I received “What We Do Now” as a gift for making a contribution to Democracy for America (DFA).

“What We Do Now” is 200+ pages containing 27 short essays or excerpts from speeches by a number of liberal politicians, activists and writers. They include VT Senator Bernie Sanders, who wrote about the six American banks that represent 60% of the American GDP; MA Senator Elizabeth Warren, on the importance of crafting a coherent economic message; Anthony Romero of the ACLU, on the dangers our democracy faces – all the usual suspects weighing in on all the usual issues. And I don’t mean to make light of them.

But after two months into the Trump presidency, I dare say we are already doing precisely what the roster of authors suggest – without having read them first. Most of us have already figured out the demagogue’s media tricks, as George Lakoff deconstructs them. And the fact that his own supporters will suffer the most, as Paul Krugman points out. We know what to expect economically, politically, and culturally. And we’re resisting.

Linda Sarsour’s essay was my personal favorite, followed by Alan Lichtman’s piece on rebuilding the Democratic Party. Sarsour takes just the right tone of stridency and progressive opposition. Lichtman, on the other hand, should be required reading (and re-reading) as a warning of how difficult it is going to be to convince Democratic centrists they were wrong. Lichtman betrayed the most partisan bias of any of the authors in the book and is clearly both a Clinton fan and a TPP proponent. But he mis-characterized opposition to the Trans-Pacific trade bill as the “rat-trap of protectionism” and didn’t bother to mention the corporate goodies buried in the TPP that were so problematic for progressives. On this Lichtman can’t see any difference between Trump and Sanders, and this is a form of blindness.

Thus, “What We Do Now” perfectly encapsulates ongoing conflicts and contradictions within the Democratic Party. For DFA to reward me with a book containing an essay by Bernie and another by a Hillary surrogate tells me the fight for the soul of the Democratic Party is far from over.

Without much leadership from the Democratic Party a resistance movement has arisen. Liberals and progressives are making daily calls, attending meetings, writing letters, attending marches and rallies – all in defense of “what we once had.” The resistance is encouraging, but social and political movements cannot be based entirely on nostalgia – regardless of the Republican Party’s fleeting success with it. If we are honest, we have to recognize that the world we created is not that rosy. We can do better.

This was at least where my mind wandered after reading Mohsin Hamid’s On the Dangers of Nostalgia.

Hamid is a Pakistani novelist perhaps best known for the book (and film) The Reluctant Fundamentalist. He writes that we seek solace in nostalgia because the world is spinning so fast. We fantasize that the men and women of the past were more confident and secure in their roles and their work than we are today. We understand the technology of the age of toasters. Robotics scares the hell out of us. We watch TV and search the internet, but the fictions and connections we are really looking for are much deeper and older, more primal. Our identities are, in part and in fact, stories. And we are story tellers. Why retreat to the past, then, when we can create new stories for an even better future? Read Hamid’s complete article here.

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And – speaking of reading – people tend to read mainly what fits or confirms their pre-existing views. Democrats and Conservatives literally read different news and hear different opinions. But if you really want to know your political adversary, you need to know what goes on inside his pointy little head. There is some disagreement whether it was Sun Tzu, Machiavelli, or Mario Puzo who came up with the quote, but “keep your friends close and your enemies closer” is good advice no matter who said it.

Republicans certainly understand this rule – know what the competition is up to. So even though it hurts, tune into the president’s speech tonight at https://www.whitehouse.gov/.

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Finally – speaking of rejecting nostalgia in favor of a better future – Massachusetts Senate Bill S.291 proposes banning “Indian” names as school mascots. This would cost my own town of Dartmouth a couple dollars to change. But it would finally end an insult similar to that of turning Black jockeys into lawn ornaments or reducing Native Americans to wood statuary in front of cigar shops. “Indians” are people, not mascots. If you really can’t think up a new mascot that belongs on your school’s front lawn, try a gnome, smurf, or a pink flamingo.

Some may object to this as “political correctness” – but what does this phrase really mean other than civility? It’s long overdue that this kind of unthinking insensitivity and low-grade racism ended. As the rest of the country plunges deeper into racism and xenophobia, it would be rather sweet if a few oases of sanity and kindness, like our own Bay State, shone a little light into the nation’s heart of darkness.

Regarding my summary of Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals,” an anonymous reader wrote to correct me on the time period in which the book was written and to do a much better job of explaining Alinsky’s purpose than I did. – Thanks.

Alinsky didn’t write Rules for Radicals during the Reagan years, He published it in 1971 during the Nixon years. 

I worked with Alinsky. Contrary to the likes of Gingrich, Saul was not a Marxist. He was a old-fashioned American patriot who frequently quoted the Founding Fathers.

One of Alinsky’s favorite quotes – mine too – and which he used to introduce an earlier book I also recommend entitled Reveille For Radicals, is from Thomas Paine: “Let them call me rebel and welcome, I feel no concern for it, but I should suffer the misery of devils, were I to make a whore of my soul.” 

Saul’s objective was not mere resistance. People tend to focus on Saul’s tactics but his objective – the objective of Alinsky style community organization –  was participatory democracy. No less than to make US style representative democracy work the way the founders intended. Here I would recommend you go back and take a look at [the ending of] Obama’s last State of the Union.

Saul’s tactics, based in life-long experience, close observation and study under everyone from UC sociology professors to John L. Lewis and Frank Nitti – what he called called “applied social science” – were designed to involve – to enfranchise – those who were excluded from civic decision-making that effected their lives. 

Alinsky used confrontation over issues important to peoples’ lives to get them involved. He started off with what he called “fast, easy victories” to give people confidence they could actually get things accomplished and to convince others to join the effort so it would be possible to take on bigger and bigger projects. In addition to political tactics Saul  taught leadership skills, research skills, fund-raising skills, how to prioritize and pursue goals and how to build not only a voluntary neighborhood organization but a coalition of voluntary associations.  

If everyone’s involved, all interests represented – and people are informed about available options and the implications of those options – Saul figured things would turn out at better than they would otherwise. What he called “enlightened self-interest.” An informed, involved citizenry was an article of faith with him as distinct from those who rely on demagoguery and/or ideology for their answers. Saul was a big fan of checks and balances. 

The idea that an educated citizenry is essential to representative democracy is of course also basic to American style democracy as envisioned by people like Jefferson and Franklin. 

Basically, Saul was a teacher – saw himself that way and saw Alinsky-style organizers that way too.  

Saul taught people citizenship – how to become effectively and productively involved.

Saul  believed therein lay the best available answers. The opposite of those who purposefully seek to disenlighten because an enlightened citizenry would never buy what they are trying to sell.

Newt Gingrich created the meme that Saul Alinsky was the Machiavelli behind Obama. Since then, the Right-wing blogosphere has been littered with denunciations of Alinsky. This has also resulted in a cottage industry of pamphlets, articles, and spinoffs like “Rules for Conservatives” by Michael Master, Jerome Corsi’s “Saul Alinsky: the Evil Genius behind Obama,” Will Clark’s “Obama, Hillary, Saul Alinsky and their Useful Idiots,” Richard Bledsoe’s “Can Saul Alinsky be Saved? Jesus Christ in the Obama and Post-Obama Era,” and, well, you get the idea. Not to mention Ben Carson’s claims that Alinsky dedicated his book to Lucifer. The Right doesn’t like it when the little guy fights back.

Alinsky learned his lessons in organizing generations ago and wrote the book Rules for Radicals during the Reagan years. He knew what kind of stacked deck workers play against. And he knew full-well what effect he had on the Right – “The job of the organizer is to maneuver and bait the establishment so that it will publicly attack him as a ‘dangerous enemy.'” Well, Alinsky’s methods worked, and his enemies respected him. Despite all their venom, the Tea Party eagerly adapted Alinsky’s methods successfully. And in fact the following quotes from “Rules for Radicals” were taken from a Right-winger who studied him in depth. Alinsky saw politics precisely as the Right does – as all-out war. And in times of war one does not always take the genteel high road.

In the quotes below, it’s clear Donald Trump uses many of Alinsky’s principles, and it’s also clear how poorly most Liberals do. Alinsky’s ideas may seem alien to people unaccustomed to street fighting. But we have now entered a period where politics has got to get a little rough.

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First, excerpts from Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals:

• This failure of many of our younger activists to understand the art of communication has been disastrous. Even the most elementary grasp of the fundamental idea that one communicates within the experience of his audience — and gives full respect to the other’s values — would have ruled out attacks on the American flag. — P. xviii
• As an organizer I start where the world is, as it is, not as I would like it to be. That we accept the world as it is does not in any sense weaken our desire to change it into what we believe it should be — it is necessary to begin where the world is if we are going to change it to what we think it should be. — P. xix
• “Power comes out of the barrel of a gun!” is an absurd rallying cry when the other side has all the guns. — xxi
• A reformation means that masses of our people have reached the point of disillusionment with past ways and values. They don’t know what will work but they do know that the prevailing system is self-defeating, frustrating, and hopeless. They won’t act for change, but won’t strongly oppose those who do. The time is then ripe for revolution. — xxii
• But the answer I gave the young radicals seemed to me the only realistic one: “Do one of three things. One, go find a wailing wall and feel sorry for yourselves. Two, go psycho and start bombing — but this only swings : people to the right. Three, learn a lesson. Go home, organize, build power and at the next convention, you be the delegates.” — xxiii
• The preferred world can be seen any evening on television in the succession of programs where the good always wins — that is, until the late evening newscast, when suddenly we are plunged into the world as it is. Political realists see the world as it is: an arena of power politics moved primarily by perceived immediate self-interests, where morality is rhetorical rationale for expedient action and self-interest. Two examples would be the priest who wants to be a bishop and bootlicks and politicks his way up, justifying it with the rationale, “After I get to be bishop I’ll use my office for Christian reformation,” or the businessman who reasons, “First I’ll make my million and after that I’ll go for the real things in life,” Unfortunately one changes in many ways on the road to the bishopric or the first million, and then one says, “I’ll wait until I’m a cardinal and then I can be more effective,” or “I can do a lot more after I get two million” — and so it goes. In this world laws are written for the lofty aim of “the common good” and then acted out in life on the basis of the common greed. — P.12-13
• It is not a world of peace and beauty and dispassionate rationality, but as Henry James once wrote, “Life is, in fact, a battle. Evil is insolent and strong; beauty enchanting, but rare; goodness very apt to be weak; folly very apt to be defiant; wickedness to carry the day; imbeciles to be in great places, people of sense in small, and mankind generally unhappy. But the world as it stands is no narrow illusion, no phantasm, no evil dream of the night; we wake up to it again forever and ever; and we can neither forget it nor deny it nor dispense with it.” Henry James’ statement is an affirmation of that of Job: “The life of man upon earth is a warfare…” — P.14
• The most unethical of all means is the non-use of any means. It is this species of man who so vehemently and militantly participated in that classically idealistic debate at the old League of Nations on the ethical differences between defensive and offensive weapons. Their fears of action drive them to refuge in an ethics so divorced for the politics of life that it can apply only to angels, not men. — P.26
• One’s concern with the ethics of means and ends varies inversely with one’s personal interest in the issue. — P.26
• …The secretary inquired how Churchill, the leading British anti-communist, could reconcile himself to being on the same side as the Soviets. Would Churchill find it embarrassing and difficult to ask his government to support the communists? Churchill’s reply was clear and unequivocal: “Not at all. I have only one purpose, the destruction of Hitler, and my life is much simplified thereby. If Hitler invaded Hell I would at least make a favorable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons.” — P.29
• The fifth rules of the ethics of means and ends is that concern with ethics increases with the number of means available and vice versa. To the man of action the first criterion in determining which means to employ is to assess what means are available. Reviewing and selecting available means is done on a straight utilitarian basis — will it work? Moral questions may enter when one chooses among equally effective alternate means. — P.32
• The seventh rule of ethics and means and ends is that generally success or failure is a mighty determinant of ethics. The judgment of history leans heavily on the outcome of success and failure; it spells the difference between the traitor and the patriotic hero. There can be no such thing as a successful traitor, for if one succeeds he becomes a founding father. P.34
• The ninth rule of the ethics of means and ends is that any effective means is automatically judged by the opposition as being unethical. — P.35
• The tenth rule of the ethics of rules and means is that you do what you can with what you have and clothe it in moral arguments. …the essence of Lenin’s speeches during this period was “They have the guns and therefore we are for peace and for reformation through the ballot. When we have the guns then it will be through the bullet.” And it was. — P.36-37
• Eight months after securing independence (from the British), the Indian National Congress outlawed passive resistance and made it a crime. It was one thing for them to use the means of passive resistance against the previous Haves, but now in power they were going to ensure that this means would not be used against them. — P.43
• All effective actions require the passport of morality. — P.44
• But to the organizer, compromise is a key and beautiful word. It is always present in the pragmatics of operation. It is making the deal, getting that vital breather, usually the victory. If you start with nothing, demand 100 per cent, then compromise for 30 per cent, you’re 30 per cent ahead. — P.59
• The organizer becomes a carrier for the contagion of curiosity, for a people asking “why” are beginning to rebel. — P.72
• To realistically appraise and anticipate the probably reactions of the enemy, he must be able to identify with them, too, in his imagination and foresee their reactions to his actions. — P.74
• With very rare exceptions, the right things are done for the wrong reasons. It is futile to demand that men do the right thing for the right reason — this is a fight with a windmill. — P.76
• The moment one gets into the area of $25 million and above, let alone a billion, the listener is completely out of touch, no longer really interested because the figures have gone above his experience and almost are meaningless. Millions of Americans do not know how many million dollars make up a billion. — P.96
• If the organizer begins with an affirmation of love for people, he promptly turns everyone off. If, on the other hand, he begins with a denunciation of exploiting employers, slum landlords, police shakedowns, gouging merchants, he is inside their experience and they accept him. — P.98
• The job of the organizer is to maneuver and bait the establishment so that it will publicly attack him as a “dangerous enemy.” — P.100
• The organizer dedicated to changing the life of a particular community must first rub raw the resentments of the people of the community; fan the latent hostilities of many of the people to the point of overt expression. He must search out controversy and issues, rather than avoid them, for unless there is controversy people are not concerned enough to act. — P.116-117
• THE THIRTEEN RULES – Always remember the first rule of power tactics: Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have. The second rule is: Never go outside the experience of your people. …The third rule is: Wherever possible go outside the experience of the enemy. Here you want to cause confusion, fear, and retreat. …the fourth rule is: Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules. …the fourth rule carries within it the fifth rule: Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. …the sixth rule is: A good tactic is one that your people enjoy. …the seventh rule : is: A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag. …the eighth rule: Keep the pressure on. …the ninth rule: The threat is usually more terrifying than : the thing itself. The tenth rule: The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition. …The eleventh rule is: If you push a negative hard and deep enough it will break through into its counter-side. …The twelfth rule: The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative. …The thirteenth rule: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. — P.126-129
• One acts decisively only in the conviction that all the angels are on one side and all the devils on the other. A leader may struggle toward a decision and weigh the merits and demerits of a situation which is 52 per cent positive and 48 per cent negative, but once the decision is reached he must assume that his cause is 100 per cent positive and the opposition 100 per cent negative. He can’t toss forever in limbo, and avoid decision. He can’t weigh arguments or reflect endlessly — he must decide and act. — P.134
• It should be remembered that you can threaten the enemy and get away with it. You can insult and annoy him, but the one thing that is unforgivable and that is certain to get him to react is to laugh at him. This causes irrational anger. — P.134-135
• I have on occasion remarked that I felt confident that I could persuade a millionaire on a Friday to subsidize a revolution for Saturday out of which he would make a huge profit on Sunday even though he was certain to be executed on Monday. — P.150
• For example, since the Haves publicly pose as the custodians of responsibility, morality, law, and justice (which are frequently strangers to each other), they can be constantly pushed to live up to their own book of morality and regulations. No organizations, including organized religion, can live up to the letter of its own book. You can club them to death with their “book” of rules and regulations. This is what that great revolutionary, Paul of Tarsus, knew when he wrote to the Corinthians: “Who also hath made us able ministers of the New Testament; not of the letter, but of the spirit, for the letter killeth.” — P.152
• Many of the lower middle class are members of labor unions, churches, bowling clubs, fraternal, service, and nationality organizations. They are organizations and people that must be worked with as one would work with any other part of our populations — with respect, understanding, and sympathy. To reject them is to lose them by default. They will not shrivel and disappear. You can’t switch channels and get rid of them. This is what you have been doing in your radicalized dream world but they are here and will be. — P.189

