When, after 2004, the notion of a “troop surge” started to become something of a cliché, and the verb surge began to appear in more and more places, I had a shadowy, antagonistic response every time I came across it. But, like an itch that needs scratching but isn’t intense enough to force its way into your consciousness, troop surges remained at the periphery of my attention. And, until this morning, I never investigated if the prickly intuition I had about the phrase — that its unthinking repetition and proliferation in the media masks something more significant than just another shift in news-cycle language — were true. But, since I am somewhat without anything to do today — no announcements to copyedit, no desire to pound out several more pages on Arendt — I went to LexisNexis and looked into the use of “troop surge.”

From 1999 to 2003, a search for the phrase turns up nothing. The first article in the last 10 years to contain both “surge” and “troop,” “Relax, It’s Only a Surge,” occurs on February 05, 2004, in Washington Outlook. In it, the then chief of Central Command, John Abizaid, discusses the novel way that troops will be deployed in conflicts of the future:

“I would prefer [that a commander] should feel free to go to the secretary of Defense and say, ‘Look, we’re going to need a brigade here for probably 60 days for a certain operation.’ I think this concept of [employing] a combination of a base force in the region plus surge forces — to use things as you need them, and for all of the combatant commanders to have less ownership — is pretty important. You [can then] use surge forces to deal with specific military problems.”

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In this otherwise mediocre — which I think I’ll poke at in a moment — take on the current state of the artworld, author David Galensen posits that

From the Renaissance onwards, artists were constrained in the extent to which they could innovate by the need to satisfy powerful patrons and institutions. The rise of a competitive market removed this constraint and gave artists greater freedom. Collectors soon recognised that the most innovative art would become the most valuable. In a market setting that rewarded innovation, conceptual artists who could innovate rapidly and conspicuously gained a decisive advantage. And here too Picasso led the way.

While it’s patent that prior to the market, artists were ‘constrained’ by the need to secure their livelihood from patrons and institutions (and it isn’t really obvious to me that this became the case in the Renaissance; medieval artists relied on institutions for their porridge), the lavish praise given to the market as motor of liberty here is pure ideology. The implication is that the personal whim of patrons, apparently, is less desirable that the impersonal adjudication of the market, since the market rewards ‘competition’. This is all cant, even when the talk is about normal commodities like mayonnaise and 3/8” screws, but when it is applied to art it simply becomes lunacy. Artists do not ‘compete’ in the way that artisans and manufacturers do; and the ‘innovation’ that successful artists manage to capitalize has little to do with their product in itself, and more to do with passing trends, the cleverness of curators, and the buzz hummed by gallery-owners. Much more important to an individual artist’s success is the set of practices that established independent galleries (which was mentioned earlier in the piece), but if we turn to that, then we’re not really moving beyond feudalism into a brave modern future; we remain constrained by patronage and personal whim — now, however, that of the gatekeepers of major galleries and other places.

Galensen also makes an odd analytical split between ‘experimental’ and ‘conceptual’ artists:

Important artists can be divided into two types on the basis of their goals and methods. Experimental innovators seek to record visual perceptions. Their goals are imprecise, so they work by trial and error. They build their skills over time, and their innovations appear gradually, late in their lives. Conceptual innovators express their ideas or emotions. The precision of their goals allows them to plan their works and execute them systematically. Radical conceptual innovations depend on the ability to recognise the value of extreme deviations from existing conventions, and this ability declines with experience, as habits of thought become entrenched, so the most important conceptual innovations occur early in an artist’s career.

Even under cursory consideration, the distinction made between these two putative art-practices doesn’t really hold. It’s gasbaggery. Of course, since the overall aim of the piece appears to be the vindication of the independent art market, which Galensen is tying to the explosion of ‘conceptual’ art, ‘experimental’ art is said to have ‘imprecise’ goals.

At any rate the piece is not all bad. It notes that the contemporary art world has its roots in the first impressionist exhibition. This is clearly true. But while Galensen just assumes that opening up of the art market has meant the liberation of artists everywhere, the reality is much sloppier: instead of religious or personal constraints, there are now the constraint of profitability, prestige, and ‘innovation’.

The situation in Gaza is appalling. If you needed any more proof of that, after the premeditated destruction of three UN schools, Lenin, via Jamie, has linked to a Telegraph article that details the planned decimation of nearly an entire village. Apparently, after the IDF orders everyone in your community into a single building at gunpoint you can expect that building to get shelled.

But besides the news we’re not hearing about what sort of catastrophes are being perpetrated within the Gaza strip, we get all sorts of strange rhetorical devices. For instance, NYC’s own Michael Bloomberg, interviewed on — where else — Fox, paints a somber picture to defend Israel’s use of disproportionate response. (Skip to 2:28 for the relevant bits if you are pressed for time).

