Throwback Thursday: Hillbilly Elegy

 J.D. Vance has been in the news lately because he announced his candidacy for senator in Ohio. He's running in the Republican primary and so he's had to do his mandatory obeisance to the head of his party. He made the obligatory pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago to kiss the ring and, I suppose, apologize for failing to be an enthusiastic supporter in 2016. He has continued to apologize publicly for the negative comments about the candidate that he made in that political season and to explain that he believes the winner of the election was an excellent president.

I read and reviewed Vance's best-selling memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, in 2019. Here's a "throwback" of that review.

~~~

Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance: A review

February 27, 2019

I have resisted reading this book. It wasn't really hard. I don't usually read memoirs or biographies, so I wasn't particularly tempted. Plus, I wrote my own (metaphorical) hillbilly elegy long ago and wasn't really interested in reading somebody else's.

Yes, I grew up as a hillbilly, too. But my "hills" were several hundred miles south of the ones in Kentucky/Ohio that J.D. Vance called home. My heritage, though, is much the same Scots-Irish ancestry and culture as his.

Moreover, the rural community where I grew up was poor as Vance says his was. However, based on his descriptions of his family's holdings and income, they would likely have been considered middle-class where I lived. But perhaps poverty, at least to some extent, is in the eye of the beholder or in the perception of the one who experiences it.

At any rate, Vance's memoir of himself and his family and the poverty they experienced and how they pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps stayed on the best-seller list month after month after month, taunting me it seemed. And finally, after recently reading and enjoying Tara Westover's memoir, Educated, I felt that perhaps I was ready for another. So, somewhat reluctantly, I picked up Hillbilly Elegy.

What I found was a mesmerizing story of what appeared on the outside to be a dysfunctional family that still managed to function and care for its members on some level. The memoir part of Vance's tale was compelling, particularly his portraits of the grandparents who were the center of the family and who were his anchor and salvation as his mother descended into drug addiction and went through a long series of thoroughly hapless men, only one or two of whom actually took an interest in and tried to relate to her two children. His father had long since been absent.

His family, including his grandparents, were violent; their main claim to fame and a source of pride was their connection to the famous Hatfields of the Hatfield and McCoy Feud. Both the grandparents carried guns and Vance repeatedly refers to his grandmother, the chief influence in his life, as a pistol-packing lunatic who promised to kill anyone who dared harm him. He believed her and loved her for it.

This portrait of a family and its rise out of poverty is paired with a good bit of right-wing political polemic which I found less mesmerizing. He writes about the country's descent into what he sees as a nanny state, with generous government benefits that suck all of the initiative from their recipients. While his family is hard-working and always striving to better themselves, he sees his neighbors as lazy and shiftless. He complains about "welfare queens" and food stamp recipients shopping at the grocery store, walking through the check-out line while talking on their expensive cell phones and paying for their T-bone steaks with food stamps. Alternatively, he complains of food stamp recipients buying nothing but sugary drinks and snacks with their benefits. He is very condescending toward these people who somehow missed the boat when the Scots-Irish stubborn pride was being distributed. He never considers that their challenges might even be greater than his and that they, too, are trying to better themselves and the lives of their children. Empathy seems a concept foreign to him.

Having worked as a social worker and supervisor of social work for more than thirty years, I have quite another view of the poor. Sure, there are those that are lazy and lack initiative, but most are struggling for a better life. Many work two and even three jobs to try to support their families. If they receive government benefits, they are a supplement to their own efforts.

In describing his hard work to achieve his middle-class status, Vance elides over the part that government benefits played in his own rise; namely, his four years as a Marine gave him discipline and leadership skills and his service subsequently helped to pay for his education.

In addition, he got lucky with his friends and his contacts who helped him along the way. Not everyone manages to have such luck.

This book came out in the middle of the presidential election year of 2016 and it fed into the stereotypes propounded by one of those campaigns - the undeserving poor who constantly make bad choices and are to blame for their own poverty. It's wasteful and useless to spend taxpayer money on them. Conservatives ate it up.

In an afterword written later, Vance wants us to know that although he admired some things about the Republican presidential candidate such as his "outsider" status and his scorn for the "elites" (This from a graduate of Yale Law School!), he did not vote for him. No, he kept his honor and voted for the third party candidate.

Throwback Thursday: The new Know-Nothings

Earlier this week, I read a column in The New York Times by Paul Krugman titled "A Plague of Willful Ignorance" and later the same day a Washingon Post column titled "The U.S. is falling behind its peers. Americans - if not their leaders - are starting to notice." The columns pricked my memory. Hadn't I written something along those same lines a few years ago? A search through the blog archives revealed that my memory was correct. Almost eight years ago in 2012, I had written this post about "The new Know-Nothings." Little could I have guessed at the time to what levels these Know-Nothings would sink. They have left their nineteenth-century forbears in the dust when it comes to willful ignorance.