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David Frum is a prominent Neoconservative who worked for the Bush administration. Many of his foreign policy prescriptions are pretty repellent. But for Frum, as with many Neocons, Trump’s proto-fascism is so frightening that he’s offering advice to the Atlantic Monthly’s liberal readers:

“It’s possible I’m not the right person to offer the following analysis. Yet it’s also a good rule to seek wisdom wherever it may be found.”

And Frum’s counsel on strategy is pretty sound. In fact, it sounds an awful lot like Alinsky’s:

• The more conservative protests are, the more radical they are. You want to scare Trump? Be orderly, polite, and visibly patriotic. Wave the flag, be more inclusive. Disinviting pro-Life women from the Women’s March may have been an error. Invite more cops and veterans. Don’t be so partisan. Be inclusive. Be dignified. Don’t let Trump set the tone.
• Strategic thinking, inclusive action. The military formula is – superior force at a single point. OWS fizzled because it was diffuse. Be selective with demands that can be achieved. And go after specifics related to Trump – “Pass a law requiring the Treasury to release the President’s tax returns.” – “An independent commission to investigate Russian meddling in the US election.” – “Divest from the companies.” – Limited “asks” with broad appeal.
• Protests are fun but meetings are effective. Bodies in the street represent potential power, not necessarily real power. What happens when people get on the bus and go home? In contrast, it’s the mundane day-to-day organizing that gets things done. Less hair-splitting, more organizing. Relentlessly use the kind of tactics Indivisible spells out to keep steady pressure on elected officials.

Review of “Von Wutbürgern und Brandstiftern” by Hajo Funke (ISBN 9783945256640)

This is a book review, but it’s not entirely that.

The title of Hajo Funke’s book translates to roughly “Of Angry Citizens and Arsonists” – which describes the break with polite center-right politics and an embrace of angry rhetoric and violence by native Germans, and the rise of neo-Nazi and xenophobic groups. This is a shockingly familiar story in Germany but one also familiar in almost every Western nation.

Author’s Introduction

Funke introduces the German Extreme Right: Pegida, the NPD, and the AFD. Pegida is now also a political party and is in Denmark. The AFD cultivates the appearance of a dry, conservative economics-focused party but its base is the radical right consisting of members of the NPD (a barely-legal party that never got much traction), Pegida (primarily a hate group for xenophobes), the German “Identitäre Bewegung” (white supremacist “Identitarian movement”), and the “Institut für Staatspolitik” (the National Policy Institute, founded in 2000), which sees itself as the voice of Germany’s “New Right.”

But Germany’s New Right is not so different from the old in its connection to Nazism. In the USA Richard Spencer’s “National Policy Institute” (founded five years later) seems to be a knock-off of the Institut für Staatspolitik – and virtually every feature of German neo-Nazism exists in the United States. This is one reason I found Funke’s book so fascinating and chilling.

Funke frames the political climate in Germany. He paints a picture of alienated young Muslims sitting in chat rooms and working themselves up to acts of violence. But this is also what happens with angry white Germans. Both seek online confirmation for their beliefs and become angrier by the minute. And for the Wutbürger somebody has to pay. Germans found an example in Jörg Haider of the FPÖ in Austria, who offered simple solutions – get out of the EU; kick out foreigners; and shut the borders. Then Austria would be great. Sound famliar?

Of course real reasons are more complex. Geopolitical issues – such as Western nations destabilizing the Middle East – created refugees. The rise of ISIS was a consequence of Western nations creating failed states. The economic meltdown of 2008 wasn’t created by Syrian asylum seekers, nor was income inequality within Western nations, nor were the bankruptcies of southern European nations. Global Capitalism, globalism, and unstable markets are not a refugee issue. But simple minds cry out for simple solutions.

Funke cites Oliver Nachtwey’s book on economic decline in Germany – the end of the “German dream” that has shaken those who thought their place was secure in the modern BRD. Low-paying MacJobs are proliferating just as elsewhere in global Capitalism, and the social safety net has disappeared. People are on their own and they’re angry.

Economic inequality engenders political inequality and political instability. Funke points to Armin Schäfer’s work on participatory democracy. Das Volk may be dumb, but they’re not stupid. They know that the big decisions are not made by little people – even in a benign liberal “democracy.” Consequently voters often sit out elections. Why bother? It’s all been decided. And the press? They’re run by elites, right-populists tell voters.

Funke cites Wolfgang Streeck’s “Buying Time: The Delayed Crisis of Democratic Capitalism.” Streeck writes of the frequent crises of Capitalism, the profit-taking that occurs even when markets fail, and of the austerity programs and the sacrifices citizens must make in order to prop up the markets. The”elites,” say right-wing populists, always manage to suck money out of the system while the little guy suffers. And this is correct, although one right-wing “populist” is himself a billionaire sucking money out of the system. But the rightwing-populist cannot – and will not – repudiate Capitalism or point fingers at the real criminals. Another enemy must be found.

As the economic middle class becomes thinner and more vulnerable, the stability of the political center of the middle class becomes weaker and it can move in unexpected directions. Zick and Klein’s book “Fragile Mitte” describes this phenomenon and offers reasons for the country’s move to the right: although economically weaker, they slavishly align themselves with the ruling class.

Finally, Funke enumerates a few of the right-wing demagogues busy at work in Europe: Norbert Hofer and Heinz-Christian Strache in Austria; Marine Le Pen in France; Geerd Wilders in the Netherlands; and Nigel Farage in Britain.

Right-wing demogogues claim the EU takes jobs away from workers; that the EU imposes quotas on refugees. Globalism is your enemy, say the populists, because it imposes a second set of laws over nations, injuring sovereignty and productivity. As for NATO, only the NPD in Germany is opposed. For the AFD the Defense industry is nation and business friendly. Foreigners are the problem. Never is it global Capitalism because neo-Nazis don’t really want to fix an unjust system. They just want to be the ones to run it.

Against Human Dignity

The section describes how easily hate speech becomes acts of hate. When the far-right start calling for the expulsion of foreigners, it’s not long before supporters start fire-bombing them. The “Mitte-Studie” from the University of Leipzig showed that the middle class (AFD members especially) were increasingly likely to be hostile to foreigners and evinced anti-democratic and authoritarian attitudes. A surprising number also approved of a dictator. In the German states where right-wing parties were politically strongest there were more physical attacks.

PEGIDA – Unleashed resentment

Pegida’s first demonstration was in Dresden in October 2014, where over 10,000 people protested foreigners and the nation’s asylum laws. It was founded by Lutz Bachmann, who apparently loves Hitler, and has grown to at least 40,000 members, at one point having 200,000 Facebook page supporters. The University of Göttingen did a study of the typical Pegida member: 80% male; 70% without religion; 80% in a relationship; average income, most late thirties to fifties. 90% were unhappy with the way democracy worked. And they were angry. This is a Trump supporter.

AFD: Alternative for Germany – Populist in form, Extreme Right in substance

In the preceding chapter Funke goes through a list of Pegida organizations in each of the German states, as well as showing links to the NPD and the AFD. The AFD is a party whose platform is a bland enumeration of mostly economic policy, which seems to place it on even footing with the CDU. However, the AFD has a “wing” of extremists who regularly coordinate work with Pegida and the NPD. In many ways, they are all interchangeable.

Originally the AFD was constituted as an economic opponent of the Euro and as a political opponent of the CDU. It was formed by an economics professor, Bernd Lucke, and a former IBM (Europe) executive, Hans-Olaf Henkel. Both opposed the Euro but found the international company they were in – Marine Le Pen in France, for example – distastful.

But it wasn’t long before they were deposed (see the “Erfurt resolution” of March 2015) by extreme right-wing members Björn Höcke, André Poggenburg, Hans-Thomas Tillschneider, Alexander Gauland, and Frauke Petry, who replaced “technocrats” and those “without vision” with “patriots” capable of taking the fight to the mainstream parties, the media, and “social experimentation.”

Funke footnotes a voting rights survey with figures on attacks against foreigners, mainly Muslims. On the “wahlrecht” website there is a page that shows percentages each party would get if an election were held today. In Baden-Württemberg, Saxony, Thüringen, and Sachsen-Anhalt the AFD is running second place behind the CDU. In Mecklenburg-Vorpommern they lead. They are not yet ready to take on everyone and take over the government. But they’re gaining on the CDU.

Björn Höcke, one of the party leaders, is the motor driving the extreme right transformation of the AFD. Höcke has been trying to Nazi-fy the party by making it more Völkisch – a racial adjective meaning organic, tribal, and “native” in a genetic sense. Even Frauke Petry, the telegenic, well-spoken and English-fluent face of the party, has defended the use of this old Nazi adjective. It is a perfect example of a German dog whistle. The neo-Nazis for whom the party speaks know exactly what the term really means. The party is also unapologetically anti-Semitic, although it keeps trying to appeal to Zionists on the basis of shared commitment to nationalism and ethnocentrism.

Despite the many links between the AFD and the NPD and Pegida, AFD leadership has sought to keep a safe distance from more violent elements of the other two movements. In May 2016 the party passed a resolution playing down these connections. But Hans-Thomas Tillschneider, the party’s “go to” man for all things anti-Islamic, condemned the move while praising Pegida: “Pegida exudes calm and discipline, equanimity and sensibility.” Tillschneider sees the AFD’s role as carrying Pegida’s protests into parliament. Alexander Gauland, another AFD leader, describes the relationship this way: the AFD and Pegida are “naturally linked.”

Funke offers many examples of fuzzy lines between the three extremist groups. Pegida and the NPD have strong relationships to resurgent Nazism and a cadre of neo-Nazi members. The AFD takes pains to distance itself from them, creating “deniability,” but the AFD’s message is still crafted to appeal to them, and AFD leadership praises their extreme brethren. The AFD also refuses to condemn violence against foreigners. Bottom line – neo-Nazism is a unified movement in Germany. Only at the top is there a thin veneer of respectability – and even that is often unmasked by leaked internal documents or YouTube videos of private meetings. Americans should recognize the frightening similarities between German and US politics.

The extreme “New Right”

As if all these angry xenophobes were not bad enough, Germany has a problem with white supremacy. The Identitarian Movement and what we call the “Alt-Right” here in the USA have found a home in Pegida and the AFD.

In 2000 Götz Kubitschek founded the “Institut für Staatspolitik,” which publishes “Sezession,” and sees itself as thinkers of the “New Right.” Both journal and founder have close relationships to all three extremist organizations as well as the Identitarian Movement. Sezession regularly attacks the “lying press” and majority-elected political “elites.” The American Alt-Right happily reproduces these materials, although Americans now have their own Kubitschek in Richard Spencer who has a similar journal. In Austria, where voters narrowly rejected an Identitarian candidate, a 2014 Sora Institute poll showed 40% think Nazis weren’t so bad and 30% liked the idea of a Führer – numbers that doubled since the 2008 economic crisis.

Kubitschek is a disciple of Armin Mohler, credited as an “early thinker” of the New Right. Mohler described himself as a fascist and deserted from the Swiss army to join the SS. He was also an admirer of Mussolini. Kubitschek is a pal of the extreme-right publisher of the short-lived Compact magazine, Jürgen Elsässer. One issue of the defunct magazine featured a roundtable with AFD members on white supremacy.

