jane dark's sugarhigh!

closure

High school student by day, hijacker by night.

"His stated intent was to hijack the airplane and commit suicide," said George Bolds, an FBI spokesman in Memphis, Tennessee. "He did indicate he intended to die in Louisiana. It appears he had a ticket to Louisiana." [...] The teen wanted to crash the plane into a Hannah Montana concert in Lafayette, Louisiana, two CNN television affiliates in Nashville, WSMV and WTVF, reported, citing unnamed sources...

third rail

Median and mean are hard to measure, but the modal reaction to the Mitchell Commission report seems to be: Roger Clemens! This is usually followed by some formulation either of "Wow, it's worse than we thought," or "I knew it all along." Neither of which is a story.

After a brilliant early career, Clemens' trajectory was defined by
• a return to dominance after a mild decline
• thrilling greatness for longer than thought possible
• unheard-of power approaching 40 and after
• a record number of awards and a run at numerous other records
• a huge fucking head.

If there's a story in the Clemens revelations, it's not that the Rocket was juiced. Or that we shoulda known he was juiced, or did know he was juiced. It's that he bore transparently and exactly the same signs of juicing as Barry Bonds, and rode them to utterly parallel and heretofore unknown achievements. And yet there was no talk of asterisks, no endless whisper campaign, no media indictment, no requisite holiday party debate over Roger. The fetishistic spanking of Barry Bonds, which predates the millennium, is now obviously rendered as the racist exercise that many pretended it wasn't. The spankers got off on it, under the flag of moral judgment: essentially a free shot. And the justifications just look embarrassing now. Barry's case wasn't more obvious. He wasn't closer to the spotlight or the record books. He was not even a bigger asshole. But he was quite a bit darker of skin.

best law & order episode ever

Pakistan Police Attack Lawyers at Protest

While trying to ignore the slavering banalities of the sovereignty-theory gang (hey look! that obvious thing we keep pointing out as if it were a revelation: still true!), one notes that this could not get any more embarrassing for the administration, given that Pakistan is now distinctly less democratic than Iran.

Moreover Musharraf has now demonstrably outstripped the supposed sins of Hugo Chavez, meaning that if the U.S. doesn't take action againt Pakistan, there will be no justification for opposing Venezuelan socialism. Which means, one imagines, that anti-Chavez activity will have to be even more covert. Seriously, he may be the big loser of this martial law, given that the Allende bullet now seems like the only workable solution for capitalismpanik.

"that annihilated place"

On this, the second anniversary of Katrina, there will be many forms of attention to the specifics of that event, of the current parlous circumstances of New Orleans, or the handling of the ongoing aftermath by George W. Bush, the Republican party, and the institutional racism in which they swim. The destruction of individual lives and communities will be detailed; testimonials from current and former residents will serve as indictments. Specific addresses, that is, will call out specific betrayals.

Little of this commentary will be mistaken. We wish only to add a soupçon of longue durée to the pungent local details. Following Mike Davis's argument in Ecology of Fear (and Paul Virilio's regarding "accidents" in the contemporary world) we would first note the error of considering Katrina's destruction to be either a "natural disaster" or a "singular event." It is instead an amplified example of what is one eventual outcome of elaborate human calculations, most obviously regarding where and how to build dwellings, and how to protect and maintain them against chronic and acute — but predictable — ecological events. Katrina is, one might say, the inverse event of the inevitable destruction when view-lot homes are built, underpinned by the promise of imported water, in wildfire corridors.

Again, it should be stressed that this realization in no way forgives the shameful and murderous response to the disaster. It is merely to try to understand both the event and the response historically. For it is similarly crucial to understand not just the destruction itself but the failure to rebuild New Orleans — the writing off of a major city and its populace — as a historical event, with a structuration that is not accidental or unique.

In 1970, the United States was ruled by a corrupt Republican regime; it is hard to suppose that there was substantially less institutionalized racism at that juncture then now. Nonetheless, it seems likely from here that, had the same event happened then, New Orleans would have been well en route to a rebuilt renaissance by 1972. This is a fairly simple economic deduction: that infrastructural repair and reinvestment would have been a lot easier to come by before the long economic downturn that began in 1973. Or, to rephrase the matter in terms of Giovanni Arrighi's Braudelian analysis of the United States' "long Twentieth century," wherein he holds that the peak of the US cycle of accumulation was 1973: the seemingly singular decision not to rebuild New Orleans is exactly the mark of an empire in decline. It's structural, not singular at all. The abandonment of a great city to time and tide is indeed both symptom and mark of empire on its downhill slide; it bears noting as well that pathetic, delusional and desperate regimes are equally an indicator of this decline.