~~~

Thursday, September 27, 2012

The new Know-Nothings

I was reading a story about Bill Nye, the Science Guy, a couple of days ago when I came across a sentence that literally made me groan out loud. It said, "In June, a Gallup poll revealed that 46 percent of Americans believe that God created humans in their present form about 10,000 years ago." So much for science and the fossil record. So much for critical thinking. These people prefer to accept the Bible as their scientific and historical text and not worry their little heads about any more complicated explanations. Oh, well, I guess we should just be relieved that the percentage wasn't even higher.

As the story pointed out, the United States stands alone among modern industrialized states in this Know-Nothingism. It's only in the most backward and theocratic places on earth that you would find such a high percentage of people who refuse to acknowledge evolution as settled science.

The same disheartening assessment can be made regarding human-caused global warming. The United States is the center, the hotbed of denialism.

Indeed, a denial of evolution and a denial of global climate change seem to go hand-in-hand. Both refusals to accept the facts established by science involve a kind of magical thinking. Dinosaurs and humans walked the earth at the same time and Noah carried two of them onto the Ark! God is looking out for us and will not allow the earth's systems to be destroyed by human negligence; therefore, global warming cannot be happening. Both thought processes, of course, absolve humans of any responsibility for the consequences of their actions.

In this march back to the Dark Ages, Texas Republicans proudly lead the way. Earlier this year, they came up with a party platform that sought to ban the teaching of critical thinking skills in schools! Their reason was that critical thinking causes people to focus on behavior modification and, according to them, it has "the purpose of challenging the student's fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority." Heaven forbid that a fifteen-year-old should be forced to reexamine his/her "fixed beliefs" or that s/he should question whether father really knows best. 

This refusal of a large percentage of Americans to think critically and rationally about issues facing them and the country certainly goes a long way toward explaining many of the problems which our society has. It truly is enough to make one despair of the future. In fact, Bill Nye himself seems to despair of the adults whose brains are already ossified, but, in a video that is making its way around the Internet, he asks them please not to impose their beliefs on their children.


It seems a reasonable argument to me. Let the kids think for themselves and make up their own minds. Somehow, though, I doubt it will be persuasive to that 46 percent that the Gallup pollsters counted.

Throwback Thursday: Unsheltered by Barbara Kingsolver

I was recently reminded of this book by my blogging friend, Judy Krueger, and I've been thinking about it for a few days. I read it a couple of years ago and loved it but it seems even more timely now as so many of us are sheltering in place. Our shelters have become increasingly important to us. And what of those who have no shelter? The characters in this book faced that prospect.

~~~

Wednesday, November 28, 2018

Unsheltered by Barbara Kingsolver: A review

Is it my flawed memory or have there been an unusual number of new books out this year that have featured a house as a central character? It seems to me that many of the books that I've read recently have had a house as an important element in the plot. And now here comes Barbara Kingsolver's contribution to the genre.

Perhaps the emphasis on houses - shelters - is a reflection of the unsettled times in which we live when it seems only natural to long for sanctuary and asylum from the daily onslaught of ineptitude, belligerence, and outright brainlessness that seem to rule our national life. There is the understandable fear that the shelter which has always protected us is being ripped apart piece by piece. We are literally becoming unsheltered.

Then again perhaps I am projecting my own opinions onto the author.

Nevertheless, the characters in Kingsolver's book are in danger of becoming unsheltered as the house in which they live is unstable with the roof caving in and walls collapsing. It is true of two distinct sets of characters, with whom she presents us, from two different centuries.

First, we meet Willa Knox and her family. It is 2016 and Willa and her husband have just lost their jobs in Virginia - Willa as a magazine editor and her husband as a professor - when both of the entities they worked for closed. The family has moved to a house that Willa inherited in the community of Vineland outside of Philadelphia where her husband has obtained a new job. The house, like their lives, is falling apart.

Our first view of Willa is at her meeting with a contractor who tells her, "The simplest thing would be to tear it down." To do the necessary renovation and repairs would be prohibitively expensive.

The more than century-old house is a shambles but it will shelter Willa, her husband Iano, Iano's Greek immigrant father Nick, Willa's and Iano's daughter Tig (Antigone), and soon their son Zeke's newborn son for whom he, as a single and destitute father after the suicide death of the boy's mother, is unable to care. Oh, yes, and their ancient dog named Dixie. The shambles of a house is matched by the shambles of their lives.

Nearly 150 years earlier, in the 1870s, another family lived on the same acreage. Schoolteacher Thatcher Greenwood and his new wife Rose, her mother Aurelia and her sister Polly along with two large hounds named Scylla and Charybdis live in a decaying house and they, too, do not have the money to do repairs and so must endure the privations.

Thatcher and Rose are poorly matched; he is a man of science and she is only interested in society and appearances. Theirs seems a doomed alliance from the start.

In time, Thatcher meets their next-door neighbor, Mary Treat, a real-life naturalist who carried on extensive correspondences with Charles Darwin as well as many other scientists of the day. They are kindred spirits and she becomes a major influence on his life and work.

Willa Knox hopes to prove that their house has historical significance because of the Treat/Greenwood connection and thus to get a grant to restore and preserve it. It's the only hope she has for saving it.

The tracks of the lives of these two families run parallel in many ways. Not only do they occupy crumbling houses but they each live in a time of economic uncertainty when the truth of scientific inquiry is denied and all of its evidence dismissed because it doesn't agree with the "gut feeling" of its "very intelligent" opponents. In the case of the Greenwood family, the scientific inquiry is Darwin's and in the Knox family's lives, it is the conclusions regarding global climate change.

These two parallel narratives reflect each other occasionally in surprising ways, but, taken together, they present a thoroughly absorbing story of human adaptability and survival instinct. They also provide us with a cautionary tale of where fear and denialism can take us:

“I suppose it is in our nature,” she said finally. “When men fear the loss of what they know, they will follow any tyrant who promises to restore the old order.”

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Throwback Thursday: Something to think about

I just realized that I completely forgot to mark the tenth anniversary of this blog which actually occurred exactly one week ago on December 5. But in honor of that, here's one of my past posts from 2015. It still has some relevance I think.

