Islamofascism

Jim Henley observes the phenomenon of non-Muslim, Euro-American laymen pronouncing the doctrinal necessity of their own bloody demise at the hands of International Islam--most certainly not a religion of peace, QED, SOS, thank you vewy much. This is not exactly new for the indicated community. Let us call them the bedsore brownshirts. Their forefathers wore high-and-tight haircuts, hated queers, and imagined the restless, relentless march of a bearskinned Soviet menace: vast, cold, hard, throbbing, nuclear. The bedsore brownshirt brigade, meanwhile, has gotten over the old masculine rituals of carwashing and yard work, which could at least be done with military efficiency, prefering to loll around in their pajamas on piles of pillows with teeny little computers perched on knees like ten-pound butts of Mortadella. Their prose models are the Papal bull, the stuffy Oxbridge essay, circa the glory years of Brideshead, and the fortune cookie. That is to say absolutely certain of itself, interminable, and with an agrammatical air of poor translation.

Their source material is The Once and Future King, The Lord of the Rings, The Bible, The Quaran, and the writings of Huntington. In other words, the fantasy genre. If they had a convention, they'd all arrive in costume. They're pretty sure it would be swell to have a clash of civilizations. For all the invective they hurl at Islam, and for the billions of keystrokes they lavish on proving the whole of that religion wishes them ill, they hold no real antipathy to Islam per se. Their disappointment is with their own civilization. Like most fantasists, their only heartfelt belief is in anachronism. They're quixotic in the truest sense of the word. Islam could just as easily be militant nationalist Hindu or parliamentary democracy or red hair or vegetarianism. Islam got chosen simply because it was a characteristic of the authors of the latest outrages. If they had been Chinese, we would now be hearing about the need for war in the Yellow Sea. They lack the skills of decency, understanding, and self-deprecation necessary to comport themselves in a diffuse and unideological modern world, but because they're so self-regarding, they see their own status as outsiders as an indictment of their whole society. What they project on their bogeymen is what they want for themselves: something martial, uniform, aesthetically traditional, male-dominated, priggishly virtuous in public, secretly louche in private for those in the know. Of course they imagine themselves in that category, even though it's perfectly clear that real Fascism has even less use for fat, cossetted weaklings with big mouths than these decadent, Hollywoodized United States.

It's an amazing failure to learn from history. Every authoritarian state gets built on a foundation of red-faced blowhards who imagine themselves a little more integral to the revolution than they really are. The new authoritarians really seem to anticpate that in the new ministries of war and information, they're going to get big mahogony desks and pert secretaries and will spend their days pushing important memos around on their desks and making stentorian announcements from grand balconies to crowds that clap in unison. If their vision ever comes to pass, of course, it's worse than the camps for them. The rest of us get forced labor, sure, but former faithful of the Movement always seem to end up in public squares with their heads on pikes.

A Mauser Rifle from a Javelin

General Petraeus presents his report to Congress.

Join 'Em

Remarkably, the billionaire leadership of the Colombian narcotics trade have been able to bribe people. With money. For information.

There is a tone of rather crass naïveté, if such can be said to exist, to the linked article, and I admit it amazes me that on one hand America thinks that it can give some Waziristani goat farmer a Publisher's Clearninghouse outsized prop check for 10 million smackers and get him to turn over Osama bin L, while on the other hand remain shocked, shocked that anyone else might engage the same basic tactic. The difference, of course, is that a cartel is a real business, and you can be sure that deep in the computerized bowels of the international drug trade, some boring accountant has got a full actuarial table to guide the outlay of bribes. Fifty bucks to a subsistence farmer; fifty thousand to a colonel in the army. That sort of thing. Neither a penny more nor a penny less than necessary for the efficacious completion of the task at hand.

Not even Eliot Ness was Eliot Ness, after all, and the utility of a bribe is in direct proportion to the futility of the task. No doubt there are plenty of officials in Key West and SoCom and the DC offices of the DEA who truly believe that the Drug War is winnable, but to the poor bastards cutting through jungle to blow up one more totally expendable coca processing facility, it's just a job with shitty pay. If you can't beat 'em.

Cooties

Adolph Hitler bristles when he is accused of shifting on the issue, as he has on the wisdom of opening up a second front in the East, pointing out that he has been consistent in denying citizenship to the International Jew and revoking any legal recognitions of the Jew's common humanity.

