Mencius Moldbug: Religious Zeal for Promoting Democracy Led Anglo Powers into War Against Germany

Moldbug has made a good case for the idea that the America of the 20th century had a religious devotion toward democracy, and many elite Americans hated Germany because it had opted for Hitler's nationalism instead of Weimar republicanism. Moldbug excerpted writings by Anglophone writers in the 1930s who loathed Hitler before he did anything to regain the territory Germany lost in the Treaty of Versailles.

http://unqualified-r...sourcebook.html

America entered the war not because Germany was a strategic threat, but because the war was an opportunity for American internationalists to remake the world to their fancy and at the same time beat up on a sinner nation that had abandoned the secular religion of democracy. America's entry into the war in turn was the impetus for the Nazis' systematic efforts to kill off the Jews; since the Jewish holocaust would cause Western elites to make antiracism their highest value, the American faith in democracy and republicanism can be blamed for the demographic displacement of whites that is occurring now.

Moldbug's primary sourcebook on WWII shows that the Allies, in their "normal and sane" attempts to promote democracy, abandoned the centuries-old convention that limited hostilities to uniformed forces and reverted to primitive forms of war that targeted civilian populations for violence and starvation. Moldbug's block quotation from a book by F.J.P. Veale, whom he calls a British fascist historian, is worth reading because it dramatizes the sharp break the combatants made with the conventions of civilized warfare that had ruled Europe since the end of the 1600s:

As early as 1770, by which time the horrors of the Thirty Years War had become generally forgotten, the Comte de Guibert could express the already prevailing complacency by writing:

"Today the whole of Europe is civilized. Wars have become less cruel. Save in combat no blood is shed; prisoners are respected; towns are no more destroyed; the countryside is no more ravaged; conquered peoples are only obliged to pay some sort of contributions which are often less than the taxes they pay to their own sovereign."

An explanation is clearly needed to account for the fact that governments composed of educated men, reared in the 19th century and brought up to accept as a matter of course the standards of conduct then accepted by everyone, should have so quickly and easily overcome their natural repugnance and adopted and carried out such enormities as the systematic extermination of a defenceless minority on account of its racial origin, the mass-deportation of enemy populations numbering millions, and the deliberate slaughter of enemy civilians by terror bombing in order to generate among the survivors a disposition to surrender unconditionally. 

.... They failed to realize that genocide and terror bombing were not isolated phenomena but symptoms of the same retrograde movement which had mysteriously overtaken Western civilization.

In the rest of the sourcebook, Moldbug attempts to use primary sources, mainly Edgar Mowrer's "Germany Puts Back the Clock," to explain the cause of the "retrograde movement" that accounted for both the civilian bombing and genocide. Moldbug includes a long quotation from Mowrer (a journalist from Bloomington who was apparently human) to show that the Anglosphere's casus belli was to punish Germany for "rebelling against the nascent international community," and WASP republicanism. Whether the Mowrer passage proves that thesis or not, the block quotation is a good read and it brims over with a sort religious loathing of the German republicans for failing to keep Hitler from coming to power. Mowrer's book was a best seller and he won the Pulitzer Prize.

Why Antiracism Become the West's Supreme Moral Value

The West's conversion from the ethnocentrism of the late 19th century to the liberalism of the mid-20th century occurred in part because the Third Reich's treatment of the Jews horrified English-speaking intellectuals and tainted the hereditarian view of human nature and group differences. Western elites made it taboo to assert that biology or genetics could cause race differences in IQ or behavior because that inquiry would just lead to another Auschwitz. American and European elites opened their countries to mass nonwhite immigration as part of a long recoil against the Jewish holocaust.

          

Half-Baked Thoughts on Tragedy and the Sublime

The best art is honest, and honesty requires acknowledgment of the fact that the universe is godless and morally empty, that life inevitably frustrates man's desires, including his desire for eternity.

The great tragedies hit a sweet spot where technique and an uncompromising commitment to truth can be combined to achieve the sublime.  At the end of Hamlet, for example, all the members of Denmark's royal family have died violent deaths, and the state itself has fallen to Fortinbras's invading army from Norway. The characters that Shakespeare made you sympathize with and their entire country have been destroyed. With the corpses of the royal family lying all around, a messenger arrives to announce that the king's will has been done because the government of England has beheaded Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. This is a sublimely ironic announcement because the king of Denmark had actually dispatched the two of them to escort Hamlet to England and give the king there an order that Hamlet, not Rosencrantz and Gildenstern, be beheaded. Destruction can be so complete, ambition thwarted so roundly, it can be sublime.

Secular, modern art can depict an intellectually honest form of transcendence. The man whose reach exceeds his grasp can be heroic. A man's life can be worthwhile even though his desires and ambitions will inevitably meet with frustration. "A tragic situation exists precisely when virtue does not triumph but when it is still felt that man is nobler than the forces which destroy him."          

Lawrence Auster on the Origins of Multiculturalism in America

Larry Auster’s psychological interpretations of liberal positions at times remind me of Nietzsche’s genealogical explorations of the origins of morality. Auster tries to open a window into the liberal mind and examine the thought processes that have given rise to the liberal values that rule the Western world.

In The Path to National Suicide, he argues that American elites endorsed ethnic diversity as an end in itself only after the 1965 Immigration Reform Act unexpectedly led to dramatic growth in the Asian and Hispanic populations. Although backers of the 1965 Act had insisted that the reform would not upset the ethnic mix of the country, it did just that, with the Asian population increasing from 900,000 in 1960 to 8 million in 1990, the Hispanic population rising from less than 7 million to 22 million, and whites’ share of the population dropping from 85% in 1960 to 75.9% in 1990 (and down to 63.4% in 2011). By the late 1970s, American elites had discarded all values but humanitarianism and equality; according to Auster, the burgeoning nonwhite populations left the elites with no choice but to declare ethnic diversity the purpose and destiny of America. That is, the elites made diversity into a sacrosanct value as an after-the-fact response to the large nonwhite populations that were unexpectedly created by the 1965 Act. Around this time multiculturalists began disseminating propaganda claiming that the ethnic makeup of the country had always been in flux, and that America had never had a fixed racial and cultural identity. Outside the paleoconservative and alternative Right, these myths are widely accepted, but of course they are belied by the fact that, for the first 350 years of its existence, America drew its population and culture overwhelmingly from Europe.

Auster predicts that, as white Americans begin to grasp that mass Third World immigration has stripped their country of its Anglo-European identity, they will suffer “the same collapse of spirit that occurs to any people when its way of life, its historical identity, is taken away from it.” But the pain will be short lived:

As the clerics of diversity indoctrinate new generations into the Orwellian official history, even the memory of what America once was will be lost.

The Path to National Suicide, An Essay on Immigration and Multiculturalism, is a free download here: http://jtl.org/auster/PNS.pdf

What is racism?

In The Path to National Suicide, Lawrence Auster offers a fascinating deconstruction of the meaning of the word “racist.” Auster argues that, because we have not taken care to define the term precisely, it has become an instrument of thought control; and our uncritical acceptance of the notion that racism, when broadly defined and practiced by whites, is wrong leads to an intellectual justification for a totalitarian program to merge all the races and thereby purge human beings  of their tendency to prefer others of the same race, class, and intelligence. 

According to Auster, racism should be defined as the attitude that denies the humanity and intrinsic moral worth of members of a particular racial group based on nothing more than their race; it also includes the feeling of hatred or hostility toward another based solely on his race. Racism should not be defined as the simple acknowledgement that races differ from one another on particular traits because such differences are undeniable. We have a concept of race only because there are “plainly discernible physical groupings of the human family.”

When the term is properly defined, simply writing about and discussing the physical and intellectual differences between the races, without expressing animosity toward, or denying the humanity of, a particular racial group can’t be described as racist. But people have accepted a broad definition of the concept that deems as “racist” any statement that is offensive to members of a particular race; our society’s disapproval of racism has therefore become a “prescription for the massive repression of speech.”

The idea of racism has so run amok and grown so broad that it is now considered “racist” for whites to prefer the company of other people of like ethnicity, race, and class, since that preference means excluding people of other races. This preference for similar people exists among men and women of all races and few would accuse a black man of bigotry for joining a black church or marrying a black woman. Yet when it comes to white people, this preference for similarity is deemed “racist” and “xenophobic,” and the United States government seeks to prohibit whites from acting on it, at least when it comes to where they live and send their children to school.

