ephemera

Ephemera, n.
1. A fever of one day’s continuance only.
[1913 Webster]

Self Loathing and Salvation at the Seventies’ End, on Acid

I am transfixed by the excessive make-up on the homely girl sitting next to me. Color has taken on a familiar and peculiar quality; things are sharpened and outlined with a current of acidic light about the edges, as if superimposed on film. Everything has a blood-filled look. The physical world is flattened out before me, I’m viewing it on a screen in my mind, and all is roiling beneath this surface, masking some teeming atomic boil. I have developed novel abilities; my focus is now superhuman. I can see the molecules binding things together; I can see the space in between.

My new screen-vision is faulty; an area of distortion moves about it, a ball rolling about on a suspended sheet of plastic. For a moment I understand, perfectly, the space-time continuum. Just as quickly it is lost to the ether. The girl’s face won’t stay still, swelling outward here and there momentarily. The ungainly contours of her face are shifting endlessly. All of this as she sits perfectly still. Later I realize it. She’s terrified too!

The two of us make up the back row of the sparsely peopled classroom, where we take cover from humiliation. We never spoke; we never made eye contact. We studiously avoided giving any hint of recognition of each other. We are cowering through high school, developing strategies to avoid being caught out in the open. We fear even the sympathy of kindred souls.

I am overwhelmed by empathy for the homely girl, for the pain of humiliation that has nowhere to go and must continually consume our rapidly diminishing innocence like an electrochemical reaction. Our batteries are already low. But I haven’t named these things yet; inside it can only resolve in self-loathing and a heightened sense of this vague, maddeningly pervasive fear.

Now the walls are breathing, like we’re inside a great bellows. I can hear it; nobody else can. They don’t have my heightened senses. My hair is straw; my skin is cardboard. I marvel at their touch. I want to flee. I need to get out of the constricting room, away from the bughouse that is our school, out of these filthy clothes. I want to shed my skin. I feel filthy, right down to my core. But there is no escape because everything is implicated in the fraud. Everything and everybody is newly exposed; ugly, mean, common, false. None of us are real; we are mere representations and facsimiles. Just like the false plastic veneers all about us. We are projecting these images like holograms; they shimmy and stutter occasionally. This too I now see clearly.
The interior of the room, dusted with a film of harrowing school-room light, is a deliberate, menacing kitsch. Everything looks ugly and cheap, second-rate. It all looks as if it’s about to fall apart, to burst at the seams. Everything is about to melt into one formless, indistinguishable mass.
I’m not sure how I will be able to continue, having seen this. I’m beginning to worry. I need to move, to shake this presence somehow. I can’t escape but I can keep moving. It seems like I’ve been sitting in class for hours, yet only five minutes have passed. And I’m starting to peak.

Mr. Hino, the Born-Again history teacher, is oblivious to my condition. Every Pearl Harbor Day Mr. Wong–being Chinese, and therefore duty-bound–recruits a class to launch a paper-airplane surprise attack on the Japanese Hino, assailing and pelting him in mid-period. He takes this like he takes most minor indignities, with slightly annoyed, patient grace.
Mr. Hino is rightfully appalled at the condition of the youth he tends, and still he has no idea how degenerate we are, the ignorant, oblivious contempt we have for decency. He has no idea how far the rot has progressed, because no one does yet; it is overtaking even itself. He doesn’t know the levee has already been breached, and it is only now a case of water finding its level. He will not be here to see its later stages; he will not suffer the realization that it has no end, no breaking point, just an infinite, endless degradation. I do hope Mr. Hino never looked down to find there is no bottom.

But, God bless him, he is forever looking upward. He occasionally tries to better us, railing, gently, against decadence. Today he announces a special guest. An alumnus from a few years prior has come to give us a talk. An eminence of a sort, he is a local legend; a gang-banger known for his oversized arms (“Chops” was his nickname) and his bravery. He is regarded, in the highest praise granted one of his milieu, as being “crazy.” Chops is impressive too; squat and powerfully built, with a jet black pork chop moustache and heavy lidded eyes giving him a look of latent ferocity. He wears the basic cholo uniform of the time: khaki pants, plain white t-shirt. He’s here to tell us the tale of his redemption. In the throes of my chemically-induced paranoia, I’m about to be scared straight. I‘m panicked anew.

Apparently Chops laid waste to the dowdy suburbs of Norwalk with no lasting consequences, and it would take a purely accidental brush with death in the army to open his eyes. Something about a failing tank turret threatening to decapitate him and a prayer answered. Chops finishes his testimony by asking for volunteers to rise and pledge themselves to Jesus. A whole new dilemma! Rise and risk being torn to shreds by your fellows; remain seated and renounce God. For all but two of us, God proved less fearsome than the mob. The bell rang.

By Way of Explanation

It’s hard to resist, and my indifferent pose is revealed as hopelessly false as I now recourse to the “sorry for the lack of posting…”, er, post. But since debasing oneself should be, like any worthwhile pursuit, done thoroughly, I will do it right and proper:

Sorry for the lack of posting. If I wasn’t already prostrate before you (see above), and still pretending to be peer to my more successful and capable brethren, I would employ one of their words and say I am “blocked.” But I suspect this wouldn’t be accurate in the sense that professional writers use the phrase. If anything’s blocked it’s my capacity to care and any faith in the efficacy of care. I’m beginning to suspect that caring is very bad for one’s health. Like that creepy doctor on late night television selling the mysterious product (does anyone out there know what is meant by “that certain part of the male anatomy”? for the life of me I can’t figure out what these people are selling), I have personally researched my product. Unlike the doctor, I cannot stand here and brag about the results. Care is a (insert epithet inferring incest here) as far as I can tell. Oh cruel mirror’s proofs!