That New Orleans was the first city to go (or was it Detroit?) means, among other things, that it won't be the last; when "Ozymandias" is written about us, the busted statue will not be found near the desert of ocean lapping over the Delta, but in the lone and level sands of Los Angeles, or New York, or Las Vegas.

good job

So, voting Democratic got you the brutal beating of your remaining Fourth Amendment rights. And let's be clear: this was done because Republicans and Democrats worked together. They are not oppositional parties.

Perhaps you could claim that you didn't see it coming when you voted. Just as you didn't see the Defense of Marriage Act, NAFTA, the end of Welfare. It would be an implausible claim, but you could make it. You could pretend you didn't vote for it, even though you did. You could wail and moan about such craven behavior, even as you ready to go back and submit your bodies for more. You could believe you're not the person making sure this keeps happening, and that change will happen through their behavior, not yours. Abused spouses and kids believe all kinds of stuff.

But it's time to break that model and make the move on up to sadomasochism. Be proud. Own it. The Democratic candidates are now telling you explicitly in words, as they have relentlessly in deeds, that they will not in reality end the war. The violence is all on the table: this is your real chance, killer.

confidential to manoel de oliveira

Seriously, dude, watch your back.

"curves in all the right places"/a propos

On the day of Anna Nicole Smith's death, it seems worth mentioning that the catchiest song of the last 12 months is certainly Mika's Queen-inspired rollick, "Big Girl (You Are Beautiful)." Album not yet released; song available for download here.

a specter is haunting china

reposted from marxists.org

MIA faces very significant challenges

In early November we came under sustained denial of service attack from Internet hosts in China attempting to exploit a misconfiguration in our server's operating system. The nature and origin of the attack, our previous history with the PRC, and the experience of others suggest that this maybe politically motivated and directed by the Chinese government. Protecting ourselves necessitated rebuilding part of the kernel and rebooting the system remotely. The failure of the system to properly boot into the new kernel caused a prolonged outage as we scrambled to find someone with the necessary access to get the system back into the previous configuration.

Details of the attackers origins [this link is now mysteriously dead — sugarhigh!]

While the attacks continued and greatly degraded MIA performance, we were understandably cautious about rebuilding the kernel and trying again. On January 15, the server became unresponsive and we asked for it to be remotely rebooted, taking the opportunity to bring it up with the new kernel.

While this alleviated the previous issue, it seems to have uncovered another, more serious, problem with our CPU that causes random errors (machine check exceptions) and cause the system to reboot.

Each time the system reboots, it causes our RAID storage system to reinitialize and rebuild, a lengthy process that severely degrades performance. To make matters worse, the redundant disk in the array seems to be failing.

As if that weren't bad enough, while attempting to make arrangements to buy a new server, we learned that our collocation facility will be closing on February 1, leaving MIA literally homeless.

At the moment, our redundant disk is back online and we are rebuilding the array to protect against data loss on the server. We also have offsite backups of all MIA content should the worst come to pass. We are furiously searching for new hosting space, but our data transfer needs (approximately 1.3TB a month) make this a very difficult choice compared with our previous non-profit host.

The bottom line: there is a significant probability that we will not be able to find and deploy an acceptable solution in time to meet the February 1 lights-out date. This means that the MIA will be off the air. We will make every attempt to bridge the gap with the help of our dedicated mirror operators though we may need to stop serving some of our more "expensive" content such as MP3s and PDFs. There is also a chance that our ultimate solution may require us to make a long-term evaluation of the type of content we serve and make things like PDFs available via alternate distribution channels (e.g. BitTorrent). However, despite our recent litany of seemingly fatal problems, the MIA remains a strong organization with a wealth of content, committed to providing the premiere electronic library of Marxist writings. Despite the political, technical, or economic pressures, rest assured that we will find a way to keep these works available to the world.

cog diss

Time magazine's "Person of the Year" is "You"; in the words of the Houston Chronicle, the annual edition "cited the shift from institutions to individuals — citizens of the new digital democracy, as the magazine put it."