Bloomberg first dismisses the notion of proportional response, saying that “In, in the United States, somebody was sending rockets, over our shoreline or over one of our borders we would not respond proportionally. We would respond with everything at our res — with every resource at our disposal.” Moreover, this is “exactly, incidentally, what we’d do in New York City.” If any of “our people” are “under attack by a criminal or a terrorist,” Bloomberg’s instructions are for his police chief to use any and every thing he has available to “protect our citizens.”

The tired line about how Israel is “forced to respond” to Hamas’ flagrant abuses is not surprising, and the rather startling statement that “most people in the Western world” recognize that “their freedoms are directly tied to the freedoms of the Israeli people” should not be — I mean, it is practically the same as the strategy for containing communism: if terrorism wins here, it will spread everywhere! At any rate they have been dissected by many people many times over. But Bloomberg’s strategy for justifying disproportionate force is bluntly wishing to be clever. He employs a metaphorical scenario: suppose there is a criminal or terrorist kicking down your door? Would you want the police to send just one person, since that is all is kicking at your door? No? Well, then, you agree with disproportional response!

Except this doesn’t work. It is flawed in so basic, so childish a manner, you almost have to wonder why someone, even someone from Fox, didn’t ask about it: “But Mr Mayor, you seem to be saying that the entire Palestinian people are a single, faceless body, a single entity that can be described as a criminal or terrorist. I’m not sure that analogy makes sense. Doesn’t it seem more apt to describe a situation where a stranger walks into an apartment complex and scrawls some graffiti on the wall, so you send in a SWAT team and ‘clear’ the whole building, in the process executing a couple of the residents to aid them in remembering not to let strange people use their things? I mean, that’s how I would describe what is actually going on, Mr Mayor.”

More than his metaphorical idiocy, Bloomberg gently cozens his listeners with soft inclusive wes and ours: this is how we would respond; one of our citizens; etc.  We can all rest assured that this is exactly how we would properly react to protect our own.

Andrew Sullivan sees the same thing differently than I do (unsurprisingly). About the sources of the finance crisis, he writes:

The reasons for this are well known. Since the mid1970s, most American incomes - with the marked exception of the very big - have stagnated as even growth in productivity has been swamped by far fiercer global competition and freer trade. Americans, resistant to the idea that their incomes cannot keep growing at the free-lunch pace of the 1940s to the 1970s, decided to get rich the easy way. They borrowed to reflate in the 1980s, played the stock market in the 1990s and gambled on the real-estate boom in the first decade of the 21st century.

The shrewd ones succeeded in gaining and then selling before it came crashing down. Most, as usual, didn’t. The greed that led many ordinary Americans to take out loans they had no way of repaying and the recklessness with which banks and mortgage companies satisfied that hunger are, in retrospect, staggering. Both the banks and the borrowers deserve their comeuppance. And a truly conservative, free-market administration would be happy to let them fail.

Sullivan makes an interesting concession — I suppose it is a concession — that the typical American wage has stagnated since the 1970s; while his attribution of this to the great emancipation of the markets is specious, I do think it is interesting that this is just bandied about as the source of the finace crisis. People, well, working people, received less of the share of total social productivity than they had before; I call this a greater amount of theft, Sullivan calls it a result of greater competition and the free market. Whatever: semantic difference.

But then here comes the thing: Americans, whose wages became stagnant, are made to be the scapegoat for several waves of financialization that were intended to contain growing structural inequalities in the economy? This doesn’t follow. It’s ludicrous — moralistic pap. Oh, the stupid, cretinous, avaricious American public wanted a “free lunch!” Nevermind the fact that their wages depreciated in tandem with a surge in overall social productivity. How else was all the overabundant shit going to be absorbed? Let mealymouthed conservatives curse the loathsome cupidity of the typical American consumer all they like, the financialized credit industry kept the US, and the World, economy afloat for quite some time; now that it is unraveling, we’ll need someone to blame. And there’s no one better to blame than the one most ripped off by the whole affair: those whose wages stagnated as they watched the greater part of social wealth shoot through the roof, who worked for less a share of the collective pie, who paid usurious interest on plastic accounts, who may even have dreamt — callous asshats! — of owning a home! Let them have their comeuppance! All hail the Free Market!

