2012.12.15 — The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe: Finished in 1992(?) and Fushigi*

I wrote a review of Bonfire of the Vanities on 2012.12.14 to post on Goodreads. When I wrote it I was going to leave it there because I read BotV in the early 90s and because I felt

compelled to wrote a contrary voice to the effusive praise and awards this book has undeservedly received. I finished editing and posting the 'Goodreads' review around 1am.

Before you get to read the review, however, I'll introduce the remarkable fushigi. This morning, I resumed my perusal of Stanley Park by Canadian (Vancouver) writer, Timothy Taylor (ISBN 9780307363596).

At the bottom of the page where against which my mark sat were the words Will Work For Food in italics. Here's the paragraph that that text finishes:

He stood and approached this tree-like diorama and began to examine its leaves and branches. There were childhood pictures, here. There, a wedding picture he had not seen before. The Pelikan pen itself Scotch-taped to the wall in a cluster that included a letter from the dean of anthropology approving extended sick leave. A page torn from Will Work for Food (276).

Now that, as it turns out, is a remarkable fushigi because of what I didn't include in my review of Bonfire of the Vanities.

Bonfire of the Vanities
by Tom Wolfe. Macmillan. ISBN: 9780312427573 or ISBN10: 0312427573.

★☆☆☆☆

Here's the review I wrote:

This was one of the few books I've read because of the chit chat around it. The movie, which I felt had potential but which I thought was ultimately a directorial failure, was the final element that brought me to pick this book up. I was curious at how the movie failed and needed to read the book to see if my impression that it was a directorial failure was accurate or not. My reading that book did not answer that question with any certainty because BotV has become one of the touch stone books marking me as an outsider to the society

within which I live. Its award winning popularity is a complete mystery to me. Poorly written, it has uninteresting characters and characterization espousing a heavy handed superficial morality — sort of. My few observations of Wolfe in book interviews did not in any way dissuade me that he is an overrated wind-bag, filled with ego and hubris and little of what I would consider critical intelligence. It struck me that he was an advocate of American hegemony both domestic and foreign.

So, with that in mind it was with surprise and even fascination that I read a Tom Wolfe encomium of American domestic practices under Reagan get severely castigated by Noam Chomsky. In his satirically way, Chomsky basically puts Wolfe's social commentary into the ranks of the rantings of a delusional apologist for the greed-based policies that successfully impoverished the majority to the benefit of the very few. So, in a perversion of a 'proper' book review, here is a taste of Chomsky chastising Tom Wolfe — note, I hadn't even heard of Chomsky before reading BotV:

...
What the [economic] "paradox" [in 1992 of a 'Weak Economy but Strong Profits'] entails for the general population is demonstrated by numerous studies of income distribution, real wages, poverty, hunger, infant mortality, and other social indices. A study released by the Economic Policy Institute on Labor Day, 1992, fleshed out the details of what people know from their experience: after a decade of Reaganism, "most Americans are working longer hours for lower wages and considerably less security," and "the vast majority" are "in many ways worse off" than in the late 1970s. From 1987, real wages have declined even for the college educated. "Poverty rates were high by historic standards," and "those in poverty in 1989 were significantly poorer than the poor in 1979." The poverty rate rose further in 1991, the Census Bureau reported. A congressional report released a few days later estimates that hunger has grown by 50 percent since the mid-1980s to some 30 million people. Other studies show that one of eight children under 12 suffers from hunger, a problem that reappeared in 1982 after having been overcome by government programs from the 1960s. Two researchers report that in New York, the proportion of children raised in poverty more than doubled to 40 percent, while nationwide, "the number of hungry American children grew by 26 percent" as aid for the poor shrank during "the booming 1980s"—"one of the great golden moments that humanity has ever experienced," a spokesman for the culture of cruelty proclaimed (Tom Wolfe Boston Globe February 1990) [I did a Google and found these relatively contemporary items: A Rising Hunger Among Children and Infant Malnutrition at Staggering Levels in Massachusetts.]

The impact is brought out forcefully in more narrowly-focused studies; for example, at the Boston City Hospital, where researchers found that "the number of malnourished, low-weight children jumped dramatically following the coldest winter months," when parents had to face the agonizing choice between heat or food. At the hospital's clinic for malnourished children, more were treated in the first nine months of 1992 than in all of 1991; the wait for care reached two months, compelling the staff to "resort to triage." Some suffer from Third World levels of malnutrition and require hospitalization, victims of "the social and financial calamities that have befallen families" and the "massive retrenchment in social service programs" (Boston Globe September 8, 25, 1992). By the side of a road, men hold signs that read "Will Work for Food," a sight that recalls the darkest days of the Great Depression.(Year 501: The Conquest Continues, p280-1).

I am being a little mean here, I fully acknowledge. But in the few Wolfe interviews I saw, I found myself becoming angry that a bad writer was being heralded as a visionary and truth seeker to be paraded by the media in their campaign to mis-represent the extent of income polarity and impoverishment that is the direct result of American policies that are benefiting very few, but doing so to a staggering degree.
End of Goodreads Review

What made the highlighted text above not just a fushigi, but a remarkable one is that when I originally cited Chomsky in the review I omitted that line, and only that line. I remembered reading it, but because I was squeezing my citation I felt that that line wasn't necessary to make the point I was trying to make. I have, since then, edited the review to include it.

Post-Script 2012.12.16:
And I know this is completely irrelevant, and totally meaningless, but I have found it a little bemusing that the colour of covers of Year 501 and Stanley Park is almost identical. I have no idea why I am writing this down. When I first noticed it I dismissed that detail as trivial and uninteresting and likely to make me look like an idiot if I were to put it out here. But, each time I pick up Stanley Park to recommence my perusal — I'm now page 278 now — that thought gets into my brain and buzzes around for a while. So, I have written this post script to stop that thought from floating around and to fully prove my madness to the few who read my blog. (But then, those few will already know that I am mad.)

2012.11.24 — Jung by Anthony Stevens: Read

Anthony Stevens.
Jung.
Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1994. ISBN 0192876864. [Note: the link is to 2001 edition, not shown here.]

Begun: 2012.10.29.
Finished: 2012.11.21.

★★★★★

Jung is a tightly written, comprehensive yet short overview of Jung's ideas and biography. Stevens managed to connect how Jung's biography influenced the

development of his ideas and how influential those ideas have been. Stevens' survey of Jung's relationship with Freud is interesting and balanced, as is his refutation of the anti-semitism charges that have floated around Jung since before the second world war.

Now after all that praise, I would suggest that Jung is a book without a really strong audience. The book is detailed enough and I suspect generally as accurate as a 3rd party biography can be. But that is its biggest problem. I suspect that many people completely unfamiliar with Jung's writings are likely to come away from this book with an exaggerated understanding of the power and range of Jung's ideas and influence and decide to not read anything else. They will not understand that the reason people read Jung is to begin the journey of self-understanding, what Jung called individuation.

On the other hand, those who are significantly familiar with Jung will not find too much new here. It remains simply a summary and review, albeit a very good one. It does have some nice quotable bits for those interested in quips or sound bites.