The Plot . . . Revealed

In a new tape whose contents were recently leaked to the Who Is IOZ? news division, Osama bin Laden aims his address directly at the American people. After praising Allah and inviting Americans to submit to Islam, bin Laden says to the American people, "You say that the black walnut is on your side of the property line, but I say to you that the root system and at least forty percent of its branches are on my side of the property line."

Bin Laden continues, "Therefore, I am within my rights under the bylaws of the neighborhood association to prune those branches."

A spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security, whom we reached for comment, responded, "The position of the United States government is clear." When asked to elaborate, he declined further comment, citing national security concerns.

Bin Laden notes that black walnuts contain a plant toxin that is ruining his compost pile.

"Again and again, your nuts and leaves alkalize my compost," bin Laden complains, "Yet the American people continue to grow the same tree, year after year."

"If the American people do not wish to pay retail for branch cutters at the Home Depot, I understand," bin Laden concludes. "I keep offering my CostCo card, but you stubbornly refuse."

Officials continue to examine the tape for authenticity.

Natural History

Arthur Silber, a fellow (and more learned) opera fan, mentioned to me in an email that Régine Crespin, one of the greatest French sopranos, also died this year. She retired from professional singing in the late eighties and dedicated the rest of her life to teaching, so her death was less remarked than it might have been. Still, it's a shame to see such an artist forgotten in the (deserved) tide of affection for the late Luciano. Here she is singing an absolutely perfect Ravel:

And follow this link so hear her singing Berlioz.

And the Epistolary Madness Continues

When the Democrats in congress wonder why we civil libertarians get so testy about allowing the Bush administration unfettered power to spy on its own citizens, this is why.

-Digby

Dear Digby,

The Democrats in congress don't wonder because the Democrats in congress don't care.

Your friend,
IOZ

As Arthur Silber has tirelessly pointed out, the value of "intelligence" to foreign policy is nil. Now Jonathan Schwarz has dug up a remarkable validation of that viewpoint from none other than John Kerry, back before he had his soul exorcised at the Bohemian Grove and replaced with the ashes of a billion dollars, a thesaurus, and the Will to Power.

Cinema in the Age of Terror

Well it appears that bin Laden is going to release a new video. Remember when you could still see videos on MTV, before it got all reality television? Fuck yeah, man.

If I were ObL, I'd drum up some advance chatter with an awesome teaser trailer:

Six years ago, in a world where everything was the same because nothing was different, only one man had the courage to make sure that on 9/11, everything changed.

Now he's back. And this time . . . he's serious.

Anyway, I'm totally excited because I hear that Gore Vidal wrote the screenplay but then disavowed it when Bob Guccione insisted on more penetration. The whole project has apparently been plagued by cost overruns and off-set intrigue. My sources tell me that Joel and Ethan Coen want their names scrubbed from the credits, too.

Foodie Friday XI

You're tired of pasta and you're tired of risotto and you're sick of summer corn so you don't want polenta. How bout some farro, the most ancient grain of Italian peninsula. You might also find it sold as "spelt." It's a rich, chewy, hearty grain with a flavor of earth and red meat to it.

Farro grain with fennel, red pepper, parsnips, shaved Parmagiano, and perfect poached egg

The farro salad base of this dish is shockingly simple to prepare, and eggs poached by this method make a beautiful, unusual presentation, almost like a white flower on top of the dish. When you begin to eat, break open the egg and let the warm yolk run over the grains below--the plain yolk is the perfect rich sauce.

2.5-3 cups farro
1.25 cup cold water per cup grain
1.25 cup good chicken stock per cup grain
1 small pot of water to boil
fresh fennel bulb
fennel fronds (for garnish)
1 red onion
1 red bell pepper
1 large or 2 small parsnips (or substitute carrot)
4 very fresh, cageless eggs
sea salt
white pepper
extra virgin olive oil
Parmigiano Reggiano

Soak the farro in cold water for about a half hour. Meanwhile, finely dice the fennel bulb, red onion, red bell pepper, and parsnips. Bring a pot of water to a rolling boil on the stovetop.

After soaking the fennel, drain the water and add the chicken stock. Bring it to a boil all together, and then reduce to a simmer. Simmer covered for 15-20 minutes until the grains are soft but still chewy.

While the farro cooks, prepare your eggs. Get a small bowl or ramekin. Place a sheet of plastic wrap over it with a slight indentation in the center. The plastic wrap should be about 11" x 11". Crack an egg and gently empty it into dent. Carefully (so as not to break the yolk) raise each edge of the sheet, creating a little pouch that holds the whole egg. Twist the edges together above, then tie off with a twist-tie or with kitchen twine. Drop immediately in boiling water. Repeat for all four eggs.