In Germany the Identitarian movement was resuscitated from outlawed French neo-Nazism, “Génération Identitaire,” which again has its American admirers. Alain de Benoist developed a racist ideology for the Nouvelle Droite (New Right) and was embraced by both German New Right and American Alt-Right. He advocates a type of Apartheid and cultural hegemony: “What the ND wants is a federal Europe, founded on the principle of subsidiarity…” This Catholic concept on the surface sounds a bit like federalism, but it really means turning your back on the rest of society. Many Catholics are appalled at the corruption of the principle, but it is part of the AFD’s platform.

Kubitschek is also knee-deep in the Identitarian movement, along with Pegida supporter Felix Menzel, editor of the “Blaue Narzisse” and whom American admirers would call a Christian Identitarian. Kubitschek has close relationships with Austrian neo-fascists and neo-Nazis. To Identitarians the problem is “population transfer.” They see themselves being replaced. The former head of the Deutsche Bundesbank, Thilo Sarrazin, had a catchy title in his book, “Deutschland schafft sich ab” (Germany does away with itself). But if the problem is “population transfer,” transfer is also the solution. Identitarians believe multiculturalism must be fought and foreigners expelled. Trump has promised the forced expulsion of 11 milllion foreigners and 53% of Israelis support the forced expulsion of Israeli Arabs. Ethnosupremacy is not just for Nazis anymore.

Limits to opposing the Right

Germany’s “liberal democracy” can’t (or won’t) fight the extreme right as it once did – despite an uptick in rightwing terror attacks. In Brandenburg rightwing groups have started doing “evening strolls” – intended to send a chilling message to immigrants. AFD parliamentarians propose the most hateful policies in the Bundesrat. Is this “democracy at work? Or”democracy doing away with itself?” And both local police and national security agencies now have extremists within their ranks. When a permanent state of emergency is declared, you can bet it won’t be by moderates.

This is a terrifying book, but at the end of the day it’s a German problem. Germans had better wake the hell up and crack down on these groups before it’s too late.

Ditto for us.

Review of “Imagined Communities” by Benedict Anderson (ISBN 9781844670864)

Benedict Anderson writes in a florid style, using metaphors where descriptive phrases would be more useful, which often forces you to reread a long paragraph in order to find the simple idea buried within. It is quite annoying, yet Anderson’s distillation of the features of nationalism is valuable for a patient reader. That said, I don’t agree with everything he writes, as you will see.

“Imagined Communities” takes us through many phases and factors in the development of nationalist thought. Anderson makes a few initial generalizations: that nationalists insist their nations are far older than historians would agree; that nationalism is “normal”; that pan-nationalism is thought to be aberrant; that the political power of nationalism is incredibly strong when compared to its thin and flimsy philosophical foundation and its incoherence. We seem to be dealing here with something as dangerous and tantalizing as a narcotic.

Anderson’s definition of a “nation” is an “imagined political community” – not merely invented but invented out of whole cloth. Its cultural and psychological roots are a preoccupation with death and sacrifice (example: the unknown soldier). Nationalism on the surface is incredibly similar to religion: it addresses many of the same needs for belonging and individual meaning. In this Anderson takes pains to disavow a causal link, but he points out that nationalism arose just as religion was being eclipsed by secularism in the 18th century.

Looking at nationalism anthropologically, religions and nations share a sacred language (Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Arabic, etc.). The sacred language (referred to as a “truth-language”) is necessary for the transmission of sacred texts which convey foundation myths. Consequently nationalists often insist on the use of a particular language since it is central to establishing nationalist narratives and propagating them.

A king’s legitimacy stemmed directly from God. Dynastic rule was possible because one’s father or ur-father was the man God had anointed to lead his people. An easily understood reason for God’s anointing of the king was sacrifice. For example, in Judaism, the near sacrifice of Isaac was necessary to establish legitimacy for the story of biblical Israel that would follow. It involved a truth-language (Hebrew), and cosmology blending seamlessly into history. But when did Abraham actually live? The question has sent historians scrambling for answers. In later years, the story of biblical Israel would become linked to the foundation of a modern state.

Printing and the Reformation weakened “truth languages” as millions of publications were issued in German, French, English, and other “vulgar” languages. When Luther posted his theses, they were printed in German. Protestantism replaced Catholicism, German replaced Latin, and married clerics replaced a supposedly celibate hierarchy led by a Pope whose legitimacy stemmed all the way back to Saint Peter. It was quite a shakeup: language had become the central feature of nationalism, not God.

The Holy Roman Empire operated on Latin which was not only a “truth language” but a pan-national language. When the Church finally lost its absolute control over Europe, the alliances and marriages joining the royalty of diverse nations meant that the royalty did not always speak the language of its subjects. For example, the Habsburgs ruled Magyars, Croats, Slovaks, Italians, Ukrainians, and Austro-Germans; the Turks ruled over a similar polyglot empire. And both were hated by everyone – the Habsburgs for their choice of administrative language, German, and the Turks for propagating their language.

But the bourgeoisie did speak the people’s language. To this class was left the responsibility of directly managing peasants, who were happy to have their local languages elevated. Slowly, local (“national”) languages became the standard among not only serfs and middle management, but by the kings themselves.

To language were added additional trappings – flags, inherited nobility, anthems, national stories of sacrifice – all intended to create “buy in” from the serfs. And all “imagined” in the sense that they were actually of fairly recent vintage. Even in the United States, Anderson points out, this was the case. Americans may have been the riffraff of Europe, but each of the founding states had its own anthems, flags, nobility (Penns and Carrolls, for example), their genealogies and generals. A war was fought to preserve an amalgam of states which itself had only existed a couple of generations. But by the time of the Civil War an imagined nation whose legitimacy derived directly from God’s grace had to be preserved at all cost. (I find it interesting that American nationalism seems to have only partially digested European nationalism. In many parts of our country inhabitants still identify with the “Old Country” – Scots/Irish, German, Quebecois (who in turn identify with their Old Country, France), Italian, Ashkenazi Jewish communities, and others)

With the establishment of the League of Nations, the “nation-state” became the norm. Empires and dynasties were on the way out. The last European empire dissolved in 1974 with the end of Portuguese dictatorship. By the early 20th Century subjects of former empires all began wanting their own nations too. Arabia, India, Israel… But Imperialism came hand-in-hand with nationalism. By the 19th Century every self-respecting “nation” was expected to have some sort of Imperial project to despoil and pillage neighbors or the Third World.

It is impossible to be honest with one’s citizenry about the reasons for subjugating another people. And it’s impossible to be honest with those brought under the heel. Consequently, propaganda has always been a feature of the nation state. It turns out, the stories invented for legitimizing the subjugation of another people are closely related to the stories invented to establish the legitimacy of one’s own “nation.” And education fulfills this function. Schools have always been necessary for normalizing national values and propagating national myth. It is no coincidence that long after European colonists left India or the Dutch Indies the educational institutions they created still exist. At first the purpose was to instill the values of the settler state, but now the same institutions promote their own fledgling nationalism.

But the lures of nationalism don’t entirely depend on language. Toward the end of his chapter on the last waves of nation-state formation, Anderson brings up the case of Switzerland, a polyglot federation. Many historians contend that Switzerland never really became a state in any real sense before 1813, that in 1891 the Swiss were late-comers to European nationalism. And it wasn’t until this year, right on the verge of the 20th Century, that they decided to look back 600 years and declare the “real origin” of the Swiss nation as the year 1291. They had rehabilitated a long-standing “Confederation” and re-invented it as a “nation.” Schlomo Sand has an even more controversial theory about the “invention” of Israel.

The last waves of nationalism occurred in Africa and Asia. As empires struggled to educate and standardize native-staffed bureaucracies, and as global Capitalism exploited new markets, schools, the media, laws, and language began forming all the trappings of modern nation-states (it took Anderson 3 pages to say this). It wasn’t long before the natives became restless, and then not much longer until they had established their own nationalisms. The 20th Century saw a frenzy of people desperate to form themselves into nations.

* * *

The last part of the book is equally fascinating because Anderson addresses patriotism and racism, both contemporary features of nationalism – especially in the United States.

Anderson contends that patriotism is almost exclusively presented in the language of love – admittedly, love of a very narrow and inflexible sort. Individuals may not deviate from this “love” – expressed as devotion, purity of heart, willingness to sacrifice even one’s life – or they will be hated. Anderson poses the provocative question – “Can the reader think immediately of even three hymns of hate?” (apparently he had not read the third stanza of the “Star Spangled Banner”). Militarism epitomizes the ideal of willingness to sacrifice for the nation, and it shares many of the same features of religion (observe a military funeral – equal parts nationalism and God).

Because we have now encountered a state based on ideology and myth, Anderson makes the case that anti-Semitism and racism are not necessarily derived from nationalism, that their roots are actually based in class. The ruler is divine, the aristocracy well-bred and cultivated, deserving of their rights to govern serfs and peasants. All are protecting the destiny of a people.

“The fact of the matter is that nationalism thinks in terms of historical destinies, while racism dreams of external contaminations. […] The dreams of racism actually have their origin in ideologies of class rather than nation.”

Anderson goes on to say that, because racism is class-based:

“… on the whole, racism and anti-Semitism manifest themselves not across national boundaries, but within them. In other words, they justify not so much foreign wars as domestic repression and domination.”

This assertion is impossible to reconcile with actual history. In Nazi Europe millions of Poles were murdered. In the Americas, colonial powers waged genocidal wars on natives across the seas. The United States is currently waging a war on Muslims half a world away. The atomic bomb was not used against Europeans but against Asians. Life is cheap when Europeans are not involved.

In the British empire Lords were the supreme aristocrats. But in the colonies, even the petit bourgeoisie scrambling for advantage or exiled, could “play aristocrat.” They could have their mansions, cooks, houseboys, and horses. And they could have their slaves. From India to the Americas, brown-skinned people were subjugated to the whims of Eurotrash. And while Anderson’s theory is that this was class-based racism, there seems to be no example of a European people that was ever forced into slavery by other Europeans. Class does not appear to me to be the main factor.

Still, here we are in the New World – New York, New Jersey, New Haven. The colonies were what Anderson calls “doubles” of the Old World. Ethnically we were British, French, German, or Spanish. But the distances between Old and New Worlds made holding together far-flung colonies impossible in the long run. When the United States finally penned a Constitution, it was truly something new – something no longer based on European history, or even its own. There was no mention of Columbus, the Mayflower, or Pilgrims – all that came later.

By the 1830’s, however, the new state was a “nation.” It had a piddling history, its genealogies, some founding myths. People were beginning to ponder what their country was and how they belonged. As always, things had to be invented, facts adjusted, to suit the story. In Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, for example, Huck and Jim’s friendship is portrayed as a friendship of equals – but Jim is also a slave.

After reading Anderson’s book, I came away thinking that he had somewhat haphazardly synthesized the thinking of other authors on nationalism – Elie Kedourie, Ernest Gellner, Eric Hobsbawm, and Anthony Smith. I am particularly fascinated by how nationalism can easily supplant religion. For example, Zionism has largely eclipsed Jewish observance since the Six Day War; and while many Americans no longer take the family to church, they never fail to “support the troops.” In both societies religious militarism is a striking feature (think of the US Air Force Academy or the IDF). And in both there are problems with institutionalized racism – privilege of one ethic group and demonization of another.

But all in all, a useful book to kick off thinking about the anachronistic scourge of nationalism.

Review of “Listen Liberal” by Thomas Frank (ISBN 9781925228885)

This book explains when the Democratic Party decided to abandon organized labor, befriend Wall Street, and embrace the professional, instead of the working, class. It explains how Bill Clinton put a bullet in the head of an already-injured New Deal, ushered in a new era of “meritocracy” and its close friend, social and economic inequality. It explains how and why all of Obama’s “best and brightest” simply ended up doing what the Republicans had done before them. It explains why — even in Bright Blue states like Rhode Island and Massachusetts — economic inequality has not been addressed or repaired by Democrats. It takes us from Boston to Fall River, one of the poorest cities just a short ride away. It looks at the record of Duval Patrick, once an “Obama Lite” governor, one who started his professional career at Ameriquest and ended up at Bain Capital.

But Democrats can’t help it. This is who they are. Clinton the First, Clinton the Second, Obama, and many other “meritocracy” Democrats draw Frank’s scrutiny. Their friends, the Eric Schmidts, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerbergs, are their idols. Their shared values are with pharmaceutical magnates and software developers, hedge fund managers and dot.com billionaires. Long gone are Democratic friendships with captains of organized labor such as the teamsters or the teachers. Half the time Democrats at war with Labor (think Rahm Emanuel’s and Arne Duncan’s attacks on teachers). The New Democrats are nothing like FDR’s allies of the common man. Instead, they are smug, well-fed, well-educated functionaries, “gatekeepers” who serve the ruling class yet still like to think of themselves as the Democrats of their fathers’ generation — all while betraying them.

They are a separate economic class — themselves neither fish nor fowl, workers nor oligarchs. They have no idea where their allegiances lie. They think they’re voting for the common man but they live, dress, and eat better — and then they wonder why their noble gestures aren’t appreciated.

Frank concludes his book with this:

“It is time to face the obvious: that the direction the Democrats have chosen to follow for the last few decades has been a failure for both the nation and for their own partisan health.”Failure” is admittedly a harsh word, but what else are we to call it when the left party in a system chooses to confront an epic economic breakdown by talking hopefully about entrepreneurship and innovation? When the party of professionals repeatedly falls for bad, self-serving ideas like bank deregulation, the “creative class,” and empowerment through bank loans? When the party of the common man basically allows aristocracy to return?

Now, all political parties are alliances of groups with disparate interests, but the contradictions in the Democratic Party coalition seem unusually sharp. The Democrats posture as the “party of the people” even as they dedicate themselves ever more resolutely to serving and glorifying the professional class. Worse: they combine self-righteousness and class privilege in a way that Americans find stomach-turning. And every two years, they simply assume that being non-Republicans is sufficient to rally the voters of the nation to their standard. This cannot go on.

