Rebels without a Cause

I don’t know what a 21st Century American theocracy would look like and I certainly hope neither I nor my heirs will ever find out, but I doubt if most conservatives would really like the reality of a no-fooling-around American Crusader state. The German conservatives from whom our rightists derive many of their ideas didn’t necessarily want the gangster regime that emerged from the last great defeat of liberalism, either, though their support was essential to the triumph of the Nazis. People like Carl Schmitt, Martin Heidegger, and Hans Freyer were far clearer on what they hated about soulless modernity and parliamentary government than on what kind of new dispensation could underlie a new and unified Germany. People whose political program amounts to waiting for a miracle aren’t likely to be very choosy. Which is probably also accounts for the surprising enthusiasm so many conservatives evince for authoritarian forms of traditional religion. It isn’t that any of these decrepit belief systems have become even slightly more plausible over the last decades—if anything, just the reverse. What has changed is the level of cultural anxiety. The right doesn’t know what it wants. It just knows that it wants it very badly. If you’re impatient enough for the Second Coming, you can even manage to be rapturous about the Reverend Moon.

For a long period after the end of the Second World War, conservatives in America and Europe accepted that welfare state capitalism and the extension of human rights to minorities were irresistible and that a meaningful conservatism should dedicate itself to preserving what remained valid in tradition while countering the utopian and potentially despotic tendencies of the dogmatic Left. That’s not enough any more.

Unfortunately, the real enemy of these folks is not the political ideology of liberalism, but social, economic, and cultural trends that are far more stubborn than a few Democrats. Religious enthusiasm can perhaps cow the feminists, but it doesn’t change the fact that the economy depends on everybody working. One can resist gay marriage and call for family values, but the demographic fact that most people aren’t going to have more than a kid or two isn’t going to change. Kansas may not teach evolution to high school kids, but using religious politics to squelch the autonomy of the sciences gets self-defeating very quickly. Does anybody really think that the spiritual situation of the age is going to be fundamentally altered by outlawing condoms and stem-cell research?

Jus Fetiales

By ancient Roman law, the state was forbidden to engage in aggressive war. A college of 20 priests, the fetiales, had to establish in each case that some king or other had offended the senate and people before war could properly begin by casting a bloody spear into the territory of the enemy or, when that wasn’t convenient, from the Temple of Bellona to the ager hostilis. Amazingly, this scrupulosity did not prevent Rome from expanding from a hilltop refuge for horse thieves to the greatest empire the History Channel has ever known and thus demonstrated once and for all that counterpunchers can be champs. The Etruscans, Samnites, Carthaginians, Greeks, Macedonians, Illyrians, Spaniards, Gauls, Thracians, Egyptians, Numidians, Arabs, Persians, and Britons probably had a different take on things, but all Roman wars were officially defensive.

Granted the durable success of Roman hypocrisy, Bush may be right in invoking in his doctrine of Preventative War an American version of the Jus Fetiales. If, on the other hand, we really don’t have the resources or the will to enforce universal empire, we might be better off with attitudes that suit a powerful but not all-powerful nation in its dealings with other nations. It used to be possible for a country to assert its interests in an international dispute without claiming that its foreign policy echoed the obvious principles of Natural Law if not the will of Almighty God. Before the first Gulf war, for example, Bush the First could and should have informed Hussein that the United States had a vital interest in the independence of Kuwait, an interest that didn’t have to be defended theologically but would be defended with guns and bombs. We didn’t need to represent ourselves as Pure and Good in every way in order to act decently. Indeed, absent the interminable rhetoric about how wonderful we are, other countries and their people would probably find it easier to accommodate our wishes. Even being recognized as a non-equal is an improvement on not being recognized at all except as a law-breaker.

They finally got Bush to stop talking about crusades, but his policy is remains “Love me, love my Sun God,” an interminable exercise in self-righteousness and national egotism. Unfortunately, Bush the Second didn’t invent American highhandedness; and the notion that we are always and obviously the offended party has been intoned on many previous occasions by the journalists who make up the local Fetial College. Too bad. I think we’d be less dangerous if we didn’t always have to be right.

Spammed by Maxwell’s Demon

What we think of as the norm is, after all, just what we’re used to. We shouldn’t be surprised, then, if some oddball thing we happen on turns out on closer examination to be exemplary. Since our existence is only possible because we are located in the bull’s eye of a nested set of improbabilities, inductions on everyday experience are risky. The Firesign Theater may be overstating matters to claim that everything you know is wrong, but everything is certainly likely to be anomalous. Many of the regularities we mistake for laws of nature are just ground rules and only apply in this one ballpark and then only for the duration of a game that may be called at any time for bad weather. I’ll mention some highfalutin instances in a moment, but the phenomenon is already captured by the puzzled look of a soon-to-be run over pedestrian who doesn’t understand how a taxi could be bearing down on him since the light is red. And then there’s the case of the extremely virginal girl I knew in high school who, when informed that her best friend was pregnant, cheerfully informed everybody that there must be some sort of error since her friend wasn’t married. Unlike Janet, Leibniz wasn’t, so far as I know, a Christian Scientist; but his belief that all curves have simple formulas has some of her endearing naïvite. It could not last, not for Janet, probably, and certainly not for the mathematicians, who having laboriously defined a few pathological functions in the 19th Century had to admit by the 20th that almost all functions are pathological and that the exceptions are the rule.

What I’m talking about only seems to be a rare pattern. Some more examples: in ordinary life, we assume that knowing more about what’s going on in some competitive situation will improve our chance of prevailing. That expectation may or not be valid in these parts and for the nonce, but it certainly can’t be generalized. Years ago, the game theory folks devised games in which having more accurate information puts a player at a disadvantage. Subsequently, they realized that these monsters were not curiosities at all. Having more information turns out to be disadvantageous in most possible games. Again, Kurt Godel proved the existence of propositions whose truth could not be decided by deductions from the axioms of the system in question. Naturally, it turns out that essentially all possible true propositions are in this set.

Many apparently general procedures only work under very particular circumstances. One example is the simplex method of solving linear programming problems, the single most commonly used operation’s research technique. The simplex method is the means by which an enormous number of governmental, business, and military decisions are made because it can often quickly find the best available solution to real-world problems. But the method, which works splendidly in practice, shouldn’t be that efficient. Tested on randomly generated inputs, it takes a long time to find the answer. The utility of the method depends on something about our world and how we deal with it. Which really shouldn’t be too surprising. We know that the performance of other optimizing techniques also depends on the circumstances. It has been clear for a long time that natural selection only works in a small subset of possible environments; and, more generally, the efficiency of any learning algorithm depends on what there is to be learned. We can’t know in advance what method to use. It’s not just that it’s better to be lucky than good. You’ve got to be lucky to be good.

Meanwhile. All of these thoughts were occasioned as I set about the task of deleting a day’s worth of emails for advanced degrees, penile enlargements, photos of hot middle aged women, real estate deals, and work-at-home schemes from my computer. I suddenly realized that the spammers aspired to be Maxwell’s demons, agents that make a profit without doing any work. As you’ll recall, a Maxwell demon is a character in a thought experiment. The demon, acting as a gatekeeper between two gas-filled chambers, lets fast molecules go from left to right while only letting slow molecules go from right to left until one chamber is much hotter than the other. In this fashion, in apparent disregard of the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, a temperature difference is created that can be used to drive a piston. The demon gets something for nothing, exactly what the Viagra salesmen are trying to get.

Now a Maxwell’s Demon is not really possible if only because it costs something to find out about the velocity and location of the particles and compute when to open or close the gate. But one of the reasons it costs to do the computation is rather subtle. Holding the intermediate results of your calculations in your head isn’t so expensive, but you not only have to remember things. You have to forget them, and that requires extra energy. When I encountered this argument years ago in an article in Scientific American, I never expected that it would turn out to have a real world application, but it does. It explains how the computer spammers succeed. They can impersonate Maxwell’s Demons by finessing the energetic costs of forgetfulness. They aren’t stuck with the vast amounts of garbage information they generate in the course of their operations, but only because they can get us to take out the trash for them.

Malpractice, Good for Everybody

Vilifying John Edwards as a trial lawyer hasn’t worked very well for the Republicans, who seem to have misjudged to what degree the public shares their visceral hatred for personal injury attorneys—in their innocence, many Republicans simply do not realize how much their version of common sense simply reflects their class interests. It isn’t that very many thoughtful people think that expensive lawsuits and occasional lottery-scale payouts are a rational way to curb the greed and arrogance of corporations. It’s just that in our dysfunctional system, random legal remedies are getting to be the only check on the power of money. If regulators won’t regulate, if legislators won’t legislate, if journalists won’t denounce, what else? In a nation of people on the take, the worst excesses can only be moderated by other people on the take. Why the enormous amounts of money some lawyers make from injury cases upsets the Republicans beats me. Aren’t they the party in favor of enormous rewards for dubious services? In red-state, red meat America, the Land of Betting on the Come, high rolling is as honorable as holy rolling. Junk politics, junk bonds, junk religion aren’t that much different, or less profitable, than junk lawsuits. If it pays, it’s patriotic. So why the hostility to shysters by folks who love CEOs?

