It's A Gusher!

I recently finished the audiobook of Upton Sinclair's 1927 novel Oil!

Readers may know the novel as the basis for Paul Thomas Anderson's 2007 film There Will Be Blood (a movie which I admired but did not like, exactly). But having now sampled both, I think the book differs from the film enough for them to be treated as quite separate entities. While sharing numerous superficial traits, they really tell different stories.

Oil! tells of a young boy, James Arnold Ross (called Bunny by his family and friends), whose father is a California oil developer. Bunny's youth and early manhood are spent next to his father as "Dad" negotiates deals and drills and develops oil fields. Bunny is a sensitive and intelligent child who is increasingly troubled by the disparity between his own lavish lifestyle and the much more meager (and hazardous) existences of the working men on the oil fields. Dad looms large in Bunny's eyes (as fathers always do for sons), representing expertise and competence and accomplishment to the young boy; unquestionably talented and hardworking and knowledgeable, Dad is a mover and shaker in the world. But Bunny begins to see that other people not nearly as materially comfortable or accomplished as Dad are also intelligent and meritorious. And some of Dad's fellow movers and shakers--many of them, it seems--are nasty, soulless pieces of work. This divide is kept continually in front of Bunny as he grows up, dividing his time between the oil fields and high-toned schools and colleges where he is surrounded by other wealthy, privileged people. The folks in Bunny's social world are steeped in money; they accept their easy lives without question and feel entitled to anything and everything--yet none of them have ever worked or actually accomplished anything useful in life.

It's a story that places very basic questions before us about inequality and the value of labor and management, about justice and the transmission of information, about friendship and business ethics.

Sinclair was an unapologetic socialist, and the book accordingly paints a sympathetic picture of the oil field workers, and indeed of workers generally. But though there are archetypes on both sides, Sinclair engages us by making all the main characters as nuanced and multi-faceted and flawed as, well, as real human beings are. The foibles of humanity are on display on all sides. Neither Bunny with his socialist leanings and Bolshevik friends (whom Bunny often funds and otherwise assists with Dad's oil money), nor his very big business father is given a free ride. Sinclair depicts uneducated and badly-behaved working men alongside the rapacious and astoundingly entitled oil executives; and he shows Bunny's father (J. Arnold Ross) as a principled and caring employer, someone sharply contrasted with many of the other oil executives (a fact which makes Bunny's deliberations much harder). The Bolshevik revolution in Russia is depicted in rather glowing terms, and the opposition to it as irrational and even as spiral-eyed fanaticism. Whatever truth may lay in these characteristics, the novel is not a work of journalism: the glowing praises of the Russian revolution are countered only with scandalous and unsupported accusations and wild, exaggerated stories. If we would make up our minds about these historical events, we'll need a better source of solid intelligence.

My attempts to survey my own political views over the years typically place me in the socialist camp, and so this worker-friendly tone is congenial to me. But I believe that I am utilitarian at base: whatever the theory, I'm interested in what can be shown to WORK. (Maybe everybody thinks this about themselves.) This of course presupposes that we can agree on what an outcome should be, which is itself a pretty tall order. (A law making abortion illegal may in fact reduce the numbers of abortions, but I'm unlikely to agree with the men passing such laws about the desirability of that outcome divorced from any other consideration; and I certainly will disagree with them about claims of any positive increase in "moral behavior" that results from such a law.) I can see as readily as the next person the pitfalls that await us  in a society that simply provides everything for everybody while demanding nothing in return, a society that does not differentially reward those willing to work harder, willing to take bigger risks, willing to dream bigger. So my socialist utopia would require significant modifications from "pure" socialism. (Interestingly, these basic ideas are still bandied about today with talk of "takers" and "job creators" and the appropriateness of a social safety net and the justice or injustice of taxation. Lest we think Sinclair's thinking belongs to a bygone era.)

But Oil!, which story is based on the Teapot Dome scandal of the early 1920s, reminds us of the troubles of unchecked capitalism, a lesson which in the last decade or two I think we've largely lost sight of.

For as long as I've chewed on these basic issues--the proper place of workers and management in society, the proper role of government in civilization--I'm always a little surprised at how they resist reflecting a single hue. There are two or more sides to any complex issue, and while I feel reasonably settled about where I fall on political matters I am still often intrigued by the arguments arrayed against my convictions. (This is partly why I am so continually disgusted by Fox News, since there surely are cogent arguments to be made in support of conservatism, and yet instead of informing people and making a case for their positions, they are happy to gin up a silly world of spook stories and straw men that keep red meat before an unquestioning audience.) Upton Sinclair's Oil! is not telling a balanced story, and yet it's a story that has useful observations. And it's an entertaining read.

Highly recommended.

A Kind Of Book Report

My layover routine in the past couple of years has focussed on taking longer and longer walks. I've always walked a lot, but after taking off a few pounds a couple years ago I found myself going further and further. In the last six months I've begun doing regular outings of 25-30 miles and more. This distance, at roughly 17:15 per mile pace, amounts to eight or nine hours on the hoof. Many of these walks have been in Cologne, where I take the train to a nearby town--Düsseldorf to the North or Bonn to the South--and walk back into Cologne. I'm pretty much moving non-stop for the duration, stopping momentarily at the little kiosks and street vendors along the way for snacks and drinks, and I usually end up at a favorite pub by our layover hotel back in Cologne for the aforementioned "Flammkuchen" (or Tarte flambée). But I've done them in a variety of places.

Part of my routine also involves having a good book to listen to, and with listening sessions of this length one goes through an audiobook quickly. So I've gravitated to some longer works. The last couple of months I've been working on Jean M. Auel's "Clan of the Cave Bear" series--also called the Earth's Children series. There are six books in the series, beginning with 1980's Clan of the Cave Bear, and each book in audio form is 20 hours or so in length.

I knew nothing about this book series, even thinking at first that the name was a metaphor for something. But no, it's just what it says: a tale of prehistoric humans, specifically about a single Cro-Magnon girl whose family is killed in an earthquake. The five-year-old girl, near death, is found by a group of Neanderthals who nurse her back to health and raise her as part of their own tribe. This setup is perfect for telling the Ultimate Story of Racism, with the Neanderthals fearing the Cro-Magnons as violent and incomprehensible and the Cro-Magnons thinking the Neanderthals to be little more than animals. Our heroine, Ayla, must bridge the two civilizations.

The story is of course entirely speculative. While there seems to be some evidence that Neanderthals and the anatomically-modern Cro-Magnon humans existed at the same time--approximately 30,000 years ago--I think the notion that they interacted is as yet pure invention. But it's an intriguing idea, and Auel has taken some pains to stick mostly to informed speculation. The Neanderthals are given a distinct culture and, though not physically equipped for speech (a detail currently disputed), they are here given the ability to deftly communicate among themselves with gestures, a kind of sign language punctuated by limited sounds. Here too Auel tries to flesh out this idea, giving many examples without giving any actual details as to how it would work. She implies that this form of communication is as nuanced and broad as spoken language; personally, I can't quite see it, but the story relies on the detail and we just have to take her word for it.

And that's not the most unlikely idea she puts forth. Her Neanderthal "Clan" people are able to pass memories on genetically, a detail justified by the different shape of their brains from ours. This skill allows, for example, a medicine woman of the Clan to pass her hard-won information about plants and animals on to her children without direct communication (Lamarckism, anyone?). Kids thus pre-loaded need only be "reminded" to find they already know things. Given the kinds of knowledge that ARE passed on genetically in the animal kingdom (I think of a bee hive or the migrating behavior of birds or little marsupials climbing up their mothers' abdomens looking for their pouch), this is perhaps not a complete absurdity. But it does seem a leap.

What I did NOT know--honest!--is that the series is known for a certain moist-and-meaty depiction of sexuality, earning it a legendary titter-worthiness among teens and young adults. I spent some time looking at series reviews after I had finished three of the six books (trying to decide after the rather irritating third book whether I should bother to continue), and at least one reviewer reminded us that the sex scenes are not too big a part of the whole story, not least because you have to wade through some 900 pages before you even get to the first of them. But then Auel has left her mark on the world of sex writing, having apparently invented such terms as "throbbing manhood" and "warm, moist folds" and many other seeming-staples of soft-core porn. The first time these scenes flash before us it is in the service of the story, but then they become a bit distracting and superfluous.