The belief that racism is wrong implies the existence of a non-racist norm from which the racist person immorally deviates. But this non-racist norm has no basis in reality because all people have a preference for associating with others who are intellectually, racially, and ethnically similar to themselves. Auster suggests that, because everywhere people act on their preference for similar people, the norm of anti-racism leads to a justification for the “ultimate totalitarian project” whereby the government seeks to overturn the world as it exists and build in its place a non-racist world in which there are no racial differences and people cannot prefer members of their own race. Auster writes:

"… the only way the nations of the earth could truly cease being racist would be to institute a world-wide exchange of populations, creating an identical racial mix in every country, followed by several generations of scientifically planned and state-controlled intermarriages, resulting in a single perfectly blended human race. We may see, in the current efforts of government to enforce statistical racial balance in every area of life (based on the assumption that the absence of such balance must be due to racism), the beginnings of just such a global experiment."

Although Auster cautions in his essay that no one calls for a global program to merge all the races, his vision turned out to be prescient. In 2007, William Saletan in Slate called for higher rates of intermarriage between whites and blacks as a means of closing the IQ gap between the races. According to Saletan, if the racial intelligence gap has partially genetic roots, the best way to close it is to “reunite the genome.”

As scientists amass more and more evidence that race differences in psychological attributes have genetic origins, more liberal intellectuals will explicitly call for racial intermarriage as a means of eliminating those differences. Perhaps the 21st century will see the enactment of anti-anti-miscegenation laws designed to cap the percentage of whites who marry within their race each year.

Auster had good comments on Saletan's argument here:

http://www.amnation....ves/009262.html

The Case Against Amnesty for Illegal Aliens

President Obama’s efforts to grant legal residency and citizenship to the estimated 11 to 12 million illegal aliens in the United States will, if successful, worsen the already poor employment prospects of less-educated Americans and increase the budget deficits of the state and federal governments.

Although proponents of amnesty argue that employers cannot find Americans to perform the jobs that illegal aliens take, the Department of Labor’s data actually indicate that America has a large surplus of unemployed and underemployed workers who could fill these jobs. According to the broad measure of unemployment, the U-6, the unemployment rate for workers with only a high school degree is 17.4%; the unemployment rate for workers without a high school degree is 27.4%. By the end of 2012, the total number of working-age, native-born Americans who were not working had risen to 50 million, up 8.3 million since the end of 2007.

Earnings data also indicate that the supply of workers exceeds demand. Median inflation-adjusted earnings of working-aged American men fell by 28% from 1969 to 2009. Declining incomes signal a glut, not a shortage, of labor.

Illegal immigrants in the United States hurt the employment prospects of American workers. Between 74% and 79% of illegal immigrants have no more than a high school degree. Seven to eight million illegal immigrants are holding jobs. In the absence of illegal immigrants, American workers with a high school education or less would fill these positions. To attract American workers, employers might have to raise wages, but improving the living standards and bargaining power of less-educated Americans is a good thing. By enforcing existing law, which prohibits employing illegal aliens, the federal government could increase the number of Americans with jobs, raise wages, and encourage illegal aliens to return to their home countries.

In addition to darkening the employment outlook for Americans, an amnesty would cost the government trillions of dollars in increased benefits payments, over and beyond the taxes illegal immigrants would pay. Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation estimated that the amnesty proposed in 2007 would cause the federal government to pay out an additional $2.5 trillion in Social Security and Medicare benefits, beyond the taxes the amnestied immigrants would pay in. Further, according to an estimate by Republican staffers in the Senate, if seven million illegal aliens are uninsured, an amnesty would increase spending under the Obamacare program by $300 billion over the next ten years. Spending on welfare will also go up because immigrant-headed households are much more likely to receive government assistance. A CIS analysis of the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey in 2007 found that 46.9% of households headed by a Hispanic immigrant used some form of welfare, versus  6.6% and 38%, respectively, of non-Hispanic white and black households.

Finally, an amnesty would worsen overpopulation and overcrowding in the United States. The Census Bureau projects that under current law the total U.S. population will rise to 436 million by 2050, an increase of 127 million over its current size; 96 million of this increase will result from net immigration and children born to immigrants. America is already a fully settled and overcrowded country. Although we should stem population growth in order to protect the environment and preserve our country’s open spaces, an amnesty would amplify population growth because those receiving legal status would be able to bring in the members of their immediate and extended families living back home; and an amnesty would cause new waves of poor people to illegally settle in the U.S. in the expectation of the next one.


Numbers USA has a form that automatically populates with your representatives’ contact information after you fill in your zip code. You can use the form to fax your representatives a well-written form letter outlining why they should vote against amnesty.

A Serious Philosophical Question

In The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus examines whether suicide is a logical course of action for a man to take after he realizes that his existence has no meaning. A reader might object that people commit suicide because of sorrow resulting from personal loss, not philosophical arguments about life's meaning. But according to Camus, the recognition that life is meaningless brings with it a feeling of alienation from the world, and this same alienation is experienced by people who commit suicide because of emotional pain resulting from things such as terminal disease, the death of a loved one, or professional scandal. A man can feel at home in the world only when he can give reasons, even bad ones, for his existence. But when he is no longer able to give reasons for existence--because he recognizes that God does not exist and life is meaningless, or because of personal loss that makes happiness impossible--he loses hope of a promised land and the memory of being at home in the world. This "divorce" between "the actor and his setting" is the feeling of absurdity. Camus wants to determine, strictly as a matter of logic, and not as a matter of habit, emotion, or fear, whether life is worth living when man is conscious of its absurdity.

By saying that human life is absurd, Camus means that human beings have basic psychological drives that go unfulfilled because of the nature of the world. Most people have an innate longing for a meaning that transcends their own lives, but that longing is inevitably frustrated because the universe has no moral structure or overarching purpose. Further, people cannot help but structure their lives around the attainment of their goals in the future; they live for that "someday" when they will have established a career, overcome some challenge, or started a family. The only thing the future certainly promises, however, is death. It makes no more sense for a man to structure his life around the accomplishment of his long-term goals than it does for him to strive for constant consciousness of his inevitable demise. Camus’s subject is whether, in the face of these contradictions, the value of human life can be affirmed without resorting to religious or philosophical doctrines that offer false solutions to the problem of absurdity. An intellectually honest man cannot resolve the problem by convincing himself that life has meaning or that the afterlife will provide him with an escape from death. Such solutions are false because the world has no meaning and death is unavoidable; these solutions simply deny the existence of the terms of the problem, which are the divorce between man’s need for a future and the absence of any future apart from death, and the divorce between man’s longing for meaning and the world’s meaninglessness.

Camus argues that human life can actually be lived all the more robustly because it is meaningless. To live a fate known to be absurd, man must strive to remain conscious of its absurdity. Revolt is one of the only coherent positions that can be held in an absurd world because it does not falsely deny the existence of any aspect of the absurdity of man's condition. The absurd man carries out his revolt against life by simultaneously acknowledging the meaninglessness of the world and his psychic need for meaning. He acknowledges his need to live for the future while rejecting the future because it will bring about his death. The conscious revolt that is carried out by the absurd man gives life its value. It is magnificent because of the discipline and will it requires. Suicide cannot be a logical response to the absurdity of existence, to the divorce between the world we inhabit and the world we want to inhabit, because it constitutes an acceptance of death. Suicide takes away one piece of the problem of absurdity--man’s horror toward death--and replaces it with complete acceptance.

On first reading this argument, I thought that Camus was guilty of circular reasoning when he claimed that suicide was an invalid response to absurdity because it replaced man's revulsion toward death with complete acceptance. I thought that a man rationally could opt for suicide if he found that he could not be happy and did not want to live in a meaningless world. But this rejoinder does not address Camus’s point because he is looking at suicide from a dispassionate, strictly logical standpoint. Certainly some people may for emotional or other subjective reasons choose death over living a meaningless life, but suicide does not follow as a logical consequence from the fact that life is meaningless, in the same way the conclusion of a syllogism follows from the major and minor premises.

And yet, how can Camus argue that a life without meaning can be lived more fully than a life that has meaning? It is because the lack of meaning gives man the freedom to make judgments about how to live out his life. While revolt is the first consequence Camus draws from the absurdity of life, the second is total freedom. By stripping man of any hope for freedom from death, of any reason to live for the future, consciousness of the absurd magnifies man's freedom of action. Before recognizing the absurdity of life, man acted as if his life was given meaning by the long-term aims he set for himself. He felt obliged to act according to whatever purposes he sought to achieve, as, for example, a father, engineer, leader, or clerk. Man’s false sense that his life took on meaning from his long-term goals created barriers that constrained his range of action. But the conscious man grasps that it is absurd to live for a future that means his own inevitable death. Thus, he is released from any obligation that may come from a sense that one’s life is given purpose through the goals he sets. A man’s goals create no obligation to act in a manner consistent with those goals because “there is no future.”

