Elizabeth Bruenig Has A New Piece in the Post. It's...

Utterly devastating. There's a certain genre of what might as well be called Oriental porn, where we share stories of how some wretched village in some developing country responds to allegations of rape by having the townspeople ban together to stone the victim. These stories are intended as quiet reminders of our own moral and economic superiority. But read this and ask yourself: Are we any better? Indeed, replace all the usual mentions of "family honor" with something along the lines of "football glory," and you may wonder whether there's any difference at all.
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"Stranger rapists — the kind of attackers who victimize people they don’t know — hunt for victims who exude vulnerability, Caddy said. Acquaintance rapists exhibit similar behaviors, Caddy pointed out, scanning their social milieus for people who are in some way incapacitated, available for the taking: people whom nobody will believe, people who can’t fight back.

"It’s like hunting, in other words. The whole thing was something like a hunt, and Wyatt was easy prey.

"In the crime-scene photographs taken inside the shed where Wyatt said she was assaulted, you can count the buck heads — 12 mounted neatly on the first floor, another half dozen strewn on the ground of the loft, antlers tangled like bramble, eyes wide and staring. Wyatt’s panties are there, too, on the concrete under the empty watch of the beheaded deer. How blunt it seems, overstated almost— prey among prey.

"Many a treatise on brutality has taken deer as its subject, because the pleasure derived from killing them is so disturbing in light of their docile grace. Montaigne laments the dying cries of a wounded hart in his essay on cruelty; so does William Wordsworth in his poem “Hart-Leap Well.” Both Montaigne and Wordsworth meditate on the deer’s last stagger, the long prelude to death, the moment when the light leaves its eyes.

"Wyatt had eyes like that: thick-lashed, wide and dark, dimmed to vacancy at times by drugs and alcohol. She was beautiful, and she was vulnerable. And everyone knew it.

"Indeed, Wyatt’s case remains a dark reminder that vulnerability to predation occurs on more than one axis. Wyatt was young. But she was also someone who struggled with drug and alcohol use, and someone her peers understood to be working-class. For the assault itself, and for everything that followed, she was easy to discount.

"Montaigne and Wordsworth lived near enough to the bloody indifference of nature to spare a thought for its victims. But the veneer of civility painted over modern life has paradoxically revealed a certain contempt for victims and the condition of victimhood. And perhaps, lurking in all the complaints about our putative culture of victimhood, there is something uglier than generalized contempt: a disdain for the weak."

The Other Constitutional Crisis

In the aftermath of last week's not-so-fresh revelations of a Whitehouse full of contempt and devoid of competence, there's been a lot of talk about a "constitutional crisis." This notion, unsurprisingly, was freshly asserted in the most self-serving backdoor brag imaginable, casting some anonymous White House insider as a savior of the Republic, a proud member of the "steady state," a metaphor tailored toward comfort, but serving mainly as a reminder of the topsy-turvy world the author is attempting to obscure. There, a resort to the 25th Amendment to oust the current, much deranged sitting president, was avoided, lest is trigger a "constitutional crisis." The possibility that avoiding a compulsory feature of the constitution in the event of the very sort of incapacity the author details, is, in fact, an ongoing constitutional crisis, appears not to have entered our anonymous Republican careerist's mind.

This is, naturally enough, not a new development. Hand-wringing over constitutional crises, both real and imagined, is a sort of standing ("stable"?) preoccupation of the political and legal commentariat. The one predictable feature of this perpetual worry is that it's inevitably voiced long after the actual crisis has already occurred. The denials, incompetence, and inaction that enabled whatever actual crisis precipitated our fresh round of concern trolling are "explained" as an attempt to avoid some possible (inevitably worse!) state of affairs that could have resulted from, you know, actually following our own supposed rules and procedures.

Whatever we're to make of all this, I find it useful to remember that our perpetual worry over the current crisis of a Trump presidency is, rather like the man himself, more imagined than real. Trump's easy to vilify, since he's essentially devoid of any recognizable human virtue. That this essential fact is what drives vast swaths of the country toward admiration says a lot more about the country than the man, and perhaps this most painful fact explains the ongoing search for some, really any, possible external villain, to distract us from our own, fully home-grown rot.

Although our constant worry has by now reached a frantic pace and pitch, it's useful to take a day like today to reflect on some of the essential steps that got us here. For as much as we worry about the Trumpster fire, it turns out that the secret alliance that might preserve the Republic is the manifest incompetence of both the man and his rotating squad of hired goons.