It’s just too painful to watch, much less respond to, the Commodore of the Straightjacket Express (with Maverick off the stick, the bus has fared considerably better than any airplane the Captain ever piloted) gloating as only a mean and vain old man redeemed can, noticing that the newspapers started cropping the less favored candidates out of the photos weeks ago (what sort of madness is at hold at the New York Times, when after its humiliating snookering and cooptation by the War Party, it heaves a great grey sigh of relief at the prospect of McCain vs. Clinton?)–de-selecting them on the basis of polls and the primary votes of somewhere around one percent of the country. The haste to stamp the “safe” (more madness, the Orwellian inversion of that word here) candidates with the imprimatur and get on with an election that is rendered, if not quite meaningless at least safely limited in its meaning or potential to change (verb, as opposed to the hollow lure that is the noun, “Change”) anything significantly, is perhaps the most telling of the various phenomena associated with it all.
No, it will take a younger, stronger, more capable person than I to flail away futilely at this impermeable edifice. Retreat is the only option. I would rather be thought this much a coward than that much a fool.
The elites win, and they drag along some ill-informed, fool faction or other to do the heavy lifting. It matters not whom. C’mon to the trough, all who profit from the war trade, all you race hustlers, ambitious young men and women looking for a future. Forget what you’ve heard. We’re hiring, and you don’t need to be human to apply. It’s business as usual and the potential is limitless.

The Slow Death of Satire Continues

The Great Debaters is also excellent because it educates its audience on the word “denigrate.” The word comes from the Latin words “de+nigrare,” meaning “to make black.” Washington’s character makes the case that the word we use to mean “disparage” or “defame” also means “to blacken” and that it has racist undertones.

I have used the word denigrate without knowing its origin or its ability to offend. I have also used other words unintentionally that were equally insensitive. Mulatto, a word that is sometimes used to describe a person with both black and white ancestry, comes from the Spanish word mulato, meaning “a young mule.” Papago, the name given by the Spanish to an Indian nation in Arizona, means “bean eaters.” Unfortunately, there are probably other words that I still use that are unintentionally insulting to someone.

The words we use have the power to inflame and incite or to heal and uplift. This holds true for debaters, screenwriters, television writers and all the rest of us. The lesson in denigrate is that it is important to choose our words well, and that it is unfortunate that even when we do so we may still accidentally offend. Resolved (as they say in The Great Debaters): Sticks and stones can break your bones and words can be MORE hurtful.
More

Unearthed by Steve Sailer in a recommended article here.

Brush with Grayness

Passing into a government building resembles passing out of one mode of existence into another. The very act of gaining entrance into one of these citadels of authority is fraught with dread, anxiety and alienation. This is a normal response to the lifting of the veil from one’s irrelevance and powerlessness before the State. It is the inverse of an impression (sometimes obliviously expressed by the newly elected when freshly immersed in the well of power) of those employed by the same, when taking in architectural government grandiosity: a novel, intoxicated thrill. This comes from finding oneself on the other side of the power equation. None of us are immune to either impulse; they are the same yearning, reacting to diametrically opposed contexts.

Just getting to the door is often a will-weakening ordeal, as these buildings seem to be purposely made inaccessible (even before 9/11 security concerns resulted in consequences filtering down through the massive superstructure of the empire, becoming manifest in the most banal and lowly reaches of the homeland). They are often difficult to access from the street and even in the center of the city seem remote from the very public they exist to serve. This is merely one of the lesser ways that government’s service to the citizen becomes the citizen’s subjection to the government.

The inaccessibility of the government power emplacement (to which the citizen is more often than not summoned), if not by design no less works to render the citizen a bit more compliant–or resentful. And in our time what has the portal by which we physically engage our government become? The metal detector. A crude undiscriminating dullard of a machine, sometimes accompanied by its more intrusive, leering partner, the x-ray device.

Submitting to the unthinking arbitrament of a machine is the ultimate act of dehumanization. The already humiliating effects of the search, the presumption of guilt to be disproved, is magnified, imposed not by another person but by the absence of humanity, by a machine with an insect sort of logic.

The metal detector itself, with its inability to reason, unable to give any quarter to the harmless batch of keys (or the quarter, for that matter), or the occasional belt buckle that requires disrobing of the now penitent citizen pleading entrance through that peculiar square plastic gate, holding his pants up like a beggar dressed in rags; this is nothing in comparison to the people who man it. The callow cruelty of the government building security officer is a solemn testament to how cheaply we will sell our humanity. The machine only seems to relish humiliating you, and clearly can’t make it a point of pride or a source of amusement. The officers of the gate are no less unsentimental and unreasoning, while at the same time bringing the human elements of stupidity, cruelty and malice to a transaction already humiliatingly unequal. At their posts they become like mere apparitions of human beings, no longer bound by fear or fraternity, tasked with adopting a posture of unremitting suspicion and guile.

Those predisposed to cruelty thrive in this environment, and through emulation their advancement induces greater cruelty in all within it. Cruelty itself becomes selected for and magnified within the walls of such places and is carried out into the wider world like a virus in the host bodies of the government’s minions.