By the way, if you really wanted to cut down on frivolous injury lawsuits, the obvious first step to take would be ensure that everybody had a guaranteed access to decent health care since a huge proportion of suits begin not out of the prospect of a big payday but out of fear of being ruined by medical expenses—at the outset, all the scalded lady wanted was enough money to pay her hospital bill. An efficient, universal health care system is out of the question, however, since it would lower the profits of the medical industry and put untold thousands of insurance company bureaucrats out of work. Anyhow, and this is the obvious consideration that never seems to be considered, the malpractice suits have their good side for the health industry. Because of the endlessly hyped threat of lawsuits, the doctors and hospitals are obliged to practice defensive medicine and order a host of expensive tests and procedures, most of which are not performed pro bono. I’m not aware if anybody has done the arithmetic, but do we know that the increased cost of insurance is as great as the increased profits from all those extra X-rays and blood workups? Many doctors find it personally distasteful to waste their patient’s money. My point is that the system provides them both an incentive to overspend and a handy and elastic excuse. Meanwhile, the purported malpractice crisis is also useful to right-wing politicians, who can blame escalating medical costs on lawsuits and thus deflect attention from the grotesque structural inefficiency of the system.

Silver Linings

When I read that the balance of trade improved slightly last month, I wasn’t surprised since the considerable recent decline in the value of the dollar has made imports more expensive while lowering the real price of export goods. That’s good or at least necessary, but only in the sense in which it is necessary to go to the dentist after years of sucking on hard candy. Like working off a bout of inflation or increasing the savings rate, redressing a gross imbalance of trade inevitably involves pain. Just who does most of the suffering is another question. Which is probably why right-wingers view the trade balance with equanimity. They are aware that the balance of trade will eventually be redressed, but that’s OK because under the current political economy of the United States, the cost of paying down the deficit can be shifted to the proles. No need to lower your profit rate to reflect the lower prices you get for your goods internationally when the difference can be more than made up by lowering the standard of living of your workers who will be buying more expensive consumer goods on lower wages. A utopian solution, always assuming, of course, you don’t end up with your head on a spear.

The prosperity of the United States is artificial to a considerable degree. Unless we really do figure out how to make empire pay on a grand scale, our standard of living must eventually come more into line with the rest of the world. Such an outcome is not necessarily tragic, both because the continual improvement of technology means that a relative decline doesn’t have to imply an absolute decline and because wealth simply isn’t the only measure of the well being of a nation. If the burden of a decline were equitably borne, paying down the trade imbalance wouldn’t have to unpleasant political consequences. Indeed, shared sacrifices can promote genuine unity in a country, something with which we’re completely unfamiliar after long decades of commercialized patriotism. It might also be a relief to have some goal in this life beyond the endless accumulation of things. I don’t expect things to work out in this happy fashion, however. As the American economy continues to come under competitive pressure, the natural reaction of the well off will be to compensate for declining national income by increasing their share of what’s left.

Enter the Dragon (Here and on Line 32)

Am I alone in thinking that the great problem of the left is not political but ideological? While Ehrenreich or Nader or Chomsky can score rhetorical points against the powers that be and turn out the usual crew of protesters, what are they offering as a coherent alternative to business as usual? What the heck is democratic socialism—or whatever—in the 21st Century? Acting as if a mass outbreak of virtue and compassion will solve our problems just doesn’t cut it.

I'm not writing this to carp. I keep looking around for a confident voice on the left that has something to offer but theoretical nuance or petit bourgeois moralizing. I'm not sure I'd buy into a fresh radical point of view, but I'd sure like to hear one. Capitalism itself seems to work much better when it is challenged and checked by a credible counterforce with serious ideas. Which probably requires the emergence of a group or class of people with a vital interest in changing things and some idea of what they want.

Incidentally, I don't have a clue what the title of this bit means either.

Back in that Forking Garden

I’m skeptical of meditations on history that appeal to the now familiar butterfly effect. As a matter of mathematics, arbitrarily small differences in the starting points of certain dynamic systems have huge consequences. If the world and therefore history is a chaotic system, however, that just means that any alteration of boundary conditions whatsoever suffices to change everything after a while. But this notion is perfectly empty, first, because one can never test or exploit the sensitivity of the system because no one can change anything at all, and, second, because all changes, meaningful or meaningless, are equivalently potent in this hypothesis. So far as I can see, chaos theory has nothing to tell us about what makes historical events decisive. It can never help us figure out what would have happened if Grant had been drinking at Appomattox.

Counterfactual historians like to underline the quirkiness of history by suggesting that plausible alternative decisions would have led to vastly different outcomes. I have no quarrel with this procedure as a way of thinking about what’s at stake in history, though in many cases I think it is employed mostly as a prophylactic or postphylactic against the apparently unbustable ghost of Marxism. But counterfactual history, as practiced, actually presumes a high degree of rationality in human affairs. It is anything but a celebration of the sovereignty of chance. Only in a highly organized world is it possible for an individual or a few individuals to make a decision that has recognizable, if not entirely predictable consequences. The paths fork—the government of Italy chooses to invade France or it doesn’t—but the options don’t splinter into thousands or billions of outcomes at every moment. If Croesus crosses the river Halys, he doesn’t know whose kingdom will be put at hazard, but somebody’s will. Atoms, molecules, rocks, and animals just don’t have that kind of leverage.

Counterfactual history only makes sense if human affairs mostly make sense. Niall Ferguson may not be a Hegelian, but his methodology strongly implies that the “Real is pretty rational: the pretty rational is real.” That’s not a small matter, and raises the preliminary question of how a region of reality got predictable enough to be uncertain in a game-like way.

That Time of Year

Reading through Stephen Owen’s Anthology of Chinese Literature I was struck again by how few themes dominate poetry, especially lyric poetry, and how few genuinely novel sentiments ever appear. According to the ancient Classic of Documents, “The Poem articulates what is on the mind intently.” Apparently nothing makes the mind more intent than the bloodshot dawn of old age, though there really isn’t more to say about it than there is to do about it; and the master plot of all those poems can be provided all too easily as in my contribution to the genre:

The Poet’s Keen Awareness of his Approaching Decrepitude

Crap!

Of course it could be that Chinese were wrong about what poetry is about and that “what’s on the mind intently” is just another formal element like rhyme or meter. Or maybe it is an instance of a deeper artifice to deny a really depressing fact by concentrating on it in a patterned way.

The Japanese poet Michizane’s line about the failure of the light: “It was not the wind—the oil is gone.” Let us consider the extent to which this loveliness helps and the extent to which it does not.

The Difficulty of Figuring Out Who’s Really on the Top in Wrestling and Religion or Mort Saul Among the Prophets

In my village atheist phase, I’m concerned by the influence of religion on politics because bigotry and irrationalism are catching. Religion is a very mixed bag, however; and though all faiths are obviously false if construed as systems of propositions, religious values are certainly not all malevolent or anti-democratic. The very notion of the separation of church and state originated on the church side of the line, for example. Indeed, it could be argued that the worst thing about the current confluence of politics and religion is the bad effect that politics is having on religion.

If slavery is the Punic curse of American history, imperial patronage plays the same role in history of every church. Preachers sometimes claim that Christianity triumphed because of the many miracles wrought by the saints and apostles; but, from a real politik point of view, the only miracle that mattered was the miracle of the Milvian Bridge in which Constantine saw a cross in the sky, won a battle, and became emperor. In one respect, of course, that cross was a good sign for the faithful since Christianity needed the coercive power of the state to become a universal religion, but it was a bad sign also since the empire provided its services at a high price. To this day, for example, the monarchical mummery, obsessive secrecy, and authoritarianism of the Catholic church derive from the imperial model; and it is these political characteristics much more than the doctrines of the faith that make abuse and corruption inevitable.

George Bush isn’t exactly Constantine, but he and his cohorts are offering the modern churches a new version of the imperial bargain. In return for votes and money, churches will get tax breaks, federal funds, and support for some but not all their cultural concerns. Go along with aggressive wars and your leader will endlessly profess his faith. Soft-pedal your opposition to the death penalty and we’ll recriminalize abortion and pester the pornographers. Rome has been making these kind of deals for centuries and will probably go along—it’s only the first moral compromise that keep you awake at night, the ten thousandth is easy—but some of the more traditional Protestant groups, especially the Baptists, are having second thoughts about making their services into pep rallies for the President or acknowledging that the Reverend Moon really is the Messiah.

Democratic Vistas

It’s rather like the joke in which a clerical error results in a world where the cooks are English and the cops are French. America circa 2004 has all the bad features of a democracy with few of its redeeming qualities. As the vice president would put it, right wing populism stokes class resentment and envy big time. Even though the Republicans are far wealthier as a group than the Democrats, it’s John Kerry’s class standing that’s somehow the issue in a campaign where the other guy comes from the bluest blood in America. More generally, the people are encouraged to believe that majorities should rule in the sciences (Creationism) but not in economics or even politics where the interests of the contributing classes trump, as if by rule, the concerns of lower and middle class people. Meanwhile our billionaires have become just plain folks, at least in the Dogville sense. While 19th Century economic elites felt an obligation to get cultured, modern money parades its coarseness and ignorance. Noblesse oblige really is problematic attitude, of course, but dispensing with it altogether is not necessarily better. And it’s not just that our nouveau riche have learned how to have nouveau riche children. The grandchildren of Connecticut bankers have learned how to munch on pork rinds in public, and their great grand children have learned how to like ‘em. Mr. Bush would feel perfectly at home in a house trailer. Indeed, if anybody ever belonged in a trailer…

What’s missing from our ersatz democracy is a first of all the sense of responsibility that should accompany popular sovereignty. Many of the people I speak with act as if they would be doing somebody a favor if they voted. Perhaps because they realize that they have little or no voice in public life, they don’t think of themselves as actors but victims. If, as is unfortunately very likely, America’s arrogant foreign policy eventually results in domestic disaster, it’s a good bet everyone will look around the next day and blame “them” for what happened. “Why didn’t you tell us?” they’ll ask, though they certainly never tried to find out.

