A Colossal Wreck (56 page)

Since then, like other Trotskyist vets, such as Christopher Hitchens, Horowitz has thrown his energies into crusading on behalf of the American right, fuelled in his efforts by copious annual disbursements from the richer denizens of that well-populated sector. Richard Mellon Scaife—apex demon in the “vast right-wing conspiracy” identified by Hillary Clinton amid the Lewinsky scandal—has poured millions into Horowitz’s organizations, as have other well-heeled conservative foundations. Every now and again Horowitz will raise some spectacularly nutty alarum, like the
Los Angeles Times
being taken over by pinkos, and I always assume that Horowitz must be filling out his annual grant applications, and reminding Scaife that others may snooze and idle, but he, Horowitz, is unceasing in his vigilance against sedition.

In Horowitz’s bestiary, sedition comes in all the traditional forms, from Commies on campus to Commies in the press, and he’s churned out endless bulletins charting their insidious reach. Some of his specific accusations have no doubt been useful to fearful school administrations eager to harry and expel the few radical teachers able to find employment in these bleak times.

But the problem for Horowitz is one of supply. The left in America is really in very poor shape: near zero Commies, and really only a sprinkling of radical black profs, militant lesbians, and kindred antinomians to beat up on. The notion of pinkos in the media is laughable to all except the fearful imaginations of millionaires like Scaife. Hence the spotlight on Islamo-Fascism, a gloriously vague term whose origin is the topic of a tussle between Malise Ruthven, who used the term in 1980 to describe all authoritarian Islamic governments, and Stephen Schwartz, yet another fat, bearded former Trotskyist who says he was the first to use it in its specific application in 2000, eventually receiving a tap on the shoulder for so doing from Christopher Hitchens and John Sullivan. Arise, Sir Stephen!

Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week has been featuring Horowitz and big-name ranters of the right like Anne Coulter and Fox’s Sean Hannity, plus former US Senator Rick Santorum, and noted Islamophobe Daniel Pipes. They descended on various college campuses to be received by Christian-Fascists and the curious while they hurled imprecations at the left for being soft on sons of the Prophet stoning women to death for adultery.

The reaction of the left has been mixed. In some ways it always takes Horowitz’s antics far too seriously, though the latter’s effect on timid college administrations cannot be entirely gainsaid. On the other hand, Awareness Week is having a galvanizing effect. Coalitions have formed to combat Horowitz’s version of Awareness with a superior Progressive Awareness about what is good or not so good about Islam. Since Santorum and others have ripe records of intolerance for women, the air is usefully thick with shouts of “hypocrite.” Horowitz is probably the best organizer the left has these days.

November 7

Paris in Brumaire—late October and early November in the French revolutionary calendar devised by d’Eglantine—should be mellow and the vegetable stalls full of bolete mushrooms. But this Brumaire has been inhospitable, with a wind as sharp as the knife that sliced
through d’Eglantine’s neck—though conditions are tolerable when the sun is up.

The plus side held gloriously clear skies and beautiful light, filling Suger’s great cathedral at St. Denis. At the Pompidou there is an immense exhibition of Giacometti, in which profusion has a reverse effect. Two or three Giacometti sculptures by themselves look great, but hundreds tell you the guy ran out of steam some time in the late ’30s. His studio became a mecca for top level photographers doing “the sculptor at work.” Cartier Bresson, Brassai, Arnold Newman, and Irving Penn were all in attendance. Giacometti was a manly looking Swiss-Italian, and played the “artist at work” part well. Annette G. looked less happy as the decades passed and there are odd times when he spends three or four years sculpting and drawing a couple of Japanese men, at least one of whom was Annette’s lover. Giacometti chose his fans well too. Genet did a big essay on him and Sartre wrote the catalogue intro for his first New York show.

The Modern Art collection at the Pompidou is really good and reminds one—if reminders are necessary—just how awful “modern art” collections are in US. There was room after room of great and interesting things: ravishing Kandinskys, a fantastic room of Picabias, one with two naked women in ’40s movie poster style with a bulldog, plus a really frightening Golden Calf. Then on the next floor a whole late-modern collection with excellent acquisitions from 1950s, 1960s, and on.

