One learned tonight that vice-presidential candidate Palin doesn’t “attribute every activity of man to the changes in the climate”. Whew!

One can write to one’s congress representative (Sam Farr in my case, who voted yes on HR 3997: see recorded votes on 9/29/08) or senator (Diane Feinstein) something like:

Dear Representative: Please kill the misnamed Paulson bill—a cloud of goody-good suggestions really— and replace it with a bill that helps those people for whom foreclosures are real catastrophes. Do not be fooled by the money-man’s muscle-showing in the case of Lehman’s and Washington Mutual. If one trillion dollars or so is needed to make up for deflated values of purchased homes, it must go to the initial accounts and lenders, and absolutely not to help the creators of derivatives. Also needed: to go back on the iniquitous bankruptcy law and afford better safety for the weakest and most at risk in this financial fiasco.

Les électeurs américains sont en colère d’après les journaux, et gare aux politiciens qui abondent dans le sens de Paulson, Bernanke et la Maison-Blanche et renflouent les banques d’investissement. Il serait en effet assez gros de voir beaucoup de gens perdre leur maison ou partie de leurs avoirs immobiliers pendant que les principaux acteurs de ce fiasco immobilier, qui ont poussé à la manipulation des garanties immobilières et à leur liquéfaction, s’y retrouvent! De plus, comment pourrait-on à l’avenir déterminer le risque (et donc mesurer l’intérêt) si les grands acteurs de cette débâcle sont renfloués? MacCain est en chute dans les sondages et se démène comme un beau diable. Il retrousse les manches et retourne faire son travail de sénateur à Washington! Pas un mot sur les épargnants ordinaires cependant. Même Obama est trop prudent: il pourrait nous dire un peu plus clairement ce qu’il a l’intention de faire, mais peut-être est-il à court d’idées sur ce qui se passe?

Vincent Reinhart, an economist at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, is quoted in the New York Times of 9/10/08 as saying that

Mr. Paulson, like Mr. Bush, would ordinarily resist government intervention. “I think the economy is taking Bush and Paulson to a place where they wouldn’t go on their own,” he said. “In a crisis, you start bending principles, and Paulson bent principles.”

What principles is he talking about? not the socializing of debt and privatizing of profits apparently.

Quote from Zygmunt Bauman (Does ethics have a chance in a world of consumers?, 2008, p. 25):

To sum up the seminal departures discussed thus far: The presently emergent human condition augurs an unprecedented degree of emancipation from constraints—from a necessity experienced as coercion and therefore resented and rebelled against. This sort of emancipation tends to be experienced as the reconciliation of Sigmund Freud’s “pleasure principle” with the “reality principle,” and therefore as the end of the epoch-long conflict that in Freud’s view made civilization a hotbed of discontent.

Emancipation from constraints? this to me is an appearance: forced consumption everywhere, masking as freedom, as long as there is enough oil in the gears. Ok though on the success of hybridity or liquidity for the inhabitants of this purportedly new world, and of those who make themselves liquid: suave, multi-sided, couleuvres? Metaphors: anchor (setting, lifting) instead of roots (sinking, uprooting, disembedding), etc. Ok also, but hasn’t this been seen already by Augustine et al (being a pilgrim, being on the road, with inns here and there).
Emancipation from territorial adscriptions, ok of course, but towards what? See Exodus and its tales of alienation. My emancipation as an intellectual from local dependencies is also an enslavement to new tools, manières de faire, ever-changing desires…. Bauman doesn’t seem to indicate anywhere (of what I’ve read) that it has become obvious (or is easily visible if one follows one’s eyes) that we are entirely made of the work, thinking, living of distant, invisible, uncontactable others. Incarnation and its mysteries unfolding faster than ever. Oh yes, he does so pp. 71–3: globalization as ethical challenge, and here is a passage:

Within the world’s dense network of global interdependence, we cannot be sure of our moral innocence whenever other human beings suffer indignity, misery, or pain. We cannot declare that we do not know, nor can we be certain that there is nothing we could change in our conduct that would avert or at least alleviate the sufferers’ fate. We might be impotent individually, but we could do something together, and “togetherness” is made of and by the individuals. The trouble is—as another great twentieth-century philosopher, Hans Jonas, complained—although space and time no longer limit the effects of our actions, our moral imagination has not progressed much beyond the scope it has acquired in Adam-and-Eve times.

Surprising or perhaps not so surprising that the story of Jesus is wholly absent here. Everything said here was apparently already felt in a little corner of Roman Galilee, and Bauman’s sentences should read: “Within the world’s dense network of global interdependence, we can be sure of our moral guilt whenever….” Or how does one explain food prices in our supermarkets? clothes’ price? energy prices above all? the infrastructures of Europe and northern America, etc.? But Bauman seems to think it can be fixed by new imaginative, transformative (of course), polity networks. New forces are needed (pages 76–77). Whence?

Reading of the so-called news was cut short by that of Imre Kertész’s Kaddish: les grands livres nous dispensent de ce qui passe pour être nouveau. Commentary on Todesfuge page 73, talking about his writing and more to the point literature in general, and East European literature in particular (and its compromissions and the uncertainties one is in as to aesthetic
judgment, clouded by all sorts of political and other considerations):

insofar as I am and must be at all—oh, what do I have to do with literature, with your golden hair, Margarethe, for a ballpoint pen is my spade, the sepulchre of your ashen hair, Shulamith;

Aqiba being burned and the letters of the torah in flying sparks over the fire (and a sweet smell from inside the acrid, putrefying one, as in Samson’s story?). “… truth is what consumes you, I wrote” (page 84).

