Dear Guy,
I am a self-aggrandizing 8-year-old. Some of my greedy friends say there is no Obama. My security guard says, "if you read it in a blog, it's so." Please tell me the truth. Is there an Obama?
Condoleeza O'Reo
________________________
Condoleeza, your piggy little friends are wrong. The have been infected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except what they see on cable TV. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. All minds, Condoleeza, whether they be men's or children's, are as little as yours. In this great universe of ours, men are mere insects, or ants, in their intellect as compared with the boundless (and warming) planet around them, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and power. How can you doubt if Obama is The One?
Yes, Condoleeza, there is an Obama. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and credulity that can be exploited, and you know that they abound and give to all our lives their highest beauty and joy. Alas! how hopeless would be the world if there were no Obamas to market the audacity of hope? It would be as flat and profitless as if there were no Condoleezas, and no international oil cartel. There would be no childlike faith in market economics then, no poetry, no sensational and carnival-like electoral cycles to make tolerable this subservient existence. We would have no enjoyment, then, except in blackberries and pornography. The brilliant white light with which credulity enlightens the warming planet would be extinguished. It would be like a sad and melancholy existence in a dreary world unillumined by Adam Smith's restricted economics or the guidance of the magnificently gifted oligarchical families whom the Almighty has in his infinite wisdom sent to lead our hesitant and faltering footsteps along Wall Stret's pathway to perfect and perpetual profit. Where would we be in our fallen state if it were not for the Browns, the Bloombergs, the Cheneys, the Clintons, the Corzines, the Cuomos, the Daleys, the Doles, the Forbes, the Humphreys, the Kennedys, the Rockefellers, the Roosevelts, the Saltonstalls, the Tafts and the Youngs sent to guide us? Where would we be without Ebony and Fortune? America then would look like Renaissance Italy without the Borgias, the Medici, the della Rovere, the Sforzas and Niccolo Machiavelli to enlighten and bring order to their city-states and their assiduous mayors (podestas).
Not believe in Obama! You might as well not believe in flunkys or fairies. You might get General Petreus to draft civilians to watch all the oil derricks on Christmas Eve to catch Santa Claus, but even if you did not see Santa Claus going down a derrick, what would that prove? Nobody sees Santa Claus, but that is no sign that there is no Santa Claus. The most real things are those that neither voters nor children can see. Did you ever see fairies dancing on Wall Street? Of course not, but that's no proof that they are not there, or in the Congress, or the Pentagon,or armed resistence to the global financial empire.
You can tear apart the Middle East in a quixotic quest for weapons of mass distruction, but there is a veil covering the unseen world of fantasy which not the strongest man, not even the united strength of all the strongest military forces in the world could ever tear apart. Only faith, poetry, love and an irrepressible attraction toward the summum bonum can push aside the curtain of transient profit to picture the supernal beauty and glory of another world beyond. Is it all for real? Ah, Condoleeza, in all this world there is nothing more real and abiding than our illusions.
No Obama! Thank the Almighty! He lives and lives in the hearts of humankind forever. A thousand years from now, Condoleeza, 10,000 years from now, Obama's fiat mintage of small change will continue to inflate and gladden the credulous hearts of ambitious men who share a childlike faith in the American form of predatory plutocracy.
-----Wall Street Sun
Deo gratias
NIHIL OBSTAT
NIHIL OBSTAT
Thursday, November 20, 2008
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
DUCK SOUP: PHANTOM GOURMOND VISITS MAISON DE MOTYL
Alexander J. Motyl. Imperial Ends. The Decay, Collapse and Revival of Empires. New York: Columbia University Press, c. 2001.
A couple of weeks ago the reknowned Continental chef Magda de Motyl picked me up at my luxurious East Side Apartment above 82nd Street, a mile north of Bloomingdale's, escorted me to the subway and accompanied me under the river to emerge in one of the many grimy, decaying neighborhoods of working-class Newark, New Jersey. She held my hand feverishly as we ascended a low eminence to enter at last a majestic, Viking-style eating hall ("Maison de Motyl") at the peak of the low-browed hillock ("Freedom Heights"), where the eyes of all men could feast upon us in repressed envy.
APERATIF
At the gentle urgings of my solicitous escort, widely reknowned as a witty conversationalist, I resolved to try the Canard au Motyl, modestly named after herself. As we dallied over the Bloody Marys and indulged in footsie under the table, the chef (famous in Newark) explained duck anatomy to me. Duck, she explained, was now back in fashion after a long absence. It is a migratory fowl with a central torso and peripheral limbs that sometimes act independently. "Theorizing about duck," she breathed confidentially, "may be a challenge but it is not insurmountable." Duck disposes of a hierarchically organized nervous system with a brain at the center and a rim of peripheral ganglia that feed information to the center, which in turn parcels out commands to the limbs. Decay is caused by a weakening of the brain; decline is a weakening of the fowl's physical prowress and a decline in prestige throughout the barnyard pecking order; disassemblage represents a rotting away of the extremities; attrition is manifest when rodents in the hen-house appear to nibble away at the weakened and near-immobile corpus; and revival is made manifest by the re-emergence of a healthy brain and torso, possibly after a vetinary's injection to restore the fluid circulation in a desiccated body which has lost confidence in its capacities.
The chef's appreciation of the duck is focussed exclusively on its anatomical structure. She denies it free will, and ardently believes that "agency-oriented, choice-centered and intentionalist" behavior is beyond the capacity of a dumb bird.
Recalling the assiduous observations of a hospitable Baltic guide for Hamburgers and Frankfurters touring from Germany, Rein Taagepera (the "Latvian Flash"), Ms. Motyl notes that the ideal trajectory of a falling duck imitates a parabola. In the tenebrous background of the refectory a hand-wound grammophone began to grind forth a recitation of "Parabolic ballad" by the famous Russian poet Andrei Voznesensky., who wrote:
Each gets to the truth with his own parameter
a worm finds a crack, man makes a parabola"
Evidently the same holds true for ducks. The same would be true for all ducks, should other factors not intervene. All ducks have the same morphology, and this identical structure holds the key to understanding the relationship between brain and limbs, head and wings, core and periphery. Nevertheless, Ms. Motyl's sample is delimited to the swamps and shores of eastern and central Europe, without regard to the Mediteranean, the Atlantic, or the slanted morphological characteristics of Oriental ducks. She is pessimistic regarding the survival of a single endangered species, le carnard russe or Russian Duck, predicting its increasing isolation within a restricted habitat.
ANTIPASTO
Dissecting the torso of the fallen fowl at our table with a ceremonial flourish of rhetorical scalpels, my loquacious chef pointed again to the brain as supreme in the hierarchy of avian organs, communicating along ganglia to subordinated control cells in the extended limbs which cannot communicate or signal to each other. But as she looked momentarily askew, I whispered surreptitiously into my cell-phone recorder that she seemed unaware of the radically differing morphology of the corporately-dominant Oriental species, the Japanese Kereitsu and the Korean Chaebol. The Japanese duck has its stomach as the center,or energy bank, with all the other organs feeding from it or contributing to it. The Korean Chaebol takes the heart as the structural center, pumping red blood cells around the corpus including the subordinate stomach with its bank of digestive energy, and used to enjoy a distinctive 5-year feeding cycle for both its northern and southern sub-species. Both of these spreading species slant quite markedly away from the "straight-and-level" European duck structure with which my companion is, apparently, exclusively familiar. But with all species, when the peripheral organs begin to communicate directly with each other, by-passing the Center, disassemblage occurs as the corpus disintegrates.
Kitchen theorists of cuisine take "stability" of the anatomical structure of duck as their base-line. They are uniformly troubled by change. A spark, or a shock, such as a shotgun blast, is requisite to down a ruptured duck. But "One could," Chef Motyl ventured with a wink, "just as easily start with change, and puzzle over stability." But as a trusted employee of the trans-Atlantic Kitchen Condominium, she wouldn't dare. For it would be a form of culinary treachery to entertain the concept that a duck could expire from internally-generated causes. It must always be downed by "shocks from outside," such as errant stones flung by a blindfolded Fortuna, or a wicked boy. Theories of change, to the loyal kitchen crew, are as incomprehensible as "theories of anarchy."
Nevertheless, after darkness falls, the kitchen scullions mutter sotto voce that anatomical theory alone cannot explain the timing of life events in a duck's aging, that rational choice theories erroneously attribute a capacity of ratiocination to an avian brain which lacks the capacity to embrace it, and that anatomical structuralism downgrades both the ideology of avian supremacy shared by all birds and the species-specific cultural quackery of duckdom, just as practitioners of haut cuisine do not transcend the blood-red lines of their own practice. Even Chef Motyl concedes that structuralist or morphological theories of duck anatomy are partial theories. But she simply prefers them (or finds them more accessible) to "agency, choice, and intentionalist" theories, which are self-contradictory, quite confusing,and and above the capacity of the average dead duck anyway on its way to the cutting board.
PASTO
The health of the edible fowl begins to decline as the brain, or center of the normal avian nervous system, begins to expand within the cranial cavity (or "brain bunker") and sucks ever-increasing electrical stimulation from its mobile peripheral extremities, resulting in mass inflationary pressures exerted against the bony protective templates surrounding it. In Riga, Latvia, the hunter Taagepera has photographed the trajectories of countless falling ducks over the decades as they splash down into the chilly waters of the Gulf of Finland, and can graphically demonstrate that the defunct ducks fall in a consistent parabola. Chef Motyl maintains that take-off, cruising, and controlled descent are common characterists
of this feathered species, but that terminal collapse (or "crash") can be explained only by the hammering of outside variables (or, to prefer a botanical image, by a gardener's sickle cutting off a dying blossom). Ducks flourish when blood cells carry nutritional resources to the central brain, which "shares the wealth" by returning a portion to the peripheral organs again. But the voracious maw of the Central Core manifests increasing obesity as it gratifys an uncontrollable appetite until, to speak crudely, it "busts a gut." As the overstretched core corrodes and the "gut" of the Core explodes, globules of partially digested informational nutrient spatter the walls of the cranial cage until rodents prowling around the kitchen perimeter snatch them up with their jaws and carry them away to gnaw in their separate holes. The entire anatomical structure of the doomed duck progressively disaggregates from the head down, rather like the fall of the World Trade Center in New York.
While asserting that "agency-implemented, rational-choice and conscious-intentionalist" explanations of duck behavior patterns attribute far too great an intelligence quotient to the flighty feathered paddle-footed biped, Chef Motyl (somewhat inconsistently) argues that the brain-and-extremities pattern (or "hub-and-spoke" structure) of the duck inherently produces decay, i.e., that stability produces instability, structure unlooses disorder, the rock of ages disintegrates into a Katrina of collapse. The imaginative chef's recipe in this cookbook appears positively Orwellian: "War is peace, freedom is slavery; ignorance is strength." Structure is chaos.
