douglass carmichael: books

Sun, 19 Sep 2004 16:50:36 GMT

Books in the NYT this morning. The place of nature

http://www.nytimes.com/pages/books/index.html

But as magnificent and successful as they are, there is something wrong with the peregrine. That's why Tennant is in that old airplane, a guest of the Army Chemical Corps, which is trying to figure out where these falcons go when they migrate. The Army wants to know because in the tissue and bones of these tough little birds resides the residue of the millions of gallons of pesticides that keep American farms productive. Falcons are at the top of their food chain, which means they eat creatures that eat the insects that ingest the deadly chemicals. This accumulation of poisons has brought the peregrine to the brink of extinction. The Army studies the falcons not because it loves them, but because it hopes to figure out what is going to happen to them, and by extension to us, and to prepare for the worst.

and from Joce Carol Oates

OYCE CAROL OATES'S gravely ambitious new novel is set at Niagara Falls, and you practically need a rain slicker to read it. As usual, Oates pours out her story in great cascading sheets of prose in which words, sentences, paragraphs, even chapters often seem as insignificant individually as drops of water in the massive falls, their only function to contribute, by sheer volume, to the persistent fine spray of actions, perceptions and metaphors that is this writer's idea of a novel, and to the constant dull roar of Meaning that ''The Falls,'' like all her fiction, aims to generate.

Her method, that is to say, has always been to overwhelm, to awe, to wear her readers down with the relentless pounding of her sensibility. But enough. Niagara Falls is such an apt metaphor for Joyce Carol Oates's force-of-nature aesthetic that the temptation to elaborate it further is nearly irresistible. In that direction, however, lies madness -- which, according to one of the book's epigraphs, attributed to a Dr. Moses Blaine, happens to be a possible consequence of allowing oneself to linger too long in the mysterious presence of the falls. Writing a hundred years or so ago, Dr. Blaine identified ''an uncanny effect called the hydracropsychic,'' a ''morbid condition'' that has been known to ''render even the will of the active, robust man in the prime of life temporarily invalid, as if under the spell of a malevolent hypnotist,'' with the result, in the direst cases, that ''the unfortunate victim throws himself to his doom if he is not prevented.''

Tue, 24 Aug 2004 15:44:10 GMT

Another must read..

http://www.logosjournal.com/west.htm

an analysis of the needs of real democracy now. excerpt..

Democracy matters are frightening in our time precisely because the three dominant dogmas of free-market fundamentalism, aggressive militarism, and escalating authoritarianism are snuffing out the democratic impulses that are so vital for the deepening and spread of democracy in the world. In short, we are experiencing the sad American imperial devouring of American democracy. This historic devouring in our time constitutes an unprecedented gangsterization of America—an unbridled grasp at power, wealth, and status. And when the most powerful forces in a society—and an empire—promote a suffocation of democratic energies, the very future of genuine democracy is jeopardized.

And as for solutions

No democracy can flourish against the corruptions of plutocratic, imperial forces—or withstand the temptations of militarism in the face of terrorist hate—without a citizenry girded by these three moral pillars of Socratic questioning, prophetic witness, and tragicomic hope.

Mon, 28 Jun 2004 00:28:44 GMT

Timothy Garton Ash

Americans can still do these good things in the world, but they don't have unlimited time. As time goes by, the power of the United States will fade. As time goes by, Americans will be less and less able to shape the world around them. We cannot know how long this time will be, but it may be no more than 20 years. In those 20 years, however, Americans have a historic chance, working with Europeans, to lay the foundations of a free world.

from

http://books.guardian.co.uk/extracts/story/0,6761,1234540,00.html

he is writing a book called free world published jluy 1 by penguin, he wants to organize the civilized internationalsits around the world. He estimates them at 1 billion people.

An interview audio is at

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/aod/radio3_aod.shtml?nightwaves_fri

for a week

Mon, 28 Jun 2004 00:11:09 GMT

I've been reading Infidels: the conflict between Christendom and Islam 638-2002. The deep message is that jews, arabs, chiristians, reviled each other, borrowed slogans from each other, methods of fighting from each other, and remained irreconcilable. Economic pressures and slogans and fear make a bad combination. The slogans gain their energy by putting categories of defilement under religious ategories and this leading to violence and war to protect us from them. We all know this, but the depth and horror of it leaves me wilted.

a review from the guardian

http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/history/0,6121,1221931,00.html

Thu, 24 Jun 2004 06:00:29 GMT

Larry McMurtry reviews Clinton's book. At last an adequate review.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/23/books/review/0623books-mcmurtry-clinton.html

illiam Jefferson Clinton's "My Life" is, by a generous measure, the richest American presidential autobiography - no other book tells us as vividly or fully what it is like to be president of the United States for eight years. Clinton had the good sense to couple great smarts with a solid education; he arrived in Washington in 1964 and has been the nation's - or perhaps the world's - No. 1 politics junkie ever since. And he can write - as Reagan, Ford, Nixon and Lyndon B. Johnson, to go no farther back, could not.