Yet it will go on, because the most direct solutions to the problem are off the table for the moment. The Democrats have no interest in reforming themselves in a more egalitarian way. There is little the rest of us can do, given the current legal arrangements of this country, to build a vital third-party movement or to revive organized labor, the one social movement that is committed by its nature to pushing back against the inequality trend.

What we can do is strip away the Democrats’ precious sense of their own moral probity – to make liberals live without the comforting knowledge that righteousness is always on their side. It is that sensibility, after all, that prevents so many good-hearted rank-and-file Democrats from understanding how starkly and how deliberately their political leaders contradict their values. Once that contradiction has been made manifest – once that smooth, seamless sense of liberal virtue has been cracked, anything becomes possible. The course of the party and the course of the country can both be changed, but only after we understand that the problem is us.”

I would also add — don’t automatically give your vote to a party that hasn’t earned it.

Review of “Among Strange Victims” by Daniel Saldaña París, Christina MacSweeney (Translation) (ISBN 9781566894302)

Among Strange Victims has an unlovable protagonist who is content with his peeling walls and his boring daily rituals. He apparently told his family he was attending college but dropped out almost immediately. The description of his day is boring in the extreme, and unfortunately this does not make for good fiction. As he puts it, “one of my strengths is an ability to enjoy the most trivial situations intensely.” Sadly, most readers do not have this same strength.

Our lazy protagonist, who doesn’t even bother to identify himself at the beginning of his story, spends considerable time on a “disintegrating” bench in a gazebo, watching people. When he is not doing this he is working in a museum editing press releases and proofreading the catalog. In one chapter we learn how he goes to a cafe, has a cup of tea and returns home with the soggy tea bag, which he hangs on the wall. Gripping narrative – this is not. At about this point the reader is ready to stretch his arms a couple of thousand miles and and throttle the author.

By the time the narrator has accumulated ten teabags on his wall, still not much has happened in the story, which until now has been a tale of boredom, shirking, and masturbation. And then he decides to save the life of a hen in the vacant lot next door. He throws a table into the lot, and goes down to position it as a suitable shelter. Which is when he discovers a grisly bag full of putrefying viscera.

But now we once again enter stagnant waters when his co-worker Cecilia is sent a prank marriage proposal in his name, and she accepts. For the first time we learn the narrator’s name: Rodrigo Saldivar.

The book goes on in his way for many hundreds of thousands of keystrokes, each of them more painful than the one before. There is the mystery of a turd on his bed. Then we meet a BolaÒo type academic slumming in Mexico, an elusive and dissolute philosopher-boxer the academic is studying while living with the narrator’s mother, and a shady gringo who bought a nubile young girl whose urine is used for rituals.

In the end not much is resolved, although we do finally learn who has deposited the turd on the bed.

I am not sure if my quarrel is with the work itself or with the translation, but it is neither an easy nor a pleasant, nor a rewarding read. I have limited patience for writers who, rather than invite you into their heads and hearts, try to keep you at arm’s length or deposit turds on the pages of the book you bought from them. The book has an intellectual conceit, but it’s a rather shallow one.

BTW, if you want to see another sample of SaldaÒa ParÌs’s writing, which demonstrates more talent than this first disaster of a novel, here is a piece he wrote for Electric Literature:

http://electricliterature.com/planes-flying-over-a-monster-the-writing-life-in-mexico-city-954a79f43165

For the giveaway pile.

Review of “Zubaida’s Window” by Iqbal Al-Qazwini (ISBN 9787774563214)

Although this book has been described (by the LA Times) as a “dirge” and as a “confusing stream of consciousness” by some Goodread-ers, I found it to be a fluid account of the days in which a woman who had seen much suffering in Iraq and lived in exile in Germany for many years is now forced to watch the final destruction of her country as the United States invades Iraq. This is a masterful account of her emotional roller-coaster ride.

Our childhoods and every state of our development are inexorably bound up with our national history. Just as we might ask: where were you when Kennedy was assassinated? Al-Qazwini recalls when young King Faisal was murdered in a coup. She recalls each member of a family that has been blown to the far corners of the earth. Her digressions into Iraqi history and all its calamity become part of Zubaida’s narrative, just as 20th Century Jewish writers have been unable to separate the Shoah from their own family stories.

One of the saddest tales in the novel is of Zubaida’s brother, who lives two hours away in Leipzig. He calls one day to tell her he is depressed and she immediately makes up an excuse to visit him. They agree to meet at the train station. However her brother never shows up and, despite going to his apartment, leaving a note and waiting weeks for a reply, Zubaida never hears from him. Perhaps he has just picked up and left Germany, she thinks. But then she reads an article about an unknown foreign man who has leapt to his death in front of a train in Leipzig. This is both the fate and the fear of the refugee: to die un-mourned either at home or in exile.

Zubaida is pulled to leave and pulled to stay in Germany. She often buys tickets to some destination, packs a suitcase and passport, but ultimately shreds the ticket and the passport remains unstamped.

But suddenly, with an empty suitcase she is in Amman, Jordan, where she is about to take the long bus ride to Baghdad. An old woman tells her how painful exile is, the cab driver inquires about her life in Europe. She recalls the sky, the warmth, radio news in Arabic, the markets, the sadness, but also the vividness of life in the Middle East. And then she closes the suitcase and is once again in her cold Berlin apartment.

Zubaida is now curled up in a ball in front of the television. The war is just a jumble of frightening images as once-powerful men take off their medals, don civilian clothes, denounce the dictator, and hop in non-military vehicles while giving CNN interviews for the last time. The dictator’s statue is destroyed at Firdaus Square, “coalition” forces have seized control, and Iraq has been subdued and destroyed.

Zubaida feels a certain kinship with her adoptive city, where dictators have fallen and the people rejoice their sudden freedom. Suddenly long-repressed memories and feelings surface and she writes non-stop for four days. But the history she has recorded feels false, manufactured, and she leaves the pages in the rain to un-write themselves, then throws all these recollections in a dustbin. As the apartment building strangely empties of its elderly residents, Zubaida is alone with her arrhythmia, having fallen into a fitful sleep.

A review of “Consequence” by Eric Fair.

I began this book last night and finished it this morning. Although the first person, present tense is grating for the length of an entire book, and Fair still is not fully open with himself or his readers, it was an engrossing read. My three stars reflects an average of four stars for interest yet only two for candor.

What happens to a man who goes off to war? The book certainly answers this question: nightmares, guilt, alcoholism, sometimes death – either by war or the man’s own hand.

How does a man like this reconcile his own religion with what he is ordered to do? I don’t think we ever really get an answer. In his account, Fair’s family expect him to become a pastor like his grandfather, but he is drawn to a darker, physical side, first becoming a policeman, where he learns to deploy violence against people who are always (well, at least in theory) criminals. For the longest time Fair thinks religion will save him, and the book contains a strange account of his interrogation of salafis who tell him how much like them he really is – a thread that really leads nowhere. Aside from Fair’s restlessness and his perpetual life crises, readers never really learn why he avoids the ministry, why he stubbornly clung to Presbyterianism despite it changing in front of his eyes, why he really dropped out of theological school. It wasn’t that his writing was starting to take off; it was something else, unnamed, unexamined.

And why does a man go off to war – especially when many in his family have warned him against it? Fair again avoids fully answering the reader’s questions, but we sense a tremendous restlessness in him that leads him to ignore his father’s and grandmother’s counsel. Fair is obviously a person of well above-average intelligence, and he is given to instrospection and guilt, but he shies away from truly probing the demons that still stir within him.

The book begins with a quote from Maimonides’ Laws of Repentance. Maimonides was the Arab-Jewish Talmudist who, besides being the Sultan’s physician, wrote Guide for the Perplexed and had much to say on moral conduct. Maimonides counsels the guilty party to approach his victim “again and again until he his forgiven.” Islam requires precisely the same of a wrong-doer, while in Christianity a hall pass signed by Jesus suffices. Unfortunately, all of Fair’s – and Bush and Cheney’s, and Obama’s – victims are now either dead or lost to squalid prisons in places where Americans will fear to go for a long, long time. A dark truth never acknowledged in this book is that there never will be apologies – and there never will be forgiveness for these personal and national sins.

And so in the end Fair falls back on his Christianity – or perhaps just wishful thinking. In his aunt’s words, Eric Fair ends up forgiving himself: “I am just a human kid.”

Review of Rise of the Robots by Martin Ford

“Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future” (ISBN 978-0465059997), by Martin Ford, a former software developer and entrepreneur, begins with a survey of the technology landscape – an over-clocked world where change seems to follow Moore’s Law – doubling in speed every couple of years. Ford paints a picture of the capabilities of robots and the dismal economic climate for humans that has existed since the mid-seventies: real wages are declining; wealth is being concentrated in the hands of 1% of the nation; half of all college graduates are not finding work that can use their college education; even highly-skilled professionals are being replaced by automation; the top 5% now accounting for 40% of all purchasing; and he asks whether tech firms – which pride themselves on “disruptive technology” – will disrupt the entire system. This is a great question – the entire system is indeed heading for a collapse. But Ford does not seriously explore the nature of “the system” – and he is certainly not looking for serious solutions – only bandaids.

Ford examines the “service sector” jobs left to American workers and refutes the notion that they are training grounds for young workers to learn valuable workplace skills. It turns out, actually, that 90% of fast-food workers are over 20, the average age is 35, their median hourly wage is $8.69, and most of them qualify for welfare programs costing taxpayers at least $7 billion a year. And still the fast-food chains are looking at new technology to replace half of their employees with automation. Ford writes that we can expect similar encroachments of robotics into wholesaling operations, retail, and agriculture. Yet, like men waiting for their turn in front of a firing squad, most workers today already see the writing (if not the blood) on the wall. What Ford is telling us is nothing new.

From the beginning of the computer age, even its creators foresaw the threat of human obsolescence. Norbert Wiener argued in a 1949 New York Times piece that there is theoretically no human task that a computer cannot learn and duplicate. In the Sixties, President Johnson convened a panel to write one of those government studies destined to molder in a filing cabinet – this one about the “Triple Revolution” occurring in the United States: human and civil rights; advances in weaponry; and “cybernation” or cybernetic automation. The report concluded that, without oversight and planning, the “nation will be thrown into unprecedented economic and social disorder.”

But economic planning is for Commies and sissies; and besides, the nation now had an oil crisis, stagflation, Iranian hostages, Sandinistas to fight, medical students to rescue in Granada, and corrupt ex-friends to punish in Panama. The Reagan years marked the beginning of attacks on labor, the rapid ascendency of pro-business advocacy in government – and what in retrospect was a new austerity regime being imposed on American workers. Ford lists seven trends he sees responsible for the misery of workers: stagnant (actually decreasing) wages; decreasing share of the national income by workers and increasing share by corporations (inequality); declining labor force participation (despite women being forced to augment family incomes); long-term unemployment and lack of job creation; soaring wage income inequality; declining opportunity and underemployment by college graduates; and the rise of McJobs and loss of full-time jobs with benefits.

Amazingly, Ford ascribes all these developments to technology. And he feels obliged to explicitly discount three other contributors: globalization (outsourcing and offshoring); financialization (the turn from factories to hedge funds); and politics (trickle down market fundamentalism in Congress and rabid pro-business lobbying from without).

Although Ford’s own graphs show a plunge in the percent of manufacturing jobs from a height of 32% in 1952 to a low of 8% in 2012, his discussion centers on the percentage of foreign products Americans buy from foreign corporations. He writes that the plunge in manufacturing jobs began before NAFTA and, hence, globalization was not the cause. However, labor historians might disagree with Ford. Textile workers, for example, remember the loss of their jobs to Mexico in the Fifties; and Mexicans remember the loss of these very same jobs in the Sixties to Asia. Globalization cannot be linked solely to trade agreements and Ford mistakenly labels globalization a modern phenomenon. Even the first economists, like David Ricardo, had it very much in mind.

Ford correctly nails the obsession with profit-taking and the abandonment of job and product creation. However, he writes that it is “important to realize that growth in the financial sector has been highly dependent on advancing information technology.” No doubt the hedge fund guys need their high-speed computers and trading networks. But Ford does not mention that the financial sector’s growth is largely the result of reckless deregulation and the invention of questionable financial “products” like the ones that nearly crashed the economic system in 2008 and necessitated massive taxpayer-funded bailouts. These companies, deemed “too big to fail,” were not permitted to reap what they sowed. They were hauled off the edge of the abyss, guaranteed continued rapacious profits, and their CEO’s were still remunerated handsomely despite their questionable ethics and performance. For one brief moment the curtain dropped on the wizard and those who did not avert their eyes saw how obscene profit-taking was and how income inequality is actually generated. Meanwhile, the average citizen-consumer – who represents 65% of economic growth in the United States – was left to fend for himself. The recovery plan both parties championed was not only unfair, it was irrational: it rescued the wrong people.

Ford grudgingly acknowledges the political climate that banned unions, attacked worker rights, deregulated businesses, dropped or eliminated taxes on the wealthy, sent an army of lobbyists to Washington, made sure corporate press shills printed op-eds from right-wing think tanks, and foisted all the economic risk on taxpayers and working people. Ford writes that, even in Canada where unions are healthier than in the U.S., income inequality is rising – the implication being that it’s not political. But Ford doesn’t mention the Tory government of Stephen Harper in the same breath, or the fact that some provinces of Canada (Alberta, for example) are as non-union as the American South.

Ford concludes that information technology “stands alone in terms of its exponential progress. Even in nations whose political environments are far more responsive to the welfare of average workers, the changes wrought by technology are becoming increasingly evident.” What nations is Ford referring to? Are there really any powerful First World nations that do not espouse labor-crushing austerity programs or champion trickle-down economics? The IMF, global banks, the G8, and global trade agreements have made sure the world is safe for Capitalism. Greece is not suffering because of technology.