But what moved this book from just a solid four to five stars was something Stevens observed I had until reading it here thought that I had uniquely noticed. Thank god I am not the only one to have spotted the remarkable similarity between Noam Chomsky's linguistic theories and Jung's conceptualization of the collective unconscious and archetypes (p37). Now, it is possible that other Jungian commentators I have previously read made this connection too, but at a time in my life before I was familiar with Chomsky's linguistic ideas. But I do not remember even one such reference, and definitely haven't seen one since then. Nor have I seen anyone from the Chomsky side making the connection. (For those curious about this, a good overview of Chomsky's linguistics is Justin Leiber's Noam Chomsky: A Philosophic Overview. I have blogged my review of it here.) And in it was my first publication of my perception of the strong equivalent between Jung's collective unconscious and Chomsky's Deep Structure and Universal Grammar. (No, the writers of the Wikipedia do not make a similar claim.)

Furthermore, Chomsky completely eviscerates behaviouralist models as having been completely ineffectual at explaining anything. Jung found the idea that behaviouralism could explain the human experience as untenable as well. Here's Stevens' summary:

… An archetype, [Jung] said, is not 'an inherited idea' but rather 'an inherited mode of functioning, corresponding to the inborn way in which the chick emerges from the egg, the bird builds its nest, a certain kind of wasp stings the motor ganglion of the caterpillar, and eels find their way to the Bermudas. In other words, it is a "pattern of behaviour". This aspect of the archetype,' concludes Jung, 'the purely biological one, is the proper concern of scientific psychology' (CW XVIII, par. 1228). In a sense, ethology and Jungian psychology can be viewed as two sides of the same coin: it is as if ethologists have been engaged in an extraverted exploration of the archetype and Jungians in an introverted examination of the [biologically postulated] IRM [Innate Releasing Mechanism].

The currency of archetypal theory

Many other disciplines have produced concepts similar to the archetypal hypothesis, but usually without reference to Jung. For example, the primary concern of Claude Levi-Strauss and the French school of

structural anthropology is with the unconscious infrastructures which they hold responsible for all human customs and institutions; specialists in linguistics maintain that although grammars differ from one another, their basic forms—which Noam Chomsky calls their deep structures—are universal (i.e. at the deepest neuropsychic level, there exists a universal [or 'archetypal'] grammar on which all individual grammars are based), an entirely new discipline, sociobiology, has grown up on the theory that the patterns of behaviour typical of all social species, the human species included, are dependent on genetically transmitted response strategies designed to maximize the fitness of the organism to survive in the environment in which it evolved; sociobiology also holds that the psycho-social development in individual members of a species is dependent on what are termed epigenetic rules [epi = upon, genesis = development; i.e. rules upon which development proceeds); more recently still, ethologically oriented psychiatrists have begun to study what they call psychobiological response patterns and deeply homologous neural structures which they hold responsible for the achievement of healthy or unhealthy patterns of adjustment in individual patients in response to variations in their social environment. All these concepts are compatible with the archetypal hypothesis which lung had proposed decades earlier to virtually universal indifference.

This raises an important question. If lung's theory of archetypes is so fundamental that it keeps being rediscovered by the practitioners of many other disciplines, why did it not receive the enthusiastic welcome it deserved when Jung proposed it? The explanation is, I think, twofold: namely, the time at which Jung stated the theory, and the way in which he published it.

In the first place, throughout Jung's mature lifetime, researchers working in university departments of psychology were in the grip of behaviourism, which discounted innate or genetic factors, preferring to view the individual as a tabula rasa whose development was almost entirely dependent on environmental factors. lung's contrary view that the infant comes into the world with an intact blueprint for life which it then proceeds to implement through interaction with the environment, was so at variance with the prevailing Zeitgeist as to guarantee it a hostile reception.

Secondly, Jung did not state his theory in a clear, testable form, nor did he back it up with sufficiently persuasive evidence. His book Transformations and Symbols of the Libido in which he first put forward his idea of a collective unconscious giving rise to 'primordial images' (as he originally called archetypes) was so densely written and so packed with mythological exegesis as to make it virtually impenetrable to any but the most determined reader. Moreover, in arguing that 'primordial images' were derived from the past history of mankind,

Jung exposed himself to the accusation that he, like Freud, subscribed to the discredited theory of the inheritance of acquired characteristics, originally proposed by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829), i.e. that ideas or images occurring in members of one generation could be passed on genetically to the next and subsequent generations.

In fact, the collective unconscious is a respectable scientific hypothesis and one does not have to adopt a Lamarckian view of biology to entertain it. Indeed, as we have seen, it is entirely compatible with the theoretical formulations of contemporary ethologists, sociobiologists, and psychiatrists. Precisely in order to acquit himself of the charge of Lamarckism Jung eventually made a clear distinction between what he termed the archetype-as-such (similar to Kant's das Ding-an-sich} and the archetypal images, ideas, and behaviours that the archetype-as-such gives rise to. It is the predisposition to have certain experiences that is archetypal and inherited, not the experience itself. The French molecular biologist and Nobel Laureate Jacques Monod reached an identical conclusion: 'Everything comes from experience, yet not from actual experience, reiterated by each individual with each generation, but instead from experience accumulated by the entire ancestry of the species in the course of its evolution.'

Thus, the Jungian archetype is no more scientifically disreputable than the ethological IRM. Just as the behavioural repertoire of each species is encoded in its central nervous system as innate releasing mechanisms which are activated in the course of development by appropriate sign stimuli, so Jung conceived the programme for human life to be encoded in the collective unconscious as a series of archetypal determinants which are actualized in response to inner and outer events in the course of the life cycle. There is nothing Lamarckian or unbiological in this conception (37-9).

On the day I began this book, it managed to link itself to a small fushigi involving my friend BH. For the curious you can read the fushigi at 2012.09.29 —….

2012.07.21 — What Uncle Sam Really Wants by Noam Chomsky: Finished 2012.07.01

Noam Chomsky.
What Uncle Sam Really Wants.
Berkley, CA. The Odonion Press, 1995. ISBN1878825011.

Began 2012.06.23
Finished 2012.07.01
★★★★☆

This book is Chomsky at his most accessible. The publisher claims, on the back of the book, that "political books don't have to be boring." And this one certainly isn't boring because this publisher's need for brevity has forced Chomsky to the bare bones. His sarcasm and irony are very sharp, and his details far more concise than in his full length works.

However, I do not actually recommend this book as an introduction to Chomsky's political writing because that brevity allows more easily for incredulity to become dismissive skepticism. What he writes is so far away from the official historical myths that we believe that after the fourth or fifth debunking claim he makes it becomes increasingly easy to become convinced that he is just some left-wing nut-job with a horribly over-active imagination who hates America. Yes, his claims are referenced in the back of the book. But they are not footnoted in the text, and that lapse more easily gives the cynic the mental elbow room to dismiss Chomksy's arguments and claims.

In a curious irony, and an affirmation of Chomsky's frequent observation that concision is America's most effective and widely practiced form of censorship, this book's brevity also makes it very quotable.