Of course it is arguably true that no nation was ever very democratic in the sense of having a truly well-informed and vigilant electorate—I mostly believe in the iron law of oligarchy myself—but in any case, the anti-democratic tendencies of the last thirty years are not just a matter of process. Whether our politics are by the people or of the people, they surely aren’t for the people. The last three Republican administrations have been dedicated to lowering wages and cutting benefits for the majority of the population with predictable results.

Genuine Blogging for a Change

Today’s disappointing job report puzzled me a bit because I had expected more of a bounce off the bottom of the last recession granted what can be expected from a normal business cycle and the cumulative effective of massive deficit financing and ultra-low interest rates. Like many observers, I thought the tax cuts, overwhelmingly aimed at people in the upper brackets, were an inefficient way to stimulate the economy; but I thought they would provide some Keynesian stimulus if only as a side effect. At the recent rate, it will take years for employment to catch up with the population. In fact, at this month’s rate, it will never catch up. However you measure it, the current recovery is exceedingly sluggish, a fact somewhat obscured by the nonstop cheerleading of the financial press.

Even observers like Paul Krugman who are decidedly hostile to the administration’s economic policy tend to suggest that the price we pay for running enormous deficits in the federal budget and the balance of trade is mostly long term. Indeed, they imply that one of the structural problems with the nation’s real constitution is that there is no political cost for promoting bad economic policies since the public is too stupid or too distracted to register consequences that occur incrementally over a long time period. Opportunistic political economics such as unsustainable tax cuts are rational in the same sense that knowingly operating a polluting factory is rational. The malefactors get the benefits and leave everybody else with the costs. It may be, however, that the piper will have to be paid in real time on this go round.

One other economic thought, a question really: Critics of the Bush tax cuts have generally complained that drastically lowering the higher tax brackets was an inefficient way to stimulate the economy because well off people don’t spend as high a proportion of their income as poorer people. But doesn’t it also matter what the tax cut dollars are spent on? Less affluent people spend extra money on food, shelter, clothing, health care, and education. More affluent people spend extra money on recreation, prestige items, second homes, and fancy rides. Even if high bracket tax payers spent the same proportion of their tax cuts as the less well off, their dollars would be stimulating different segments of the economy. Doesn’t the quality as well as the quantity of effective demand have an effect? For example, doesn’t a pro-wealth policy result in more capital going into the development of gated communities rather than affordable housing? Just asking.

It’s Not a Well?

Watching television informercials on the golf channel, you have to wonder why Ernie Els and Tiger Woods don’t get themselves one of those patented rescue clubs so they, too, can reliably hit 200 yard shots out of deep bunkers. Since it is likely that they can afford the three easy payments of $69.99, it must be pride. Or, perhaps what we have here is the commercial version of something that happens all the time in the realm of religion and the occult. Mystics and gurus of all sorts perpetually advertise amazing secrets that must be kept from the profane mob, but what they reveal in their more exoteric statements is typically far more extreme, lurid, and downright screwy than the vastly more guarded remarks they make to their actual students. Thus, for example, of the two attested works of the philosopher and shaman Empedocles, the Purifications, which is addressed to all the citizens of the city of Acragas, teaches an elaborate doctrine of reincarnation with many mythological trimmings while the book On Nature, which is addressed to a fellow philosopher, offers a reasoned and admittedly provisional physical account of the universe. In this instance, as in many others, the esoteric is less exotic than the exoteric.

Nothing is more plebian than the rhetoric of secret wisdom. Since the content of popular religion is a mix of banalities and science fiction, it is absolutely necessary to tart things up with mystifications about things hidden since the foundation of the world. Meanwhile, the conversations of people seriously interested in figuring things out are extraordinarily modest and matter of fact since the object of the game is not to impress the natives by claiming to possess God’s unlisted phone number and actual knowledge, as opposed to humbug, is damned hard to come by. There is a secret about real thinking, however. Most people will never understand how grounded you can feel once you’ve acknowledged to yourself that neither you nor anybody else can see through walls by sheer concentration.

The Will of Zeus Was Being Accomplished

The official handoff of sovereignty to the provisional Iraqi government wasn’t a very grand affair and not simply because it took place in deep secrecy two days before its scheduled date. The sovereignty in question, at least so far, is utterly notional. The initial affect of today’s proceedings is simply to transfer effective power from the American administrator to the American ambassador. Before leaving, Bremer underscored the hollowness of the gesture by committing Iraq to a series of laws that include legal immunity for foreign contractors and a fairly low (15%) ceiling on the highest income tax bracket. Since the new government will be dependent on the American military, their freedom of action will be sharply limited in any case. I, for one, find it hard not to feel sympathy for the members of the new government, at least some of whom appear to be sincere Iraqi patriots. Since ’75, the personal prospects of members of American puppet regimes have not been proven very good from an actuarial point of view.

As in antiquity, the temporarily victorious powers establish their form of government in occupied states. Sparta set up oligarchies. Athens set up democracies. In much later history but in the same vein, the Soviet Union set up People’s Republics in its Eastern European empire. Now we’re establishing what we are calling a democracy in Iraq. Democracy, however, is a very elastic term. For the most part, its semantic value in our political discourse is the equivalent of a grunted “Good.” It certainly doesn’t mean popular sovereignty or anything like it. Our foreign policy maintains a steady hostility to that—an electoral victory by the wrong guy amounts to sending the Marines an invitation with an RSVP. But “Democracy” can’t be used to refer to a general preference for the rule of law over arbitrary executive power either since this administration famously asserts the supremacy of presidential authority over both the courts and congress. In this respect, Bush, though personally innocent of any knowledge of political philosophy, is just following the lead of the Neocons in his administration. In turn, the Neocons are following the influential German rightist, Carl Schmitt, who asserted back at the end of the Weimar Republic that political legitimacy is logically and materially superior to legality. The current administration idea of democracy also seems to derive from Schmitt, for whom it referred to a regime legitimized by the Will of the People as defined by a charismatic leader ruling by plebiscite. That pretty much captures what the administration stands for in Iraq and, for that matter, at home: an authoritarian regime that overrules juridical and legislative authority in the name of the Nation. Writes Schmitt, “Every democracy rests on the presupposition of the indivisibly similar, entire, unified people.” While this Republican version of democracy indeed uses populist, demagogic methods to promote itself, in practice it defends the interests of wealthy people against the liberals or socialists who threaten the sacred rights of property, conceived of, as conservatives always do, as natural.

As everybody admits, it will not be easy to establish democracy in Iraq; but that’s especially true if the democracy in question is the kind contemplated by our government. Conservative ideologies are hard to disseminate because they are particularistic. If you don’t mind the mumbo jumbo, it makes some kind of sense to pledge allegiance to the mystical body of your own country. You can hardly expect the Iraqis to be similarly worshipful about the American Way. Besides, although we hear more about religious objections to our policy, a lot of opposition in Iraq, perhaps most of it, is completely secular and derives in large part from the accurate perception that the non-negotiable privatization policies foisted on the country at gun point amount to the theft of the national wealth of Iraq and its distribution to a politically connected elite. Some of the insurgents are determined to prevent their nation from being ripped off. Unfortunately, the bulk of them are probably just determined to get cut in on the swag.

Where’s Waldo?

The Gods have smiled on me by staging a series of really stupid miracles as if they were determined to teach me an important lesson about synchronicity. Back in the 60’s, for example, I had a night of truly obsessive dreams, all of which involved the unlikely theme of tuna spaghetti sauce. Like golf dreams in which you never actually get to tee off, like sex dreams in which you actually never get to get off, the tuna spaghetti sauce dream was intensely frustrating. Though I courteously informed everybody I didn’t know the recipe for the dish, indeed, had never actually heard of such a thing, people of all kinds kept insisting that I cook it for them. One and after another and then in choruses, women, men, children, talking animals, cartoon characters on television shows, midgets with Munchkin voices, even rows and rows of newborn babies in the hospital all chanted: “Tuna spaghetti sauce! Tuna spaghetti sauce!” And I tried to make what they wanted but either I couldn’t get the stove to light or there wasn’t any pasta or there wasn’t any tuna, always something. I think I must have spent half a sweaty Connecticut summer night tossing and turning as I moaned to myself “Tuna spaghetti sauce! Tuna spaghetti sauce!” I woke up several times during the night, but it didn’t help. No sooner had I got back in bed and fallen asleep than a new variation of the Tuna spaghetti sauce dream would begin. As you’d imagine, when morning finally came, I was relieved to hear the clock radio come on. Relieved that is, until I heard the unmistakable nasal tones of Myra Waldo, New York radio personality and food expert, announcing “Today’s recipe: tuna spaghetti sauce!”

Now I suppose that someone with a more spiritual turn of mind than my own would find some meaning in this episode as I might have myself had the subject matter been less trivial. I’ve never had a similar experience involving the death of a loved one or some other event emotionally significant enough to turn a quirky coincidence into a portent. I do continue to experience equally screwy conjunctures, however. The other day when I was trying to think of an especially odd incident in the Bible to exemplify all the things in scripture that nobody remembers, I considered the story in First Samuel of how God inflicted the Philistines with a plague of hemorrhoids for capturing the Ark of the Covenant. In order to appease Yahweh, the Philistines not only returned the Ark but also sent with it an offering of five golden hemorrhoids and five golden mice. I didn’t use this bit, settling instead on the tale of Ehud and Eglon King of Moab as my example, but I certainly had in mind a day later when I more or less accidentally caught a few minutes from a television interview of Ashley Judd. She was talking to Conan O’Brien about her role in the new movie about Cole Porter. They were talking about somebody’s jewelry and I was suddenly struck with a premonition that she had actually encountered a copy of one of the golden hemorrhoids. Of course that’s exactly what happened. I guess there really is a God.

