On the passing of William F. Buckley, Jr.

(X-posted to pas au-delà .)

Probably it would be better to say nothing, but as man is currently being lionized beyond belief...my family has a telling story about the real William F. Buckley.  So I'll tell it briefly in a minute.  Given the shameless right-wing bias of the obituaries in our SCUM these days, let's start with a few timely comments from this thread which will always bear re-emphasizing (my father–as it happens–made them more than twenty years ago)...the first from professional blog-commenter John Emerson:

Besides being wrong and right wing, Buckley made a lot of extremely unpleasant statements, especially about race.  His civility was limited to those whom he deigned to recognize as peers and who were willing to play his game, and did not extend, e.g., to queers like Gore Vidal.  Or most other people.

I'€™ve always thought of him as someone who provided a veneer of class for tacky people with unpleasant attitudes.  A bit like Hugh Hefner as a marketer of a cultural trend to people who needed training wheels.  His intellectual accomplishments seem to have been at the level of a generic second rank English or History professor who has a knack for popular writing.  Nothing very interesting, though better than Jonah Goldberg.  His affectation of aristocratic mannerisms was parodic.  Without his inheritance and his claque, he wouldn'€™t have been anything.

That should cover the motherfucker.

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comfort torture

Yesterday, Tuesday April 10, I saw an article by Mr. Joseph Kahn at the New York Times on China's mistreatment of one of its intellectuals. If you read the Times, you've read the same article about a hundred times before. They love writing articles about evil foreign regimes while luxuriating in the pink bubble bath background assumption that "we" aren't anything like that. And thus Kahn was more than willing, when referring to China's treatment of its reformist intellectuals, to use a word that has become, recently, "contested": torture. Earlier this year, in January, I contacted another Times reporter, Mr. Scott Shane, who was unwilling to use the 'T' word in an unqualified way concerning our treatment of detainees at Guantanomo. The contrast between these two uses of the word 'torture' is what prompted me to contact both authors.

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first person (plural) shooter

I'm sure soldiers, ever since there have been soldiers, have hooted adolescently in the throes of combat. What would we expect, that they'd go about their work gravely, constantly reminding themselves of the seriousness - the mortal seriousness - of the things that they do, the weapons that they discharge? That is undoubtedly too much to expect. The stupid talk and yells undoubtedly represent a release from the psychosis inspiring and inspired actions that they are committing.

It is not new, it is not groundbreaking, to think: "They sound like the subset of students that you see hooting and unawarely spewing stuff they heard in a movie somewhere. They always talk like this, yell like this. They likely feel most themselves when they most completely give themselves over to the canned material they have been served, night after night, for their entire lives."

What we hear is not the organic, the militaristically gnomic, the earthy - it is the sitcomedic. MTV trashtalk, some Full Metal Jacketisms (Kubrick would have loved this, at least in a way) thrown in.

And, because you too have seen the same movies, at least a lot of them, you are able to try to reconstruct any possible reason, any scenario at all, in which the cars that speed in, crash, disgorge their occupants, who then are blown away by the Americans. The sniper was in a car? The insurgents, after a lengthy pause, get into their little cars and attempt, as an act of insane bravery perhaps, to speed past the marines' position? Why?

Unlike the talk, no, the actions of the "insurgents" don't fit into any plausible script, especially not the one posted at the end of the video.

Neocon Clusterfuck in Middle East (open thread)

"...in times of war we revert, as a species, to the past, and are permitted to be brutal and cruel...it is sentimental to discuss the subject of war, or peace, without acknowledging that a great many people enjoy war–not only the idea of it, but the fighting itself."

"....somthing frightening, the unhealthy, feverish illicit excitement of wartime..."
-Doris Lessing

Post-oracular hypothesis:  that no thinking person would honestly dispute the distinction between a free-wheeling, cultural-political, descriptive or generic or even centuries-old genetic "desire" for (what will become of the concept of) "war," and someone ignorantly wishing it to happen, or for that matter, refusing the responsibility that comes with power, and for  having significantly, predictably, knowingly, and against the consensus wisdom merely prescient of the glaringly obvious, helped it to happen.  The very intensity and stakes of the current 'crisis' (what makes it new–though never purely original–this time) have everything to do with a certain pressure on 'democracy,' it seems to me.

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Moral Laziness (i)

(The following is a guest post by Roger Gathman, freelancer, Texan, dry humorist and author of the weblog Limited, Inc.)

Lately, I’ve been pondering Lev Shestov's  essay  (Update:  cache here) about Tolstoy, "The Last Judgment", in trying to understand the changes – the movement from mildmannered literatus to crazed anti-American -- that I’ve undergone over the last five years.

Being a person who likes to have names for things (who even, clownishly, likes the names better than the things), I think my discontent is all about moral laziness. Or, to put it another way: it is all about the moral laziness that seems to have flowed from the liberal order that I’ve always preferred, my whole life long.

I should say right away that I don’t take laziness to be the opposite of busyness. Quite the contrary – the perpetual scheduling self stands in the same relationship to moral laziness as the prison bars stand to the prisoner: they don’t make the prisoner, but they don’t allow the prisoner an option to be anything else. 

Shestov’s essay begins like this:

Aristotle says somewhere that every one has his own particular world in his dreams, while in his waking state he lives in a world common to all. This statement is the basis, not only of Aristotle's philosophy, but also of all positive scientific philosophy, before and after him. Common sense also looks upon this as an indisputable truth.

The remark about worlds sets up Shestov’s theme, which is that Tolstoy’s career can be looked at as a conversion from a man who is quite happy with the world he shares in common with others to the torn world in which such commonalities escape him. In other words, he moves from a man who has a brilliant sense for the ordo et connexio rerum, as Shestov puts it, to a man who doesn’t, and has to make it all up.

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Bring Out Your Dead

The hurricane porn enjoying Katrina has, in part, circled around dead bodies. Bloated corpses floating in flood water. Blanketed bodies in wheelchairs. Rows of the dead found in a hospital chapel and a nursing home. Bodies gnawed on by animals. A town turned into a morgue blocked from view, from the gaze of the press.  A preoccupation with counting the dead, a preoccupation that seeks to reassure itself of its sovereign authority by reducing accountability to quantification, a matter of counting.

Tripping over these bodies, even rightwing pundits of cable news find themselves off-message, criticizing any and all governmental authorities including the federal. With Katrina the object of so many obscenities, why does the presence of the dead body on the street become a particular locus of anxiety?

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Criticism's cruelty

Our own Jodi Dean has produced some fascinating ruminations on cruelty, to which I only want to add a brief speculative note. So far, Jodi has described cruelty as a displacement onto others of the vulnerability one feels in oneself; i.e., I am strong, I am pure; but the [blacks-Jews-terrorists-Arabs-poor-ad infinitum] are weak and dirty and deserve to be scourged. I agree with this definition, and wonder how it accommodates the oft-noted connection between aestheticism and cruelty, a frequent subject both of literature and of literary criticism that purports to be moral (and that generally, with varying degrees of subtlety, occupies a political space at the convergence of traditional liberal ethics and neoliberal or neoconservative ideology).

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