Such encounters, increasingly common, are still brief and contained, individually of little significance, but they are not without significance, and the cumulative effect of these ever-multiplying requirements is still unknown. It alters us without our assent, or knowledge. The change is diffused across the population, altering society and changing the People. None of this is within our control, or even within our ability to comprehend.

Technology and modernity mean a world forever new. It means one’s society differs greatly from that of his father’s, and the society of his children will differ in ways unknown. It means one is born into one world and leaves another. There is a characteristic look of bewilderment that sometimes comes upon us; the modern mask of marvelment. Whereas throughout history humanity’s experience has been of only slow, barely perceptible progress punctuated by periods of revolution that usually brought more noise than real change in the daily life of the individual, we exist in a continual, unending revolution–not of ideas or values, but of technology and commerce; it is not a revolution of a population or a faction with designs, but the aggregated energy of self-interest. No purpose; no design. It is under no one’s control; yet the same game of wile and cunning will promote some to power and condemn most to insignificance. Same as it ever was.

Humanity’s progress once seemed destined for a more libertarian future, and perhaps it is, but the lesson of our time is that there is no guarantee of this, no reason to make this assumption. Invasive technology and multiplying media unduly empower not only of the government, but any powerful entity, and the masses as well, to crush the individual. The surveillance state may in fact be the inevitable result of indifferent technology blithely destroying the private realm. But above all, technology, for all of its wonder and because of its irresistable nature, has thus far been as much a friend of government and corporate power as it has been a tool for resistance to them. And they already operate at a distinct advantage. I do not lament technology, but humanity, as always.

The very reason that government is necessary means that its benignity is not possible; the cruel force upon which government must be predicated, a consequence of nature, cannot be concealed or mitigated but through layers of restriction, dull and sense-deadening at their best, murderous at their worst.
But the threat of violence is there, always, implied but overwhelming, the most terrifying and all-encompassing sort of violence, state violence, the sort that, sufficiently provoked, can not merely kill a man but ruin him, with impoverishment, enslavement, scandal; the destruction of his very name and humanity it holds in reserve and uses with ease.

I don’t pretend it can be any other way. One can just as easily argue that we’ve accomplished an astounding compromise with our violent nature, and the gray face of government is the dam behind which that dark force is contained. This compromise is more fragile than we know; we always forget. But our duty to humanity, to ourselves, is to remain keenly aware of these effects, to mitigate them as much as the preservation of order allows, to imagine the realization of something more. To be vigilant in pursuing the dream of liberty. To plot our escape.

(In a wholly unrelated side note, I will be absent from posting for a period of 2 to 3 years, with possible time off for–never mind)

Has-Beens, Take Me Away!

It’s a familiar and cynical cliche that the masses “crave a strong leader.” This commonplace endures because it is so often demonstrably true. The priesthood of today’s prevailing order, mainstream media punditry, occasionally demonstrates this with the unintentional comedy of paeans extolling, say, the masculine vigor of a particular favored politician (think of of Chris Matthews’ serial man-crushes), revealing a desire, even, or especially, among this parasitical elite for a stern leader as impatient as they are with limits on authority.
In our mature democracy the mandarins and their flatterers sometimes betray a longing for the uncomplicated efficacy of dictatorial rule more readily than the people, whom they often see as the problem for which a unifying despot is the answer. There is even a distinctly modern American, pop-celebrity “liberal” version, envisioning a benign leader who will unite us in defiance of our most elemental divisions by sheer power of personality or demographic circumstance; their acolytes sometimes use the familiar totalitarian method of deifying and sentimentalizing the chosen by the use of the familiar forename (such as Hillary, but not Barak, which doesn’t carry the musical open-ended vowel structure of Obama or the soft consonant ending of, say, Saddam). Andrew Sullivan’s boundless faith in the transcendent power of Barak Obama’s racially blended visage is one genre of the art; Chris Matthews’ more subliminal homoeroticism another.

This natural enemy of republican government didn’t escape the attention of the founding fathers, and many of those arguing for the necessity of an “energetic” chief executive (themselves not entirely immune) reassured us that the office created by the Constitution was not and would not become the overbearing, imperial presidency we have made of it. No doubt among their expectations was that legislators’ jealousy of their own power would naturally create resistance to executive overreach, rescuing us from a precarious dependence on mere ethical discipline. Alas.

The co-equal division of powers was to be our guarantee against the vanity of a despotic executive. The two party system, which would seem to support this, has somehow managed to erode it. Political partisanship hasn’t ensured a vigorous minority opposition, but, remarkably, has created a supine legislature that is the inferior part of a disastrously unitary government.

Congress has abnegated all authority over war, first by passing an open authorization for the president to invade at will a nation halfway around the world and powerless to threaten us, then by surrendering the power of the purse and funding the ensuing imperial occupation at each turn–long after its pretext was revealed as deliberately falsified. Any consequences for that crime have been thwarted, through this perverse state of comity between executive and legislature.
The power we’ve vested in the presidency compounds itself; one party wields this power while the other covets it. The spectacle of the Democratic majority in Congress powerless to oppose an unpopular war is a direct result of their presidential aspirations. Through it all a distinct faction and particular worldview at odds with the valid interests of the nation have carried the day with remarkable efficiency. Corrupt though it may be, our government cannot be said to be either divided or lacking in vigor. The divisions are between popular and elite will, between the law and government action, between legitimate, morally defensible interest and current foreign policy.