While ducks in the prime of health will win in all barnyard battles with encroaching rival birds, ducks in declining health will both win some and lose some. In psychological imagry, the duck's rational Center plays a delaying game against inexorable decay. The symptoms of this decay are unmistakable: the central brain falls play to illusions (such as power illusion, e.g. flying unopposed into a future expanse of unending grain fields) and the rational or literati cells progresively lose coherence; centrifugal impulses lead the active loci of physical activity toward the peripheral organs; the appetite of the musculature grows as the nutritional intake declines (see the strictures against "hypertrophy of the central nervous mechanism" by Professor Pavel Miliukov in the early twentieth century); and sometimes, as the peripheral limbs attempt to break the control of the overgrown Central Intelligence Apparatus, a systemic pattern of "liberationitis" may be observed afflicting the minor extremities in a kind of "restless legs syndrome."
It would be superfluous to emphasize that the progress of this decay increases the probability that the afflicted duck will lose prestige in the henhouse pecking order and increased attrition of its physical capabilities will be observable. Chef Motyl has commented with regret that anatomical theorists have no way of predicting how far this process of attrition will proceed as the life-cycle of the decaying duck descends along its inescapable parabola. But this conclusion simply demonstrates the restricted applicability of morphological theory to a duck's vital physiological process.
At this juncture, as we jointly devoured a magnificent repast, the Maitre d', Monseignor Caeteris Paribus, seconded to the Maison de Motyl from the Cardinals'Kitchen in Rome, emerged through a white kitchen door shouldering a broad tray laden with the smouldering carcasses of two fallen fowl who reportedly had fallen foul of the blazing marksmanship of Herr Taagepera, camoflauged unbeknownst in a salt-laden clump of Baltic sea-side shubbery. Thrusting his great bald noggin through the white power-door, Joe the Sous-Chef mouthed a penetrating whisper, "If you can't stand the heat, get out of my kitchen!"
MEAT
Although the chef determinendly rejects the view that ducks die from internally-generated system failure, he rather paradoxically insists that a duck's decay is generated inexorably from internal causes. As the peripheral limbs begin to convulse and gyrate on their own (symptomology of "flapdoodle"), attrition must necessarily follow. But the final, fatal stroke, as from a headsman's axe, is an unpredictable factor. Again, the ducks he studies are all denizens of the east European or Baltic regions (e.g., the Pripet Marshes). In these fertile swamps, "easy feeding" permits the ducks to side-waddle or overlook their inherently declining physical resources. In a rather anti-intellectual exercise the chef quacks that the factors leading to duck attrition cannot be predicted; that attrition cannot be predicted; and that any fatuous attempt at life-cycle prediction would fall off her kitchen writing-table like water off a duck's back. She does, however, asservate that ducks on the upswing of their life's trajectory are sometimes inclined to "adopt" and shelter enfeebled and weakened ducks, well along their downward parabolas, to parody a variety of man-boy love relationship, save that the roles are reversed, and that the child (or chick) is father to the man (or dying duck). The notorious scandal involving the overweening Wilhelmian German drake and the inverted Austro-Hungrian cross-bred bird is cited, but he discreetly forbears to allude to the current scandal in which the common Potomac duck reams the tailfeathers of swans from the Thames. The extended feeding-ground of the voracious Peking Duck is totally beyond her range of vision.
In terms of cruising range, the low-bred or "honky-tonk" Potomac duck enjoys a favorable geographic feeding ground around the waters of Chesapeake Bay, but distance from foreign predators, like an oceanic Maginot Line, cannot permanently shield the North American avian from external conflict and internal decay. Be that as it may, it is unquestionable for Chef Motyl that some form of powerful external shock will be necessary to de-feather a high-flying broad-beaked grain-gobbler permanently. Unfortunately, morphologically-inclined theories of internal structure are in principle incapable of predicting future events. Different forms of shock or shot wound ducks differently along various loci of their life parabolas. A duck in decline may unconsciously effect a re-arrangement of its internal organs in a form of anatomical perestroika, but in the end it wll fall prey to the shot of a Great Marksman. (Here the Chef, all unconscious of the fact that she is a victim of internal contradiction, shifted the Leit-motif of her explication de cuisine from anatomical or structural determinism to accentuating the role of Great Men, or Great Shots, thereby endorsing in practice her previously discarded theory of "agency, choice, and intentionalist" activity as the final "decider" in duck-hunting history.) A further weakness is her failure to consider the history of the Canard Fasciste flying around the Mediterranean in Spain, Italy and France, or to acknowledge anecdotal testimony to its re-appearance in Austria.
At this moment Monseignor Caeteris Paribus shambled forth once more, looking like a Teutonic caricature of the Dickinsonian character Uriah Heep, bearing two Schnapps-doused dessert dishes piled high with Canard Flambe, a specialite de la maison.
DESSERT
As my earnest companion's logomachy continued, she reiterated her view that anatomical structuralism cannot predict when or if a downed duck can revive from a severe external shock to reclaim part or all of its previous avian empire. But as she defined "revival" to mark a return to the status quo ante, it became clear to me that her "counterobservational hypothesis" had developed into an Alptraum, or alcoholic's fantasy. Chef Motyl reached for another cognac while she continued to unwind her explantory vision. Her azure eyes appeared to glaze over slightly as a wooden coo-coo clock from the Schwartzwald began to throatily sound its hourly call, "Pee-do-dnya, pee-do-dnya, pee-do-dnya."
If one were to contrast the gigantic European goose to the modest, peace-loving Eurasian duck, it would become evident that the European barnyard is surrounded by formidable institutional fences, akin to the ghetto walls construced in mediaeval Europe as a form of "fortified hamlet" to contain minorities. But the chef regrets that the neighboring lesser Slavic barnyards would probably not be annexed to Euroland Farms (or, in Cryllic lettering, HATO-LAND)"when it matters most." The development gap between Euroland (HATO) and and the inoffensive, peace-loving, collective-minded flocks of the Canard russe could only grow broader with the passage of time. (Regrettably, the recipe tables 4.4 through 4.9, which attempt to quantify taste, are largely nonsense. De gustibus non est disputandum.)
Be that as it may, the course of history predicts a continual expansion of the feeding ranges of various European avian species because of "...a spinoff of untrammeled capitalism and rampant modernization" in duck farming, including force-feeding. As Eurofarms (HATO) expand through globalized inflation of refined fiat-feed, Eastland (Slavgloryfarms) will stagnate, follow a unique path (Sonderweg) toward duck development, or simply degenerate to another Animal Farm as depicted by George Orwell. In any event, the Chef explained with a radiant if twisted smile (though hiccoughing), the eastern ducks will fall off the main flight-path of history (presumably in a declining parabola). While some zoologists view the Canard russe as merely another species of paddle-footed fish-grabbers with their own flock-minded culture and regional veneration of the Great Duck flying over Red Square, the Chef rejects this common-sense view in favor of a darker vision, inclining toward a prognostication of a march of ineffable evil across tundra, taiga, forest, steppe and desert in a perpetual Long Winter of perpetual avian animosity encompassing eleven time zones. Queerly, she neglects to comment on the extended feeding grounds of the Euroland (HATO) sea-birds now goose-stepping through Afghanistan and the "long march" of the omniverous Houston duck from North America to Baghdad, Iraq (not Bagdad, Florida).
DIGESTIF
Her face assumed a gloomy mien as she described the fragmentation of Eastland's barnyard and the consequent constriction of the feeding ground of the Carnard russe, clearly in her mind now an endangered species. She clearly had "misunderestimated" the prudent management of the new owner, Vlad the Farmer, acclained by the ducks (and other fowl forms), as the Re-gatherer of the Russian Barnyard. In his view the Eastland farm managers could hold their unstable farm together only by requesting financial aid from Euroland (HATO) or "...the assistance of solicitous Western meat stores." In this kitchen scenario, the Muscovite ranchero would have to play the role of a "weak sister" dominated by foreign financiers issuing sub-prime ruble mortgages, and exhibiting an increasing suseptability to shocks. Only an aggressive policy of annexing small ranchlets in the "near abroad" could preserve Eastland Farms from decay, further bankruptcies, and collapse. At this point, of course, the farm's assets would be divided among its international creditors, although Chef Motyl was too far gone with Schnapps and Weltschmerz even to allude to common business practice. Should these events transpire, Eastland Farms at the terminus of Slavgloryroad would dissolve into an awkward amalgam of squabbling petty mortgaged farmers assailed by increasing social distress, economic dislocation and distracted by perpetual cock-fighting tourneys behind the hay-mow.
To conclude, Chef Motyl rasped with a raucous rattle in her throat, if Euroland (HATO) continued to buy up farms formerly belonging to Eastland Farms, the stability and security of both Sunriseland and Sunsetland might well become mutually exclusive. At this moment of existential dispair, her faculties abandoned her, and the little chef slid under the table. At a loss as to how to proceed at this unexpected termination to the liquid portion of our elegant repast, I looked around the Maison de Motyl until my eyes struck the exhibit at the
Capitalist Corner of the kitchen where a Praying Wall had been inlaid behind a small statue of the Golden Cockerel. Beneath the pedestal was carved the Latin motto, Coquero ergo sum. On a small table had been had been reverently laid volumes by Brillat-Savarin (Physiology de Gout) and Julia Child (Masterihg the Art of French Cooking), together with a cheap reproduction of her OSS ID card. Above this Corner of Culinary Patriotism was displayed a silken US flag crossed with a black flag to commemorate MIA's lost in the Quest Eternal for a really good duck. I lowered my head repeatedly back-and-forth before the corner prie-dieu, making the requisite gesture of waving a spatula in a broad circle, while repeating the ritual formula to overcome the White Monkeys' mind-body duality, "I duck, duck you." Then I carefully demounted the American flag from its wall-snaps and covered the recumbant body of the now-snoring little chef-let, inebriated with the exuberance of her own elegant ingenuity, and tiptoed out of the Maison de Montyl to return demeurely to my own abode, where the manuscript of a lengthy essay explaining the internal physiology of global duckdom and refuting the sterility of stagnant anatomical structuralism lay waiting to be lashed into order by the vigorous strokes of my little quirt of a pen.
Ensconsed in my domestic carrel, I had initially queried myself, "But who will take care of the recumbant little drunk?" Then I ceased worrying.
Ceaeteris Paribus, of course.
--Esther Khlysta
Literary note: The names of "Esther" and "Magda" are borrowed from a favorite novel of my youth, The Gallery, by John Horne Burnes (1947), who assigned these pet names to two US Army Supply Sergents in occupied Naples after World War II. His oeuvre, cut short by premature death, was appreciated by Gore Vidal.
A couple of weeks ago the reknowned Continental chef Magda de Motyl picked me up at my luxurious East Side Apartment above 82nd Street, a mile north of Bloomingdale's, escorted me to the subway and accompanied me under the river to emerge in one of the many grimy, decaying neighborhoods of working-class Newark, New Jersey. She held my hand feverishly as we ascended a low eminence to enter at last a majestic, Viking-style eating hall ("Maison de Motyl") at the peak of the low-browed hillock ("Freedom Heights"), where the eyes of all men could feast upon us in repressed envy.