Fri, 11 Jun 2004 04:16:23 GMT

Ancient education - how did it work? Here is Erasmus getting ready to tell us about Folly

http://www.ccel.org/e/erasmus/folly/folly.html

But I would have them whom the lightness or foolery of the argument may offend to consider that mine is not the first of this kind, but the same thing that has been often practiced even by great authors: when Homer, so many ages since, did the like with the battle of frogs and mice; Virgil, with the gnat and puddings; Ovid, with the nut; when Polycrates and his corrector Isocrates extolled tyranny; Glauco, injustice; Favorinus, deformity and the quartan ague; Synescius, baldness; Lucian, the fly and flattery; when Seneca made such sport with Claudius’ canonizations; Plutarch, with his dialogue between Ulysses and Gryllus; Lucian and Apuleius, with the ass; and some other, I know not who, with the hog that made his last will and testament, of which also even St. Jerome makes mention.

How did he learn so much, what way of taking notes, of remembering?

Fri, 04 Jun 2004 17:28:39 GMT

First report..

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/04/national/04clinton.html

Clinton, on the Road Again, Stumps for a Book, Not a Seat

By STEPHEN KINZER

HICAGO, June 3 - Bill Clinton is back.

The former president kicked off his first book tour on Thursday with a wide-ranging speech here that touched on his great-uncle Buddy, the National Rifle Association, William Butler Yeats and political attacks "that would have blistered the hair off a dog's back."

Mr. Clinton spoke to a hall packed with more than 2,000 booksellers just weeks before the release of his memoir, "My Life," which is to be delivered to bookstores on June 22. Sonny Mehta, editor in chief of Alfred A. Knopf, which is publishing the book, said the first printing would be 1.5 million copies. Mr. Mehta called the book "the fullest and most nuanced account of a presidency ever written" and promised that "our author is going to work enthusiastically to assure its success."

If the Chicago speech was any indication, Americans are in for another round of Mr. Clinton's storytelling, homespun philosophy and political insights. But Bush-bashers may be disappointed.

Mr. Clinton was remarkably conciliatory toward the Bush administration, portraying it as trying to find a new political paradigm in a swiftly changing world and gently chiding those who are horrified by the nation's course.

"You shouldn't worry about this," he said. "What's going on has happened before in America, and it should be no particular cause for concern to you."

The closest he came to criticizing President Bush was when he asserted, "Politics is not religion, and we should govern on the basis of evidence, not theology." That line won the biggest applause of the evening, some of it evidently coming from listeners who were disappointed that he did not take a more critical tone.

Mr. Clinton said he had written his book in longhand, filling about 20 notebooks. He said his editor, Robert Gottlieb, had considerably influenced its contents, at one point telling him he could not write at length about his favorite movie, "High Noon," and at another point asking him, "Did you know any sane people as a child?"

Although he spoke warmly about old political rivals like Bob Dole and Newt Gingrich, Mr. Clinton did show a flash of anger when he mentioned Kenneth W. Starr, the special prosecutor who investigated him. He said that while writing about his confrontation with Mr. Starr, he had to take a four-hour break to calm himself.

"I don't spare myself in this book," he was quick to add. "I take on a lot of water for not just the personal but the political mistakes I made."

Mr. Clinton said his book told two sets of stories.

"You could almost look at it as two books," he said. "The first is the story of my life and the story of America and how my life interwove with America's story."

This part, he said, deals with his rural upbringing and political coming of age, with special focus on the 1960's.

"If you look back on the 60's and think there was more good than harm, you're probably a Democrat," he suggested. "If you think there was more harm than good, you're probably a Republican."

The second part of the book, Mr. Clinton said, is "almost like a diary of the presidency." He said there was "a lot of policy in it, some will say too much."

"I tell the story as it happened to me," he said. "I want people to understand what it was like to be president."

Once notorious for his lack of discipline, Mr. Clinton did something he said Mr. Mehta had told him not to do: tell stories from his book. Most were from his childhood, including one about a fat and unattractive schoolteacher who told his students that he began every day by looking in the mirror and telling himself, "Vernon, you're beautiful." He joked that some of the Arkansas characters he describes might have come from a novel by Gabriel García Márquez.

"There's a lot of personal stuff, even in the White House years," he said. "I try to tell how this little story is part of America's big story."

Mr. Clinton said his book concluded with reflections on "how I think my philosophy should operate in the post-9/11 world."

"A lot of presidential memoirs are dull and self-serving," he said. "I hope mine is interesting and self-serving."

Wed, 02 Jun 2004 17:29:56 GMT

Frm Brad deLong, finding a review by Keynes of Trotsky. Quoting Keynes,

http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2003_archives/001717.html

He assumes that the moral and intellectual problems of the transformation of Society have been already solved--that a plan exists, and that nothing remains except to put it into operation. He assumes further that Society is divided into two parts the proletariat who are converted to the plan, and the rest who for purely selfish reasons oppose it. He does not understand that no plan could win until it had first convinced many people, and that, if there really were a plan, it would draw support from many different quarters. He is so much occupied with means that he forgets to tell us what it is all for."

Sun, 09 May 2004 14:58:19 GMT

Some comments on

http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/generalfiction/story/0,6000,1205883,00.html

Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake, which was shortlisted for the Orange prize this week, is a fascinating exploration of a world in which pornography has taken over from sexual intimacy. She writes of a dystopian future in which the needs of the body rule, and in which the mind and the soul are entirely discredited, a culture in which "Executions were its tragedies, pornography was its romance".

This is a long article on the social place of emerging pornography. The trend in the media, seemingly inexorable, is to have live sex and live death on TV. We are getting close. Part of the fascination with Iraq is the nudge in that direction provided by the "photographs".