The third consequence Camus ascribes to the absurd is quantity. If life had a meaning, it would imply a scale of values that would allow us to say whether one life was more valuable than another, but the absurd rejects both meaning and the scale of values meaning implies. Because no scale enables us to rank a life filled with one set of experiences as better than a life filled with another, the sole criterion by which lives can be judged is the quantity of living they contain. But the importance of quantity does not mean that the purpose of life is to live as long as possible, that man should strive break all records and maximize one’s lifespan. Life has no purpose. Living to the maximum is a matter of luck.

The Absurd Hero

At the end of his investigation, Camus addresses the Greek myth that gives his essay its name. Sisyphus was a mortal who had been condemned by the gods to spend eternity in the underworld rolling a boulder to the top of a mountain. Whenever he reached the summit, the boulder rolled back down and he had to repeat his labor. Camus imagines that, when Sisyphus is returning to the plain before resuming his toil, he is conscious that he has no hope of succeeding in the work he must perform endlessly. It is Sisyphus’s lucidity on the descent--his awareness of the futility of the task that he must perform forever--that makes his story tragic and gives his futile work its element of torture. But it also makes Sisyphus superior to his fate. He is able to scorn his wretched, powerless condition. This contempt makes him superior to his fate.

At times on the return, Sisyphus remembers too vividly the pleasures he had enjoyed while alive--the beauty of the sea, the touch a woman’s hand, a glass of wine--and he is struck by sorrow for what he has lost. But the weight of his loss is bearable when he regards it coolly. He recognizes that his only link to the world is the memories of earth that brought on his sorrow. This recognition leads him to cry out, “All is well!” despite the eons of pointless labor that stand before him.

Sisyphus has a fate like that of the modern laborer, who works every day of his life performing the same pointless tasks. Both can be happy and proclaim that all is well because the futility of their work and the meaninglessness of their lives do not, or at least need not, exhaust them. Man’s awareness of the absurdity of life dispels his delusional fears and hopes about God and the future. He can glance backward over his life and coolly regard the series of meaningless actions that have come to define his fate. In his effort to maintain his absurd revolt--his striving for consciousness that the world has frustrated his need for knowledge, meaning, and a future--the absurd man undertakes a struggle like that of Sisyphus’s. That struggle by itself can provide him with a measure of happiness. Having abandoned any hope for the future, the absurd man recognizes himself in the “noble, soulless land” on which he lives out his time on earth.

Germany's Blunders in the First World War

Canadian historian Holger Herwig constructed a history of the Central Powers’ military operations in the First World War through a decade's worth of study devoted to the military archives of the German and Austro-Hungarian Armies and the letters and journals of the soldiers and officers who participated in the conflict. The result of Herwig’s labors, The First World War: Germany and Austria-Hungary 1914-1918, is a bracing chronicle of the war that brought an end to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the German Empire, and imperial Russia. Some of the archival material Herwig used became available for the first time in the early 1990s, when Russia released documents that the Soviet Army had seized from Berlin and Vienna at the end of the Second World War. While most English-language histories have documented the Great War from the perspective of the Triple Entente powers, Herwig focuses on the decisionmaking of the leaders of Germany and Austria-Hungary.

Herwig’s accounts of the major battles on the Western Front bring home the terrible futility of the war. From February to December 1916, Erich von Falkenhayn, the Chief of the German General Staff, tried to bleed the French Army to death through sustained infantry and artillery assaults on the French fortifications at Verdun, which guarded access to the plains northeast of Paris. Germany’s Meuse Group West gained two miles of territory in four months of fighting at a cost of 69,000 men. In the corridors of the forts, the stench of human excrement, putrefaction, and explosive gases from the German troops’ flamethrowers took combatants’ breath away. Herwig puts the total number of casualties at 350,000 on each side, or about 70,000 for each month of fighting. Due to the offensive’s failure, Kaiser Wilhelm II replaced Falkenhayn with Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff. In December, French forces regained Fort Douaumant, whose capture by the Germans had been celebrated across Germany.

The duumvirate of Hindenburg and Ludendorff refined the German system of trench fortifications, which had consisted of three parallel trenches totaling a mile in depth. They replaced it with a system of trenches between six and eight miles in depth. Under the principle of defense in depth, front lines were lightly manned, and the mass of German machine guns were housed in steel-reinforced concrete bunkers located at half-mile intervals well behind the first lines. The first line troops were to resist assaults only as long was reasonable, allowing attacking forces to enter the killing zone behind the front created by German machine gun nests with their interlocking zones of fire.

Germany’s ally in the conflict, Austro-Hungary, was militarily useless. Germany repeatedly had to move troops from the west to rescue Austrian forces from defeat by Russia and Serbia. The head of the Austrian general staff, Conrad von Hotzendorf, drew up grandiose battle plans that didn’t account for weather, terrain, or his men's condition. By the end of 1916, Austria depended on German loans to finance the war, and the German general staff dictated most major decisions to their Austrian counterparts.

The German leadership overreached disastrously in its prosecution of the war. You can make a good case the Reich would have come out of the conflict with its frontiers intact and perhaps more territory than it entered the war with if it had avoided any one of three major blunders: resuming in February 1917 unrestricted submarine warfare, which drew the American republic into the conflict; imposing the onerous peace on Russia in December 1917; and making a final push for victory in 1918 instead of withdrawing to more defensible lines.

Germany’s most egregious mistake was its decision to resume unrestricted submarine warfare against civilian ships bound for Great Britain. At the beginning of 1917, German planners concluded they could knock Britain out the war by destroying the vessels that brought the island nation food from the Western hemisphere. The Germans knew that submarine warfare targeting commercial ships would lead America to enter the war. In 1915, a German U-boat sunk the Lusitania, a civilian passenger ship. The dead included 128 Americans. President Wilson issued a note threatening Germany with war if it continued targeting civilian vessels. Germany apologized and suspended submarine war. But in early 1918, German leaders concluded that unrestricted sub warfare could force Britain out of the war before America could deploy enough troops on the Continent to affect the outcome. Germany greatly overestimated Britain's reliance on imported food, however. Seven months of submarine warfare failed to produce food shortages in Great Britain, contrary to the Germany’s predictions. In April 1917, after U-boats had destroyed several American merchant vessels, Congress passed a declaration of war against Germany. By March 1918, just as Germany was mounting its doomed final attempt to secure victory, 287,000 American soldiers had arrived in France. By July 1918, 250,000 Americans were arriving every month, and there were over 1,000,000 Americans on the Western Front by the autumn.

Although by the end of 1917 Germany had defeated and secured peace with Tsarist Russia, Serbia, and Romania, it failed to capitalize on its victories by moving enough troops from the east to the west. Serbian forces had repelled the Austro-Hungarian invasion, but the armies of Serbia and Romania were handily routed by the Germany Army, and the resources of those countries were being exploited to supply the Central Powers. The Germans transported Vladimir Lenin from Switzerland to Russia, where he led the Bolshevik revolution that ended the Tsar’s reign. Weeks later, Lenin signed a peace decree, proposing Russia’s immediate, unilateral withdrawal from the war. The Central Powers and Soviet Russia met at Brest-Litovsk to work out terms in December. When Soviet representatives initially refused to cede the territory demanded by the Germans, Quartermaster General Ludendorff re-mobilized the army and sent German ships into the icy Gulf of Finland to take Petrograd. The Russians returned to the negotiating table and ceded more territory than the Germans initially demanded.

Out of fear that Lenin would retake the lost territory, Ludendorff kept over a million German soldiers in the east. Months later, in March 1918, German troops on the Western Front carried out a last-ditch offensive to punch through the Allied lines and throw the British Expeditionary Force against the Channel. The German Army advanced to within 56 miles of Paris. The French and British leadership made contingency plans for the collapse of the French Army and the evacuation of the British off the Continent. The German Army, however, suffered over 600,000 casualties in three months of fighting. Due to insufficient manpower and resources, the Germans could not hold the territory they gained. By August, English, French and American forces pushed the Germans back to the lines that existed before the offensive. If Ludendorff had moved more troops to the Western Front, the Germany Army might have brought France to its knees before enough Americans arrived to change the war’s outcome.