Of the two defining initiatives of the Bush administration, the war and immigration reform, the government has from start to finish showed a unity that authoritarian regimes acting in camera sometimes struggle to achieve. Most remarkably perhaps is that on both of these issues, this united government acts in defiance of popular will. In the case of the war a bizarre pattern of official subterfuge giving way to exposure and failure giving way yet again to another subterfuge has unfolded (false pretext gains public support for war; pretext is exposed and the war goes badly, turning the public against the war; consequences of the failure of the war become the pretext for remaining in the war; the “surge” and attendant ethnic cleansing create a plausible success, quieting public opposition; no one notices or cares that this success bears no relation to the original purposes given for the war); this absurdity renders us as a people complicit through a lack of diligence in the criminal behavior of our government. Nonetheless, in each phase the people have either been misled or defied.

Regarding the other grand initiative of this administration and its allies on both sides of the aisle, immigration reform, the concerted efforts at disinformation haven’t been so dramatic and criminal but merely standard political faire; the media needs no prompting to comply with it and regards the issue with a sort of willful and sentimental ignorance that dismisses majority opinion as callow bigotry. Rather there has been a combination of rhetorical evasion and outright defiance, only checked by the sort of public outcry and resistance that happens once in a generation. The public has been broadly opposed from the start to immigration reform as the political parties, the government, and their lobbyist overlords envision it. Despite a campaign of dissembling and browbeating nearly as energetic and concerted as that which brought us the war, the more informed and engaged the public becomes regarding the issue, the more steadfast is their opposition. And still, one gets the feeling that the government will prevail ultimately through some combination of subterfuge and incrementalism, and that they will do it with the sort of vengeance characteristic of a privileged elite angered at being denied and embarrassed.

The common feature through all of this has been a remarkable level of unity among the two political parties, lobbyists and private interests, notwithstanding the belated and stillborn Democratic opposition to the war that was the public’s paltry payout for returning them to power. “Bipartisanship”, that hoary cliche lamented by politicians whenever they lack political cover or imagination, has never been more in evidence, never more disastrous to the health of the nation.

Remarkably, viewing this wreckage, a group of mostly retired politicians has decided that the problem is a lack of cooperation within the government, demanding their erstwhile colleagues present them with their plan to forge a “government of national unity”, and threatening a to challenge them for power if they don’t with their very own Augustus consecrated with the holiest validation of our time, massive wealth: New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

One might conclude from Bloomberg’s putsch that he opposes the policies of President Bush. He does not, and has been one of the war’s most enthusiastic supporters. This isn’t merely political opportunism or post 9/11 hysteria that might presage a coversion to realism, either. The Mayor has been among the more vociferous supporters of a foreign policy that views Israel’s security as inseparable from America’s (see Glenn Greenwald for a summary of the Mayor’s fervor), and it is by the pathway of staunch support for Israel and its attendant charges of anti-Semitism and speech suppression that the neocons and their agenda will transition into the next administration, like a parasite in a host body, maintaining a Middle East policy centered on a pointless state of cold war with Iran and Syria, regardless of how the Iraq war and its public perception proceed.

On the issue of immigration Bloomberg is characteristically dismissive of public opposition, once angrily stating that the only problem with the system is that it doesn’t supply enough cheap, unskilled labor for New York’s businesses. His enthusiasm for illegal immigration does not still his natural authoritarian tendencies however: the Mayor does support the institution of “a DNA or fingerprint database to track and verify all legal U.S. workers.” Any possible erosions of liberty ensuing from immigration enforcement do not trouble the Mayor, while any actual control of immigration does, suggesting he merely approves of the widening surveillance state in general.

Revealed in the enthusiasm of supposed statesmen for such a figure is a system that rewards cowardice and complicity, punishing courage and independence. Pushing for “unity” under a strong leader is making deliberate, and a redoubling of, that process. This revealed defect in our political system (as opposed to the system of government it tramples) already causes power to flow upward and into the executive office; if the current President is any indication, the increase in power may be inversely proportionate to the character of the individual occupying the office. The intellectual and moral inadequacy of President Bush, thus empowered, has been disastrous. The Bloomberg campaign suggests that our elites do not see the power of the Presidency as a problem that needs any remedy other than the installation of a more capable sovereign.

Watching this last gasp of a group flailing against the irrelevance of their impending dotage I’m reminded of nothing so much as the the old guard of the Soviet Union dying off; first an infirm Brezhnev passing, then Yuri Andropov’s brief turn, giving way to an exhausted Constantin Chernyenko (who barely made it through the eulogy he gave at the funeral of his predecessor) making it no farther, and ending finally with communism’s unwitting gravedigger, Mikhail Gorbachev, taking up his spade. Are we auditioning Gorbachevs?

What the elite laments is not divided government, but a government limited in its powers. In effect, they lament democracy. It’s a remarkable thing, but apparently the longer one serves in a republic the more he comes to disdain it.

The complete lack of interest in the recent fictional thread combined with the ongoing death spiral in readership (at what point does decency require we pull the plug?) is not lost on Untethered’s editorial staff. Therefore, in one final attempt to revive this thing from its catatonia, I hereby announce a new direction. From now on I will stick to straightforward blogging, in the form of literal commentary about issues of broad interest, taking definitive stands alternating between a loose, jocular style and grand, sweeping pronouncements. You can look forward to loads of linking, and much dissection of original material published elsewhere. Polemics like you’ve never seen before. Also, I’m actively seeking a group of bloggers who will admit me into their linkage circle-jerk; Bob said of Jim’s post about my mention of Joe’s remarks regarding Bob’s… I’m even thinking about going with the lower case i as a personal pronoun. Baby steps.
So, to inaugurate our new path, here’s a post about the Iowa caucus. It is, however, written in invisible typeface, similar to that ink that is only visible on paper after you highlight it with a catalyst. To view it you will need to swab your computer screen with a blend of equal parts egg whites, cranberry juice, and urine from a cat in middle to late estrous cycle. Enjoy:

There. That wasn’t so hard. Excuse me, I think I’m going to be ill.