He moves on to a discussion of comparative advantage in which businesses and nations choose to forego opportunity “X” for a more profitable one, and permit those who can do “X” more inexpensively to do so. Robots, Ford says, mean never having to say “I’m sorry, I’ll pass on that opportunity” because they can be programmed to do anything. Ford describes “long tail” distributions, which describe employee/profit relationships. In 2012 Google made $14 billion with 38,000 employees; GM made $11 billion with 840,000. His prediction is that most corporations of the future will have to look like Google, and this in turn will force people out of stable full-time jobs into the “informal economy,” the “Uber economy,” in which people pick up work where they can. Ford cites Jared Lanier, claiming this is essentially the model in the Third World, and that it is precisely what accounts for the erosion of the middle class. But Ford does not describe how a strong middle class makes a nation politically stable. He makes the throwaway point about citizens having a moral right to share in the benefits of technology – especially since much of it is funded or seeded by taxpayers. So presumably the public deserves a few more tech jobs and discounts when buying Tang.

But by all means: let’s disrupt technology but leave the system alone.

Ford loves factory tours. We are introduced to sportswriting bots, data mining apps, marketing analytics, machine learning, language translation, neural nets, genetic programming, cars that drive themselves, project and productivity management software, AI, complex modeling, smart searching, customer management, online ordering, cloud computing, specialized robotics, and programs that write symphonies. We learn that computer-delivered educational and machine-reading tests have not delivered on early expectations. Medical diagnosis, on the other hand, using massive repositories of case studies, pharmaceutical data, and symptoms, has been a useful tool in the hands of medical specialists. Ford, however, gushing over the possibilities of delivering family medicine by robot, runs off the rails when he advocates “para-medicals” – lesser-trained medical professionals, similar to paralegals, whose job it will be to run the medical robots that talk to human patients.

There is an odd tendency among humans to think up complex and stupid systems, then double down on them by devising yet more complex and stupid solutions to the systems’ shortcomings. Ford’s is one such example. Another is the predicted use of elder-care robots in Japan – because, Ford says, the Japanese are too xenophobic to hire foreigners to take care of their elderly.

Many uses of technology – like the use of IBM’s Watson to diagnose and manage types of leukemia – are lumped into robotics in Ford’s book – for example, his mention of glucose sensors for diabetics. If this is the face of robotics, then my old mercury-based thermostat is as well. Both are basically sensors linked to controllers. Google Nest and Google’s contact lens are examples of how the company is developing consumer products to enable it to creep into the lucrative medical market. These are new products and, if anything, will put people to work somewhere – likely outside the U.S. But they are, as yet, not robotic threats to human jobs.

Ford’s discussion of medical overcharging – $6,500 CT scans and $200 aspirins – does not address the issue of greed. Instead, he portrays these practices as necessary maneuvers to cope with that 5% of medical patients who, he says, account for 50% of all expenses. He teases us that AI software running on a tablet in a doctor’s hands will make diagnoses and devise more cost-effective treatments. However, who would not expect the software to cost physicians $1,000 a month and have to run on otherwise standard Android tablets, but costing $5,000 each? Gouging is so entrenched in medical software that it would surprise no one that such an exception for a single AI product would ever be made – particularly when many physicians nowadays are investors in their own labs. Ford proposes creating a single-payer health care system which can mitigate the gouging. He suggests a private management consortium modeled on the old national AT&T phone system – a sanctioned oligopoly. His ideas include auctioning off operating licenses – as if he had never heard of the problems the FCC has run into with bandwidth spectra. But my question is – why? Why is he trying to design a new health care system on the heels of the first one ever created, and one that could be dismantled after the next election? And what does all this really have to do with robotics?

Cars are another story. Self-driving vehicles are almost here, and they belong to two family trees: one is the traditional family car from Detroit, Japan, or Bavaria, plus a host of self-driving and self-parking options; the other is the Google car, a no-frills vehicle that will eventually not even have a steering wheel. Many options for these new vehicles are possible, but Ford sees, eventually, a world of commercial car fleets. For a monthly fee you would have car service, pickup and dropoff capabilities, and vehicles would cease being status objects – simply another commodity like cable TV or high speed internet. These fleets would be owned by companies like Google, Avis, Hertz and Uber. Ford slyly suggests that the changes wrought by driverless cars would be the ultimate in disruptive technology: “Imagine the uproar when Uber’s cars start arriving without drivers.” As fleets consolidate, the number of taxi drivers, muffler and brake guys, auto body shops, car dealerships, detailing shops, and car washes will shrink dramatically. As fleets of cars grow, the fleet of auto guys will fade into obscurity – only to be replaced by a much small number of highly-trained technicians in the fleet garages. Ford did not touch on some of the privacy issues of concern with cars today – particularly that cars gather tremendous amounts of personal information on their drivers and can actually be hacked during operation. Or that vehicles will no doubt also become part of our new surveillance landscape.

In fact, the privacy and civil liberties implications of robotics and automation are entirely absent from Ford’s book.

Expanding the context in which technology changes are expected to occur, Ford paints a picture of the fragility of the middle and upper-middle class – including the top 5% which constitutes an affluent upper tier, but one easily broken by the loss of two salaries. He discusses debt, education, aging, and labor force participation. The bottom line is: our national prosperity was once dependent upon a healthy middle class, and the middle class is anything but healthy nowadays. Most people already understand this.

When Ford turns his attention to the “Singularity” and the general kookiness of Ray Kurzweil, it’s initially an amusing story – until we discover that Kurzweil’s pseudo-religion of “eternal life via cybernetics” is widely supported by, and shapes, Silicon Valley. The use of new technology at micro levels – nanotechnology – will create, he writes, chemical and mechanical miracles that will prolong life and function like the alchemist’s bowl, synthesizing entire meals from amino acid glop – at least so sayeth the prophets of the future with their billions to spend experimenting on the rest of us.

In his final chapter, Martin Ford takes a stab at creating a “new paradigm” for economies in which, as Sun Microsystems founder Bill Joy puts it, “the future doesn’t need us.” In this future, the highly educated are not really needed. Not surprising; they never were. Even today, between 20% and 50% of college graduates are “overeducated” for existing jobs in industrialized countries. Ford questions the conventional wisdom that throwing more vocational education at today’s burger flippers will magically create a climate for more technologically-related economic growth. He describes the job market as a huge pyramid, with the technical and business elite at the top – graduates of graduate programs – and not just people with graduate degrees, but people from prestigious universities. The kind of people whose survival would be assured by sticking them in a secure vault in a granite mountain somewhere in case of nuclear war or an asteroid. Ford laughs at the expectation of finding technical jobs for everyone. “The person who would have worked on a farm in 1900, or in a factory in 1952, is today scanning bar codes or stocking shelves at Walmart. […] So, historically, there has been a reasonable match between the types of work required by the economy and the capabilities of the available workforce. […] The conventional wisdom is that, by investing in still more education and training, we are going to somehow cram everyone into that shrinking region at the very top [of the pyramid].” Ford’s bleak prediction is like End Times: only a small multitude will be saved during the Apocalypse and make it to heaven. The rest of us are doomed.

Ford makes much – everything, actually – of the speed of technological innovation and sees this as the primary driver of the threat of the working class (or working aspirants). But technology is a very fast but relatively small wind-up mouse in a room with a huge elephant no one wants to talk about. That elephant, of course, is Capitalism. It takes 255 pages for Ford to mention the word – the economic system imposed on people in nations where technology is regularly used against them. He writes, “The progression toward ever more automation is not an artifact of ‘design philosophy’ or the personal preferences of engineers: it is fundamentally driven by capitalism. […] The only difference today is that exponential progress is pushing us toward the endgame. […] Changing that would require far more an appeal to engineers and designers: it would require modifying the basic incentives built into the market economy.”

Or – and this does not occur to Ford – changing the system.

If Capitalism is a race for market domination, then a supermarket chain cannot survive its equally technologically-savvy competitors unless it eventually replaces all its cashiers with automated checkouts. Fast food restaurants cannot survive the demand for the cheapest possible “food” unless they eventually replace their humiliatingly-attired employees with vending machines or burger-stamping robots. Mass retailers like Walmart cannot mercilessly crush their competition unless they reduce or eliminate warehouse workers, retail workers, transportation workers, and replace American seamstresses with Bangladeshi children living in shacks and working in fire traps twelve hours a day. But the need to win at all cost exacts enormous social costs – costs that, under Capitalism, businesses and their wealthy owners and investors refuse to pay. This is why, as Ford points out, Social Security is abused as a permanent safety net. This is why most Walmart and fast-food employees collect welfare benefits at a cost of billions to taxpayers – when many of these same corporations are paying no taxes at all. Ford sees the dysfunction. He just doesn’t have the stomach to really change it.

So what is Ford’s solution – since he seems to think that Capitalism is the only form of economic and social organization? A basic guarantee of income. Hand out croissants to the peasants so they won’t revolt. He cites Friedrich Hayek, the ultra conservative economist, who saw this as an interim measure – right before pulling the plug on all social support systems. Ford writes that, without doubt, conservatives are not going to like this idea. I would suggest that neither Libertarians nor Social Democrats nor even Socialists are going to like the idea very much because citizens are completely at the mercy of a government that can “giveth or taketh away” such benefits. Worse, Ford envisions a society of free agents, where everyone is scrambling to “go out and participate in the market.” He thus betrays his own Free Market fundamentalism. He’s for the Uber economy. Besides, there is, as many economists and historians have pointed out, no such thing as an entirely free market. Could I, under Ford’s scheme, found an empire like the Tata’s, or Donald Trump’s? Probably not. I’d have to be born into wealth, as in these examples, or born with a silver spoon in my mouth like Bill Gates, the Walton heirs, or Mark Zuckerberg. And if the top 1% owns 90% of the nation’s wealth, how is guaranteed income really going to help the bottom 99%? The super-rich will still have their billions and their disproportionate access to influence and politics. No, if we are being honest – a monthly allowance is really just to keep the proletariat from rioting.

I have a low tolerance for “timely,” “insightful,” and “pioneering” books on social issues that seriously pull their punches, especially when they ignore the most egregious features of the problem they are examining. “Rise of the Robots” is such a book. I am very grateful to the friend who let me read his copy – and for the fact that I did not have to buy a copy myself.

I re-read Josef Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” after many years to see how it has stood up. And it does – very well. Modern critiques of the book have been harsh, but Conrad’s story turned the tables on colonial Europe, suggesting who exactly were the savages.

The story is recounted, as fin de siècle stories sometimes were, as the recollections of a narrator once-removed. The narrator recounts a tale told by a mariner named Marlow, who as a young man had been out of work for some time and had obtained work as a river pilot for a Belgian colonial enterprise.

In Part I of the story, even before Marlow enters the Congo, his first ominous brushes are with the corporation to which King Leopold had given the charter to pillage a massive part of the Dark Continent (an area 75 times as large as Belgium itself). The company Marlow visits when signing on is quartered on a street with grass growing up through the cobblestones – a spent Europe. As if a heroic journey were beginning, in Conrad’s story the building is “guarded” by two old crones who usher Marlow into a perfunctory interview, then a medical examination in which his supposed “English cranium” is measured every which way (phrenology was in vogue and it had eugenic overtones). He next visits the aunt who has secured his position for him, who gives him a lecture on how he is benefitting the savages of the Congo, doing the Lord’s work.

Then Marlow begins his month-long trip up the river, on a French steamer captained by a morose Swede who tells him the story of another Swede who has committed suicide, all along which various European colonial military forces are shooting their cannons into the brush – for no purpose other than to demonstrate colonial power – or building insane projects with slave labor, whose weak and used-up laborers are literally cast upon heaps to die. It’s not a pretty picture of European colonialism. Conrad often describes the natives as “brutes” and “cannibals” and “savages” and his use of the word “nigger” describes the collared and chained people of Africa in the 19th and early 20th centuries: still slaves, though only a legalism alters the true status of people “brought from all the recesses of the coast in all the legality of time contracts.” In contrast, the Europeans are described as “pilgrims” – presumably on a quest supposed to be holy.

When Marlow arrives in Leopoldville, he discovers that the vessel he was hired to captain has been sunk, its bottom ripped out on a sand bar, and that he is to proceed to find Mr. Kurtz, an agent many miles inland whose franchise accounts for more than half of all the colonial spoils. Kurtz is legendary and expected to go great places on his return to Europe. And we learn what it is these colonists are up to. “The word ‘ivory’ rang in the air, was whispered, was sighed. You would think they were praying to it.” Marlow, in speaking to the station master, sees a portrait of a blindfolded woman holding a torch (very likely Astraea), but it appears sinister to him. It turns out to have been painted by Kurtz, who is believed to be quite the Renaissance man. It seems to at least this reader to be a warning that the practice of foisting Western ways on non-Western people is not going to end well.

Conrad briefly pulls us out of the dark midnight of Marlow’s tale described as a dream. “It had become so pitch dark that we listeners could hardly see one another. For a long time already he, sitting apart, had been no more to us than a voice. There was not a word from anybody. The others might have been asleep, but I was awake.”

Marlow resumes his tale, remarking that the minor colonial functionaries ensured uninterrupted trade in worthless glass beads, yet the rivets that could have repaired his boat never managed to find their way to him. Marlow resolves to get them in three weeks, but all that arrives is another colonial expedition looking for more spoils. “Their talk, however, was the talk of sordid buccaneers: it was reckless without hardihood, greedy without audacity, and cruel without courage; there was not an atom of foresight or of serious intention in the whole batch of them, and they did not seem aware these things are wanted for the work of the world. To tear treasure out of the bowels of the land was their desire, with no more moral purpose at the back of it than there is in burglars breaking into a safe.” Take that, Dick Cheney. Take that, United Fruit.