The well understood arithmetic of coincidence guarantees that this sort of thing will not be especially rare, especially for someone like me who, as I am fond of saying, lives as a kind of intellectual oyster or barnacle that filters an immense stream of information through my brain every day. If I got it into my head to be superstitious, I could be very superstitious indeed. Besides, no doubt as a further consequence of an off-brand nervous system that’s been out of warrantee a very long time, I’ve had a host of uncanny experiences that a more enterprising type could have made into a career as a retail mystic. I used to sleep walk and on one memorable occasion woke up with muddy feet and dressed only in the jacket of a tuxedo. I’ve had repeated and memorable hypnagogic visions and even a couple of ecstasies and long ago learned how to throw myself into a passable imitation of a shamanic trance, though I’ve never been moved to send back a post card from the Land of the Dead. The net effect of all these interior adventures, like the prophetic dream of tuna spaghetti sauce, has been to make me highly skeptical of the value of mysticism itself. Extreme psychological states and uncanny coincidences are like exclamation marks. No matter how much they impress you, they owe whatever meaning they have to the words that precede them.

Principalities and Powers

I admit that Bush exercises a certain fascination, rather like something alarming and mysterious you find sticking to the bottom of your shoe; and, certainly, the American system gives him staggering official power and very real actual power. Political combinations aside, he still commands the loyalty of the dull normals, an enormous voting block. All that said—and these are not insignificant considerations—Bush just isn’t the problem. Evicting him from office may be an indispensable step towards restoring a decent state of affairs, but it is not a sufficient step and it makes a very great difference how he is removed and by whom. That’s why I have very mixed feelings about recent evidence that the CIA is working to unseat Bush.

One can hardly blame the professional spooks for despising an administration that has used them so badly and in so many ways. But it goes beyond making Tenet the in-house fall guy for every disaster or even the cynical and, indeed, criminal outing of Valerie Plane, now in the late cover-up stage. The CIA, in common with many other career defense and intelligence people like Richard Clarke, see the Bush doctrine as potentially fatal to their own much subtler approach to dominating the world. Almost everybody’s an imperialist at this point. The issue is whether the empire should be managed with a certain amount of tact and an awareness of the very real limits of American power or whether we can afford to rub the world’s nose in our endlessly advertised righteousness.

There are plenty of signs that CIA people are busy undermining the administration. Retired intelligence people have been furiously criticizing our unilateral foreign policy, and an active CIA man, writing as Anonymous, will shortly publish a ferocious attack on Bush that predicts that Bin Laden will make a point of undertaking a showy terrorist attack in the United States before the election in order to get his favorite candidate a second term—nothing could have furthered the cause of Islamic radicalism so much as the invasion of Iraq. The appearance of Imperial Hubris is especially significant since active intelligent agents have to get company permission before publishing. It would have been very easy for the CIA to have delayed the book beyond the election if they wished. They didn’t.

We do not know what other actions CIA people are undertaking. They are, after all, accustomed to operating clandestinely. In the first three years of the administration, very little embarrassing paper surfaced about the Bush administration. I suspect the increasing appearance of secret documents and memos over the last six months or so owes something to the activities of disgruntled insiders. Bush is not quite the Lone Ranger in his own administration, but he is having some serious What-You-Mean-We-White-Man moments. Of course the CIA is not the only power group with an ax to grind. I’m sure that plenty of generals would like to get even with Rumsfeld for his highhandedness and micromanagement. The administration should keep an eye on those folks—high-ranking officers are far more intelligent and vastly better trained than the average political hack—and the heads of the various commands are used to exercising independent power.

Military and intelligence groups have long exercised extra-constitutional power in the United States. Democratic presidents, in particular, haven’t been able to rely on the loyalty of the cops, spies, and generals for a very long time; and if some renegade admiral torpedoes a Republican at some point, I guess turn about is fair play. The net effect of the process, however, is to continue the erosion of responsible government in the country. Most of the time, I believe liberal empire is the best available short-term outcome, but it worries me that a Kerry administration is going to have to kiss a lot of rings to achieve even that.

What Caesar Rendered Unto

Recent surveys show that a majority of Americans claim to believe in the literal truth of such Bible stories as the Garden of Eden, Noah’s Ark, and the parting of the Red Sea. Although American piety doesn’t seem to extend much beyond the Golden Oldies—who remembers what happened when Ehud stabbed Eglon?—the poll does show an increase in belief. In the most recent studies I’ve seen, however, church attendance and other indexes of religious behavior continue to decline. For most Americans, religion is adherence to a form of words rather than the practice of a form of life, which is a bit of a comfort to us infidels. The government recently argued before the Supreme Court that the “Under God” clause in the Pledge of Allegiance was constitutionally permissible because nobody took it seriously anyway. To judge by what people do, as opposed to what they say, affirming the existence of the Almighty to a pollster is similarly lacking in existential force. However.

A real, as opposed to notional, religious revival is not impossible granted the pathological state of our public discourse and the extremism and irrationality of our political leaders. One should remember that all the great historical religions achieved political and cultural domination through political coercion. Universal religions are systems of compulsion. Before the Conversion of Constantine, Christians were a considerable minority but no more than that. Islam was always an affair of the sword, and even Buddhism only spread widely with the help of the Mauryan emperors. The Church Fathers were well aware that it was Roman imperial power that made their success possible. From their point of view the Empire was a work of providence, part of what they called the preparation for the gospel.

It’s hard to imagine a real theocracy in America, of course; but the right obviously does not believe in the separation of church and state—according to one of the planks in the platform of the Texas Republican Party, the United States should define itself overtly as a Christian country. Professions of traditional belief are already a de facto requirement for high political office in these parts. Free thinkers like Jefferson couldn’t pass the test and the Spinozistic Abraham Lincoln wouldn’t have much of a chance either. Much rightwing support for religion is completely cynical—neoconservatives from Leo Strauss on down regard popular faith as a useful fraud—but people like Bush appear to be completely sincere. We don’t know what may happen now that an authentic bigot has the bomb.

The Descending Limb of the Parabola

Feminism, democracy, and rationality have had a remarkable run over the last 200 years, but it remains to be seen if any of these rockets has achieved escape velocity from the gravitational pull of human nature. The historical and anthropological record suggests that males normally dominate women, the thugs normally intimidate peaceable people, and the population at large finds crazy religious ideas irresistible. Under the circumstances, I’m thankful and a little surprised that my neighbors haven’t gotten around to murdering me in my bed. Of course it may be that the special conditions of a complicated, high technology civilization really do automatically promote the persistence of enlightenment, at least in the long run. Or maybe they don’t. Or maybe, though the suggestion is rather strenuous, the liberal option remains open if and only if people keep it open by an exercise of their collective will.

From Minerva to Mars

Conservatives traditionally claimed they just were defending themselves against the advance of various terrible radicals but above all against anybody who proposed to redistribute wealth. That stance required them to represent property rights as sacred and natural, a dubious proposition from either a philosophical or a historical point of view, but one that at least didn’t justify the acquisition of additional wealth by force and fraud in the present day. Modern conservatives are more ambitious. They are as eager to redistribute wealth as any socialist regime. In the Code Napoleon, the first heading under the rubric of Ways to Acquire Wealth was marriage. In the current code of American politics, it’s buying influence. The Republican Party, far better at this sort of thing than the Democrats, has become a powerful engine of wealth creation, but only for its supporters. A new and vigorous round of primitive accumulation is underway here and around the world.

Previously, people used to assume that corruption is only a major problem in the Third World countries or southern states in which a significant proportion of pubic wealth is siphoned into private pockets. Corruption in most of the United States, despite some impressive specific cases, seemed at most to have a moral significance, that is, it was deplorable but also not very important from a macroeconomic perspective. Small time opportunists, like camp followers, might latch onto a successful politician to make their thousands or millions; but the net effect of all the chiseling was negligible, a kind of friction. In the last 30 years, this assumption has been proven wrong. The active and partisan intervention of government has made it possible for the already wealthy to increase their share of wealth at the cost of the overall prosperity and health of the population. And the rich have grown accustomed to this fast-food feast. Which is also why so much money continues to pour into Bush’s coffers even though it is as apparent to Big Money as to everybody else that the President is utterly incompetent and exceedingly dangerous. He’s still the best profit play around; and if things go to Hell in the U.S., they can always move. They already have an office in Bermuda.

Low Cal Snacks

Dogville:

The movie in a capsule: a Greek Tragedy that ends with the murder of the chorus.

A Poem Found in a Scholarly Article about the Renaissance Philosopher Pico della Mirandola:

"Can the right-thinking scourge of the stargazers have been
A wooly-brained wizard himself?"

Written On a Stray Piece of Paper I Found Under the Bed:

Long acquaintance hath at last made the world unfamiliar to me.

Useful Quotation for all Occasions:

“The sun will have no spectators if it is not in eclipse.” – Olaus Magnus, Historia de gentibus septentrionalibus

The Fate of Holy Writ:

As Moses could have told Marx, an author who is not allowed to be wrong will end up not being read, no matter how often he’s quoted.

An Explanation:

The innumerable vampires and demons of Sunnyvale
The invincible Kung-Fu of Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan
Because there are no Gods or spirits at all
Because the force of a single man is merely contemptible.

Cheer Up:

In view of the dullness we daily observe
Even you are a God if they grade on the curve.

The Lure:

Grand theories are like big tits, a bait and switch operation. Seeking pleasure, we procreate. Seeking enlightenment, we conduct empirical research.