What move me to write about this is what I see as confusion in the sentences quoted.. "Needs of the body rule." Death and pornography are not needs of the body in contrast to spirit. They are perversion s of needs of the body, and emerge when culture does not provide healthy approaches to sex and death. Both should be blended with positive ritual and romance and feeling. Well done they are also expressions of the body.

The problem is the modern tendency to define the body as another thing. A thing among things. Georges Bataille wrote that religion begins when humans eat the flesh of an animal. The anxiety is that as we see the animal has been reduced to a thing, so can humans. To avoid the starkness of that, the death of the animal is ritualized in a sacrifice to the gods, where god or the gods take a small part and leave the rest for us humans to eat.

Good love, good eating, good death, require a full range of feeling, the expressions of the heart, in some kind of community, with meaningful (meaning comes from what we do repeatedly - so chose carefully) ritual. In our modern America, marriage still works fairly well. But romance fails as a feeling, and death is filled with tubes and machines and money hemorrhage. We are on the wrong path.

But some simple things: we as a species have not come to terms with photography and is impact on how we see ourselves. Current photography favors medium tones - but not white- skinned skinny types with even features. The tech has a selective bias to it. And pushes people to be seen as things (Hockney has faced this with courage in much of his writing).

And before, representations of the body in drawings. Most great and (the rest )artists have played quite seriously with the open naked body in arousal. But their work remains fairly taboo. We can see this is hinting at how much moder culture is at odds with traditional, and that the move toward a successful modernity has not yet occurred. We also have to think through the possibility that modernity is not capable of being a successful humane culture because of its biased thing orientation (that is, seeing the world as made up of things rather than as experiences. Your choice of which is primary - things or experiences - is a crucial decision).

Wed, 05 May 2004 19:01:43 GMT

From Martha Nussbaum's Upheavals of Thought. (hinting at why humanities thinking is crucial to strentghten our understanding...)

(she is discussing Dante and the perspectives on love).

The love of Dante and Beatrice is, then, a love that respects subjecthood *ular manner in which it is mingled here with passivity, with what we might call the romance of grace. To that extent, it recognizes the fact that each person is a distinct individual, having only a single life to live. Is it also a love of the qualitatively particular? It is among the poem's most central concerns to establish that it is. In taking this stand, Dante's Thomistic view argues against the Augustinian tradition, according to which much of the qualitative particularity of persons - their flaws and faults, their idiosyncrasies, their very bodies and their histories - are all incidental accretions from the world of sin, to be disregarded in the context of redemption. Augustine still wishes to maintain that each soul is a distinct individual, a new beginning, having its own life to live.29 And yet, he omits so much of the lives individuals have actually led that we wonder, in the end, whether the integrity of their distinctive individual engagements has been preserved. Here we see a link between the two components of individuality: insofar as our qualitative particularity expresses wnat we have made of ourselves, the distinctive lives we have led, to treat those particular traits as inessential is to fail to respect the integrity of our personal distinctness. Reacting against Augustine's treatment of persons, Dante emphasizes these components of particularity throughout the poem, as he does most strikingly in the scene with which I began. page 572

Thu, 01 Apr 2004 16:53:42 GMT

From: H-Net Reviews <books@H-NET.MSU.EDU>;

H-NET BOOK REVIEW

Published by H-LatAm@h-net.msu.edu (February 2004)

Selwyn H. H. Carrington. _The Sugar Industry and the Abolition of the Slave Trade, 1775-1810_. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002. xxii + 362 pp. Tables, notes, bibliography, index.

$59.95 (cloth), ISBN 0-8130-2557-5; $29.95 (paper), ISBN 0-8130-2742-X.

Reviewed for H-LatAm by Matt D. Childs, History Department, Florida State University

The Caribbean Strikes Back: Eric Williams Redux

In one of the latest books in a long historiographical tradition, Selwyn Carrington tackles the relationship between the abolition of slavery and the rise of capitalism. Carrington's book should contribute to a scholarly debate that will likely intensify, as the bicentenary of the British abolition of the slave trade will be commemorated in 2007. His study builds upon the foundational work of Eric Williams's _Capitalism and Slavery_ (1944), which argued that Caribbean sugar plantations funded British industrialization that, in turn, made slavery an outdated mode of production.

Subsequently known as the "Williams Thesis," the Trinidadian-born and Oxford-educated historian delivered the coup de grace to studies that explained emancipation through hagiographies of British abolitionists. Williams powerfully concluded: "The commercial capitalism of the eighteenth century developed the wealth of Europe by means of slavery and monopoly. But in so doing it helped to create the industrial capitalism of the nineteenth century, which turned round and destroyed the power of commercial capitalism, slavery, and all its works. Without a grasp of these economic changes the history of the period is meaningless."[1] While other scholars had been working on economic explanations for abolition prior to Williams, none had stated the issue so bluntly and with such bold confidence as the Caribbean nationalist and future president of Trinidad and Tobago, much to the vexation of his imperial colleagues in Britain.[2]

Tue, 30 Mar 2004 16:12:17 GMT

Sometimes those who are at a distance can see more clearly. And it is importnat to note that the NYT, printing this, is taking a stand it badly missed the day after Clarke's meeting with the 911 commission, when the Times seemed not to see the significance of Clarke's speech

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/29/international/europe/29SPIEGEL2.html

ichard Clarke, Washington's director of counter-terrorism for many years, has delivered a devastating condemnation of the Bush administration with his sensational revelations.