For those looking for proof of the individual's triumph over institutional power, one need search no further than this: US Army might break Goodyear strike headlines this article, which begins:

The US Army is considering measures to force striking workers back to their jobs at a Goodyear Tire & Rubber plant in Kansas in the face of a looming shortage of tyres for Humvee trucks and other military equipment used in Iraq and Afghanistan.

notes on the new(s)

You will note that the style of this entry is stolen from the deeply pleasing mystery-rag that is The New-York Ghost¶To include more than four poetry titles in The Grey Goose's list of the year's 100 Notable Books would fly so thoroughly in the face of their audience's reading practices as to seem polemical. And there's a logic to the fact that the youngest poet included is a spry 62; no one in that world knows what to make of contemporary poetry; choosing already-canonical figures is a to-hand solution. The dissonance, finally, comes from the distance between this latter banality and the fact that the editors must — must — be aware that, if they themselves made a list of 40 books of poems they loved and recognized as significant (limiting themselves to original collections by 20th Century American poets), which they wouldn't have any trouble doing, they would shortly discover that the vast majority of these books were written by poets in their twenties, thirties, and forties. Ginsberg was 29 when he wroteHowl; its inclusion this year is the perfect myth, in the Levi-Straussian sense of an imaginary solution to real contradictions. It at once recognizes the way that much poetry that matters to us comes as a sort of shock or breakthrough rather than a consolidation, while opening the gateways only to figures who've been culturally validated. This, not "poetry" or "taste" as such, is the real horizon of the list, the discontinuity within its apparently smooth ideological gleam.¶In light of the Number One Leader's recent visit to Vietnam, we wonder if it makes sense to situate the last several years in Iraq in relation to the economic logic of Hollywood that tells us it's economically safer to pursue franchises, sequels, and remakes (up to and including the art-school variant of "shot-by-shot" covers of previous films of which Gus Van Sant's Psycho was only the best-distributed; the form finds its zenith in the loving recreation of Raiders of the Lost Ark by three adolescent boys, a story the rights of which have now been acquired by Hollywood). Such films have a massive head start in finding a place in the cluttered imagespace of the average American, while being simultaneously more cost-effective to produce and market. They are pre-imagined and pre-sold. Might we think of the United States' domino-theory global hedge action to be a sort of franchise, involving little more than cosmetic changes and an updating of the plot to seem relevant to current events? Might we indeed expect to start seeing shot-by-shot recreations of wars?¶Elsewhere our friend Herr Dinglö directs us to this almost incomprehensibly satisfying passage in a recent article on Beirut: “We have no work. We have nothing else to do, so we came to overthrow the government.”¶

nostalgia of the infinite

...or an archaeology of the future?

review image below, then guess world's top two arms exporters

there's a brand new dance

Craig S. Smith, who seems to head the Paris bureau of The New York Times, has proven over the last year to have a mere few journalistic failings; consider the niceties on display in his account of the national reaction to Zidane's coup-de-boule:

PARIS, Monday, July 10 — In the end there was bewilderment, embarrassment and, among some, a sense of betrayal as the national party planned to celebrate France's World Cup victory and a glorious end to the career of France's star player fizzled in a moment of frayed nerves.

France could have used a triumph to boost the national spirit, flagging after a year of social unrest and political scandals. It could have used an unblemished hero, too.

Instead, Zinédine Zidane, the team's star and captain, ended his World Cup performance with an ignominious moment of pique that got him ejected from the game. It was his last game before he retires from international competition.

It is, one supposes, a reasonable attempt to fashion a fabric of national life from the pattern of a single incident (of a piece with the analogical thinking which seems to take on the order of an imperative for the Times, especially in the Op-Ed section); alas, pull on a thread and the whole thing unravels.

First, it is worth noting that "bewilderment and embarassment" do not seem to be the foremost feelings, much less universal ones, here in France. "Curiosity"? Certainly — and its mother, amazement. But if there is an accompanying affect (and there are many), unregistrable delight is probably closer to the truth. When Zidane gave a cable-tv press conference on the 12th, people filled the bars and crowded outside in the streets trying to watch through windows. Zidane soccer jerseys are exhausted at every store — and every store had been stocking more than many.

If Zidane seemed the most famous man in the world after the 1998 World Cup victory, he has eclipsed that now, and not in the form of a villain. He has made the true leap from sport celebrity to folk hero. It's less than a week since Zidane knocked down Materazzi with a single head-butt, and there is already a song about it: "Coup de boule," it's called, by Lipszyc and Lascombes. The title seems to continue, "Zidane il a tapé." It comes with a dance, naturally (one for which you will not require much instruction).

It's too early to measure, but it seems to be the most popular song in the country. It has already entered the charts as a ringtone, and as of this writing has almost certainly reached Number One; the song to follow. This is not exactly what "embarrassment" looks like.

How could Smith have gotten it so wrong? His first failing, a minor one for a reporter, is that he seemingly hasn't actually spoken with actual people — certainly not people in bars, French-Algerians, Marseillaises, immigrants, soccer fans, or anyone with whom we've had any occasion to make chat in the last week (for here there is only one topic, or was, until the bombing of Beirut). Nor, would it seem, has Smith listened to the radio or watched much television. Well, he's merely a journalist after all; he's not Superman.