Title in Search of an Essay:

Much Wretched Queen Adieu About Nothing

We Were Just Ordering Followers

The administration is blaming 19-year old soldiers for implicating the administration in war crimes. “None of this would have happened if the soldiers had demonstrated more moral strength and disobeyed our clearly illegal orders.” In a separate statement, a Whitehouse spokesman reassured the American public, “We’re doing everything we can to ensure that you won’t hear another word about the abuse of prisoners.”

Edification with Real Edifices

Part of the charm of early medieval literature is the contrast between its sophistication, sometimes amounting to preciosity, and the barbarity of its environment. While assorted Magyars, Vikings, and Moors prowled around the walls of the monastery, the monks wrote charming love letters in Latin verse to their (Platonic) girl friends in the adjoining nunnery or elaborated complicated allegorical interpretations of the Song of Songs. In a time of universal violence, poverty, and disorder, when the thugs had just begun their ambiguous transformation into knights, you might think that a coarse and masculine style would rule. In the vernacular and outside the cloister, it did. In Latin and inside, however, the classic models emulated by the intellectuals were the self-consciously literary works of Virgil and Ovid. I find it piquant that an Alexandrian poetics flourished in the midst of chaos and ruin, rather as if the Institute of Advanced Studies were located in downtown Trenton instead of Princeton, Andrew Sullivan may be an evolved Catholic, but stylistically he's no Liudprand of Cremona.

I was brought back to that world by reading the Craft of Thought, the most recent work of the medievalist Mary Carruthers. We’re supposedly living in an era in which scholarship has been debased by fashion, but authors like Carruthers refute that libel, which, truth told, is mostly supported by the very dubious practice of quoting assistant professors at random. Now it is perfectly true that very few people are in a position to enjoy the artistry as well as the erudition of somebody like Carruthers—nobody believes me that philological books can be absurdly exciting. Unfortunately, her theme, the practice of meditative thought in the Christian West before 1200 or so, sounds hopelessly recherché unless you understand how it fits in with the art of memory in the premodern world. If you aren’t into the topic, you’d be advised to read the works of Frances Yates instead of Carruthers, though I think Carruthers understand many issues better than Yates.

Both the moderns and the medievals understand thought as an activity, but whereas we credit the imagination as the active agent responsible for the invention of ideas, people formerly thought of invention as belonging to memory, a dynamic organization and reorganization of the contents of the mind or, more generally, received culture. The Medievals had recourse to traditional rhetorical techniques to order their thoughts, an art of memory that was far more than a set of parlor tricks to memorize speeches. The Art of Memory involved the association of particular ideas with places in a familiar context, most often an architectural setting such as a public building like a courthouse or church but sometimes an imagined theater or even the Zodiac. By mentally traversing the various places in one these sites, one could recall the topics of a speech or order the elements of a literary composition, or, in a religious context, meditate on the elements of faith—think of the Stations of the Cross. The vital point, which Carruthers does seem to have understood better than Yates, is the benefit in this internal ritual arises from the process than its results. It is getting organized, not being organized that energizes and illuminates the mind, which is also why, if you don’t mind an aside by an old textbook editor, modern pedagogy with its boxes, chapter summaries, and forty-two levels of emphasis is so self defeating.

In her Craft of Thought, as in her earlier Book of Memory, Carruthers deals with the very general anthropological question of how individuals and cultures can make sense out of the world, granted that the structuration provided by the categories of natural languages doesn’t provide a sufficient grid to underlie either sociability or the acquisition of empirical and theoretical knowledge. In this respect, her work is similar to the structural anthropology of Levi-Strauss, which focuses on the cognitive role of myth and other cultural artifacts—my use of the word “grid” in the previous sentence is actually a microplagiarism from the Frenchman’s seminal book the Savage Mind. The monks wove their web of thought and practice out of the Psalms, church architecture, classical rhetoric, and a few other elements they found good to think just as Levi-Strauss’ Amazonian natives articulated their world by relating everything to the natural kinds of animals and plants and European modernism made overall sense of things by reference to a history rectified through “falsified outlines” (another microplagiarism).

Time to Repair Your Bicycle?

Since there isn’t room for Reagan on Mt. Rushmore, the Republicans are petitioning the Reverend Moon to promote the late president to the third person of the Trinity—not so radical a tribute, when you think about it, since nobody is sure what the Holy Ghost is anyhow. Meanwhile, back in the sublunary sphere I continue to be troubled by the possibility that I was right about something. It’s sure looking likely that Saudi Arabia is going to go Iranian on us over the next several months.

The Iranian revolution began a parenthesis in American political history what with the hostage crisis and Carter’s subsequent defeat, the rise of the Neocons, the Iran Contra affair, our sponsorship of Saddam Hussein, the Iran-Iraq War, Kuwait, and the various Desert Storms, and 9/11. It would be satisfying, though only from a formal point of view, if this era of skullduggery ended with the ) of a second Islamic revolution. Unfortunately, the foreseeable bad consequences of the collapse of the House of Saud trumps the advantages of any possible Schadenfreude, especially in view of the possibility that Fundamentalist insurrections are also possible in other Muslim countries such as Pakistan. Well, I solace myself with the thought that I’m reading too much into the bombings and assassinations in Saudi Arabia, though granted the incompetence of our Press one may perhaps be forgiven for reading corpses like tea leaves—who the heck knows what’s going on? The trouble is, even on general considerations, you’d have to figure that our activities in Iraq and our attitude towards the Palestinian problem would set off an explosion if an explosion were possible at all.

Second Story Man

I’ve never been a big Stanley Fish fan, but I share some of his suspicions about abstract principles. My problem with immutable truths, however, is not that they are too abstract but that they often aren’t abstract enough. Partisans nail their flags to privatization or state’s rights or multiculturalism or some other slogan masquerading as a transcendent principle when these policy themes are at best means to end. To suggest that these ideas are good or bad depending on time or circumstance is not to embrace some sort of moral relativism, any more than the infinity of possible viewpoints in perspective drawing implies the nonexistence of an objectively real landscape. Just the reverse. Tactics are properly judged in terms of the strategies they realize, and policies by the higher purposes they serve.

I don’t favor the public ownership of utilities or the private ownership of utilities. I favor ensuring safe, reliable power at reasonable cost and with minimum damage to the environment. I don’t think it is decisively important whether health care is largely private or largely public, but I do care that it is available, efficacious, and universal. Sometimes a national news service promotes free debate and accurate news, sometimes it is merely the ministry of propaganda just as a privately owned press at times serves as a marketplace for ideas while at others, as in contemporary America, it is just a whorehouse.

People would like to believe that simple answers are available to problems just as they prefer to follow a preadolescent morality based on concrete prohibitions because, contrary to appearances, situational ethics are too rigorous. In politics, as in private life, the only reliable moral compass is gyroscopic, a complicated machine that allows an individual to maintain a sense of direction despite the turbulent motions of his or her surroundings.

The would-be student was disappointed with the Sufi master because he blew on his fingers because they were cold and blew on his soup because it was hot.

Saints' Lives

We all know that TIME magazine will never have a cover that reads: Latest Scientific Discoveries Imply the Nonexistence of God. The reverse proposition, on the other hand, has been repeatedly floated by that publication and many others. Hence the widely trumpeted theological significance of every local flood in Anatolia, every splinter on Ararat, every Palestinian graffiti that includes a Biblical name. The middlebrow press may be too proud to emulate the checkout tabloid that once led with a picture of a bear skull with a hole in its forehead and the caption “Goliath Found!” but the principle is the same. Since journalism is the business of telling people what they want to hear, so long as it’s something the owners want to tell them, it doesn’t matter how feeble the connection may be between each reported discovery and some popular religious or ideological thesis. The people want to believe and the advertisers want them to believe so that facts and logic don’t matter.

Mass-market journalism has a natural affinity for the great retail religions; for like them it depends on crude, endlessly repeated story lines. Because its core activity is the creation of prejudices, journalism is far better suited to promoting credulity than to providing a forum for critical thinking. Religious genres suit it. Thus, though the deification of Ronald Reagan doubtlessly serves the interests of the conservatives who dominate the media, Gipper hagiography would come naturally to these folks in any case. “Let your speech be Yea, Yea and Nay, Nay” is more fundamental to press practice than the business about Who, What, Where, When, and Why. Granted its formal requirements, the press is never going to get science right, even if, for some reason, the powers that be became markedly unreligious. In that case, as in fact used to happen regularly in Pravda, atheistical conclusions will be promoted by sound bytes every bit as irrelevant as the line about Goliath. “Our Cosmonauts have encountered no angels.”

From Christ to Jesus

A recent Frontline television series was titled From Jesus to Christ. I think they got it backwards. Christ, zillionth edition of the dying/resurrected God, comes before the much more original invention of Jesus, the mere mortal. Granted that the humble carpenter, endlessly glorified in later Christian art and theology, often reverted to his previous status as a normal Hellenistic savior god, the literal humanity of Jesus is absolutely central to the faith, as reflected, or example, in the Creeds. Thus attempts to recover the historical Jesus are anything but heretical or daring. They simply repeat the literary strategy of the evangelists by providing another novelization of the myth. Indeed, even those who deny the resurrection or the divinity of Jesus are simply extrapolating a tendency that was present from the beginning.