This Year’s Legislative Lump of Coal

With the 9/11 attacks al Qaeda sought to draw the United States into the “slow bleeding” of wars in Muslim countries, sapping American will to remain in the Middle East while increasing Muslim resentment against the United States and support for the global jihad. With the invasion of Iraq, its disastrous progress, and the rapid unraveling of the Bush administration’s fictive justification leading to a concomitant unraveling of American prestige and power, al Qaeda’s once delusional analysts succeeded beyond their wildest fantasies. There could be no more effective articulation of their claims of US aggression against Muslims than the invasion of Iraq.

The terrorist attacks were a challenge to our military presence in the Middle East; the administration reacted by reasserting that presence dramatically. Success was to have broken finally resistance that didn’t begin with 9/11. We all know the fanciful process by which this was supposed to happen. Things haven’t gone as planned. But there’s another constituency which now distrusts the US presence in the Middle East. Because of its humbling failure, the administration may have turned the American public against a military commitment that it previously took for granted, to the extent it considered it at all.

But even if America is run out of the region altogether, al Qaeda’s ultimate goal of re-establishing the Caliphate remains as fantastical as it is unappealing to the vast majority of Muslims, no matter how much their resentment of the US leads them to identify with the global jihad and terrorism. There are only two factions who take this delirium seriously: fanatical jihadis and true-believing neocons (as opposed to neocon fellow travellers who simply cite it disingenuously).

Had the jihadis of al Qaeda a greater understanding of our society and its history, they might have recognized and deliberately sought the less dramatic, more insidious wound they nonetheless managed to inflict with the dramatic strike of 9/11. They may have inflicted a wound to liberal democracy itself that will take generations to heal.

The global jihad was influenced by the West’s own Marxist rhetoric, with Muslim scholars adopting much of the language of the Left from the sixties and early seventies, so perhaps they adopted another strategy of the now defunct terrorist Left of that time period. A few diehard groups in Western Europe, dismayed by the success of center-left political coalitions, the collapse of authentic Communist parties in the wake of Soviet brutality toward the Hungarian and Czechoslovakian revolts, and the proletariat’s improving material circumstances and lack of enthusiasm for class struggle, took the Marxist-Leninist analysis to its logical extremes. Acts of terrorist violence, they reasoned, would provoke repressive countermeasures from Western European democracies, exposing the “repressive tolerance” inherent in the system and causing the once deluded masses to rise up, finally, in revolt. The underlying theoretic rationale may be shaky, but as a strategy it would make far more sense than planning to revive the Ottoman Empire.

Germany’s Baader Meinhof gang and Italy’s Red Brigades ultimately got nowhere with their strategy of provocation (though traces of the far more effective Red Brigades remain, as well as sympathy for Brigate Rosse). They were isolated and targeted by governments that refused, or were unable, to play along. Perhaps all these revolutionaries lacked was their 9/11; a sudden, transcendental act of violence so extreme that it rendered their targets irrational. This may explain the openly admiring, reverential response of some aging leftist radicals to the towers’ fall.
The jihadis, by virtue of the suddenness and drama of the Twin Towers’ collapse, above all by virtue of those heart-rending pictures, have managed to provoke.

Only the masses, mostly shielded from and welcoming the degradation in civil liberties they see as directed outward, aren’t rising up. The core reason for the terrorist left’s failure remains; the people are inherently conservative and desire security and prosperity above all. Even now, six years on and with little evidence of a domestic terror threat, the public assents, to the extent it pays attention, to the dismantling of the Constitution. The absence of a terrorist attack on US soil since 9/11 and the dearth of “homegrown” terrorists hasn’t cooled the ardor of most politicians for ever more restrictions on a public within an ever-widening surveillance state. Into the void of apathy, as always, strides political ambition.

Even without crisis, the need for politicians to look like they are necessary and vital, above all doing something, ensures the continual flow of unnecessary legislation and its attendant dispersal of public wealth from which private and public interests alike swill as if from a perpetually self-renewing spring. Problems, exaggerated or downright fraudulent, exacerbated or created by politicians themselves, are the raw material used in fabricating political careers. The passion, fear, greed and paranoia of the public, sometimes meticulously cultivated, not hard reality, determines the amount of attention political leaders conspicuously, if not necessarily effectively, pay to these troubles.

Thus we get the costly busy work that produces legislation with titles that none but the blackest heart, surely, would stand athwart; War Orphans Acts and Wet Nosed Puppies Resolutions. Normally waste and fraud are the severest damage coming from this defect of democracy. In the perverse and perilous atmosphere of our current moment, the costs to the Republic of personal ambition are considerably higher.

The latest piece of dubious legislation that we can only hope turns out to be no more than a pointless waste of tax dollars and time and not a vehicle for further degrading freedom of speech and association, the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007, has caused some commotion out here on the open range of the Internet, but most Americans remain unaware of its existence. The bill has was passed in the House with a level of bipartisanship (404 to 6), that suggests either its utter pointlessness or the kind of mass political cowardice and corruption that gave us the PATRIOT Act and, nearly, “comprehensive immigration reform”, and is all but assured passage without significant alteration. The proposal comes from Jane Harman of California, who was missing in action as the senior Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, offering no resistance to illegal wiretapping and little more to the destruction of CIA interrogation tapes.