As a result, Smith finds himself a bit like a reporter in Baghdad's Green Zone, insisting that the war's going well. His general observations about the state of things, though you wouldn't know it from what's written, turn out to be true for a rather small group of people, in a rather fortified area.

This analogy, while crude, clarifies some oddities in his attempts to annex Zidane's singular act to the condition of the national psyche (already an absurdity, a total misunderstanding of exactly what was beautiful about the non-institutional because entirely non-strategic act). Here's the passage immediately following Smith's lede above:

It seemed almost metaphorical for a country that, despite its successes, has been paralyzed by its recent failures. They began with last year's rejection of the referendum on a proposed constitution for Europe [....]

Then came last fall's outbreak of urban violence, which exposed the failures of the country's egalitarian ideals. Finally, the government foundered over a modest attempt to loosen labor regulations. Violence briefly surged again.

"Its recent failures" — but failures for whom, exactly? One suspects that last year's Non vote on joining the European constitution was a a success for some; perhaps the national majority that voted Non? Similarly, this spring's overturning of the CPE might not be considered a failure by the millions who marched, blockaded, and struck against the pro-business measure? As one slogan had it, Travailleurs, étudiants, chômeurs, sans-papiers— tous précaires, tous solidaires! "Workers, students, unemployed, illegals — all precarious, all in solidarity." Well, perhaps not the most elegant slogan; however, a useful list of folks with whom reporter Smith has not spoken, who are excluded from his national psyche.

This finally, is what links the embarrassment over Zidane and the year's "failures": they exist only for a small and perhaps imaginary minority. We can imagine it via all the persons this population does not include, as mentioned above: they are white liberal bourgeoises, sitting in their étage noble apartments and fretting about the decline of civilization, believing all the while that "France" still means them and them alone. They are cranks, perhaps, except, as is quite clear from Smith's measure, they are businessmen as well. It's from within their comically narrow worldview that Smith speaks in the voice of the universal subject, rendering his politics as if they are simply a set of facts, and discovering without much expense of shoeleather what's true for everyone — a truth requiring the fantasy that there is a single national condition, a country of a single mind, which just happens to be that of a few men in suits. And this is true, as long as the nation is limited to a few conversations within the carefully entrenched green zone. Beyond the Belle Epoque fortifications, the love for Zidane, if it must be made to tell a national story, would narrate it rather differently.

this long gyre or, the rhetorical wonder of the permanent present tense

A prizewinning college essay in The Nation begins a sentence, As the Iraq debacle spirals out of control... (July 17, 2006).

Bodies pile up in morgues as Iraq spirals out of control, reads a headline from The Times (February 23, 2006).

In Iraq the situation started to spiral out of control with the blowing up of the Askariya Shiite Muslim shrine in Iraq on Feb. 22, 2006, our particular favorite from a site named Revelation 13: Saddam Hussein, the former evil dictator of a modern-day Babylon, and the Wars in Iraq -- A Bible prophecy and New Age analysis.

The Nation is no newcomer to the war spiraling out of control: per an editors' note last year, The war has also become the single greatest threat to our national security. Its human and economic costs are spiraling out of control (November 28, 2005).

In all, at least 30 people died Saturday in politically motivated violence across Iraq — stark evidence of a security situation threatening to spiral out of control, according to China Daily (October 31, 2004).

Stanford expert says Iraq spinning out of control, notes a San Francisco Chronicle headline (April 25, 2004).

Rebel war spirals out of control, according to a headline from The Observer (November 2, 2003).

Well, the fear is that this is just a spiral, that this is spiraling out of control, Hassan Fattah, editor of Iraq Today, told interviewers on CNN (August 28, 2003)...

...to which Soledad O'Brien inquired, Is it spiraling out of control?...

notes from all over (arbitron edition)

• In the world of Wikipedia, which just recently abandoned its universal anyone-can-edit policy, additional screen names invented by a user (most frequently to feign support in a vitriolic debate over a disputed page's content) are known as, wait for it, sock puppets, predictably leading to a policy page named Wikipedia:Sock puppetry.

• Priceless first line from Michiko Kakutani: This is the sort of book that gives the Left a bad name. It's a bit like a review by a pro-life zealot beginning, This is the sort of book that gives abortion a bad name. Now let's make a list of the books that would, in eyes of Ms. Kakutani, give "the Left" a good name. Perhaps one called We're Sorry. Or, We're Moving to the Center. Or one called Liberalism Has No Future Unless It Embraces the War On Terror without Reservation and with Bloody Teeth Bared and Purges Anyone Who Disagrees. No, whoops, that book already exists, and is called The Good Fight, and the Times has given it not one creamy review, but two. Actually, one supposes that any book which presents liberalism as the Leftern front might help the Ms. Kakutani and the Times rest easy.

