Posts in April, 2008
Militias, message force multipliers, and Christopher Hitchens
April 23, 2008 54 comments
Attention: there is a new album by Whitesnake available at Amie St. The first track goes like this:
You may imagine I am making the horns.
What’s that? You were expecting something about Unspeak too? Oh, very well.
“Radical cleric” Muqtada al-Sadr has, I heard a CNN news reporter say the other day, been “refusing to disband his militia”. Well, why should he? After all, everyone knows that a “well-regulated militia” is “necessary to the security of a free state”, which is why America’s houses need to be stuffed with guns. Perhaps the complaint is that al-Sadr’s militia is not “well-regulated”. In response, al-Sadr pointed petulantly at the Badr Organization, formerly known as the Badr Brigade, and said “They’re a militia, why don’t you tell them to disband?” And the Badrs said “Hey, we’re not a militia: look, it says Organization in our name, how can we be a militia?” And al-Sadr said “All right then, I shall rename the Mahdi Army, from now on it will be called Mahdi, Brown & Root, is that better?” And so it goes.
By the way, Patrick Cockburn’s book on al-Sadr is good: here is my short review of it, together with a review of a book called Mindfucking, which I wish had lived up to its title. Of course, Unspeak is a kind of mindfucking.
Meanwhile, according to the New York Times, US military “analysts” who appear on TV and defend the administration’s policies are, um, administration stooges who basically say whatever they’re told to say. Who would have guessed? The report contains some lovely Unspeak. These sockpuppets, apparently, are known as message force multipliers, to help the Pentagon gain information dominance in the MindWar being waged against — who else? — the American people themselves.
Lastly, what is an “intellectual”? Darned if I know, given Foreign Policy / Prospect magazines’ new list of the top 100 public intellectuals in the world, from which you are invited to vote for five. Apparently, General Petraeus, “military strategist”, is a public intellectual. Qué? (So, apparently, is Björn Lomborg, here described as an “environmentalist” although he isn’t one.)
Luckily, our old friend Christopher Hitchens is also on the list, and has written an essay explaining what a public intellectual is. Among other things, intellectuals are those people:
who care for language above all and guess its subtle relationship to truth
The subtle relationship of Hitchens’s language to truth has often been remarked hereabouts.
The list itself is interesting. There’s a pretty good showing for novelists — Coetzee, Eco, Oz, Pamuk, Rushdie — and unspeak.net favourite Slavoj Zizek also creeps in, to throw custard pies in everyone else’s face.
When you vote, you can also nominate someone who isn’t on the list, but should be. Defend your choice in comments!
54 comments
Politicians: mafiosi?
April 20, 2008 1 comment
Henry at Crooked Timber links to Charles Tilly’s 1982 essay Warmaking and Statemaking as Organised Crime [pdf], which by happy chance dovetails nicely with my previous post on the US Justice Department’s current system of deferred prosecution for corporate malefactors, and reader Richard’s apt characterization of it as basically a protection racket. Tilly’s paper opens with a nice riff on the possible valences of the word “protection”:
In contemporary American parlance, the word “protection” sounds two contrasting tones. One is comforting, the other ominous. With one tone, “protection” calls up images of the shelter against danger provided by a powerful friend, a large insurance policy, or a sturdy roof. With the other, it evokes the racket in which a local strongman forces merchants to pay tribute in order to avoid damage, damage the strongman himself threatens to deliver. [...]
[C]onsider the definition of a racketeer as someone who creates a threat, then charges for its reduction. Governments’ provision of protetion, by this standard, often qualifies as racketeering. To the extent that the threats against which a given government protects its citizens are imaginary, or are consequences of its own activities, the government has organized a protection racket.
TWAT, anybody?
1 comment
A new approach to corporate crime
April 16, 2008 8 comments
The New York Times reported recently:
In a major shift of policy, the Justice Department, once known for taking down giant corporations, including the accounting firm Arthur Andersen, has put off prosecuting more than 50 companies suspected of wrongdoing over the last three years.
Instead, many companies, from boutique outfits to immense corporations like American Express, have avoided the cost and stigma of defending themselves against criminal charges with a so-called deferred prosecution agreement, which allows the government to collect fines and appoint an outside monitor to impose internal reforms without going through a trial. In many cases, the name of the monitor and the details of the agreement are kept secret.
Deferred prosecutions have become a favorite tool of the Bush administration.
Deferred prosecution is a beautifully tactful way to say No prosecution (as long as you pay us big wads of cash). But perhaps you suppose that “deferred” means, as it is normally understood, just put off until later? Not really:
Most agreements end after two or three years with the charges permanently dismissed.
Ah, so the prosecutions are “deferred” for ever. That’s a relief.
But why is the government so interested in collecting big wads of cash in lieu of prosecuting companies for acts that include “financial crimes, [...] Medicare and Medicaid fraud, kickbacks and environmental violations”? This might be a clue:
Deferred prosecution agreements, or D.P.A.’s, have become controversial because of a medical supply company’s agreement to pay up to $52 million to the consulting firm of John Ashcroft, the former attorney general, as an outside monitor to avoid criminal prosecution.
I am reminded of George W. Bush’s insistence that “the justice system” shouldn’t “affect the flows of capital”. Presumably, diverting a little of those flows into the pockets of the former chief law-enforcement officer of the US doesn’t count.
A “deferred prosecution”, of course, is only a narrow case of the administration’s speciality, which we might be tempted to christen deferred justice — retaining, of course, the special meaning of “deferred”, so that it means “no justice, ever”. This is the species of justice that, in an admirable display of even-handedness, the government metes out not only to prisoners held for years without trial but also to the politicians and lawyers responsible for dreaming up its torture régime: they are granted immunity from US prosecution by the MCA. Really, a justice forever deferred is the most perfect kind.
What have you “deferred” recently, readers?
8 comments
Amis: no laughing matter
April 8, 2008 26 comments
Martin “I am a serious” Amis’s book about the scrotum-tighteningly horroristic age in which we live in has attracted an exhilaratingly vituperative review by Michiko Kakutani in today’s New York Times. She starts as she means to go on, referring in the first sentence to “one of these chuckleheaded essays”. Lovely.
But then I began to wonder: what does “chuckleheaded” really mean? I had always vaguely assumed that it was an American coinage dating from within the last century or so, and had fondly visualized a person with a big squishy yellow cartoon head; or alternatively, a person so irredeemably stupid that he does nothing but chuckle: a laughing fool.
Checking in the OED, though, I find that it has been possible to be a chucklehead since as long ago as 1730. In Thomas Bridge’s Homer travestie (1764), we find the following remarkable couplet:
You think the rock of Troy
Some chuckle-headed booby boy.
(He didn’t call it a travestie for nothing.) And although “chuckle” meant “laugh” from 1548, it seems that chuckleheaded is built rather on the sense of “chuck” meaning “lump” (originally the same word as “chock”). So, the indefatigable lexicographers say, “chuckle-headed” is very like “block-headed”. (There are also the mocking usages “chucklepate” and even “chuckle Chin”.)
Gratifyingly, the sense of a “chucklehead” as someone big, lumbering and clumsy might even represent an extra gleeful ad hominem dart, when applied to the small Mr Amis.
But anyway. I am glad to have learned more from Kakutani’s review than I would have learned from reading The Age of Testicle-Torsioning Infinite Horroristicality. A chucklehead is not, as I had always thought, someone who goes round giggling all the time, but someone whose head is so dense that no mere idea can penetrate it.
What words have you only recently discovered the proper meanings of, readers?
26 comments
