William Rodney Herring

“Elections cannot inconvenience me. They ratify my will or I neuter them.”

George Bush? Nope. Another George: Hearst.

As for the presidential George: in the linked article, Mark Rozell says “the administration’s stance ‘is almost Nixonian in its scope and breadth of interpreting its power’”; I wonder if it’s not beyond Nixonian.

In "The Man of Letters as a Man of Business," which we'll be reading in a few weeks in my Literature & Business course, William Dean Howells writes:

Perhaps, then, and as a matter of business, it would be well for a serious author, when he finds that he is not pleasing the women, and probably never will please them, to turn humorous author, and aim at the countenance of the men. Except as a humorist he certainly never will get it, for your American, when he is not making money, or trying to do it, is making a joke, or trying to do it.

I wonder if he had Al Swearengen in mind. There is, of course, a link, but I'm too tired to flesh it out at this point. Too much course planning -- syllabus mapping, etc., etc.

In the season one finale, with Deadwood's annexation imminent, Al Swearengen struggles to avoid an outstanding warrant charging him with murder. Coming under the jurisdiction of the US government, Al would be subject to federal laws, whereas to this point, Deadwood has operated under a peculiar structure of lawlessness, which is no doubt structured, but structured in such a way that its absence of law in large part determines the structure itself. The following conversation between Al and the US Magistrate takes place:

Al: Did young Adams deliver my message...[that] as to bribing you further with help with that warrant against me, beyond the $5,000 you've already pocketed, the gist was "Fuck yourself."
...
Clagett: That would be imprudent, Al. A failure to properly value your freedom in the promising days ahead.
Al: Maybe you don't value keeping your fucking guts inside your fucking belly enough.
Clagett: Those are the days behind us.
Al: No, those are the days to my fucking left. [points to Dan Dority, his henchman]
Clagett: I didn't generate the warrant. My disappearance won't quash it. You can't murder an order or the telegraph that transmitted it. Or those that are content to put food on their table by being the instruments. It can't be done.

Originally a bribe was to take care of the warrant, but after the first payment, the magistrate extended the demand to make it an ongoing blackmail. Which is to say that though murder won't quash a warrant, money will.

But the real difference between Agamben and Marx is that the former would, I take it, say that the magistrate is right because the law, having been constituted by an act of sovereignty, can't help but continue constituting its own sovereignty (the indistinguishability of constituted and constituting power). Hence, the order (a power constituted by the sovereign) can't be murdered because it constitutes its own orders (telegraph transmissions). But this is only to focus on half of the magistrate's claim. The other half needs a Marxist analysis: what ensures the transmission of orders is the people who work for "food on their table"; it is the economic relation that determines the purview of power and guarantees its effective expression.