What do I mean, you ask? Just this: We know what a quiet coup looks like, because we essentially lived through one, which we still, even now, largely fail to recognize. I refer, of course, not so much to the horrible attacks of 9/11, but to the momentous, country-killing programs, the effects of which we have, even now, largely failed to comprehend.

Because make no mistake: The attacks of 9/11 were truly world-altering, mainly in the worst imaginable ways. We make a lot of the disasters of Trump, but so far, they're nothing in comparison to the disaster that befell the country--and the world--under the "W" years. And sadly, all of the lessons that that horrible misadventure should have taught us went essentially unlearned. Then, we lived through some real-time effects of having an incompetent boor at the helm. Unfortunately for us all, that boob had a thoroughly vicious staff. Sadly for us, unlike the current occupant, that incompetent boob was happy to cede authority to a cast of competent career bureaucrats. True, as statesmen, they were a perfect portrait of corruption and incompetence. But as bureaucratic insiders, they were vicious and effective. The leading characters of that constitutional crisis weren't really even accurately describable as the President's men; they were old hangovers from an even older constitutional crisis involving Tricky Dick. As such, they were hell-bent on restoring their lost fantasy of a unitary executive, largely unaccountable to the body politic or the other branches of government, and, as with Nixon before them, they enacted that fever-dream on the largely unsuspecting populations of several developing nations half-way around the world, with about as much collective insight into the inner-workings of Al Queda as your average American possesses about Sharia law.
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I was viscerally reminded of the way that 9/11 shattered my own small internal world by a really excellent piece of self-reflection excerpted in the Guardian from a new memoir by Suzy Hansen. The work deserves a broad readership, and it breathed new life into my recollection of the extent to which 9/11 represented a decisive turning-point in my own intellectual development. I was just starting my second year of graduate study when the planes struck. The only small satisfaction I take from the event was that I had sufficient intellectual tools to avoid the worst excesses of rank propaganda that followed the attacks. But let there be no mistake. Every action that flowed from that wretched day was part of a rapidly unfolding constitutional crisis, one which saw the largely unreflected failure of many of our supposedly most mature institutions. Because this crisis would be the canvas upon which the newly revitalized neocons would finally be able to remake the world in the image of the libertarian fantasies that had driven so much of America's most misbegotten foreign ventures, but perhaps most strikingly, our own Chilean coup of a much earlier 9/11, wherein the assassination of a leader whose election our own strong internal interference couldn't sufficiently rig formed the pretext of our installation of the Friedmaniac Chicago Boys into the highest halls of state economic policy.

That, of course, was a bit of past as prologue. It's difficult, even today, to take stock of the series of disasters that our competent totalitarians managed to wring from the attacks. The slow and steady drip of our own quiet coup merited immediate remedies, but nobody seemed to have the time or the stomach for it. I attempted, back then, to keep something of a running tally of the scandals eking out of the executive. It proved difficult, even then, to keep track.

We forget now the early, frenzied path to our still ongoing foreign ventures. The ground in D.C. had been well prepped, with a series of anthrax attacks serving as an excellent catalyst to the pervasive sense of fear gripped the capitol in the immediate aftermath of the attacks. The planned response was true to America's by-then thoroughly developed military character, and the man who had penned the planning documents as a member of the idiot-prince's father's administration--Paul Wolfowitz-- would now serve as Rumsfeld's own henchman. First to Afghanistan, where we would now go to battle against the same forces that we had, largely away from the light of public scrutiny, funded starting all the way back in 1977, in an old and largely successful effort to draw the U.S.S.R. into their own Vietnam. This time, the quagmire would be of our own making, but the strategic goal perpetually hidden. By the time we had marched in troops, and established two intersecting networks of bases in that ancient imperial stomping pad, we had effectively erased our own long attempt to procure a UNOCAL oil pipeline passing from Turkmenistan to Pakistan by way of Afghanistan, underaken by Chevron's former executive, and now the administration's own Condie Rice, whose efforts had resulted in the formal recognition of the Taliban as the official Afghan government (a requirement, no doubt, of the insurance underwriters. That our chiastic array of bases largely mirrored two earlier-planned pipeline routes passed largely without notice.