APERATIF
At the gentle urgings of my solicitous escort, widely reknowned as a witty conversationalist, I resolved to try the Canard au Motyl, modestly named after herself. As we dallied over the Bloody Marys and indulged in footsie under the table, the chef (famous in Newark) explained duck anatomy to me. Duck, she explained, was now back in fashion after a long absence. It is a migratory fowl with a central torso and peripheral limbs that sometimes act independently. "Theorizing about duck," she breathed confidentially, "may be a challenge but it is not insurmountable." Duck disposes of a hierarchically organized nervous system with a brain at the center and a rim of peripheral ganglia that feed information to the center, which in turn parcels out commands to the limbs. Decay is caused by a weakening of the brain; decline is a weakening of the fowl's physical prowress and a decline in prestige throughout the barnyard pecking order; disassemblage represents a rotting away of the extremities; attrition is manifest when rodents in the hen-house appear to nibble away at the weakened and near-immobile corpus; and revival is made manifest by the re-emergence of a healthy brain and torso, possibly after a vetinary's injection to restore the fluid circulation in a desiccated body which has lost confidence in its capacities.
The chef's appreciation of the duck is focussed exclusively on its anatomical structure. She denies it free will, and ardently believes that "agency-oriented, choice-centered and intentionalist" behavior is beyond the capacity of a dumb bird.
Recalling the assiduous observations of a hospitable Baltic guide for Hamburgers and Frankfurters touring from Germany, Rein Taagepera (the "Latvian Flash"), Ms. Motyl notes that the ideal trajectory of a falling duck imitates a parabola. In the tenebrous background of the refectory a hand-wound grammophone began to grind forth a recitation of "Parabolic ballad" by the famous Russian poet Andrei Voznesensky., who wrote:
Each gets to the truth with his own parameter
a worm finds a crack, man makes a parabola"
Evidently the same holds true for ducks. The same would be true for all ducks, should other factors not intervene. All ducks have the same morphology, and this identical structure holds the key to understanding the relationship between brain and limbs, head and wings, core and periphery. Nevertheless, Ms. Motyl's sample is delimited to the swamps and shores of eastern and central Europe, without regard to the Mediteranean, the Atlantic, or the slanted morphological characteristics of Oriental ducks. She is pessimistic regarding the survival of a single endangered species, le carnard russe or Russian Duck, predicting its increasing isolation within a restricted habitat.
ANTIPASTO
Dissecting the torso of the fallen fowl at our table with a ceremonial flourish of rhetorical scalpels, my loquacious chef pointed again to the brain as supreme in the hierarchy of avian organs, communicating along ganglia to subordinated control cells in the extended limbs which cannot communicate or signal to each other. But as she looked momentarily askew, I whispered surreptitiously into my cell-phone recorder that she seemed unaware of the radically differing morphology of the corporately-dominant Oriental species, the Japanese Kereitsu and the Korean Chaebol. The Japanese duck has its stomach as the center,or energy bank, with all the other organs feeding from it or contributing to it. The Korean Chaebol takes the heart as the structural center, pumping red blood cells around the corpus including the subordinate stomach with its bank of digestive energy, and used to enjoy a distinctive 5-year feeding cycle for both its northern and southern sub-species. Both of these spreading species slant quite markedly away from the "straight-and-level" European duck structure with which my companion is, apparently, exclusively familiar. But with all species, when the peripheral organs begin to communicate directly with each other, by-passing the Center, disassemblage occurs as the corpus disintegrates.
Kitchen theorists of cuisine take "stability" of the anatomical structure of duck as their base-line. They are uniformly troubled by change. A spark, or a shock, such as a shotgun blast, is requisite to down a ruptured duck. But "One could," Chef Motyl ventured with a wink, "just as easily start with change, and puzzle over stability." But as a trusted employee of the trans-Atlantic Kitchen Condominium, she wouldn't dare. For it would be a form of culinary treachery to entertain the concept that a duck could expire from internally-generated causes. It must always be downed by "shocks from outside," such as errant stones flung by a blindfolded Fortuna, or a wicked boy. Theories of change, to the loyal kitchen crew, are as incomprehensible as "theories of anarchy."
Nevertheless, after darkness falls, the kitchen scullions mutter sotto voce that anatomical theory alone cannot explain the timing of life events in a duck's aging, that rational choice theories erroneously attribute a capacity of ratiocination to an avian brain which lacks the capacity to embrace it, and that anatomical structuralism downgrades both the ideology of avian supremacy shared by all birds and the species-specific cultural quackery of duckdom, just as practitioners of haut cuisine do not transcend the blood-red lines of their own practice. Even Chef Motyl concedes that structuralist or morphological theories of duck anatomy are partial theories. But she simply prefers them (or finds them more accessible) to "agency, choice, and intentionalist" theories, which are self-contradictory, quite confusing,and and above the capacity of the average dead duck anyway on its way to the cutting board.
PASTO
The health of the edible fowl begins to decline as the brain, or center of the normal avian nervous system, begins to expand within the cranial cavity (or "brain bunker") and sucks ever-increasing electrical stimulation from its mobile peripheral extremities, resulting in mass inflationary pressures exerted against the bony protective templates surrounding it. In Riga, Latvia, the hunter Taagepera has photographed the trajectories of countless falling ducks over the decades as they splash down into the chilly waters of the Gulf of Finland, and can graphically demonstrate that the defunct ducks fall in a consistent parabola. Chef Motyl maintains that take-off, cruising, and controlled descent are common characterists
of this feathered species, but that terminal collapse (or "crash") can be explained only by the hammering of outside variables (or, to prefer a botanical image, by a gardener's sickle cutting off a dying blossom). Ducks flourish when blood cells carry nutritional resources to the central brain, which "shares the wealth" by returning a portion to the peripheral organs again. But the voracious maw of the Central Core manifests increasing obesity as it gratifys an uncontrollable appetite until, to speak crudely, it "busts a gut." As the overstretched core corrodes and the "gut" of the Core explodes, globules of partially digested informational nutrient spatter the walls of the cranial cage until rodents prowling around the kitchen perimeter snatch them up with their jaws and carry them away to gnaw in their separate holes. The entire anatomical structure of the doomed duck progressively disaggregates from the head down, rather like the fall of the World Trade Center in New York.
While asserting that "agency-implemented, rational-choice and conscious-intentionalist" explanations of duck behavior patterns attribute far too great an intelligence quotient to the flighty feathered paddle-footed biped, Chef Motyl (somewhat inconsistently) argues that the brain-and-extremities pattern (or "hub-and-spoke" structure) of the duck inherently produces decay, i.e., that stability produces instability, structure unlooses disorder, the rock of ages disintegrates into a Katrina of collapse. The imaginative chef's recipe in this cookbook appears positively Orwellian: "War is peace, freedom is slavery; ignorance is strength." Structure is chaos.
While ducks in the prime of health will win in all barnyard battles with encroaching rival birds, ducks in declining health will both win some and lose some. In psychological imagry, the duck's rational Center plays a delaying game against inexorable decay. The symptoms of this decay are unmistakable: the central brain falls play to illusions (such as power illusion, e.g. flying unopposed into a future expanse of unending grain fields) and the rational or literati cells progresively lose coherence; centrifugal impulses lead the active loci of physical activity toward the peripheral organs; the appetite of the musculature grows as the nutritional intake declines (see the strictures against "hypertrophy of the central nervous mechanism" by Professor Pavel Miliukov in the early twentieth century); and sometimes, as the peripheral limbs attempt to break the control of the overgrown Central Intelligence Apparatus, a systemic pattern of "liberationitis" may be observed afflicting the minor extremities in a kind of "restless legs syndrome."
It would be superfluous to emphasize that the progress of this decay increases the probability that the afflicted duck will lose prestige in the henhouse pecking order and increased attrition of its physical capabilities will be observable. Chef Motyl has commented with regret that anatomical theorists have no way of predicting how far this process of attrition will proceed as the life-cycle of the decaying duck descends along its inescapable parabola. But this conclusion simply demonstrates the restricted applicability of morphological theory to a duck's vital physiological process.
At this juncture, as we jointly devoured a magnificent repast, the Maitre d', Monseignor Caeteris Paribus, seconded to the Maison de Motyl from the Cardinals'Kitchen in Rome, emerged through a white kitchen door shouldering a broad tray laden with the smouldering carcasses of two fallen fowl who reportedly had fallen foul of the blazing marksmanship of Herr Taagepera, camoflauged unbeknownst in a salt-laden clump of Baltic sea-side shubbery. Thrusting his great bald noggin through the white power-door, Joe the Sous-Chef mouthed a penetrating whisper, "If you can't stand the heat, get out of my kitchen!"
MEAT
Although the chef determinendly rejects the view that ducks die from internally-generated system failure, he rather paradoxically insists that a duck's decay is generated inexorably from internal causes. As the peripheral limbs begin to convulse and gyrate on their own (symptomology of "flapdoodle"), attrition must necessarily follow. But the final, fatal stroke, as from a headsman's axe, is an unpredictable factor. Again, the ducks he studies are all denizens of the east European or Baltic regions (e.g., the Pripet Marshes). In these fertile swamps, "easy feeding" permits the ducks to side-waddle or overlook their inherently declining physical resources. In a rather anti-intellectual exercise the chef quacks that the factors leading to duck attrition cannot be predicted; that attrition cannot be predicted; and that any fatuous attempt at life-cycle prediction would fall off her kitchen writing-table like water off a duck's back. She does, however, asservate that ducks on the upswing of their life's trajectory are sometimes inclined to "adopt" and shelter enfeebled and weakened ducks, well along their downward parabolas, to parody a variety of man-boy love relationship, save that the roles are reversed, and that the child (or chick) is father to the man (or dying duck). The notorious scandal involving the overweening Wilhelmian German drake and the inverted Austro-Hungrian cross-bred bird is cited, but he discreetly forbears to allude to the current scandal in which the common Potomac duck reams the tailfeathers of swans from the Thames. The extended feeding-ground of the voracious Peking Duck is totally beyond her range of vision.
In terms of cruising range, the low-bred or "honky-tonk" Potomac duck enjoys a favorable geographic feeding ground around the waters of Chesapeake Bay, but distance from foreign predators, like an oceanic Maginot Line, cannot permanently shield the North American avian from external conflict and internal decay. Be that as it may, it is unquestionable for Chef Motyl that some form of powerful external shock will be necessary to de-feather a high-flying broad-beaked grain-gobbler permanently. Unfortunately, morphologically-inclined theories of internal structure are in principle incapable of predicting future events. Different forms of shock or shot wound ducks differently along various loci of their life parabolas. A duck in decline may unconsciously effect a re-arrangement of its internal organs in a form of anatomical perestroika, but in the end it wll fall prey to the shot of a Great Marksman. (Here the Chef, all unconscious of the fact that she is a victim of internal contradiction, shifted the Leit-motif of her explication de cuisine from anatomical or structural determinism to accentuating the role of Great Men, or Great Shots, thereby endorsing in practice her previously discarded theory of "agency, choice, and intentionalist" activity as the final "decider" in duck-hunting history.) A further weakness is her failure to consider the history of the Canard Fasciste flying around the Mediterranean in Spain, Italy and France, or to acknowledge anecdotal testimony to its re-appearance in Austria.
