Daniel Cohn-Bendit (once known as Danny the Red) put it this way the other day: Why not stop talking about May '68? All I am hearing is the prattle of the inept. That's a paraphrase by a friend.

What Cohn-Bendit, who is now a Green Party member of the European Union parliament, actually said, was: "Forget it: '68 is over -- buried under cobblestones ..." So shitcan the nostalgia: "It was nice for those who experienced it but it is over now."

Everyone knows the events of May 1968 changed everything, except that they didn't. Here's why:

In France, conservatism was so entrenched on both the left and the right that both missed the movement's meaning and could only fall back on stereotyped revolutionary interpretations. As for the anarchists, their utopia of widespread self-management -- tied to outdated historical references -- appeared entirely unsuitable. Starting from an initial rejection of political institutions and parliamentarism, we understood only later that the democratic challenge lies in occupying a politically "normalised" space.

Faced with the anarchists, with their confining minimalist political grammar -- reflected in the famous slogan elections, piege à cons (elections, a trap for idiots) -- and with the Communist Party, whose revolutionary ideal was eventually linked to totalitarian types of society, the future of May 1968 could only shift to the right with the election victory of General de Gaulle.

Which is not all that different from what happened in the States. The election of Richard M. Nixon comes to mind.

Nor is what Cohn-Bendit saying all that different from what Carl Oglesby says in his recently published memoir "Ravens in the Storm." It's about the 1960s anti-war movement, his involvement with the old Students for a Democratic Society, and his misadventures as the blue-collar, self-described "centrist" SDS president who was "star-chambered" for being an "incorrect liberal" unwilling to go along with the Weathermen.

They were young and angry and lived in a separate reality of their own. Many of them had been comfortably raised with a middle-class sense of entitlement, which they brought too easily to their politics. They believed that SDS was passé and that it was their right and their moral duty to take the step beyond nonviolence to terrorism. They were not personally violent. Even as terrorists, they confined themselves to symbolic targets and never killed anyone but three of their own, by accident.

But their vanity was boundless. They believed they were right simply because they were who they were. And after they had picked up a few deadly phrases from Marx, they went from knowing what was right to knowing what was "correct," as though politics were like arithmetic.

One day I'll have to read "Fugitive Days," Bill Ayers's memoir of the Weather Underground. Lazing about like this, I've got plenty of time. Its opening words sound promising: "Memory is a motherfucker."

(Crossposted at HuffPo)

"...the democratic challenge lies in occupying a politically 'normalized' space."

Well maybe in a parliamentary system that allows for small parties. Where is our Green Party? They need to tell us how progressives can occupy a "normalized" space in the USA.

Which candidate is going to bring our military spending under control? Which will create support for the arts like Europeans have? Who will end the death penalty? Who will revive our inner-city schools? Who will end the extreme poverty of our ghettos and create programs to revive our destroyed cities?

No candidate. Elections are indeed "a trap for idiots." The only reason to read or watch the news is to study the techniques of deceit and manipulation that have become so habitual that they are now simply considered reality.

Does anyone really believe that Obama's going to make more than a cosmetic difference? Look at our massive ghettos, and then think about a black President who only talks about race when forced to. It will be difficult for our electoral system to create genuine progress. No?

I have never felt more disengaged from the electoral process. It's like watching a fixed horse race, where the same bigwigs own all the horses and will win all the money no matter which horse crosses the finish line first.

In a word: Yes.

I second Peter Schjeldahl ("The world will have cults, and who better merits one?"), as well as Holland Carter ("...Kahlo enters your system, fast, with a jolt..."). Both of them can't help gaping.

Neither can Sanford Schwartz. His remark is my favorite ("She is giving the world the finger ..."). He cites her own frequently quoted final words, written in her diary not long before she died, "I hope the exit is joyful -- and I hope never to come back."

I'm a late convert to the cult.

