END-RON PART ONE

Oscar Wilde famously said that a cynic knows the price of everything but the value of nothing. It stands to reason, then, that cynics should have been well represented in the investor base of Enron, as they pushed to the moon the stock price of a company that in retrospect had no real value other than as anchorage for an astonishing collection of ninnies and frauds. But cynics, of course, would never have bid ENE to the 90s in the first place. Cynics generally are not welcome in the bidness, as they call it in Texas, world; in bidness (as opposed to business) you gotta be blue skies all the time, and skeptics are commies or worse. Ken Lay epitomized this, in the incessantly cheery and patently false corporate reports issued by Enron in his name up until this past summer. .

Well, Enron’s blue sky—one evidently unmarred by the accountant’s green eyeshade to boot—has not only clouded over, but is raining down a storm of recrimination and scandal so fierce that it’s booted the war right off the front page. Corporate fraud and duplicity can only go so far in explaining such a stunning and ongoing misapprehension of reality on the part of so many people involved with the Enron debacle as employees, employers, investors, analysts, accountants … the list goes on. The story is now embracing even the Indian subcontinent. The full measure of the Enron disaster and the blame for it can only be attributed to an optimism that was dangerously, almost seditiously, unchecked by any sense of … er, cynicism. So maybe we need to stand Wilde’s observation on its head: it is now the cynic who, in the wake of first the technology stock-market bubble and now the Enron disaster, will need to take the lead in determining what the true value of things are, since the seduction of price has shown to be keenest not with the cynic, but with the optimist.

The names of the players are rapidly becoming well known. One imagines somewhere a fantasy scandal league is holding a draft. There is the position of corrupt honcho [chairman Ken Lay, CEO Jeff Skilling]; there is the position of document thresher [David Duncan of Arthur Anderson is the obvious first-round pick, even though he looked pretty hapless up there taking the Fifth, so counsel Nancy Temple, with her mantra of “To the best of my recollection …” is a sleeper choice here.] There are elected officials who are impressively outraged [Billy Tauzin of Louisiana, who looked great in the combine on Thursday, January 25th], and predictably inept [Joe Lieberman, who invariably will start with the same kind of old-maid scolding that he directed at Hollywood during the election]. And the big prize is the most likely Big Fish to fall. Will it be Karl Rove and his $100,000 worth of ENE that he sold before Bush took office? Or maybe Cheney and that mysterious energy cabal that either caused or didn’t react to (I forget which) the California energy crisis? Or maybe it will be Dubba himself, longtime friend of fellow Texan Lay

As Jim Cramer and Larry Kudlow both have noted on their CNBC cable show, “America Now” [look for Enron to do for that show what the Iranian hostage crisis did for “Nightline”], this really is the new Watergate [Enrongate does have a certain clunky ring to it], complete with document destruction and mirky financial transactions. All we need now is to learn how E. Howard Hunt is connected to it, or to hear about an Enron middle manager who offers, a la G. Gordon Liddy, to be shot on a street corner in Houston so that everything can be covered up. [Speaking of which, this just in. Truth really is stranger than fiction.]

Now that both the national media and the independent blogtocracy has seized on the Enron matter, a thousand different angles have been launched. Some should, and maybe even will, flounder. The most predictable and dispensable one is the attempt to politicize Enron and serve it up in the grand tradition of Conduit/Levy and Clinton/Lewinsky. It is fortunate that the company spread its cash over both parties, which should forestall this from becoming too much of a political circus. Nevertheless, wise heads are shaking in earnest, and as the Congressional hearings grind on, I can envision a manager pointing to his boss, who then fingers her boss, who then fingers Skilling or Lay, who then fingers someone in the Administration, and there you have it. The noxious nexus of corporate power and government greed always makes for a rippin’ good story—it’s certainly more interesting than discussing the failings of the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB)—and even for a Pulitzer or two, and the opportunity afforded by the Enron blowout will no doubt inspire many a wannabe muckraker.