At this moment Monseignor Caeteris Paribus shambled forth once more, looking like a Teutonic caricature of the Dickinsonian character Uriah Heep, bearing two Schnapps-doused dessert dishes piled high with Canard Flambe, a specialite de la maison.
DESSERT
As my earnest companion's logomachy continued, she reiterated her view that anatomical structuralism cannot predict when or if a downed duck can revive from a severe external shock to reclaim part or all of its previous avian empire. But as she defined "revival" to mark a return to the status quo ante, it became clear to me that her "counterobservational hypothesis" had developed into an Alptraum, or alcoholic's fantasy. Chef Motyl reached for another cognac while she continued to unwind her explantory vision. Her azure eyes appeared to glaze over slightly as a wooden coo-coo clock from the Schwartzwald began to throatily sound its hourly call, "Pee-do-dnya, pee-do-dnya, pee-do-dnya."
If one were to contrast the gigantic European goose to the modest, peace-loving Eurasian duck, it would become evident that the European barnyard is surrounded by formidable institutional fences, akin to the ghetto walls construced in mediaeval Europe as a form of "fortified hamlet" to contain minorities. But the chef regrets that the neighboring lesser Slavic barnyards would probably not be annexed to Euroland Farms (or, in Cryllic lettering, HATO-LAND)"when it matters most." The development gap between Euroland (HATO) and and the inoffensive, peace-loving, collective-minded flocks of the Canard russe could only grow broader with the passage of time. (Regrettably, the recipe tables 4.4 through 4.9, which attempt to quantify taste, are largely nonsense. De gustibus non est disputandum.)
Be that as it may, the course of history predicts a continual expansion of the feeding ranges of various European avian species because of "...a spinoff of untrammeled capitalism and rampant modernization" in duck farming, including force-feeding. As Eurofarms (HATO) expand through globalized inflation of refined fiat-feed, Eastland (Slavgloryfarms) will stagnate, follow a unique path (Sonderweg) toward duck development, or simply degenerate to another Animal Farm as depicted by George Orwell. In any event, the Chef explained with a radiant if twisted smile (though hiccoughing), the eastern ducks will fall off the main flight-path of history (presumably in a declining parabola). While some zoologists view the Canard russe as merely another species of paddle-footed fish-grabbers with their own flock-minded culture and regional veneration of the Great Duck flying over Red Square, the Chef rejects this common-sense view in favor of a darker vision, inclining toward a prognostication of a march of ineffable evil across tundra, taiga, forest, steppe and desert in a perpetual Long Winter of perpetual avian animosity encompassing eleven time zones. Queerly, she neglects to comment on the extended feeding grounds of the Euroland (HATO) sea-birds now goose-stepping through Afghanistan and the "long march" of the omniverous Houston duck from North America to Baghdad, Iraq (not Bagdad, Florida).
DIGESTIF
Her face assumed a gloomy mien as she described the fragmentation of Eastland's barnyard and the consequent constriction of the feeding ground of the Carnard russe, clearly in her mind now an endangered species. She clearly had "misunderestimated" the prudent management of the new owner, Vlad the Farmer, acclained by the ducks (and other fowl forms), as the Re-gatherer of the Russian Barnyard. In his view the Eastland farm managers could hold their unstable farm together only by requesting financial aid from Euroland (HATO) or "...the assistance of solicitous Western meat stores." In this kitchen scenario, the Muscovite ranchero would have to play the role of a "weak sister" dominated by foreign financiers issuing sub-prime ruble mortgages, and exhibiting an increasing suseptability to shocks. Only an aggressive policy of annexing small ranchlets in the "near abroad" could preserve Eastland Farms from decay, further bankruptcies, and collapse. At this point, of course, the farm's assets would be divided among its international creditors, although Chef Motyl was too far gone with Schnapps and Weltschmerz even to allude to common business practice. Should these events transpire, Eastland Farms at the terminus of Slavgloryroad would dissolve into an awkward amalgam of squabbling petty mortgaged farmers assailed by increasing social distress, economic dislocation and distracted by perpetual cock-fighting tourneys behind the hay-mow.
To conclude, Chef Motyl rasped with a raucous rattle in her throat, if Euroland (HATO) continued to buy up farms formerly belonging to Eastland Farms, the stability and security of both Sunriseland and Sunsetland might well become mutually exclusive. At this moment of existential dispair, her faculties abandoned her, and the little chef slid under the table. At a loss as to how to proceed at this unexpected termination to the liquid portion of our elegant repast, I looked around the Maison de Motyl until my eyes struck the exhibit at the
Capitalist Corner of the kitchen where a Praying Wall had been inlaid behind a small statue of the Golden Cockerel. Beneath the pedestal was carved the Latin motto, Coquero ergo sum. On a small table had been had been reverently laid volumes by Brillat-Savarin (Physiology de Gout) and Julia Child (Masterihg the Art of French Cooking), together with a cheap reproduction of her OSS ID card. Above this Corner of Culinary Patriotism was displayed a silken US flag crossed with a black flag to commemorate MIA's lost in the Quest Eternal for a really good duck. I lowered my head repeatedly back-and-forth before the corner prie-dieu, making the requisite gesture of waving a spatula in a broad circle, while repeating the ritual formula to overcome the White Monkeys' mind-body duality, "I duck, duck you." Then I carefully demounted the American flag from its wall-snaps and covered the recumbant body of the now-snoring little chef-let, inebriated with the exuberance of her own elegant ingenuity, and tiptoed out of the Maison de Montyl to return demeurely to my own abode, where the manuscript of a lengthy essay explaining the internal physiology of global duckdom and refuting the sterility of stagnant anatomical structuralism lay waiting to be lashed into order by the vigorous strokes of my little quirt of a pen.
Ensconsed in my domestic carrel, I had initially queried myself, "But who will take care of the recumbant little drunk?" Then I ceased worrying.
Ceaeteris Paribus, of course.
--Esther Khlysta
Literary note: The names of "Esther" and "Magda" are borrowed from a favorite novel of my youth, The Gallery, by John Horne Burnes (1947), who assigned these pet names to two US Army Supply Sergents in occupied Naples after World War II. His oeuvre, cut short by premature death, was appreciated by Gore Vidal.
Saturday, October 4, 2008
DECISIVE REBUFF TO SELIG HARRISON (Open Letter)
OPEN LETTER TO SELIG HARRISON
Director, Asia Programme
Center for International Policy
1717 Massachusetts Avenue, NW
Suite 801
Washington, DC 20036
Your opinionated essay, "Support to Pakistan Distorts Asia's Balance of Power," published in the Boston Globe on September 27, cannot be permitted to pass without rebuttal. The first in your series of misstatements is the allegation that the so-called Al Quaida organization operates without opposition. This is easily refuted by the actions of the frontier corps, the Pakistani military, the criticisms of modernizing and moderate mullahs in their mosques, and the seige of the Red Mosque. You do not deign to specify the US weapony you so readily denigrate as unsuitable for Islamabad, yet opening the plains of Punjab to a speculative Indian incursion (as previously practiced in the birthing of Bangladesh) would just as readily open the Punjab to separatist militias from Sindh (the Bhutto family principality) or the Baluchis, among others. To criticize Pakistani intelligence as being "riddled with Islamists" manifests total cultural blindness as well as condensation toward a putative allied state whose capital is, after all, Islamabad. Is one to expect followers of Shinto? Is one to criticize Italian intelligence in Rome for being "riddled with Catholics?" As for anti-American sentiment in the sub-continent, it is surely nourished by the grinding, if ill-coordinated, NATO mechanized forces in Afghanistan (eerily reminiscent of the more efficient operations of German and Italian troops in republican Spain) and USAF incursions into Pakistani air space.(recalling the Condor Legion).
The US financial consortium that lent Pakistan $6.2 billion in 2001 did so to support the military government of General Perez Musharraf, subsequently toppled for failure to massacre his own people with sufficient vigor, by a (sponsored) lawyers' riot and a US intrigue to replace him with civilian celebrities acting in the conjoined interests of Israel and India--Israel, inspired by a paranoid apprehension among Zionist zealots of a rebirth of revanchism in the Muslim world, and India, similarly apprehensive about Chinese ambitions and still smarting over Krishna Menon's defeat and its subsequent failure to pacify and absorb Kashmir. To expect the General Accounting Office to provide an accurate summary of disbursements of a foreign sovereign government would be properly adjudged "quaint," were it not purely ludicrous to expect acturarial accuracy from an agency that cannot satisfactorily account for billions of US fiat funds disbursed to American and British security contractors in US-occupied Baghdad.
To restrict the transfer of military weapons to those restricted to small-unit engagements amounts to the progressive disarmament of the Pakistani military which remains, as ever, the single strongest cohesive force in a multi-national Muslim state. Equally multi-national, Hindu India, surrounded by Muslim states to the north, west and east, nervously watches the new Maoist government in Nepal while suffering an internal guerilla war in the east and Tamil support for the Sri Lanka "Tigers" in the south. Harrison may posit a future in which the surrounding states, from Pakistan to Myramar and Thailand, may rejoice to live "in the shadow of Kali" (and the next BJP government), but India can in no way be conceived of as a solid rock to function as a fulcrum for globe-girdling American military might. Rather, a quick examinatin discloses it is as full of holes, ethnic, religious, and economic, as a piece of coral dredged from the Great Barrier Reef. It is the circle of Muslim states and non-states, from the Uighers in Sinkiang through Malaysia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and a newly-freed Afghanistan after NATO withdrawal (for reasons of expense) that would furnish an unassailable cultural-religous barrier against the "revisionist PLA generals" now enjoying their "place in the sun" in Beijing, and presumably mulling over an overland strike to facilitate their access to Iranian oil. (Land transport would be far more reliable than a "long march"
across the oceans from Venezuela.) Assailing Pakistan in a slimy piece of reptilian journalism for its military partnership with the Chinese generals only serves to make the "deep state" in Islamabad more militant, while attempting to chew the dragon's tail with rotten and falling (financial) teeth.
While Harrison may hurry to bank rupees from India and shekels from Jerusalem, he will do so only with his ears ringing with the guffaws of robust Russian laughter. The Indian air force is furnished with aging Soviet equipment, and Medvedev's forces have had recent experience in bombing Sukhoi air fields and repair facilities in Georgia. And since the Bush administration has made the Non-Proliferation Treaty a dead letter, it would be will to remember that Moscow also has weapons to sell.