Iraq was, naturally, a good deal worse. By that time, the full force of the military's private contracting world had put all in. Pushing promises of a fully liberated Iraq, finally free to dump loads of cash on U.S. hoteliers, fast-food chains, banks, oil companies, and their assorted companions in interest, the private business world put on a traveling roadshow to hock their services to the highest corporate bidders.

The push to war was a shining example of the full force of public-private propaganda that we refer to casually as "news." No detail was spared, no lie too big or small. The public bearer of the Bush administration's military honor, Colin Powell, would serve as the mouthpiece for the greatest lies--lies about Iraq's weapons programs, the dangers of which he had himself publicly disavowed in the intervening years.

The foreign aftermath of this is almost inestimable. From the first days of our almost totally unprepared journey into Iraq, though the initial looting, through the devastating destruction of so many ancient cities and museums and culture centers, the war was sold under the auspices of "liberation." As usual, the primary effect of all this was to free mothers, fathers, and children from their lives, families from their homes, kith from their kin, and citizens from their state. A Lancet story from 2006, much rebuked but never actually undermined, calculated a death toll well over half a million from the first three years of the war that continues to rage to this very day.

From the beginning, the war seemed tailor-made to serve its own internal ends. Far from running a natural course to victory, its primary goal seemed to be self-perpetuation, and the continuous creation of new enemies all-too-easily rebranded in the Al Qaeda mode. This story, so far from being done, continues to this day with our new ISIL foes, another iteration.

That the venture was a gross calamity should have been obvious from the get-go, but the same rank propaganda that fueled the invasion would continue to provide cover to the worst excesses. Still some of the stories were too obvious to ignore. The looting of Baghdad's museums was an early exception. (Only the occasional stray report would mention that on our initial invasion, the only building our soldiers had advance orders to guard was the ministry of oil.) But crises would continue. There were so many that it's difficult to even begin an accounting, but in no particular order:

Blackwater: The infiltration of own invasion by a privately contracted force to whom we contracted out our own diplomatic and governmental defense work, and a series of public scandals as that largely unaccountable private force perpetrated a series of mass killings.

Corrupt Contracting: Halliburton, with the help of it's former CEO Dick Cheney and subsidiary KBR, would continuously find itself the target of bribery and corruption investigations, ultimately paying hundreds of millions of dollars in settlements, which again continues right up to the present. They are only the most noticeable instance.

Debaathification: Paul Bremer surely gets the award for the most spectacularly ill-conceived move of the war, moving immediately to decommission an entire large Iraqi civil and defense apparatus under the aegis of de-Baathification, a truly curious move in a society that required membership in the Baath party as a requisite for any form of government service. This would lead indirectly to the formation of many highly successful military opposition groups, right up to ISIL. It would also place our own armed services at the heart of state administration in a land they barely conceived, and with whom they had next to no prior acquaintance.

Torture and infinite detention: We would also preside over what we now know was a sprawling torture network, in which our own troops were encouraged to humiliate and torture prisoners of war. This took place alongside the creation--from whole cloth--of an infinite detention system with its heart in the lawless U.S. military enclave of Guantanamo Bay, where some 40 prisoners continue to be held without warrant or lawful charge. This truly astonishing bit of criminality managed to enlist the best legal minds of the administration, who jumped through all manner of acrobatic hoops to show that "terrorism" was such a singularly new category in international law that people suspected (but not even charged, must less tried!) for it were exempted from the requirements due under the Geneva conventions. The administration managed, simultaneously, to effectively repeal--in practice, if not law--our own adopted and ratified conventions against torture, again with the help of characters who fill some of the most honored positions of our own judiciary and most prestigious law schools.

Assassination Abroad: Although explicitly banned by a prior executive order, the Bush administration successfully revived our old targeted assassination program, this time with the technological assistance of unmanned drones. Removing some of the sting from the act of killing, our new program relied on pilots manning what amount to video-game consoles around the globe to visit death on (often incorrectly identified) targets. The targets have not been limited to terrorists; on the contrary, they've included two U.S. citizens against whom no formal charges have ever been filed, both of whom were killed essentially for political speech that's actually protected under the First Amendment.

