Month: July 2012

Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries

Responding to my post about the De Maistre Drones, Larry Houghteling, a reader, directs me to this poem of A. E. Housman. Seems appropriate for our “all-volunteer army.” Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries These, in the day when heaven was falling, The hour when earth’s foundations fled, Followed their mercenary calling, And took their wages, and are dead. Their shoulders held the sky suspended; They stood, and earth’s foundations stay; What God abandoned, these defended, And saved the sum of things for pay.

The Drone: Joseph de Maistre’s Executioner

The  drone (h/t Liliana Segura): From his computer console here in the Syracuse suburbs, Col. D. Scott Brenton remotely flies a Reaper drone that beams back hundreds of hours of live video of insurgents, his intended targets, going about their daily lives 7,000 miles away in Afghanistan. Sometimes he and his team watch the same family compound for weeks. “I see mothers with children, I see fathers with children, I see fathers with mothers, I see kids playing soccer,” Colonel Brenton said. When the call comes for him to fire a missile and kill a militant — and only, Colonel Brenton said, when the women and children are not around — the hair on the back of his neck stands up, […]

Lunch Break Utopia (Cont.)

Continuing with my series on the ever-disappearing lunch break, we get this (h/t Derek Attig) Want to take off for lunch but the boss won’t let you? Then buy this inflatable Lunch Decoy from Applebee’s. That’s the premise behind the latest marketing campaign from the fast casual dining chain. But the product is no joke — it’s a real product actually on sale on Amazon. There are six such decoys to choose from, including The Cubicle Queen and The Go-Getter. Soon, all we’ll be left with is this:  

Liberalism Agonistes

After a couple of Twitter skirmishes tonight about Alexander Cockburn and his apologetics for the Soviet Union—though see this reconsideration from Cockburn (I’m told there are others in The Golden Age is Within Us; since we’re moving, my copy is now boxed up somewhere in Brooklyn, so I can’t check it out)—I come back to my age-old conundrum about the American liberal. Why is he or she willing to make his or her peace with the American state—despite all its crimes (crimes acknowledged by liberals!)—yet never willing to make his or her peace with critics like Cockburn, whose only “crime,” if you can call it that, was to apologize for the Soviet Union long past its sell by date? Why […]

More on Alexander Cockburn

I wrote a longer piece on Alexander Cockburn for Al Jazeera. Here are some other reminiscences, remembrances, and reflections: One of the most thoughtful and comprehensive assessments from Kathy Geier, who also includes some great links. Dennis Perrin on, among other things, Cockburn’s darker side. I linked to this in my earlier piece, but here again is Jeffrey St. Clair, Cockburn’s comrade and writing partner. More on Hitchens versus Cockburn from Jeff Sparrow. An interesting appreciation from National Review‘s John Fund, who had once been Cockburn’s editor at the Wall Street Journal. And another appreciation from the right: libertarian Jesse Walker. Some tweets from his niece actress Olivia Wilde: “He taught me how to make coffee in a jar, how […]

Alexander Cockburn, 1941-2012

Alexander Cockburn, one of the finest radical journalists—no, journalists—of his generation, has died. Because of the similarities between him and Christopher Hitchens—both Anglos (he of Ireland, Hitchens of England) in America; both friends, for a time; both left (though, in Hitchens’s case, for a time); and both dying relatively young from cancer—people, inevitably, will want to make comparisons. Here, very quickly, are three (and why I think Cockburn was ultimately the superior writer). First, Cockburn was a much better observer of people and of politics: in part because he didn’t impose himself on the page the way Hitchens did, he could see particular details (especially of class and of place) that eluded Hitchens. At his best, he got out of […]

Eli’s Comin’—Hide Your Heart, Girl: Why Yale is Going to Singapore

In Fall 1998, my penultimate semester at Yale, I TA’d for a course called “Yale and the External World.” Taught by historian Gaddis Smith, it was part of the university’s annual DeVane Lectures, in which a distinguished member of the faculty is given an opportunity to expound over the course of a semester—to students, alums, and the public—on a topic of his or her choice. Other DeVane Lecturers have included Nancy Cott on the history of marriage, whose lectures ultimately became this excellent book, Michael Denning on democracy, and more. But in 1998, Yale was heading toward its tercentennial, and President Richard Levin wanted someone to take stock of “the evolution of the University’s place in the modern world.” Smith, […]

Desperate Housewives

Here’s a fantastic piece in the current issue of Harper’s on Mary Kay and their exploitation of desperate housewives. It’s by Virginia Sole-Smith, a talented young journalist who’s carved out an interesting niche for herself: her beat combines beauty, labor, and exploitation. (She also happens to be the daughter of my adviser in grad school, Rogers Smith.) Alas, the geniuses at Harper’s have it behind the firewall.  But it’s astonishingly cheap to subscribe to the magazine, so do that or buy the issue.