Or so it seems to my superannuated self. I find myself skipping tracks that seem to have been inserted, like a drop-in addendum, from the last encounter and the one before that and so on. (The skeevy vibe is not helped by the narrator, one Sandra Burr, sounding very like one's grandma reading the Penthouse Forum aloud to you.)

However cloying and repetitive, this remains a pretty small part of the narrative. What IS fascinating, and what I think many people would find resonating, is the close-up look at what life is like when there is nothing to do with our time but to LIVE. The business of procuring food and shelter in this setting, especially when traveling, is a full-time job and something very far removed from modern life. And Auel has done a good job of showing us what skills are needed and how one might excel at things I've never even thought about. Ayla is given a great problem-solving brain, and we are shown the kinds of dilemmas a pre-historic person might have faced and shown how we might have solved these issues. I've done almost no camping--none whatsoever in over 35 years--so this survivalism is probably further from my daily consciousness than it is for some. But the idea of wandering a vast, virgin continent and foraging and hunting and finding uses for its resources has a distinct appeal.

Auel spends a fair bit of time talking about both Clan and Cro-Magnon interaction with "the spirit world," another detail that is perhaps supported by archeological artifacts. But all the talk of "totems" and the homages paid to the "Earth Mother" and such naturally make one wonder. It's hard for me to wrap my head around what advantage would have been gained in the ancestral environment to ascribe meaning and intent to things that did not have that meaning. How does believing something that's simply not true help the organism? Indeed, I'm probably spring-loaded to see this as a detriment, a diversion that takes resources away from survival, and Auel takes no pains to explain how these beliefs might have aided survival. But to the extent that Auel's depictions are true, they must have aided survival. It seems like survival for early humans was much more a razor's-edge proposition than it is in modern times, and anything that posed a burden may have meant the difference between survival and extinction. The fact that we're here to speculate about it makes me think my instincts are wrong, but I can't see how. Anyway, it's another thing to chew on.

Even apart from the groan-worthy depictions of sexuality, I can see why teens and young adults might be drawn to the books. They are written in a very simplistic and straightforward style. Everything moves at a glacial pace and the plotting seems wooden and stale. (In between the last book and the current one, I listened to William Boyd's Ordinary Thunderstorms and was shocked at its comparative sophistication. I hope the brain cells are not permanently lost.) But the grand sweep of the adventure overcomes this. We come to identify with the feisty, extraordinary woman and I find myself eager to follow her ongoing adventures--even as I skip over the tawdry with an eye roll.

I'm currently about halfway through the fourth book, and my sense is that she has spoken her piece at this point. Now we're just muddling along with standard plotting. But having invested some 70 hours in the story to this point, it'll take some real bungling to keep me from seeing it through.  Stay tuned.

Here Comes the Sun

I finished Isabel Wilkerson's The Warmth Of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration (2010) a couple weeks ago. The book tells of what has become visible now as the great migration of slave-state blacks Northward and Westward between 1915 and 1975. Though she interviewed a thousand people for the book, the narrative primarily follows three people from their varied backgrounds in Jim Crow states to what is hoped will be better lives up North. Sharecropper Ida Mae Brandon Gladney left Mississippi for Milwaukee in 1937; field worker George Swanson Starling left Florida for Harlem in 1945; and Robert Joseph Pershing Foster, a physician and surgeon, left Louisiana in 1953 for a better life in California. Though none of these migrants saw themselves as part of a movement, with a little distance we can see them as exactly representative of a mass movement involving some six million blacks, mostly in waves after the two World Wars.

As has become a custom of late, I'm reading this book in audio form which makes it difficult for me to recount my way through the pages by way of favorite passages. But like Matt Taibbi's Griftopia or Chris Hedges' Death Of the Liberal Class, this one has too many quotable passages anyway. It's not the language that grabs me, though Wilkerson is a former Pulitzer Prize-winner. The magnetism comes from the world she captures, an alien place that most of us--I, certainly--don't really understand.

Everyone knows the term Jim Crow, and most of us know that it represents a series of laws and codes intended to enforce a racist view of the world. But that description, ugly as it is, sounds considerably less menacing and heinous than the reality of Jim Crow. On many occasions in the past I have found myself shocked by information I should have taken on board years before; and so it is here. I've seen many a photo of "whites only" and "colored only" signs from the Jim Crow era and I know a little about the Civil Rights marches of the '60s, but somehow I never really took this information in and processed it.

Wilkerson's book goes into minute detail about what life was like for Southern blacks after the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, and provides a chilling rationale for what became a mass exodus of blacks from their homes over a 60-year period. I want to think that Lincoln's proclamation marked the beginning of the end of one of the epic wrongs of history--slavery--but in fact the act changed very little in the lives of the now-former slaves. The conquered Confederacy was under Northern control after the war for the decade of Reconstruction, and Northern values were enforced during this time. But with the withdrawal of Union garrisons, the ways of the Old South quickly reasserted themselves, and an ugly and rigid caste system--a system of apartheid--was enforced. This was Jim Crow.

I knew all this, of course, but it depresses one right to one's bone marrow to see the totalitarian and cunning and slippery way this tyranny was enacted--to see the frantic urgency with which this system was built and expanded. Far beyond separate-but-decidedly-UNequal facilities, blacks were placed, by law and custom, in an inferior position to whites in all things, and harsh and differential treatment was mandated and brutally enforced. This enforcement went so far as to punish any white person not wishing to follow these rules, and any black person even suspected of an infraction was dealt a brutal, and often fatal, reprimand. Many slaves became sharecroppers, working as "free men" the same land they had hitherto worked under duress. These land owners quickly found novel and unconscionable ways to keep their former slaves under their iron control. The common scenario was for a sharecropper to work an entire year and then go to the boss at season's end for a "reckoning." The boss would add up the worth of the sharecropper's labor and subtract from that the "costs" the sharecropper incurred from the boss--food and lodging and medical expenses, etc. The laborer had no say in these calculations. And the outcome in the vast numbers of cases was--at best--a draw: the sharecropper worked for a year for no wages, "earning" only the most meager hardscrabble existence. With a "fair" boss, a sharecropper might earn a few dollars at year's end, but more often the books would show the sharecropper further in the hole than when he started. That placed the sharecropper in the boss's debt, a position of legal standing which would give the boss leverage over the workers' very lives. Naturally, there was no legal recourse for any black person in the South, and even beatings and lynchings were not considered matters of legal importance--unless it was a white person who was beaten, then any kind of mob "justice" was tolerated, even mandated. A white man could do virtually anything to any black man, woman, or child and be reasonably assured that no legal action could be taken against him (nor would he likely face public condemnation). Blacks on the other hand were routinely beaten and tortured and killed for infractions they may never have committed. As men and women and families fled this oppression and injustice (imagine a black soldier returning to the South after fighting for his country overseas, only to face Jim Crow back at home!), the South saw its free-labor economy evaporating; it's incredibly revealing to watch the oblivion of the Southern whites as their economy faltered, and to see the risible and offensive attempts to correct the situation--always without admitting the epic wrong that lay at the core of the problem.

This system, laid bare before us, is absolutely shocking to my naive and easy-going nature. The details--and I had no idea how vast and all-encompassing this institutionalized racism was--leave one sick to one's stomach. To think of millions of people living in this system, denied essential human rights and the basic rights of law and citizenry, and for this system to have existed after the legal abolition of slavery, makes one realize that the greatest stain on our country continued long after the Civil War was said to have settled the issue. And as the story continues, we realize that the monstrous discrimination continued on, closer and closer to our own day, until we find ourselves in the present day (where we hear Supreme Court justices claim that racism is no longer an issue--which proves the lie much more eloquently than a detailed roster of infractions could do).

But as a white person a hundred years removed from slavery, I can only wonder at this state of affairs. I can't really understand what it was to live under this system, on either side. All I can do is try to absorb the reality of those times and translate it to something in my own world. And here's what strikes me: it seems that the country went through an episode of mass mental illness in the 1860s (and beyond). There was a wild irrationality in the Confederate mind, a blood-boiling certainty about things that just weren't true--not least in the conviction that a person's merit could be determined by their race (or their sex). Seven states--slave-holding states all--seceded immediately upon Lincoln's election to the Presidency, even though he had stated for the record that he had no desire, and felt he had no legal right, to interfere with slavery where it presently existed (all that was being proposed was that new territories added to the nation be free). But the would-be Confederacy took that information and concluded that "He's a-comin' for my slaves!" or "He's reducing me to the equal of a slave" and felt the only way to hang onto their "property" was to secede and form a new nation--a nation whose constitution, tellingly, held as a central tenet that whites MUST occupy a superior status to non-whites

It's just hard to make a rational account of this, and yet we descended into massive and prolonged bloodshed, town against town, neighbor against neighbor, because of it.