After the initial operation failed to produce victory in the spring of 1918, Ludendorff persisted in offensives that wasted German lives without strengthening Germany’s position or materially weakening the Allied armies. Each month from March 1918 to June 1918, Germany suffered about 200,000 men taken prisoner, wounded, or killed. In July alone, Germany had 420,000 men killed and 340,000 captured or missing. Ludendorff could have withdrawn his forces to the Reich's antebellum frontiers or to more defensible positions behind the front. Instead, his isolated and ineffectual offensives nearly destroyed the army. In July, another officer described him as morally and physically broken, at wit’s end. In October, Ludendorff instructed the Kaiser to task the liberals and socialists--whom Ludendorff wrongly blamed for Germany’s defeat--with negotiating an armistice on the basis of President Wilson's 16 points.

If Germany had avoided defeat in the First World War, the Reich’s imperial government would not have been succeeded by the unstable Weimar Republic, which came to an end when Hitler took power in 1933. Had the imperial government survived the war, Hitler and the Nazis would not have brought on the Second World War or carried out an industrial-scale attempt to exterminate the European Jews. More than any other event, the Jewish holocaust led white Westerners to set anti-discrimination and racial equality as their highest moral values. Consequently, if the First World War had not planted the seeds for the Nazis’ rise to power, Western elites would not have opened up their countries to the mass immigration that has injected racial discord into the West and that will ultimately reduce whites to minority status. If Germany had avoided defeat in the First World War, Western civilization would not now be dying from the mass immigration that was brought on by racial egalitarianism.

Boozing It Up on the Campaign Trail

Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 is Hunter S. Thompson's account of the Democratic presidential primaries in 1972 and the general-election contest between the Democratic nominee, George McGovern, and the incumbent, Richard Nixon. The book features Thompson's mordant observations on American politics, in addition to a sharp-eyed analysis of how McGovern won the Democratic nomination, only to get crushed by Nixon in November.

The Democratic primaries in 1968 and 1972 saw the party's liberal wing clash with the party establishment over the Vietnam War, which Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson had begun in 1964. In the '68 primaries, Senator Eugene McCarthy challenged LBJ for the Democratic nomination, campaigning against the war. Although as the sitting president LBJ should have walked to the nomination, McCarthy nearly beat him in New Hampshire and was polling ahead of him in Wisconsin; other candidates, including Bobby Kennedy, entered the race on an antiwar platform.  Realizing that he had lost the support of the party due to the war, Johnson eventually withdrew.

At the '68 Democratic Convention, after Bobby Kennedy's murder in Los Angeles, LBJ's vice president, Hubert Humphrey, won the nomination in a deal brokered by party insiders. Outside the convention hall, Chicago police used tear gas and truncheons against antiwar protesters, many of whom supported McCarthy's anti-war campaign; the networks carried live footage of the clash.

While the police were beating down the protesters outside, Connecticut Senator Abraham Ribicoff gave a speech in the convention hall in support of George McGovern's late-starting bid for the nomination. Ribicoff claimed that with McGovern as the nominee Chicago cops wouldn't be using Gestapo tactics against the protesters outside the hall. TV cameras didn’t record the audio of Mayor Richard J. Daley's response to Ribicoff, but his lips could be read, saying, "Fuck you, you Jew son of a bitch! You lousy motherfucker! Go home!"

In the general election, Republican Richard Nixon defeated Humphrey by a margin of 0.7% of the popular vote, with one-time Democrat George Wallace carrying five southern states. Had the white Democrats who defected to Wallace voted for Humphrey instead, he would have won.

In a hilarious flashback to Nixon's inauguration in January 1969, Thompson imagined the crowd showering abuse on the inaugural parade as it proceeded through D.C.:

Washington was a sea of mud and freezing rain. As the Inaugural Parade neared the corner of 16th and Pennsylvania Avenue, some freak threw a half-gallon wine jug at the convertible carrying the commandant of the Marine Corp ... and as one time Presidential candidate George Romney [Mitt Romney's father] passed by in his new role as Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, the mob on the sidewalk began chanting "Romney eats shit! Romney eats shit!"

Three years later, the candidates vying for the Democratic Party's nomination to challenge Nixon in November 1972 included Hubert Humphrey, the unsuccessful nominee from '68; George McGovern, the liberal senator from South Dakota; and Ed Muskie, the Maine senator who'd won the support of organized labor and big city bosses like Mayor Daley. In February, during the New Hampshire primary, which Muskie was supposed to walk away with, Thompson came out as a strong supporter of McGovern, who was then a dark horse candidate. McGovern had opposed the Vietnam War from the start (although he had grudgingly voted for the Gulf of Tonkin resolution in 1964). He supported amnesty for draft dodgers and campaigned as an anti-politician who said what he believed rather than what served his political interests. To the consternation of party bigwigs, McGovern established himself as a serious contender for the nomination by nearly beating Muskie in New Hampshire and easily winning Wisconsin.

Thompson hated Muskie and the party establishment that he represented. During the Florida primary, Thompson gave his Muskie press pass to a drunk, acid-fried jailbird, the Boohoo, who used Thompson's credentials to enter the chartered train that carried Muskie on a whistle-stop tour to Miami. When Muskie gave a speech from the balcony of the caboose in Miami, the Boohoo pulled on Muskie’s leg and shouted for the "old fart" to go inside and get him another gin. The Muskie campaign revoked Thompson's press pass in retaliation for the Boohoo incident.

Thompson said that Muskie sounded like he had spent decades trying to overcome a speech impediment only to end up talking like someone in a narcotic stupor. On first hearing a Muskie radio spot, Thompson thought it was a new Cheech & Chong record. He wrote in Rolling Stone that Muskie was secretly addicted to ibogaine, a hallucinogen that's used in African spiritual rites. He was amused when this baseless claim was taken seriously by other journalists.

Because of Thompson's enthusiasm for intoxicating drugs and his hatred of the political establishment, he felt like a foreigner in his native country. But he realized that this "sense of doomed alienation on your own turf is nothing new." He opened the chapter on the California primary by quoting a 15th-century poem in which Francois Villon said, "In my own country I am in a far-off land / I am strong but I have no force or power." Thompson had used the same poem as the epigraph for Hell's Angels, which dealt with a chapter of the  motorcycle gang that Thompson shadowed for a year. According to Thompson, motorcycle outlaws are socially useless losers who "make good copy" only because of their uncontrollable propensities toward rape, violence, and mayhem. But I think Thompson respected the outlaw's independence, however stupid and impulsive he is. At least while he is at large, the outlaw is the state's equal, not its subject. He recognizes no authority that limits his freedom of action.

Thompson drank a lot on the campaign trail, but the booze didn't cloud his account of the candidates' election strategies. It didn't get him arrested for DUI either, although a lot of his drinking took place behind the wheel. When he moved to D.C. in December 1971 to cover the campaign, he got half drunk from doing off a quart of Wild Turkey on the drive from Chicago to Altoona. (28). Later he drove a rented sports car from Boston to New Hampshire for the February primary, with "a glass of iced Wild Turkey spilling onto [his] lap on every turn." (58). At the smorgasbord lunch for the few journalists covering McGovern during the New Hampshire primary, he had three Budweisers. After McGovern sewed up the nomination in Miami, Thompson drank himself into a mean-drunk stupor and swam in the ocean, where a rip-tide swept him out to sea. (318). In May, on visiting McGovern's original campaign headquarters in D.C., he picked up some Ballantine ale at the liquor store next door; the clerk was willing to charge it to McGovern's campaign but Thompson paid anyway. (407). Before sitting down to write his piece on the Republican convention in Miami, he picked up two six packs of Ballantine ale at a beachside shop. (337). He finished the book’s final chapter during an all-nighter at the Seal Rock Inn in San Francisco, drinking Wild Turkey and coffee and smoking short Jamaican cigars, with the Allman Brothers' "Mountain Jam" blasting out of four speakers hung from the ceiling. (503).

By the time Nixon trounced McGovern in the general election, winning 48 of 50 states, Thompson was exhausted from the campaign but also hopelessly hooked on politics. He said he would definitely cover the 1976 presidential election, and he was going to look into trying to get elected to the U.S. Senate from Colorado. He did neither.

On the book’s final page, Thompson described coming across a McDonald's advertisement that featured inspirational remarks about persistence. Without it, the ad claimed, talent, genius, and education were useless. Thompson mocked this message. After discussing it with McGovern's campaign director on the phone he headed out to a bar called the Loser's Club. Thus the book ended. The ending struck me as a statement that Thompson had given up on influencing American politics. Nixon's reelection also may have caused him to give up any ambition of writing serious books. Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 marked the end of his peak period. Between 1960 and 1974, he had written four major pieces of literature that were as funny as Mark Twain's best stuff; in the three decades of his life that followed, he produced nothing of comparable quality.