On a trip to Mexico City last October, I went to Kahlo's family home -- La Casa Azul in the city's Coyoacán suburb, where she was born and where she lived for much of her life and where she died. The place was crawling with diligent tourists like me.

More than a museum, it is a shrine to her memory. When I was there, the curators had mounted a touching exhibition of dozens of personal letters, photos, and artifacts. On display were some of the traditional Mexican dresses she famously wore. They had been tucked away in closets and were being exhibited for the first time. Many of the letters had also been secreted in the house, unseen for decades. Some, hidden behind a bathroom wall, were opened for the first time in 2004.

One in particular that struck me was a letter Kahlo wrote in 1939, defending her husband Diego Rivera against a complaint by Leon Trotsky, one of her former lovers. It is typewritten in English.

Dear Lev Davidovich: In your letter you say: 'Diego should never accept a bureaucratic position in the organisation because he never writes, never answers letters, never comes to meetings on time ...' So your conclusion is that he is a lousy 'secretary'. This position of yours I find rather unjust and childish. On several occasions in your house I observed that whenever there was a discussion of any kind, and Diego gave his opinion, you always took it with a certain irony and doubtfulness of its truthfulness. This kind of irony in time gets on one's nerves.

I'm now a bona fide Kahlo cultist. That's me in the tour-guide headphones, trying unsuccessfully to mimic the sad whimsy of a huge papier-mâché mask she made. It hangs on an exterior wall of the house adjacent to the garden, along with a handful of colorful papier-mâché skeletons strung up in a jolly kindergarten dance of death.

Not incidentally, the house where Trotsky was assassinated is only a few blocks away. That, too, was a revelation -- though of a different sort. Unlike La Casa Azul, it is grim and ugly. You can still see bullet holes in a bedrooom wall from an assassination attempt that failed. His hammer-and-sickle gravestone -- looking grand, in contrast to the house -- is an ironic reminder that everything he worked for is buried with him, swallowed by what he himself used to call "the dustbin of history."

Postscript: Notice Frida Kahlo with her hand on Diego Rivera's shoulder in this detail from Rivera's 1947 fresco "Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in the Alameda," on exhibit at the Museo Mural Diego Rivera. The museum is located at the west end of the Alameda in Mexico City. (Click the photo.)

It's also probable that nobody represented the old Lower East Side with more sweat equity and flesh-and-blood belief than Clayton Patterson -- not Allen Ginsberg or Abbie Hoffman, not Ed Sanders or Tuli Kupferberg, not The Living Theater or The Hell's Angels, not Keith Haring or Taylor Mead, maybe not even Emma Goldman or Dorothy Day.

Clayton who?

This Clayton Patterson -- the videographer, photographer, artist, photojournalist, archivist, community activist, neighborhood preservationist. The motivating force behind the books "Captured" and "Resistance" -- their instigator, editor, and slave. The irrepressible and irreplaceable Clayton Patterson who recorded the infamous Tompkins Square "police riot" of 1988 on videotape. The Clayton Patterson who is the subject of a new 90-minute documentary, also titled "Captured." (It's being screened Thursday, April 24, at 6 p.m., free, at NYU's Cantor Film Center.)

Have a look at the trailer:

The amount of time and energy devoted to this furtive exercise at the very highest levels of the government reminded us how little Americans know, in fact, about the ways Mr. Bush [the Bullshitter-in-Chief] and his team undermined, subverted and broke the law in the name of saving the American way of life.

We're glad The Times finally got around to chiming in. But the hope it expresses that "a new Congress and a new president" might provide "the full truth," let alone hold the war criminals to account, is rosy at best.

The Times knows that, of course. Even so, it offers a bromide for the Pollyannas that "only by fully understanding what Mr. Bush [the Bullshitter-in-Chief] has done over eight years to distort the rule of law and violate civil liberties and human rights can Americans ever hope to repair the damage and ensure it does not happen again."

What about the damage that is not repairable? Uh, take two aspirins and call us in the morning.