Monitor the eggs closely. They will first cloud up, then turn white. Doneness is determined by feel, not by time. (Typically, though, it will be about 3-5 minutes.) You want eggs that are solid white and springy when you squeeze them. That means the white is thoroughly cooked and the yolk is warm but still liquid. When finished, remove the eggs from the water, cut the twine or undo the twist, and remove from the plastic. Reserve on a warm plate or bowl.

Your grains should now be nearly finished. Add your diced vegetables so that they cook for a minute or two with the broth and farro. The heat will help them release their aromas and blend their flavors. When complete, drain any remaining liquid broth, and then add a few small pours of extra virgin olive oil for flavor. Salt and pepper to taste.

To serve, spoon the farro into shallow pasta bowls. Place the egg on top in the center. Shave the cheese (I use a vegetable peeler) around the egg. Garnish with chopped fennel fronds. Serve immediately.

I'll Etherise Your Table, Bitch

Eliot's pessimisim is partly the Christian pessimism, which implies the decadence of Western civilisation ("We are the hollow men, we are the stuffed men," etc. etc.), a sort of twilight-of-the-gods feeling, which finally leads him, in Sweeny Agonistes for instance, to achieve the difficult feat of making modern life out to be worse than it is.

-George Orwell, from "In the Belly of the Whale"

How to Review a Book about Israel

John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt have expanded last year's bruited article on the Israel lobby in the US into a book called, rather plainly, The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy. If the title sounds oddly anodyne, then perhaps that's because it is. If the book reads like a rather dry, conscientiously argued, dispassionate, and rather musty, academic affair, then perhaps that's because it's all of those as well.

The Times gives the review to William Grimes, and he engages the curious and curiously common tactic when dealing with any measured, well-researched, and largely irrefutable critique of Israel. The tactic generally works thusly: concede every major point; concede the quality of the authors' argument; acknowledge the authors' own caveats about their argument; then, wave your hands, scream about Iran, and accuse Mearsheimer and Walt of wanting to drown the Jews in the Mediterranean.

Break on through to the Other Side

There are now more reports about the situation in Iraq than there are Iraqis remaining in the country, and this latest is pretty hilarious. It notes, for instance, that having 160,000-odd troops zooming around the country conveys "an unintended message . . . of 'permanence,' an occupying force, as it were." Sing out, Louise! "All of Iraq's 18 provinces should be transferred to government control, the report says--only seven currently have that status." So the United States is eo ipso the "occupying force" in eleven Iraqi provinces, and Iraqis largely share the "perception" that the United States is an occupying force. What a bunch of kooks they are, those Iraqis. Someone probably ought to explain to them that if the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern

A cenar teco

Some Democrats have concluded that their decision earlier this summer to thwart votes on alternatives left them open to criticism that they were being intransigent.

-"Democrats Newly Willing to Compromise on Iraq"

It's true that when the Times says "some Democrats" it usually means something like "this one conservative Democrat we always call for a 'some Democrats' line in a process-of-politics piece." Nevertheless. Intransigent? Good god At this point, I think we'd all settle for passive-aggressive.

Otherwise the only question raised by the article is what, precisely, about the Democrats' willingness to deal with the devil is new?

I Pity the Fool

How do you solve a problem like Teresa? To call her an atheist, as Hitchens does, is reductivist and absurd. She did not "feel" the presence of god. So what? Nor do most believers, despite protestations to the contrary. The idea that the presence of god or grace is a sort physical, endocrine actuality within the human body is largely the belief of crackpot (which is not to say unpopular) protestantism in any case. Clearly Teresa believed there to be a god of some sort or other. To feel "forsaken" is inherently to grant existence to some remembering entity.

But the depth and duration of her doubt clearly undercut the argument that she was a believing saint living through a night of Augustinian doubt. It's fairly clear now that though she credited something or other with forgetting her, she was pretty certain that the whole Jesus racket was exactly that: a racket. And yet she was intimately a part of it, and no matter how deeply she came to suspect that the father, son, and holy ghost were at most colorful characters in a popular tale, she was not about to start telling the dalits that prayer was not the answer.

In the Post, Michael Gerson continues this month's tradition of misunderstanding Graham Greene, but quoting one of the famous lines from the unfamous Brighton Rock. Interestingly, the line was spoken not to a saint, but to a little murderer. For what that's worth. How it applies to Teresa remains a question. Greene's priest is talking about forgiveness for crimes of thought and action. Is Gerson implying that Teresa's disbelief was like murder? Perhaps. Who ever knows what he's trying to say.