The whole affair reads like a script for a catastrophic film in the best Hollywood tradition: The White House is in panic and a heavily armed Secret Service team quickly whisks Vice President Richard Cheney to a nuclear bunker and command post underneath the White House; its principal tenant, George W. Bush, jets through the skies above the Midwest in his enormous Air Force One, searching for a safe place to land.

And this review of Clarke's book this morning's Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/29/books/review/0411books-risen.html

Review of The Birth Of The Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited

Sat, 20 Mar 2004 00:27:51 GMT

Good review of the early palestinian - israeli history in a review of the book.

http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2004/04/noteworthy.htm

Tue, 16 Mar 2004 22:35:15 GMT

A very distressing review sjowing how mere calculational analysis supports a theory that people are merely calculational. Lots of hard work, all advancing the emerging mechanization of ssocial thinking. In this case, that the sighners of the Constitituion were motivated by financial personal interests.

TO FORM A MORE PERFECT UNION: A NEW ECONOMIC INTERPRETATION OF THE UNITED STATES CONSTITUTION, by Robert A. McGuire. Oxford: Oxford University Press,

2003. Hardback. 416 pp. $24.95. £25.00. ISBN: 0195139704.

Reviewed by Irwin L. Morris, Department of Government & Politics, University of Maryland. Email: imorris@gvpt.umd.edu .

http://www.bsos.umd.edu/gvpt/lpbr/subpages/reviews/McGuire304.htm

Monotheism vs polytheism

Fri, 12 Mar 2004 22:32:00 GMT

Here is a review of a book with an important theme.

God Against the Gods: The History of the War Between Monotheism and Polytheism, Jonathan Kirsch,

Alexander the Great and his successors carried Hellenism and all its intellectual and cultural baggage into the land of the Jews. The Hellenic lifestyle was immensely seductive to Jews, as Kirsch explains, but even more insidious was the Hellenic worldview, which offered a rational, flattering and attractive < and still viable < alternative to the Jewish revelation, and later to the Christian and Muslim ones as well. This titanic, and ongoing, struggle between reason and revelation is ...

What Kirsch is really interested in, and it takes up a well-merited two-thirds of his book, is, to put it somewhat baldly, Emperor Constantine's heavy-handed conversion in 313 of Christian monotheistic intolerance into the policy of the Roman empire, antiquity's "first totalitarian state."

Foreign Affairs review of Empire books.

Sun, 29 Feb 2004 16:20:43 GMT

I earlier posted the articles in Foreign Affairs. One is a review of half a dozen books on Empire, critical of the US and praising. Reading them against each other can be very useful. Each is a "true" picture, except for what it leaves out. the whole is complex., and worth study. My own conclusions, the reviewer does not see the internal dynamics of the empire as an economic hierarchy, and those who are critical, such as Johnson, do not put the events against either the achievements, or alternative ways things might have evolved. The fact that since ww2 the world has been in some major ways stable is too ignored, and that too much of the world has been economically subordinated is also not given enough weight. The picture that emerges is of a complex balalnce of goods and bads, not given to a revolution so much as an extention of the good and a suppression of the bad. In my mind the propblem at the core is that employees at a distance that take over our tasks at the local level are often scoundrels, and we, in the center, demand performance they can't deliver except by threat and coersion. More decentralization, and less cash payout to the really successful seems a modest proposal.

http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20040301fareviewessay83212b/g-john-ikenberry/illusions-of-empire-defining-the-new-american-order.html

Fernandez-Ernesto's Civilizations

Sat, 28 Feb 2004 17:26:56 GMT

There is an interesting book, Civilizations, by Fernandez-Ernesto, in which he argues that the civilizational impulse is very strong in humans, and successful empires of necessity exploit their own and surrounding people (energy and food considerations, as wll as labor to build). If this is true, how close to nature can we be and still have civilization? I look at the salmon situation and despair of the complexity of this "simple" adaptation?

Review of Herzl's novel

Fri, 27 Feb 2004 16:51:56 GMT

And read this from the New York Review

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/16955

Theodor Herzl, founding father of the Zionist movement, was not a gifted novelist. Nevertheless, his novel, Altneuland (Old-New Land), is one of the most remarkable books of the twentieth century. Although Herzl finished it in 1902, the visionary ideas expressed in this "fairy tale," as he called it, belonged firmly in the century before. Altneuland is a blueprint of the perfect Jewish state, a technocratic Utopia, a socialist dream with all the advantages of capitalism, an idealistic colonial enterprise, a model of pure reason, a "light unto the nations." It also helps to explain the extremism of some of those who rebel against the dominance of what is widely regarded as the arrogant West.

...

Altneuland is worth reading because it contains so much that is grand and hopeful about Western thought since the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. From this kind of thinking came the Industrial Revolution, liberal democracy, scientific discovery, and civil rights. But the same Promethean dreams of European rationalists, taken to logical extremes and brutally implemented, often by nonEuropeans who wanted to catch up with Western progress, have ended in the mass graves of the gulag and the killing fields of China and Cambodia. Europeans justified their imperial conquests with claims of progress and enlightenment. Asian tyrants murdered millions with the same justifications.