There was an interesting segment where Jeremy Scahill went into the RNC to interview delegates — presumably because Amy Goodman and the two producers of Democracy Now! had been detained and had their RNC press badges were taken by the Secret Service — and talked to this lady who was selling buttons. She shows him one, that has a bald eagle flipping the bird, as it were, next to a caption that says Jihad This! The lady runs along for a while, discussing how this reflects her views, on how she loves the troops, how she loves America, and doesn’t love jihad. Scahill listens quietly and waits for her to finish, then he says “I don’t get it.” There, in that moment, the surrounding and sustaining ideology of the woman’s views are no longer self-evident, and she struggles to justify what she has just said. It even seems that she feels shamed for saying it.

This passive attack — which boils down to “oh really, why do you think that?” — on a received and baseless view may be more effective than more aggressive efforts.

It’s always interesting to me how the pohlice, when it is talking about “criminal protestors,” talks about throwing of stones and feces. Often feces — always feces! I am sure that someone has looked into this, and seen the consistency. So, either every single protest that is violent likes to lob shit at cops — I mean, they are basically simian, degenerates, right? They’re protestors! — or there is like a grand PR strategy that has been taught to police spokesman, probably at some trade event, you know, where there’s a stall with new batons and one with new delivery systems for pepper spray. It’s a grand caricature, really.

Last week the NYTimes ran a story on the state of food production in India. The general gist of the story is that since there hasn’t been an increase in food production to match India’s growing population, the country has been forced to buy certain foodstuffs on the already stressed global market. This is A Very Bad Thing. The author of the piece, Somini Sengupta, seems to believe that it need not be this way, and argues that with a return to the Green Revolution India could not only feed its own citizens, but those of the world. At least, that seems to be the overarching thrust of the article, but it gets caught up in the internal tensions of Green Revolution — its tendency to strip the land of resources, its intense energy inputs, etc — and so the article as a whole comes off as ambiguous and unresolved.

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I’m undertaking my taxonomy of lifestyle choices, niche markets, and purchasing patterns, and their various ideologies. Or at least, these things as they are reflected from the glossy paper of magazines and periodicals, and as I am able to infer from the rhetorical turns and aesthetic impulse of copy, ads, and layout. As I am not a demographer, statistician, adman, or publisher, some of these reflections will be rather crude. With luck, though, they will also congeal to be a sort of critically oriented collage. We shall see.

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The AP has conducted a poll of Americans that shows that 80% believe the country is headed in the wrong direction. You can read a summary of the findings at the HuffPo rag here, but I found this to be rather interesting:

People with lower incomes were more likely to frame the economic situation as their own “cost of living,” while wealthier people listed the economy more abstractly _ a sign that those hurting the most personalize the issue a bit more.

For two reasons this intrigues we — well, for two mostly: First, it seems that if you are actually ‘hurting’ due to an economic downturn, you tie it into your everyday subsistence. Your ‘cost of living’ is a concrete thing. If you are of more substantial means — that is, if you are not worrying about starving or being booted from your home or filling up your gas tank — the economy is something you view ‘abstractly’. Something that doesn’t really affect you, perhaps something you read about in the paper. Ok, clear enough. But the second thing is what is most interesting: those being hurt personalize the issue? As if this were anything other than an assault on their livelihood — don’t take it personally! AP, showing its condescension for those who take these things personally.

ETA: You’ve got to love this as well:

The survey reinforces the notion that consumers are particularly gloomy _ possibly more than economic statistics justify. Despite record energy costs, slumping stock prices and the housing and credit crunch, reports show the economy to be still growing, if slowly. Inflation and interest rates remain at relatively tame levels. And the unemployment rate is lower than it was during the past two recessions, in 1990 and 2001.

I’m not an economics reporter. I don’t write for the AP. But I know this is a load of horseshit. I mean, where do they get these people, and where do they get off giving this pep talk to consumers. Relatively tame levels of inflation! Inflation is rising, whether the AP wants to admit it, and it is rising most in the basic necessities. In fact, so is unemployment! Those two things are old news. And yet we’re being told that, golly gee, it’s not as bad as it was in 1990 and 2001? When the Fed raises interests rates to curb inflation, we’ll see whether it really is!

Yours truly is currently mulling about the spreading fascination with information, data, semantic content rendered calculable and quantifiable. The research project that attempts to make this so, to proceed as if if individual facts could be taken as a given: as if Ralph enjoys lemonade could be treated as an isolable unit of sense and cut off from becoming, turned into a quantifiable unit and operated on formally, or as if one could proceed from the factlet men are better at mathematics. This worldview is at base unintelligible, for reasons that Husserl laid out 75 years ago, but I’m not immediately concerned with its conceptual flaws; I first need to get a grasp on its movement through culture, how it is that something that is so utterly ridiculous become taken as the gawdshonest truth. It is a world view that is sold, quite literally, in magazines, during radiobroadcasts, on websites and teevee, by cheap rhetoric and dumb repitiation. It’s enough for it to be made so, almost.

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