When Hayek Met Pinochet

  In case you missed my five-part series on Hayek in Chile, here are the links: Hayek von Pinochet: In which we learn what our protagonist had to say about one of history’s tyrants. But wait, there’s more: Hayek von Pinochet, Part 2: In which we learn what our protagonist had to say about South Africa and what Ludwig von Mises had to say about fascism. Friedrich del Mar: In which we ask the question: Did Hayek make the decision to convene a meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society in Viña del Mar? The Road to Viña del Mar: In which we answer the question: Did Hayek make the decision to convene a meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society in Viña […]

Viña del Mar: A Veritable International of the Free-Market Counterrevolution

This is the second in a two-part post.  Part 1 is here. • • • • • The 1981 Mont Pelerin Society (MPS) meeting at Viña del Mar was “one of the largest and most successful regional meetings” (p. 1) the MPS had ever held, claimed Eric Brodin, author of an eye-opening report for the MPS newsletter. Two hundred and thirty men and women from 23 countries attended, making it a veritable International of the free-market counterrevolution. It featured such luminaries, as I reported, as James Buchanan, Gordon Tullock, Milton and Rose Friedman, and Reed Irvine. (For a complete list of attendees, which included higher-ups in the Pinochet regime, corporate heads and bankers, and US officials, see pp. 16ff of […]

The Road to Viña del Mar

Who decided to hold the November 1981 meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society (MPS) in Viña del Mar, the Chilean seaside resort city by the sea where the 1973 coup against Allende was planned? Was it Friedrich von Hayek, as I claimed in The Nation and The Reactionary Mind? The short answer is: it’s complicated. And in that complexity we get a glimpse of Hayek’s intimate involvement in the Pinochet experiment and the deep affinities he and his associates saw between his ideas and the regime’s actions. That, at any rate, is what I discovered after a week of digging in the archives of Stanford’s Hoover Institution, where the Hayek and the MPS papers are held. This post is Part […]

Wow, Tyler Cowen, How Much Paper Do They Steal at GMU? And Other Responses to the Libertarians

Since my last roundup on the response to Chris Bertram’s, Alex Gourevitch’s, and my piece on workplace tyranny, there’s been a lot of action. But before I get to that, there are a couple of dispatches from the front that are just doozies. Down in Australia, a company issues guidelines for how its employees ought to keep their work stations clean: Cold soup can be freely enjoyed in communal hubs on each floor, but hot soup is only permitted on the “top deck”, an area devoted to eating and socialising on level 45 with sweeping views of the city and beyond. While gum, throat lozenges and lollies can be consumed at desks, the privilege does not extend to “chocolate, fruit, […]

Kissinger: Allende More Dangerous Than Castro

By coincidence, Greg Grandin has a piece on Allende and Chile in the new issue of the London Review of Books.  It sets out very clearly why so many on the right saw Allende as such a profound threat. And then came Allende, horn-rimmed, jowly and looking a little too well lived to be a revolutionary. An avowed Marxist who was also an avowed democrat, he was at odds with Kissinger’s bipolar world. He was neither raw nor cooked. ‘I don’t think anybody in the government understood how ideological Kissinger was about Chile,’ an aide at the National Security Council once said. ‘I don’t think anybody ever fully grasped that Henry saw Allende as being a far more serious threat […]

Friedrich Del Mar*: More on Hayek, Pinochet, and Chile

In my first post about Hayek and Pinochet, I quoted a statement that I had written in the Nation in 2009 and had repeated in my book The Reactionary Mind: Hayek admired Pinochet’s Chile so much that he decided to hold a meeting of his Mont Pelerin Society in Viña del Mar, the seaside resort where the coup against Allende was planned. The Mont Pelerin Society (MPS) was a group of intellectuals and activists that Hayek helped found after World War II to advance the cause of the free market. In recent years, it has become the subject of some great new scholarship; judging by the fall catalogs it looks likely to be an even hotter topic in the future. […]

But wait, there’s more: Hayek von Pinochet, Part 2

My post last night on Hayek and Pinochet is getting a fair amount of attention. But there’s more to the story that I didn’t include. So here are some additional details. First, though Farrant et al (authors of the excellent article on Hayek and Pinochet that I linked to last night) cite from this letter Hayek wrote to the Times on July 11, 1978, they don’t cite what to my mind is the most remarkable statement in that letter: If Mrs. Thatcher said that free choice is to be exercised more in the market place than in the ballot box, she has merely uttered the truism that the first is indispensable for individual freedom, while the second is not. That […]

Hayek von Pinochet

It’s no secret that Friedrich von Hayek was a warm supporter of Augusto Pinochet’s bloody regime. As I wrote in The Nation a few years back: Hayek admired Pinochet’s Chile so much that he decided to hold a meeting of his Mont Pelerin Society in Viña del Mar, the seaside resort where the coup against Allende was planned. In 1978 he wrote to the London Times that he had “not been able to find a single person even in much maligned Chile who did not agree that personal freedom was much greater under Pinochet than it had been under Allende.” Greg Grandin, Naomi Klein, Brad DeLong, John Quiggin (twice), and Michael Lind also have written about the Hayek-Pinochet connection. By […]

When Utopia Becomes a Lunch Break

James Livingston is one of the most brilliant historians of the United States. His book Pragmatism and the Political Economy of Cultural Revolution is by far the best book I’ve read all year. In his more recent book, Against Thrift, he makes the claim that advertising is “the last utopian idiom of our time.” If Jim is right, we’re in major trouble. Because, according to this New York Times piece, working conditions have gotten so bad that advertisers can now depict utopia as…taking a lunch break: But marketers are urging workers to commit small acts of so-called rebellion — like taking a vacation, or going on a lunch break. That’s the message McDonald’s sent this spring with a campaign called, “It’s […]