Historical reality writ larger

Fri, 27 Feb 2004 16:45:14 GMT

The way the bigger picture was seen 20 years ago..

At the basis of the experienced dissatisfaction lie the general miseries that afflict human existence, enumerated by Hesiod as hunger, hard work, disease, early death, and the injuries the weaker must suffer at the hands of the stronger. This general potential of dissatisfaction can then be exponentially aggravated by the disturbances of personal and social existence through events with historical mass effect. To the class of these events belong a variety of phenomena. From the demographic side one would have to consider large population movements through migration and conquest, unsettling whether peaceful or violent, unsettling alike for conquerors and conquered; furthermore, sudden decreases of population caused by human epidemics, mass starvation caused by the spread of animal and vegetable pests, and increases of population beyond the subsistence level provided by the economic and technical potential of place and time. From the political-pragmatic side one would have to consider the vast destruction of ethnic cultures by the imperial entrepreneurs of the Ecumenic Age and the subsequent rise of imperial-dogmatic civilizations from the wreckage of the ecumenic empires. For the modern period one would have to add the creation of the power differential between the Western and all other civilizations through the intellectual, scientific, commercial, and industrial revolutions in the West, as well as the exploitation of the differential to the global limits; the decline of Western power and order through the internal conflicts caused by the rise of imperial nationalisms and of equally imperial ideological movements; and the resistance of the non-Western civilizational societies to the destruction of their own cultures by a Western global ecumenism.

Voegelin Order in History vol 5 page 50

Plato and poetry - a reversal..(more)

Wed, 25 Feb 2004 17:33:10 GMT

Always a basic argument to understand..

(From BMCR 2004.02.47)

Ramona A. Naddaff, Exiling the Poets: The Production of Censorship in Plato's Republic. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Pp.

xv, 189. ISBN 0-226-56727-3. $27.50.

Reviewed by Bruce Krajewski (bkrajews@georgiasouthern.edu) Word count: 1547 words

-------------------------------

Naddaff sets out to offer an "original interpretation" of the ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy. "The censorship of poetry, I argue, is a foil, a cover, to produce literature, to produce philosophy, and to produce a reciprocal need between the two" (xi).

This surprising thesis converts censorship into something salubrious from Naddaff's perspective, at least for the goals of Platonic/Nietzschean philosophy -- more about that below.

She asserts that Plato does not wish to do away with poetry but to learn from it, in the process strengthening philosophy. The talk about censorship in the Republic calls for rethinking, according to Naddaff, since dialectic, by its nature encourages openness. "This openness to all discourses, however, is unconditional; indeed it is the condition of the possibility of the dialectic itself when it examines a nature alien to its own" (133). At this point, Naddaff sounds downright Gadamerian in her allegiance to the openness of dialogue, and fully philosophical in describing poetic discourse as "alien." That allegiance to openness dissolves rapidly when a few sentences later Naddaff endorses the analytic view of philosophy as an endless agon, a view she inherits from Nietzsche (a strange but telling source of inspiration for Naddaff's book). Naddaff tells the reader that "philosophy risks losing its own individual identity and individuality when it engages with and incorporates the object of its discourse....

Nussbaum on music and cognition

Thu, 19 Feb 2004 16:49:37 GMT

Reading Martha Nussbaum's Upheavals of Thought, the most recent in her series of books bringing the emotional life into philosophy.

What we need, then, is an account that preserves the cognitive and bolic complexity of musical experience, while refusing to treat the music as a mere means to a cognition that is extramusical in nature. Page 265.

Vidal quoting Franklin

Wed, 11 Feb 2004 22:32:55 GMT

From Gore Vidal's essential Inventing a Nation. I say essential because he tells the story in a wy that makes it interesting and human and motivated by real people, just as now..

quoting Franklin "America will, w happy country; and England, if she has at length gained wisdom, will have gained something more valuable, and more essential to her prosperity, than all she has lost; 1 be a great and respectable nation. Her great disease at present is the numerous and enormous salaries and emoluments of office. Avarice and ambition are strong passions and, separately, act with great force on the human mind; but when both are united, and may be gratified in the same object, their violence is almost irresistible, and they hurry men headlong into factions and contentions, destructive of all good government. As long, therefore, as these great emoluments subsist, your Parliament will be a stormy sea, and your public councils confounded by private interests. But it requires much public spirit and virtue to abolish them; more than perhaps can now be found in a nation so long corrupted. "

Thus Franklin, describing the England of 1783, nicely describes the United States of 2003, a once "great and happy country" being torn apart by avarice and ambition while our "public councils [are] confounded by private interests."

Note that we are talking about the same time as Napoleon is getting ready to take france out of the revolution and towards a bureucratic military state of interests.

George Washington's 1776 diary note on his new countrymen in general and the Continental Congress in particular is not promr patriots abound: venality, corruption, sh ends, abuse of trust, perversion of 1 to a private use, and speculations upon the rvade all interests."

The alternative would be a deep cocnern for the general good and freedom for all, and a recognition of the difficulties of governanace. We need to watch now for how *opposition to Bush* is a cover for class interests. Not a fully free concern for the common good.

Bush and Napoleon, obvious difference but..

Wed, 11 Feb 2004 03:18:43 GMT

Just finished reading Johnson's short biography of Napoleon. You can gues what led me to read it. The following extensive quotes bring out most of the main points..