Meanwhile, better late than never, the front page investigates a not-so-hidden hand:

Ushered into a studio, I passed a long row of 20-somethings sitting on stools at a counter. For a moment it looked to me like an espresso bar and I wondered, where's the barista? They were all mousing away on their laptops. "Who are they?" I asked. "Oh, producers, people like that," said my escort, a 20-something producer himself.

The host of "The Blog Bunker" is a 20-something, too. His name is Joe Salzone, and he looks like a nerd minus the glasses and pocket protector. Anyway, he wanted to talk about three topics: 1) "Cable news and the Internet: Implications on the election and news in general"; 2) "Saturation coverage of a single story -- does it annoy you?"; and 3) "Impeach Bush: Is it too late? Why should he be impeached?"

Could have been interesting. We had half an hour. But Salzone, a self-described conservative, kept wanting to talk about "the impeachment of Clinton" -- duh? -- and it all sounded like, well, "talk radio," a media cliché. That was the mood, and there was no escape from it. I'm sure my comments must have been clichés as well. I'm told the show airs again today at 1 p.m. So if you have a subscription, you've been warned.

Update: April 21 -- Now have a look at "Murdoch, Ink," Newsweek's huge takeout about the actual WSJ that hit the street today. In the orotund prose of magspeak:

With its increased focus on politics, international news, culture and sports, Murdoch's reconceived Journal represents nothing short of a formal declaration of war on that most venerable of journalistic institutions, The New York Times. Not since William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal challenged Joseph Pulitzer's New York World in the late 19th century has there been such a clash of newspaper titans.

Give-'em-hell Rupe offers his own sedate description about some of what he's up to in this morning's unsigned column, "The New Opinion Pages." OK, I'm exaggerating. Paul Gigot may have written it, or someone who reports to him. But you can be sure Rupe looked it over and gave his approval.

A reader writes: "Thank you.  Parry's article is incisive in overview and on the mark in particulars. Excellent." He continues:

One example of Parry's thesis -- that "sophisticated manipulation of information is what would do the Republic in" -- is waterboarding being dismissively defined by journalistic leaders as "simulated drowning" rather than something like "repeated, forced drowning to near death."

However, what I see as "sophisticated" in that context differs somewhat from Parry's thesis: Much that is now classified and lamented as "sophisticated manipulation of information" is and used to be called "prevarication."

My view is that "what would do the Republic in" is not so much the "sophisticated manipulation of information" as the orchestration (think Rove) of the large-scale, often very clever, sophistry that results in journalistic leaders buying the prevarications by treating them as fact and continually repeating them as fact.

For instance, the Nixon-era's catchy but trivializing and dismissive term "Whitehouse horror story" is still with journalists who use the term "horror story" these days in place of "very serious violations" of criminal statutes, ratified treaties, or constitutional guarantees.  Equating Abu Grab torture and "Animal House" is another example.

As may become clear when you read Carter/Kaplan, configural theory was extremely unpopular with the daydream believers because it shows that new "transformational" weapons have in reality nothing like the capabilities they have in supposed scientific mathematical models that contravene physical theory, but are believed by the daydreamers (Rumsfeld, for instance) to scientifically confirm those nonexistent capabilities. What Parry's article and Carter / Kaplan separately identify is synergistic.

As Carter notes: "Much of this faith is rooted in admiration of American military technology and the belief that the 'revolution in military affairs' enabled us to do anything we wanted in the world, with or without our allies, regardless of whoever opposed us. Kaplan walks us through this history, from the carpet bombing campaigns of World War II to the first precision-guided bombing of a bridge in North Vietnam to the Gulf War and its famous smart bomb videotapes to today's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan." Thanks again for alerting me to Parry's article.

Por nada. I should have mentioned the title he gave it: "Losing the War for Reality."

Postscript: I see I completely overlooked the ABC News report on the top war criminals in the White House. It's not as if we didn't already know who they are. But the report -- in the mainstream media, let's not forget -- gives vivid details worth noting.