Free trade is fine for economics departments and newspaper editorials, but nobody in the corporate world or the government takes the doctrines too seriously. The parts of the US economy that are able to compete internationally are primarily the state subsidized ones: capital intensive agriculture (agribusiness as it is called), high tech industry, pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, etc.

The same is true of other industrial societies. The US government has the public pay for research and development and provides, largely through the military, a state-guaranteed market for waste production. If something is marketable, the private sector takes it over. That system of public subsidy and private profit is what is called free enterprise (p.13).

Now I think the government and corporate leaders have recently entered the next or 4th degree of delusion — they actual have fallen victim to their own propaganda, and truly believe that the massive subsidies these groups get aren't actually subsidies. What the social critic and comic Bill Maher calls "being in the bubble."

And on Amercia's support for democracy immediately following the second world war: the CIA's first job was to subvert democracy and help ensure the installation of a fascist dictatorship response to America's business needs:

Restoring the traditional order
But far more important was the first area of Europe liberated — southern Italy, where the US, following Churchill's advice, imposed a right-wing dictatorship headed by Fascist war hero Field Marshall Badoglio and the King Victor Emmanuel III,

who was also a Fascist collaborator.

US planners recognized that the "threat" in Europe was not Soviet aggression (which serious analysts, like Dwight Eisenhower, did not anticipate) but rather the worker- and peasant- based antifascist resistance with its radical democratic ideals, and the political power and appeal of the local Communist parties.

To prevent an economic collapse that would enhance their influence, and to rebuild Western Europe's state-capitalist economies, the US instituted the Marshall Plan (under which Europe was provided with more than $ 12 billion in loans and grants between 1948 and 1951, funds used to purchase a third of US exports to Europe in the peak year of 1949).

In Italy, a worker- and peasant-based movement, led by the Communist party, had held down six German divisions during the war and liberated northern Italy. As US forces advanced through Italy, they dispersed this antifascist resistance and restored the basic structure of the prewar Fascist regime.

Italy has been one of the main areas of CIA subversion ever since the agency was founded. The CIA was concerned about Communists winning power legally in the crucial Italian elections of 1948. A lot of techniques were used, including restoring the Fascist police, breaking the unions and withholding food. But it wasn't clear that the Communist party could be defeated.

The very first National Security Council memorandum, NSC 1 (1948), specified a number of actions the US would take if the Communists won these elections. One planned response was armed intervention, by means of military aid for underground operations in Italy.

Some people, particularly George Kennan, advocated military action before the elections — he didn't want to take a chance. But others convinced him we could carry it off by subversion, which turned out to be correct.

In Greece, British troops entered after the Nazis had withdrawn. They imposed a corrupt regime that evoked renewed resistance, and Britain, in its postwar decline, was unable to maintain control. In 1947, the United States moved in, supporting a murderous war that resulted in about 160,000 deaths.

This war was complete with torture, political exile for tens of thousands of Greeks, what we called "re-education camps" for tens of thousands of others, and the destruction of unions and of any possibility of independent politics.

It placed Greece firmly in the hands of US investors and local businessmen, while much of the population had to emigrate in order to survive. The beneficiaries included Nazi collaborators, while the primary victims were the workers and the peasants of the Communist-led, anti-Nazi resistance.

Our successful defence of Greece against its own population was the model for the Vietnam War — as Adlai Stevenson explained to the United Nations in 1964. Reagan's advisors used exactly the same model in talking about Central America, and the pattern was followed many other places (15-17).

Here is another quotable passage:

Broader studies by economist Edward Herman reveal a close correlation worldwide between torture and US aid, and also provide the explanation: both correlate independently with improving the climate for business operations. In comparison with that guiding moral principle, such matters as torture and butchery pale into insignificance (p.29).

This book is full of these little gems. However they only have realistic descriptive power if you have already read enough of Chomsky to fully understand that the words 'butchery' and 'torture' are not exaggerations when applied to American foreign policy. Rather they are a kind of ironical whitewash of the breadth and scope and scale of American brutality not infrequently approaching genocidal proportions.

A fun read, but it won't give those people who are familiar with Chomsky anything new — except a source of Chomsky sound bites. And it will likely be seen by people new to Chomsky as confirmation by the skeptical that he is a fruitcake and reduce him to being merely an eloquent conspiratorialist out in the fringes.

2012.07.01 — Deterring Democracy by Noam Chomsky: Finished 2012.06.25

Deterring Democracy by
Noam Chomsky.
New York: Verso (New Left Books) 1991 ISBN 086091318X.
(Out of Print: the link to the title above goes to the text of the entire book at ZCommunications.org.)

Begun 2012.05.08.
Finished 2012.06.25
★★★★★

The end of the Cold War was greeted by the free world with a self congratulatory praise that echoed off the moon and back. And for the average person, the prospect for disarmament and some kind of 'real' peace had become a tangible reality. But the end of The Cold War gave to the American military industrial complex an opportunity and a problem. The opportunity was that without the USSR as a viable deterrent to American foreign aggression, America now had the opportunity to invade other countries at will.

And the problem? The American public, having been fed a steady and successful propaganda about the role of the USSR evil and American benevolence during the Cold War, saw its end as an opportunity to give peace a chance. Thus, in a curious irony, the end of the Cold War threatened to expose to America that they had been misled about that war by their media that had acted in collusion with big business's management of 'their' government. In effect, Americans had been given an opportunity to discover that they had been manipulated by a pervasive and expansive propaganda into giving to their corporate masters their manufactured consent to propagate American hegemony disguised as defending freedom.

It would have most likely been bad for business if the truth of American hegemony actually made it into prime time news. What could the manufacturers do to avoid such a catastrophe and how were America's hegemons going to be able to take advantage of their new freedom and expand in scale and scope their overt and covert invasions; and continue their practices of disrupting fledgling democracies without a solid enemy to justify the military spending in a time of peace? The answer: follow the same media farce as was practiced during the Cold War by the simple manufacture of 'properly' acceptable enemies with the proper implementation of the media supported propaganda. Thus was born, for example, the war on drugs, the farce of Grenada, Nicaragua, and Panama as serious threats to American sovereignty and safety.

The media hypocrisy and outright lying around these wars, and the comparison Chomsky makes to Britain forcing China to buy opium, is chilling. He provides numbers to back up his argument, and citations from business leaders and NSC documents that, if they had been spoken by German SS officers in WWII, would have earned them post war convictions for crimes against humanity.

Speaking of war crimes, it would appear that the USA was one of the biggest war criminals on the planet in the eighties, frequently using their UN veto power to overturn condemnation for their frequent invasions and unprovoked attacks on other countries for the explicit purpose of enriching big American business. News of these votes rarely made it into the news. Or, if they did, it was with complete fabrication as to the vote and what it really meant. Interestingly enough, this kind of behaviour was not new in the media's history of misrepresenting American foreign practices. For example, the non-reporting of the role America played in their support for and re-establishment into positions of capitalist influence many of the pre-war German industrialists that included convicted war criminals. Nor was America's support for pro-Nazi sympathizers in the brutal suppression of democracy in Greece following WWII that resulted in the torture and/or deaths of hundreds of thousands of people and the establishment of a brutal dictatorship (p335, 342).