The bill would create something called “the National Commission on the Prevention of Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism”, to convene hearings on the potential for and identification of domestically originated terrorist associations and even, perhaps most ominously, individual radicalization, presumably through the Internet and other media, leading to “lone wolf” terrorism.
Of course the Internet figures prominently in the air of impending doom the act projects in its findings. What it does not account for is the remarkable dearth of domestically originated terrorism thus far. Why the sad sacks of the Sears Tower plot and the uncertain case of the Lackawanna Six would warrant the creation of yet another governmental entity within or without the multi-billion dollar homeland security complex created following 9/11 is not explained, and judging from the mass acquiescence of Congress, few are asking.
The commission’s mandate is broad and flexible, empowering any sub-commitee or individual commitee member to call hearings:

The Commission or, on the authority of the Commission, any subcommittee or member thereof, may, for the purpose of carrying out this section, hold hearings and sit and act at such times and places, take such testimony, receive such evidence, and administer such oaths as the Commission considers advisable to carry out its duties.

The commission is to terminate after 18 months, producing “a university-based Center of Excellence for the Prevention of Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism”, which remains ill-defined.

As Philip Giralidi points out, empowering commission members individually, acting whenever and wherever they wish, could potentially turn it into something akin to the McCarthy hearings:

Like Joe McCarthy and HUAC in the past, the commission will travel around the United States and hold hearings to find the terrorists and root them out. Unlike inquiries in the past where the activity was carried out collectively, the act establishing the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Commission will empower all the members on the commission to arrange hearings, obtain testimony, and even to administer oaths to witnesses, meaning that multiple hearings could be running simultaneously in various parts of the country.

Any such legislation carries the potential for opportunistic spill-over; the same vague definitions and broad mandate this bill utilizes to reserve powers are the breaches through which the zealous of various ideological convictions will pour. To avoid the appearance of “racial profiling” and “Islamophobia” the bill states its purpose as identifying radicalization of any sort. The commission could become a vehicle for harassment of a wide range of activist organizations and websites; it’s not hard to imagine the SPLC appearing before the commission with its list of “hate sites”, David Horowitz using the venue to call out “anti-Semitic” university professors, or the ACLU dropping its opposition to the scheme to seek the designation of some anti-abortion groups as “terrorist.” The targeting of individual radicalization, with its hints of thought-crime, must have Daniel Pipes fidgeting in anticipation of testifying about “sudden jihadi syndrome.”

The most chilling aspect for freedom of speech and association may lie in the commission’s high profile imprimatur to identify and publicly label groups and individuals “extremist.” Merely being subpeonaed by the commission could prove to threaten livelihoods.
Imagine the commission, cobbled together by partisan horse trading between Republicans and Democrats and thus encompassing a wide array of opinion regarding what constitutes extremism, its members individually empowered to convene hearings and subpoena witnesses and trading one hearing or ruling for another among themselves.
They’ll have the opportunity to bring forth allied “experts” using (and seeking) grants paid in tax dollars, pushing whole-cloth theories of how certain “extreme” views and statements, say regarding sex, race, immigration, abortion or religion, inevitably lead to and therefore constitute violent radicalization, prompting the commission or its “Center” (ironically, al Qaeda means “the center”) to recommend that websites publishing these views be labelled, surveiled or otherwise harassed; perhaps even dragging individuals who write for them before their hearings to explain their heterodox views.
I repeat: we’ll be lucky if it’s merely a colossal waste of money and time.

***

Add:
As a novice clumsily researching these things, I find myself wondering if something that draws my attention is unremarkable. Nonetheless, I couldn’t help noticing the commission is exempted from The Federal Advisory Committee Act, which seeks to limit the number, authority and activities of such:

(a) The Congress finds that there are numerous committees,
boards, commissions, councils, and similar groups which have been
established to advise officers and agencies in the executive branch
of the Federal Government and that they are frequently a useful and
beneficial means of furnishing expert advice, ideas, and diverse opinions to the Federal Government.
(b) The Congress further finds and declares that –
(1) the need for many existing advisory committees has not been adequately reviewed:
(2) new advisory committees should be established only when they are
determined to be essential and their number should be kept to the minimum necessary;
(3) advisory committees should be terminated when they are no longer carrying out the purposes for which they were established;
(4) standards and uniform procedures should govern the establishment, operation,
administration, and duration of advisory committees;
(5) the Congress and the public should be kept informed with respect to the number, purpose, membership, activities, and cost of advisory committees; and
(6) the function of advisory committees should be advisory only, and that all matters under their consideration should be determined, in accordance with law, by the official, agency, or officer involved.

"Blogging!", Still

Not that anyone is out there to notice, much less care (I of course am not referring to you, Uncle Morty), but recently I “blogged” on the subject of the recent NIE and the apparent defections of two senior Iranian government officials [correction: the arrest of one for “spying”, and the apparent defection of another, Ali Reza Azgari, who is the subject of today’s post] wondering aloud (or rather, in print) if there was a connection. In today’s Asia Times Gareth Porter reports that one of them may indeed be at the root of the remarkable reversal of intelligence community consensus:

The key development that altered the course of the NIE on Iran, according to intelligence sources, was the defection of a senior official of the Iranian Ministry of Defense, Ali Reza Asgari, on a visit to Turkey last February, as widely reported in international news media in subsequent weeks. The Washington Post’s Dafna Linzer, citing a “senior US official”, reported on March 8 that Asgari, who had been deputy minister of defense for eight years under the reformist president Mohammad Khatami from 1997 to 2005, was already providing information to US intelligence.