In Part II, Marlow runs upriver into the “heart of darkness.” It is as if he is moving back into the time of pterodactyls, into pre-history. He considers the thin veneer of civilization that Western man has accreted and the common humanity with the “cannibals” and “savages.” He ponders the ease with which a “cannibal” with a bone through his nose can be trained to watch the pressure gauges on a steamer. On the eve of arriving at Kurtz’s station, they stop at a deserted settlement and find a sign warning them to “approach cautiously.” They stop for the night, resolved to proceed cautiously by light of day. In the morning there is a thick fog and to all the “pilgrims” their steamer is the only object left in the world, everything else “gone, disappeared; swept off without leaving a whisper or a shadow behind.” Marlow asks why the steamer’s native crew (“thirty to five” Europeans) did not eat them. And all the passengers wonder at the unseen natives on the riverbanks: “Will they attack, do you think?” The question is answered the moment the arrows start flying at the vessel and a crewman is killed.

The main narrator then interjects in a sort of flash-forward, to point out that Marlow has lied to Kurtz’s wife – women need to be shielded from the truth – the truth, Marlow believes, is that Kurtz’s bleached skull will be found with a mountain of ivory he has collected. Marlow speculates on the identity of the half-British, half-French Kurtz – mentioning a report Kurtz has written for the Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs. “All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz.” It is a magnificent opus, Marlow believes. It suggests that savages can be elevated by the white man. Yet, at the end of the report, in unsteady handwriting, Kurtz has scrawled: “Exterminate all the brutes!” Marlow is faced with the decision to convey the report to its intended readers – or to “lose” it. Mainly he wants to preserve Kurtz’s memory, but he is undecided about the report. The fast-forward ends and finally Marlow’s steamer arrives at its destination and there he meets a young Russian who knows Kurtz.

In Part III, the Russian fills in Marlow on Kurtz and, through his binoculars, he sees Kurtz’s compound walls, surrounded by heads. Now we know the truth about the man. We meet a fierce, beautiful black woman who may have been Kurtz’s consort, and we learn that Kurtz ordered the attack on the steamer. But Kurtz is in bad shape and the natives return him to Marlow, whereupon he is loaded onto the boat and conveyed back out of the heart of darkness. On board he dies after many days, his last uttered words being “the horror, the horror.” Marlow returns to Belgium with Kurtz’s papers and the report (from which he as ripped the final scrawled page) and protectively guards Kurtz’s memory, even lying to Kurtz’s fiancee about his last words. The story returns to the prime narrator, who returns us to the story’s present – an old group of seafarers on a tranquil waterway flowing “into the heart of an immense darkness.”

I love this story because it so beautifully combines the political, the psychological, the cultural, and is written in Conrad’s beautiful language. His descriptions are always rich and thoughtful and – though European (and American) colonialism are officially gone – they linger about, continuing to wreak their horrors on the rest of the world.

This volume also contains three other stories.

• “Amy Foster” – a beautifully-written tale of a Slavic shipwreck victim who marries Amy Foster.

• “The Secret Sharer” – the tale of a ship’s captain who risks everything to help a murderer who steals aboard his ship.

• “Youth” – a wonderful story, with surprisingly modern and very poetic language, about a young officer on board an old ship hauling coal to Bangkok.

Review of “Anarchism and Other Essays” by Emma Goldman (ISBN 9780486224848)

This is a fascinating book. As Emma Goldman painted it, Anarchism is the ultimate in Western freedom, but at its core it is humanist and not a sociopathic cult of individual advantage (Ayn Rand comes to mind) – and certainly not the cult of terror as it was commonly portrayed. Yet Goldman and her comrades never succeeded in making Anarchism attractive to the public. This was due to constant character assassination by the corporate press, infighting, and whispers that Goldman was somehow associated with several high-profile assassinations, including President McKinley’s. The Anarchists themselves were passionate orators who spoke in generalities, were fond of using literary references, and they were not shy about stating that the public they were courting could sometimes be nothing more than a stupid mob. And they were arguing against nationalism and populism at a time these were quite popular. Anarchists were feared and reviled as ISIS is today, and J. Edgar Hoover’s modern FBI was created largely out of this fear.

Anarchism and Communism were both finished off by the corporate press, intense government surveillance, zealous prosecutions, show trials, executions, Congressional hearings, and the suppression of their ideas by legal edict. In the United States we have always had freedom of the press and expression – as long as any ideas expressed are in line with capitalism and nationalist fever.

Anarchism may be dead, but Goldman’s social and political criticism is as relevant as ever. In fact, reading this volume of individual essays written almost exactly a century ago is to realize how little has changed in this nation. Is our militarism, police brutality, neglect of the poor, social inequality, gun fever, our culture of violence, or the massive prison industry anything new? Read this book and weep. It has always been thus so.

The book’s first essay, “Anarchism,” argues successfully for individual freedoms and shows that the only function of the state is to guard a monopoly on violence for the benefit of oligarchs to whom the masses have stupidly given away their rights, wealth, and lives. True. But for all the Tolstoy and Emerson she quotes, Goldman does not really offer a picture of how Anarchism would actually work in practice. In fact, she is rather cagey about committing to any depiction of a new way of organizing society, except to say that social associations would be voluntary.

“Minorities versus Majorities” puts her on firmer theoretical ground, but her views insult the public. Jimmy Carter knew the sting of a public too dumb and proud to be chastised for its greed and shortsighted thinking. Don’t mess with the mob. Instead we prefer the rouged flattery of a Reagan who capitalized on our American 20 Mule Team Borax wholesomeness, Christliness and cleanliness. Goldman shows that majorities routinely persecute minorities and, worse, usually do so in the service of privileged minorities. Goldman could not have foreseen the Hobby Lobby case, but this is a perfect contemporary example of her point. She points out that public opinion is fickle and dangerous and that it tends to reject justice in favor of stasis. Goldman says it is individuals, not the masses, who generate new ideas that change the world. The crowd “clings to its masters, loves the whip, and is the first to cry Crucify!”

“The Psychology of Political Violence” attempts to explain why lone wolves were flaunting society’s monopoly on violence and using it themselves: “The ignorant mass looks upon the man who makes a violent protest against our social and economic iniquities as upon a wild beast, a cruel, heartless, monster, whose joy it is to destroy life and bathe in blood; or at least as an irresponsible lunatic.” She defends the bomb-throwing lone wolves and the authors of political manifestos (like the contemporary Unabomber). She sympathizes with those driven to insane acts by a cruel society: “The indisputable fact is that homicidal outrages have, from time immemorial, been the reply of goaded and desperate classes, and goaded and desperate individuals, to wrongs from their fellowmen, which they felt to be intolerable.” She lists the homicidal damage by the state: victims of wars of choice, victims of industrial accident, the poor who die of hunger, victims of police and Pinkerton killings: “Compared with the wholesale violence of capital and government, political acts of violence are but a drop in the ocean. That so few resist is the strongest proof how terrible must be the conflict between their souls and unbearable social iniquities.” And I agree. The terror of individuals is nothing compared with the terror of any state.

“Prisons” describes the huge prison industry that existed a century ago, and the prison-industrial complex built to permit corporations to further exploit the incarcerated. Sound familiar? Goldman quotes Dostoevsky and Oscar Wilde, something we would shy away from today – after all, there is no need to describe the actual human experience of being unjustly (or justly) jailed or condemned. She points out that in 1915 the U.S. was spending $6 billion a year to incarcerate people – five times the combined output of wheat and coal, and representing the greatest proportion of jailed people in the world. “Such unheard-of expenditure for the purpose of maintaining vast armies of human beings caged up like wild beasts.” Goldman points out that, whatever we are doing, it’s not working. We still have the most violent society in the world. She cites homicide rates of that time. Chicago then had 118 murders that year. London (5 times greater in population) had only 22. She points out that crime is a direct consequence of human desperation and quotes Havelock Ellis extensively. She examines the nature of crimes; from political to violent to economic, she charges society with creating the conditions for crime to flourish. Citing Quetelet, Lacassagne, and Ellis, she writes: in the end “every society has the criminals it deserves.”

“Patriotism: A menace to Liberty” cites the well-known Dr. Johnson quote describing patriotism as the “refuge of scoundrels.” Goldman describes how hyper-nationalism is nothing but a tool for encouraging a violent society to extend that violence to wars of opportunity. She cites Tolstoy’s conception of patriotism – “the principle that will justify the training of wholesale murderers; a trade that requires better equipment for the exercise of man-killing than the making of such necessities of life as shoes, clothing and houses; a trade that guarantees better returns and greater glory than that of the average workingman.” Goldman could not have foreseen the future when soldiers were elevated as gladiators to be publicly worshipped, thanked with several holidays a year, given preferential hiring, and granted economic, social, and even legal benefits denied others.

Goldman points out that the ruling class has its “cosmopolitan” (current word: “global”) interests, that patriotism is for chumps, for the masses. She hadn’t heard of Swiss or Cayman Island accounts but she points out that it is never the oligarchs who must sacrifice their children – they tend to get the officer positions far from the front. Quoting Carlisle: “war is a quarrel between two thieves too cowardly to fight their own battle; therefore they take boys from one village and another village, stick them into uniforms, equip them with guns, and let them loose like wild beasts against each other.” And then we wonder why our citizens act in greater proportion like wild beasts. Goldman speaks explicitly of the links between “militarism” and “commercialism.” In the end, she writes, war is incredibly profitable – at least for some people.

She brilliantly describes the benefits of a volunteer military (which the U.S. had at the time, just as we do today: “conscription has created in Europe a deep-seated hatred of militarism among all classes of society.” And “it is the compulsory feature of militarism which has created a tremendous anti-militarist movement, feared by the European Powers far more than anything else.” It seems when someone else is dying for questionable militaristic adventures we don’t bother to examine the reasons for it so closely. In fact, she says, capitalism is based on militarism: “The very moment the latter is undermined, capitalism will totter.” She points out that militarism is reinforced by economic security. She could not have foreseen how many men (40% from the South) signed up for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but she understood their economic motivations: “Is it not a fact that during industrial depressions there is a tremendous increase in the number of enlistments?” Goldman also could not have foreseen JROTC or the militaristic high school recruiting provisions in “No Child Left Behind,” but she wrote: “Evidently the government holds to the Jesuitical conception: ‘Give me the child mind, and I will mould the man.’ Children are trained in military tactics, the glory of military achievements extolled in the curriculum, and the youthful minds perverted to suit the government. Further, the youth of the country is appealed to in glaring posters to join the army and navy.”

The book also includes a pamphlet Goldman wrote defending the memory of Francisco Ferrer, an anti-cleric and anti-monarchist who was killed for his beliefs rather than actions by Alfonso León Fernando María Jaime Isidro Pascual Antonio de Borbón y Habsburgo-Lorena, otherwise known as King Alfonso XIII.

In addition to her political work, Goldman wrote literary and cultural commentary. “The Hypocrisy of Puritanism” aptly nails the stifling effects of Puritanism on American culture. “It is killing what is natural and healthy in our impulses.” The Puritan Fathers “established in the New World a reign of Puritanic tyranny and crime. […] Puritanism no longer employs the thumbscrew and lash; but it still has a most pernicious hold on the minds and feelings of the American people. […] With Puritanism as the constant check upon American life, neither truth nor sincerity is possible.” It is Puritanism, Goldman writes, that, “having suppressed the natural sex desires of the unmarried woman, […] blesses her married sister for incontinent fruitfulness in wedlock. Indeed, not merely blesses her, but forces the woman […] to bear children.” Goldman did not foresee the day when unmarried women, too, would be forced to bear children they did not want. Prostitution is “born of the hypocrisy of Puritanism.” It is the back-alley, the outlet, the furtive, the covert, the perverted expression of sexuality that, like much in this country, cannot breathe. To top it all off, she writes, the poor worker can’t even spend Sundays away from the gloom of Capitalism; he must attend church and permit himself to be lectured-to. Puritanism, in the end, contributes to stifled, miserable, unharmonious lives.

The Anarchists were among the earliest feminists. In “The Traffic in Women,” Emma Goldman describes how Capitalism and Puritanism create a culture in which women become commodities. She actually uses the word “commodity.” She also uses the phrase “double standard” when describing attitudes around sex for men and women. At first, a poor woman with no means of her own must resort to what she euphemistically calls “Mrs. Warren’s profession.” And these are working girls in every sense. “The average wage received by women is six dollars per week for forty-eight to sixty hours of work, and the majority of female wage workers face many months of idleness which leaves the average wage about $280 a year. In view of these economic horrors, is it to be wondered at that prostitution and the white slave trade have become such dominant factors?” Citing Margaret Sanger’s observations on women driven to prostitution by economic necessity, she writes: “Also it will do the maintainers of purity and morality good to learn that out of two thousand cases, 490 were married women, women who lived with their husbands. Evidently there was not much of a guaranty for their ‘safety and purity’ in the sanctity of marriage.” Goldman points out that the “sanctity of marriage” cannot survive poverty, much less natural inclinations. Much of her critique of sexual politics had its genesis in being ostracized by friends and comrades, and actually having to set up her seamstress shop (she did piece work) in a brothel, where she was treated kindly and where she began to see the women there as desperate, even moral, workers – only driven to the profession by necessity. Citing Havelock Ellis, Goldman saw the institution of marriage in a patriarchy as inherently corrupt: “The wife who married for money, compared with the prostitute, is the true scab. She is paid less, gives much more in return in labor and care, and is absolutely bound to her master. The prostitute never signs away her freedom and personal rights, nor is she always compelled to submit to man’s embrace.” For women, Goldman described marriage as a “miserable institution which they can not outgrow.”