Napoleon

Tuesday, February 10, 2004

7:21 PM

Napoleon / Paul Johnson.

It right, therefore, that we should study Bonaparte's spectacular career unromantically, skeptically, and searchingly. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, anxious as we are to avoid the tragic mistakes of the twentieth, we must learn from Bonaparte's life what to fear and what to avoid.

NAPOLEON BONAPARTE was born on 15 August 1769

sR( ment corruption was universal in Europe, one tiny country was still capable of legislating against it, in a spirit of primitive simplicity.

.. As a boy Bonaparte was distinguished by his Gift for mathematics,

(Paoli, leader of Corsica) was a man of the Enlightenment who believed—as did Jefferson, Adams, and Washington on the far side of the Atlantic; Burke and Fox in England; and Lafayette in France—that revolution and armed struggle were no more than the necessary prelude to creating a humanitarian republic endowed with an ideal constitution. …. He both hands the opportunity to treat Corsica, as Rousseau had envisaged, as a tabula rasa on which could be inscribed a scheme of government and code of laws that would make it, though small and weak, a world exemplar …. But the archetype of Paoli, not just conquering soldier but supreme legislator and enlightened ruler as well, became part of the furniture of Bonaparte's mind. …. ; an opportunity to impose a new order on the old corrupt and inefficient systems. …. Selves, was a mere liberator who then legislated with their consent, Bonaparte, with his overarching scheme for Europe, was not so much a liberator as a conqueror, and the violence of the conquest was incompatible wit …. I Bonaparte, having once unsheathed his sword, found it impossible to lay it down for long. He ended by being no nearer his goal, and no safer, than his last victory—thus inviting inevitable nemesis.

Abstract notion of Rousseau's concept the General Will, …. His will expressed the General Will (an antidemocratic notion, in which a nation's will was embodied by one man rather than by head counting) …. . Constitutions were important in the sense that window dressing was important in a shop.

Europe in the 1780s, spurred on by constitution making in America and by autocratic reform at home, was ripe for change. …. Instance, prison and law reforms were carried through, poor relief established, land reform introduced, feudal labor services abolished, the slave trade outlawed, outmoded tariffs removed, and commerce liberated, all without the assistance of the mob and without a single riot or political execution. …. .If] and decisive, France could have followed the same pattern. The aristocracy was crowded with progressive reformers. …. And France, unlike Denmark, was tied to the chariot of its great power status—it referred to itself as "the Great Nation" and sought in the second half of the eighteenth century, almost as a duty, to engage in vastly expensive and increasingly unsuccessful wars to maintain its historical position as Europe's leading country.

U>out 100,000 words survive of his notes on the books he read. He described Cromwell thus: "Courageous, clever, deceitful, dissimulating, his early principles of lofty republicanism yielded to the devouring flames of his ambition;

Civ be …. Bonaparte had called attention to himself by writing and publishing a call for national unity, a pamphlet entitled Le Souper de Beaucaire.

In ment, the war commissioners in Paris sent him to Toulon. He arrived there on 16 September and at once reorganized the artillery of the besieging forces. …. Cannon were not merely Bonaparte's trade; they embodied the power principle that was always at the heart of his thinking. The object of power, in his view, was not only to crush opposition to his will, but more usually to inspire fear, so that power did not need to be used at all. …. Another Bonaparte principleseparating opponents and attacking them individually—…. Bonaparte went to Paris, following his principle of going direct to where power lay. …. The advent of Revolutionary "justice" could be made into an opportunity to amass wealth as well as a chance to grab top positions. …. Parts of Paris were still almost entirely medieval, with narrow streets fringed by rookeries of crumbling, many-chambered houses, in which thousands of the poor lived and groaned. They could form a vast mob at short notice, capable of overawing troops without decisive commanders …. Boi decided to use artillery, the embodiment of his fear principle. That meant choosing his ground carefully and encouraging the mob to move into open spaces, near I …. Kth, mob yielded to a new era of order under fear. …. Old General de Broglie had advised King Louis XVI to use grapeshot six years before. He had been ignored, and ruin had followed. "Now," as Thomas Carlyle put it in his epic book, "the time is come for it, and the man; and behold, you have it; and the thing we specifically call French Revolution is blown into space by it, and becomes a thing that was!" ….

Fhe in the power of evil to replace idealism, ar …. The Revolution left behind itself a huge engine: administrative and legal machinery to repress the individual such as the monarchs of the ancien regime never dreamed of; a centralized power to organize national resources that no previous state had ever possessed; an absolute concentration of authority, first in a parliament, then in a committee, finally in a single tyrant,…. And a universal teaching that such concentration expressed the general will of a united people, as laid down in due constitutional form, approved by referendum. …. I It heralds Armageddon, the giant conflict for justice and nght between angered populations, each of which thinks it is the righteous one. …. His energy was godlike. Thus, as George Meredith put it, he was "hugest of engines, a much limited man."

.By Italian conquest, Bonaparte struck a responsive chord…. His first proclamation (28 March 1796) set the tone ot his relationship with his troops: "Soldiers, you are naked, ill-fed. . . But rich provinces and great towns will soon be in your power, and in them you will find honor, glory, and wealth. Soldiers of Italy! Will you be wanting in courage and steadfastness ?"….