The senior official told Linzer, however, that Asgari was not being questioned about Iran’s nuclear program, despite the fact that Asgari certainly had significant knowledge of policy decisions, if not technical details, of the program. That incongruous denial that Asgari had anything to say about Iran’s nuclear program suggested that the information being provided by Asgari on that subject was considered extraordinarily sensitive.

Intelligence officials have kept any reference to Asgari out of the discussion of the NIE. Former Central Intelligence Agency officer Philip Giraldi has told Inter Press Service (IPS), however, that, according to intelligence sources, information provided by Asgari was indeed a “key component” of the intelligence community’s conclusion that Iran ended its nuclear weapons-related work in 2003, although it was corroborated by other sources.

Israel downplayed Asgari’s importance regarding Iran’s nuclear program; an official was quoted in the below linked Washington Post article:

“He lived in Lebanon and, in effect, was the man who built, promoted and founded Hezbollah in those years,” [former Mossad officer Ram] Igra told Israeli state radio. “If he has something to give the West, it is in this context of terrorism and Hezbollah’s network in Lebanon.”

Either Mossad never got their hands on Asgari or they somehow got a little more than they bargained for, revealing a clumsiness that’s almost charmingly American, assuming they are as disappointed in the NIE as they suggest. It will be interesting to see how the efforts of some within (and without) the Israeli government to counter-spin the NIE play out.

Porter joins the many who’ve pointed out President Bush’s (apparently) feigned ignorance of these developments is highly unlikely, suggesting he knew as early as March of this year, when Asgari’s cooperation was being reported in the Washington Post. As Porter notes, that cooperation, corroborated by Giraldi’s (whose short dispatches on intelligence matters can be found in the American Conservative’s regular feature,”Deep Background”) reporting here, would have had to find its way into the President’s Daily Briefing (PDB) about the same time.
Keep in mind, while the president was warning of “World War III” because of Iran’s alleged position on the verge of nuclear power status, not only did he likely know of contradictory intelligence, he had to know how diligently Vice President Cheney’s cabal was working to suppress that intelligence. Contemplating this government of ours kind of makes me all warm inside. Maybe that’s just heartburn. Or do I mean heartache?

Sunday Sermonette

The Unanticipated Consequences of Unacknowledged Ambitions

Let’s try to be precise then. The word “torture” does not appear in our orders… And those who explode bombs in public places, do they perhaps respect the law? … No, gentlemen, believe me, it is a vicious circle. And we could discuss the problem for hours without reaching any conclusions. Because the problem does not lie here. The problem is: the NLF wants us to leave Algeria and we want to remain. Now, it seems to me that, despite varying shades of opinion, you all agree that we must remain… Therefore, to be precise, I would now like to ask you a question: Should France remain in Algeria? If you answer “yes,” then you must accept all the necessary consequences.
—Col. Mathieu, The Battle of Algeirs

It is mad and preposterous to bring to the standard of justice and humanity the exercise of a dominion founded upon violence and terror.
—Thomas Erskine, 1789

I fear that we would become a third-class nation after two or three years if we just sat tight.
—Hideki Tojo, Nov. 5, 1941

Any defense of torture must ultimately reduce down to two assertions that have always constituted the core defense of any such moral compromise in the enforcement of the law or the waging of war:
we can entrust our representatives with this awful device because our safety is in their hands–our motives vindicate our means; and, conversely, our enemies mean us harm and observe no comparable standard–their motives vindicate our means, negating whatever rights we would normally accord the accused before the law or prisoners of war.

However a standard made conditional and subjective is not a standard but a farce. It is nothing more than power’s expedience on masquerade. Justice reserved for those presumed innocent or harmless is no justice at all, and inevitably produces an abomination: accusation equals guilt. And guilt demands punishment. We have ceded the determination of guilt, and thus punishment, to authorities acting in secret. While the Administration insists torture (while refusing even the responsibility to either acknowledge or deny its use) is keeping us safe, it has yet to produce a single instance of proof, citing a need for secrecy that is in large part a consequence of the use of this “enhanced interrogation”. Fear, meticulously nurtured by a political faction, now determines our values. It is not merely rhetorical flourish to describe ours as a paranoid society.

A precious standard has been destroyed for expedience. But expedience has its price. Repercussions await; but for the moment, as we explicitly work to legitimize torture for ourselves by claiming extraordinary circumstances, we incidentally work to legitimize torture in and of itself, for us and for our enemies alike, following the presumption that our present might will hold us harmless in perpetuity.

What the argument for torture lacks in logical consistency and ethical rigor it more than makes up for in base appeal. The instinct to hate and fear our enemies is natural and necessary, but for liberty and order to coexist we are forced to adhere to a decidedly “unnatural” state, holding our impulse for self-preservation in abeyance before the sober consideration of fact, granting our enemies a measure of restraint we cannot expect in return.

Before 9/11 there was a clear demarcation between law enforcement and war. Taking advantage of the fear and confusion following 9/11, the Administration created a shadowy non-category, neither entirely criminal nor entirely combatant, for terrorist suspects, fuming at the proposition that we treat the threat as a “law enforcement issue” rather than warfare, and equally outraged at the prospect of waging this war within recognized convention. A “global war on terror” as its proponents so flexibly and vaguely define it, is war without limits or laws, everywhere without end, nominally waged against a method, but actually against the sentiment of anti-Americanism.

