Upon the Notion of Externalities

Welcome to Philadelphia, Friends, where black is the new black, plain is the new attractive, rich is the new smart and it all just seems so goddamn familiar it's like switching back to the right hand.

In short, Welcome to the annual convention of the Modern Language Association.

We know we've been gone for awhile, and we know that you're expecting all sorts of snide observations about the smug mystification of academic "radicals," about literature that is subverting, resisting, third-space-of-critique-opening, all sorts of gerunding in the face of manifest social, sexual, racial, and economic inequalities.

You've come to expect it from us, haven't you? If you wanted an informative piece on the MLA that included wacky paper titles, you'd go to the New York Times. If you wanted to know where to get a first-class cauldron of Belgian-style mussels, you'd look -- well, okay also the New York Times. You come here not to learn, but to remember what you might accidentally have misplaced.

Our admittedly lucrative job, therefore, isn't to report, to deconstruct, or even to entertain. Our job in these moments is to remind you that public universities have demonstrably joined their private counterparts in working as engines of inequality, to remind you that "ad hominem" is a satisfying fallacy, but that -- nevertheless, Friends, never-the-less -- people with pensions and portfolios don't have much interest in changing the way business is conducted.

We further trust that you recognize how openly, strongly, and insistently we include ourselves in all of these indictments.

So why do we come here every year? Not for the job opportunities, we can assure you. For us there are none, or at least none that aren't indexed to the manifest and admirable talents of Those We Keep Close By.

No, we come here every year because sometimes the Swill needs to be reminded of things. We need to be reminded of all the research we could have done but didn't, all the articles we might have written but wouldn't, all the thoughts we might have but won't, the people we might know but don't, the conversations we're having that we wish we weren't. The MLA serves for us as a mnemonic string -- no, make that a tourniquet -- that we tie around our index-finger anually, to remind us of how quickly our life is slipping away, and how we're not ever sure if we want to retard or accelerate the process.

But we're not going to complain, we're not going to indict, we'll neither denounce nor announce this year's convention. Why? Because it's the opportunity cost for living a life of relative ease and comfort, no boss on our back and no real back in our labor, if you know what we mean. On a daily basis, we are able to avoid confronting what our lifestyle in academia truly costs, because we externalize most of it and sublimate the rest.

But this year, we're also reminded of something positive: that we can indulge our own decadent sensualities and support skilled Minnesota craftsmen and craftswomen doing their Unionized best to ease the pain of everyday life. How? With a pair of Red Wing Model 875s, $148 with tax. Lifetime boots, friends, that are simultaneously classic, cutting-edge, cozily familiar and shockingly styslish. As an added bonus, there are no fingernails of Indonesian 12-year-olds to be found stuck in the tongues.

Expensive? Not at all. Red Wing Shoes and Boots are just one of those increasingly rare moments in American consumer capitalism when you are allowed to confront the full cost of your comfort.

We're not sure whether or not you'll hear from us again in this Foulest Year of Our Lard. We don't have the stomach to look back on what we have done, much less on what we did nothing much to prevent in 2006.

But do know that, through all the bile and guile, we will have loved you all.

And Iran, Iran so far away...

In our continuing spirit of generous giving, we offer you -- Dear Friends!!! -- more thoughts from prominent members of the Collective Swill, the very power and rarity of whose words makes them unfit for weekly consumption. In short, we're not sure you're ready to handle them frequently.

This week, we're joined once again by Mickey Bones, an unruly thinker and iron-fisted administrator who has long served as a sort of Shadow Swill. Bones is the kind of writer who knows more dead languages than you do, who knows more about Irving Berlin than you ever will, and who enjoys the protection of more than a few gonnegtions. In short, give a hay-ho swillcome to Mickey Bones, whom we recently approached with questions about the conference in Tehran. The responses are characteristically pithy and cogent.

*****

For those who are interested questions concerning the connection between the Holocaust and the existence of the state of Israel, here’s the answer: there is none. Moral justifications are not sufficiently persuasive to maintain the continued existence of states. Besides internal cohesion (i.e. nationalism), states are made possible by the political function they serve for other states (i.e. realpolitics).

Historically, the geo-political function of Israel has been to help a world power dislodge another world power from its control over the resources of the Middle East.

Examples:

Balfour Declaration 1917: The British support Palestinian Jewry as part of a strategy to dislodge Ottoman control of the Middle East.

Outcome: Successful. The Ottomans lose their Middle East empire to Great Britain.

UN vote of 1947: The USSR supports a two-state solution as part of a strategy to dislodge British control of its Middle and South Eastern empire.

Outcome: Successful. The British lose most of their empire to the USSR.

Yom Kippur War of 1973: The USA supports Israel as part of a strategy to dislodge Soviet control of the Middle East, specifically over Egypt.

Outcome: Successful. Egypt becomes a client of the US, the USSR loses its Middle East Empire to the US.

The irony of this strategy is that once successfully executed, Israel the ally becomes a liability to the colonizing force, since local populations do not tolerate the existence of Jewish state power. It has usually taken a period of two or three decades before the former allies become outright enemies. The US and Israel are in that transitional period right now.

Probable future:

(1) Israel and America will part ways.

(2) Israel will find new allies that wish to dislodge American control over the resources of the Middle East.

(3) America will lose control over the resources of the Middle East.

If the Holocaust had any role in creating the State of Israel, it was to remind Jews of the obvious: power and political function are the only justifications that matter.

- mb

Ballad of Deading Gaol

Dear Swill:

The passing of Pinochet, with all its alliterative charm, puts me in a bind. As usual, I rejoice when a public figure I detest dies--it's nice, nice to outlive the assholes who make the world such a grim place for so many. Even the glum thought that there's an eternally- replenished source of venal scum doesn't quite dim this bit of Schadenfreude.

Parties were thrown at Phredward's when Francisco Franco finally kicked the tube, when Reagan joined his ancestors, when the grotesque John Paul II finally went to greet Peter at the pearlies, when Jean Kirkpatrick, that totalitarian prune, allowed her small heart to burst one night, when Hassan II of Morocco, against whom my family nurses a very particular animosity, one of my relatives having spent seventeen years in Hassan's jails, alternatingly suffering torture and isolation, shuffled off his mortal coil.

Yes, good deaths, all of them.

But among these good deaths that have come, limpingly, to evil men and women, Pinochet's provokes some of the most mixed feelings. Not because yours truly joins the flocks of Chilean bourgeois fools and US neocons-in-the-totalitarian-vs-authoritarian-mold, à la Kirkpatrick--of course not. Because the more-or-less peaceful death at the fine age of 91 of a particularly disgusting criminal so ripely proves that justice doesn't come when called (or even when summoned by drop-dead gorgeous Spanish judges like Baltasar Garzón), and because this confirms one's own views, viz., that justice, being nothing in particular, never comes on time, if at all.

I am gladdened, horribly, in this way: the worse the perpetrator, the more awful the crimes, and the less he or she is punished, the clearer the thrown circumstances of folks become--the clearer it is that no gods, justice or even Baltasar Garzón, however loudly or persuasively addressed, will show up to toot the final trump. I have an obscure sense that Primo Levi, and Paul Celan, and Jean Améry bumped into this sense, maybe once too often, in the years after they left the camps, after Nuremberg.

In any event--here's a sentence I address not to justice, who won't show and might not be welcome at my party if she did, but to another no-show whom I prize as highly--the thousands that Pinochet had tortured and killed, the disappeared, the lost: compañeros, the pig is dead, and you are not forgotten.

Phredward