Rousseau. Which, given the heat, the work, financial panic, my usual summer libido, constant thirst, and the inability to end a day without feeling like I am leaving my stitching undone, is as hard to do as it would be to whistle a tune from Don Giovanni in the midst of a brass band undertaking Lynyrd Skinner's greatest hits.

Since this was the great week for the banks, the week of triumph for the Bush-Obama regime's policy of encouraging peculation on the national scale for the scaliest oligarchs, I wanted to pound a few points home to my own corvine satisfaction (that crow like delight in plucking out the eyes of the dead, the dead being, in this case, democracy and justice in the cracked republic of America). After all, what is the point of watching the fall of a great power from the inside if you can't crack some jokes about it? And since this was the week - this was the week! - in which we got not only bank reports, but a bevy of media stories about the "joblessness" of the recovery - stories in the true concern troll mode, setting us up for the next episode of our reality show nation, "Middle Class Survivor" - I really wanted to be the Lenny Bruce for this moment. It is so ripe and rich with promise! The Dems on the verge of suicide, nixing national health insurance once again so that they can run as the party of do nothing and bloated rhetoric against the GOP's classic do nothing and rabid rhetoric. The Obama approved war in Afghanistan ravaging the country for no good reason. The bankster fest. The ADS nation deep into Celebrity Death a day irrelevance.

We're all gonnnaaaa die!

Well, in the hustle and bustle, I have been reading bits of Hannah Arendt's On Revolution. I was fascinated by this passage, which seemed accidentally apposite the Bush-Obama policies at the Fed and the Treasury:

Politically, both Socrates and Machievelli were disturbed not by lying but by the problem of the hidden crime, that is, by the possibility of a criminal act witnessed by nobody and remaining unknown to all but its agent. In Plato's early Socratic Dialogues, where this question forms a recurring topic of discussion, it is always carefully added that the problem consists in an action 'unknown to men and gods.' The addition is crucial, because in this form, the question could not exist for Machievelli, whose whole so-called moral teachings presuppose the existence of a God who knows all and eventually will judge everybody. For Socrates, on the contrary, it was an authentic problem whether something that 'appeared' to no one except the agent did exist at all. The Socratic solution consisted in the extraordinary discovery that the agent and the onlooker, the one who does and the one to whom the action must appear in order to become real - the latter, in Greek terms, is the one who can say dokei moi, it appears to me, and then can form his doxa, his opinion, accordingly - were contained in the selfsame person."

Well, we know the name of that person: Behemoth. And we know that the secret crime is the systematic crime, which defines both revolution and reaction. The revolution of what one could call America's fourth republic, the republic of around 1956 to 1979, turned inside out the order of crime in this country, because that order was unjust. It was the order of apartheid. And, for a brief moment, the country lurched towards being a thing it had never been - a democracy. The reaction, swift in coming, long in staying, has systematically attacked that fearsome threat, the demos, with its own systematic reversals of law. Where the crime of the revolution was civil disobedience by the people, the crime of the reaction is institutional disobediance of the law - which pretty much describes the Treasury and the Fed from October of last year onward. Retroactively, the court system, which is in the forefront of reaction, will bless the numerous institutional crimes. A secret is kept best when it is kept in the open - a lesson from the Purloined Letter. The same is true about the crime that has debauched and degraded the American system. Call it the purloined nation.

We're all gonnnnnaaa die.