Someone cleverer than I am recently noted that Big Media, having so thoroughly botched their reputations in their collective prediction of a military morass in Afghanistan, is just itching to get the nation’s attention focused on more familiar ground where the stink comes from rotten consciences and not rotting bodies, and where it can win back some measure of credibility. Enrongate, then, is a godsend, affording the Fifth Estate the opportunity to bring to bear the skills honed during the 90s when it read the entrails of O.J. and Jon Benet and Paula Jones. The more sophisticated, meanwhile, will brace themselves against the framework of James Stewart’s books and, going back a bit to the 80s, of Drexel Birnham Wood and Dusinane, and make hay over various questions about business ethics and government’s responsibility to rope in the bull of Mammon when it gets too rambunctious. The wisdom of government involvement in a situation that in all probability will be self-correcting is an issue generally left hanging in these analyses--until, that is, the blowback (to use a phrase now popularized in a different context) of the new government intervention has warped yet another business cycle.

What is rather surprising is the newfound zeal demonstrated by some conservatives for government oversight. Some of this is disturbing, some good. Conservative godfather George Will advises Republicans that they have a responsibility to “police business outlaws” in the same way as Democrats have a responsibility to ride herd on the “ditziness of the cultural left.” It says a great deal about Will’s brand of “conservatism” that he thinks his crowd needs to “police” business but not the idiocy of their cultural right intent as it is on proscribe our individual freedoms with Saudi-like zeal. Kudlow is more sensible, calling for the Security and Exchange Commission to promote reform of accounting guidelines and corporate reporting while, appropriately, prescribing the hoosegow for Lay and Company for their flagrant violations of the ethical standards and practices that are essential to the proper functioning of capitalism. In fact, Kudlow advocates greater regulation of the accounting profession (I assume he means for the government to be the one to take up the cudgel, if necessary), which is surprising coming from such an outspoken free-market advocate. But then you consider that Arthur Anderson, Enron’s accountant-cum-advisor whose name grows muddier with each passing news cycle, practiced similar chicaneries in a case involving Waste Management years ago.

The problem is, once it starts, the press for government regulation can quickly become irresistible. Already you hear the call to arms of the class warfare crowd, like the inimitable Al Sharpton. Some think the Administration was lax in allowing the poor, ignorant, white-collar Enron shareholder to exercise their power of choice and invest in a company that was headed down the tubes. This puts the Democrats in the curious position of advocating for white-collar, affluent Texans, among whom there were probably precious few Gore supporters. This is the kind of crowed that doesn’t believe in government intervention no how, no way, unless of course it's when their blue skies turn gray.

It was quite the noisome spectacle a couple months back, when the scandal first began to go critical, when Congress gave a hearing to Enron employees bitching and moaning over losing their entire 401k’s in ENE’s disintegration. I'm sure these are the kind of people who are always keen on the need for taking "personal responsibility" for one’s actions, and that too many people want the government to save them from themselves. No doubt most of them thought it a good thing that so many high-tech and dot.com investors lost their shirt in the Nasdaq meltdown, since they weren’t really doing anything important like trading computer-bandwidth futures and establishing partnerships in the Cayman Islands.

Well, to all those 30-year Enron employees who suddenly woke up with their 401’s ko'ed, I say welcome to the club, keep a stiff upper lip, and don’t go blaming others for the fact your retirement savings have been wiped out. Buck up and get a job at Wal-Mart. After all, there was only a month-long lockdown period starting October 17th (before which any reader of the regular business press, not to mention Enron employees, must have known that something was rotten; Fortune magazine, for instance, raised serious doubts about it in its March 5, 2001 issue.) when employees could not sell their company stock. The reason why no one had complained over the years that Enron only matched employee contributions with company stock was that during that same time, the company’s stock price was violating all reasonable laws of appreciation, gliding to stratospheric heights on the back of revenue streams which were not only too good to be true, but which didn’t exist at all. Once Enron’s edifice began to crack, and all that debt leveraged on a stock price that was collapsing faster than the Taliban army was suddenly and unavoidably there, it was only a matter of time before grandmothers and other socially acceptable Enron investors and employees began to be paraded in front of Congress as “victims,” when what they were really victimized by, arguably, was their own greed and lack of skepticism.

