Zone of Interest: US Style

  

Zone of Interest: US Style

Peter Schultz

 

[The following is from Scorpions’ Dance, by Jefferson Morley]

 

                  “While Nixon brooded, Helms waltzed. He relished his job, ran laps in the basement of the CIA headquarters, played … tennis on the weekends, and got to bed early. Helms loved ballroom dancing. He and Cynthia attended parties of the Waltz Group, a network of like-minded couples in government, law, and the press. Once a month they put aside the business of power in favor of Brahms….Tom Hughes…recalled … ‘He was an excellent dancer and an avid gossip, always in control.’

 

                  “Other evenings, Dick and Cynthia read spy novels aloud to each other. Helms didn’t care for the fiction of John le Carre’ …, a former MI6 man whose dour tales of the Circus, a fictional version of the British service, did not glamorize the Cold War…. ‘He found Le Carre’ too dark and cynical,’ Cynthia said.

 

                  “Helms got his fill of the dark and cynical on page B7 of the Washington Post on January 18, 1971, where syndicated columnist Jack Anderson … published a nasty and all-too-accurate column headlined ‘6 Attempts to Kill Castro Laid to CIA.

 

                  “The shadow of JFK’s assassination fell on Dick Helms once again.”

 

                  “’Locked in the darkest recesses of the CIA is the story of six assassination attempts against Cuba’s Fidel Castro,’ Anderson’s column began. The story was true, as Helms knew better than anyone. Anderson was referring to [a] top-secret report of May 1967, which recounted the Mafia and AMLASH plots in dispassionate detail.” [135]

 

                  Helms: a cultured, gentlemanly assassin. The U.S. “zone of interest.” The morally decent, the cultured are comfortable, even proud of engaging in assassinations and other morally dubious and inhuman actions in the political arena.

 

The Political: Gentlemanly Assassinations

  

The Political: Gentlemanly Assassinations

Peter Schultz

 

Regarding the assassination of General Schneider in Chile preceding the coup against Allende. “Such was the Dick Helms that friends and admirers did not care to think about too clearly, the gentlemanly planner of assassinations, who expressed goodwill to the men who shot [General] Schneider in the back because the general respected civilian rule. Nixon and Helms cast themselves as tough-minded defenders of the Free World, and they killed a defender of democracy to prove it.” (Scorpions’ Dance, 133)

 

Helms was a gentleman and he was an assassin, not an uncommon combination in the political arena. Blowjobs and burglaries can create havoc. Assassinations….not so much.

 

“Nothing threatened Dick Helms more than the shadow of JFK’s assassination.” ( Dance, 246)

 

Irony and Contemplation

  

Irony and Contemplation

Peter Schultz

 

Consider: Was Aristotle moralizing about morality in writing his Ethics? Or was he philosophizing about morality? And: what happens to morality when you philosophize about it, when you contemplate it philosophically?

 

Was Aristotle politicizing about politics in his Politics? Or was he philosophizing about politics? [E.g.: Men like Jefferson and Madison were politicizing about politics, not philosophizing about politics. They were “political thinkers” or “statesmen,” not political philosophers.] Political thinkers, statesmen, unlike political philosophers, are not ironic. 

 

What happens to the political when you philosophize about it? Is it possible, so viewed, to affirm the political? Viewed philosophically, the political is ironic.  

 

Was Jane Austen romanticizing romance or was she contemplating romance, philosophizing about it? George Will, et. al. say the former. Jane as radical says the latter. Hence, Jane’s irony, especially revealed in her anal sex joke about “rear admirals.”  

 

Was Mark Twain romanticizing (affirming) Joan of Arc or contemplating her, philosophizing about her? Hence, his irony. Who was closer to being contemplative, Tom Sawyer or Huck Finn? 

 

Regarding Jane Austen

Regarding Jane Austen  

 

Jane saw through “it” all, that is, the empire, the aristocracy, the patriarchy, the navy, even “Britishness.” Saw it, in the light of the erotic, for what it was and what it wasn’t. It is only in the absence of the erotic that Lady DeBoerg (?) looks like and can be considered a lady, the woman of quality the aristocracy claims her to be. In that absence, she doesn’t look and act like the controlling shrew she actually is. 

Strauss argued early on that the Republic abstracts from eros. I have wondered about that. Perhaps: it’s the absence of eros that makes possible the constructions, political and otherwise, of the Republic. It’s only in the absence of eros that philosophers would rule. But without eros, philosophers wouldn’t be philosophers. Perhaps they’d be intellectuals or sophists. The latter taught for pay and to empower their students, that is, for their own and their students’ “advancement” or acquisition, for fame. 

Did “The Crown” series do a pretty good job of illustrating the absence of eros among the British elites and the monarchy, and the consequences of that absence? For example, Diana’s fate? Elizabeth’s fate? Charles’s fate? Needed : erotic foils like those created by Jane Austen. “There are facts and there is truth and you better make room for both.” Or: there is fact and there is fiction and you better make room for both.

Walter Lippman: Crime and the Underworld

  

Walter Lippman: Crime and the Underworld

Peter Schultz

 

                  In 1931, Walter Lippman wrote an article entitled “The Underworld as Servant.” In it, he distinguished between crime and “the underworld,” arguing that while “the criminal as such is wholly predatory, … the underworld offers something in return to … respectable members of society.” [59, Tyler Organized Crime in America] In a key passage, Lippman wrote: “The issues that are most perplexing and ominous are those presented by the underworld which defies the law, establishes a regime of terror and violence, and draws profit for services performed from conventionally respectable members of society.” [59]

 

                  Not a bad description of government and politics, right? Government and politicians often, even commonly, “defy the law.” At times, they defy the law by cancelling it, e.g., by issuing pardons. But informally, everyone knows that politicians defy the law often on behalf of supporters and allies. Such defiance could even be called providing “services [for] conventionally respectable members of society.” And that defiance is as acceptable politically as criminal defiance is in the underworld.

 

                  “A regime of terror and violence?” What are prisons? What is war? What does the FBI do? The CIA? NSA? Navy Seals? All engage regime-motivated, regime-justified terror and violence.

 

                  “Draws profits for services performed?” Can you name a politician who ended up poorer or less wealthy after his/her government service? I cannot. Just the opposite: Nancy Pelosi, Joe Biden, the Clintons, Obama, Nixon, Trump, T. Fauci. Politicians resemble underworld figures in this regard, profiting despite their defiance of the law. And they also resemble such figures in avoiding punishment for the ways, often suspect, in which they have acquired their wealth, acquisitions that often required defying the law.

 

                  So, “the issues … presented by the underworld” are also the issues presented by government and the political. Lippman, and almost everyone else, even or especially “realists,” avoid or “disappear” this phenomenon by embracing the idea, the myth, of two worlds, an underworld that is distinct from an upperworld. This is a comforting myth; but it is not one that clarifies the character of the political as, e.g., Machiavelli, et. al., illuminated it.