Real News

While we obsess about minor wars and Janet Jackson’s left nipple, serious history rolls on in its subterranean channels. In the last couple of weeks, for example, three exceedingly important scientific papers appeared that bear on the origins and nature of animal life. A run down and some discussion:

Bejerano et. al. announced in the 28 May issue of SCIENCE the discovery of 481 DNA segments that are 100% conserved in the human, rat, and mouse genomes and are also extraordinarily similar to corresponding stretches in the DNA of chickens and fugu fish. Analogies between DNA segments are not surprising, but absolute identity is amazing because of the well-known near impossibility of perfectly faithful transmission—even the best Xerox machine will eventually produce a garbled image if you keep copying the copies of the copies. The authors of the paper point out that their findings imply that the duplicated stretches are extremely important to the survival of the organisms and therefore subject to powerful stabilizing selection or that some sort of exceptionally effective and so far unknown editing mechanism is at work on just those base sequences. Interestingly, many of the conserved segments do not code for messenger RNA—only 111 overlap the mRNA of a known protein-coding gene. Presumably they are important because of their role in the regulation of gene expression and RNA processing rather than specifying a protein.

The same issue of SCIENCE includes a paper by Finnerty et. al. that also deals with conserved genes, in this case the Hox genes that pattern the front-to-back axis of development in all bilateral animals, including us. The authors demonstrate that Hox genes underlie the development of the sea anemone, Nematostella vectensis, a bilateral organism in a phylum (Cnidaria) whose members mostly have radial symmetry. Remarkably, the top-to-bottom axis of Nematostella is established by the action of the same gene (decapentaplegic) that patterns the top-to-bottom axis in Bilateria. The authors conclude that their data “suggest that bilateral symmetry arose before the evolutionary split of Cnidaria and Bilateria.” Now that was a very long time ago indeed—Cnidarians and bilaterians appear together in Precambrian fossils from 560 to 570 billion years ago. Meanwhile.

A June 3 paper published in SCIENCE on line (Chen, et.al) reports the earliest known bilaterian fossils. The authors date these tiny forms (<150 microns) to 580-600 million years before present, just after the end of a period of intense glaciation, hence the name of the organism, Vernanimalcula guizhouena, spring animalcule. The date matches up pretty well from guesses on the age of the earliest bilateral animals derived from phylogenetic analyses, but other scientists are sure to second guess this research. The authors also claim the animals “had paired coeloms extending the length of the gut; paired external pits that could be sense organs; bilateral, anterior-posterior organization; a ventrally directed anterior mouth with thick walled pharynx; and a triploblastic structure,” That’s a lot of structure to identify from minute and ancient specimens. It remains to be seen if these conclusions hold up. However

Taken together, these three papers emphasize how little wobble there has been in the history of animals. It appears that over the last 600 million years or so evolution has been playing with a very small toolkit indeed. Of course it may be possible that there is just one way to put together a mobile, multicellular organism and that the leaping green mice of Mars will turn out also to have Hox genes and hyperconserved DNA; but it certainly looks as if what occurred was the selection of one possible system among many. Of course that version suits my own rather hobbyhorsical view of how the universe operates—on every scale and in every venue relentlessly thinning out an original plentitude of possibilities in favor of a vanishingly small set of survivors. That’s just my take. The results are remarkably suggestive even for those who don’t like to make generalizations in the style of Herbert Spencer.

In other news, Ronald Reagan died. Mr. Reagan is mostly significant as an example of how a handsome nonentity can be turned into a beloved and irreproachable icon by modern public relations techniques.

We’re Looking for a Few Bad Apples

It is far from clear that the Abu Ghaib excesses were exceptions, but the appeal of the “99% of the [cops, prison guards, soldiers, journalists, CEOs, stock brokers, lawyers, doctors, scientists…] are decent people” dodge is apparently irresistible and not just to the defenders of the administration. Nobody wants to suggest that all or most American soldiers are keen to abuse human beings or even that they are willing to go along with such doings, though, truth told, nobody knows how widespread the practices were. The appeal of the exonerating argument doesn’t depend on its factual basis—it usually has none—but in our reluctance to entertain the possibility that the exception may turn out to be, to an uncomfortable degree, the rule. It doesn’t bother me so much that this rhetoric may help malefactors get off the hook, if that’s indeed what’s going on. The trouble with the exception business is that it gives us an excuse for not looking at the rule itself because all the trouble is supposed to arise because of the aberrations of individuals.

Abu Ghraib nestles in the heart of a whole series of concentric circles. It is embedded in a much wider pattern of abusive practices that took place elsewhere in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Cuba. It was made possible by a systematic hijacking of the existing military and civilian intelligence systems by ideologists. Legions of administration lawyers and public relations professionals, aided by the usual crew of fellow travelers in the commercial press, worked for a long time to weaken legal barriers against the torture of prisoners by figuring ways around the Geneva conventions. With considerable prescience, if not premeditation, these same people denied the jurisdiction of the World Court over Americans and resurrected the vicious sophistry, originally invented to manage inconvenient Haitians, that we could do whatever we want in Guantanamo because it isn’t our territory. These maneuvers were themselves part of a larger program, the promotion of a theory of American exceptionalism that provided an off-the-rack excuse suitable for any occasion. Since we know a priori that our intentions are benevolent and indeed sanctioned by a patriotic Jesus dedicated to our version of Truth, Justice, and the American Way, we can break any rule with impunity. Why reserve the Teleological Suspension of the Ethical for special occasions?

Rush Limbaugh famously asserted that the Abu Ghraib abuses were little worse than fraternity hazing. That’s absurd, of course, especially since it is likely that the guards murdered some of the prisoners, but it is true that it could have been much worse. My concern is that this episode is merely a segment of a longer trajectory. It belongs to a process of moral coarsening that has been going on for some time and may continue in the future despite brief interruptions. Some time ago, presumably out of fear, we Americans started to get cruel. As part of that process, we not only filled our prisons with millions but we rewarded politicians who made the prisons more terrible—the exception that is Abu Ghraib is arguable far less horrible than the daily routine of Pelican Bay.

Wedding Pictures

Everybody expects governments to lie, especially about military matters in a failing war. You have to wonder, however, whether or not there is a point at which relentless fabrication becomes self-defeating. What we have here is not an instance of rhetorical tactic of casting doubt on the witness’ testimony because he lied about an affair with his uncle’s second wife. The problem is quite real for those of us who, whatever our own propagandistic intentions, also want to know what eigentlich gewesen ist. At this point, nothing the administration says counts as evidence, except, perhaps, evidence of the state of mind of the administration. I haven’t a clue who killed Berg or why. I don’t know to what extent Chalabi and therefore the American government was effectively working for the Iranians all along. I don’t know how much various officers and civilian DOD administrators knew about the specifics of the torture and murder of prisoners. And I certainly do not expect any official investigation to clear things up. Why credit any proceeding controlled by the same military careerists and right wing ideologues who created the problem in the first place? Legalities and procedures only work where people with integrity make them work—in its cruder versions, faith in the rule of law is simply animism—and the one thing we have no reason to have any doubts about is the integrity of Bush, Rumsfeld, and the others.

Somebody Up There Likes Pus

The 14 May issue of SCIENCE summarizes a piece of research recently published in the journal Cell by You et. al. Certain papilloma viruses that maintain a latent infection have developed a protein tether that attaches the viral genome the chromosomes of their hosts so that the virus will be shared out between daughter cells during mitosis. It all sounds very clever, though it is hardly the most elaborate biochemical trick played by parasites, some of whom manipulate the behavior of their hosts or promote their own survival by altering the sex ratios of their host’s offspring. All of which raises a question in my mind.

The Intelligent Design folks claim that certain biological mechanisms are too complex and intricate to have developed by chance. They usually point to such examples as the bacterial flagellum and the vertebrate clotting mechanism as systems that are, in their lingo, irreducibly complex and therefore prima facie evidence of the intervention of something or somebody. If you buy into this logic, however, don’t you have to address the possibility that complex parasitical adaptations are also evidence of design? Furthermore, since the tricks of the parasites appeared very late in the history of life, doesn’t the uncanny biochemical virtuosity of tapeworms and plasmodia strongly suggest that wonders have yet to cease?

Conative Dissonance

Because judgments of probability are made on the basis of prior knowledge, the same piece of information can either confirm or disconfirm a given hypothesis depending on one’s presuppositions. This is not a theoretical possibility. It happens all the time and goes a long way to explaining how contradictory political views can persist in the face of uncontroverted evidence. Different judgments reflect different values, but they are also rooted in contrasting factual beliefs.

The application: right-wingers not only believe that America ought be the unquestioned paramount power in the world; their foreign policy proposals only make sense if we are and will remain vastly more powerful than the other nations for the foreseeable future. Recent events have shown that this notion is at least questionable. In theory, the contrary evidence might change minds; but in practice, believers in American exceptionalism are more likely to explain away failures by recourse to ad hoc supplementary hypotheses. Recall the precedent of 1918. When defeat on the battlefield challenged the presumption of their invincibility, the Germans could have acknowledged that they had been overmatched. Instead, they devised the Stab-in-the-Back story. The analogous salves to pride are currently under construction in the conservative think tanks, and prototypes are tested nightly on Fox News. The narrative about domestic cheese-eating surrender monkeys will make it possible to interpret each new disaster as further proof that we were right all along. After all, it’s obvious that only a womanish failure of nerve and a neurotic obsession with legalistic scruples stands between us and ultimate triumph.

Karma Yoga

The complete collapse of the administration’s credibility has led to a baroque profusion of conspiracy theories, but there is another reason why almost any screwy hypothesis can get traction in these later days. The administration is full of people who love intrigue and skullduggery. The propensity of excitable bloggers to detect plots is matched by the right-wing propensity to hatch them. The ruling Republicans are the same people, after all, who cooked up Watergate and Iran Contra. They like that sort of thing; and, between the Straussian doctrine of premeditated dissimilation and the general glorification of political crime as machismo, they have found a wonderfully elastic excuse to do whatever they want and lie about it with a good conscience. So one shouldn’t be too hard on the conspiracy theorists. Discovering complicated schemes is surely no nuttier than contriving them. There’s more than one way to acquire a tin-foil hat.