Whether or not you buy my rather harsh judgment, it remains that the Enron situation is precious little rationale for the government to start going around to companies telling them how to run their retirement plans. Dot-comers and tech investors who were burned in the Nasdaq bubble of 1999 and early 2000 received little sympathy from the public; neither should these Enron investors. Investing in markets implies risk; if you don’t want to take it, there's always government bonds.

RALL DEAL

I've an engagement later this evening that I've got to get prepared for, and instead of posting over lunch I was going to go to Armand's pizza buffet and line my stomach with carbs. But I just couldn't let this piece of nonsense go.

I know Rall's latest bull has already been detected by other bloggers -- notably the estimable (except when he bashes the Humane Society) InstaPundit -- who've given it a one-line mention as just more nonsense from this guy. But I just had to get on the record about a few things.

Primarily, there are so many good writers out there with so many interesting things to say; why does Ted Rall get a special link on Yahoo's daily news page? (Come to think of it, Ann Coulter and Maggie Gallagher get linked there as well, and both of them are second-rate, though Coulter's good for a unintentional hoot every now and then.) I recently purchased Yahoo's stock, thinking I'd turn a quick trade; now, I'm tempted to hold on until the next shareholder's meeting, and go there and raise a stink about who it chooses to highlight as columnists.

So here we go, a down and dirty dismemberment of Ted Rall's latest garbage.

"NEW YORK-Conspiracy theories are funny things: the wackier they sound, the more likely they are to be true."

Mr. Den Beste put it perfectly; if someone says it's too crazy to be true, it is.

"Little did I know how quickly I would be proven right."

This is one of the most nonsensical things anyone can write; we've all done it (or said it) every now and then, but someone who is paid to write really should be a little less sloppy in his thinking, or hire a better editor. Think about it; if Rall didn't know he would be "right" about his conspiracy theory, then he wouldn't have spouted off about it in the first place, and so he wouldn't be surprised about how he thinks he is right now. I guess you could say that he's surprised how "quickly" he was proven right (in his own mind, of course), but that's splitting hairs. The fact is, something like this is not only an immediate turn off (why should anyone want to read someone congratulating himself, unless he's doing it skillfully, artfully, humorously, all qualities missing here), but it's a cliche, and really doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

OK, OK, maybe I'm quibbling with that one. From here on in, however ...

"The Taliban government and their Al Qaeda "guests", after all, both were at best bit players in the terror biz."

Bit players? The guys who planned and executed the greatest atrocity in the long history of terrorism, the greatest single-day civilian loss of life in the U.S. in over 100 years? Who, pray tell, are the big dogs of terror, if Al-Qaeda are only wannabes. Oh, I forgot ... George W. Silly me.

"If the U.S. had really wanted to dispatch a significant number of jihad boys to meet the black-eyed virgins, it would have bombed Pakistan."

Our stated goal was not to dispatch "jihad boys" (is that anything like the Jerky Boys? Or the Boys of Summer? Boyz' in the Hood?), it was, initially, to break up Al-Qaeda by neutralizing the Taliban regime that harbored them. Any ten-year-old kid knows this, and there's very little doubt about it. Now you can disagree with that aim, or disagree with the war entirely, or even think that there may be an ulterior motive to it (it's the rare act, after all, that has only a single motivation) but there's absolutely NO disagreement about the primary reason we have been doing what we have been doing in Afghanistan the past three months. And no doubt that, in Rall's clunky phrase, we could bag the greatest number of "jihad boys" by targeting Tora Bora and its environs.

"Instead, the State Department inexplicably cozied up to this snake pit of anti-American extremists, choosing a nation led by a dictator who seized power in an illegal coup as our principal South Asian ally."