In the end, Teresa woke up to this, at least. Jesus does not speak to us aloud in Wilts and Thous. But like many of us who wake in the middle of the night, she just kept her eyes closed, figuring that it was close enough at least to slumber. When she woke, she'd be a bit more rested than if she stayed up thinkin'. Given her dedication to the poor, it is difficult to say that her public dishonesty caused any particular harm, but given her PR value to the Church, it's hard to say she did much good either. Her life, like so many, ended in a wash, valuable only as a lesson that the price of unexamined doubt is unhappiness. No one who does so much small good for so many should die feeling herself to be a failure. That she did is a testament to something appalling all right, but it's not the mercy of god.

The Coming Conflict

In Washington's farewell address to the nation, he made the interrelated points that "nations" are neither virtuous nor evil, but often simply self-interested, that friendships and enmities between them are dangerous illusions, and that in matters of international intercourse, the best foundations are commercial, mutually advantageous, and temporary. Having seen the Continent tear itself apart with conflicts that grew inexorably because of many secretive and shifting alliances--a pattern that was to repeat itself at least until World War I--he came to understand that non-interference, if not a guarantor of security, was at least a solid bulwark, and that if you produce decent goods, services, and culture that you make available to free and fair exchange, your foreign customers will naturally be predisposed favorably toward you. These ideas were in practical abeyance almost before Washington expressed them, but they're no less true for it.

In the case of Iran, we can see once again how enforced austerity and isolation have only strengthened the hold of an autocratic régime. Sanctions and isolation have subverted the opposition(s) more than the domestic theocracy ever could. They have limited exposure to the political and economic ideas of the outside world; they have eroded access to the commercial goods and foreign culture that would make life in Europe or North America seem desirable; they have created an impoverished population whose resentments are easily swayed against the Western powers whose actions are the proximate cause of such poverty and isolation. By global standards, the Iranians are a well-educated, numerate, and literate people, and so it's even easier for their politicians to tell them that their economic woes are the result of nefarious foreign interference. Meanwhile, the West provides an endless stream of derision and bellicosity that hardly has to be altered or reset to be turned into propoganda. If the wildly exaggerated threat of terroism was able to speed the effective termination of the American Republic, then the threat of high-altitude bombing, cruise missile attacks, and a ground invasion from the world's last great military empire is surely sufficient to undermine the struggling opposition in a theocratic autocracy.

After the passing of the twentieth century, some of Washinton's points ring a little hollow. Who, for instance, would argue that Nazi Germany was not evil? Or Stalin's Russia, even with our late knowledge that Stalin's military power was significantly overblown. At the same time, those of us living in twenty-first century America should pause, for we can see clearly how difficult it is to halt the progress of national wrongdoing from within. The subversion of domestic institutions is a geologic process, and often unstoppable and unfixable. You can't fill a canyon with dirt once it's been carved. You can't pile rocks to stop the wearing down of mountains. On one hand it's true that none of us has done enough to act in opposition to our government. On the other hand, it's true that there was little we really could have done. We can look at the history of Germany and see, finally, that despite the thousand lynchpin moments in the rise of the Nazis, there was at last a certain inevitability to it, and what was required at last was the destruction of the nation and its government by foreign powers in war.

The United States is as unique as any nation with imperial ambitions, and so comparisons to this or that precedential empire are of limited value. We are not Nazi Germany, at least. And it seems unlikely that we will be defeated on some apocalyptic field of battle by an alliance of other peoples. Nevertheless, we should be sure to understand the essence of the end of empire lies in small defeats--in Vietnam, in Afghanistan, in Iraq, perhaps in Iran. There is a certain moral callousness here. I am sitting safely at home, and it is very unlikely that I will die in a war with Iran, whereas many, many Iranians surely will. Yet if we accept that our goverment will pursue these wars regardless, we might at least pin certain hopes on their certain failures. I hope, for the sake of the many innocent people who will be killed and maimed, that the United States doesn't go to war with Iran. But since I don't see that conflict as evitable, I hope, for the sake of many, many more, that we find ourselves pinned down, bleeding, and going broke.

Subject

Please read Arthur's latest, and not only because he quotes little old me. Click through to read the full Chris Floyd article as well.