--Anatol Chatsky
--Ministry of External Affairs
North American Resistence Command
Director, Asia Programme
Center for International Policy
1717 Massachusetts Avenue, NW
Suite 801
Washington, DC 20036
Your opinionated essay, "Support to Pakistan Distorts Asia's Balance of Power," published in the Boston Globe on September 27, cannot be permitted to pass without rebuttal. The first in your series of misstatements is the allegation that the so-called Al Quaida organization operates without opposition. This is easily refuted by the actions of the frontier corps, the Pakistani military, the criticisms of modernizing and moderate mullahs in their mosques, and the seige of the Red Mosque. You do not deign to specify the US weapony you so readily denigrate as unsuitable for Islamabad, yet opening the plains of Punjab to a speculative Indian incursion (as previously practiced in the birthing of Bangladesh) would just as readily open the Punjab to separatist militias from Sindh (the Bhutto family principality) or the Baluchis, among others. To criticize Pakistani intelligence as being "riddled with Islamists" manifests total cultural blindness as well as condensation toward a putative allied state whose capital is, after all, Islamabad. Is one to expect followers of Shinto? Is one to criticize Italian intelligence in Rome for being "riddled with Catholics?" As for anti-American sentiment in the sub-continent, it is surely nourished by the grinding, if ill-coordinated, NATO mechanized forces in Afghanistan (eerily reminiscent of the more efficient operations of German and Italian troops in republican Spain) and USAF incursions into Pakistani air space.(recalling the Condor Legion).
The US financial consortium that lent Pakistan $6.2 billion in 2001 did so to support the military government of General Perez Musharraf, subsequently toppled for failure to massacre his own people with sufficient vigor, by a (sponsored) lawyers' riot and a US intrigue to replace him with civilian celebrities acting in the conjoined interests of Israel and India--Israel, inspired by a paranoid apprehension among Zionist zealots of a rebirth of revanchism in the Muslim world, and India, similarly apprehensive about Chinese ambitions and still smarting over Krishna Menon's defeat and its subsequent failure to pacify and absorb Kashmir. To expect the General Accounting Office to provide an accurate summary of disbursements of a foreign sovereign government would be properly adjudged "quaint," were it not purely ludicrous to expect acturarial accuracy from an agency that cannot satisfactorily account for billions of US fiat funds disbursed to American and British security contractors in US-occupied Baghdad.
To restrict the transfer of military weapons to those restricted to small-unit engagements amounts to the progressive disarmament of the Pakistani military which remains, as ever, the single strongest cohesive force in a multi-national Muslim state. Equally multi-national, Hindu India, surrounded by Muslim states to the north, west and east, nervously watches the new Maoist government in Nepal while suffering an internal guerilla war in the east and Tamil support for the Sri Lanka "Tigers" in the south. Harrison may posit a future in which the surrounding states, from Pakistan to Myramar and Thailand, may rejoice to live "in the shadow of Kali" (and the next BJP government), but India can in no way be conceived of as a solid rock to function as a fulcrum for globe-girdling American military might. Rather, a quick examinatin discloses it is as full of holes, ethnic, religious, and economic, as a piece of coral dredged from the Great Barrier Reef. It is the circle of Muslim states and non-states, from the Uighers in Sinkiang through Malaysia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and a newly-freed Afghanistan after NATO withdrawal (for reasons of expense) that would furnish an unassailable cultural-religous barrier against the "revisionist PLA generals" now enjoying their "place in the sun" in Beijing, and presumably mulling over an overland strike to facilitate their access to Iranian oil. (Land transport would be far more reliable than a "long march"
across the oceans from Venezuela.) Assailing Pakistan in a slimy piece of reptilian journalism for its military partnership with the Chinese generals only serves to make the "deep state" in Islamabad more militant, while attempting to chew the dragon's tail with rotten and falling (financial) teeth.
While Harrison may hurry to bank rupees from India and shekels from Jerusalem, he will do so only with his ears ringing with the guffaws of robust Russian laughter. The Indian air force is furnished with aging Soviet equipment, and Medvedev's forces have had recent experience in bombing Sukhoi air fields and repair facilities in Georgia. And since the Bush administration has made the Non-Proliferation Treaty a dead letter, it would be will to remember that Moscow also has weapons to sell.
--Anatol Chatsky
--Ministry of External Affairs
North American Resistence Command
Friday, September 26, 2008
MEHDI BAZARGAN: A COMMENTARY
A commentary on pages selected from H. E. Chehabi, IRANIAN POLITICS AND RELILGIOUS MODERNISM (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, n.d.)
Religious modernism is seen by the author as an effort to reestablish harmony between religion and a changing socio-cultural environment. The author interprets this phenomenon as a reactive movement. He is wrong. It is an adjusting movement, to which there is no terminiation. One would better speak of "adaptive permanence" which will continue as long as homo sapiens creates more or less imaginary constructs in an attempt to reduce the complexity of an expanding universe to the dimensions of his small skull.
The author differentiates between modernism, which is secular and Western, and reformism, which is an adaptive tendency within a religious community. In a parallel to intellectual struggles within twentieth century secular Marxism, we may identify "reformism" with "revisionism."
Professor Chehabi asserts that nationalism and "religious modernism" share similar attitudes. That is debatable, but nationalism as a surrogate religion is infinitely malleable, and can coexist equally well with state-sponsored paganism, as with some Nazis in Germany, and state-sponsored secularism, as with Communist Russia, or state-sponsored polytheism, as with the BJP government in Hindu India, or iodolatry of the marketplace, as celebrated in Washington, and first identified by Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626) Nationalism, further, is inward-oriented or centripetal within a state structure or linguistic unit, attaining its extreme forms in integral nationalism, as exemplified by Zionism, whereas religion (except for the Hindu caste system) is presumed to supply a universal explanation equally accessible to all adherents regardless of language or race. (To evaluate the Islamic view that the Bahai's are contaminated by Western culture, one may consult statements published by their world headquarters at 100 Linden Street, Wilmette, IL 60091 /www.bahai.us/).
The defensive character of religious modernism is more pronounced in the non-Western world, inhabited by the majority of the planet's population. For technology and ideas about different political systems come to this majority population from outside, as in the case of colonialism, often accompanied by foreign Christian missionaries, or their short-wave radio broadcasts. (as is said to be proverbial in East Asian studies, "First the missionaries, then the merchants, then the Marines.") In later generations the defensive character of the "anti" motivation broadened from individual psychology to a social imperative to resist the invasive sociological entity insofar as it pressed aggressively for a seismic shift in the traditional or dominant social order. Professor Chehabi misses the mark, however, when he glibly speaks of the European acceptance of "modernity" without referring to the French Revolution (1789-99) that gave birth to it, and the Napoleonic Wars that diffused it by military means (1799-1815) until surrounded by commercial-religious nationalism in Anglican England and monarchical-communal nationalism in Orthodox Russia.
SHI'ITE MODERNISM
One characteristic trait of religious modernists is that they are eclectic in their thinking. After the Iranian revolution of 1905-06 (contemporaneous with the first Russian revolution), one faction of the ulema (or community of Islamic scholars) asserted that a secular constitution was incompatible with Islam, whereas a second faction admitted members of the Islamic clergy into the Parliament and thereby asserted that a Parliamentary body was indeed compatible with Islam. Thus the Shi'ite clergy became the most politically active clergy of the early 20th century, according to Dr. Chehabi. They were primarily motivated to establish a "rule of law" in the state rather than to reform or modernise Islam.
To focus on influential Western influences on modern Iranian political thouught, one must advert to the quasi-Fascistic Alexis Carrel (1873-1944), awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1912, and who conducted research at the University of Chicago (funded by John D. Rockefeller) and the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in Newe York City. In 1935 he wrote MAN, THE UNKNOWN (L'homme, cet inconnu) in which he argued that the huyman racd should be governed by a limited intellectual elite, and advocated the useof gas chambers to cull the human herd of inferior stock, e.g., the mentally diseased, the criminal and the defective. Government should be restricted to a hereditary minority composed of the descendents of revolutionary heros, great criminals, or financial magnates. As he wrote, "The conditioning of petty criminals with a whip, or some more scientific procedures, followed by a short stay in hospital, would probably suffice to insure order." ("Alexis Carrel," Wikipedia) Among his aphorisms may be fouond the following: (1) All great men are gifted with intuition. They know without reason or analysis, what they need to know; (2) Everyone makes a greater effort to hurt other people than to help himself; (3) Hard conditions of life are indispensable to bringing out the best in human personality; (4) Life leaps like a geyser for those who drill through the rock of inertia; (5) Man cannot remake himself without suffering, for he is both the marble and the sculptor. After 1939 he enjoyed connections with the government of Marshal Philippe Petain (1856-1951) which chartered his charitable institution, the French Foundation for the Study of Human Problems, in 1941. Among other projects, it developed the first French opinion polls. After Paris was liberated by the Free French army under General Leclerk, Carrel was suspended from his administrative function, and died in November, 1944. Currently he is honored only by Jean-Marie Le Pen of the National Front party.
To explain the appeal of Carrel to Muslim modernizers would try the tolerance of an angel, and certainly exceeds the competence of this writer. In part, Professor Chehabi's view that a disparate variety of sources is requisite to nourish a cultural eclecticism is incontrovertible. On the other hand, his dismissal of Iran as "peripheral" to the market economy of the West manifests an unconscious proclivity to cultural superiority which is incompatable with objective research , sine ira et studio. In Tehran, the social thought of Brussels or New York is equally peripheral to their interests, for there are not many libraries in Europe with volumnous translations from Farsi--not to mention the presence of an unofficial market censorship commonly expressed in the judgment that a volume, musical form or fashion in couture is "not commercial," and where the cultural stagnation of pop music forms of the 1960's and stereotyped Hollywood sit-coms becomes progressively more evident.
Shi'ite modernists in Iran have two guiding principles, according to the author: return to the Koran and a preoccupation with science. In this dual quest they may be contrasted with the revolutionary May 4th movement in late imperial China, which adopted the watchwords "Science and Democracy." While an admiration for empirical science was common to both movements, "democracy" pointed to broad popular participation in political activity, whereas a return to the Koran implied a return to guidance from a narrow council of clerical scholars. In 1883 Ernst Renan (1823-1892) in France attributed Islamic retardation ("backwardness") or persistent traditionalism to features of the Muslim religion, perhaps projecting on the Islamic world elements of his own agonized struggle to reconcile Catholic clericalism with the democracy of the 3rd Republic. The Shi'ite reformer al-Afghani agreed with him.
MEHDI BAZARGAN
Mehdi Bazargan reversed this judgment, observing that in Europe practicing Christians emphasized faith or belief, whereas in Islamic civilization Muslims always emphasized knowledge. In his political thought Bazargan might be clasified as a (waffling) "Islamic liberal." Like others living under the Reza Shah regime, he became influenced by the legends of Persian imperial greatness before the Islamic conquest and gave considerable attention to the controversial question of Iranian national identity. Islamic "underdevelopment," he thought, was initiated prior to European expansion and flowed from Islamists' withdrawal to private affairs to the detriment of state (so-called "public") interests. Muslim scholars thereby became progressively divorced from a practical familiarity with secular or everyday affairs. Notwithstanding this social defect, Bazargan asserted that the Iranian nation (as part of the Aryan race) proved to be uniquely adaptable in its historical development, for the peaceful Aryan base had progressively assimilated successive waves of "progressive and violent" invaders, from the ancient Assyriansto the later Arabs, Mongols and Tatars. (One also encounters the same argument propagated among its Russian neighbors to the north, when the agrarian and democratic Slavic communes and their princes progressively assimilated their foreign conquerers, from the Scandinavians in 862 through the agnostic Mongols, Muslim Tatars and Protestant Germans from the Baltic principalities.) Rural agriculturalists, according to Bazargan, were less inclined to mensuration than uban merchants, and consequently the agrarian Aryan nation, accustomed to domination by Mother Nature, developed a fatalistic outlook and were indifferent to academic accuracy. The result was that classic Persian literature valued exaggeration at the expense of realism (as did the Ukrainian Nikolai Gogol' /1809-1852/), and deployed the same commanding tone against sloth as progressive Russians, including V.I. Lenin (1870-1924), manifested in condemning that privileged scion of aristocracy, Oblomov, lounging in his halat (dressing gown) on his divan, in Goncharov's famous novel of 1859. Indeed, it would appear that Bazargan, born in the Russian-dominated Caucasus in the city of Bazargan in Azerbaijan, and following the same migratory route to Tehran as Ayatollah Khomenei (1900-1989), projected many of the standard formulae of classic Russian literary tradition on the developing Iranian national consciousness.