No, the snake pit was the Taliban, who we have dispatched (or at least violently displaced). There are certainly elements of Pakistan that aren't our friends, and it is somewhat disturbing that the Afghanis seem to be acting a little more truculent as time goes on. But the Pakistani anti-Americans, at least for now, don't have control, and whatever authority that is in Afghanistan now is certainly preferable to Omar and OBL .... isn't it?

"Moreover, the American military strategy in Afghanistan (news - web sites)-dropping bombs without inserting a significant number of ground troops-all but guaranteed that Osama would live to kill another day."

How in god's name does the one follow from the other? This is some violation of a fundamental principle of logic or dialectics or something, but I'm too lazy and in too much of a hurry to look it up. Suffice to say that we didn't NEED to insert too many troops in order to meet our military goal, which was to deny Afghanistan as a base of operations to Al-Qaeda and to destroy their ability to operate there. Which we have done with stunning success. And there's no guarantee that 150,000 American troops on the ground would have found OBL by now; the guy's got a price on his head for 25 million and is almost universally hated by Afghanis; you don't think they're not looking for him as much as possible? Rall's implication here is that ONLY American troops can finally corral OBL, and that the Afghanis, bless their little hearts, just don't have what it takes. That's a bit ... er, condescending of Afghanis, I believe. If the shoe were on the other foot, so to speak, and someone from their side was writing this, they'd call the author a racist for thinking that only our boys can do something and that those boys can't.

"So the Third Afghan War obviously isn't about fighting terrorism-leading cynics to conclude that it must be about (yawwwwwwn!) oil. Bush and Cheney were both former oil company execs, after all, and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice (news - web sites) was corporate counsel at Chevron."

What is a "terrorism-leading cynic"? Get a copywriter, for Chrissakes.

Now, on to the meat, which here is, that omnipotent Texan energy cartel that really runs the show, and has been running the show, I suppose, since the first wildcatter poked a hole in the Permian Basin. Ted Rall, meet Howard Zinn. The fact that Enron fell apart and trashed the private fortunes of many a Texan, no doubt friends to George W. and Cheney, is conveniently dodged here. We're to believe that this ubiquitous Texan energy cartel which runs the adminstration and even has a place for that turncoat-to-her-race Condi Rice (she sits on the BOARD OF CHEVRON, after all!) can trump up a war on the other side of the planet and hide their true motivations, but can't stop a Houston-based company from ginning up their books with nonexistent revenue streams and then blowing up into a full-bore disaster that threatens to dog this adminstration with scandal for quite a while. And if we were to damn every person in this country who sits on a board of directors of an energy corporation, we wouldn't have too many politicians left. (Of course, that might not be such a bad thing, but not in the way Rall thinks.) I'm surprised Rall didn't mention another master manipulator, Paul O'Neil, former CEO of Alcoa, which we know is one of those horrid extrusion-industry companies, not to mention the biggest single user of power in the Pacific Northwest. Rall, if you're going to make these accusations, please do your homework thoroughly!

"Unbeknownst to most Americans, oil fields dot northern Afghanistan near its border with Turkmenistan. But the real jackpot is under the Caspian Sea. Between confirmed and estimated oil reserves, Kazakhstan is destined to become the world's largest oil-producing nation, and will one day dwarf even Saudi Arabia."

Rall, look at a damn map. The Caspian Sea is quite a bit closer to Turkey and Russia than Afghanistan. If we were angling for that oil, why wouldn't we just buddy up to Turkey instead of promulgate a war with the defenseless and innocent little Talibanners? And guess what? There are existing pipelines from Baku, Azerbaijan on the west coast of the Caspian that run through the Causasus (and our new best friend, Russia) to the Ukraine and to Batumi, Georgia on the east coast of the Black Sea. And what the hell is so bad about this anyway? The U.S. goes in and helps underdeveloped countries like Kazashstan and Turkmeinstan and Afghanistan develop their economies so that their people can enjoy a good standard of life. WHAT IN GOD'S NAME IS WRONG WITH THAT? (Look what we did with the Saudis ... er, maybe I should strike that.) And if Chevron or Exxon (or even a moron like you, Rall) makes a couple of bucks in the transaction that they pass along to their shareholders (BTW, full disclosure, I am a proud owner of ExxonMobil stock for 15 years; I guess that disqualifies me from commenting on this situation), that's a good thing. That's capitalism, and that's a GOOD thing. Get it, Teddy Boy? And anything --- anything! -- that reduces our dependence on those Saudi bastards is also an unqualified GOOD thing.