Watch the report: Bush advisers approved torture.

The amount of time and energy devoted to this furtive exercise at the very highest levels of the government reminded us how little Americans know, in fact, about the ways Mr. Bush [the Bullshitter-in-Chief] and his team undermined, subverted and broke the law in the name of saving the American way of life.

We're glad The Times finally got around to chiming in. But the hope it expresses that "a new Congress and a new president" might provide "the full truth," let alone hold the war criminals to account, is rosy at best.

The Times knows that, of course. Even so, it offers a bromide for the Pollyannas that "only by fully understanding what Mr. Bush [the Bullshitter-in-Chief] has done over eight years to distort the rule of law and violate civil liberties and human rights can Americans ever hope to repair the damage and ensure it does not happen again."

What about the damage that is not repairable? Uh, take two aspirins and call us in the morning ...

Well, no promotion for heem. He couldn't spin it. Petraeus himself conceded in his parting remark to the Senate Armed Services Committee, "The Champagne bottle has been pushed to the back of the refrigerator."

(Retired Lt. Gen. William Odom, commenting on today's testimony, caught it just right: "To continue to put the cozy veneer of comfortable half-truth" on the situation in Iraq "is to deceive the American public and to make them think it's not the charade it is.")

Written by M.K. Bhadrakumar, a former career diplomat in India's Foreign Service, it ran a couple of days ago in the Asia Times. The headline, "Iran torpedoes U.S. plans for Iraqi oil," gives only a hint of what has happened.

But "oil" is an important hint, and you don't find it mentioned in any of the NYT, WashPost, or LAT takeouts. (I wonder why.)  Meanwhile, Bhadrakumar offers a lot more to chew on while we await the Senate testimony of Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq.

For instance, chew on this:

It appears that one of the most shadowy figures of the Iranian security establishment, General Qassem Suleimani, commander of the Quds Force of Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps, personally mediated in the intra-Iraqi Shi'ite negotiations [to end the fighting]. ... 

US military commanders routinely blame the Quds for all their woes in Iraq. The fact that the representatives of [the] Da'wa [Party] and SIIC [the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council] secretly traveled to Qom [in Iran] under the very nose of American and British intelligence and sought Quds mediation to broker a deal conveys a huge political message.

Anyone who knows today's anarchic Iraq would realize that triggering a new spiral of violence in that country may not require much ingenuity, muscle power or political clout.

But to be able to summarily cry halt to cascading violence, and to achieve that precisely in about 48 hours, well, that's an altogether impressive capability in political terms. In this case, the Iranians have managed it with felicitous ease, as if they were just turning off a well-lubricated tap.

Wash it down with this:

Out of the dramatic developments of the past week, several questions arise, the principal being that the Bush administration's triumphalism over the so-called Iraq "surge" strategy has become irredeemably farcical, and, two, US doublespeak has become badly exposed. What stands out is that Washington promoted the latest round of violence in Basra, whereas Iran cried halt to it.

Here's a tasty hors d'oeuvre:

Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, who was camping in Basra and personally supervising the operations against the Mahdi Army [the Sadrist Shiite faction], was not in the loop about the goings-on. As for US President George W Bush, he had just spoken praising Maliki for waging a "historic and decisive" battle against the Mahdi Army, which he said was "a defining moment" in the history of a "free Iraq". Both Maliki and Bush look very foolish.

Getting on to the main dish:

What has happened is essentially that Iran has frustrated the joint US-British objective of gaining control of Basra, without which the strategy of establishing control over the fabulous oil fields of southern Iraq will not work. Control of Basra is a pre-requisite before American oil majors make their multi-billion investments to kick start large-scale oil production in Iraq. Iraq's Southern Oil Company is headquartered in Basra. Highly strategic installations are concentrated in the region, such as pipeline networks, pumping stations, refineries and loading terminals. The American oil majors will insist on fastening these installations.