• The House, Declaring that the United States will prevail in the Global War on Terror further "declares that it is not in the national security interest of the United States to set an arbitrary date for the withdrawal or redeployment of United States Armed Forces from Iraq" [emphasis ours]. These bright lights and sock puppets seem not to know exactly what "arbitrary" means, and use it as if it meant "specific." Existing in distinction to "random" (which would indicate a date settled on without any selection activity whatsoever), an "arbitrary date" would indicate one in which a choice was indeed made, but one without recourse to "necessity, reason, or principle." Which is to say that, per the House's own resolution, it would require nothing more than a reason — "worsening conditions" works for us — to commence withdrawal with honor at sunrise. Yes, we know: the dictionary is the sort of book that gives the Left a bad name.

americanarama

You may recall that, in the most recent national election — after Abu Ghraib, after the complete failure to stabilize Iraq or install a democratic regime or install a regime — both presidential candidates ran on a strongly pro-war platform. You may also be aware that — after more Abu Ghraib, Gitmo, worsening situations in Iraq and Afghanistan — the minority party's leading candidate for the next election continues to support the war aggressively, while the majority party whips up a constitutional amendment on gay marriage that proposes about the exact same thing that the current minority party already signed into law as the Defense of Marriage Act back when they held the presidency, when they were also busy engineering and signing NAFTA so the other party wouldn't have to waste their effort or ink.

To some, this may seem an alarming and blurry sameness; indeed, to the cynic, it may appear that the two parties are not offering you the actual spectrum of human possibilities. Or meaningful product differentiation, which is your right as an American.

However, you may take a different view of what the full range of possibilities is, and what's more you may be more open to nuanced distinctions. Indeed, perhaps you find yourself dizzied by the choices on offer betwen the Republicans and Democrats. You are, let's say, unable to navigate the yawning gap between whether we should not discuss retrieving troops from Iraq for at least a year, or not discuss it at all; exhausted, perhaps, by the labor required to parse whether one ought to prefer an estate tax which effects three persons in every thousand, or none.

This is why a third party is needed. The two parties are simply too different to allow for rational choice, and how can anything get done in such circumstances? We need some clarity, some narrowing of the gab between these insanity-threatening polarities.

This is where Unity08 comes in. A serious player on the national stage, founded by veterans of the Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter administrations, it promises to bridge these impassible political chasms and heal the national wound by nominating and electing a ticket with a Republican and a Democrat (or even an independent, as long as said person displays their independence by "committing to a Unity team"). You say that, although the two parties do not offer you an option to favor a woman's right to choose, nationalized health care, an end to the death penalty, greater social support, the equal protection of marriage for all persons, or ten thousand more things that any European person might cast a vote for (much less a ban on SUVs, an end to home ownership and animal testing, or a 1% tax on every international business transaction) there is still too wide a range, too much polarization, too much national pain. Focus08 hears you. Free at last, free at last — no longer are we bound by the panoplies of choice so fearsomely threatened by American politics! Let the healing begin.

extensive/rock that meme

Without endeavoring to summarize the entire "is Stephin Merritt a racist?" discussion (one can find a recent note and an outlinked entry-point to the debate here and here), sugarhigh! offers a couple ancillary notes:
• It's interesting that the debate focuses on trying to ascertain some abstract truth about Stephin Merritt, as if that mattered at all. The soul of some individual you're unlikely to spend much time with: whatevs. What seems more fundamentally at stake is: does this possibility begin to explain something about Merritt's music and, far more importantly, about the extent to which people embrace and identify with it, despite its dullness? That is, is this an explanatory account, or just an insult?
• Somewhere around the heart of this lies what we see as a most fundamental issue about "taste," and what can be deciphered about ideology and social damage by tracing the chasm between someone's self-proclaimed beliefs and what seems to be revealed by their actual practices. But if we're going to do this, let's do this. No one thinks they're a racist, and as sugarhigh! can attest from asking strangers "what kind of music do you like?" reflexively for years, a vast majority of white people from metropolitan areas believe they have eclectic tastes, or enjoy "everything." This everything, as it happens, is a curious one: it never includes Too Short, or Christina Milian (or, for that matter, Toby Keith or Jessica Simpson).
• So, you are saying, there are two issues being conflated here: the racism implicit in the empirical preferences of some people who insist they're not racist, and the unstated opposition between "eclectic" and "pop" that renders the term "eclectic" as self-canceling — not just meaningless, but encrusted with a rather laden delusion. Indeed. This conflation, and the labor of spackling over the logical fissures of each portion, strikes at the heart of the basic problematic of taste as it regards mass culture in the United States (particulary when race is considered integrally with class). Stephin Merritt is just a cool test case: everyone believes they have self-determined, non-ideological preferences that are not only unbound but democratically virtuous; meanwhile, individual taste, when you look at someone's iPod, often turns out to be a map of exclusions — a map that is resonant with, if not isomorphic to, rather undemocratic histories.
• But why pillory poor Stephen? If the order of the day is to call bullshit on this phenomenon, there's a broader version we've been meaning to mention: the "playlist meme." Every now and then, someone sees fit to post a random list of ten or twenty songs generated by their digital music player. We understand this practice as meant to demonstrate the serendipitous collisions of songs that can be produced by randomizing; meant perhaps to archive a particularly pleasing set; and meant to celebrate the general excellence of the songs appearing. Swell. At the same time, let's remember these lists have two determinations: on the one hand, they are a "random" cross-section of the kind of music someone collects; on the other, they are a cross-section the person feels particularly compelled to share. They are, thusly, doubly representative of someone's empirical tastes. So let us love this empiricism, and invite everyone into the Merritocracy: if that playlist is all white people, well then, whatever it is that one thinks it is communicating about one's taste, and whatever one might claim about how that quality came to pass...