Among them was “Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, A Real-Time Social System as of May 1, 1971,” the series by Hans Haacke that got his one-man show axed at the last minute by the Guggenheim in the 1970s. The work consists of 146 photographs of buildings, many of them slums, acquired between 1951 and 1971 by Harry Shapolsky, named at the time as the city’s top slumlord. Haacke included in each photo the info given in the Real Estate Directory of Manhattan. They make ironic reading now. Back then, to take a couple of examples, Shapolsky had 219 E. 94th, a five-story building with an assessed land value of $25,000 and a total value of $47,000. A six-story walk-up, 346 East 13th St., had an assessed land value of $22,000 and a total value of $57,000.

The best pieces on this floor of the Pompidou were an immense robe made from bottle tinfoil and bottle caps, maybe fifty feet by fifty feet, looking like a Klimt, by a Ghanaian artist, El Anatsui; and a fifty-foot sperm whale or plane, depending on one’s point of view, made from bamboo, with about 10,000 scissors, knives, etc., confiscated by security at Sao Paulo airport. The artist is Cai Guo Qiang, about whom one story I found begins with the promising words that he is best known “for his magnanimous works using gunpowder.”

The greatest delight of the Pompidou’s modern collection is that not one Warhol—as profuse in American institutions of culture as dinosaurs—was on display.

December 11

Overheard by the SF cab driver:

Twenty-something female passenger: How are you feeling?

Twenty-something male passenger: Like I’m about to pass out.

Female passenger: Awesome. Passing out is awesome.

2008

January 2

It’s time to take stock of the landscape. The American political system, as conditioned by corporate cash, legal obstructions to independent candidacies, and the corporate press, is designed to eliminate any substantive threat to business as usual. In the case of the Democrats, the winnowing process is working well. Mike Gravel, by far the most vivacious and radical of the party’s candidates on the substantive matters of the war and empire, was swiftly marginalized. I’ve seen very few Gravel buttons.

Dennis Kucinich seems to have a lock on those Democrats prepared to stay true to a hopeless outsider. I don’t understand this loyalty to the Ohio congressman. The point of hopeless outsiders is to give us hope. It’s a dialectical thing. They convince us that their cause is not hopeless, but his signs and buttons and tickers already look as though they’re collectibles on eBay.

The three major Democratic contenders for the nomination are all unalluring. John Edwards is offering us a populist package, with homilies on fair trade, gaps between rich and poor, corporate greed and so forth. Decent people including many labor organizers are working for him. I don’t believe a word he says. His substantive record on war and empire is bad. He has poor judgment. Why spend $400 to have a hairdo that makes you look like a slick lawyer with a fancy haircut?

Barack Obama? I can’t remember a single substantive statement he’s made. In terms of political philosophy and pragmatic intention his platform is like the Anglican clergyman’s answer, when asked for his conception of God: an oblong blur. When pressed, Obama’s positions on war and empire are usually very bad. Talk about “moving beyond partisan differences” invariably ends with the Establishment’s long-term goal of abolishing Social Security.

Hillary Clinton is the candidate for corporate power at home, and empire abroad. She argued passionately in the White House for the NATO bombing of Belgrade. Five days after September 11, 2001, she was calling for a broad war on terror. She voted for the Patriot Act. When it came time for Mrs. Clinton to deliver her speech in support of the war, she reiterated some of the most outlandish claims made by Dick Cheney.

On the Republican side I’ve liked Mike Huckabee. He had a decent record as governor of Arkansas and deserves support if only for his moral and political courage in his pardoning or sentence commutations of some 1,200 convicted criminals. These acts of mercy and faith in rehabilitation have been predictably attacked by many liberals because one of those he released may well have subsequently killed someone. This is an unavoidable risk unless you achieve certainty by execution or a sentence of life without the possibility of parole—which will be the trend if states continue to abandon the death penalty. The release on New Year’s Eve of the seventy-seven-year-old Sara Jane Moore after thirty-two years prison for trying to kill our greatest President since Warren Harding is, alas, scarcely a precedent.

But Huckabee, particularly since he took on board a big-name political strategist, Ed Rollins, has made bad mistakes, flip-flopping on his enlightened position on immigration and taking on the awful John Bolton as a foreign policy counselor. Nonetheless I have a soft spot for the guy, if only because he has real populist character and has panicked the Establishment into regrouping round John McCain as the Republican match to HRC, as the bipartisan candidate of choice.