"For the U.S., more production means cheaper oil, lower production and transportation costs, and higher corporate profits. The Kazakhs would be happy to work with us, but their oil is frustratingly landlocked. The shortest and cheapest of all possible pipelines would run from the Caspian to the Persian Gulf via Iran, but lingering American resentment from the 1980 hostage crisis has prevented U.S.-aligned Kazakhstan from getting its crude out to sea. Plan B is a 1996 Unocal scheme for a trans-Afghanistan pipeline that would debouche at the Arabian Sea port of Karachi."

Well, yeah, that's about how it would work. What's wrong with any of this?

"As Zalmay Khalilzad co-wrote in The Washington Quarterly in its Winter 2000 issue, "Afghanistan could prove a valuable corridor for this [Caspian Sea] energy as well as for access to markets in Central Asia." Khalilzad has an unsavory past. As a State and Defense Department official during the Reagan years, Khalilzad helped supply the anti-Soviet mujihadeen with weapons they're now using to fight Americans. During the `90s he worked as Unocal's chief consultant on its Afghan pipeline scheme. According to the French daily Libération, Khalilzad's $200 million project was originally conceived to run 830 miles from Dauletebad in southeastern Turkmenistan to Multan, Pakistan. Multan already possesses a link to Karachi. Partly on Khalilzad's advice, the Clinton Administration funded the Taliban through Pakistani intelligence, going so far as to pay the salaries of high-ranking Taliban officials. The goal: a strong, stable authoritarian regime in Kabul to ensure the safety of Unocal's precious oil. In 1998, after Taliban "guest" Osama bin Laden (news - web sites) bombed two American embassies in east Africa, Unocal shelved the plan. Chief consultant Khalilzad moved on to the Rand Corporation think tank."

Boy, this is just precious. Lemme get this straight. Some rather anonomyous chap who happened to write an article for a rather obscure D.C. publication about the importance of Afghanistan to the energy markets is the DARK PRINCE behind it all!. "Consultant" (what a dirty thing to be, Ted, especially when you're the chief one!) Khalilzad, from his perch at Rand Corporation, is mastermining the entire ebb and flow of this autumn's events --- hey, wasn't that Unocal gasoline that the NYFD fire trucks responding to the WTC were using? -- across space and time in ways we poor mortals (except, of course, for Ted Rall!) barely understand, using his contacts with the mujihadeen, the Clinton administration, the boards of Unocal, Condi Rice and her hairstylist, the Masons, the Freemasons, the Queens of England and Sheba, the man on the grassy knoll, the aliens from Planet Dork, and the cigarette-smoking man from the X-Files, so that this adminstration can all get rich on Caspian Sea oil and retire to St. Bart's after they've obliterated millions of Islamic freedom-fighters and crushed the Muslim world under the boot of free enterprise. I cannot IMAGINE a more dastardly plot. Thank God Rall has uncovered it. We can all sleep better at night.

"Considering the Taliban irredeemably unreliable, Clinton withdrew U.S. support. But as the newly-minted cliché goes, everything changed after 9-11. Now the Taliban are gone, replaced with a U.S.-installed interim government.Rising energy prices helped push the economy into recession; perhaps 90-cent gas will work where interest rate cuts failed. Once again, the pipeline plan is hot. Did Bush exploit the September 11th attacks to justify a Central Asian oil grab? The answer seems clear. On December 31, Bush appointed his special envoy to Afghanistan: Zalmay Khalilzad."