This very partial list only stratches the surface of the foreign scene. Meanwhile, at home, we got:

The NSA and Vast Warrantless Surveillance: The Times again aided the administration's lawlessness, by delaying a blockbuster report about a vast warrantless wiretapping scheme ordered and gradually implemented after the attacks, complete with a total breakdown of an already woefully under-regulated FISA process. In addition to the sprawling foreign ventures, the Bush administration oversaw a truly staggering growth of the domestic surveillance apparatus, with whole fields of stadium-sized buildings covered from floor to ceiling with machines devoted to surveillance and analysis populating the outskirts of D.C.

Paid-to-Play Generals: A recurrent cast of TV commentators, who were endlessly paraded on networks in both the run-up to and the course of the wars, was revealed to be working as paid government and private consultants for the very wars they were supposed to be impartially analyzing for the public.

Domestic Business Corruption: Few may remember now the totally fraudulent business practices of Enron, with its own deep ties to the Bush administration, but that turned out to be a mere prelude to the shenanigans going on in the bond-selling and -rating industries, as a then successfully underregulated financial industry reaped the full benefits of the repeal of Glass Steagal, converting private mortgages into a disastrous Ponzi scheme that would wind up devestating the entire world economy, complete with a shadow insurance industry resulting in trillions of dollars of ledger-line losses. The prodigious growth of the financial sector, along with a series of novelties going under the mysterious title of "derivatives," would serve to line the golden parachutes of dozens of executives, while simultaneously hiding the systemic risk of endlessly repackaged junk loans.

I could go on indefinitely, but perhaps this outline is sufficient to convey the magnitude of the crisis.

You might complain at my cobbling these apparently disparate things together, but contemplating the connections turns out to be essential. The horribly named Global War on Terror ("GWOT") turned out to be the perfect vehicle for realizing the generations-old conservative dream of freeing big business from pesky oversight. Mass deregulation was never legislatively popular, but it turned out to be much easier to accomplish by simply redirecting the attention of the apparatus of the administrative state. An FBI that devotes all of its resources to terrorist hunts ceases to effectively police white collar crime. Where the police go, the prosecutors follow. And the worst domestic abuses are easier to paper-over where a sprawling war effort distracts an entire population from its own slowly eroding internal affairs.

So when people show such despair at the incompetence and corruption of the Trump administration, usually lamenting what's supposedly now lost, a part of me can't help but laugh. We've already been through worse, you just failed to notice. And the ghost of that failure will continue to haunt us, probably for the remainder of our days, and the days of our children.

Correction (9/22/18): I earlier mistakenly referred to Ms. Rice as an executive of Exxon. She was in fact employed at Chevron during the relevant time period.

The Ronell Affair is Bad...

But the culture that supports it is worse.

The latest #metoo story has managed to get plenty of press. At least on the surface, it looks like an intriguing variant on the more usual stories of male sexual predators. In this case, the predator, Avital Ronell, is a lesbian, and the prey a much younger gay male (and, at the time of the alleged misconduct, Ronell's student), Nimrod Reitman. More intriguingly still, Ronell has managed to rack-up a who's who list of (often fact-challenged) academic defenders. (The affair first attracted a broader audience when Brian Leiter brought attention to the incredibly embarrassing defense letter penned by (the usually comparatively rigorous) Judith Butler. Since then, Reitman has sued NYU for Title IX violations, and a steady drumbeat of scholars, peers, colleagues, and former students have weighed in. I'll leave it to the curious reader to pick through that material, but many good links are available at Leiter's Blog, 

The assorted grotesqueries of that situation have been well covered, but the irony remains rich. So-called "theory" departments, which typically pride themselves on their close analysis of structures of dominance and coercion, fail to so much as recognize obvious misconduct among their own ranks. The circling of the wagons among the now-established guard has been (unintentionally) both hilarious and deeply cringe-inducing. And the factually and argumentatively impoverished apologetics that have followed the initial broader publication have been equally pathetic.

Most recently, the former chair of NYU's Germanic Studies department, Bernd Hüppauf, who apparently offered Ronell her original position in the department, has published a rather long essay detailing his history with Ronell. Although Leiter quite correctly describes the essay as a "damning account" of Ronell's time at the department, it's rather worth exploring more broadly, because, well, everybody in it comes off looking basically horrible, and inadvertently illustrates a lot of the ways that university life produces and shelters awful people.