explication du texte

Today's New York Times writes:

....That clause makes all the difference: if workers strike in the United States, they risk losing their jobs, but strikers in France do not fear for their jobs, regardless of whether they are union members. [1]

But most important, French unions have continued to play a leading role far beyond wage negotiations, fighting to shape a sort of workers' paradise [4] and amassing entitlements for the broader population along the way. It is primarily because of the strength of the unions that all workers enjoy a minimum of five weeks of vacation, affordable health care and a 35-hour week. [5]

This is an astonishing bit of journalism; one could spend a day meditating on the whiplash shifts between "fact" and "opinion," or more pointedly, the material and immaterial. Sentence [1] provides the all-important material explanation of why French workers feel able to strike; immediately, the article nervously suggests that they are a sort of docile bunch ("willing populace") who pursue their goals out of a kind of nostalgic abstraction — certainly not out of (just to pull something out of the blue) their own interests in how daily life is lived.

The next paragraph returns to some facts of labor, mystifying them at the same time. While noting factually that employees can join a strike without being part of the union and not fear for thier jobs, the article can't bring itself to note that this is true exactly because previous generations have "put pressure on the government." It then suggests [3] that the loss of pay in return for not working is somehow a strikingly insufficient punishment ("all they lose") — as if there were naturally some ethical dimension to showing up for one's wage job, some divine right that exists in the relation between employer and employed beyond wage negotiations.

With stunning indifference to its own rhetoric, the article in the very next sentence claims that, should the workers believe in some right beyond, whoops!, "wage negotiations," [4] they must be Communists ("workers' paradise": not the sublest code, sir). This villlainous spectre, when forced to appear in material form in the final sentence [5], turns out to be something like the basic protections that every worker in the world would hope for, and lacks only because their capacity to struggle for them has been systematically broken.

The article just barely stops short of saying that French workers, because of their myopic attachment to "entitlements" (health care is an entitlement, apparently. Can one take seriously a single word of anyone who talks like that?) are worse off and less productive than they are in a country without such roadblocks. Perhaps this hesitancy stems from the Times' recollection that this isn't actually the case.

Here at sugarhigh!, we should be clear: we find modern labor unions to be a revolutionary force only insofar as they mediate revolutions in capitalist production; their historical task is to make sure that increasing pressure on workers — to live less and produce more — is cushioned so that there won't be any substantial overturnings of the great apple-cart. We recall well the slow entry and swift exit of the CGT during France's last great unrest (all of which is why we believe, optimistically, that when Josh Corey writes of a union for poets, he means something far more like collectivity).

That said, it would be an error to suppose that the current labor action in France can be understood purely as a defense of the status quo, a maintenance of "entitlements" already in place. This is what the papers here and in France have endeavored to suggest, repeatedly, over the last week — including the Times, when it isn't paradoxically concocting its nostalgic anxiety about communism. Here are three reasons why not:

• The current issue does not concern some abstracted feeling that one is secure in one's job, a vague sensation that makes the cherries taste sweeter. Everyone (including the Times) admits that it is exactly and specifically the protection from unfair termination that allows workers to have any say in their own labor conditions — both now and in the future. The CPE (the law against which the current strikes are set) is part of an explicit removal of this protection, and thus a crippling blow to the possibility of any postive changes for laborers.