And as horrific and inexplicable as this seems when I read it, the real take-away is the recognition that very little has changed. As I read I find myself again and again thinking that this crazy, conspiracy-laden irrationality, this fear-and-armageddon thinking, is alive and well and completely unchanged in our present day. And it's centered in exactly the same geographical area (though racism and irrationality are found everywhere): the states of the Old Confederacy--the "red state" phenomenon where "conservatism" and social dysfunction are inextricably linked. The primary speakers of this country's political right--Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann and Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter and Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly--spout exactly the same kind of apocalyptic, made-up garbage (presumably because a straight accounting of the facts won't really get anyone's blood up). They and their followers are mad as hell at an awful lot of things that are demonstrably untrue--and talk of secession from the union once again swirls.

Any sober look at the opposition to Obama can't help but see a thick sinew of racism in the criticism of the policies of his administration--indeed, finding overt racism is not hard to do. Which REALLY makes it seem as though we've made zero progress in the last 150 years. While racism has always been with us and probably will continue to be a force until whites are soundly outnumbered in our population; and while far fewer people in 1860, North or South, were likely comfortable with the idea of full equality between races; I suspect the proportion who would reorder the world based on race remains similar to what it was back then.

It says the worst things about us that we seem unable to progress beyond this ugly clannishness, and that our culture, far from embracing rationality, is moving backward as rapidly as big money can write the checks.

Wilkerson's book tells an important story and is entertaining and engaging, but it's overlong. I appreciate that she did years' worth of prodigious research, but there is a lot of repetition. There's an argument to be made (tho she has not done so) that a lengthier immersion into this horribly unjust world is needed for those of us in the privileged classes to begin to grasp what it means to live under such strictures; but the book's impact was limited by our seeming to cover the same ground too many times. But that's a small complaint that does not undo the book's importance. If we are to prevent history repeating itself--as it seems to want so badly to do--we must first know this history. If this story is as eye-opening to others as it was to me, this book should be required reading. 

The Great Curio

Just finished with Ron Chernow's Pulitzer-Prize-Winning biography, George Washington, A Life.

I've managed to make it almost to my 50th year without reading much about Washington.  Accordingly, I found going in that my sense of Washington is comprised of a vague bundle of half-baked ideas and mythical associations: that he "cannot tell a lie," that he was upright, that he was a great military leader. Even in life it seems there was a god-like aura surrounding Washington, and it hampered people forming a very down-to-earth sense of the man. The first biographies after his death were almost comically unrealistic.

Chernow starts with a clean slate and aims at a full-color portrait of Washington, tossing aside the mythology and assembling a fresh picture of Washington from original sources. Luckily for history, there are many contemporary accounts of him, and with so much repetition these views slot into our minds almost as our own--we almost come to think we know him. And while our cliched views have grown out of kernels of truth, the reality of the man was of course more human and flawed, more nuanced.

Part of Washington's legend involves his status as a great military general, so it's surprising to find that his skills were more political--think diplomacy and constancy--than military (to the extent that I can judge such things). While no one, it seems, failed to note his regal, almost royal, bearing, and his stoicism and unpretentiousness, it turns out there was plenty of dispute about his suitability for the country's highest military command. Though he had fought in the French and Indian War, when he was appointed to lead the Continental Army he was not widely experienced in running a large army. Many men felt themselves better qualified than he, and they may have had a point. The dominant characteristics from the many accounts of his character give a picture of charm and ease of manner and dignity without pretense or self-aggrandizement. And many people comment on his tendency to listen intensely but talk little. These things were very useful political skills. But on the field of battle he made as many blunders as triumphs, and his talent in what turned out to be largely a war of attrition was more in assembling and holding together an army from such meager raw materials as in how he used that army. In the circumstances this was an extremely valuable talent: greater military skill could have availed him little if there was no army to muster, and that was the very real threat facing him for much of the duration. Even with his great administrational talents, his army teetered many times on the brink of chaotic dissolution throughout the war.

This was another bit of news to me. I hadn't realized how difficult the conditions were under which the newly-formed army toiled. It's common that soldiers in antiquity died much more from disease than from battle wounds, but conditions for the Continental Army were appalling. They existed for the whole of the war with hardly any resources; their pay was always in arrears (often extraordinarily so); the ability to feed the men was often doubtful on a day-to-day basis; there were not enough weapons and a constant shortage of ammunition; the army had no uniforms and men were typically half-naked and / or dressed in rags and typically shoeless--even in the depths of winter. Many soldiers lived in camp for whole winters without a tent or even a blanket. Washington complained about these things vocally and continually, but it seems no one was able to act, even as men were dying from exposure.

Colonies or nation.

Maybe the single most striking thing of the Revolutionary War to me was the inability of the newborn nation to think and act in a collective way, even about its defense. The colonists did manage to muster an army, such as it was, and from the push for independence there arose a series of congresses that resulted in the Constitution. But these things were the first steps in forming a nation, and people needed time to begin to think collectively about their common goals. This collective thought was the great accomplishment of this small group of fertile minds in a sea of self-interest, and prior to this the individual colonies were quite insular. At any given moment during the war the army found support or scorn in exact proportion to the advantage expected by the people directly underfoot. There was naturally a strong thread of states' rights running through the delegates to the Continental Congresses, and most people were reluctant to cede any rights and responsibilities to a federal authority, even when in the midst of an altercation that needed a collective, national response. They would come to see their common purpose, but not without a struggle. History has many accounts of the disconnect between the soldier in the field and the citizen removed from the struggle. The soldiers are asked to sacrifice everything, while society at large--for whose rights and protection the soldiers are presumably asked to sacrifice--lives on in comfort. But Washington struggled for seven years to provide even the most essential things to his army--clothing and ammunition and food--and many times found himself with massive desertions and even starvations and exposure deaths because he could not get the Continental Congress to provide. That the coffers were empty did not help, nor did the inability of the new nation to borrow money when there was no strong, central entity with which other nations might deal.

And yet the colonies had plenty of money, but none of it was volunteered--nor requisitioned--for public use. Taxation to the British crown without representation in that crown's government was one of the things that forced the colonies to break with Britain; and so the states--which were the salient entities at the time--were reluctant to levy taxes to pay for war, especially when many citizens were slow to relinquish their allegiance to England. As soldiers were literally freezing and starving to death in camps positioned to defend cities from British attack, the citizens of those cities were selling their goods to the invading British Army. It's hard to imagine a more dispiriting circumstance for a soldier. (Washington, hinting early at his federalism, argued that a nation like England could borrow money to prosecute the war, giving them effectively unlimited resources.)

Slavery.

I'm always somehow unprepared to come face-to-face with this country's history of slavery, despite having read much about the Civil War, which placed the institution front and center. It is a thing so monstrously wrong, so repellant to any sense of morality or ethics, that to read about us warring over the subject--that is, to find a substantial portion of us willing to fight to keep it, especially so recently--can only be an indelible stain upon our national character. In thinking about WWII, I often wonder how Germany goes about life after the Third Reich; but we are faced with the same question after slavery.

Washington was, of course, a large slave holder, as were Jefferson and Madison and others of the founders. He is on record as disliking the institution, but his objections seem more practical than moral. His primary complaint seemed to be that he was not getting the best of the bargain when the cost of maintaining slaves was weighed against the value of their output as laborers. He prided himself on being fair-minded and liberal toward his slaves, and he was a more humane and sensitive master than most, and yet he drove them relentlessly and was not above having them whipped if he found them indolent. I'm skeptical that this kind of power would not alter a man's wiring in a deleterious way. For his whole life Washington seemed at a loss to understand why slaves were not eager to work hard despite there being no possibility of advancement or personal gain to come from it. This is a peculiar blindness.

Nothing casts more doubt upon Washington's character than his insistence on bringing slaves to Philadelphia during his presidency when the capitol was moved thence from New York City. Pennsylvania was a free state, and Philadelphia had a large population of free blacks, but Washington brought his own slaves into this environment and kept them in bondage even as they were surrounded by men and women enjoying freedom under the law. Worse yet, when he was made aware of a Pennsylvania law stipulating that any slaves residing in the state for six months would be automatically granted their freedom, he connived to be sure his own slaves were spirited back to Mount Vernon before this time elapsed to reset the clock--and then quickly returned to service in Philadelphia. And he lied about what he was doing and his motives, both to his slaves and to others. He told his slaves that they were returning briefly to Mount Vernon for humanitarian reasons, e.g. so that slaves could reunite with their spouses. (In breaking up the slave families in the first place he had broken one of his cardinal rules.) And letters between him and Martha showed that they maneuvered together to evade the Pennsylvania law. So much for not being able to tell a lie.