His technique, adumbrating the Stalinist methods used in Eastern Europe at the end of the Second World War, was to encourage the formation of "patriotic" and republican committees in the main towns, then respond to their requests for independence under "French protectioin"

From first to last, the expedition to Egypt was rich in dra-*^. T plished artists like Jacques-Louis David and Antoine-Jean Gros whom Bonaparte was beginning to cultivate. …. Pid with a bazaar uprising that killed 250 of his men, exacting the deaths of 2,000 Arabs in consequence, and a fierce outbreak of bubonic plague that killed 3,000 Frenchmen. Despite this, rlprl Strno «nfl-. Methods and invaded Syria with 14,000 men, leaving only 4,500 behind in Cairo. He took Gaza, then Jaffa, where, fearing trouble from his 4,500 prisoners, he ordered them all slaughtered, which was done by bayonet thrusting or drowning, to save ammunition….. As it happens, Bonaparte's Egyptian expedition is now remembered not so much for military defeat as for cultural suecess. Indeed, it had a huge impact in France at the time as the "discovery of the Orient," …. Denon launched both the Egyptian Revival in Paris and the idea of Bonaparte as a cultural prince-innovator, turning him into a quasi-Renaissance figure with wide appeal not only throughout France but in the whole of Europe. In short, Denon was a propagandist of genius, and Bonaparte made increasing use ot his services, as head of the Louvre (soon renamed the Musee Jnapoleon) ….

Bonaparte was never held to account for these desertions, or indeed for his losses of French troops, which averaged more than 50,000 killed a year.

A few, Keats and Shelley among them, continued to recognize in Bonaparte the romantic hero, the man who broke into Egypt like a modern Alexander, or led his army across the Great Saint Bernard Pass like Hannibal. They fell in fact the propaganda, turned into actual images of the man by Bonaparte's well-coached teams of portrait and history painters, Gros, David, and the rest. In the twentieth century, this infatuation was to occur time and again: George Bernard Shaw and Beatrice and Sidney Webb falling for the Stalin ime, Norman Mailer and others hero-worshiping Fidel Gastro, and an entire generation, including many Frenchmen such as Jean-Paul Sartre, praising the Mao Zedong regime, under which sixty million Chinese perished by famine or in the camps. [efferson never said another word of personal admiration for Bonaparte after he made himself emperor. He said Bonaparte's policy was "so crooked it eludes conjecture." …. The United States was the power that permanently benefited most from the Bonapartist epoch.

The trouble with the Napoleonic Empire was that it had no natural or even artificial hierarchy. Fouche, who operated the world's first secret police force, and who was the prototype of Himmler or Beria, was an imionaparte's legacy of evil….Bonaparte was by birth a quasi-Italian, but by national adoption he became a French cultural racist. He saw the appeal of French culture as a fifth column within the camps of his enemies, a force by means of which he could appeal over the heads of hostile courts to the intelligentsia, the young, the progressive, the bohemian, ….Fra ized, but its urban economy of skilled craftsmen flourished mightily under this patronage. …. Mir sions: agriculture, commerce, subsistence, population, trade balance, factones, mines, foundnes, religion, education, and an arts section involving theater, architecture, music, and literature. …. Tn Rome, in which Bonaparte had taken a particular interest since he made his infant son its king, he created the Piazza del Popolo. There were monumental schemes elsewhere in Europe, which remained for the most part visionary, like the grander projects of Mussolini and Albert Speer.

Maker, which allowed him to claim to be the Justinian of the modern world. …. He code was conservative, or rather paternalist. It reversed the progress in women's rights tha …. It enabled the French state to reimpose slavery in the West Indies, at …. And weighted the balance heavily in favor of public authority as opposed to the individual. ….

By military men, works only (if at all) in emergencies for brief periods. Madame de Stael, whose book Ten Years'Exile is an indispensable guide to the Napoleonic period …. "an equal person like himself, …. Happen to be the rest of humanity…. "

He thing new must be done every three months, to captivate >ri stands still is ruined.r he sought to distract attention from his catastrophe in Russia by ordering the highkicking dancers at the Opera to stop wearing drawers—but the girls flatly refused.

Bonaparte believed that his foreign subjects would never rise against him, for he was the victim of his own propaganda. What he did not grasp, because he did not listen to his critics, was that in trying to conquer all Europe, he was stirring up precisely the popular nationalism that had made Revolutionary France so formidable in the first place, but that was now spreading throughout the Continent.

THE DOWNFALL of Bonaparte had its origins in the unwillingness of the British to accept his conquests and legitimize them by a general peace treaty. …. This blockade had an effect on Bonaparte disproportionate to its economic importance, considerable though that was. He thought it was unfair, even morally outrageous….. The products from the Americas and the East took back with them French wine, brandy, and silks for smuggling into Britain