• The current unrest is part of a larger historical moment, which includes last autumn's riots in France no more more than the current debate about immigration and "guest-workers" in the United States — a moment in which the terms of the relationships between the enfranchised and the disenfranchised are being restructured. Each seemingly individual and local skirmish takes its place within an increasingly global confrontation; the rendering of any given struggle as irrelevant or insubstantial serves particular ends.

• It's a bit of nonsense, isn't it? By the same logic, the American resistance to the Townshend Act in the late 1760s was "a defense of the status quo," as was the Boston Tea Party. New taxes had been levied, and the colonists wished them to be unlevied — to return to the status quo, eh? This entire rhetoric is transparently absurd.

We are not suggesting these events are the beginnings of a revolution; likely, they will turn out to have been a systemic adjustment of labor relations as late capitalism seeks out a sleeker body to march across continents. But we remember well that no overturning comes from a single moment of athletic heroism. If the histories of the 1760s in the American colonies, the 1780s in France, the 1940s in India, or the 1980s in the Soviet bloc teach us anything, it is that — even as onlookers inevitably remark on their pointlessness — there must be quite a bit of calisthenics in the public square before any great weights are lifted, or thrown down.

the years of magical thinking

Francis Fukuyama's recent change of heart is farce and tragedy at once. Fukuyama, the neocon and neo-neo-Hegelian, proclaimed in The End of History and the Last Man, with an inverted millennarism, that the long progress of historical spirit had found its final form — that U.S.-style liberal capitalism had superseded everything else. He then (somewhat oxymoronically) helped inscribe the strategic and ideological dogma for maintaining the supposedly steady state, in the famed "Project for the New American Century" documents. In the race to war, he served as a marshal.

But now, in the words of Tom Petty, there's been a change. The blinders are off! He is against the war! History may not be over quite yet! This change is recorded in numerous places, not the least of which is the seven-page abstract of new volume America at the Crossroads, featured in the paper of record's weekend fashion spread a few Sundays back (and archived for free here). A couple weeks later, reviewing the book itself, the POR opens by focusing its amazement on the book's apostasy...made all the more devastating by the fact that the author, Francis Fukuyama, was once a star neoconservative theorist himself.

Apostasy must be secured, natch, through the ritual denunciation of the apostate by a true believer — a labor taken up by Chris Hitchens, the neocons' potbellied attack pig, in the pages of Slate. That ought to do it; Fukuyama can now be a hero, or at least a name to proffer, for the progressive liberals who dream only of being allowed to say "I told you so" once in a midterm election.

Alas, Fukuyama's blinders aren't off so much as optimized. He is still searching for a successful strategy for American hegemony; he's just come to realize that a somewhat higher competence level may be required. A world in which this brings comfort to anyone of conscience is tragic to say the least. Meanwhile, his profound aspect-blindness is unchanged. One clear indication is in the piece Fukuyama wrote recently for Slate, in which he diagnoses last year's French riots as part of

....the ongoing struggle with radical Islamism (aka the "war on terrorism").

This is a smallish detail in the essay, but an utterly telling one. Perhaps he failed to read any of the serious journalistic coverage of the riots; perhaps he has no French friends, or, just as likely, his informants share his blindness. We have a name for that: ideology. Dude (as I like to say to destroy my own credibility), that wasn't radical Islam. That wasn't terrorism. That was poor, mostly immigrant kids. That was class conflict.

What the rioters had in common was, in ascending order of commonality, a) varying tones of darker-colored-than-Sarkozy skin, b) a history of being actively and passively brutalized by governmental agents, most notably cops with batons, tasers, and guns, and c) disenfranchisement.

To not see this is to see nothing. One wonders if Mr. Fukuyama is able to present the current unrest by poor and disenfranchised French youth as similarly linked to "radical Islamism," or if, in what may be an even greater achievement in magical thinking, he finds this wave to be unrelated and only coincidentally similar. Unable to see, much less speak, the obvious, these are his choices — and ours. Which is to say that, as an intelligent and informed person with the apparent capacity to open and change his mind, Fukuyama is the America we would like to believe in. But with his hysterical inability to mention social relations, social class, and the transnational, transreligious confrontation between the wealthy and the disenfranchised, Fukuyama is the America we know, in which any story can be told as long as it doesn't mention those niceties. In that regard, Fukuyama clings to to the murderous blindness of the New American Century as dogmatically any of his colleagues, while playing at debate — a farce indeed.

hidden in plain sight

Our collective sorrow at the decommisoning of Franklin Bruno's blog konvolut m is matched only our delight at such periodic revenances as this. I'm happy to post Franklin's notes on the Michael Haneke film Caché, discussed recently on this site. His entire note below.