And for what? Where is the necessity to use slaves as your household servants? His argument that the  slave economy of Virginia and of his plantations could not simply be wiped away by fiat since there was no labor pool with which to replace the slaves has perhaps a shred of validity (though nobody seemed to consider freeing and then hiring the slaves to work for wages). But even if this argument holds true on his plantations in Virginia, it falls to pieces in Pennsylvania: as a free state, Pennsylvania DID have an economic structure where domestic servants for the President could be easily hired--and indeed their wages and attendant costs would have been paid by the federal government!

For the life of me, I can hardly see how to avoid seeing this as a stain on Washington's honor. It only makes sense in light of a man looking at other men in exactly the same way he looks at beasts of burden. The country is of course indebted to the man and his services on many fronts, but this chapter certainly scrubs away any godly patina.

I've also been disabused of any notion that our present state of divisive politics and brain-crumbling, 24-hour lying tits-and-ass news channels represent something new or unique to our age. Washington seemed to enjoy a special, even unique, status as our country was born; he was the universal choice for the country's first president, and even those who didn't especially like him or agree with his politics felt him the perfect choice for the office. But even if Washington for most of his presidential career remained aloof from most partisan issues, American political life, once delivered from the rancorous independence / colonialist question, quickly segmented into factions. One favored a strong federal government (the Federalists, led by Alexander Hamilton) and the other believed that states should be the governing authority and a strong central government risked monarchy (what became the Republican Party, with Thomas Jefferson as its figurehead). Even as Washington tried to stay out of the increasingly bitter and intractable fight between Jefferson and Hamilton, he was excoriated in the press with every imaginable charge in quite shocking fashion, especially during his second term. And it all looks quite familiar: stuff was just made up out of whole cloth with the intent to further a cause and damage an "enemy," and when he refused to take the bait then the press doubled down and doubled down again, denigrating his personal honor and war service in really scurrilous fashion. Like what you hear on Faux News today or coming from Tea Baggers' gatherings, there was no charge that either side could think up to denigrate Washington that was deemed off-limits--never mind that BOTH factions scandalizing him made it clear that NEITHER side possessed his favors.

I remember thinking this when reading about Lincoln's presidency as well: people are shitty and the press is shitty and honor and decorum extend only so far as they get results--and then the gloves come off. Lincoln suffered really humiliating and baseless criticism from all sides during his first term, and history shows that none of the people hurling the stones had accurately taken his measure--quite the contrary. Washington had something of Lincoln's unflappability and aloofness, though perhaps not quite the same ability to absorb invective without comment. But he absorbed plenty, and it's everyone else that comes off the worse for it.

Lastly, I would say this. In the new world of twitter and texting, many have lamented that we're losing our ability to write coherent, long-line thoughts. Well, reading the correspondence of Washington, a man who never went to college, makes the point glaringly obvious. The wonderful eloquence of his letters and speeches make us seem as though we've lost our command of the language.

This was a splendid read, a great story about a rare and worthy character in a tumultuous time.  Recommended.

Mirror, Mirror...

I'm just finished with Barbara Tuchman's 1978 book A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century. The book is a rather exhaustive look at the life and times of the French nobleman Enguerrand de Coucy (1340-1397). Rather than a biography per se of Coucy, Tuchman uses his unusually well-documented life (for the time) as a backbone for a more general survey of life in the 1300s. 

A book like this one is a reminder that if history feels stuffy and boring then we're doing it wrong. Tuchman is particularly good at illustrating how daily life has changed in the 700 years since Coucy, concentrating on what was involved in a person's daily life--what they wore, what they ate, what courtship was like, how they made their money--and examining the hierarchical social network that was perhaps the defining feature of life. Exploring these differences big and small makes the book almost like an exercise in time travel: the people of the time are fully recognizable to us, but the trials that face them and their reactions to them are of a very different period. That little spark of recognition seems the perfect gift of history.

As it happens, our man de Coucy was a rare beacon of enlightenment and gentility--well, within reason; he did after all spend much of his life doing his sovereign's business, which was not always rainbows and puppies. But he displayed less brutality and more largesse and magnanimity than most of his contemporaries. And he seems to have been especially gifted at diplomacy, accomplishing quite an impressive list of thorny negotiations where good outcomes were achieved and all sides felt and spoke highly of him. By the end of his life he had garnered a deep and widespread admiration that was rare for the time.

I'm particularly struck to see how brutal life was in the 1300s (and certainly before and for quite a while after). People, whose lifespans were already short and very uncertain, were routinely killed for all manner of infractions real or imagined, for things that by today's standards just don't seem very offensive. And not just killed, but tortured and their hacked-off bits and massacred carcasses put on barbaric display. Royal policies were not uncommonly enforced by the threat of death and torture for anyone who spoke out against them--thought crime. Nobles were allowed to kill common people without much accountability, and tales abound of torture and cruelty practiced as a kind of rich man's sport.

And--surprise!--the church was right there in the dirt. 14th Century France was almost monolithically Catholic, at least in written history, and the institution reflected every weakness and folly of the wider society in which it lived, routinely meting out barbarity and committing every conceivable crime in pursuit of very human desires: sex and luxury and power and wealth. (Far from demonstrating the holy and supernatural, it provides a perfect proof of the absence of supernatural intervention in this brutal life.) Those not of the fold--Jews and Muslims--were routinely persecuted and slaughtered by the faithful, as were any who failed to toe a very whimsical line of obedience (like "witches" or "infidels," often deemed such so as to make their torture and murder legal or ethical). Maybe that's to be expected, since people were--usually with the church's insistence--completely uneducated and class-bound and they lived lives rife with fear and prejudice. But even I am a little surprised at how base and brutal and violent the very upper reaches of the church leaders were. Indeed, it was almost universal. (Speaking of absolute power and absolute corruption... Christopher Hitchens used always to urge us to remember exactly how the church has behaved throughout history when there were no restraints on its power. They may come with their cap in hand now, he'd say, but remember how they've behaved when they thought they could get away with it). 

The organized church vied for power over the masses with the royal houses who nominally controlled the country--usually themselves claiming divine sanction--but these authorities seemed always to be in flux and the whole business, looked at up close, was ugly and violent and brutal. I found the papal schism of 1309-1417 to be particularly entertaining (though for those who lived through it it may have lacked entertainment value), as theft and murder and brutality on a massive scale was carried out on behalf of two very mortal men, each claiming to have a singular mythically-sanctioned dominion over everyone else. The hypocrisy looks comical now. The lower classes--of course--found themselves under the chance control of one or the other of the warring factions, while the other side's marauding bands burned and raped and pillaged the "infidels." Ordinary people lived in terror of being made heretics or of their prayers not being heard or of dying without having received "proper" last rites, etc., etc. The unwashed were constantly told absolute and terrifying things--by people whose confident assertions hadn't the tiniest whiff of legitimacy but certainly played to their grab for power.

Religion poisons everything indeed. (But we're all better now, right?) How horrible is a world without science.

With the almost indiscriminate killing and the ravages of constant war and the horrors of the plague (as mentioned before) and other infectious diseases, one wonders how we managed not to dwindle right out of existence. And indeed by the end of the 14th Century, the plague had reduced Europe's population by almost half.

Barbara Tuchman is masterful. Her command of language is perfection itself for this kind of writing--she's like the Jane Austen of history. I'm now trying to add her other works to my to-read pile.  Her linguistic skills are enhanced in this case by the narrator Nadia May (a.k.a. Wanda McCaddon), who might have the perfect, authoritative English spoken voice.  (Judging by her massive catalog of works, I'm clearly not the first to conclude thus.) This is especially fortunate, in that this book covered some 27 hours of audio time. It's entirely to Tuchman's credit that I wished it were more.

In Search Of An Analytical Faculty

This is a book I've been struggling with for a couple months now.  I'm not a voracious reader, but I made especially slow progress with this one, reading it in several-page snippets over weeks of lunches. But I've needed time to digest it, and I'm frankly making even slower progress with that. There's a lot to chew on in here, and I find myself strongly drawn and chastened at the same time.