Both (spain and Russia) had untamed, often unbridged rivers, poor or nonexistent roads, subsistence economies that could not support unsupplied armies, …. Placed the rest at the invader's feet. They were both eaters of armies..3ut in Spain the more troops the emthe more resistance stiffened. There were 30,000 in Madrid, under Murat, appointed military governor. An army of 25,000 under Junot in Portugal, and ) along the Tagus, 15,000 in Catalonia, and 30,000 in reserve in Castile—120,000 in all. Fhe Spanish army was beaten again and again, with no perceptible change in the overall situation. …. Victory at all, was one of the many reasons that led Bonaparte to embark on a war against Russia. …. "Does not your master realize I have 800,000 troops?" He did not have that many, but he could get together 650,000. …. The great plains of Russia, in summertime, were baking hot and almost waterless. …. Tec losses on both sides were enormous: 40,000 Russians and perhaps as many as 50,000 on the French side…..calculated that defeat in battle would bring the czar to the negotiating table and, if that failed, the loss of the ancient capital, Moscow, would leave him no alternative but to capitulate. But from first to last the czar did very little, leaving his two armies to blunder about. But by now he was down to 95,000 effectives and most of his horses were dead. Metiernich, shaken by the emperor's lack of realism, asked him if he really wanted peace—did not the lives of men matter to him? Bonaparte told him that, rather than accept such dishonorable terms, he would gladly sacrifice a million."

Destroying the Holy Roman Empire seemed, to Bonaparte, no more momentous than ending the Venetian oligarchy or replacing the Knights ot iviaiia. It was just dumping a medieval relic in the dustbin of history. In fact, the Holy Roman Empire filled a role. It was a device for stressing the cultural unity of Germany while making it difficult to bring about its political and military unity. …. ,Th wanted to keep things as they were. They argued that the balance between Prussia and Austria, and the existence of other German cultural centers, was of great benefit to Europe in music and painting, education and philosophy, theology and literature. Culture was Germany's gift to Europe, not power.

Bonaparte played the detonating role in this process. …. but it was all the more powerful, when the Russian catastrophe brought it into the open, for being accompanied by a deep-rooted and overwhelmingly muscular cultural reaction. The explosion in German thought and literature at the end of the eighteenth century was a determining event in European history. Coleridge was one of the first to become aware of its importance, and brought the good news to England. He thought that the imposition of alien French culture would turn German creativity inward, with disastrous consequences, and that was one reason why he hated Bonaparte so much, saw him as an enemy of the creative human spirit. The mature Bonaparte, was increasingly seen by the intelligentsia as an old-fashioned relic of a dusty classicism whose day was done, and as an implacable opponent ot the dawning romanticism his tyranny had evoked.

Great evils of Bonapartism—the deification of force and war, the all-powerful centralized state, the use of cultural propaganda to apotheosize the autocrat, the marshaling of entire peoples in the pursuit of personal and ideological power—came to hateful urity only in the twentieth century, which will go down as the Age of Infamy. It is well to remember the truth it the man whose example gave rise to it all, to strip away reality. We have to learn again the central lesson of history: that all forms of greatness, military and administrative, nation and empire building, are as nothing— indeed are perilous in the extreme—without a humble and a contrite heart.

regaining humanity

Sat, 07 Feb 2004 23:00:27 GMT

This is a good measure of the need to regain each other's humanity.

During the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, ...."This thing called reconciliation," the mother of a victim said, "if it means this perpetrator, this man who has killed Christopher Piet, if it means he becomes human again, this man, so that I, so that all or us, get our humanity back... then I agree, then I support it all."

from On Equilibrium by John Ralson Saul

NYT review of O'Neill

Mon, 02 Feb 2004 20:41:58 GMT

From the O'Neill book, via NYT review

When O'Neill worked in the Nixon and Ford White Houses, Suskind writes, he served presidents whom he respected as policy makers, whatever their other faults, for two reasons: first, they were knowledgeable about the details of policy; and second, they made it a point to have their aides present them with different, and sometimes starkly warring, points of view. Nixon called on the Office of Management and Budget (where O'Neill worked) to prepare so-called Brandeis briefs, named after Justice Louis Brandeis of the Supreme Court, that presented thorough analyses of opposing arguments and made everyone ''really think deeply about the ideal of good government and how to get there,'' in O'Neill's words. The people in the room may have all been from one political party or shared a general world view. But they understood that when spending the people's money and acting on behalf of the entire country, including that segment that did not vote for their president, their obligation to fact-based inquiry and rigorous testing of hypotheses was self-evident.

This book serves as that standard's obituary notice. First, Bush himself is portrayed as disturbingly unengaged. From O'Neill's first meeting with him through his last, Bush asked some questions here and there about politics and perception, but he rarely asked a specific question on a policy matter.

The weekend after the Sept. 11 attacks, when O'Neill was among the group invited to Camp David to discuss responses, he espied a large stack of intelligence briefings brought by the director of central intelligence, George Tenet, and found himself thinking, ''I hope the president really reads this carefully. It's kind of his job.''

Second, O'Neill smelled at many high-level meetings the odor of a conversation set up in advance to drive the discussion toward the conclusion that Rove and the political team had already settled upon. One example: At a meeting on steel tariffs, which the administration put in place in 2002 against all free-market principle, O'Neill could tell where things were going when the United States trade representative, Robert Zoellick, ''made several oblique references to 'political realities.' '' The pattern repeated itself over and over, on tax cuts and the economy and energy policy and Iraq. In time, O'Neill grew aghast, and went to his old friend Cheney to suggest that the administration try Brandeis briefs. But Cheney -- the book's chief villain and, if Suskind and O'Neill are to be believed, our functional president -- just sat passively. ''He thanked Paul, as always, 'for his sharp insights,' '' Suskind writes. And that was the end of it.