—————

Ex-blogger Franklin Bruno here. Jane graciously agreed to host a few additional comments on Cache; these don’t add up to a complete reading, much less an argument, and are not especially meant as responses to Jane's own discussion.

1) One criticism I’ve encountered runs: What, we’re supposed to hold Georges (Auteuil’s character) culpable for his actions as a selfish six-year-old? I think this question is misplaced, at least as a way of dismissing the drama, and especially the political allegory. What the film (and, if Haneke is successful, the viewer) passes judgment on is the “mature” Georges’s incapacity to respond in the present to past events set in motion by his agency – in his name – except with defensiveness, belligerence, and dishonesty. This much is obvious, as is the extension of the charge to Western democracies. A thornier point, perhaps, is that it’s left massively unclear how a more appropriate response would look. But that, as I understand it, is the logic of Haneke’s work. He’s not terribly interested in how his bourgeois characters (or audience) might “put things right”; his brief is to mete out a fated and merited punishment – in this case, a largely psychic one. Asking anything else would be like expecting Sally to reject Harry.

2) Haneke’s not thought of as a witty director, but there’s one bone-dry joke here I haven’t seen mentioned. We think we’re watching a broadcast of Georges’s book-chat show, but when the image breaks up, we see that we’re watching the footage being edited, as Georges fast-forwards over a guest’s discussion of Rimbaud – just as he does with the uneventful surveillance tapes he’s been receiving – while commenting, off-screen, “Too theoretical.” In part, this exemplifies one of Georges's subsidiary crimes – the trivialization of the literary. (Speaking of “howling white space,” think also of the blank-spined mock-books of the show’s set, mirroring the unread – unreadable? – wall of volumes that dominates the central couple’s apartment.) But it’s also a moment of auto-critique: an anticipation of viewers’ potential rejection of the film’s technical-cum-diegetic play. If what one values in an artist is an unwillingness to be outflanked, Haneke is your man.

3) Didactic film-making doesn’t bother me in principle – if it did, how could I have sat through Letter to Jane? – but that’s not to say I accept all of Haneke’s demonstrations. Take the scene above, in which a panicky George and Anne (Binoche) attempting to locate their missing son by phone, while the television, set directly between them, displays violent footage from Iraq and, if I’m remembering correctly, Palestine. I presume this arrangement is meant to exemplify the bourgeoisie’s ability to use their blinkered focus on their private concerns as a means of “tuning out” history. For me, this was one spot where Haneke’s critique felt cheap, in that a concern with one’s immediate family, though not universal, is not at present a characteristic that marks the class in question off from others. This is so even within the film’s own terms -- the combination of filial and social solidarity displayed by its Algerian characters is too tricky to unpack here. More generally, all I mean to suggest is that the problem of partiality – whether directed toward one’s “blood,” or some otherwise constituted set of persons – is more complicated than Haneke allows.

4) In the end, I wish I were more convinced that Haneke’s use of the 1961 FLN protest and subsequent massacre to set his plot in motion deserved to be called “historically situated,” rather than “ripped from the headlines” (in the manner of many Law & Order episodes). Though he means to allegorize collective denial, one can still come away with the sense that everything would have been just dandy for this family had Daddy not done something particularly nasty to a particular Algerian forty-odd years ago. The contrast with Haneke’s 1997 Funny Games , in which another similarly-named bourgeois family are tortured and killed for sport by two amoral youths, is instructive. Notions of motivation and explanation, imperatives of the psychological thriller, are roundly mocked as the tormentors present a variety of incompatible and ultimately irrelevant of both “how they got this way” and why they’ve singled out this couple. The political specificity of Cache is absent in the earlier film, but so is the individualized quality that blunts Haneke’s point: This Georges and Anne have “done nothing,” and that’s enough.

Cheney reverses course

Or perhaps he simply ran out of poor people at whom to shoot.

WWMD

Jordan proposes a "new meme"; we're down, way retroactively.

matters of degree

Short version of long post: take your relativism to the moon. Like Martha Stewart, James Frey did it for the money. To let him off the hook because we should be paying attention to worse misdeeds won't fly. Nothing will fly until he admits he did it to get your money, that this is his relation to both truth and art. Truth and art don't get better until we confront that unequivocally. The language of therapy that he and Oprah invoke with equally relentless ease is a perfect description of what such language is for: an alibi for profit. If we're worried that we're going to run out of fury and need to allocate with care, we're not angry enough.

[short addenda for struggling readers: this note isn't in the logical form of premises and conclusions though it's interesting if you need that to engage. To experience e.g. the Frey case as an exception in the realm of language abuse rather than a rule is to play along. We fight out of optimism. ]