DD is well written, and Chomsky's anger is tempered with a wry kind of humour at just how deluded and delusional the press is about their role in paving the way for American military brutality and unrelenting violation of the UN and the most basic tenets of respect for the rights of others. As always, the footnoting to the references is extensive.

For me, the detailed and somewhat organic way Chomsky writes solidifies the connections between the way the American military functions as the arm of Big Business, and Big Business's function as the manager of the controlled understanding of America's 'generous' role as planetary policeman. That perhaps the planet's greatest violator of the basic tenets of human rights and democracy is lauded by its corporate media as the singular champion of those ideals is nothing short of an astonishing proof that delusion knows no bounds. The level of hypocrisy that the media relays or creates with a straight face cannot be described in a review without the reviewer being seen as a complete idiot.

~~~~~~~
[Interlude: While reading this, there arose a pair of strange synchronicity events I like o call fushgis. Loosely, I understand fushigi as a synchronicity-like thing — click on the link to read my understanding of what it means. To read these 'synchronicity petites', as I have sometimes called them, and some quotations from the book, go to Deterring Democracy & a Pair of fushigis
End of Interlude.]
~~~~~~~

Now for some citations. Note, that since DD has been published on line and is available for free on ZCommunications' Web Page, my citations come from there. They originated as blue sticky notes I stuck in the book as I was reading it, and I've linked the page numbers to their appearance in ZCommunication's publication. Also, the on-line publication has also published the footnotes that you will see numbered in the citations.

Enjoy, if you can. From: 'Ch2. The Home Front: 2.Political Success:'

The political and social history of Western democracies records all sorts of efforts to ensure that the formal mechanisms are little more than wheels spinning idly. The goal is to eliminate public meddling in formation of policy. That has been largely achieved in the United States, where there is little in the way of political organizations, functioning unions, media independent of the corporate oligopoly, or other popular structures that might offer people means to gain information, clarify and develop their ideas, put them forth in the political arena, and work to realize them. As long as each individual is facing the TV tube alone, formal freedom poses no threat to privilege (p76).

From: 'Ch2. The Home Front: 3. The Achievements of Economic Management:'

The Reagan era largely extended the political program of a broad elite consensus. There was a general commitment in the 1970s to restore corporate profitability and to impose some discipline on an increasingly turbulent world. In the U.S. variety of state capitalism, that means recourse to military Keynesian devices at home, now adapted to the decline in U.S. power and therefore with a right-wing rather than liberal slant, the "great society" programs being incompatible with the prior claims of the important people. Abroad, the counterpart is large-scale subversion and international terrorism (whatever term is chosen to disguise the reality). The natural domestic policies were transfer of resources to the rich, partial dismantling of the limited welfare system, an attack on unions and real wages, and expansion of the public subsidy for high technology industry through the Pentagon system, which has long been the engine for economic growth and preserving the technological edge (p81).

From: 'Ch3. The Global System: 6. The Soviet Threat:'

We need not suppose that the appeal to alleged security threats is mere deceit. The authors of NSC 68 may have believed their hysterical flights of rhetoric, though some understood that the picture they were painting was "clearer than truth." In a study of attitudes of policy makers, Lars Schoultz concludes that they were sincere in their beliefs, however outlandish: for example, that Grenada -- with its population of 100,000 and influence over the world nutmeg trade -- posed such a threat to the United States that "an invasion was essential to U.S. security."22 The same may be true of those who, recalling our failure to stop Hitler in time, warned that we must not make the same mistake with Daniel Ortega, poised for world conquest. And Lyndon Johnson may have been sincere in his lament that without overwhelming force at its command, the United States would be "easy prey to any yellow dwarf with a pocket knife," defenseless against the billions of people of the world who "would sweep over the United States and take what we have." Eisenhower and Dulles may have believed that the "self-defense and self-preservation" of the United States were at stake in the face of the terrible threat posed by Guatemala in 1954 -- though it is interesting that in the secret planning record the only example cited to justify their desperate anxiety is "a strike situation" in Honduras that might "have had inspiration and support from the Guatemalan side of the Honduran border."23 The same may even be true of those who instituted and maintained a national emergency from 1985 to defend us from the "unusual and extraordinary threat" to our national security posed by Nicaragua under the Sandinistas.

In such cases, we need not conclude that we are sampling the productions of psychotics; that is most unlikely, if only because these delusional systems have an oddly systematic character and are highly functional, satisfying the requirements stipulated in the secret documentary record. Nor need we assume conscious deceit. Rather, it is only necessary to recall the ease with which people can come to believe whatever is convenient to believe, however ludicrous it may be, and the filtering process that excludes those lacking these talents from positions of state and cultural management.

In passing, we may note that while such matters may be of interest to those entranced by the personalities of leaders, for people concerned to understand the world, and perhaps to change it, they are of marginal concern at best, on a par with the importance for economists of the private fantasies of the CEO while he (or rarely she) acts to maximize profits and market share. Preoccupation with these matters of tenth-order significance is one of the many devices that serve to divert attention from the structural and institutional roots of policy, and thus to contribute to deterring the threat of democracy, which might be aroused by popular understanding of how the world works (p100-1).

From: 'Ch4. Problems of Population Control: 4. The Narcotraffickers:'

Social policies implemented in Washington contribute to the toll of victims in other ways, a fact illustrated dramatically just as the vast media campaign orchestrated by the White House peaked in September 1989. On September 19, the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) panel held a hearing in Washington to consider a tobacco industry request that the U.S. impose sanctions on Thailand if it does not agree to drop restrictions on import of U.S. tobacco. Such U.S. government actions had already rammed tobacco down the throats of consumers in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, with human costs of the kind already sketched.

This huge narcotrafficking operation had its critics. A statement of the American Heart Association, American Cancer Society and American Lung Association condemned the cigarette advertising in "countries that have already succumbed to the USTR crowbar of trade threats," a campaign "patently designed to increase smoking by...young Asian men and women who see young U.S. men and women as role models." U.S. Surgeon General Everett Koop testified at the USTR panel that "when we are pleading with foreign governments to stop the flow of cocaine, it is the height of hypocrisy for the United States to export tobacco." Denouncing the trade policy "to push addicting substances into foreign markets" regardless of health hazards, he said that "Years from now, our nation will look back on this application of free trade policy and find it scandalous." Koop told reporters that he had not cleared his testimony with the White House because it would not have been approved, and said he also opposed actions under the Reagan administration to force Asian countries to import U.S. tobacco. During his eight years in office, ending a few days after his testimony, Koop backed reports branding tobacco a lethal addictive drug responsible for some 300,000 deaths a year.

Thai witnesses also protested, predicting that the consequence would be to reverse a decline in smoking achieved by a 15-year campaign against tobacco use. They also noted that U.S. drug trafficking would interfere with Washington's efforts to induce Asian governments to halt the flow of illegal drugs. Responding to the claim of U.S. tobacco companies that their product is the best in the world, a Thai witness said, "Certainly in the Golden Triangle we have some of the best products, but we never ask the principle of free trade to govern such products. In fact we suppressed [them]."