When Every Creature Shall Be Purified

Even after mastering theology, medicine, and law, Dr. Faustus remained dissatisfied with his limited understanding of the world. Demonology offered him a means of extending his knowledge. He sold his soul to Lucifer in return for having the demon Mephistophilis at his service for a term of 20 years. In  Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, the first use Faustus makes of  Mephistophilis is to ask where hell is. In response, Mephistophilis offers a striking image of Armageddon, in which every creature will be purged of evil and all of existence apart from heaven will be hell.

FAUSTUS. First will I question with thee about hell. Tell me, where is the place that men call hell?

MEPHIST. Under the heavens. 

FAUSTUS. Ay, but whereabout? 

MEPHIST. Within the bowels of these elements,
Where we are tortur'd and remain for ever:
Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscrib'd 
In one self place; for where we are is hell,
And where hell is, there must we ever be:
And, to conclude, when all the world dissolves,
And every creature shall be purified,
All places shall be hell that are not heaven.

FAUSTUS. Come, I think hell's a fable. 

MEPHIST. Ay, think so still, till experience change thy mind.

Labor Force Participation Rate Keeps Dropping

The drop in the unemployment rate to 8.3% in January occurred only because the Bureau of Labor Statistics removed 1.2 million people from the labor force. The adult civilian population increased 1.69 million, to 242.27 million in January, but the labor force grew by only 508,000, to 154.39 million, and the number employed increased by 847,000, to 141.637 million. How can unemployment go down when the adult civilian population grows more than the number of people who are actually employed?  By excluding 1.2 million people from the labor force, so that they aren't counted as unemployed even though they're jobless. The labor force participate rate, which is the percentage of the civilian non-institutional population that is either employed or actively looking for work, has hit a 30-year low at 63.7% (154.39/242.27).

http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t01.htm

It's remarkable that the non-institutional population grew by over 1.5 million people in January. How long are increases in electricity and food production going to keep up with population growth, which is almost entirely driven by immigration?

Will a False-Flag Attack Be Used to Justify War Against Iran?

Iran has threatened to close the Strait of Hormuz if Israel or the United States strike its suspected nuclear-weapons sites. About a fifth of world-traded oil (17.3 million barrels per day) gets shipped through the strait. By closing it Iran could drive up oil prices and perhaps send the American economy back into recession. Iran hopes its threat will deter the Obama administration from joining with or authorizing Israeli military strikes against Iran.

The two aircraft carriers that the United States already had sent to the strait were recently joined by the U.S.S. Enterprise, which is the oldest carrier in the fleet and due to be decommissioned next year. Cynics have pointed out that one reason America would put an old carrier in harm's way is to manufacture a casus belli that will lead the American public to support war against Iran. Israel could use its submarines to sink the Enterprise; the U.S. and Israel could then blame the attack on Iran; the media would pass the charge on and the gullible public would accept it unthinkingly.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ufdw21ltc-8&feature=player_embedded


This may sound outlandish but remember that the Bush administration concocted a false justification for our second war against Iraq. Iraq wasn't developing WMDs, it had no connection with the 9-11 attacks, and it posed no threat to the U.S. If and when America strikes Iran, there probably won't be any better justification than there was for the Iraq war.

Israel's False-Flag Operations Against Iran

According to leaked CIA memos, Israel began false-flag operations against Iran during the second term of George W. Bush. Israeli agents used American dollars and passports when they offered assistance to Jundalla, a terrorist group that has killed Iranian officials and civilians. Jundallah wants independence from Iran because its followers are Sunni and the Iranian government is Shiite. The purpose of the Israeli operation was to create the perception in Tehran that America is bankrolling a separatist group that is trying to break the country up.

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/01/13/false_flag?page=full

If Great Britain wanted to create hostilities between the United States and Canada, it might try mislead Ottawa into believing that Washington was arming militant separatists who wanted to gain sovereignty for Quebec. Britain could create this perception if British agents who were disguised as American operatives offered Quebecois militants arms and money. If Washington learned of an operation like that, it would be less likely to cooperate with Britain; it might even temporarily recall its ambassador or suspend diplomatic ties. But Washington had no public response when the CIA learned of Israel's false-flag operations against Iran. America gives Israel over $2 billion in aid every year.

Western Civilization Commits Suicide

In The Pity of War, Niall Ferguson analyzes alternate-history scenarios to explore whether the European powers made good decisions during the First World War. He argues that Great Britain would have been better off if it stayed out of the war. Germany did not want to dominate the Continent like a 20th-century Napoleon. Rather, its prewar aims were limited to neutralizing the threat posed by France and Russia and establishing a customs union little different from today’s E.U. A neutral Britain would have not have lost 700,000 men or spent itself into debt servitude; it would have emerged from the war with sufficient wealth to keep the British Empire intact and influence the Continental powers. In the actual event Britain became dependent on American loans, and the principle of self-determination underlying the postwar peace led to the breakup of the British Empire.

Ferguson argues that if Britain had made that it would fight with France instead of equivocating after the assassination of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire by a Serb nationalist, Germany would have forced Austria to moderate its demands against Serbia, which in turn would have averted the calamitous chain reaction in which Austria's military mobilization against Serbia led to Russia's mobilization against Austria, which in turn led to Continent-wide conflagration when France refused Germany's request to commit to remaining neutral in the conflict. On the other hand, if Britain had stayed out of the war when war came, Germany could secured victory, which would have led to the establishment of a customs union little different from the European Union.

It is remarkable that the Triple Entente powers (Britain, France, Russia) were unable to defeat the Central Powers (Germany and Austria) when one considers the Triple Entente's pronounced superiority in terms of economic resources and population. Before the war began in 1914, the combined armies of the Triple Entente numbered over 5.7 m men, while the armies of the Central Powers numbered only 3.48 million. In 1914, the Triple Entente powers, including the British Empire, had a combined population of 656 m; they called up a total of 32 m men to fight. The Central Powers had a combined population of 144 m and called up about 25 m to fight. The combined national income of Russia, France and the British Empire was 60% greater than that of the Central Powers.

Given these gross disparities, how did the Central Powers defeat Russia, advance to within 40 kilometers of Paris, and avoid decisive defeat? The answer Ferguson gives is the tactical superiority of the German army and the "net body count": the Germans permanently incapacitated more French, Russian, and English soldiers than the Germans themselves lost. The Central Powers killed 5.4 million men fighting for the Triple Entente powers and their Allies, as against just over 4 million men who died fighting for the Central Powers. A similar net body count held for prisoners of war, with the Central Powers capturing between 3.8 and 5.1 million prisoners and the Triple Entente capturing 3.7 million.

Why did the Germans seek an armistice in October 1918 if their army was superior? According to Ferguson, Generalquartermaster Erich Ludendorff suffered  a nervous breakdown after his spring offensive, Operation Michael, failed to destroy the British and French armies. At that point, Ludendorff should have offered to restore Belgian independence in return for a negotiated peace, but he continued to make smaller offensives that cost lives without improving Germany’s position. Then there were only 325,000 American soldiers in France. British and French leaders believed Germany might still take Paris. After Amiens, instead of offering the Kaiser his resignation and publicly admitting that the German army had been defeated, Ludendorff should have withdrawn to the existing Germany frontiers while fighting a rearguard action. The net body count on the Western Front had swung against the Germans from July to September 1918, but it swung back in their favor in October 1918, when mass surrenders eased and German soldiers regained the will to fight. If Luddendorff had not hastily sought an armistice due to loss of nerve in October 1918, the Germans could have won a negotiated peace rather than an armistice in which the Allied Powers were able to dictate terms. 

Review of Infinite Jest, Part 2

The first chapter of the book takes place at the chronological end of the story. Hal is competing at a national tennis tournament in the Southwest and interviews with deans at the University of Arizona for a tennis scholarship. Although Hal's first person narration is beautifully written, when he tries to answer the deans' questions, he makes sub-animalistic noises that sound like a goat drowning. They think he has a seizure and send him to the emergency room. There, Hal remembers when he and Donald Gately dig up Hal's father's head, which, the reader will learn about 700 pages later, is where the master of Infinite Jest is.

A few chapters later, Wallace introduces the protagonist and moral center of the novel, Donald Gately, a big man who burgles the homes of rich people to support his addiction to oral narcotics. On a September night two years before Hal's interview at Arizona, Gately breaks into the Brookline, Mass. mansion of a Canadian national, M. DuPlessis, who serves as liaison between Quebecois and Albertan separatists. The loot Gately and his partner, Trent Kite, gain in the burglary includes a non-master copy of Infinite Jest, which they fence and which the Wheelchair Assassins ultimately trace to Antitoi Entertainent (sic) in Cambridge.