As a progressive "liberalizing" intellectual, Bazargan supported creating Islamic associations of students, engineers and teachers, and urged Muslim scholars in the ulema to support Iranian nationalists. He asserted that while political considerations should not interfere with religion, Islam should inform all social and political activity in the state. The application of Islamic principles should constitute the legislative agends of parliaments. While Islam should proclaim the general principles by which society should constitute itself, the details of governance are to be worked out by believers according to the immediate situation. (His views in this regard bear comparison with the assertion of a leading Slavophil, Ivan Kireevsky /1806-1856/) that the Russian Orthodox Church should consititute a "community of believing reason.") He repeatedly asserted that there should be no compulsion in religion. Bazargan believed that all believers in the three Abrahamic cults should have equal rights and responsibilites in the Islamic state. Like other modernists he emphasized that Islam was rationalistic (tactfully not mentioning the irrational mystery of a Triune God worshipped in the West). But in criticizing the UN Declaration of Human Rights, Bazargan asserted, with the Prophet, that "the dearest to God were those who were most virtuous," and that, by implication, virtue trumps legality. Unaware of the contradiction, he sides with those early Muslims he formerly criticized for withdrawing from public life to restrict their social activity to virtuous practice in private. He never overcame this contradiction. After resigning as Prime Minister of the new Islamic Republic in 1979 and returning to private life, he wrote that the Republic demanded more of its free citizens than Allah had demanded from the prophets.
But as the Prophet and the Imams were no longer accessible for guidance, Bazargan asserted that the congregation of all believers must participate, in a kind of "community of believing reason," in the choice of their rulers. He also argued that as men are free, they were endowed with the capacity and the right to embrace Islam or to reject it. Freedom of speech should be allowed to opponents in order that the application of reason to problems whould illumine a more enlightened path. In his final book, written in 1983, Bazargan summons the Spanish Inquisition to the minds of Eurasian readers to color his rejection of the methods of his Islamic successors in authority to impose religion. He might have recalled, but did not, that the Thirty Years' War in Europe (1618-1648) was settled at Westphalia through the partisans' acceptance of the formula Cuius regio, eius religio (Religion follows the will of the ruler). In his final years he rejected the market-of-heads political orthodoxy proclaimed in the European political systems: "From an Islamic point of view Western democracy is not government by the people, nor does it benefit the people....It rules over the whole people and deceives them with its false propaganda. The colonial governments that had dragged people through blood and debased them derive from the same democracy." Scholars in comparative political systems might view Bazargan as a kind of proponent of Muslim Iranophilism modelled on Slavophilism. It is incontrovertible that Bazargan's world outlook was comprised in part from incompatible propositions, in that while valuing Islamic virtue over political activity, he recommended broad popular participation in selecting a government while at the same time he rejected the demonstrated course of popular democracy in practice.
--Joe Tudeh
Religious modernism is seen by the author as an effort to reestablish harmony between religion and a changing socio-cultural environment. The author interprets this phenomenon as a reactive movement. He is wrong. It is an adjusting movement, to which there is no terminiation. One would better speak of "adaptive permanence" which will continue as long as homo sapiens creates more or less imaginary constructs in an attempt to reduce the complexity of an expanding universe to the dimensions of his small skull.
The author differentiates between modernism, which is secular and Western, and reformism, which is an adaptive tendency within a religious community. In a parallel to intellectual struggles within twentieth century secular Marxism, we may identify "reformism" with "revisionism."
Professor Chehabi asserts that nationalism and "religious modernism" share similar attitudes. That is debatable, but nationalism as a surrogate religion is infinitely malleable, and can coexist equally well with state-sponsored paganism, as with some Nazis in Germany, and state-sponsored secularism, as with Communist Russia, or state-sponsored polytheism, as with the BJP government in Hindu India, or iodolatry of the marketplace, as celebrated in Washington, and first identified by Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626) Nationalism, further, is inward-oriented or centripetal within a state structure or linguistic unit, attaining its extreme forms in integral nationalism, as exemplified by Zionism, whereas religion (except for the Hindu caste system) is presumed to supply a universal explanation equally accessible to all adherents regardless of language or race. (To evaluate the Islamic view that the Bahai's are contaminated by Western culture, one may consult statements published by their world headquarters at 100 Linden Street, Wilmette, IL 60091 /www.bahai.us/).
The defensive character of religious modernism is more pronounced in the non-Western world, inhabited by the majority of the planet's population. For technology and ideas about different political systems come to this majority population from outside, as in the case of colonialism, often accompanied by foreign Christian missionaries, or their short-wave radio broadcasts. (as is said to be proverbial in East Asian studies, "First the missionaries, then the merchants, then the Marines.") In later generations the defensive character of the "anti" motivation broadened from individual psychology to a social imperative to resist the invasive sociological entity insofar as it pressed aggressively for a seismic shift in the traditional or dominant social order. Professor Chehabi misses the mark, however, when he glibly speaks of the European acceptance of "modernity" without referring to the French Revolution (1789-99) that gave birth to it, and the Napoleonic Wars that diffused it by military means (1799-1815) until surrounded by commercial-religious nationalism in Anglican England and monarchical-communal nationalism in Orthodox Russia.
SHI'ITE MODERNISM
One characteristic trait of religious modernists is that they are eclectic in their thinking. After the Iranian revolution of 1905-06 (contemporaneous with the first Russian revolution), one faction of the ulema (or community of Islamic scholars) asserted that a secular constitution was incompatible with Islam, whereas a second faction admitted members of the Islamic clergy into the Parliament and thereby asserted that a Parliamentary body was indeed compatible with Islam. Thus the Shi'ite clergy became the most politically active clergy of the early 20th century, according to Dr. Chehabi. They were primarily motivated to establish a "rule of law" in the state rather than to reform or modernise Islam.
To focus on influential Western influences on modern Iranian political thouught, one must advert to the quasi-Fascistic Alexis Carrel (1873-1944), awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1912, and who conducted research at the University of Chicago (funded by John D. Rockefeller) and the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in Newe York City. In 1935 he wrote MAN, THE UNKNOWN (L'homme, cet inconnu) in which he argued that the huyman racd should be governed by a limited intellectual elite, and advocated the useof gas chambers to cull the human herd of inferior stock, e.g., the mentally diseased, the criminal and the defective. Government should be restricted to a hereditary minority composed of the descendents of revolutionary heros, great criminals, or financial magnates. As he wrote, "The conditioning of petty criminals with a whip, or some more scientific procedures, followed by a short stay in hospital, would probably suffice to insure order." ("Alexis Carrel," Wikipedia) Among his aphorisms may be fouond the following: (1) All great men are gifted with intuition. They know without reason or analysis, what they need to know; (2) Everyone makes a greater effort to hurt other people than to help himself; (3) Hard conditions of life are indispensable to bringing out the best in human personality; (4) Life leaps like a geyser for those who drill through the rock of inertia; (5) Man cannot remake himself without suffering, for he is both the marble and the sculptor. After 1939 he enjoyed connections with the government of Marshal Philippe Petain (1856-1951) which chartered his charitable institution, the French Foundation for the Study of Human Problems, in 1941. Among other projects, it developed the first French opinion polls. After Paris was liberated by the Free French army under General Leclerk, Carrel was suspended from his administrative function, and died in November, 1944. Currently he is honored only by Jean-Marie Le Pen of the National Front party.
To explain the appeal of Carrel to Muslim modernizers would try the tolerance of an angel, and certainly exceeds the competence of this writer. In part, Professor Chehabi's view that a disparate variety of sources is requisite to nourish a cultural eclecticism is incontrovertible. On the other hand, his dismissal of Iran as "peripheral" to the market economy of the West manifests an unconscious proclivity to cultural superiority which is incompatable with objective research , sine ira et studio. In Tehran, the social thought of Brussels or New York is equally peripheral to their interests, for there are not many libraries in Europe with volumnous translations from Farsi--not to mention the presence of an unofficial market censorship commonly expressed in the judgment that a volume, musical form or fashion in couture is "not commercial," and where the cultural stagnation of pop music forms of the 1960's and stereotyped Hollywood sit-coms becomes progressively more evident.
Shi'ite modernists in Iran have two guiding principles, according to the author: return to the Koran and a preoccupation with science. In this dual quest they may be contrasted with the revolutionary May 4th movement in late imperial China, which adopted the watchwords "Science and Democracy." While an admiration for empirical science was common to both movements, "democracy" pointed to broad popular participation in political activity, whereas a return to the Koran implied a return to guidance from a narrow council of clerical scholars. In 1883 Ernst Renan (1823-1892) in France attributed Islamic retardation ("backwardness") or persistent traditionalism to features of the Muslim religion, perhaps projecting on the Islamic world elements of his own agonized struggle to reconcile Catholic clericalism with the democracy of the 3rd Republic. The Shi'ite reformer al-Afghani agreed with him.
MEHDI BAZARGAN
Mehdi Bazargan reversed this judgment, observing that in Europe practicing Christians emphasized faith or belief, whereas in Islamic civilization Muslims always emphasized knowledge. In his political thought Bazargan might be clasified as a (waffling) "Islamic liberal." Like others living under the Reza Shah regime, he became influenced by the legends of Persian imperial greatness before the Islamic conquest and gave considerable attention to the controversial question of Iranian national identity. Islamic "underdevelopment," he thought, was initiated prior to European expansion and flowed from Islamists' withdrawal to private affairs to the detriment of state (so-called "public") interests. Muslim scholars thereby became progressively divorced from a practical familiarity with secular or everyday affairs. Notwithstanding this social defect, Bazargan asserted that the Iranian nation (as part of the Aryan race) proved to be uniquely adaptable in its historical development, for the peaceful Aryan base had progressively assimilated successive waves of "progressive and violent" invaders, from the ancient Assyriansto the later Arabs, Mongols and Tatars. (One also encounters the same argument propagated among its Russian neighbors to the north, when the agrarian and democratic Slavic communes and their princes progressively assimilated their foreign conquerers, from the Scandinavians in 862 through the agnostic Mongols, Muslim Tatars and Protestant Germans from the Baltic principalities.) Rural agriculturalists, according to Bazargan, were less inclined to mensuration than uban merchants, and consequently the agrarian Aryan nation, accustomed to domination by Mother Nature, developed a fatalistic outlook and were indifferent to academic accuracy. The result was that classic Persian literature valued exaggeration at the expense of realism (as did the Ukrainian Nikolai Gogol' /1809-1852/), and deployed the same commanding tone against sloth as progressive Russians, including V.I. Lenin (1870-1924), manifested in condemning that privileged scion of aristocracy, Oblomov, lounging in his halat (dressing gown) on his divan, in Goncharov's famous novel of 1859. Indeed, it would appear that Bazargan, born in the Russian-dominated Caucasus in the city of Bazargan in Azerbaijan, and following the same migratory route to Tehran as Ayatollah Khomenei (1900-1989), projected many of the standard formulae of classic Russian literary tradition on the developing Iranian national consciousness.