But my favorite remains Ron Paul, rock solid against war and empire and the neoliberal corporate state. He’s a principled fellow
who’s won passionate support (and millions in modest cash contributions) from ordinary Americans. I recently drove down I-5 from Washington through Oregon to northern California and “Ron Paul” signs were almost the only ones I saw. I like the look of the people behind them.

All great seasons in politics begin with excitement. Right now there’s none.

January 3

For the party establishments—Democratic and Republican—it was a bad night, as their favored candidates went down to severe defeat.

With Barack Obama’s crushing victory over Hillary Clinton, the campaign scenario of the Democratic elite is now in the trash bin. Their calculation had been that Obama would never be able to match the Clintons’ fund-raising. Wrong. Obama raised huge sums from small contributors, who can continue their support. A lot of Hillary’s big financial backers have already reached their legal limits.

They thought Obama was another Howard Dean, headed for deflation as soon as the voters faced the moment of decision. Wrong again.

Mrs. Clinton had the big feminist organizations in her corner and a good chunk of organized labor. They didn’t deliver, any more than the Democratic machine supervised by campaign chairman Terry McAuliffe and superpollster Mark Penn. They thought they could sink Obama with December’s slurs about drug use, Islamic heritage, and color. They backfired.

The only age bracket Hillary scored well in was that of women sixty-five and up. However, Obama was able to expand the electorate, an unprecedented feat in the history of Iowa caucuses. Students currently on winter break went back to Ames, Iowa City and Des Moines to vote for him.

The three main issues on voters’ minds were, in descending order, the war, the economy, and health care. Obama led in all three. Overall, he beat Hillary among both men and women. He took the five biggest cities and most of the counties in every quarter of the state. Young people simply don’t care for Hillary. Young voters see Obama as a
break with the past, and he skillfully manages to avoid any substantive positioning that might disabuse them of this belief. As much as the press tried to say that the war is no longer an issue, it turned out to be the top concern of the voters, and Obama’s record features opposition to the war in his Senate campaign in 2004. Clinton and Edwards both voted for the war. Edwards apologized for that vote. Clinton never did.

It’s hard to see any future for the Edwards campaign, unless as some kind of Hillary surrogate to siphon votes away from Obama in New Hampshire and South Carolina. There’s no evidence that economic populism doesn’t sell in Iowa. It’s simply that this time around Democrats and Independents didn’t see Edwards as a persuasive salesman.

January 16

Terrorism flourishes brazenly at Ground Zero in the new 7 World Trade Center building. Here can be found a secretive entity of fabulous wealth and power. Kingdoms and corporations alike tremble at its shadow and make haste to pay it tribute. I refer to Moody’s Investor Services, wholly owned subsidiary of Moody’s Corporation, which reported $2.3 billion in revenues in 2006.

On January 10 Moody’s, in concert with the other main bondrating firm, Standard and Poor’s, gave the United States its top AAA credit rating. The terrorist blackmail threat came in the form of a demand by Moody’s that the US government “reform” Social Security and Medicare. “In the very long term, the rating could come under pressure if reform of Medicare and Social Security is not carried out as these two programs are the largest threats to the long-term financial health of the United States and to the government’s AAA rating.”

Steven Hess, Moody’s top analyst for the US economy, spelled it out more explicitly to the London
Financial Times
: “If no policy changes are made, in 10 years from now we would have to look very seriously at whether the US is still a triple-A credit … The US rating is the anchor of the world’s financial system. If you have a downgrade, you
have a problem.” Thus does Moody’s man calmly threaten to plant the financial equivalent of a thermonuclear device under the Statue of Liberty.

Right now the US deficit is around $200 billion, 1.5 percent of GDP, which is not large by recent historical measure and which presents no danger in itself to US financial soundness. But as Professor Robert Pollin of U Mass/Amherst adds, if Moody’s analysts want to discuss the causes of fiscal laxity, “Why not look at the Iraq war? The defense budget for 2006 was $617 billion. That is 4.8 percent of a $13 trillion GDP. Before the Iraq war, the defense budget was about 3.0 percent of GDP. So Iraq alone is costing about $150 billion annually, about 1.1 percent of GDP. And what has it accomplished? Social Security and Medicare combined were about $900 billion in 2006. Why assume we first have to attack our minimal welfare state, and leave the imperial budget intact?”