I don't read a lot of politics, but I've been increasingly frustrated over the past decade at the seeming inability of progressives to craft a coherent message and stay on point. Conservatives by contrast seem to be able to lock arms at a moment's notice, and it seems nothing obstructs them in propagating their message. This doesn't need to be surprising, when conservatives have all the money and own most of the means of communication; but I've never been convinced that the gauntlet of their unified message was really reflective of mass thinking (though every election result gives me doubts). Regardless, progressives have done a much worse job of rising to the challenge: not only has our national discourse moved further and further to the right (in part due to Overton window mechanisms we've looked at previously), but progressives and centrists have been incredibly inept and disorganized in pushing back against this Dark Ages tide.

One could at this point toss off a growing, but far from comprehensive, list:

• an unjustified war--a war waged against another nation!--followed by another and yet another, making for a kind of permanent state of armed conflict, the immense funding for which is now paid into the coffers of a handful of for-profit vendors; 
• the Patriot Act; 
• the suspension of habeas corpus; 
• Guantanamo Bay; 
• so-called "extraordinary rendition;" 
• secret "black ops" prisons on foreign soil;
• governmental sanction of the torture of prisoners; 
• the constantly escalating efforts to erode the separation of church and state; 
• the undermining of science education, and of the acceptance of the findings of science for political purposes; 
• the systematic hobbling of government oversight of industry and of the protection of our environment and natural resources;
• the war on women; 
• the victimization of the poor; 
• the politicization of our mainstream news coverage, including the escalation of hyperbole and outright falsification, always for political ends; 
• the systematically and ongoing transfer of the nation's core wealth from the lower and middle classes of this country up to a tiny (and already very wealthy) sliver at the top of the food chain, a transfer which is mostly illegal and fraudulent and certainly immoral but which has been protected and sanctioned by the governments of both parties

This can go on and on. I want to cry to read a list like this, to think how far we have come from the innocence and can-do attitude for which this country has stood as a beacon for generations. But my dismay is far from universal. Conservative television and radio hosts speak to large audiences who alternately deny these conclusions or defend them pridefully.

I've found some relief from my gloom in the writings of Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins, people who aren't promoting a particular political philosophy so much as standing up forcefully for well-reasoned argument and the force of logic. And I hide for an hour or two a day under the awning of NPR, where issues are given a calm and methodical dismantling and look-see.

Chris Hedges is a former reporter and bureau chief for the New York Times, among other places (the Wikipedia article has an overview of his CV). I've read a number of his columns at Truthdig, and he shows up on NPR and on the occasional YouTube video. Like Christopher Hitchens, Hedges writes and speaks like a machine gun, fearlessly and brimming with righteous outrage. I find I am immediately drawn to him in print or in person.

So I bought one of his books, picking as an introduction one that seemed most germane to our present moment in history: The Death of the Liberal Class. And from the outset he presents one challenging page after another, premise after premise that make me sit up and question what I think I know and ask whether I really agree with what he's saying. On principle alone this seems like the best sort of book.

But--and here is the crux of my ambivalence--I had my hesitation as well: Hedges' name also crops up from time to time on religious matters, and invariably in a way that makes me wince--or at times droop in crushing disappointment. A graduate of divinity school and the son of a Presbyterian minister, Hedges consistently plants his flag on the opposite shore of the discussion from my own (and has earned the wrath and even dismissal of people I really admire like Sam Harris and PZ Myers). I don't care especially about his religious views in a political discussion, but I find he does not carry himself nearly so well on religious matters as he seems to do when discussing politics and this makes me wonder: are his political arguments similarly poorly supported and am I simply too ignorant of history to see it? Like Christopher Hitchens, Hedges makes his arguments by tethering current events to the long line of human history, and as with Hitchens I find I am ill-equipped to critique much of this approach. I am naturally skeptical of any argument from authority, but his eloquence and forcefulness are winning when he talks of politics; yet when he takes on atheism he seems quite out of the water.

But I vowed to forge ahead, and apart from a few sections where his mythological views come out and circulate among the crowd, he keeps the church bottled up for most of this book. And I find I have highlighted passages on nearly every page, hundreds of quotes ranging from quiet truisms to calls for militant action, passages where he connects solidly with the ball and hits it out of the park. Winnowing these passages down seems nigh-unto impossible; there's just too much here. Just starting with the opening chapter, I am immediately drawn into his argument (again apologizing for the e-book not providing reliable page numbers):

The inability of the liberal class to acknowledge that corporations have wrested power from the hands of citizens, that the Constitution and its guarantees of personal liberty have become irrelevant, and that the phrase consent of the governed is meaningless, has left it speaking in acting in ways that no longer correspond to reality. It has lent its voice to hollow acts of political theater, and the pretense that democratic debate and choice continue to exist.

The media, the church, the university, the Democratic Party, the arts, and labor unions--the pillars of the liberal class--have been bought off with corporate money and promises of scraps tossed to them by the narrow circles of power. Journalists, who prize access to the powerful more than they prize truth, report lies and propaganda to propel us into a war in Iraq. Many of these same journalists assured us it was prudent to entrust our life savings to a financial system run by speculators and thieves. Those life savings were gutted. the media, catering to corporate advertisers and sponsors, at the same time renders invisible whole sections of the population whose misery, poverty and grievances should be the principle focus of journalism.

Since the presidency of Ronald Reagan, the corporate state has put the liberal class on a death march. Liberals did not protest the stripping away of the country's manufacturing base, the dismantling of regulatory agencies, and the destruction of social service programs. Liberals did not decry speculators, who in the seventeenth century would have been hanged, as they hijacked the economy... The liberal class was eventually forced in this death march to turn itself inside out, championing positions it previously condemned. That it did so with almost no protest exposed its moral bankruptcy.

Capitalism was once viewed by workers as a system to be fought. But capitalism is no longer challenged. Capitalist bosses, men such as Warren Buffett, George Soros, and Donald Trump, are treated as sages, celebrities and populists. The liberal class functions as their cheerleaders. Such misguided loyalty, illustrated by environmental groups that refuse to excoriate the Obama White House over the ecological catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico, ignores the fact that the divide in America is not between Republican and Democrat. It is a divide between the corporate state and the citizen. It is a divide between capitalists and workers. And, for all the failings of the communists, they got it.

Permanent war is the most effective mechanism used by the power elite to stifle reform and muzzle dissent... The collapse of liberalism, whether in imperial Russia, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Weimar Germany, the former Yugoslavia, or the United States, was intimately tied to the rise of a culture of permanent war.

Military spending, which consumes half of all discretionary spending, has had a profound social and political cost. Bridges and levees collapse, schools decay. Domestic manufacturing declines. Trillions in debt threaten the viability of the currency and the economy. The poor, the mentally ill, the sick, and the unemployed are abandoned. Human suffering is the price for victory, which is never finally defined or attainable.

I have to stop. These come from the first 10% of the book, and Hedges is similarly quotable to the very end. On the strength of these passages alone I have to strongly recommend the book to anyone who inclined to this kind of subject matter. Myself, I find it incredibly energizing to see some fire and brimstone (to borrow a term) applied not against the little person but in their defense, and in defense of the dignity of work and the correctness of the desire for the good of society to spread among all its citizens. I understand the degree of naivety involved in this utopian vision; I can see as well as the next person the looming horde of freeloaders waiting to live off the public teat. But I've come to see that the expense and waste of THAT injustice is child's play next to the corporate welfare that is currently bankrupting our nation. (Hedges' recent speech at the OWS gathering in Zuccotti Park, after which he was arrested, gives an excellent introduction to his style and content.)

And yet. I listened a couple days ago to an interview on NPR with Chris Hedges after the publication of this book last year. Neal Conen spend half an hour talking with Hedges, who was a onetime correspondent for NPR, and in typical NPR fashion the soundbite is eschewed and the interviewee is given time to elaborate his theories and to stand for some grilling. I had just finished the book, and it was Neal Conen's grilling that again gave me some pause. On two or three occasions during the interview, Conen clearly restrained himself from asking yet another followup question after Hedges had seemingly gotten around the previous challenge. And again I was left feeling that I'm not really qualified to assess whether Hedges has made a good stand for his views or not. His fire and his dialectic skills connect solidly with me, but I feel it would be wise to embrace him provisionally while further efforts are underway to see how well tethered his conclusions are.

I welcome the comments of others who have read this (or other of his columns).

