tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4019662.post-862824632002-12-19T11:29:00.000-08:002002-12-19T11:29:10.810-08:00Dear Jean Paulhan, Yesterday’s New York Times ran an article with the title, "Stocks Bullish In Iraq’s Market; Don’t Ask Why." It began with a vignette of the quaintness of the Iraqi Stock Exchange, focusing on the attire of one trader named Abu Zaki--his "finely tailored herring-bone tweed" jacket, his "polished brogues and the 1930’s opera glasses he carries around his neck in inlaid Chinese cloisonne." Abu Zaki’s panache is shown as comic: "the breeziest boulevardier on the Baghdad bourse." The piling up of similar sounds works toward caricature, suggesting Disney representations of "Arabia." That there is a Stock Exchange should be our first surprise, and that it has a few aesthetes vaguely aware of culture outside Iraq (albeit decades old) should be our next. (Zaki’s golden age, the article suggests, was the 1950s, before King Faisal II was assassinated). But lest Zaki’s cultural and sartorial hybridity complicate our picture of Iraq too much, the article quickly moves to its argument: that Iraq’s market knows that its new situation (either passing inspections and having sanctions lifted or being invaded and having a new government imposed) is good for it, and people like Zaki are therefore placed in the difficult situation of explaining why the market is up. The Market operates as a kind of disturbing unconscious whose desires and, eventually, effects are starting to become legible through the Stalinist censorship. Ultimately it is the special power of "Markets" to challenge such regimes of false representation that the article celebrates: "Don’t ask why." Markets function as irrepressible baselines of global valuation, and hence "realism." By the end, then, Abu Zaki’s comic stature has taken on a range of other implications beyond being a dandy in third world nation: people like him must walk the tightrope of explaining this "fact" of a bullish market to investors without admitting why it has come about. What the article cannot say, and what it somehow offers itself as a compensation for, is that no one now believes that the option of passing UN inspections is real, and that the country will, therefore, undergo a series of massive strikes to its population and infrastructure. And in this way Americans seem to be speaking to themselves through the "facts" of the Baghdad market: even they know, the Iraqis, that invasion is good for them. After the dust settles, the phoenix of The Market. Friend of Cornelia Hardt Jeanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11365690346376170574noreply@blogger.com