The game plan for control of Basra now needs to be reworked. The idea was to take Basra in hand now so that the Sadrists would be thwarted from taking over the local administration in elections in October -- in other words, to ensure the political underpinning for Basra. All indications are that the Sadrists are riding a huge wave of popular support. They have caught the imagination of the poor, downtrodden, dispossessed masses in the majority Shi'ite community. They are hard to replace in democratic elections. The sense of frustration in Washington and London must be very deep that Basra is not yet fastened. Time is running out for Bush to make sure that his successor in the White House inherits an irreversible process in the US's Iraq policy.

Ready for dessert?

US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates put on a brave face, saying first-hand information was limited, but based on that, "they [Iraqi troops] seem to have done a pretty good job". To be sure, Cheney must be furious that Tehran torpedoed the entire US strategy for Big Oil. He has had a hard time shepherding the pro-West Arab regimes in the region, especially Saudi Arabia, up to this point.

Besides, nothing infuriates Cheney more than when US oil interests are hit. Thus, the most critical few weeks in the decades-long US-Iran standoff may have just begun. Last week, five former US secretaries of state who served in Democratic and Republican administrations - Henry Kissinger, James Baker, Warren Christopher, Madeline Albright and Colin Powell - sat at a round-table discussion in Athens and reached a consensus to urge the next US administration to open a line of dialogue with Iran.

Let me emphasize that our new Sunni friends insist on being paid for their loyalty. I have heard, for example, a rough estimate that the cost in one area of about 100 square kilometers is $250,000 per day. And periodically they threaten to defect unless their fees are increased. You might want to find out the total costs for these deals forecasted for the next several years, because they are not small and they do not promise to end. Remember, we do not own these people. We merely rent them. And they can break the lease at any moment. At the same time, this deal protects them to some degree from the government's troops and police, hardly a sign of political reconciliation.

-- William E. Odom, Lieutenant General (retired) 

Testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Iraq

April 2, 2008

Postscript: Here's a link to Odom's complete testimony. "It is the most realistic and disquieting analysis I have seen," a weapons analyst friend of mine writes. He continues:

Odom's recommended course of action is at least as realistic and disquieting. It gives an unpleasantly vivid sense of the enormity of the wanton blunder into which the Bush Administration, the Congress, and many active duty and retired senior officers have led the country.

They have wasted hundreds of billions of dollars, destroyed countless lives, wounded the country, and are outraged only by Senator Obama's pastor shouting words of outrage about the carnage they created to fulfill their fantasy of the "New American Century" in the guise of retribution for the Saudi attacks on our country. Chutzpah!

But there it is, finally -- the bribes to the tribes, a key tactic used by the U.S. military to suppress the Iraqi insurgency -- in the next-to-last paragraph of today's NYT frontpager: Maliki was pressed by U.S. officials "to seek an alliance with the Shiite tribes, as the Americans had done with Sunni tribes in the so-called Anbar Awakening."

The last paragraph quotes U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker: 

"We strongly encouraged him to use his most substantial weapon, which is money, to announce major jobs programs, Basra cleanup, whatnot," Mr. Crocker said. "And to do what he decided to do on his own: pay tribal figures to effectively finance an awakening for Basra."

You can tell from the whatnot that Crocker isn't talking about anything, really, except bribes. As to Maliki doing anything on his own, except screwing up, that's pure 'ganda talk, too. Such are the arrangements of our subprime war.

This is what struck me:

Have an online look at two things in real time: the mounting cost of the war in Iraq and what's happening in Times Square. I would suggest there's a direct correlation: The higher the cost, the glummer the tourists.

That blogpost, which went up on Aug. 11, 2003, also googled "weapons of mass destruction," noted the news coverage of John Cage's "music for the ages," and described how the media (specifically msnbc.com) was "shilling for celebrities." So little has changed, eh?