In “Woman Suffrage” Goldman turns her attention to universal suffrage, the right of women to vote. But she warns women that the vote alone will not set them free. Starting with Christianity, she writes: “Religion, especially the Christian religion, has condemned women to the life of an inferior, a slave. It has thwarted her nature and fettered her soul, yet the Christian religion has no greater supporter, none more devout, than woman.” Goldman could not predict the Palins and Bachmanns of today, so she must have had extraordinary powers of discernment. War, too, oppresses women, leaving them bereft, lonely, often without resources. Her energies are sapped and sucked by housekeeping. “Yet woman clings tenaciously to the home, to the power that holds her in bondage.” She mocks the power of the vote and asks what it has bought men: “The poor, stupid, free American citizen! Free to starve, free to tramp the highways of this great country, he enjoys universal suffrage, and, by that right, he has forged chains about his limbs. The reward that he receives is stringent labor laws prohibiting the right of boycott, of picketing, in fact, of everything except the right to be robbed of the fruits of his labor.” She looks in several countries where women have the vote and finds individual freedoms there completely lacking. In four states which already permit women to vote, Puritanism keeps them in their place. She cites Emmeline Pankhurst on economic equality. Without economic parity there can be no equality. Why, after 100 years and thousands of observations like Goldman’s, is this still so? And then she takes on class.

“The Tragedy of Woman’s Emancipation” was written as women’s suffrage was partly underway. It is in some ways a meditation on What’s Next? Goldman realized that emancipation would not be panacea. She predicted continuing wage inequality with men; that women now functioning independently would be afraid to “marry down” because of class concerns; that “love would rob her of her freedom and independence; […] that motherhood will only hinder her in the full exercise of her profession.” Goldman somehow saw the future long before women had to discover how to “lean in” and attack “glass ceilings.” She cites a book by Laura Marholm on exceptional women of the day: Eleonora Duse; Sonya Kovalevskaia; and others. She writes that the more exceptional the woman, the more difficult it is to find a mate who will love her and awaken love in her: “In the case of the modern woman, these attributes serve as a hindrance to the complete assertion of her being.” It has taken a hundred years for some men to cherish exceptional women; but even here nothing is perfect.

“Marriage and Love” is a savage attack on the institution of marriage. “On rare occasions one does hear of a miraculous case of a married couple falling in love after marriage, but on close inspection it will be found that it is a mere adjustment to the inevitable.” Ouch. “Marriage is primarily an economic arrangement. […] Its returns are insignificantly small compared with the investments.” Double Ouch. “Dante’s motto over Inferno applies with equal force to marriage: ‘Ye who enter here leave all hope behind.'” Triple Ouch, anyone? She declares marriage as a failed institution; every twelvth marriage ends in divorce. She obviously didn’t see a 50% failure rate coming. “Can there be anything more outrageous than the idea that a healthy, grown woman, full of life and passion, must deny nature’s demand, must subdue her most intense craving, undermine her health and break her spirit, must stunt her vision, abstain from the depth and glory of sex experience until a “good” man comes along to take her unto himself as a wife? […] How can such an arrangement end except in failure?”

“The Modern Drama” is Emma Goldman sticking her toe into literary criticism. She was exceptionally knowledgable of literature in French, German, Russian, English, and Yiddish and frequently cited contemporary writers in these languages. She tipped her hat to Tolstoy, Turgenev, Dostoyevsky, Andreiev, Gorki, Whitman, Chekov, Mirbeau, Zola, Maupassant, Holz, Suderman – and others. Her influences would have been chiefly European Naturalists writing fiction and drama. But Drama, the theater, was especially dear to her heart. She had nothing against propaganda and pamphleteering. She did it herself. But she especially venerated the theater as a place where people could see humanity in a mirror. She saw drama also as a way to suggest new values to society. For this reason it is not difficult to understand why she especially loved Ibsen’s plays. Much of this essay is analysis of plots; what the characters and their strivings meant to her. And, by extension, to humanity.

She was something. I would have to add her to my list of exceptional women of history I’d like to meet in a time machine. Rosa Parks, Emma Goldman, Rosa Luxemburg…

The introduction to this collection by Richard Drinnon is aptly titled “Harking Back to the Future,” which was absolutely perfect. Emma Goldman was way ahead of her times, and a century later is still way ahead of ours.

Review of Orfeo by Richard Powers

We don’t fully understand the link with Orfeo (Orpheus) until the end of Richard Powers’ book, when we have to acknowledge Els’ life’s goal in hindsight as the strivings, like Orfeus, of the musical being known for his ability to charm all living things, capable of even moving stones to tears. Like Orfeo, Els dies at the hands of those who cannot hear his divinely-inspired music. The Greek historian Strabo wrote of Orpheus as a mortal suspected of hatching a violent plot by his killers – and this is pretty much what happens to poor Peter Els in the book.

As I began reading Orfeo, it struck me that Peter’s father’s death merited only a quarter of a page, yet the author’s digressions on Kindertotenlieder and his dead dog, Fidelio, and the reminiscences of their attendance of musical funerals (really!) went on for pages. Powers worked a little too hard to sell us the notion that Els was a high-strung music geek – the kind who has a little eight year-old’s erection when he hears dissonant music for the first time. Please. I was really not enjoying the book at first.

But it did eventually get better.

Within short order we learn that Els is obsessed with the notion of creating transcendent music, something good, something unique, something remarkable, something possibly even holy. Unfortunately he cannot seem to find it in a world that filters out so much, that has such a short attention span: a world that generates and treats music like a commodity. Intermixing hints of the godliness of Els’ goals – and hints of a social critique of art in a capitalist society – muddies Powers’ theme.

In the first 70+ pages we find Els persisting in his art, but also taking the occasional shortcut. He experiments with Markov chains – probabilistic state machines that permit new states to be randomly generated. If you’ve heard it – and it exists – Markov chain-generated music is dull and lifeless, even when using many orders of complexity and tweaked by a human hand. It is unsurprising that Els moves on to something more alive – though randomness is at the heart of both his music and his life.

Els is explicitly compared to Faust several times – more muddying. He makes the acquaintance of Richard Bonner, a performance artist and artistic co-conspirator described as “seductive,” and he begins to see the act of making art as not simply bold but subversive. Is Orfeo the story of a Faust’s fatal seductions by a Mephistopheles or is it what happens when artists have impossibly high ambitions and are not understood?

Ultimately, Els’ wife Maddy, once a fringe musician herself but now a responsible wife and mother, begins to appear to him as a “schoolmarm” and his marriage and relationship with daughter Sara founder as he goes his own way and they move to Saint Louis. He lives a somewhat itinerant existence until (by random chance, again) he becomes a lowly adjunct professor in a charity appointment.

Much of the plot of Orfeo is counterposed with events of the Sixties through 9/11. There is the occasional reference to theory of art under capitalism (recalling Adorno and the Frankfurter school). In numerous places music (recounting the experiences of Messaiaen and Shostakovich, for example) is described as subversive to the state, and even Els’ innocent project of producing music with a telephone keypad for his daughter may have had unintended consequences (unwittingly dialing emergency services) that leave him on a Homeland Security watchlist. Creating custom sequences of DNA encoded with music might have seemed like conceptual art to Els, but in post 9/11 Amerika it is an attack on die Heimat, Verrat gegen das Vaterland.

Many reviews of the book seem to peg Orfeo as an exercise in music appreciation, and no doubt Powers adores the composers he describes. However, for “civilians” like me it was also a book about seeking patterns and manipulating them. Many of the obsessions of practitioners of art, music, and literature seem to center on recognition of patterns and concepts, and/or imposing, forcing, shoe-horning, conjuring, or wishing them [just as often inartfully] into some kind of artistic vision. To some degree, everyone in Els’ family is guilty of this offense: his doomed authoritarian father; his brother Paul, a conspiracy theorist; and his sister Susan, living in an ashram in India. Els, either by temperament or choice of collaborators, is looking for meaning in nature and working mightily to convert nature into meaning. Even Els daughter Sara is a data mining whiz – perhaps the ultimate in pattern recognition pursuits. Maybe there’s no avoiding it: it’s just what we humans do.

There is a sequence in the book early on in which Els goes for his morning walk and encounters a Spandex goddess running while listening to her iPod, filtering thousands of melodies by sending them like a concentration camp guard either to the right, where they live for a closer listening later, or to the left, where they meet a certain death. “The job of taste was to thin the insane torrent of human creativity down to manageable levels. But the job of appetite was never to be happy with taste.” We learn that Els has a rule for himself: that he will always listen through to the end of a piece. This flaunts the practices of a society whose teens are drowning in Adderall. After attempting to listen to the hour-long pieces Powers has chosen to describe in the novel, I confess to firmly belonging to the ranks of Adderall philistines. Life is too short to honor or indulge every artist’s notion.

Society’s brutal winnowing principle is not just for the products of art but for artists as well. Society surrounds “dangerous” art and artists like macrophages attacking pathogens – a principle reflected in the paranoia overtaking our nation. “The race now bunkered down behind the barricades, surrounded by illegals and sleeper cells of every imaginable strain.” Once Els goes on the run, someone discovers an old composition of his and “mines” the lyrics for dangerous and subversive references. Society is clearly afraid of challenge and provocation – if nowhere else than in the citizenry’s pointy little heads.

Els is painfully aware that his artistic search is not bringing him any pleasure, nor does it seem to bring anyone else much. In England after a traffic-direction miscalculation has killed his mother while vacationing there, Els goes to a pub and sees happy publicans singing to crude tunes: “People at pushed-together tables sang club football songs, swaying to more communal pleasure in three minutes than Peter’s music had created in thirty years.” How easy it is for artists to doubt themselves. And sometimes with inexplicably good reason.

Our protagonist lives in an age in which randomness, chaos, and lack of control are what truly set the world in motion. And why should his art not reflect this reality? Watching the Arab Spring unfold, we see it through Els’ eyes: “As in every large production Els had ever worked on, chaos called the tune.” Thus, we can imagine, his interest in musical DNA was hatched.

Still in England, Els visits his first love, Clara, who has set him on his artistic trajectory. They have dinner and she takes him upstairs to her bedroom, telling him everything is on the table, anything is possible – and he flees from her. It seems tragic to the reader but Els senses the same danger in Clara that society senses in him – and he does not have the courage to live life on these terms. He really doesn’t know in which world he belongs. On the one hand, he is Sara’s father (“make something good, daddy”) and on the other a subversive wannabe. This is the tragedy of the book. He cannot be a god.

Els eventually writes an opera entitled “City of God.” It is a Reformation tragedy based on actual events in Münster, Germany. A group of Protestant religious fanatics who have become polygamists believe the earthly world must end before a heavenly kingdom replaces it. Bonner is a collaborator in the production, but it is threatened by oddly similar events unfolding in real time in Waco, Texas. We learn that Els is not in the enterprise solely for fame, since he pulls away from his own opera when Waco hits the news. Something else motivates him (l’art pour l’art)? Somehow we start taking his music more seriously, seeing him as more artistically principled, but simultaneously as more timid.

Els, based on positive reviews of his opera, is then offered a job as an adjunct music professor and one of his students comes for musical advice, showing him a complex composition it turns out was written by software called “Sibelius” – a “program that turns an average tunesmith into Orpheus.” Shortcuts call out to Els again. Is he himself an average tunesmith who needs a lab full of DNA to make him another Orpheus. The answer is: yes.

After concocting his test-tube music and being investigated after his dog’s death, the seventy-one year-old Els goes on the run, first visiting a therapist with whom he once had an affair, his ex-wife, Bonner (now in an Arizona care facility for Alzheimer’s patients), and finally his daughter. By now we have learned that Els has tinnitus, brain lesions which have affected his musical sensibilities, and Bonner has convinced him that, as long as he is considered a terrorist, he might as well engender a little terror – by leaving a trail of vaguely incriminating Tweets. As Els navigates to his daughter’s house in a borrowed car with “the Voice” app on a borrowed cellphone, he notices the marks of tramps and vagrants on the highway, recalling a composer who memorialized them. To a consummate pattern-seeker like Els there are signs and wonders everywhere. His frame of reference has always been musical, but ultimately all of life is just random noise.

Finally Els arrives at his daughter’s house. He notices she has a piano and has not, apparently, rejected everything musically important to him. But, having sufficiently alarmed Homeland Security, Els is now surrounded by a SWAT team. With his musical powers gone and seeing his life as one huge mistake, Els decides to “arm” himself with a thin flower vase – art as a weapon – all too easily confused with a beaker of pathogens. We know how this sad story is going to end – and in the tragic end the novel is ultimately focused on society’s fear of art and the difficult path to it by artists of any stripe – not solely as a music appreciation project by Powers, the failed composer.

I had an overwhelmingly negative reaction to Pascal Mercier’s “Night Train to Lisbon,” a book our reader’s group chose this month. After a couple hundred pages it was clear to me that things were not going to get better but I ploughed on, hoping for the best. Unfortunately, the author never give it to us.

In theater, when someone says “hey, want some peanuts?” it’s something you notice. The second time it’s either a coincidence or a phrase that puts the audience on alert. The third time you hear “hey, want some peanuts?” you’ve entered the world of farce. This is what happens when a boring Swiss man, who can just barely manage to read Portuguese with the aid of a dictionary, is showered with manuscript after manuscript after letter after letter after note after valedictory speech by people who eagerly and inexplicably invite him into their lives — and who all seem to have reams of the stuff — never (as one would expect) in a single closet or shoebox. And, to boot, these are all people who just happen to be able to recite, verbatim and at theatrical length, arcane passages from these profound nuggets they have preserved apparently just for the eyes of the Good Burgher Gregorius — people who are always alive after 80 or 90 years, and who are always conveniently at home when Gregorius calls. Farce.

Then I disliked our epistolary hero, Amadeus. The dude had it all — money, private schools, parents who encouraged him, pushed him to excel, sisters who worshipped him. He had looks, brains, and talent. Yet he spent his life whining about everything. Where did all this Weltschmerz come from? And it is a mystery to me, given the vast quantity of letters he appears to have written incessantly, how he actually managed to study for medical school or even run a practice. Maybe it’s just me but, despite the many observations he raised in the hundreds of pages of italics which have now permanently damaged my eyes, there was never a true center to Amadeus. Thus the many relationships he had with friends, family, comrades, his wife, or his lover, were like gears that never actually meshed in reality. Mercier only projects a cardboard gearworks. This book, then, was never anything more than a highbrow Harlequin romance.