In the hundreds of pages between the opening and the climax, Wallace builds intense, enjoyable suspense about the questions the plot raises. What has deprived Hal of the power of speech in the chronologically last scene? Was it the powerful hallucinogen, DMZ, that Hal's best friend, Pemulis, picked up at Antitoi Entertainent? How will Hal and Gately, who have completely separate story lines, come to dig up JOI's corpse together? Will the Wheelchair Assassins succeed in acquiring the master and gaining Quebec's independence? Wallace whetted my appetite for a mind-blowing plot turn that would unite all the story's disparate narrative arcs. Disappointment sets in in the final hundred pages, as Wallace goes deeper into Gately's back story and introduces new side characters and the reader comes to realize that none of the really important narrative questions will be answered.

Another mystery that the book sets up only to leave unresolved is the extent to which Infinite Jest parallels Hamlet. The title of the novel and JOI's eponymous film is taken from Hamlet's description of his childhood clown, Yorick, a "fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy." Ellsinore, the setting of Hamlet, is haunted by the ghost of Old Hamlet, the hero's father and recently deceased king of Denmark. Enfield Tennis Academy, the setting of IJ, is haunted by the ghost of JOI, Hal's father. In both stories, the mother of the hero takes up with another man, who has an apparent familial relation to the hero, right around the time the father dies. In both, the second husband of the hero's mother succeeds the father as the leader of the community where the story take place. Do these parallels indicate that JOI was killed by his wife's lover, Charles Tavis, who succeeds JOI as headmaster of ETA? Wallace doesn't say.

Most of the book is devoted to Don Gately's effort to get and stay sober using the 12-step program of Alcoholics Anonymous. The ultimate moral value in the novel is avoiding dependency on shit that you can catch a buzz from. The novel suggests that one should do anything necessary to stay sober, and the starting point is getting on your knees every night and thanking God for the day of sobriety that has just come to an end. Gately faults JOI for self-pity when the ghost of JOI complains to Gately that he was unable to connect with Hal and that his critics failed to understand that the purpose of his films was simply to entertain. It dismayed me that in the moral hierarchy of the novel Gately, a recovering narcotics addict, has a higher rank than JOI, a Renaissance man who managed to scale that "high ridge where the mountainside of 'scientific' knowledge joins the opposite slope of 'artistic' imagination." fn1 But Wallace apparently believed that Gately was nobler than JOI because Gately learned to live without intoxication.

Wallace's own life suggests the poverty of a moral system that prioritizes sobriety over everything else. He wasn't enslaved to any intoxicating substance the last two decades of his life, yet he found his sober existence so miserable that he hanged himself at age 46, when he was hundreds of pages into his next novel, Pale King, and married.

Under one plausible reading, JOI is a tragic figure because he cannot want to live without alcohol. This would mean the novel isn't anti-drug because it recognizes that some people are not constituted to live without intoxication. But Gately's success in getting off narcotics through AA's 12 steps suggests that JOI might have been able to give up Wild Turkey if he'd done the same, living one day at a time, praying to God, and going to AA meetings all the time. Wallace's positive portrayal of AA and his lionizing of Gately lend the book a moralistic tone.

Wallace was on firmer ground when he attacked the association between ironic detachment and hipness in pop culture. All the shows telling us that it's cool to be sarcastic and insincere alienate people from themselves by discouraging them from acknowledging that they have true feelings. Instead, they are conditioned to think that it is cool to feel nothing other than patronizing contempt for people who express genuine feelings and opinions. Hal's handicapped brother, Mario, says that pop culture can't depict death and pain with anything other than absurd situations that are intended to make "everybody roll[] their eyes or laugh[] in a way that isn't happy." Tragedy is out of vogue because it requires genuine feelings, and genuine feelings just aren't cool.

Despite its flaws, Infinite Jest is a great piece of literature. Anyone who loves the written word should love this novel. Wallace’s prose style is conversational, relaxed, and frequently obscene, yet it always reads like prose poetry, and every sentence deserves to be read out loud. The drunken monologue that JOI's father gives to JOI at age 10 before the boy's first abortive tennis lesson is among the best 20th-century American fiction I've read. In it, Wallace transcends postmodernism and puts himself in the same camp as Hunter S. Thompson and Kerouac.

Wallace's writing is full of useful but difficult words that caused me to break out the dictionary scores of times. And Wallace had a capacity for inventing fictional personalities that merits comparison to Orwell, Tolstoy, and Shakespeare. The novel has dozens of realistic, complex characters. Although the book leaves unanswered the questions that kept me turning pages for the length of the 1080-page novel, the ending has spine-tingling beauty. For good reason the publisher overruled Wallace's decision to subtitle the novel, A Failed Entertainment.

fn1 The quoted line is from Nabokov's memoir, Speak, Memory.

Review of Infinite Jest, Part 1

David Foster Wallace fills his 1996 novel, Infinite Jest, with dozens of compelling and realistic characters, and his writing is often spine-tingling, but in the end the plot is deeply disappointing, even as the novel's final image delivers a pang of memorable, melancholy beauty. This is the first part of the spoiler-filled review I wrote after spending four months reading Wallace's 1,080-page novel.

At the end of the 20th century, a Las Vegas singer turned politician, Johnny Gentle (the alliteration doubtlessly refers to Ronald Reagan), wins the U.S. presidency on a third-party ticket that promises gun rights, an aggressive foreign policy, and environmental regulation that will make the sidewalks clean enough to eat off of.

When NATO is dissolved, the United States refuses to accept the return of nuclear missiles deployed in Manitoba unless Canada agrees to join a North American super-state, the Organization of North American Nations. Canada reluctantly bows to this demand, stirring anger among Quebecois separatists, who now must pry Quebec not just from Canada but also the ONAN in order to gain independence.

President Gentle's plan to blast America's solid waste into space proves to be infeasible, so the president and his puppet-master, Rodney Tine, decide to convert northern New England, from Maine to Massachusetts, into a repository for the country's toxic waste and garbage.

Canada agrees to accept the waste dump as an addition to its territory in response to President Gentle's threat to detonate nuclear missiles on the U.S.-Canadian border. Runoff from the waste dump, which is called the Great Concavity by Americans due to its inwardly bent southern border, causes birth defects in Quebec, which further stokes separatist sentiment.

Of the Quebecois separatists, Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents (the Wheelchair Assassins) are the most militant. These men lost their legs playing La Culte du Prochain Train, in which adolescent boys compete to see who will be the last to jump across train tracks as freight trains speed toward them. “Hearing the squeak,” the sound of the assassins' wheelchairs, has become synonymous with the violent assassinations they carry out.

The assassins want to acquire a master copy of Infinite Jest, the last film that James O. Incandenza, Jr. completed before committing suicide. JOI was a physicist who made a fortune by working out a new means of electricity generation called annulation. Later he took to making films with the lenses he designed and founded the Enfield Tennis Academy, where wealthy kids are taught to subordinate the self in order to play high-level tennis. He got drunk on Wild Turkey every day until the final three months of his life. Infinite Jest was JOI's attempt to arrest the progression toward solipsism of his youngest son, Hal, a nationally ranked junior tennis player who has a verbal IQ score far above the genius range. JOI feared that Hal was becoming a figurant, an extra on a TV show who's seen in the background but has no voice. With Infinite Jest, he wanted to create a medium that would allow him to have a conversation with his son.

The film doesn’t have this effect, but it turns out to be so entertaining that a person who catches a momentary glimpse of it loses the will to do anything other than watch the movie. In the film, a beautiful woman leans into a crib and says "I'm so sorry," over and over again. The scene is shot from the floor of the crib with a wobbly camera that mimics the visual field of an infant. Why would JOI think that this material would interest Hal? Why do audiences find the image so captivating that they can think of nothing else afterwards? Wallace doesn't offer satisfying answers to these questions.

The Wheelchair Assassins plan to turn thousands of Americans into zombies through the mass dissemination of Infinite Jest. They hope that Washington will blame Ottawa for their acts and that Ottawa will expel Quebec from Canada to demonstrate that it is not responsible for the assassins' campaign of entertaining people to death.

Fanny and Alexander

Ingmar Bergman planned to present Fanny and Alexander as a four-episode television movie with a run time of 312 minutes. He cut the theatrical version down to 188 minutes. Given my attention deficit, I thought Alicia and I would end up watching the film in two settings, but when we got to the two hour mark late on a Friday night we were both engrossed and wanted to see how the story would end.