The essay is basically a parade of horribles, but what really stands out for me is an almost studied indifference to the actual plight of students suffering under the nonsense Hüppauf describes. Hüppauf actually opens with a flashback to a discussion with one of Ronell's students complaining about her abuse. Apparently it didn't so much as cross Hüppauf's mind that he might have some role in curbing that sort of abuse. And tellingly, this feeble sort of learned helplessness pervades the entire article. Hüppauf eventually gets around to the students--in part IV of a six-part piece. But even there the telling is entirely bereft of any clear opposition or attempted remedial action. He doesn't even really seem to have any conception of how opposition could even be broached.

In his telling, Hüppauf is the usurped hero of this tragedy. He came to New York after being asked "to resuscitate a moribund German department"...at NYU, that prestigious private university where the humanities go to die. Ronell apparently got offered her position only after making all sort of assurances about her committment to build the program Hüppauf envisioned. On his telling, after getting her position, Ronell quickly went to work sabotaging that program, at one point supposedly even having "her secretary announce in a departmental meeting that in the German department no student's written work would any longer be acceptable unless it cited Derrida and Ronell." 

Now, this sort of episode is surely cringe-inducing. But what should anybody really make of it? It's hard to even comprehend how an academic environment like that could possibly function. And it's even more difficult to imagine the cramped intellectual and moral space in which other professors would do anything more than laugh off such incredible nonsense.

On his account, Hüppauf (amazingly!) went into his new job with little-to-no awareness of deconstructionism or the looney-tunes atmosphere that had spread like a virus through literature departments since Derrida first introduced American literary scholars with literally no philosophical background to shitty, glib prose and poorly done philosophy.

Our unsuspecting German transitions directly from his initial misunderstanding of deconstruction to a discussion of Ronell's attacks on his leadership. Here again, the discussion is instructive. Although he nods to Ronell's personal dishonesty and imperiousness, what really seems to rankle is her "disloyalty." Talk of loyalty is virtually always a sign of biased thinking, but what could it possibly mean here? Was this a team project, or an academic department? Of course, a big part of the criticism of Ronell involves the idea that her own scholarship is really closer to a cult of personality than to an objective academic enterprise with anything resembling expertise or normal conventions of scholarly rigor. But the entire account is pervaded with the insinuation that personalities are the only real movers in this enterprise.

What follows is described as a "coup" in which Ronell succeeds in (dethroning?) replacing Hüppauf as Chair. Again, the language is instructive. Hüppauf describes a pattern of Ronell unilaterally gaining the--what?--support, enthusiasm, "loyalty?!" of the dean of the faculty, who is basically described as a compromised idiot--someone who admired Ronell's publications, but couldn't have read them? This is not the stuff of a normal academic program. This is the ugly rot of palace intrigue.

Hüppauf's account is difficult to follow, at least partly because he avoids any direct discussion of his own actions or any clear timeline throughout. But also at least apparently because his desire to vilify Ronell outruns the humdrum facts of the account. We do manage to learn that Ronell became the acting chair of the department prior to Hüppauf's hiatus in Berlin. Hüppauf avoids any details on how the chairship is assigned, and in many departments regular rotation is simply the ongoing custom, especially since chairships  often involve bureaucratic hassles that most scholars prefer to avoid in favor of their own scholarship. His time at NYU appears to have begun in 1992, and Ronell's move came in 1996, so he'd probably been chair for at least four years prior to the reported "coup."

The rest of the account invites similar scrutiny. It paints a picture of an authoritarian Ronell terrorizing her colleagues and students alike, with the aid of a compliant Dean. But of course, there's little more than silence about any actual opposition from her professor peers, in what appears to be a sizeable department. A perusal of the web page suggests a faculty of 16. Of that, Hüppauf apparently served as chair when almost a third of that number of faculty was hired. (Of course, that itself is likely a pertinent fact, since unless the hires all came with tenure, some of those hires involved the extreme uncertainty of the tenure-granting process.)

What's most galling about all of this, though, is the idea that one person--and, a lot of crappy reporting notwithstanding, a pretty obvious intellectual charlatan--could exert such a destructive influence on an entire collection of scholars. Because that suggests less a free and equal collection of mature scholars, and more an immature clique of sycophants whose primary focus is on maintaining the privileges of membership, whatever the hell the supposed job happens to be. And that, naturally enough, is pretty bleak, and very pathetic. Welcome to the humanities.

Hüppauf obviously set out to write an indictment of Ronell. Along the way, he tarred his entire department and the university administration overseeing it.