First noting that we're now past any Liberty-or-Death moments for the salvation of the Republic, and further noting that violent revolutions, even where possible, aren't generally advisable or supportable, the question naturally arises: what now? The answer is not much. In large part the more pertinent question is simply how do we as individuals comport ourselves to post-citizen lives? Where do we make accommodations and accessions, and where do we offer our small resistances. What does will it mean to be a subject in the era after consensual government? What power, if any, will we have to mitigate the evils of empire abroad? Since the institutions of democracy will remain superficially central to the United States (Rome retained a Senate), to what degree is it useful or valid to participate in the preserved processes of actual democracy? Is it now meaningful to take sides in the factional disputes that will continue in the immediate future as our governors sort out their tribal affiliations and solidify a neater process of succession? What are the ethical and moral obligations of the subject, as opposed to the citizen, for the actions of his nation? If we are to some degree absolved of responsibility and culpability for something like the coming bombing of Iran, does that also abrogate our calling to speak out against it? To what extent does it remain valid to cite the extant catechisms of Republican government--the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the ideals of the Framers--and to what extent is that citation merely willful complicity in a charade?

As a wise man once said, How the fuck should I know? I frankly suspect that every one of those questions is invested with vast overages of vanity and self-regard. It is one thing to learn to recognize tyranny, but quite another, once it arrives, to sit around lost in moral casuistry and solipsism. A friend of mine keeps no bank accounts, has no credit cards, uses only pay phones, lives without a lease, and fancies himself therefore "off the grid." Were that it was so. In the end, of course, the one bombmaker in the wooded cabin arises more suspicion and lives under more odious surveillance than the man who learns to make his outward life ordinary in every affect. Keeps some money in the bank. But not too much. Pays his bills. Usually, but not always on time. Keeps his voter registration in order even if he doesn't actually vote. Registers his car every year. The panoptical capacities of the government are largely overrated in part because we're all so ga-ga over technology. The truth is that no computer can sift through the private thoughts and desires of 300 million people. They can't even keep track of our parking tickets. The best hiding place, as the saying goes, is often in plain sight.

To the extent that we continue to bear political responsibility, I'll argue that it has mostly to do with calling things by their true names and seeing them truly. That is what I try to do, but not for the sake of posterity (I hardly expect, in a few hundred years, to be IOZ, the great dissident writer of the early American empire), nor do I make the effort out of anything resembling revolutionary sentiment. People speak of today's concentration of wealth in the hands of a few, but what's far more significant, though not unrelated, is the concentration of force. I have no desire to get myself killed, or to get anyone else killed, or to get anyone I know spirited off to a secret prison, simply to spite the drab, vicious autocracy that I despise. If there is a reason to keep talking about these things, it is to remain sane, and if we keep talking to each other, it's to maintain what modest bonds of friendship, community, and gallows humor remain to us. Some people console themselves with the idea that humor and friendship are themselves revolutionary acts. These people are called toweringly masturbatory egotists. I maintain only that the Soviet Union, for one, showed the tenuousness of the modern imperial project, and I plan to keep smirking so that if the whole rotten tree bows and cracks in a stiff wind sometime in the next half-century or so, I'll be well-prepared to break into a smile.

The Final Letter of Herzog's Concise Sunday

Truancy has no single cure. Students skip school because of illness, to work, to care for younger siblings or infirm grandparents, because they have become disaffected or for more nefarious reasons — drugs and other criminal conduct.

-Harold O. Levy and Kimberly Henry in the Times Week in Review

Dear Harry and Kim,

Students skip school because American public education is boring, creepily nationalistic, inherently totalitarian, and indoors.

Your friend,
IOZ

And Yet Again, a Friendly Letter

Instead, Hayes chooses to provide what is essentially a chronological account of Cheney’s life. The strength of this approach is that it places him in a context — and a rich context at that.

-Carl M. Cannon reviewing Stephen Haye's Cheney biography in the Times

Dear Carl,

In Tom Stoppard's play, The Invention of Love, Oscar Wilde tells A.E. Housman, "Biography is the mesh through which our real life escapes."

Best,
IOZ

More Friendly Letters

Isn't it impolite to point out, as the conservative columnist Max Boot has, that our country has nine Nimitz-class aircraft supercarriers and no other country has even one?

-Joel Achenbach in the Post

Dear Joel Achenbach,

It's not the size of the ship. It's the motion of the ocean.

Sincerely,
IOZ

Another Friendly Letter

The stab-in-the-back narrative that's being prepared by the Republican Party will succeed in scaring a Democratic president and Democratic congress from taking any decisive steps to end the war.

-Robert Farley of LG&M paraphrasing John Mearsheimer

Dear Robert Farley and the Democratic Citizens of Netrootsistan,

Scared is not synonymous with committed.

Love,
IOZ