The movie version is made up of three hour-long episodes, which describe Fanny and Alexander's idyllic lives as the children of two well-off actors, and the joyless existence they lead after their father (Oscar) dies and their mother (Emilie) remarries a strict Lutheran bishop. The film opens with rollicking Christmas eve celebrations in Uppsala, Sweden at the turn of the 20th century. The local theater company, which is directed by Oscar, puts on a play about the birth of Christ with heart-stopper Emilie playing the Virgin Mary. The performers attend a banquet given at an upscale restaurant owned by Alexander's uncle, Gustav Adolph, who admonishes his staff not to cast supercilious glances even though the actors are downmarket from the restaurant's usual clientele. Following the banquet, Alexander's extended family gathers at his grandmother's mansion to bring in Christmas day with joyous singing, drinking, and dancing. Gustav Adolph (the restaurateur) beds a 15-year old maid, to which his fat and broad-minded wife turns a blind eye. 

At the beginning of the second episode, Oscar's theater company rehearses the scene in Hamlet in which the ghost of Hamlet's father reveals that he was murdered by Hamlet's uncle, Claudius, who then married Hamlet's mother and gained the throne of Denmark. Oscar, playing the ghost, suffers a stroke and is taken back to the family mansion. Before dying, Oscar tells Emilie that in death he will be closer to her, Alexander, and Fanny than he was in life. Next to the deathbed is a pail splashed with green fluid that Oscar vomited during his death throes.

Emilie aids Oscar, dressed as the ghost of Hamlet's father, after he collapses. 

As the funeral procession bears Oscar's coffin to the  grave, Alexander mutters obscenities to himself in a rhythmic chain--shit, pussy, fuck, cunt, shit, pussy, fuck, cunt. The handsome and strict Lutheran bishop who presided over the funeral begins to court Emilie. The performance of the actor playing the bishop is tremendous; seldom have I felt so much loathing for a film character. Before the bishop announces to Alexander that he and Emilie will marry, he browbeats Alexander through threats and mild physical abuse into confessing a lie he told at school. Alexander, angry at Emilie for accepting the bishop's courtship, told his classmates that she had sold him to a circus which he would join come summer. Once Alexander confesses the lie, the bishop says that, "Imagination is a splendid thing, a mighty force, a gift from God. It is held in trust for us by the great artists, musicians, and writers." In other words, little boys commit a sin when they use their imaginations.

The bishop forces Alexander to confess his lie.

Emilie accepts the bishop's marriage proposal and agrees to his further request that she and her children sever all ties with their former lives. They do not bring any of their belongings to the austere castle where the bishop resides with his spinster sister, cruel mother, and mute aunt. The aunt is a repellent specimen, obese, immobile, dependent on others for feeding, and bluish in complexion. Through punishments which range from being locked in a bedroom to sustained beatings, the bishop tries to break Alexander's spirit and force the boy to love him. Emilie realizes she has made a terrible mistake, but she has no way out, as a lawyer confirmed that if she left the bishop the courts would award him custody not only of the child she was carrying for him, but of Alexander and Fanny as well.

In another invocation of Hamlet, the ghost of Alexander's father appears to Alexander's grandmother and urges her to take action to protect the children from the bishop. The grandmother enlists her secret lover, Isak, a Jewish banker, to rescue the children. In the final episode, Isak uses Jewish mysticism in an attempt to get the children out of the bishop's castle, and Isak's nephew uses his own mystical gifts to examine Oscar's hatred of the bishop.

The film begins with the joys of childhood and ends with a horrifying killing. Let The Right One In is similar in that it presents a haunting depiction of childhood innocence and the macabre, but Fanny and Alexander is more satisfying because of the intelligence of the dialogue, the depth of Bergman's characters, and the ghost of Old Hamlet haunting the story.

Chamonix Travelogue

Wednesday, March 23

We arrived in Geneva, Switzerland at 7:20 a.m. on a Continental flight that was about an hour late. We took a shuttle operated by Mountain Dropoff to Chaumiere Hotel in Chamonix and arrived at 10:00 a.m. The driver couldn't find the hotel and claimed that I had given the wrong address. It turned out the address was right; the driver didn't know the way.

The palatial Chaumiere hotel 

Check-in at Chaumiere started at noon, so we dropped off our luggage and changed into ski gear. We took a train 10 km northwest up the Chamonix Valley to Argentiere, the town below Les Grand Montets ski domain. Alicia rented boots, and we bought Mont Blanc Unlimited Passes, which gave access to all the ski areas in the valley, plus Verbier ski area in Switzerland, Courmayeur in Italy, and the upper cable cars (telepheriques) in Chamonix, including the Aiguille du Midi.

We skied at Grand Montets from about 11:20 to after four. The lower cable car ascends from an elevation of about 1260 meters to 1972 meters. The upper cable car climbs another 1300 meters to an elevation of 3275 meters (10744 feet). From the top of the upper car you can do off piste skiing on the Argentiere Glacier and the glacier on the mountain's frontside. Two difficult patrolled runs descend from the top. Pointe de Vue winds along the boundary of the ski area, skirting crevasses on Argentiere Glacier and giving breathtaking views of the mountains to the northeast, which form the Franco-Swiss border. Cyclones is a steeper run that comes down the frontside and bisects the glacier. That day I talked Alicia into skiing the Pointe de Vue. The gorgeous gorgeousity of the mountains on the other side of the glacier and the ice fall where the glacier terminates beggars description.

Alicia on the Argentiere Glacier, with the mountains 

at the Swiss-Franco border in the background.

The temperature in the valley was unseasonably warm. There was practically no snow below 1700 meters. The one run that you could ski from the top of the lower cable car on Grand Montets to the base was a blue run that was covered in slushy artificial snow.

After completing the descent (just over 2000 vertical meters), we took the number 11 bus to Chamonix Sud, which was about three quarters of a kilometer from our hotel at 322 Route de Gaillands. At the hotel, we showered for the first time since Monday night. We walked into central Chamonix, where we had pints of Amstel at Le Terrasse, a bar that occupies an Art Nouveau building. When you descend the bar's spiral staircase you appear to be walking over the swift mountain stream adjacent to the building. Afterwards we had fondue and a bottle of wine at a French restaurant.

The north side of the Chamonix Valley from

outside the Chaumiere

We got back to the hotel at about 9:30 p.m. Western Europe time, which was 2:30 p.m. CDST. We had not slept since 7:30 a.m. CDST on Tuesday (about 32 hours earlier). Before leaving for Argentiere that morning, we had taken 12 hour non-drowsy Claritin, which contains pseudo-ephedrine. The stimulant had enabled us to power through the day, but now it had worn off. We fell asleep immediately upon retiring and slept for nine hours.

Thursday, March 24


We got up at 7:15 and had breakfast at the hotel. We put on our ski boots and took the train to the central train station, where we tried to board a bus going to the Courmayeur ski domain in Italy. The bus was fully booked, as was the next day's. We decided to ski again at Grand Montets. While we were waiting for the next train, we had coffee at a cafe that was full of mountaineers and locals. Chamonix is at the foot of Mont Blanc, Western Europe's highest peak at 4810 meters. The Chamonix Valley is considered the birthplace of modern mountaineering. Chamonix is different from ski towns in North America in that mountaineering sets the tone rather than downhill skiing. If you know the routes and are proficient with crevasse rescue systems, you can ski across the Argentiere Glacier, skin up the mountains, and ski down into Switzerland. You can ski across the Mer de Glace Glacier, skin up another set of peaks, and ski down into Italy. The professional mountaineers I saw everywhere in Chamonix, and the Alps towering over the town on all sides, made me want to acquire the skills required to safely ski from Les Grand Montets into Switzerland, or from Aiguille du Midi into Italy. The milieu and mountain aesthetics of Chamonix renewed my commitment to putting mountaineering at the center of my life.

After we settled up at the cafe, Alicia and I picked up baguettes and Roquefort cheese which we would have as lunch. I called a guiding service, Evolution 2, to see whether I could join a group for a guided descent of the Vallee Blanche, which descends about 2200 vertical meters from the Aiguille du Midi to the Montenvers train station. Because the routes pass over the Mer de Glace Glacier, which is riddled with crevasses, to ski them safely you must either have your own crevasse rescue system or go with a guide. The woman I spoke with said that there were no groups that I could join, but I could put my name down on a waiting list, which I did. The charge for joining a group of 4 or more was 79 euro per person, versus 350 euro for a private session. The woman said that Alicia could not join a group because she had no off piste experience.

We skied our first run at Les Grand Montets at around 10:30. At 3:45 we caught the second to last cable car to the top. We skied Pointe de Vue down to a chalet on the perimeter of the ski domain, had a pint of Konigsberg, and then dropped down through the trees to the run with artificial snow that led to the base. The slush on the lower run was a drag unless you were good at skiing on mashed potatoes.