Ah, the circle is complete. I can see how Rall researched this article. He typed in some keywords in a Boolean string: say, "oil", "Afghanistan", "pipeline",."Rand Corporation", "Condi Rice", and out popped from Google (no, probably Yahoo's search engine; Rall is probably contractually obligated to use it in order to keep his opinion billet) the name of the murky and malevolent Mr. Khalilzad, who has been able to wield near-absolute power over the inner circles of four U.S. Administrations going back 20-odd years. Damn, if he's that good, I'm GLAD Khalilzad's on our side, Rall. Wouldn't want him running Al-Qaeda. Invest in Unocal now!

"This is a moment of opportunity for Afghanistan," the former Unocal employee commented upon arrival in Kabul January 5. You bet it is: Pakistan's Frontier Post reports that U.S. ambassador Wendy Chamberlain met in October with Pakistan's oil minister to discuss reviving the Unocal project. And a front-page story in the January 9 New York Times reveals that "the United States is preparing a military presence in Central Asia that could last for years," including a building permanent air base in the Kyrgyz Republic, formerly part of the Soviet Union. (The Bushies say that they just want to keep an eye on postwar Afghanistan, but few students of the region buy the official story.) Many industry experts consider Unocal's revived Afghan adventure fatally flawed and expect the U.S. to ultimately wise up and pursue an Iran deal. But thus far the Bushies have given the conspiracy theorists a lot to think about."

Well, I could go on, but I won't. The fact is, this kind of dross -- shoddy research, lazy thinking, trite writing, and totally lacking in any kind of substantiating evidence -- has been going on for a while in certain precincts of American discourse. The assumption behind it all, of course, is that the profit motive is evil and that the only way one person gets rich is if 500 others are impoverished. Perhaps Rall could have written something about the Enron situation, which I'll admit is beginning to smell. But that would involve Rall knowing something or learning about balance sheets and accounting standards. Too hard, and far more fun to concoct absurd scenarios featuring all-powerful rogues who would strain credibility even as Bond villians.

LAZLO SPEAKS

Lazlo Birinyi, the stock-market strategist who's a regular on Wall Street Week and the biz networks, turned very cautious on the stock market in the summer of 2000. That alone makes him worth listening to, unlike a lot of the clowns you see on CNBC. Birinyi's advice over the years has not been undermined by the kind of http://www.ifa.tv/12steps/Step4/Step4Page2.html hamfisted attempts at overall market timing that have marked the careers of some of the Street's biggest names, like Elaine Garzarelli and Joseph Granville.



Birinyi grew more bullish last summer and, although the autumn atrocities sunk the markets for a while, that prediction seems rather prescient now. He's still cautious, however, given the run we've had since September and that the stock market no longer seems to be terra incognita to the average investor. Fear has been supplanted, if not by greed, at least by anticipation.

With that in mind, Birinyi is advising that this decade will not see the kind of returns of the 1990s, and, more importantly I think, that the market has changed from a buy-and-hold investor's market we saw in the previous decade to a trader's market. This makes sense to me, and is backed up by history. Whenever a stock market bubbles up and then deflates like what has occurred over the past few years, the next phase of the stock market move generally features different leadership, and generally rewards different investment strategies.

Birinyi notes that Wall Street member firm activity has doubled; these investors of big money are not making long-term investments but are trying to generate incremental income. He observes that there is a lot more short-term activity, and that there are a lot more aggresive buy and sell programs, than there has been in the recent past. Overall volume hasn't increased, I imagine, because the trading activity of individual investors is nothing like it was in, say, 1999, when day trading was all the rage.