Spoilers R Us

I feel somewhat unqualified to review Troy since I’ve actually read Homer. Checking out other reviewers, it was pretty clear that they hadn’t, which probably explains why the movie version of the story didn’t strike them as peculiar. I mean I expected a movie to play with the legend upon which it is built if only because there is too much narrative content for a single movie in the matter of Troy. The Greeks themselves played dozens of variations on the tale, including one version in which the real Helen never went to Troy at all because as Zeus’ daughter she was a little too grand or holy to hook up with a feckless pretty boy like Paris. Myth, as Levi-Strauss correctly understood, lives in ceaseless transformation so there’s no reason to complain if a new rendition is faithful to the original—the Iliad wasn’t the original either. There are, however, versions and versions. To meld a structuralist with a Texas way of putting things, the movie is only a semi-coherent transformation of the epic. Hector has no business stabbing Menelaus to death on the second day of the war. An Agamemnon shaped like Homer Simpson isn’t very Homeric. And allowing Helen and Paris run off to Mount Ida reminds me of the joke about the test audience that liked Titanic but didn’t want the ship to sink at the end.

Sarcasm aside, I was more surprised at what worked than what didn’t. Brad Pitt wasn’t a bad Achilles at all. I wasn’t even put off by his kung fu moves. The war itself was appropriately grim and gory. Allowing for the exigencies of film, the sequence in which King Priam begs Achilles for the body of his slain son actually has some of the pathos of the Homeric account, though its brevity points up how much is lost because of the driving tempo of popular movies. Some of the nonsense in the movie was also memorable in its own way, though the utterly inadequate Helen struck me as an insult to young audiences who are apparently supposed to find an insipidly pretty blond a credible cause of tragedy. On the other hand, I can only salute sublime absurdity of the scene in which Achilles ravishes the virgin priestess of Apollo even though she has a dagger at his throat. Somebody should have let him know that sex is not necessarily safe just because you’re using a Trojan.

Arresting Voltaire

I sympathize with the journalists and politicians who avoid Noam Chomsky. A George Will or Charles Krauthammer arguing with Chomsky could only provide a Nicholas Berg moment if not something far worse like the sadistic fantasy of President Bush suddenly required to substitute for Tony Blair at Question Time. Chomsky made his chops shooting down the likes of B.F. Skinner in a famous series of intellectual duals. There’s an entire book, Challenging Chomsky, dedicated to documenting his spectacular polemical ability on his home turf of theoretical linguistics. Being smart, obviously, is not the same as being right, at least for us empiricists; but in its superlative degree it does make you the scariest gladiator in the arena, especially to mental midgets brandishing tin swords. Respecting or even fearing Chomsky, however, is not the same thing as agreeing with him.

For all of its undeniable strengths, Chomsky’s way of thinking has at least one fatal defect as an instrument for understanding the current situation, a failing it shares with much of the non-Marxist left. It is drastically unhistorical. Chomsky has been elaborating the same indictment of the ruling world system for most of my lifetime as if nothing had changed in the underlying economic, military, and political structure of the world except the names of the members of the board of directors. But things have changed. Bush the Second is not the same as LBJ or even Bush the First. America as the leader of the Cold War coalition is a very different proposition than America as an erratic and lawless hegemon. The nature of the world economy has likewise undergone a huge mutation. A dogmatic analysis that cannot detect these earthquakes does not inspire a great deal of confidence. It also promotes a sort of cosmic Naderism that discourages the compromises and alliances the times require.

Moguls and Cliffs

Time, as the saying goes, was invented to keep everything from happening at once. If so, it has recently been falling down on the job. There are rather too many subplots in this particular movie, which can’t decide whether it is an anthology of short subjects or a sweeping political epic. In the area of economics alone, a great many themes are in play at once, cycles on top of cycles on top of cycles superimposed on trends that slope one way in the medium term and another in the long term. To some extent, surely, this complexity is nothing new. In an important way, however, I think it is. Both critics and boosters of the status quo are talking through their hats. Almost anything could happen in the next couple of years. For example:

On general principles, it’s a good bet that the United States cannot go on running huge trade and budget deficits indefinitely; but it’s also true that the world has already subsidized us for a very long time now—at least since Nixon’s time—and maybe that charity will continue for quite a while longer out of political calculation or sheer inertia. There are reasons, after all, why we’ve been able to live beyond our means for an extended period. To some extent the foreign investment was protection money, an imperial bonus. To some extent it was a premium that reflected the political stability of the United States in a dangerous world. Our artificially high level of consumption has also provided a Keynsian stimulus to a world that suffers from a more or less permanent deficit of effective demand because of great and growing inequality. The same low wages that make Chinese or Indian goods cheap, guarantee that they will have to be sold internationally. Hence America has filled a so-far indispensable role in leading the planet out of a series of recessions. All of these circumstances could change rapidly, however. The Euro could easily replace the dollar. The growth of an internal market in China and other nations could lessen the world’s dependence on the American dumping ground. Inflation in the price of industrial inputs such as oil and metals is already putting pressure on the artificially low prices for commodities that keep our domestic proles in line. A major geopolitical shock could also result in serious inflation: if the paper billionaires suddenly had to spend their money on consumption or real investment or if wealth were somehow to be distributed more evenly, it would become instantly obvious that growth in goods and real services over the last ten years has lagged far behind the production of zeroes on bank statements.

If you are very careful, you can chill water well below the freezing point and it will not turn to ice. Allow a speck of dust to fall in, however, and the whole mass congeals in a moment. I don’t know whether that sort of catastrophic change of state is likely to happen to the economy, obviously; I just don’t think it can be ruled out on the basis of the experience of the last few decades, especially granted the series of unprecedented structural changes that make up the phenomenon somewhat misleadingly called globalism.

The Boil is Ripe

America’s relationship with the rest of the world is problematic for structural reasons that will have to be addressed regardless of who is in charge in Washington next year. Moral considerations aside, we are trying to play a role that is several sizes too big for our actual capabilities. We may be militarily terrible—at least we’re impressed—but the economic primacy that maintains that strength is largely a thing of the past. Having become a global welfare mother, we can’t pay our bills without the continuous charity of other countries. Our hegemony has also lost its rationale. While in the past, we played a positive, indeed indispensable role in first defeating the Axis and then fending off the Soviets, it is no longer obvious who we are protecting from what in a world in which all the large nations (except us) are anything but bellicose. One of these days Germany and Japan are going to get tired of being occupied. One of these days, international capital is going to get tired of pouring money into New York. We would be well advised to prepare for these eventualities, none of which, by the way, have to be catastrophic for us or anybody else.

Nobody can do more to further a constructive accommodation of America to new realities than President Bush whose total and ignominious downfall might serve to drain off some of the hostility towards our country now building to dangerous levels all over the world. Universally hated outside the U.S., Bush can finally do something useful in his life by serving as a scapegoat or Guy Fawkes dummy. As conservatives, of all people, are aware, villains have their uses. Taking a clue from their practice, let us therefore ritually abuse this man, even though he is more contemptible and incompetent than grandly evil and more the symptom than the cause of American decline. And then let us get to work on the real business of the world before everybody else notices that Bush wasn’t the only problem.

Rough Music

Back in the 70s, social psychologists demonstrated that flattery works even on people who know they are being flattered. Which partially explains the effectiveness of right-wing propaganda since, whatever else Limbaugh and Hannity and O’Reilly do, they butter up their listeners to within an inch of their life. Unfortunately, it isn’t just that target demographic who get a non-stop self-esteem message on American media. CNN, CNBC, and the network news also retail an artificially sweetened product, which endlessly reinforces the notion that Americans are better and smarter and more trustworthy than other people. We are a fond people who believe that the hooker really loves us, that we actually deserve a break today…. Well, that’s not so alarming. The Laws of Marketing are, after all, as immutable as the axioms of arithmetic. But even if you choose to luxuriate in a warm tub of purchased praise, it may be advisable to remind yourself from time to time that there is a world outside the bathhouse.

In its modern form, American exceptionalism is a curious concept since our claim on the world’s respect was originally based on a denial of the Old World prerogatives of birth and blood. Whatever else America was, it was the land enlivened by a tremendously good idea that could, in principle though often not in practice, be franchised to anybody who was willing to buy into its premises. By this logic, however, what is special about the country depends upon the determination of its citizens to keep the faith. There is no American race and therefore no reason whatsoever to think that the human beings that inhabit this continent are any less capable of every kind of human folly and crime than the other peoples of the planet from whom, after all, they derive.

On a Desire to Know Basis

I recently read Brian Greene’s The Fabric of the Cosmos, an ambitious but nontechnical explanation of physical theories about space-time. The book has been extremely well received by serious scientists—I notice that Freeman Dyson also thinks highly of it, though, unlike Greene, he is not a devotee of string theory.

Most popularizations of physics take one of two tacks: they either tell us a series of human interest stories about various scientists, an extension of the what-the-novelist-had–for-lunch approach to a literary interview, or they moralize or mythologize quantum mechanics or relativity as if these alien structures of thought had any relation whatsoever with ancient folk beliefs or playing the stock market. Greene is anything but formal—his analogies often feature characters from television shows—but his informalities are all attempts to convey the content of the subject. Pop science is usually centrifugal and embraces every excuse to avoid the subject. Greene is centripetal. That probably limits his appeal, though in my experience a large part of the market for serious popularizations is made up of scientists and they, presumably, actually want to know something.