Take Me to the River

The visits I've been able to make to China with my job in the past couple of years have left me with a couple recurring thoughts. Yearnings, really. Primarily, I wish I could get a better sense of what life is really like in these places (to say nothing of all the places in China I've not seen, many of which must differ greatly from what little I know). Even after all my wanderings I'm still quite in the dark about how people actually live. Not how they make a living, exactly, but how they spend their time and what their home lives are like. I've made note of appearances often enough, but my sense is that the reality of all the billion plus lives passing here is still quite hidden from a Westerner's eyes. I wish I spoke the language, or, maybe more accurately, I wish there were some reasonable means for me to learn to speak the language. I bought the Rosetta Stone for Mandarin (but have yet to even open it), and I know I can take classes and maybe even hire a tutor, but without any means of regularly applying the language I have little faith in my ability to make progress.

I've just finished Peter Hessler's River Town (2001), a book about someone who experienced in reality the things I've been thinking about and much more besides. River Town chronicles Hessler's two years in the central Chinese city of Fuling as a Peace Corps English teacher at the local teacher's college. Hessler is the author of three books, River Town being his first. His second book (which I read first) is Oracle Bones; and his most recent is Country Driving, about his acquisition of a Chinese driving license (this is on deck).

At the time of Hessler's arrival in 1999, Fuling (which lies near the Eastern edge of Sichuan province) had seen very few Westerners, and his presence with another American Peace Corp teacher was quite an event for the town. A crowd formed wherever he went (regardless of what he was doing), and it took all of their two years plus a few dust-ups and the arrival of several more Peace Corps teachers in rotation to get the locals used to these foreign devils in their midst, and they never did fully squelch the pointing and whispers and (more rarely) outright hostility.

But a pretty deep immersion in the culture came automatically with the assignment, and Hessler got to really know people from all walks of life--teachers, laborers, shopkeepers, party members, peasants. His students were cautioned not to get too close to him (though all were cordial enough), but he inevitably made friends. And his reporter's way of asking questions and probing gained him much information that officials seemed to wish him not to have. On top of this, the sheer oddity of a Westerner in China opened doors to many experiences simply not available to a mere observer. He taught several classes of English literature, and used the opportunity to probe his students about political matters and to absorb their sense of their own culture in the world and their impressions of the rest of the world--he writes brilliantly and insightfully about these all-encompassing cultural differences. And he took daily Chinese lessons with a pair of older tutors from the Teacher's College--the passages about these lessons give one pause about the utter foreign-ness of the language to a Westerner and the difficulty in learning it.

It's an excellent book in any case for anyone who loves travelogs, but especially for anyone with a pointed interest in modern China it's indispensable.

I'll include a few quotes (my apologies for not giving a page number, as the number of pages in the electronic version varies with font size; a new issue we must grapple with!):

Street scenes:

Another staircase is home to a group of three dentists who work at a table covered with rusty tools, syringes in mysterious fluids, and pans of cruelly defeated teeth--a sort of crude advertisement. Sometimes a peasant will stop to have his tooth pulled, after haggling over the price, and a crowd will gather to watch.

About the role of literature in school:

But mostly I was disturbed by the politicization of literature in the West: the way that literature was read as social commentary rather than art, and the way that the books were forced to serve political theories of one stripe or another. Very rarely did a critic seem to react to a text; rather the text was twisted so that it reacted neatly to whatever ideas the critic held sacred.

And several quotes addressing an issue I was especially interested in, this idea of a society built entirely on the collective rather than the individual:

...collectivism was limited to small groups, to families and close friends and danwei, or work units, and these tight social circles also acted as boundaries: they were exclusive as well as inclusive, and the average Fuling resident appeared to feel little identification with people outside of his well-known groups.

...There were lots of small groups, and there was a great deal of patriotism, but like most patriotism anywhere in the world, this was spurred as much by fear and ignorance as by any true sense of a connection to the Motherland.

...Despite the self-destruction of the Cultural Revolution and the subsequent rush to open to the outside world, there was still a definite sense of what was Chinese, and I believed that this would help them survive modernization. But there was also a narrowness to this concept, and it seemed nearly impossible for a Chinese to go to a place like Xinjiang, learn the language, and make friends with the locals. In the five thousand years of their history it was striking how little interest the Chinese had in exploration, and today that same characteristic limited them, even within their own borders. They seemed completely content in being Chinese, and they assumed that this feeling was shared by everybody else.

...Everything was further complicated by the influence of traditional collective thinking. The longer I lived in Fuling, the more I was struck by the view of the individual--in my opinion, this was the biggest difference between what I had known in the West and what I saw in Sichuan. For people in Fuling, the sense of self seemed largely external; you were identified by the way that others viewed you. That had always been the goal of Confucianism, which defined the individual's place strictly in relation to the people around her: she was somebody's daughter, somebody else's wife, somebody else's mother; and each role had its specific obligations. This was an excellent way to preserve social harmony, but once that harmony was broken the lack of self-identity made it difficult to put things back together again.

Writing about visiting an old priest and how the man uses language:

He traces the ten characters on the surface of the low table in front of min, stroke by stroke, dipping a finger into his tea. This is a common Chinese habit when speaking with foreigners--because so many characters have the same sound, a conversation will sometimes pause as the speaker writes a word in order to clarify the meaning for the waiguoren listener [foreigner]. They write them in the air, on the palm of their hand, in tea water on a table; and to watch a Chinese person do this is to realize how unique the written language is, and how its words are truly shapes--not just sounds, or collections of letters but tangible things that are handled and touched.

A Book Recommendation

I've certainly made no secret of the fact that I don't really understand high finance. Understand or trust. I've long suspected that the complexity of financial matters is an intentional thing, an obfuscation which encourages schmoes like me to disengage and which provides cover for guys who are gaming the system to make themselves very rich. I suppose it's not unwise to look with some skepticism at my own suspicions, as I'm an outsider to this world, but that's what I've come to: a suspicion that the explosions and implosions of markets in the past 30 years have been carefully crafted and manipulated to benefit a very small group of people. Right or wrong, I distrust the world of finance and markets profoundly.

The 2008 collapse of the economy is yet another mystery to me. All the talk of derivatives and credit default swaps and collateralized debt obligations tends to make my eyes glaze over, but even without this stuff I grasped that the markets were inflated quite unrealistically; the value of the markets in 2000 was not representative of anything real. And when THAT wealth-generation avenue seemed to fall apart after 9/11, these people accustomed to making ridiculous return on their "investments" turned their genius to housing, trying to extract their now-expected billions from that slice of the economic pie. All of this current morass seems to flow from this. But likely I'm a financial idiot; the more salient point, I think, is that the most all the rest of us have no clue about what's going on either. People have various strong feelings about the crash, but I'd venture it's a rare person who really understands the mess.

Matt Taibbi is a columnist for Rolling Stone, and he's made it his mission in the past couple of years to dig into the financial mess and put the byzantine, obscurantist mess into plain (and colorful) English. (He became an overnight sensation for referring to the giant banking house Goldman Sachs as "a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.") His book Griftopia (2010) is an expansion on a series of columns about the meltdown from Taibbi's blog. Taibbi began this endeavor as a person knowing nothing about finance, and the book is written for non-finance people. It's the best, most lucid explanation I've seen about exactly what is behind the ongoing implosion of our economy.

And we should be beyond livid.

This is one of these books that is hard for me to summarize, as the whole thing reads like a 300 page summary of a much bigger, more detailed phenomenon--every summary leaves out vital stuff. I find I've highlighted about 70% of the text, such that it will be very difficult to find any given passage without, well, rereading it (which I feel like I ought to do). And while I'm generally distrustful of apocalypticism, Taibbi is expanding on what I've already suspected from some years' observation, and in any case he supports himself well enough that no apology is needed. (The only criticisms I've come across to Taibbi's book all relate to his "tone" and not to the substance of his claims.)

Anyway, I will attempt to summarize (I would put in quotes, as Taibbi is endlessly quotable, but this already-too-long post would get waaaay longer. Just buy the book):

The 2008 financial meltdown was not a normal market correction or part of the normal cycling of a market economy; it was fraud. It involved the contrivance, with malice aforethought, of arcane financial "instruments" whose sole purpose was to extract money from the markets without the progenitors having to actually risk anything of their own. The instruments, invented and handily test-driven on these guys' personal bank accounts, were then sold for MORE profit to other banking institutions, who in turn leveraged themselves to an obviously unwise and reckless degree in order to tap into this seemingly free stream of endless wealth. And all of it built on absolutely nothing. Everybody knew it was a fraud, that it would eventually come crashing down and very likely threaten our entire economy when it did, but nobody gave a shit so long as they were themselves getting big payoffs from the scheme (longtime Fed Chief Alan Greenspan spearheaded numerous schemes to keep sand in the government's eyes, earning him Taibbi's title of "Biggest asshole in the universe.")