Critics invoked the analogy of the Opium War 150 years ago, when the British government compelled China to open its doors to opium from British India, sanctimoniously pleading the virtues of free trade as they forcefully imposed large-scale drug addiction on China. As in the case of the U.S. today, Britain had little that it could sell to China, apart from drugs. The U.S. sought for itself whatever privileges the British were extracting from China by violence, also extolling free trade and even the "great design of Providence to make the wickedness of men subserve his purposes of mercy toward China, in breaking through her wall of exclusion, and bringing the empire into more immediate contact with western and christian nations" (American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions). John Quincy Adams denounced the refusal of China to accept British opium as a violation of the Christian principle of "love thy neighbor" and "an enormous outrage upon the rights of human nature, and upon the first principles of the rights of nations." The tobacco industry and its protectors in government invoke similar arguments today as they seek to relive this triumph of Western civilization and its "historic purpose."32

Here we have the biggest drug story of the day, breaking right at the peak moment of the government-media campaign: the U.S. government is perhaps the world's leading drug peddler, even if we put aside the U.S. role in establishing the hard drug racket after World War II and maintaining it since. How did this major story fare in the media blitz? It passed virtually unnoticed -- and, needless to say, without a hint of the obvious conclusion.33

The drug traffic is no trivial matter for the U.S. economy. Tobacco exports doubled in annual value in the 1980s, contributing nearly $25 billion to the U.S. trade ledger over the decade according to a report of the Tobacco Merchants Association, rising from $2.5 billion in 1980 to $5 billion in 1989. Tobacco provided a $4.2 billion contribution to the trade balance for 1989, when the deficit for the year was $109 billion. Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky took due note of these figures while testifying in support of the tobacco companies at a Senate hearing. The president of the American Farm Bureau Federation, commenting on the benefits to the U.S. economy from tobacco exports, "cited the removal of overseas trade barriers, primarily in Japan, Taiwan and South Korea" as a contributory factor (p123-125).34

We see that it is unfair to blame the huge trade deficit on the policies of the Reagan-Bush administrations without giving them credit for their efforts to overcome it by state intervention to increase the sale of lethal addictive drugs.

This is endless. The numbers you have noticed in the text are to footnotes. If you go to the linked page numbers, you will find the footnotes supplied at ZCommunications' transcription of DD.

I'll close with Chomsky at his most eloquent. He closes DD with a short history of so-called 'Freedom of Speech' in the USA. It is not what you have likely come to believe because the rhetoric you hear about it is a complete fabrication by the media and proper intellectual journals.

Those who adopt the common sense principle that freedom is our natural right and essential need will agree with Bertrand Russell that anarchism is "the ultimate ideal to which society should approximate." Structures of hierarchy and domination are fundamentally illegitimate. They can be defended only on grounds of contingent need, an argument that rarely stands up to analysis. As Russell went on to observe 70 years ago, "the old bonds of authority" have little intrinsic merit. Reasons are needed for people to abandon their rights, "and the reasons offered are counterfeit reasons, convincing only to those who have a selfish interest in being convinced." "The condition of revolt," he went on, "exists in women towards men, in oppressed nations towards their oppressors, and above all in labour towards capital. It is a state full of danger, as all past history shows, yet also full of hope."86

Russell traced the habit of submission in part to coercive educational practices. His views are reminiscent of 17th and 18th century thinkers who held that the mind is not to be filled with knowledge "from without, like a vessel," but "to be kindled and awaked." "The growth of knowledge [resembles] the growth of Fruit; however external causes may in some degree cooperate, it is the internal vigour, and virtue of the tree, that must ripen the juices to their just maturity." Similar conceptions underlie Enlightenment thought on political and intellectual freedom, and on alienated labor, which turns the worker into an instrument for other ends instead of a human being fulfilling inner needs -- a fundamental principle of classical liberal thought, though long forgotten, because of its revolutionary implications. These ideas and values retain their power and their pertinence, though they are very remote from realization, anywhere. As long as this is so, the libertarian revolutions of the 18th century remain far from consummated, a vision for the future.87

One might take this natural belief to be confirmed by the fact that despite all efforts to contain them, the rabble continue to fight for their fundamental human rights. And over time, some libertarian ideals have been partially realized or have even become common coin. Many of the outrageous ideas of the 17th century radical democrats, for example, seem tame enough today, though other early insights remain beyond our current moral and intellectual reach.

The struggle for freedom of speech is an interesting case, and a crucial one, since it lies at the heart of a whole array of freedoms and rights. A central question of the modern era is when, if ever, the state may act to interdict the content of communications. As noted earlier, even those regarded as leading libertarians have adopted restrictive and qualified views on this matter.88 One critical element is seditious libel, the idea that the state can be criminally assaulted by speech, "the hallmark of closed societies throughout the world," legal historian Harry Kalven observes. A society that tolerates laws against seditious libel is not free, whatever its other virtues. In late 17th century England, men were castrated, disemboweled, quartered and beheaded for the crime. Through the 18th century, there was a general consensus that established authority could be maintained only by silencing subversive discussion, and "any threat, whether real or imagined, to the good reputation of the government" must be barred by force (Leonard Levy). "Private men are not judges of their superiors... [for] This wou'd confound all government," one editor wrote. Truth was no defense: true charges are even more criminal than false ones, because they tend even more to bring authority into disrepute.89

Treatment of dissident opinion, incidentally, follows a similar model in our more libertarian era. False and ridiculous charges are no real problem; it is the unconscionable critics who reveal unwanted truths from whom society must be protected.

The doctrine of seditious libel was also upheld in the American colonies. The intolerance of dissent during the revolutionary period is notorious. The leading American libertarian, Thomas Jefferson, agreed that punishment was proper for "a traitor in thought, but not in deed," and authorized internment of political suspects. He and the other Founders agreed that "traitorous or disrespectful words" against the authority of the national state or any of its component states was criminal. "During the Revolution," Leonard Levy observes, "Jefferson, like Washington, the Adamses, and Paine, believed that there could be no toleration for serious differences of political opinion on the issue of independence, no acceptable alternative to complete submission to the patriot cause. Everywhere there was unlimited liberty to praise it, none to criticize it." At the outset of the Revolution, the Continental Congress urged the states to enact legislation to prevent the people from being "deceived and drawn into erroneous opinion." It was not until the Jeffersonians were themselves subjected to repressive measures in the late 1790s that they developed a body of more libertarian thought for self-protection -- reversing course, however, when they gained power themselves.90

Until World War I, there was only a slender basis for freedom of speech in the United States, and it was not until 1964 that the law of seditious libel was struck down by the Supreme Court. In 1969, the Court finally protected speech apart from "incitement to imminent lawless action." Two centuries after the revolution, the Court at last adopted the position that had been advocated in 1776 by Jeremy Bentham, who argued that a free goverment must permit "malcontents" to "communicate their sentiments, concert their plans, and practice every mode of opposition short of actual revolt, before the executive power can be legally justified in disturbing them." The 1969 Supreme Court decision formulated a libertarian standard which, I believe, is unique in the world. In Canada, for example, people are still imprisoned for promulgating "false news," recognized as a crime in 1275 to protect the King.91