If Birinyi believes that trading and not investing will be rewarded over the next few years, I wonder if this means that he has softened his stance somewhat against technical analysis. He's never been a fan of the squiggly lines, but you can't be a trader by looking at 10-Qs or quarterly balance sheets. Most traders I'm familiar with put more faith in support and resistance levels than they do in cash flow and price/earnings rations. It's not a matter of whether that's right or wrong; the fact is that a large part of asset allocation decisions are made by technicians, and that axiomatically lends technical analysis importance. Remember, technical analysis reflects the reality of a given security's perceived value among a given set of market participants (investors) at a given point in time, and does not reflect any underlying truth of a given company's worthiness or health. It predicts market prices, and not a company's earnings stream or innovations or management. The simple fact is that these are securities markets, not companies markets. Given all the questions that have been raised with how companies are reporting their earnings, issues that are at the heart of the Enron debacle with all its off-book debt, there are increasing doubts about just how trustworthy is the data that is used when doing fundamental analysis. Technical analysis, then, seems to be even more important now.

Still, Birinyi makes a good point. He isn't the only one to bash analysts for upgrading IBM at 120 and downgrading it at 90. And, true, a lot of those decisions come from technical analysts. IBM breaks a triple top at 120 and the upgrades begin, even though IBM's all-time high is in the mid 130s. That's because one of the rules of thumb of technical analysis during the 90s bull market was that you buy breakouts above a trading range. That view, evidently, obviously still prevails among the herd mentality of certain analysts, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the market in general adheres to it. That's why Birinyi's larger message is so important: that this is a different type of market, and that those breakouts will probably not have anything like the staying power these did a few years ago. The latter 90s was one long momentum play, and you were generally rewarded buying breakouts. It's different now, Birinyi says, with different rules, and one of those rules is that a stock price breaking out of a trading range is not necessarily a sign of a new up move.

Ironically perhaps, Birinyi puts a lot of faith in money flow. That's a good habit to get into in any kind of market; you want to position yourself where the big money is going before it goes there to jack up the price of the security you own. That's what investing is all about, and although there's no magic bullet to it, money flow is probably as close as you can get to one. Yet money flow has always been considered a key feature of technical analysis, which Birinyi has historically denigrated. Curious.

THE RISE AND FALL OF THE WEST

Bubbleviewing last eve, I watched one of those shout-fests, this one on the Cornel West imbroglio. In one corner, Dr. Alvin Pouissaint, an associate dean at the Harvard Medical School; in the other, Dr. Shelby Steele, a prominent writer who is always referred to as "a conservative black" something or other, as if the two were irreconcilable to the extreme and, conjoined, represent some kind of eccentricity or, worse, aberration.

For those who haven't been mesmerized by this controversy, the president of Haavaad, Larry Summers, called the "distinguished" professor West on the carpet at the end of the old year (I"ve got to get more current in my postings, I suppose) for not attending to his collegiate duties, such as teaching and research. Evidently, Cornel had been instead cutting rap albums and bringing in 15 g's a pop --maybe it really is nothin' but a 'g' thang baby -- giving speeches across the country. West's other extracurricular activities included joining up on the unstoppable bandwagon (rollin' on the six-four, anyone?) that is the 2004 Al Sharpton Presidential campaign. West took umbrage at Sommers' upbrading and threatened to decamp to Princeton, along with the rest of the Haavaad's Afro-American Studies (does it just study hair styles of black Americans; I thought it was "African American") department. Assorted goofballs like Sharpton and his partner in bunkum, Jesse Jackson, did what comes naturally to them, and dropped the "r" bomb like tonic flakes on yo ass, bitch. (Couldn't resist it, sorry.) As usually happens in these kind of cases, a difference of opinion between a black man and a white man, both prominent, was immediately redefined through the prism of racism. Tempers "flared," tensions on campus were "ratched up," the issue was chewed over by experts in "race relations." Then, before the bitch-slappin' started, Summers made some vague statement about the spirit of diversity, West at least temporarily unpacked his bags, Sharpton went back to holding Michael Bloomberg hostage, and Jesse went off to try and open a dialogue with Iran's warped imanocracy like he'd tried to with the Taliban right after 9-11. Anyway, on the tube last night, Pouissant defended West; Steele not only dissed West, but Summers as well for caving on the issue and not canning West promptly. Steele made the better case, not surprisingly, especially when you look at what this essentially was: an employer exercising his right to criticize an employee's work and schedule. But like most conservatives, he never knows where to stop; Steele then launched into an attack on African-American studies as if that had single-handedly caused the collapse of American academic life and standards.