Eventually this fraud involved so many too-big-to-fail banks and such huge sums of money that the crash when it came could only be prevented from tanking the entire economy by the federal government stepping in. With our money. The same government that had abdicated its responsibility for oversight and regulation that might have prevented a relatively small group of guys enriching themselves on an economy-wrecking Ponzi scheme then put all of us into hock to keep the banks from pulling the trigger of the gun the same government had helped raise to the nation's temple.

Though Taibbi has written with delicious barb and wit about the idiocy of the Tea-Baggers and the risible nutcases like Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachman, he calls the bullshit where he sees it; and there is plenty to go around from both parties. He finds that the abandonment of government oversight of the financial services industry continued just as much under the Clinton administration as under the Reagan and Bush 1 administrations (and, of course, continued with abandon under Bush 2)--that is, Clinton was not any kind of counter force to the destructive Reaganomic tide that was frantically dismantling government oversight in everything.

And for this almost unfathomable destruction of wealth and outright theft, there has been no accounting whatsoever. These guys basically suffered not at all for the almost unbelievable damage they've done to the country's and the world's economies. The US Government jumped in with some $700 billion in bailout money to guarantee the fraud payoffs, basically making good "investments" which no one thought were good in the first place. This amounts to over $2000 for every man, woman and child in the country just for this particular bailout of a few big banks and insurance agencies; the drain on government resources extends very far beyond this. It doesn't touch the losses in mortgage values, the losses of pension funds and home equity and all the savings and investments of normal folks, and the loss of tax revenues from the crashing of businesses and the widespread unemployment and underemployment of millions of people. Suicide and homelessness and pain and agony for millions, and these Wall St. fuckers were living the dream--as the film Inside Job makes clear, hookers and blow and multiple homes and jets and the works. Meanwhile working folks lost their houses and their jobs as business owners "optimized" profits by sending our manufacturing jobs to China and India--often with US taxpayer funding.

And that's just the mortgage scam. Taibbi goes on to explain similar large-scale ripoffs of the public--with government complicity or even insistence--from commodities bubbles (including the devastating effects of market speculation on petroleum) and wealth funds and health care reform. This latter is surprising to me, not because I didn't expect a big bill like health care to have dark corners but because I didn't expect it to be nothing but dark corners. Obama came to office by showing a pretty nuanced understanding of exactly what was wrong in our health care system, and he then more or less completely abandoned his pledges to reform and handed the insurance companies and big pharma a blank check. There has been furious right-wing opposition to health care reform, and in this case it turns out they are riding a stampede of lies and misinformation to a proper conclusion: they are right, though for all the wrong reasons.

***

All of this contributes to a sense I've had for years that we will only save ourselves from the gnashing jaws of the profit motive and big business and markets with some prudent regulation. We've seen clearly enough what markets will do when government looks the other way--the last 30 years have seen a transfer of wealth from the lower and middle classes up to the very top (what Taibbi calls the "grifter class") that is unprecedented in history, while the shell of economy has appeared to hold station or recede even as its guts have been hollowed from within.

The idea that business is good and government is bad, that markets are good and regulation is bad, seems to be disproven in its purest form in the most painful way. And I'm tired of having the sanctity of markets and free enterprise thrown in my face continually at the mere suggestion of moderation. If government oversight of business and industry is "socialism," as we are hysterically told it is, then maybe we need to rehabilitate the term. Because we've tried the other way to a variety of degrees, and every further degree seems to bring more and more pain and misery to most of us to benefit a tiny oligarchic elite. Call me a utopian or a stooge for the workers' paradise, but I have to think the little folks of this world need to matter a whole lot more than just to promise them that one day they might have what we all know they never will.

But more than regulation, I think we need to re-examine what is supposed to underpin our democratic system. I can't imagine a much clearer demonstration that our government is now at the beck and call of business and moneyed concerns--this is where governmental power is centered now; it addresses the concerns of individual citizens only in a rhetorical and symbolic way. (Inside Job points out that the financial services industry has three times as many paid lobbyists as there are even legislators to lobby.)

It will be an ongoing task to figure out what to do. As an individual voter and consumer, I have an almost infinitesimal influence over anything--especially compared to international banks and national governments. And yet I have to believe that We, the People retain essential control over the government of our states and our country, that we still have the ability to effect that control.

We can start by trying to get corporate money out of politics, I think.

I Need a Better Nickname

Like most people, I've been called a variety of things over the years. Families in particular tend to assign affectionate monikers to people (my sister used to call me "Bitsy"), and a lot of the guys I work with come from military backgrounds where nicknames seem a requisite part of the bonding ritual. In more recent times I've been called "Stacky" by some of my pilot friends--a play on my last name--and, of course my little web handle, wunelle, is a nickname, albeit one which no one ever uses (the name is, for those two who haven't figured it out, a play on my having for three decades now spelled the name "Bil" with one L).

But these names are child's play alongside gangster names. Hoodlums, especially Mafiosi and Jazz Age yeggs, seem to have the clever naming thing worked out. I wonder if this stems from the necessity of not using a fellow criminal's real name in public or the fact that working crews typically had shifting memberships. Maybe there is another reason altogether.

The use of nicknames is one of the things I'm left chewing on after Bryan Burrough's Public Enemies: America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-34 (2004). The book was adapted into the 2009 Michael Mann film Public Enemies. The book, naturally, covers more ground than the film, which concentrates primarily on the story of John Dillinger; the book looks at Dillinger plus a number of armed gangs which were active at the same time. All these gangs were noteworthy for operating in far-flung locales across the country, and this interstate criminal commerce effected a rather rapid transformation of law enforcement in this country.

This high mobility was one of this crime wave's key characteristics. Gangs would break apart in one location and reform days later and hundreds of miles away, sometimes in places unfamiliar to anyone involved. Crimes were often planned and committed in locations remote to the gangs' current hideouts, and at other times the gang would move to a place and study it for a while (or send a single member or two to do so) before making their play and then quickly moving on. But the immediate aftermath of the crime would almost always involve the gang disappearing across state lines. In addition to little collections of photos showing the members of each of the gangs, Burrough includes maps showing the dates and locations of each gang's most significant criminal doings, and each map is striking for its geographical spread. The Barker-Karpis gang: 11 major robberies in 10 states with hideouts in several others, covering an area from Minnesota to Cuba, the Dakotas to New Jersey; John Dillinger: 15 incidents in eight states, plus hideouts in two others; Machine Gun Kelly: five incidents in as many states with operations in at least as many more; Bonnie and Clyde: seven robberies or shoot-outs in five states; Baby Face Nelson: seven incidents in seven states. Not long before this kind of mobility was impossible. Now with the rapid advancement of the automobile, society was on the move.

Most of the gangs were centered in the Midwest, with Indiana and Missouri seeming to draw criminals like a magnet. Many gangs used Chicago as a hideout, and St. Paul was also popular, as were Toledo and Cleveland and Kansas City. My own little home town of Brainerd, MN was actually the location of Baby Face Nelson's second bank robbery, and the teller involved is curiously the same odd name and approximate age of a friend's father (odd we've never discussed it).

Probably the biggest single thing that struck me: I had no idea previously that so many of the big names of America's criminal underworld were active at the same time, and that the time period in question was so short. But John Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson, Machine Gun Kelly, Ma Barker, Bonnie and Clyde and Pretty Boy Floyd were all robbing banks in this period from 1933-1934. Nor did I fully grasp how the FBI arose from this particular crime wave. Before the Bureau, criminals crossed state lines to avoid prosecution; the state in which they committed the crime had no jurisdiction, and police forces in the asylum state had no complaint. But the widespread use of this escape mechanism meant that a solution must be found.

And so the book is not simply about the crime wave itself, but also about how the FBI was convulsed into being. The Bureau was not birthed in an instant and in its present form, but rather bumbled its way into existence rather tentatively and precariously. J. Edgar Hoover was an unusual figure to be sure: vain and fastidious and eager for glory; he was to go on to become one of America's most powerful and controversial figures, but the power of the Bureau he created was forged over several years and by numerous failures and blunderings.