In Europe, the situation is still more primitive. France is a striking case, because of the dramatic contrast between the self-congratulatory rhetoric and repressive practice so common as to pass unnoticed. England has only limited protection for freedom of speech, and even tolerates such a disgrace as a law of blasphemy. The reaction to the Salman Rushdie affair, most dramatically on the part of self-styled "conservatives," was particularly noteworthy. Rushdie was charged with seditious libel and blasphemy in the courts, but the High Court ruled that the law of blasphemy extended only to Christianity, not Islam, and that only verbal attack "against Her Majesty or Her Majesty's Government or some other institution of the state" counts as seditious libel. Thus the Court upheld a fundamental doctrine of the Ayatollah Khomeini, Stalin, Goebbels, and other opponents of freedom, while recognizing that English law protects only domestic power from criticism. Doubtless many would agree with Conor Cruise O'Brien, who, when Minister for Posts and Telegraphs in Ireland, amended the Broadcasting Authority Act to permit the Authority to refuse to broadcast any matter that, in the judgment of the minister, "would tend to undermine the authority of the state."92

We should also bear in mind that the right to freedom of speech in the United States was not established by the First Amendment to the Constitution, but only through dedicated efforts over a long period by the labor movement, the civil rights and anti-war movements of the 1960s, and other popular forces. James Madison pointed out that a "parchment barrier" will never suffice to prevent tyranny. Rights are not established by words, but won and sustained by struggle.

It is also worth recalling that victories for freedom of speech are often won in defense of the most depraved and horrendous views. The 1969 Supreme Court decision was in defense of the Ku Klux Klan from prosecution after a meeting with hooded figures, guns, and a burning cross, calling for "burying the nigger" and "sending the Jews back to Israel." With regard to freedom of expression there are basically two positions: you defend it vigorously for views you hate, or you reject it in favor of Stalinist/Fascist standards.93

Whether the instinct for freedom is real or not, we do not know. If it is, history teaches that it can be dulled, but has yet to be killed. The courage and dedication of people struggling for freedom, their willingness to confront extreme state terror and violence, is often remarkable. There has been a slow growth of consciousness over many years and goals have been achieved that were considered utopian or scarcely contemplated in earlier eras. An inveterate optimist can point to this record and express the hope that with a new decade, and soon a new century, humanity may be able to overcome some of its social maladies; others might draw a different lesson from recent history. It is hard to see rational grounds for affirming one or the other perspective. As in the case of many of the natural beliefs that guide our lives, we can do no better than to choose according to our intuition and hopes.

The consequences of such a choice are not obscure. By denying the instinct for freedom, we will only prove that humans are a lethal mutation, an evolutionary dead end; by nurturing it, if it is real, we may find ways to deal with dreadful human tragedies and problems that are awesome in scale (p397-401).

2012.06.17 — Chomsky for Beginners by John Maher & Judy Groves: finished 2012.06.14 & Fushigis*

John Maher and Judy Groves (Illustrator).
Chomsky for Beginners (but published as Introducing Chomsky in the USA).
Cambridge (UK): Icon Books, 1996. [Out of Print.]
ISBN 1874166420. [NOTE: The USA cover for this ISBN is different.]
★★★★★
Began 2012.05.27.
Finished 2012.06.14



This book review also contains a pair of fushigi:, which I've linked.
1. Blood pressure Fushigi
2. Crow Fushigi.

First, the review
I purchased Chomsky for Beginners without much expectation, but as a Chomsky book to put into my library. I was very pleasantly surprised by the quality of the exposition and thought that went into putting this excellent synopsis of Chomsky's ideas in linguists and their role in utterly transforming our understanding of human language. Even more than that, Maher and Chomsky include a range of contrary opinions and subsequent arguments that, although very concise, clearly illuminate the issues, thinking and controversies.

The basic evisceration of the behaviourist model of language acquisition was well articulated throughout. But I like how he approached Skinner.

The Refutation of Behaviourism
In 1959, Chomsky composed a basic refutation of behaviourist psychology in this review of B.F. Skinner's Verbal Behaviour. According to Chomsky, children are not born tabula rasa. On the contrary, each child is genetically predisposed to structure how knowledge is acquired.

"The phrase 'X is reinforced by Y' is being used as a cover term for X wants Y, X likes Y, X wishes Y were the case, etc. Invoking the term 'reinforcement' has no explanatory force, and any idea that this paraphrase introduces any new clarity or objectivity into the description of wishing, liking, etc., is a serious delusion."

Skinner's account rejects all postulations of inner states and sees human behaviour as entirely a function of antecedent events. For Chomsky, this reduction of human behaviour to 'conditioned responses' contradicts the actual [and demonstrated] complexity and freedom of consciousness (43).

I find the few quotations supplied to be on point and interesting. As a reader of fiction, even of so-called 'literature' I was bemused to read:

Perhaps literature will forever give far deeper insight into 'the full human person' than any model of scientific inquiry can hope to do (9).

The bulk (2/3) of the book covers linguistics. The balance of the book is Chomsky's political and media criticism. This was of less interest to me, that being where the bulk of my Chomsky reading has been. However with that exposure comes my ability to assess how well that section is put together. But more than that, the precise and clearly articulated criticisms of the media and socio-political thought in general was hugely informative and entertaining to read. For example, the contrast that Chomsky draws between 'enlightenment values' and how far our science and social perspicuity have fallen from them is delightful. For example:

The American Paradox
The United States proudly calls itself 'the leader of the Free World'. We know the US as a free and open society, more so in many ways than societies of Western Europe. And yet, Chomsky has criticized the US as blind to what it really is…
1. One of the most depoliticized nations in the industrial world
2. One of the most deeply indoctrinated societies in the industrial world
3. One of the most conformist intelligentsias in the industrial world.

Q: IS THIS NOT A PARADOX?
A: It only looks that way.

The freer the society the more well-honed and sophisticated its system of thought control and the indoctrination. The ruling élite, clever, class-conscious, ever sure of domination, make sure of that (138-9).

It is clear from the very first page that, unlike the one or two 'Dummy' books I've tried, the writers of Chomsky for Beginners, John Maher and Noam Chomsky, demonstrate deep respect for the readers' intelligence and ability to understand complex ideas. This at no time feels dumbed down. This book has been described as a good introduction to Chomsky's ideas, and it is. But far, far more importantly, this is a book that introduces one to the challenge of really thinking, even those who are, like me, familiar with Chomsky. And I loved that.

Now, everything up to this point would have earned from me four stars. So why five? Because for the first time I read someone else make the connection between C.G. Jung and Chomsky's ideas of language and language acquisition. I was so excited to see this! (For my connection, see my review of Noam Chomsky: A Philosophic Review by Justin Leiber.) From Beginners Maher does not elaborate on the connection beyond a citation on the Collective Unconscious which he implies has a correspondence to Chomsky's concepts of Deep Structure and Universal Grammar.