As a progressive "liberalizing" intellectual, Bazargan supported creating Islamic associations of students, engineers and teachers, and urged Muslim scholars in the ulema to support Iranian nationalists. He asserted that while political considerations should not interfere with religion, Islam should inform all social and political activity in the state. The application of Islamic principles should constitute the legislative agends of parliaments. While Islam should proclaim the general principles by which society should constitute itself, the details of governance are to be worked out by believers according to the immediate situation. (His views in this regard bear comparison with the assertion of a leading Slavophil, Ivan Kireevsky /1806-1856/) that the Russian Orthodox Church should consititute a "community of believing reason.") He repeatedly asserted that there should be no compulsion in religion. Bazargan believed that all believers in the three Abrahamic cults should have equal rights and responsibilites in the Islamic state. Like other modernists he emphasized that Islam was rationalistic (tactfully not mentioning the irrational mystery of a Triune God worshipped in the West). But in criticizing the UN Declaration of Human Rights, Bazargan asserted, with the Prophet, that "the dearest to God were those who were most virtuous," and that, by implication, virtue trumps legality. Unaware of the contradiction, he sides with those early Muslims he formerly criticized for withdrawing from public life to restrict their social activity to virtuous practice in private. He never overcame this contradiction. After resigning as Prime Minister of the new Islamic Republic in 1979 and returning to private life, he wrote that the Republic demanded more of its free citizens than Allah had demanded from the prophets.
But as the Prophet and the Imams were no longer accessible for guidance, Bazargan asserted that the congregation of all believers must participate, in a kind of "community of believing reason," in the choice of their rulers. He also argued that as men are free, they were endowed with the capacity and the right to embrace Islam or to reject it. Freedom of speech should be allowed to opponents in order that the application of reason to problems whould illumine a more enlightened path. In his final book, written in 1983, Bazargan summons the Spanish Inquisition to the minds of Eurasian readers to color his rejection of the methods of his Islamic successors in authority to impose religion. He might have recalled, but did not, that the Thirty Years' War in Europe (1618-1648) was settled at Westphalia through the partisans' acceptance of the formula Cuius regio, eius religio (Religion follows the will of the ruler). In his final years he rejected the market-of-heads political orthodoxy proclaimed in the European political systems: "From an Islamic point of view Western democracy is not government by the people, nor does it benefit the people....It rules over the whole people and deceives them with its false propaganda. The colonial governments that had dragged people through blood and debased them derive from the same democracy." Scholars in comparative political systems might view Bazargan as a kind of proponent of Muslim Iranophilism modelled on Slavophilism. It is incontrovertible that Bazargan's world outlook was comprised in part from incompatible propositions, in that while valuing Islamic virtue over political activity, he recommended broad popular participation in selecting a government while at the same time he rejected the demonstrated course of popular democracy in practice.
--Joe Tudeh
Monday, September 22, 2008
OPEN LETTER TO DOGU ERGIL (Ankara University)
Dogu Ergil, "Turkey's Crisis and Future," MIT Center for International Studies. August 2008.
A REBUTTAL
By the thinnest of margins the Constitutional Court permitted the governing Justice and Development party government to proceed with its Muslimizing programme, permitting young women to wear the jihab at universities. You note, moreover, that the party has "lost its enthusiasm" for liberalizing and democratizing Turkey in its quixotic quest for EU membership.
Predictably you condemn the Ergenekon discussants as aspiring to impose "an isolationaist dictatorial regime" upon the secular republic established by the actions of General Kemal Ataturk. The hypothetical popular demands you visualize for "liberalization and globalization" may conceivably echo the programme advocated in Langley, VA, but it is dubious if Anatolian farmers in their mosques and the urbanized Istanbul elite, meeting in coffee shops or Mariott Hotel bars, really desire to be "globalized" under the credit pump of fiat currency underlying the marketization of the Anglo-American economic model. Progressive devaluations undercut the currency of the Ottomans, and loom ever closer for the American dollar. Criticism of the coup mentality is singularly ill-timed in the post-Cold War era, when the actions of Boris Yeltsin to summon 1300 Russian troops to bombard the elected deputies of the Russian Parliament in their skyscraper (the "White House") elicit the applause of his Harvard biographer.
Far from the fraudulent choice posed by Prof. Ergil, that Turkey must choose "Westernization" or ostracism, it would be better advised to cultivate the path of Pan-Turanism advanced by Enver Pasha and re-ignite the cooperation of colonized non-white nationalities as envisaged by Sultan-Galiev after 1918, with this difference--that the newly resurgent national state cooperate with the new Shanghai Cooperation Council, Pakistan, and the dynamic economies of the emerging Asian giants as they recycle petroleum income invested by Muslim states around the Persian Gulf.
The Muslim masses and secularizing elite may well discover a new Silk Road to Eurasian prosperity if they imbibe a colonic to purge themselves of the constipation of Western-style marketization and the Pentagon-Brussels axis of military bureaucracy through which illusory waves of parliamentary approval are suborned or purchased by manipulators of fiat-financed investment vehicles.
--Dr. Diogenes
A REBUTTAL
By the thinnest of margins the Constitutional Court permitted the governing Justice and Development party government to proceed with its Muslimizing programme, permitting young women to wear the jihab at universities. You note, moreover, that the party has "lost its enthusiasm" for liberalizing and democratizing Turkey in its quixotic quest for EU membership.
Predictably you condemn the Ergenekon discussants as aspiring to impose "an isolationaist dictatorial regime" upon the secular republic established by the actions of General Kemal Ataturk. The hypothetical popular demands you visualize for "liberalization and globalization" may conceivably echo the programme advocated in Langley, VA, but it is dubious if Anatolian farmers in their mosques and the urbanized Istanbul elite, meeting in coffee shops or Mariott Hotel bars, really desire to be "globalized" under the credit pump of fiat currency underlying the marketization of the Anglo-American economic model. Progressive devaluations undercut the currency of the Ottomans, and loom ever closer for the American dollar. Criticism of the coup mentality is singularly ill-timed in the post-Cold War era, when the actions of Boris Yeltsin to summon 1300 Russian troops to bombard the elected deputies of the Russian Parliament in their skyscraper (the "White House") elicit the applause of his Harvard biographer.
Far from the fraudulent choice posed by Prof. Ergil, that Turkey must choose "Westernization" or ostracism, it would be better advised to cultivate the path of Pan-Turanism advanced by Enver Pasha and re-ignite the cooperation of colonized non-white nationalities as envisaged by Sultan-Galiev after 1918, with this difference--that the newly resurgent national state cooperate with the new Shanghai Cooperation Council, Pakistan, and the dynamic economies of the emerging Asian giants as they recycle petroleum income invested by Muslim states around the Persian Gulf.
The Muslim masses and secularizing elite may well discover a new Silk Road to Eurasian prosperity if they imbibe a colonic to purge themselves of the constipation of Western-style marketization and the Pentagon-Brussels axis of military bureaucracy through which illusory waves of parliamentary approval are suborned or purchased by manipulators of fiat-financed investment vehicles.
--Dr. Diogenes
Saturday, September 20, 2008
BLACK SEA STUDIES (Take-home Exam. AD 2004)
Many observers have commented that American strategic planners have felt a pang of nostalgia for the former certitudes of the Cold War Era. With that in mind, please draft an aide-memoire interpreting Washington's criticism of the Russian tactics in Chechnya, demands for Russian forces to withdraw from Abkhazia and Moldova, and Secretary Rumsfeld's mission to Georgia as a legitimate and commendable democratic effort to restrain expanding Russian imperial power. (You may wish to include a few well-thouoght-out paragraphs clarifying that a strategic thrust to envelop Kiev in the arms of NATO is necessary to contain Russian expansionism.)
As the diplomatic service remains woefully inadequate at integrating economic pollicies into a coherent diplomatic strategy, include in your answer a symbolic application of the putative predominance of the American judicial system on a global scale. You might wish to conduct a Weberian "thought-experiment" imagining the collapse of Mubarak's regime in Egypt. Could not a Texas court be dextrously manoeuvered into placing the former president's assets into international escrow, to be awarded later to the victorious successor regime if it provides credible assurances that it will be guided by, say, the Bloomberg Financial Group, Goldman-Sachs, or the Carlyle Group?)
Please tie the economic and military-strategic paragraphs together with a patriotic hortatory injunction informing the reader that "loose nukes" in Russia constitute a global menace, whereas after a Third Democratic Revolution in Russia, a newly purified planet will labor diligently and optimistically for the new dominant congeries of trans-national corporations, troubled only temporarily and evanescently by earthquakes, tsunamis and pandemics in the best of all possible free-market business climates conducive, in the words of the Sage of Crawford, to "a better return on investment?"
5 pages maximum.
As the diplomatic service remains woefully inadequate at integrating economic pollicies into a coherent diplomatic strategy, include in your answer a symbolic application of the putative predominance of the American judicial system on a global scale. You might wish to conduct a Weberian "thought-experiment" imagining the collapse of Mubarak's regime in Egypt. Could not a Texas court be dextrously manoeuvered into placing the former president's assets into international escrow, to be awarded later to the victorious successor regime if it provides credible assurances that it will be guided by, say, the Bloomberg Financial Group, Goldman-Sachs, or the Carlyle Group?)
Please tie the economic and military-strategic paragraphs together with a patriotic hortatory injunction informing the reader that "loose nukes" in Russia constitute a global menace, whereas after a Third Democratic Revolution in Russia, a newly purified planet will labor diligently and optimistically for the new dominant congeries of trans-national corporations, troubled only temporarily and evanescently by earthquakes, tsunamis and pandemics in the best of all possible free-market business climates conducive, in the words of the Sage of Crawford, to "a better return on investment?"
5 pages maximum.
Friday, September 19, 2008
SUSPECTED SOCIOPATH (DIAGNOSIS AND PROGNOSIS)
TO: Health Care Professionals
FROM: Dr. Povanda, Psychological Practicioner
DATE:Feb. 5, 2003
SUBJECT: Suspected Sociopath
1. The subject, George B., currently occupies a responsible executive position in a large conglomorate deriving its income from two main subsidiaries. One is in the oil production and marketing sphere. The other provides armed security guards for managers appointed to supervise foreign subsidiaries under oil cartel control.