The book is blurbed on the front by Time Magazine as being "ludicrously entertaining," and so it is. The subject is naturally a bit pulpy and lurid, and Burrough has a great style--business-like, but fast-moving. It helped that this is one of my favorite periods of history, and the figures are colorful and deliciously antisocial. The Jazz-age style with long coats and fedoras, the ubiquitous Tommy Gun, stylish cars with running boards on which gun-toting gangsters sped away from their crimes--these things have helped fuel one of Hollywood's most fertile genres, and have featured in some of my favorite films: Miller's Crossing, Road to Perdition, The Sting, The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep, Key Largo, The Big Combo. This book knocks the romantic sheen off the period, but the story is still larger-than-life (even if not as nattily attired).

And about those names. George Barnes became known as "Machine Gun Kelly." Fred Goetz was "Shotgun George Ziegler." Charles Arthur Floyd was "Pretty Boy Floyd." Lester Gillis used the pseudonym George Nelson, and became "Baby Face Nelson." And so many others. Michael LaCapra, a.k.a. "Jimmy Needles" (LaCapra was a heroin addict); Alvin "Ray" Karpis; Arthur "Dock" [sic] Barker. And then there were some very colorful actual names: detective Dutch Akers; night club owner Nugent LaPlumma; cop Glenn "Curly" Mongomery.

But really: Shotgun George Ziegler! I mean, how do you top that? Jimmy Needles! But maybe my favorite is "Jelly." Frank "Jelly" Nash. Apart from my penchant for sweets (which might make the adoption of Joseph Negri's moniker "Fatso" more appropriate), it just rolls off the tongue.

Uncle "Jelly" Wunelle. I like it!

What Christians Should Think of China

China Road
Rob Gifford
Random House, 2007

***

I have been flying in and out of China now for a year and a half. Maybe a 15 total visits to four different locales: Guangzhou and Shanghai in China proper, and Hong Kong and Taipei just offshore. I do not speak the language(s), and I have not interviewed anyone nor even had much of a personal conversation with any resident. Despite these limitations, I'm continuously fascinated by China. My airplane naturally flies in and out of the big hubs of commerce, and the explosion of manufacturing and selling--and the upward social mobility it affords the masses--is surely the big news story of modern China. But I know there is much more to this vast country of 1.3 billion people than this.

And so for lots of reasons I'm about the least qualified person to tell the story of modern China. A better choice might be, say, the Beijing correspondent for National Public Radio. THAT person might be expected to have a much more in-depth and holistic view of the phenomenon that is China. Rob Gifford spent six years in China for NPR before taking up the post of London Bureau Chief in 2007. In his book from the same year China Road: A Journey Into the Future of a Rising Power Gifford tells of his last hurrah in China: an epic road trip 3000 miles across the country along Route 312 from Shanghai in the crowded, industrial East to the border with Kazakhstan in the remote and unpopulated West (incidentally following a similar path to the one we fly from Shanghai to Almaty). That journey is used as the backbone for his larger tale of China's modern transformation.

Depending on how tightly one wants to focus, this effort could yield a hundred different books or more. From the overview of a rural, agricultural culture turning rapidly towards industrialization and manufacturing, one can zoom in on millions of different strands, each of which is part of a story almost too big and diverse to tell. The aggregate story is immense, historic; but even the individual stories can be compelling. And then there is China's long history and how it informs the present. It's an impossible amount of material.

Like Peter Hessler's Oracle Bones, Gifford alternates between China as a country and culture and the individuals whose stories make up the whole. As he travels cross-country, he meets with many noteworthy people in arranged interviews--often clandestinely, since the government seeks to control the flow of information in and out of the country. And he mixes the stories of these movers and shakers with those of the common people with whom he shares a bus seat or who wait on him in a restaurant. He is forever stopping his taxi to jump out and chat with highway workers or someone holding a sign or a farmer plowing a field with an ox. These conversations are especially interesting to me, since they tell stories which I can glimpse in my wanderings in China but cannot access. (As an aside, I was thrilled to read the opening chapters where he describes many things in Shanghai which I happen to have experienced myself: the maglev train from Shanghai airport to downtown; the building explosion in Pudong; the old colonial architecture of The Bund; the frenzy of Nanjing Road; the contrast between the rich and poor areas of town. When I have seen so little of the country, it's thrilling to learn that what I HAVE seen is significant to China's modern story.) These interpersonal episodes from his journey are also mingled with extensive passages about Chinese history, and Gifford brilliantly connects the things we see today with China's past, especially the last two centuries or so.

I give him credit for trying to make sense of the larger picture, for trying to do more than just describe what he sees (which is all I can manage). But at times his book is a reminder that "making sense" is a very subjective process. His straight reportage is excellent; he's perceptive and writes with clarity and vibrancy and he has a knack for organizing complex stories. And, as I say, he seems to have the salient facts of China's long history well in hand. But he spends some time in a kind of philosophical vein connecting the personal stories and the historical facts and explaining what it all means, and this seems a more mixed effort (as perhaps it must necessarily be). He often explains that the Chinese are THIS way because of X in their distant past, or the absence of X in their governmental legacy results in THIS contemporary behavior or phenomenon (my apologies for not having illustrative quotes; I listened to the audiobook). I'm quite unable to say that he doesn't reason accurately, but these summaries don't always ring true and at times seem politicized and pulled out of thin air.

More objectionable to me was Gifford's need to filter every experience though his Christian faith. By the fourth or fifth mention (just in the book's first half) I began to wonder if the book had been a commission from his church congregation and should be called What Christians Should Think of China. Doubtless some readers will find this a useful orientation point, but I can't help thinking he could have chosen a more universal perspective and made the same points. At the very least I would have preferred a single chapter devoted to religion rather than each subject getting the journalist's just-the-facts treatment followed by the Jebus treatment.

Worse, his references often had a condescending undertone that implied (when he didn't just state it openly) that so many of China's difficulties and failings stem from their not being Christians. He rather ludicrously, it seems to me, credits Christianity for all manner of the West's accomplishments--and blames China's woes on their failure to see this light--without supporting the thesis or acknowledging any of the tyranny and pain and misery that form the legacy of the faith-based power structure. This is like praising Hitler because he made Germans feel good about themselves again. At one point he asks an interviewee whether China's problem isn't the absence of "revealed truth" in which the West basks. This was almost a deal-breaker for me: how naive and brainwashed do you have to be to believe a thing is true (and "revealed") because an ancient mythology says it is? Sorry, but you'll need a much longer book to effectively make that case. And each of these silly flights of fantasy made me question anew whether Gifford's whole take on China was reliable and valid.

In one telling scene Gifford interviews a rural doctor whose job it is to enforce the country's one-child policy, a conversation that is about 30% reporter and 70% ideologue. It's interesting that Gifford spends time in his book talking about the issues arising from a country the size of the US having nearly four times its population--from pollution to food issues to water shortages and so on--but then he openly rails in this conversation against the imperative of a rigid population control policy. For him the only salient point appears to be that abortion is part and parcel of the policy, and he chooses (naturally) the most brutal and marginal cases to inform his argument about the whole. Or rather, he doesn't even bother to argue the whole; he just rails against the offense against his own sensitivities. I appreciate this is what he feels; but I'm not interested in being preached to about one of our culture's hot-button topics, much less in listening to him mouth off to citizens of a culture that does not share his qualms. (How would he feel to be riding a bus in the UK while a visiting Muslim man berates English women for not covering their heads?)

I suppose I have to grant that the book is a memoir and a travelog and not an act of strict reportage. And as such he has every right to tell his personal story. But it seems to me very Fox News to interweave reportage with opinion in such equal measure with no demarcation between them--something I would not expect from a serious reporter. Perhaps I only chafe because I do not share his opinions. The lives and deaths of China's worst-off, particularly the disasters to come without some kind of population control, seem a looming and unimaginably vast cauldron of pain and misery and suffering against which the brutality of the country's population control methods must be weighed. (Even with the population controls in place Gifford himself acknowledges that the country's collapse from its own excess population is a very real possibility.)

In the end, Gifford's editorializing was not enough to ruin the book for me. The story of China, the fact of the upheaval currently under way, is simply too big to be overrun by any one person's take on it. Gifford's tone alternates between surprise and admiration on the one hand, and scorn and dismay--sometimes bordering on ridicule--on the other. But whatever the flaws, his book gives us a vibrant look at the inner lives of a people undergoing a massive transition. This is surely not the best book on modern China, but I feel better off for having read it. More and more I feel immensely privileged to have been plunked down by circumstance in the midst of what may be this century's big story.