"One part of our biological make up is specifically dedicated to language. That is called our language faculty. UG is the initial state of that language faculty" (77).
…
Universal Grammar is that part of cognitive psychology (ultimately human biology) which seeks to determine the invariant principles of the language faculty and to determine as well the range of variation that those principles allow — that is, the possible human languages(78).

Now compare with Jung's idea of the collective unconscious and archetypes:

The human psyche is composed of innate forms always present, giving direction and form to their actualization in images and action. The collective unconscious is universal: it is shared by everyone. "The autonomic contents of the unconscious or 'dominants' … are not inherited ideas but inherited possibilities, necessities even, of bringing to birth the ideas by which these dominants have been expressed, every region has its forms of speech, which can vary infinitely" (80-1).

Okay, enough book review.

1. Blood pressure fushigi

I took my wife to an appointment with a dietician to talk diet as it relates to her recent onset of diabetes. This was her first time there, and there was an instantaneous clash of personalities. I won't go into the minutiae. However, the nature of the visit may perhaps be epitomized by when she had her blood pressure. For the first time in her life, despite having had her pressure measured many times because of fifteen years of serious health issues, it was taken with an automatic machine. Well, she has a relatively contentious relationship with mechanical devices, and when the pressure on her arm became far more intense than she was familiar with from the manual systems, she freaked. Pure panic. When I picked her up 45 minutes later she was still clammy and sweating from the panic. She commented that her arm still hurt and, to her great annoyance read over 160. In fifteen years of repeated tests under various circumstances, it has never been over 130, and normally sits between 120 to 125 to the surprise of every doctor who always expect it to be high.

So, later that day, when I return to reading Chomsky for Beginners, I read:

Universal Grammar is not a grammar. Neither is it a theory of knowledge. It is a theory about the internal structure of the human mind.

Principles, therefore, are universal to all languages. The specific values for parameters are a fixed property of language which vary within very specific limits from one language to another.

For example, age, gender, and renal function are parameter values (para = in addition to) that determine blood pressure in the human body.

If renal function is damaged by an illness like diabetes, then the blood pressure goes up. Therefore the study of dietary salt intake by itself will not provide an accurate and complete picture of operating renal function.

In a tightly integrated theory with a fairly rich internal structure, change in a single parameter may have complex effects, with proliferating consequences in various parts of the grammar (Chomsky102).

And the graphic to accompany it seems right on point, too.

2. Crow Fushigi

Well a second fushigi happened on the 14th, too. And indirectly it is related to my wife's visit with the dietician, so I'll include it here, even though it is not directly related to Chomsky for Beginners except though the dimension (or element) of time.

It began in the morning while waiting for it to be time to leave for the appointment. We have been observing a pair of crows who have nested nearby. Oddly enough, for the first time in my life I was actually dive bombed by the one the crows the previous weekend. Anyway, my wife asked when crows fledged. I said I didn't know, but that it must be soon.

When I dropped my wife off at the dietician's office, I went and did some banking. After that I had a nice open block of time and then went for a good walk to Queen's Park along 5th Avenue before going to pick her up. On the way back from the park I heard unusual sounding crow squawks. When I looked over to where the noise came from, I saw three crows standing at the edge of the roof of a house. One was in the eave, the other two on the roof. The one that was making the unusual noise was being fed by the other ones: it's beak was wide open and squawked it's demand for food, and the others were feeding it.

'Ah,' I thought, 'it would seem that the crows have fledged.' L.'s question has ben answered.

2012.06.05 — Deterring Democracy by Noam Chomsky & Fushigis* Rev 12.06.09

Well, despite my lack of verbiage, here — or maybe my lack is because of it! — I have been reading. And even finishing books. And in case this has got you excited to read a full fledged book review, your premature elation was, well, premature. This is one of my *fushigi book blog things.

It began, this morning with my continuing to zip through

Deterring Democracy

by
Noam Chomsky.
New York: Verso (New Left Books) 1991 ISBN 086091318X.
(Out of Print: the link to the title above goes to the text of the entire book at ZCommunications.org.)

This is filled with documented examples of the media's general misrepresentation of America's active role in destabilizing the world, rejecting peace, and subjecting 'client' states to terror, torture and death to ensure compliancy for the survivors to live in extreme poverty so as to benefit American corporate hegemony. Today's fushigi began with a particular gruesome read: that in some Latin American countries the extreme poverty has been effective in creating new 'free' markets. Specifically, the kidnapping, sale, fattening up and trade in babies and/or their body parts. Anyway, part one of today's first Deterring Democracy fushigis:

The foreign-imposed development model has emphasized "nontraditional exports" in recent years. Under the free-market conditions approved for defenceless Third World countries, the search for survival and gain will naturally lead to products that maximize profit, whatever the consequences, Coca production has soared in the Andes and elsewhere for this reason, but there are other examples as well. After the discovery of clandestine "human farms" and "fattening houses" for children in Honduras and Guatemala, Dr Lul's Genaro Morales, president of the Guatemalan Paediatric Association, said that child trafficking "is becoming one of the principal nontraditional export products," generating $20 million of business a year. The International Human Rights Federation, after an inquiry in Guatemala, gave a more conservative estimate, reporting that about three hundred children are kidnapped every year, taken to secret nurseries, then sold for adoption at about $10,000 per child.

The IHRF investigators could not confirm reports that babies' organs were being sold to foreign buyers. This macabre belief is widely held in the region, however; indicative of the general mood, though hardly credible. The Honduran journal El Tiempo reported that the Paraguayan police rescued seven Brazilian babies from a gang that "intended to sacrifice them to organ banks in the United States, according to a charge in the courts." Brazil's Justice Ministry ordered federal police to investigate allegations that adopted children are being used for organ transplants in Europe, a practice "known to exist in Mexico and Thailand," the London Guardian reports, adding that "handicapped children are said to be preferred for transplant operations" and reviewing the process by which children are allegedly kidnapped, "disappeared," or given up by impoverished mothers, then adopted or used for transplants. Tiempo reported shortly after that an Appeals Judge in Honduras ordered "a meticulous investigation into the sale of Honduran children for the purpose of using their organs for transplant operations." A year earlier, the Secretary-General of the National Council of Social Services, which is in charge of adoptions, had reported that Honduran children "were being sold to the body traffic industry" for organ transplant."