2. The subject inherited his position from his father , George H.W., after an eight year interval in which the company was administered by a straw man. Ab initio George B. embarked on a policy of virtually unrestrained deficit spending. In this he was encouraged by his father's former comptroller, crony, and now general factotum. The company's internal script, the "Holler," has steadily fallen against both gold bullion and the new Euro. There are no appreciable signs of reversal, given the prospect of mounting deficits and the continuing prospect of of the company consuming more than it earns. The subject fired the company treasurer who, after a tour of Africa with a sexy rock star, announced his preference for a soundly-backed script (the "strong Holler"). He also took the axe to his private financial adviser, who had warned that taking over oil fields in a hostile takeover from a regional competitor would cost in excess of $200 billion US, for which the company held insufficient funds.
3. Whilst circumspect in public, the subject has frequently stated his firm is under continual threat of attack by fanatical terrorists. Last year he attacked the Afghani gas fields, removed the previous managers, and through manipulated proxies and a controlled stakeholders' assembly (the "Big Tent"), installed his own front man as manager on an ethnic reservation (Chief Hamid the Bold). For the last fifteen months he has manifested the behavior of a typical stalker, pursuing the once formidable but now superannuated manager of a semi-ruined regional oil competitor, either because he fears the old-line owner has weaponized his employees, or entertains malevolent thoughts in secret, or is dodging an international audit, or represents in his abhorrent person the quintessence of human evil. His company has continued to seek and sign secret undertakings to divide the opponent's property among the most slavish of his subsidized adherents ("lynching by the willing").
4. The subject frequently manifests inconsistent ultra-nationalistic and ultra-conservative convictions. He recently visited a sectarian Southern university where Blancos and Negros among the disparate nationalities in his employ were (until his visit) forbidden to date. He has stated orally that he favors diversity in the workplace, yet his company recently filed suit to terminate affirmative actions programs for minority nationalities. He is a stong public proponent of the so-called "right-to-life" ideology. He has forbiden the company clinic to distribute birth control implements or medication. He has refused to pay dues to an international organization on the East Coast because it distributes birth control information which might facilitate abortions in overpopulated China. On M.L. King's memorial weekend, he issued a proclamation fervently reaffirming the "sanctity" of life. Not ten days had passed before he announced an eleemosynary gift to a distant African town, to subsidize the distribution of drugs against AIDS and condoms (perhaps to restrict the reproduction of Negros).
5. He has undertaken the largest company reorganization in 40 years to unify, strengthen and coordinate (Gleichschaltung) the security guard and to restrict access to company property. He has begun interrogating, registering and fingerprinting foreign workers and even visitors to company grounds. He has complained that open parklands on his northern boundary are open to visitors, residents, immigrants, terrorists, and moose alike, and urged that his property line be secured by armed patrols.
6. Each time the possibility of a workers' action arises, he employs legal subterfuge to postpone the action ad infinitum. The leader of the company union has acquiesced, postponed union elections for two years, and disappeared from the public eye. Further to his ostensibly religious ends, the subject has advocated "faith-based employment" and introduced company chaplains (C-in-C's) into his basement command bunker. He has not shrunk from distributing photos that subliminally suggest that he is the Son of God.
7. His chief operating officer, one Dick "Torquemada" Cheney, scion of an old Boston family, exercises predominant planning functions and implements executive functions far exceeding his statuatory authority. He once chaired a search committee to select a deputy chairman which astonishingly chose himself. This eminence gris acts as a virtual recluse in an undisclosed location. George B. is a trained broadcaster with cultivated forensic skills. This cultivated ability is displayed, however, only on formal or "set piece" occasions. When forced to improvise, he is remarkably tongue-tied. Consequently he dodges the press at every opportunity, enjoys minimal contact with elected worker representatives, none with Negro organizations, and even shuns unchaperoned contact with his own company specialists. It is conceivable that his immediate entourage, inherited (or self-selected) from his father's administration, understand the limitations of his abilities. They have apparently formed an "iron ring" to insulate their employer of record from unrehearsed public intercourse. Flora, his wife, is further suspected of exercising domestic disciplinary authority over her wealthy but unstable husband. George B. continues to conduct company business with foreign clients at hole-in-corner locations, without competent experts present, at a mesquite-overgrown Texas spread or at a gated reclusive lodge in Maryland's Catatonic Mountains. His press spokesman announces George's unilateral decisions before a compliant press assembly so often that he is often (if mistakenly) assumed to be the Acting Company President. His personal secretary, Sissy Nice, a former California road-house waitress at "The Farm" restaurant not far from sophisticated San Francisco, is more adept at entertaining foreign male executives than in administering, advising, or restraining her employer. (She reserves her dominatrix tendencies for regaling competitors.)
8. In sum, because of his persistent aggressive and violence-prone advocacy ("Keep on killin' 'em! We'll kill 'em all!") , duplicity in pronouncements and policies, excessive secretiveness and extravagant spending habits--the heir to a rich oil dynasty, trained in manners at exclusive Ivy League colleges, he has never acknowledged the requirements of fiscal discipline--George B., a recovering alcoholic, is to be remanded to the Guantanamo facility for involuntary treatment as a "sociopathic personality."
Bazarov-Nosferato Psychological Clinic
Rapallo, Germany
NB--The original clippings from academic studies are no longer accessible. Psychologists in attendance are urged to consult the literature, in which the dividing line between "sociopath" and "entrepeneur" is distinctly blurred.
FROM: Dr. Povanda, Psychological Practicioner
DATE:Feb. 5, 2003
SUBJECT: Suspected Sociopath
1. The subject, George B., currently occupies a responsible executive position in a large conglomorate deriving its income from two main subsidiaries. One is in the oil production and marketing sphere. The other provides armed security guards for managers appointed to supervise foreign subsidiaries under oil cartel control.
2. The subject inherited his position from his father , George H.W., after an eight year interval in which the company was administered by a straw man. Ab initio George B. embarked on a policy of virtually unrestrained deficit spending. In this he was encouraged by his father's former comptroller, crony, and now general factotum. The company's internal script, the "Holler," has steadily fallen against both gold bullion and the new Euro. There are no appreciable signs of reversal, given the prospect of mounting deficits and the continuing prospect of of the company consuming more than it earns. The subject fired the company treasurer who, after a tour of Africa with a sexy rock star, announced his preference for a soundly-backed script (the "strong Holler"). He also took the axe to his private financial adviser, who had warned that taking over oil fields in a hostile takeover from a regional competitor would cost in excess of $200 billion US, for which the company held insufficient funds.
3. Whilst circumspect in public, the subject has frequently stated his firm is under continual threat of attack by fanatical terrorists. Last year he attacked the Afghani gas fields, removed the previous managers, and through manipulated proxies and a controlled stakeholders' assembly (the "Big Tent"), installed his own front man as manager on an ethnic reservation (Chief Hamid the Bold). For the last fifteen months he has manifested the behavior of a typical stalker, pursuing the once formidable but now superannuated manager of a semi-ruined regional oil competitor, either because he fears the old-line owner has weaponized his employees, or entertains malevolent thoughts in secret, or is dodging an international audit, or represents in his abhorrent person the quintessence of human evil. His company has continued to seek and sign secret undertakings to divide the opponent's property among the most slavish of his subsidized adherents ("lynching by the willing").
4. The subject frequently manifests inconsistent ultra-nationalistic and ultra-conservative convictions. He recently visited a sectarian Southern university where Blancos and Negros among the disparate nationalities in his employ were (until his visit) forbidden to date. He has stated orally that he favors diversity in the workplace, yet his company recently filed suit to terminate affirmative actions programs for minority nationalities. He is a stong public proponent of the so-called "right-to-life" ideology. He has forbiden the company clinic to distribute birth control implements or medication. He has refused to pay dues to an international organization on the East Coast because it distributes birth control information which might facilitate abortions in overpopulated China. On M.L. King's memorial weekend, he issued a proclamation fervently reaffirming the "sanctity" of life. Not ten days had passed before he announced an eleemosynary gift to a distant African town, to subsidize the distribution of drugs against AIDS and condoms (perhaps to restrict the reproduction of Negros).
5. He has undertaken the largest company reorganization in 40 years to unify, strengthen and coordinate (Gleichschaltung) the security guard and to restrict access to company property. He has begun interrogating, registering and fingerprinting foreign workers and even visitors to company grounds. He has complained that open parklands on his northern boundary are open to visitors, residents, immigrants, terrorists, and moose alike, and urged that his property line be secured by armed patrols.
6. Each time the possibility of a workers' action arises, he employs legal subterfuge to postpone the action ad infinitum. The leader of the company union has acquiesced, postponed union elections for two years, and disappeared from the public eye. Further to his ostensibly religious ends, the subject has advocated "faith-based employment" and introduced company chaplains (C-in-C's) into his basement command bunker. He has not shrunk from distributing photos that subliminally suggest that he is the Son of God.
7. His chief operating officer, one Dick "Torquemada" Cheney, scion of an old Boston family, exercises predominant planning functions and implements executive functions far exceeding his statuatory authority. He once chaired a search committee to select a deputy chairman which astonishingly chose himself. This eminence gris acts as a virtual recluse in an undisclosed location. George B. is a trained broadcaster with cultivated forensic skills. This cultivated ability is displayed, however, only on formal or "set piece" occasions. When forced to improvise, he is remarkably tongue-tied. Consequently he dodges the press at every opportunity, enjoys minimal contact with elected worker representatives, none with Negro organizations, and even shuns unchaperoned contact with his own company specialists. It is conceivable that his immediate entourage, inherited (or self-selected) from his father's administration, understand the limitations of his abilities. They have apparently formed an "iron ring" to insulate their employer of record from unrehearsed public intercourse. Flora, his wife, is further suspected of exercising domestic disciplinary authority over her wealthy but unstable husband. George B. continues to conduct company business with foreign clients at hole-in-corner locations, without competent experts present, at a mesquite-overgrown Texas spread or at a gated reclusive lodge in Maryland's Catatonic Mountains. His press spokesman announces George's unilateral decisions before a compliant press assembly so often that he is often (if mistakenly) assumed to be the Acting Company President. His personal secretary, Sissy Nice, a former California road-house waitress at "The Farm" restaurant not far from sophisticated San Francisco, is more adept at entertaining foreign male executives than in administering, advising, or restraining her employer. (She reserves her dominatrix tendencies for regaling competitors.)
8. In sum, because of his persistent aggressive and violence-prone advocacy ("Keep on killin' 'em! We'll kill 'em all!") , duplicity in pronouncements and policies, excessive secretiveness and extravagant spending habits--the heir to a rich oil dynasty, trained in manners at exclusive Ivy League colleges, he has never acknowledged the requirements of fiscal discipline--George B., a recovering alcoholic, is to be remanded to the Guantanamo facility for involuntary treatment as a "sociopathic personality."
Bazarov-Nosferato Psychological Clinic
Rapallo, Germany
NB--The original clippings from academic studies are no longer accessible. Psychologists in attendance are urged to consult the literature, in which the dividing line between "sociopath" and "entrepeneur" is distinctly blurred.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)