As Keith Seward explains in his introductory essay:

Motherfuckers' principals are Meng and Ecker, twins who had been subject to "scientific" experiments by Josef Mengele. After the war they find themselves in northern England, waiting for Lord Horror the way others wait for Godot. Ecker is rational but violent, Meng is a mutant whose huge cock and tits are nothing compared to the mutations of his mind. Not Holocaust survivors in any sense you've ever seen before, Meng and Ecker have adopted the ways of their captors -- the bloodlusts and hates. However, there is nothing paramilitary about them. They're not neo-Nazis or skinheads. They're more like the ultraviolent droogs of A Clockwork Orange, though it is quite possible that the droogs would not feel any affinity in return. Meng and Ecker are even further out in some post-war delirium. Auschwitz, meet Oz.

"Motherfuckers" is the third in a series of novels by the British writing and publishing team David Britton and Michael Butterworth. The other two are "Lord Horror" (now out of print) and "Baptised in the Blood of Millions." The novels succeed as "satire via hyperbole and excess," Seward writes, by applying to literature what he calls "the Boschian method":

• "time no longer flows in a straight line"
• "history loses its coordinate points and therefore its constancy
• "cause and effect are sundered"
• "space loses its divisions"
• "motion loses its efficacy"
• "gravity loses its inescapability"
• "life loses its phyla"
• "characters mutate"
• "behaviours lose their norms. Or rather, norms are represented not as injunctions but as worst-case scenarios"
• "art loses its conventions"

"Sure, there are writers who 'push the envelope,'" Seward adds. "But Motherfuckers does not just push the envelope. It beats at it with its fists, kicks, bites, and stabs the envelope. No matter how jaded a reader you are, no matter how much you've read your Henry Miller and Marquis de Sade, this is the book that will leave you feeling bad for the envelope. After Motherfuckers, it will never be the same again."

The police in Manchester, England (where Britton and Butterworth are based), didn't appreciate the idea of "satire via hyperbole and excess." Not long after "Lord Horror" was published, in 1989, the pair paid for their provocations in jail time and other forms of harrassment. Half the print run was confiscated, and a judge declared the book obscene, "less for its sex or violence than for anti-semitic ravings put into the mouths of anti-semitic characters," Seward notes. (The fact that the title character of "Lord Horror" is based on the World War II British fascist William Joyce, popularly known as Lord Haw-Haw, apparently failed to strike the judge as relevant.)

Britton went to prison for four months. Instead of discouraging him, the sentence hardened his resolve. It was in prison that he conceived the story of "Motherfuckers."

Here's a taste of it, taken from "Horror Panegyric," which offers excerpts of all three novels:

Fifty years on, Horror had confided to Ecker, Auschwitz would be a recognisable brand name, a mythic character as well-known as Sherlock Holmes or Tarzan. A fortune awaited the author who could bring 'Mr Auschwitz' to life. To recreate the persona of Auschwitz would be an ordained mission. Auschwitz, the holy end-all of life's futile pattern, slinking through the subconscious of humanity, the one archetypal riff common to all nightmares, fuelled on the anvil of Little Richard.

In a hundred years, Auschwitz would form its own genre and become the most successfully marketed product in the history of the world, a name as well-known globally as Coca Cola, taking all media under its encompassing umbrella. The camps were the obvious ultimate enclosed world, the desired image of world television, beamed by satellite into each city, town and village, ideal for community soap operas (a story of everyday life on the edge of life), of science fiction time travel (travel back through your life and end it in Auschwitz). In this televised scenario the dog-boys loomed large as Heathcliff doomed lovers, the spice of sexy bodice-rippers which thrilled millions of women. Guilt would never stand in the way of commerce ...

Seward calls "Motherfuckers" a masterpiece and compares it to the works of the Marquis de Sade and William S. Burroughs. After reading it myself, I'm inclined to agree. But he prefers not to emphasize "the rectitude of these books" for their moral instruction. "You can read them like the Gospel, if you want, and draw out the lessons," he writes. "But that's not really the point. These are not moral books. They're good books."

To read Seward's entire essay, go here.

(Crossposted at HuffPo)