A Resolution of the European Parliament on the Trafficking of Central American Children alleged that near a "human farm" in San Pedro Sula, Honduras, infant corpses were found that "had been stripped of one or a number of organs." At another "human farm" in Guatemala, babies ranging from eleven days old to four months old had been found. The director of the farm, at the time of his arrest, declared that the children "were sold to American or Israeli families whose children needed organ transplants at the cost of $75,000 per child," the Resolution continues, expressing "its horror in the light of the facts" and calling for investigation and preventive measures.12

As the region sinks into further misery, these reports continue to appear. In July 1990, a right-wing Honduran daily, under the headline "Loathsome Sale of Human Flesh," reported that police in El Salvador had discovered l group, headed by a lawyer, that was buying children to resell in the United States. An estimated 20,000 children disappear every year in Mexico, the report continues, destined for this end or for use in criminal activities such as transport of drugs "inside their bodies." "The most gory fact, however, is that many little ones are used for transplant of organs to children in the U.S.," which, it is suggested, may account for the fact that the highest rate of kidnapping of children from infants to eighteen-year-olds is in the Mexican regions bordering on the United States.13

The one exception to the Central America horror story has been Costa Rica, set on a course of state-guided development by the Jose Figueres coup of 1948, with social-democratic welfare measures combined with harsh repression of labor, and virtual elimination of the armed forces. The US has always kept a wary eye on this deviation from the regional standards, despite the suppression of labor and the favorable conditions for foreign investors. In the 1980s, US pressures to dismantle the social-democratic features and restore the army elicited bitter complaints from Figueres and others who shared his commitments. While Costa Rica continues to stand apart from the region in political and economic development, the signs of what the Guatemalan Central America Report calls "The 'Central Americanization' of Costa Rica" are unmistakeable.14

Notes:
11. Anne Chemin, Lc Monde, September 21,1988; Guardian Weekly, October 2. Ibid., September 30, 1990. Tiempo, August 10, 17, September 19, 1988. Dr Morales, cited by Robert Smith, Report on Guatemala, July/ August/ September 1989 (Guatemala News and Information Bureau, POB 28594, Oakland CA 94604).

12. Ibid.

13. La Prensa Dominical. Honduras, July 22,1990.

14. CAR, April 28, 1989. For discussion of these matters, see references of Chapter 12, Note 58.

Yup, seems unbelievable that such a thing would happen, but as always Chomsky provides citations that are not easily dismissed. This description reminds me of Jonathan Swift's caustic satire A Modest Proposal For Preventing The Children of Poor People in Ireland From Being A Burden to Their Parents or Country, and For Making Them Beneficial to The Public. And it poses the interesting question, in our news-hungry age: why isn't this kind of horror news-worthy? Chomsky's suggested answer is that it works against the notion of America's democratic benefits of free-markets.

Okay, so what constituted the fushigi? About an hour after reading this, at work I opened my gmail account, had received, as I do every day, from Powells Books their 'Daily Dose' — a book and a customer's review of that. Well, today's Daily Dose was The Barbarian Nurseries by Hector Tobar.

Here's the text from the e.mail:

The Barbarian Nurseries by Hector Tobar.

Rachel's Comments:
"I was afraid I had become too cynical a reader to enjoy fiction anymore. This book restored my faith in fiction and in just about everything else. It's one of those reading experiences that makes you feel like you've emerged from a cocoon. Hector Tobar is my new hero. Absolutely amazing."

Publisher Comments:
New York Times Notable Book for 2011;
A Boston Globe Best Fiction Book of 2011.

The great panoramic social novel that Los Angeles deserves — a twenty-first century, West Coast Bonfire of the Vanities by the only writer qualified to capture the city in all its glory and complexity.

With The Barbarian Nurseries, Hector Tobar gives our most misunderstood metropolis its great contemporary novel, taking us beyond the glimmer of Hollywood and deeper than camera-ready crime stories to reveal Southern California life as it really is, across its vast, sunshiny sprawl of classes, languages, dreams, and ambitions.

I laughed at the juxtaposition of the description of the text to that of the title. What a weird fushigi.

Well, if that weren't enough, the following night, 2012.06.06, instead of finishing this very disturbing fushigi book blog, I finally answered a co-worker who asked for my opinion on a proposal he wrote to help 'fix' the problems of the high costs of imprisoning people, and that of the problem of too light sentences and recidivism.

I wasn't swayed by his argument. I felt it ignored the roots of the problem and proceeded with some false assumptions on the nature of punishment and human behaviour. In part, this is what I wrote:

Dear RM:
I read your appeal and it has passion but does not convince me for several reasons. I will take the time to respect your effort by providing you with reasons for my opinion.

… the American solution is financially effective: the state contracts prison management to giant corporations, who have lobbied with millions to ensure that they get the job because they are solely concerned with the social well being of black Americans. (Right!) And thus is created an MBA's wet-dream: make it illegal to be poor, offshore all significant manufacturing jobs to create endless unemployment, under-fund public schools, and you will have created a corporate money making machine. So what if it costs the state $150,000.00 per year (or whatever the number is) to incarcerate the serious criminals, because it ensures that the shrinking middle classes' taxes are transferred not into the hands of those unworthy welfare bums and drug addicts, but into the coffers of big business who have successfully lobbied to avoid paying taxes. I would not be surprised if, in the near future, your solution is enacted with the USA. It is a serious money making solution. But this pales in comparison to Jonathan Swift's solution to the problem of Irish poverty, when the British lords made destitute the already poor by forcing them off the land. Read his essay A Modest Proposal, which is a satirical presaging of today's MBAs. Of course, William Blake also delineated the solution to poverty in Britain in his time by highlighting the trade in children as chimney sweeps. Of course, this is now echoed in the current child sex trade practices of Asian countries, which is dependent for its continuation on poverty, a poverty which pelf takes advantage of and enriches the overseers. And I have just read in Deterring Democracy where Chomsky sites the trade of baby parts and organs for transplants for wealthy Americans and Israelis within the context of the destitution created by American 'free trade' practices brutally brought into place with wars both covert and overt, and with prolonged help of death squads and terror.

My pragmatic MBA nature found Brazil's solution to the problem of their criminal street children quite appealing: quietly kill them with covert death squads. Clean, simple, and efficient. And if the social poverty continues to create these ungrateful miscreants, then the price of a bullet is cheap, especially if the government is paying an American manufacturer for the supply of both the guns and bullets.
…

Well, the next night, shortly after recommencing Deterring Democracy, I read the following:

The share of the poorer classes in the national income is "steadily falling, giving Brazil probably the highest concentration of income in the world." It has no progressive income tax or capital gains tax, but it does have galloping inflation and a huge foreign debt, while participating in a "Marshall Plan in reverse," in the words of former President José Sarney, referring to debt payments.

It would only be fair to add that the authorities are concerned with the mounting problem of homeless and starving children, and are trying to reduce their numbers. Amnesty International reports that death squads, often run by the police, are killing street children at a rate of about one a day, while "many more children, forced onto the streets to support their families, are being beaten and tortured by the police" (Reuters, citing AI). "Poor children in Brazil are treated with contempt by the authorities, risking their lives simply by being on the streets," AI alleged. Most of the torture takes place under police custody or in state institutions. There are few complaints by victims or witnesses because of fear of the police, and the few cases that are investigated judicially result in light sentences (228).30

Note:
30 South, November 1989. Reuters, NYT, Sept. 6, 1990.

So, there you go. Not a book review, but a pair of the oddest fushigis.

And I strongly recommend that you give Deterring Democracy a read. It is very, very good. And, despite some of the reviews I've read, not all that hard to read.

2012.06.09 Fushigi Addendum.
Well, the theme of prison reform continued to be fushigi extended: today, when I picked up my weekly Globe and Mail, the cover story was about bail reform: CRIMINAL JUSTICE
A case for bail reform by Kirk Makin June 8, 2012.