Wednesday, November 30, 2005

The Cost of Freedom

Fox News has a new financial show called "The Cost of Freedom". It's interesting that this ought to show up now when people are more seriously considering the cost of our involvement in Iraq. Here I'm assuming the usual WWII understanding of the phrase, and it fits right into the whole amnesiac rhetoric of casting Iraq as Nazi Germany. A new genre: talking points smuggled into show titles. But the phrase is being thrown around in some strange ways. First, it seems to be a rather dire name for a show about money and business. There is a sense in which the businessperson, rather than the soldier, is the martyr for freedom.

Second is the sense that freedom is only available to those who can afford it, that freedom is no longer priceless. Freedom costs money. Those who can afford to get out of New Orleans, for example, have it. Zygmunt Baumann identifies the ability to travel as the new class division in the globalist new millenium. This ethos is signified in a million shiny car ads.

Finally, there is perhaps the most bizarre, yet seemingly dominant meaning of the phrase, which is that freedom itself is bad for business. I say dominant because you can read it as a simple association of two words. Freedom costs, it hurts. That is, "the cost of freedom" is code for the value system of the advancing corporate-fascist state. The kind of freedom enshrined in the Bill of Rights, for example, must be stamped out. Freedom, if left to its idle hands, has a habit of questioning wartime profiteering, demanding all kinds of inefficiencies like public parks and Social Security and Freedom of Information Acts. The citizen of the corporate-fascist state does not have freedom (though it is said that one may acquire it for a price); this citizen rather has duties to The Economy, to suit up in a designer hairshirt of debt every year in a bizarre ritual mix of aceticism and hedonism to please the latest avatar-god, Santa. (And no, you do not have to wish for it because someday it will be Christmas all year long!) Now I think I truly understand the phrase "Freedom Isn't Free" when I see it on a car window next to a decal of a child peeing on Brand X. The hidden meaning is plain to those who do not understand irony. Freedom isn't free anymore.

Chavez and Good Deeds

When Rita and Katrina ravaged the Gulf Coast and brought the question of poverty to the image market; when oil refineries were trashed, gas prices thrust into orbit, and oil companies were making a windfall off dire speculation; and when Pat Robertson was calling for Hugo Chavez's assassination - this is when Chavez suggested that he might offer poor Americans cheap gas and heating oil through the Venezuelan state-owned PdVSA (Petroleum de Venezuela) and its US outlets, 7-11 and Citgo. At the time, he was very nearly laughed off the second page. How would he accomplish this even if he were serious? He must be just trying to rub Bush's political problems in his face.

But Chavez is following through with his announcement. The New York Daily News has been on the case. Chavez revealed the details of his pilot plan in September, which was to start shipments to poor districts in Chicago and New York Citgos. According to the Daily News, shipments of cheap fuel will begin arriving in the Bronx this week.

With gasoline prices still very high, this act ought to play very interestingly in the media. Now, for the past nine months, we have seen a ramping up of Chavez news activity. He has been on the Bush/Oilies hit list for some time now, and this year, at least before Iraq/Hurricane/Plame public opinion went south, the Bushies had been mentioning him quite often. Chavez will remain on the edge of the public radar for a while. When the time is right again, I suspect that the powers that be will engage in a full-on campaign of demonization.

Chavez knows this, and he is staging a Robin Hood spectacle as a preemptive attack. He is aware that the real battle is the rhetorical one - who can claim the higher moral ground. With the spectre of poverty rearing its un-American head and Chavez emerging as the only one who seems to care, it will be tough to turn him into a wood-chipping Saddam Hussein. And the whole thing is polished with nothing less than an ironic coat of crude oil.

But perhaps this will only infuriate the wealthier majority in the country who have to pay regular price to fill up their behemoth SUV's. They are the ones you don't want to rattle. They will run your ass over on their way to church.

Tuesday, November 29, 2005

Christopher Hitchens

MRZine recently published a lovely piece by Richard Seymour about the psychopathy of Christopher Hitchens. For me, Hitchens has stopped being a bogeyman turncoat and become more of a curiosity. I get the sense that Hitchens is pulling some kind of Andy Kaufmann stunt on the world, and it is sheer brilliance. Or he is practicing to be a chameleon in the next life. Or he is some kind of razor-tongued alien sent back from the future to out post all the post toasty lefties who consider politics irrelevant and futile. Or perhaps like Dennis Miller, Hitchens made a cold, calculated (but misinformed) wager to be on the winning team...

And because Hitchens resembles and has some of the same manerisms as a very good friend of mine, Mike Wagner, I'm willing to cut him some slack. Sorry, Mike.


The wily, opportunistic Hitchens


The wily, principled Wagner

The Psychological Effect

I've been listening to the torture debates since McCain led the Senate in passing the amendment to the defense spending bill that banned torture, a ban that Cheney opposed. All of the debates, of course, come back to Alan Dershowitz's "ticking clock" scenario where a bomb is set to go off at the Super Bowl, the CIA has the suspect, and, well... I don't think this torture debate is going to end with the McCain amendment. The executive is going to continue to press for policy that will grant amnesty if the executive is caught in a high-profile torture case that people care about. We already know that U.S. torture practices are systemic and historic.

Now, on mainstream TV news, the answer to the ticking clock argument is always the same: 1) Torture is not something an enlightened state does, and 2) Torture doesn't work. Here the "debate" ends. The enlightened state argument is trumped by the magnitude of the imminent explosion, a utilitarian (Enlightenment) appeal. The argument that torture "doesn't work" has a little more weight. But then again, if a bomb is going to go off, who cares if suspects will say darned near anything under torture? The debate ends on the tacit conclusion that torture is better than nothing. Might as well torture the hell out of the guy who is going to ruin the halftime show.

There is one response to the ticking clock argument that I have yet to see. Say a person buys the line that torture "doesn't work." Why would a snarly VP then care about the right to excercise the torture option? I'm dumbfounded that those straw-man lefties on TV don't jump up to fill this gaping logical hole. The answer is that torture DOES WORK very well. Though it may not be good for extracting correct information, it is very good for extracting confessions, a steady stream of which the administration desperately needs to convince the electorate to submit to the plutocracy. Torture has also been quite effective in human history for terrorizing a population into submission - a handy tool for running an empire. Torture works quite well for a number of things, just nothing that will protect the nation from a ticking bomb.

Like the continued U.S. use of banned-by-treaty munitions (depleted uranium, cluster bombs, white phosphorous, napalm, land mines), torture is a handy tool whose effects reach beyond only the bodies of the tortured. Like the napalm used in Fullajah, torture "works."

Col. James Alles, commander of the U.S. Marine Air Group II. "We napalmed both those bridge approaches," he said. "Unfortunately, there were people there … you could see them in the cockpit video. … It's no great way to die. The generals love napalm. It has a big psychological effect."