This dust-up touches on a lot of the same nerves that have already been rubbed raw by the events of this past autumn, both the attacks and the reactions. West is a real poster boy for the logorrhea and ethical numbness of academic discourse in this country. In the name of academic freedom and fresh scholarship, West's attentions have ranged from the predictable (free Mumia, reparations for slavery seven generations after the fact); to the irresponsible (sponsoring such racists as Farrakhan and and Benjamin Chavis Muhammad); to the downright weird (trying to merge [?] Marxist thought with Christian traditions).

Part of West's appeal I can understand. The one time I saw him speak, it was mostly inchoate musings on spirituality and Nietzsche; I think West was trying to elaborate on the "Dionysian"/"Apollonian" dichotomy, which makes him, I suppose, a philosopher of some sort. I know it all went over my head, and I've read more of Nietzsche than all of the other name philosophers combined. But I've never really been taken with the metaphysic. The point it, what he said was not nearly as memorable as the way he said it; West's delivery is hypnotic, sing-song, it rises and falls like, say, a piece of music does. He's well known for that, and probably has people constantly coming up to him and saying, "you know, Cornel, you ought to try rapping. If Shaq can do it, why can't you?" And he figured, "gee, why not?" Anyone who's ever tried to actually read West knows that, as a writer, he makes a good performance artist. Maybe that's why he's trying to break into rap. AWA: Academizz with Attitude, anyone?

One thing I'll note here in West's defense; evidently, he's fighting an "aggressive" form of prostate cancer. "Aggressive," of course, is euphemistic for "critical" if not "fatal." Maybe all this is as simple as West needing some time off to address what is obviously a serious threat to his health. I've seen close family members die of cancer, it's not a pretty sight, and I'm always willing to cut someone some slack when they've got it.

Geez, two softie posts in a row. I must have used up all my enmity this fall. Got to get back to normal.

TOUGH GUYS AND WARPED ADOLESCENTS

The sad case of Charles Bishop, the 15-year-old kid who flew the plane into the Tampa skyscraper, illustrates how due diligence against henious barbarians can become unctous chest thumping against unremarkable misfits. Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post,
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A7938-2002Jan7.html posing like many reconstituted liberals are in his new hair shirt of toughness, is glad that press accounts of Bishop have spared us the "he-was-such-a-good-kid motif" -- whatever that is.
In our national zeal to outdo the next guy in showing how studly we all are in the face of terrorism, constant belligerent blogging can easily warp into foolish bluster if it isn't occasionally tempered with forbearance. Something of empathy is lost when there's such unilateral condemnation. Perhaps because I was a loner like Bishop in high school (still am, for that matter), I'm kind of sensitized to teenaged angst, even when it is leads to violence such as Bishop's kamikaze run, or as the Columbine shootings. Lone, impulsive acts of violence that are the result of the distempered mind don't seem nearly as obscene to me as acts of terror marinated in ideological gunk, and alienation from something isn't nearly as censurable as hatred of it. Bishop was pushed over the edge and did a very bad thing. But he shouldn't be lumped in with the likes of Atta, who lusted for martyrdom through mass murder. Bishop, evidently, just wanted out.

Instead of excoriating this kid, let's remember the kind of garbage the Taliban was, and save our opprobrium for these cretins. Every day, we're reminded of how ghastly these people were and are. I just heard a press report that one of the few surviving animals in the Kabul zoo, a lion, is missing part of his face. How'd that happen? The lion, left to starve during the Taliban regime, tried to eat a live grenade that had been deliberately placed in his cage. The grenade blew up, naturally. Such deliberate acts of cruelty stagger the imagination, and the people and mindset which can conceive of such things have forfeited at least their right to freedom, if not to their lives. I'd like to see the Kurtzes of the world spend more time on that kind of thing, and less bloviating about some suicidial Tampa teenager and trying to fabricate some nonexistant link between him and Muslim terrorists.