If I disliked Amadeus, I despised Gregorius. Here was a guy who chose to spend his life being a shmoe, with his nose firmly stuck only in past realities — or more accurately – in comforting fictions. And he had absolutely no sense of the world he actually lived in. Personally, I can identify on one level with a fellow with bad eyesight who loves languages and is bewitched by a feeling that speaking in, and living in, a different culture gives you a kind of second life. But Gregorius had such an unbelievably tenuous grasp of the reality around him, even in Portugal, that the book just didn’t work for me. Gregorius was less than the cardboard cutout Mercier presents us.

I wrote these notes in Mexico, where many people have done precisely what Gregorius did — taken off suddenly and started a new life. But you know what? These people manage to have cocktail parties, spouses, friends, hobbies, pictures on the wall, and they don’t take up trying to learn Farsi while simultaneously memorizing Spanish conjugations at the Gringo language schools. I wanted to slap Gregorius. Hard. But then he had that mysterious neurological condition that went nowhere, like most of the plotlines in the book.

For a book written in the God voice, Mercier’s characters are incredibly two dimensional, especially the women. In over 400 pages, we should have known Gregorius’ mind much better, or that of his sisters. But with an excess of blah-blah and an almost total lack of dialog, how could we ever learn who any of these people are?

Then there’s what passes for plot. Besides the massive number of PASSAGENS INSUPORTAVELMENTES PRESUMIDOS UNBEARABLY PRETENTIOUS PASSAGES a reader must suffer, I kept waiting for something to happen. And, as the joke goes about a waiting Swiss wife, nothing much ever did. The structure of the whole book rests on flat, inconsistent, implausible characters and piles of disconnected thought written in a score of third person voices, all of which sound suspiciously identical.

And why the hell would Gregorius ever begin his quest in the first place? An apparently suicidal woman writes a phone number on his forehead and he instantly decides to run off to Portugal? Please! We never learn who is on the other end of the phone in Lisbon, but it was apparently a working number — unlike our protagonist. To me this dropped detail, one of dozens, points to shoddy literary workmanship. Mercier’s book reminds me of THE ARTIST. I know both the book and the modern silent film won awards for their — uniqueness — but I just can’t see why.

One of the things our bourgeois, prep-school revolutionary, Señhor Amadeus, rails against is Kitsch. If he had ever truly been a living, breathing character, he’d be rolling over in his Lisbon grave over this book.

One of the definitions of the German loan word Kitsch is “a tasteless copy of a work of real art.” Another common definition is “art that chooses aesthetics that convey exaggerated sentimentality and melodrama.” I think both of these more than apply to the book. Mercier’s characters constantly spew forth melodramatic utterances worthy of Mexican telenovelas. But, frankly, all the characters sound the same. Whether it’s Amadeus at seventeen or Jorge, or Adriana, or Silveira.

Our old friend, the real writer, Milan Kundera, calls Kitsch “the absolute denial of shit” – in other words, a sanitized, Disneyesque reality that poses no real questions and only forces sentimentality down our throats. While Mercier makes hundreds of sad observations, there is no truly coherent point of view, there are no questions asked in earnest. Only incessant “why mommy’s.”

Art historian Clement Greenberg (Art and Culture, 1978) equates uninspired adherence to “academic” schools of thought with Kitsch. Mercier may not belong to an Academie des Beaux Arts but, when we peel away his pseudonym, it turns out that Herr Doktor Peter Bieri is indeed an ex-academic who (in extreme contrast to some of my esteemed ex-academic, truly artistic friends) has not strayed far from the dusty papers of a past life as philosopher of time, mind, and ethics. Sadly, we are treated to pages of italicized ramblings that I suspect have largely been pulled from Bieri’s own private journals.

Ultimately, Gregorius returns to Bern, looks up his ex-wife, gets checked into a clinic by his Greek opthalmologist chess-playing, always on-call for psychological counseling buddy, and the novel grinds to a merciful but long-overdue end. But in the absence of any real plot or meaningful character development, the ending is very unsatisfying — especially after 438 pages of literary torture.

Will Gregorius put on his new glasses and stylish clothes, fuck the brains out of Florence and take her off to Salamanca – or anywhere but Bern? Or will he stay in those thick glasses and academic corduroy and go back to the dreary job that Kägi is holding for him?

You know what? Who gives a shit?

In the first several chapters of her 1951 book On the Origins of Totalitarianism Hannah Arendt examined 19^th century anti-Semitism and provided a class analysis of how it arose. As a classless group often associated with, under the protection of, providing services to, or granted special rights by the monarchy, Jews became a proxy for class antagonisms with the monarchy and among the European classes. First a declining aristocracy, then a scattered group of small political parties, each discovered that Jews were a useful substitute for challenging state power directly, and that anti-Jewish sentiment could be easily linked to religious antipathy for Judaism. The state religions, for their part, were only too happy to oblige. Even after the collapse of European monarchies, Jews continued to play a similar role in nationalist movements. And, of course, imperialism played a part in defining anti-Semitism.

Arendt’s analysis differs from the normative Jewish view, recited at Passover each year, that “in every generation they rise against us to destroy us.” Arendt dismissed this as a hollow explanation of anti-Semitism, but admitted it serves another purpose:

“In this situation, Jews concerned with the survival of their people would, in a curious desperate misinterpretation, hit on the consoling idea that anti-Semitism, after all, might be an excellent means for keeping the people together, so that the assumption of external anti-Semitism would even imply an eternal guarantee of Jewish existence.”

Arendt noted that the Jewish view was, strangely, precisely the same that the anti-Semites had of Jews. There was nothing historically unique, really, about a particular group of Jews. All Jews were simply an eternal plague to be fought, put down, or got rid of and, as she notes from Nazi records, anti-Semites coolly exterminated Jews without particular animus.

Whether one agrees with Arendt’s class analysis or not, it still seems clear that the historical causes of, and flavors of, anti-Semitism must be varied; that the relationship of Jews to the states in which they were persecuted — often first as protected, perhaps emancipated, in some cases elevated to the nobility — is not simple and does not indicate a generic, unwavering hate of Jews shared by everyone in every age. How otherwise could German Jews have succeeded in bourgeois society in the 18^th and 19^th centuries? How could Jews have attained influential posts in the various empires in which they lived during exile? The Book of Esther disqualifies itself as history but still seems to be a potent myth.

And if Arendt’s mechanics of anti-Semitism are correct and class antagonisms are at the heart of anti-Semitism, how then can antagonism to the state of Israel be explained? Since Andre Sakharov’s revisionist definition of anti-Semitism (based mainly on opposition to a Jewish state and not confined to simple baseless hatred) virtually every Diaspora Jewish organization has taken more interest in defending the state of Israel than in pursuing justice for individual victims of hate crimes. Arendt’s higher standard for defining anti-Semitism doesn’t seem to be at work in organizations like the ADL. But the Purimspil is recited as if a fact.

Could it be that antagonism toward Israel has nothing to do with Jews and everything to do with Zionism?

I just read Tom Segev’s book, 1949: The First Israelis (ISBN 978-0805058963). Segev calls himself a First historian, as opposed to a New historian, in using only recently-available archive materials from the Knesset and national archives. 1949 is the story of the first years of the new Jewish state, told in the words of those who created it. There are many quotes, for example, from Ben Gurion’s diaries and from transcripts of Knesset sessions and other government meetings.

Segev spends a lot of time on Israeli immigration, the secular/religious divide, government austerity programs, school system(s), the relationship to other governments (particularly the US), and what is striking is that, as Ecclesiastes 1:9 puts it, “that which hath been is that which shall be, and that which hath been done is that which shall be done; and there is nothing new under the sun” applies nicely to tensions in the Jewish state which persist to this date.

For example, post-Zionism – the view that Zionism has done its job and that it’s now time to move on to make Israel a “normal” nation – is currently seen in Israel as a discredited aberration of the 1980’s and 1990’s. Or anti-Zionism – calling for a single, secular state of Jews and Arabs – is now seen as a contemporary response to the failure of a Two State solution. But Segev discusses some of the voices of the Canaanite Movement, like Yohanan Ratosh, who foresaw an Israel eventually without Jews. Of course, breaking as it did from right-wing Revisionist Zionism, the Canaanite movement was hostile to not only Judaism and Eastern European Yiddishkeit, but Islam and Arab civilization as well. It envisioned a secular, Hebraized, Middle Eastern culture encompassing former Jews, Arabs, and Druze. Other groups, like the Hashomer Hatzair, were militantly anti-religious. Organizations like “The League for the Prevention of Religious Coercion” sprang up within 3 years of the founding of the state. Religious Jews were described as “God’s Cossacks.”

Recent riots in Jerusalem over a parking lot could have been torn from the headlines of 1949. In May of that year, the haredi (ultra-Orthodox) rioted over ticket sales for movies on the Sabbath, and over automobile traffic in the Meah Shearim quarter. The haredi, operating on the warnings in Jeremiah 17:27, took “reproof” to mean even physical violence – arson, rock-throwing, home invasions, bare knuckles, and even biting people – and rioting were justified in protecting the peaceful day of rest. Segev, in the chapter entitled “The Battle for the Sabbath,” recounts how (to avoid writing) the ultra-Orthodox bent down the corners of their prayer books containing page numbers to record the license plates of Sabbath violators, whose cars were then torched later in the week.

Segev reminds us that American peace envoys have been involved in Palestine since the very founding of the state of Israel. In September 1948, when the Swedish UN negotiator, Folke Bernadotte, was murdered by Zionist terrorists, Ralph Bunche took over the UN negotiator’s role. Bunche negotiated the 1949 armistice agreement, for which he was awarded the 1950 Nobel Peace Prize.

And the Israeli relationship with America has often been as troubled as it is today. Although the United States was the first nation to recognize Israel, our support of the state was not the one-sided love-fest now cited by Israel’s defenders. Apparently, in recognizing Israel, the United States also expected (imagine!) that an Arab state would soon follow, in realizing the two states apportioned to the land by the United Nations. And the United States was dismayed by Israel’s already apparent plans to sacrifice peace for more land. Segev writes: > Mark Ethridge, the US delegate to the Lausanne conference, wrote President Truman that Israel’s inclination to base her future on her military security, while forgoing the chance of making peace, seemed “unbelievable,” in view of her being such a tiny state. According to him, he had tried to explain to the Israelis that they were endangering their own future and that of the entire Western world, but his efforts had been in vain.

Truman himself wrote to Ben-Gurion arguing in behalf of an Arab state “because he sympathized with the suffering of the Palestinian refugees, just as he had earlier supported the Zionist cause because he had sympathized with the Jewish refugees…” Ben-Gurion fumed about Truman’s letter: > The State of Israel was not established as a consequence of the UN Resolution. Neither America nor any other country saw the resolution through, nor did they stop the Arab countries (and the British mandatory government) from declaring total war on us in violation of UN resolutions. America did not raise a finger to save us, and moreover, imposed an arms embargo… […] There are no refugees – there are fighters who sought to destroy us, root and branch. […] The rebuke and the threatening style [of Truman’s letter] are incomprehensible.

Interestingly, not all distrust of the United States resulted from Israel’s rejection of American even-handedness. Some of it sprang from Israel’s founding as a state that rejected, at least initially, both Western civilization and capitalism. At the founding of Israel in 1948, MAPAM represented Marxist Zionists and had the second largest bloc, next to Ben-Gurion’s MAPAI party. But even Ben-Gurion himself did not regard Israel as a capitalist state. During the “austerity debates,” which resulted from immigration which overtook Israel’s ability to provide jobs and housing for the new olim, Ben-Gurion defended a planned and controlled economic system. He famously declared, “the state of Israel is not a capitalist state.”

Likewise, Americans were suspected of being members of the CIA with “Arabist” motives. When “Fred Harris”, a freelance American military advisor, actually one Fred Grunich, was asked by Ben-Gurion for his military advice, many in the Knesset openly interpreted the real motivation to the desire by the United States to spy on Israel.  American Jews too were seen as convenient sources of money but were regarded as second-rate Jews who were not prepared to suffer for the new state, as their Polish brethren had.

Israel’s selective enforcement of laws and endemic corruption have likewise been present since its founding, mainly as a consequence of the internal tensions within Israeli society, which have often caused competing groups to “look the other way” to either bolster their own power or prevent offense to another group. The take-away message is that Israel has always been less a nation of laws than a collection of ideologies and a series of handshake agreements. Conflict between religious blocks, MAPAM, and MAPAI, and major organizations like the Histradrut, the JNF, and the army actually made many fear civil war in the early years.

The discussion of the Nakba, now disputed and actually criminalized in Israel, is recounted in a number of memos and letters by various cabinet and Knesset members of Israel’s first government. As Arab village after village and Arab city after city were emptied and its inhabitants deported, it became clear that it was deliberate. While the American ambassador, James McDonald, argued for a return of the refugees, Ben-Gurion was “as hard as a rock” in his rejection of this. Moshe Sharett wrote: > The most spectacular event in the contemporary history of Palestine, in a way more spectacular than the creation of the Jewish state, is the wholesale evacuation of its Arab population. […] The opportunities opened up by the present reality for a lasting and radical solution of the most vexing problem of the Jewish state, are so far-reaching, as to take one’s breath away. The reversion to the status quo ante is unthinkable.

Josef Weitz, head of the Jewish National Fund, proposed measures designed to drive internally displaced refugees even farther into desolate areas: > They must be harassed continually.

1949 recounts the stories of the aliyot of Yemenite and Polish olim. Yemenites were regarded as savages and were subjected to horrendous conditions in the resettlement camps in Israel. Polish immigrants, by contrast, were put up in hotels.

The Kulturkampf between religious and secular worlds in Israel occupies a large portion of Segev’s book, particularly in the story of the Israeli school systems(s). Censorship, laws, agrarian policy, immigration, defense, housing, settlements – any topic the first Knesset ever discussed – is mentioned in this very readable, exceptionally interesting book.