Even within this new definition, of “illegal enemy combatant,” there is no consistency; a suspect is one moment a prisoner of war, the next a criminal suspect, depending on the need to suspend whatever rights he may claim under either category, and always outside of law or convention governing either circumstance; and all predicated on an assumption of guilt. Just as we shuttle them about the globe fleeing our own laws, as if geographic distance decreases moral responsibility, we shuttle them back and forth categorically, in a shell game to confound our own republican system of co-equal government and congressional oversight. In this purgatory our leaders have created there are no limits on the exercise of power. But now we must concede it is naive to think this hasn’t been happening in secret and on a smaller scale for a long time now.

We have assented to this, taking for granted that this will all be contained somehow, evincing remarkable trust in a government that reserves unto itself the right to absolute secrecy even as it categorically rejects the right to privacy for any citizen or organization it deems.
Information, facts, events, reality, all disappear into the black hole of state power we have created, reappearing only in distorted fragments: edited, blacked out, redacted, euphemised.

And why do we consent? It is difficult to accept but impossible to deny that the 9/11 attacks were both a heinous crime against us and a consequence of our actions. These are not, contrary to popular sentiment, mutually exclusive. Just as the latter does not preclude our seeking retribution against the murderers of 9/11 and defending against their kind in the future, neither should the former preclude the frank and sober appraisal of our history and the necessary and long overdue debate attendant upon that. It awaits only the recognition of a resolute people looking beyond the hysteria created by a craven elite jealous of their power and disdainful of the truth.

But our leaders have done more than take advantage of 9/11 to draw new powers unto themselves; as well they’ve bound our security from terrorism to the very same military adventurism that produced it in the first place. The invasion of Iraq was not a misplaced response to 9/11, but a redoubling of the long project of which 9/11 was just the most dramatic and disastrous product. Now opposition to military adventurism, foreign entanglements and our newly acquired levels of state power is convincingly painted, by those keen to keep themselves in power and profiting from this monstrosity, as support for our enemies.
We remain unaware of how close a determined faction came to dealing the final death blow to a republican form of government they, and their predecessors, have been able to subdue but not quite kill for as long as we’ve had a political class. Success in Iraq as they envisioned it might have irrevocably bound up once and for all our security with our imperial ambitions. The unthinkable occurs: victory in Iraq may have been worse than the horror we are now witnessing. Even as the Iraq project foundered horribly, they still sought to advance us beyond the point of return, straining to create another fait accompli in Iran. Some work for this even now. They will not relent and they will always be with us. Some will retire, some will fall to scandal, a very few will falter in their commitment and repent, but their ranks will continually be replenished by the eager and ambitious, desperately clawing at one another even now as they mount the lower rungs of power, eyes focused upward hopefully. Republicanism is necessarily the enemy of ambition.

We have to continually remind ourselves: it is the failure of the Iraq war that has provoked widespread opposition, not the undeniable injustice of it. Even now, this opposition is thwarted, nearly irrelevant but for the advantage it grants one political party over another, nearly indistinguishable.

But if we’re to be honest and thorough we have to follow this thought to its disasteful conclusion: this necessity (as the Administration would have it) for conquest, spying and torture is not a consequence of 9/11, but like 9/11, is a consequence of history, long predetermined before the towers fell. Our leaders are disingenuous, but not entirely dishonest; they truly see the invasion of Iraq, the surveillance state and torture as necessities. It’s merely that they do not trust us with the whole truth.
The true cost of empire, to liberty and the law, has long been deferred. Refusing to accept this cost, to honor this debt to our principles, will eventually bankrupt us. That is what is happening to us now.

Combining a newfound acceptance of torture with an aggressive campaign of nation-building means that we are in the business of arresting and torturing people who are not threats to the security of US citizens, but threats to our ambitions abroad; the greater these ambitions, the greater their numbers.
The most damaging and damning reality of the Abu Ghraib scandal was not that we were involved in the torture of “suspected terrorists” but of suspected insurgents–rebels against an occupation we still cannot justify. But it’s worse than that; in the haste compelled by Donald Rumsfeld, a man with an incomparable combination of incompetence and arrogance, we soon found ourselves imprisoning and torturing innocents caught up in our desperation.
It’s not merely that we swell the ranks of the Jihadis; we’ve acquired a whole new class of enemies with which we have to concern ourselves. We’ve undeniably acquired the burdens of empire, whatever we choose to call it.

The terrorists never held it in their power to change us, our way of life, our laws, or our values. They still don’t. They are still ultimately powerless. Only we have that power.
We continue to lie to ourselves about the nature of these things. But the only way to be rid of the consequences of empire is to be rid of the empire. Neither then should we lie about the inestimable costs we will incur in abandoning it. For, having railed thusly against it, I now have to concede that I cannot tell you we haven’t gone too far already. We may have. But this I know: we can no longer justify it, if ever we could, and we can no longer deny it. The nation cannot behave as a child attempting to will away reality.
For all the celebration of martial heroism, that even the critics of the war immerse themselves in as if to baptize away the sin of insufficient patriotism, in our hearts we know the greater courage lies in standing down. Sending the children of the working class off to subdue the restive corners of the empire while singing paens to them takes no courage at all. Accepting the limitations of decency and the awful uncertainty of restraint, however, does, and it’s required of each one of us.