That I write only because I have to write, and I have to write because I am whistled up every day to drive the spade deeper, to play death on a darker, sweeter string?

On original sin, or (shall I say) a version of it: el delito mayor del hombre es haber nacido (Calderón, quoted page 93).

Quoted from the charming David Brooks about debts and the shared responsibilities of lenders and borrowers in today’s NYT:

And now the reckoning has come. The turn in the market punishes many of those seduced by financial temptations. (Sometimes capitalism undermines the Puritan virtues, but sometimes it reinforces them).

The example of a single divorced woman whose story he summarizes above in his column may fit, but Brooks doesn’t engage the real issue, namely that it is necessary for the thing he glorifies as “capitalism” to have ever-increasing consumption by the likes of this woman. And it is not true that capitalism undermines Puritan values only “sometimes”. It does so always, I rather think. Divorce, for instance, in this case, might be frowned upon by a Puritan-in-name society or today’s conservatives, but it does mean doubling your housing, transportation, toys for the kids, phone, washing machine, etc. What is there not to like by greedy money makers? And aren’t the tears shed by family-value supporters crocodilian? Much of the US economy is consumption driven: meaning immediate consumption. Brooks also doesn’t say (and here he lies by omission) that the most important group of those “seduced by financial temptations”, in the banking and insurance industry, will not be punished. He continues:

Meanwhile, social institutions are trying to re-right the norms. The government is sending some messages. The Treasury and the Fed are trying to stabilize the system while still ensuring that those who made mistakes feel the pain.

But he lies again when speaking of re-righting “the norms”. The so-called risk-takers of financial capitalism are protected after all, because, as is explained, feared, or tolerated, no matter the excesses, it would be worse for everyone if the “structure” were to collapse. Would it? Yes the Fed is trying to stabilize the system (system here is little more than saying that greed is systematic, that is to be found always and everywhere), but “ensuring that those who made mistakes feel the pain”? Well, Brooks has chosen his side: let them be punished, those idiots who didn’t know how to save and thought the good life would last (that is: who were not smart, speedy, greedy, lucky enough to make a killing on the market in time before its downturn).

An article published over a year ago in Hebrew describes a very important find that may lead to a reassessment of messianic beliefs in Judaism, the early Jesus movement, and Jesus himself. The article by A. Yardeni and B. Elitzur, published in a Spring issue of Cathedra (issue #123, Nisan 2007, pages 155-66), is available here. Today, an article of the NYT picked up the story and describes the stone and some of the claims made about it in some detail. More on this later.

A letter I read today in the NYT, and which reacts to a piece by Thomas L. Friedman:

When Thomas L. Friedman says, “It still is not clear that Iraq is a country that can be held together by anything other than an iron fist,” it made me heartsick. I thought of the countless lives lost or broken and the untold treasure expended on this needless war, only to have us come to the same conclusion as Saddam Hussein.

T. Friedman was willing to sell this Iraq war to the public, from the get-go, then became critical right before the 2004 election, and ever since has been selling it again, or elements of it. He is not the only one: the NYT and the US media in general were willing to sacrifice Iraqis and US soldiers for something they should have known couldn’t work. Oh, but it is working, we are assured. The sunnis are sufficiently paid or cowed into submission. The shi’as understand the wisdom of order. Iron fist, indeed, though it can keep some of its softness still, as the US talk of 50 bases for who knows how long….

What it is not: the hope that the trickling of time, drop by drop, will wear out or efface the fault or offense, as if it were sand and not very consistent. Would that forgetfulness would erode the fault with the memory of it! “Time heals”? or, “after all, this is how history works…” Id est, violence, injustice, etc., lose their capacity to hurt and be recognized as something that may happen to oneself and become part of the machinery or unfolding of history. Perhaps, as in a misunderstood concept developed by Adam Smith, history too, or the somnolence of time, like the market, would correct things magically, with the wave of an invisible hand. No anamnesis here, or painful effort to recognize something or someone and at least mark a possible ground for forgiveness. No, rather forgetfulness and a naturalizing of history.

What it is not, to continue with Vladimir Jankélévitch’s Le pardon (1967): an effort to understand all the dimensions and causality of an act, however wicked or offensive, because “tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner”. It was a question of knowledge or lack thereof, after all, ignorance. Proper knowledge would have set things right.

Not a resetting of accounts either, or an attempt to set the counter back to zero, in a seemingly magnanimous gesture of “letting go”. No consignment to silence of this kind.

What is it then? the opposite of this weak hope of “wearing things out”. A confrontation done with some urgency, and a painful remembering, with another person, not an image or reconstruction of it. It cannot excuse on “rational” grounds. It is irrational to forgive, or must feel so. The gratuity or grace of the act, surely this is a waste, when rationality is about balance, measure, reciprocity, calculations of one’s due. One’s due: no forgiveness without a strong sense of justice, and even without the capacity to inflict punishment, at least on the horizon. No forgiveness if one cannot hurt the other party. On the other side of forgiveness, the recognition that the transformed landscape is as it should be, a new rationality.