I was reminded of Greene’s book the other day by—of all things—a notice of the movie Troy in the New York Times. The reviewer noted that Brad Pitt’s Achilles employed Kung Fu moves on his adversaries, one attempt among many on the part of the director to make the ancient story more meaningful to contemporary audiences. That brought me up short. I usually think that the challenge of approaching old works of art is to register a view of the world fundamentally alien to my own, but perhaps it isn’t really so hard to hear what is different as to want to hear it. One could perfectly well make a Troy movie in which Achilles had naturally had stronger feelings for Patroclus than for Briseis. It would just be a marketing error. Similarly, as Greene’s book demonstrates, it isn’t impossible to convey the concepts of brane theory or cosmic inflation without equations—the physicists who cook up such ideas presumably need to think about them conceptually as well as quantitatively themselves. The supply of readers with the patience and energy to follow a clear exposition is the rate-limiting step.

What Lurks

You occasionally read that the problems of the Catholic Church would be solved if priests could marry, but the underlying pathology is political rather than sexual. From a doctrinal point of view, Catholicism is no crazier than any other religion; but its secretive and authoritarian organization guarantees mischief. That child abuse by priests is what people have decided to get upset now is probably more a function of America’s well-known hysteria about sex than an inevitable consequence of celibacy. Thus, granted the obvious willingness of church authorities to condone and conceal clerical criminality, one can bet that the financial improprieties of the church are at least as widespread as the groping of choirboys. Journalists just aren’t interested enough to battle the political power of the Church to expose unmarketable scandals, at least so long as it pays better to celebrate or at least sentimentalize the decrepit system of superstition.

I draw a partial parallel between the church case and the recent revelation that the United States has been mistreating prisoners in Iraq. Like the Catholic Church, the current regime operates in the deepest secrecy under what it claims to be divine sanction. War can be counted upon to produce horrors under any circumstances, but a war conducted in the dark by people thinking they are doing God’s work will be worse than necessary. Any regime that controls the news as stringently as Bush’s people have effectively guarantees torture and murder will occur because such activity are, as it were, the default behavior of 19-year old farm kids and professional mercenaries. Leaders have an obligation to act in order to prevent what is perfectly predictable under the circumstances. Of course it doesn’t help when a government’s rhetoric endlessly dehumanizes its enemies, suggests that ordinary rules of conduct do not apply to our Chosen nation, and glorifies brutality as “realism.” The priory may be an ideal sanctuary for a pederast, but at least the Church doesn’t actually promote child abuse as a postive virtue.

Tsk, Tsk

Economists smile when people try to understand public finances in terms of the family budget. Running up a huge debt may be inadvisable for a government, but a government cannot go bankrupt so long as the printing presses are working. But the distinction between the public and the private is more widely recognized in matters of money than in matters of policy, even though trying to understand politics in terms of private morality is no less fatuous. Nothing so defines the smallness of the small timers, the commonness of the common man, than thinking of great affairs as the soapbox opera of everyday life writ big. Petit bourgeois moralizing makes bad politics.

An application. In many parts of the United States, the use of lottery money to support public education is defended on the grounds that it only taxes those weak and stupid enough to play. Considered from a policy point of view, however, lotteries are simply regressive taxes that shift the burden of paying for necessary services on the shoulders of those least able to bear it while siphoning off a good cut for the operators of the games, the tax farmers of the new improved ancien regime. One blames a problem on the individual moral failings of the victims and then exacts a public punishment that enriches a small minority. Promoting gambling among the poor is especially cruel because it is precisely the drastic and growing difference between poverty and wealth in this country makes the appeal of long odds and huge payoffs irresistible. As it becomes more and more difficult to live a self-respecting and decent life by hard work and playing by the rules, it actually gets more rational to take wild chances. Besides, it is worth something to be able to identify with the lucky winners even though the chances of actually becoming one are essentially zero.

The Other Primrose Path

One can be corrupted to virtue as well as to vice. An example: the minority of political commentators who oppose the Conservative take over of the United States are often far more scrupulous about the truth than either their ideological opponents or the mainstream press. Joe Conason, Gene Lyons, Eric Alterman, Joshua Micah Marshall, and Paul Krugman check facts, worry about being fair to individuals, and admit error. There is no such thing and probably could not be such a thing as a right-wing Bob Somersby. It does not necessarily follow, however, that these individuals are intrinsically more honorable or honest than other writers. Even a born fabulist would find it hard to resist the siren call of integrity in a rhetorical situation where the reduction of discourse to a passionless recital of facts is such an effective tack against one’s enemies.

There’s a converse to this thought: those dedicated to craft are well advised to join the Republican Party. William Safire would only be wasting his very real literary and polemical gifts by going straight; and a similar point could be made, albeit with decreased force, about the merely talented Andy Sullivan or the merely glib Mickey Kaus

Unterwegs zur Portland

I'll be back at the beginning of May.

The Birth of a Nation

Bin Laden has endorsed George Bush for re-election because Bush’s open hostility stokes the radical Islamic cause while a less aggressive, more subtle policy might lull the Arab world into complacency, thus promoting the spread of Western ideas in the region. I suppose most people registered this statement as sarcasm. I take it quite literally. Islamic fundamentalism needs an American sponsor to flourish. Left to themselves, educated Muslims are very unlikely to persist in willfully archaic attitudes. Whatever lip service they might have be willing to pay to their tradition, they also want the economic and personal benefits of the modern world. Indeed, prior to 9/11, the scholarly consensus had it that fundamentalism had reached its maximum influence in the region and could be expected to lose strength and focus as time went on. What the radicals required was an external power that would treat Muslims with general contempt. Bush, famously a uniter, not a divider, was the necessary man. He’s certainly proved himself a nation builder in Iraq where only a bloodthirsty tyrant like Hussein or a hated foreign occupier could make a real country out of the matter and antimatter of Sunnis and Shias. It’s true that he hasn’t yet directed American troops to paint a Crusader Cross on their uniforms, but his endorsement of the Israeli policy of unilateral annexation and high-tech assassination comes pretty close.

French Commonsense

In my last post I mentioned the name of Emmanuel Todd. He’s a French anthropologist and demographer whose book, After the Empire: The Breakdown of the American Order, was a best seller in Europe and recently appeared here in translation without eliciting much of a response. To judge from the vehement denunciations of some of the reader reviews at Amazon, he certainly strikes a nerve with right-wingers, who are amazed that anybody can gainsay American righteousness and—more to the point—American might. But Todd, who is neither a leftist nor a retailer of conspiracy theories, hasn’t been much noticed by Bush’s domestic critics except for angry moderates like Michael Lind and me. Todd, however, is not angry. Observing the scene from across the ocean, he is not personally upset about American foreign policy because he believes it will mostly harm us and not the Europeans or Asians.

Todd is no philosopher. He is an observer of big trends such as the rapid spread of literacy and lower birth rates throughout much of the world. In lieu of ideological fine points, he tends to pay attention to coarse facts like the huge American foreign trade deficit and the increasing gap between rich and poor in America and Europe. It says a great deal about the false consciousness of many Americans than such a perspective upsets them so much. I don’t agree with Todd’s particular takes on the renewed importance of Russia, the future of the EU, and the potential dangers of our aggressive foreign policy, but I think his perception of American weakness and vulnerability is essentially indisputable. He also makes a couple of specific points that are well worth considering:

1. Todd buys into a modified version of Fukuyama’s theory of the inevitability of democracy because he believes that general literacy more or less automatically leads to democratic institutions. He does insist that there are very significant differences between democracies, however—it matters that parties alternate dominance in America and the U.K while in Japan the same coalition rules year in, year out. He also accepts Michael Doyle’s claim that war between liberal democracies is impossible. But Todd disputes the notion that the triumph of democracy is the end of history or, for that matter, of the realistic possibility of serious war between developed countries. Nations may tend towards democracy as their citizens learn to read, but there is no guarantee that the process stops with democracy. Indeed, both the United States and Western Europe are currently evolving into a high-tech oligarchies with declining levels of political participation and drastically higher levels of economic inequality. Perhaps Fukuyama will have to indulge us with a sequel: Son of the End of History: the Thousand Year Rule of the Optimates.

2. Many people understand that the huge imbalance of trade between the United States and the rest of the world will eventually be redressed by a lowering in the American standard of living. Todd suggests some ways in which this readjustment could occur sooner rather than later. For example, part of the reason that the rest of the world is willing to finance American power is the dominant role of the dollar. The Euro has already challenged the status of the dollar. If the British do decide to opt for the continent and the still very considerable financial clout of London goes Euro, it’s very easy to imagine a drastic realignment of currency rates.

Cops

We Americans don’t have much of an army. What we do have is an expensive but rather fragile SWAT team. Which is probably a sufficient explanation of our choice of enemies. We noisily engage the small fry while carefully avoiding anybody with real power, a pattern of behavior the French writer Emmanuel Todd calls theatrical micromilitarism. But it would be more accurate to say that we don’t fight wars at all, even miniature ones. We police.

It takes a tremendous amount of self-righteousness to invade other countries and arrest their leaders. The practice presumes that our law has a universal or at least undefined jurisdiction and that we possess a monopoly of force so absolute as to allows us to treat the citizens of Panama or Iraq like the hapless drunks and junkies on Cops. We don’t simply kill our enemies. We infantilize and degrade them. We’re like the LAPD in other ways that are certainly not lost on the rest of the world. For example, we treat Muslims, Hispanics, and Blacks (Iraq, Palestine, Panama, Venezuela, Haiti) with special contempt and yet imagine we aren’t racists because we’re quite willing to treat over class Arabs, Hispanics, and Blacks as equals.

Our highhandedness is cowardly and cruel. Granted the national impotence it conceals, it is also ridiculous.