Four views of the Argentiere Glacier from the Pointe de Vue run

We had a drink at a bar 25 meters from the bus stop. We wanted to catch the number 1 bus, which would drop us off next to Chaumiere. We saw the number 1 entering the lot from a distance, picked up our skis, and began walking toward the bus stop. As we arrived at the bus stop, the number 1 drove past without stopping. The bus system was maddening. The next number 1 would depart an hour later, so we took the number 11, which required us to schlep our skis from Chamonix Sud to the hotel.

As we were getting off the bus, Evolution 2 called and said I could join a group on the Valle Blanche the following day. I needed to visit their shop and pay before they closed at 7:30.

Elated, I carried both Alicia's and my skis on the walk back to Chaumiere. After  I showered, I hurried to Evolution 2's shop. I had not given up on having Alicia ski the Vallee Blanche with me. I told the lady at the desk that Alicia had skied the top runs on Grand Montets, including bumpy terrain. She asked a guide whether Alicia could handle Vallee Blanche. I showed him the runs on the map that Alicia had done. He said she would probably be okay. Alicia and I met at La Terrasse. She was happily surprised when I revealed that I had secured her a spot in the Vallee Blanche group.

We had pizzas for dinner. On the walk back we stopped at an English hostel up the road from Chaumiere, where we had pints of Stella Artois. We talked about Alicia's dissertation and I sketched vague ideas for the paper, like translating it into Italian or adding an interdisciplinary twist by applying the philosophy of aesthetics to her subject, Renaissance English literature.

Friday, March 25


The Vallee Blanche routes start below the summit of Aiguille du Midi (elevation 3842 meters) and descend down the Mer de Glace Glacier to the Montenvers train station. When there is a lot of snow, you can ski all the way back to Chamonix, a trip of 17 km. The distance to Montenvers is about 12 km.

At 7:40 a.m. Alicia and I left the hotel and began walking to the Aiguille du Midi cable car, schlepping our skis on our shoulders. Our guide, Sisi, arrived after us. She was a short, blond Frenchwoman whose age was made indeterminate by her wind- and sun-weathered skin. The rest of the group arrived later. There were two British women and two British men who were vacationing, and another Briton, Andy, who lived in Chamonix and was studying to become a mountain guide. Sisi had each of us put on a harness that would be used to haul you out if you fell into a crevasse. She gave Alicia and me transceivers that signal your location to rescuers if you are buried in an avalanche.

Thus equipped, we took the cable car up the Aiguille du Midi, which is vertiginous even if you are comfortable with heights. The first section climbs from Chamonix at 1035 meters to Plan de l'Aiguille at 2317 meters. The car then travels directly, without an intervening support pylon, to the upper station at 3,777 m (an elevation gain of 1460 meters). On the upper section, the car seems to rise straight up into the air, at a distance of maybe 20 meters from the frontside of Aiguille du Midi, which is forbiddingly vertical. At the top, we hiked the stairs to the observation terrace. From there you have inspiring views of the west face of Mont Blanc. I will set foot on its summit before I die.

The summit of Mont Blanc seen from the observation 

terrace on Aiguille du Midi

Things got interesting after we finished the sightseeing. By far the most dangerous part of the Vallee Blanche is coming down the steep arête that leads from the Aiguille du Midi to the start of ski routes. The arête is descended by means of steep switchbacks in the snow. The aiguille drops away steeply to the northwest; if you slipped you on the switchbacks would fall hundreds of meters. If you had crampons and an ice axe, the descent would be cake, but none of the clients except Andy had crampons. When we went down, we held a safety rope that runs parallel to the switchbacks in one hand and our skis in the other. We also were roped up to Sisi, who could use her ice axe and crampons to arrest any falls that might occur.

Here is the arete which leads down from Aiguille du Midi to the start 

of the ski routes.

The last two shots show the Aiguille du Midi from 

the beginning of the ski routes. 

After the tedious descent of the arête, we unroped and put on our skis. Sisi announced that we would ski down a mogul slope with crusty snow so that she could evaluate our abilities and select the appropriate route for the descent. Alicia was hesitant with her turns. Sisi became upset and jumped to the conclusion that Alicia would be falling constantly on the descent. "We have a very long way to go! If you are falling constantly we will never get there! You will be miserable!" she barked at us. Trying to ease her concerns, I  answered, "Don't worry. We have skied lots of difficult terrain. We are game for this." Sisi replied with exasperation and sarcasm, "Oh, I know all about you Americans! You are game for everything!" Her tone asserted that Americans often overestimate their abilities and end up in over their heads. I replied that I skied expert terrain in the American west all the time. Sisi answered, "It's not you I'm worried about; it's her," indicating Alicia. "We'll be okay," I replied, "We're tough nuts to crack."

Sisi then discovered that one of the British women lacked a transceiver. She reprimanded the woman, saying, "I asked you if you had a transceiver before we left! From now on you must do everything I say! This is not a game!" Sisi gave the woman the transceiver that Sisi herself had intended to wear on the descent.

Sisi's handling of the situation was feckless. If Alicia had demonstrated a lack of skill that meant she could not safely descend Vallee Blanche, then Sisi should have insisted that Alicia take the cable car back to Chamonix. By becoming upset, and suggesting that Alicia would be falling constantly, Sisi threatened to shatter Alicia's confidence in her ability to ski the valley safely, when in fact Alicia had more than sufficient skill to handle the descent, as she demonstrated during the event. Sisi's disparaging comments about Americans were gratuitous and marked her as a rank amateur.

Notwithstanding the bad start, the descent down the valley was a wonderful aesthetic experience. The mountains and the glaciers surround you on all sides; they render the few people there insignificant and nearly invisible. I skied pretty well and Alicia was fine as soon as she got her legs under her. It turned out that Alicia was a stronger skier than two other members of our group, an older British man and a foul-mouthed British woman who was divorcing her husband.

A little before noon we reached a beautiful stone refuge (elevation 2516 meters) two thirds of the way down the valley. Our group stopped for lunch at the cafe there. Sisi socialized with other guides. Alicia and I shared a delicious quiche and an onion soup with a wedge of cheese. An hour after lunch we finished the descent. To get to the Montenvers train station (elevation 1913 meters), we first had to hike down about 60 meters of thin snow and rocks at the terminus of the Mer de Glace Glacier. Then we climbed up four flights of stairs that lead to the cable car that takes you to the Montenvers train station. While hiking down to the stairs and then climbing up the stairs to the cable car, I lessened Alicia's load by strapping both her skis and mine to the back of my rucksack.

Schlep those skis, you dumb beast of burden.

On the cable car, I asked how long the route we had done was and what the vertical drop was. Sisi didn't know. "I don't care about the numbers. I just had a great day in the mountains," she said. The bitch is as ignorant as she is snide and amateurish, I thought. Andy, the Briton who was studying to be a guide, said that the route from the Aiguille du Midi to Montenvers was about 12 km long and descended about 2300 meters (6,900 feet).

That night Alicia and I had dinner at a pizzeria near the center of Chamonix and pints of Amstel at Le Terrasse. Back at Chaumiere, I settled up with the proprietor so that we could get an early start on Saturday, when we would check out and return to Geneva after a final day of skiing at Les Grand Montets. Before bed, we walked up the road to the hostel and had pints of Stella Artois.

Saturday and Sunday, March 26-27

The bus we wanted to take was not running so we again took the train to Argentiere. I felt rusty on the slopes in the morning, but in the afternoon I connected my turns on the mogul runs along the Blochard cable car. Alicia photographed and videotaped me while I skied. My technique is inferior to that of strong skiers, but I have improved a lot in the past few years. My skis are more parallel, my posture is more erect, and at times I am fluidly connecting my turns on moguls.

That night a driver named Rob drove Alicia, me, and four other people back to Geneva at breakneck speeds. I enjoyed getting jostled around the back of the van as he negotiated the serpentine mountain roads. In Geneva, we stayed at the S.H. Hoteles, which made up for its affordable room rates by gouging you on its food and drink prices. On Sunday morning, we caught a flight back to the States. On the  return flight (as I had done on the outbound flight as well), I listened to Philip Glass's electronic opera, 1000 Airplanes on the Roof, which supplied the musical theme for our excursion.

The trip was grueling, challenging, and pricey, but aesthetically it was worth everything we put into it. It renewed my desire to acquire the mountaineering skills that are necessary to safely ski the glaciers between the cable cars of the Chamonix Valley and the mountains that form France's borders with Switzerland and Italy. The trip also demonstrated that Alicia and I are a cohesive team that can meet the challenges presented by international travel, unstable French mountain guides, and glacier skiing.