~~~

Tuesday, January 13, 2015

Something to think about

With age comes wisdom - or so I've heard. But my own experience in life often makes me question that. Still, we'd like to believe that we do learn from our experiences and maybe even become just a wee bit wiser as we get older.

A friend sent me this email of "Lessons that we learn as we age." See if any of them ring a bell with you.

~~~

Age 5:

I've learned that I like my teacher because she cries when we sing "Silent Night."

Age 7:

I've learned that our dog doesn't want to eat my broccoli either.

Age 9:

I've learned that when I wave to people in the country, they stop what they are doing and wave back.

Age 12:

I've learned that just when I get my room the way I like it, Mom makes me clean it up again.

Age 14:

I've learned that if you want to cheer yourself up, you should try cheering someone else up.

Age 15:

I've learned that although it's hard to admit it, I'm secretly glad my parents are strict with me.

Age 24:

I've learned that silent company is often more healing than words of advice.

Age 26:

I've learned that brushing my child's hair is one of life's great pleasures.

Age 29:

I've learned that wherever I go, the world's worst drivers have followed me there.

Age 30:

I've learned that if someone says something unkind about me, I must live so that no one will believe it.

Age 42:

I've learned that there are people who love you dearly but just don't know how to show it.

Age 44:

I've learned that you can make someone's day by simply sending them a little note.

Age 46:

I've learned that the greater a person's sense of guilt, the greater his or her need to cast blame on others.

Age 47:

I've learned that children and grandparents are natural allies.

Age 48:

I've learned that no matter what happens, or how bad it seems today, life does go on and it will be better tomorrow.

Age 49:

I've learned that singing "Amazing Grace" can lift my spirits for hours.

Age 50:

I've learned that motel mattresses are better on the side away from the phone.

Age 51:

I've learned that you can tell a lot about a man by the way he handles these three things: a rainy day, lost luggage, and tangled Christmas tree lights.

Age 52:

I've learned that keeping a vegetable garden is worth a medicine cabinet full of pills.

Age 53:

I've learned that regardless of your relationship with your parents, you miss them terribly after they die.

Age 58:

I've learned that making a living is not the same thing as making a life.

Age 61:

I've learned that if you want to do something positive for your children, work to improve your marriage.

Age 62:

I've learned that life sometimes gives you a second chance.

Age 64:

I've learned that you shouldn't go through life with a catcher's mitt on both hands. You need to be able to throw something back.

Age 65:

I've learned that if you pursue happiness, it will elude you. But if you focus on your family, the needs of others, your work, meeting new people, and doing the very best you can, happiness will find you.

Age 66:

I've learned that whenever I decide something with kindness, I usually make the right decision.

Age 72:

I've learned that everyone can use a prayer.

Age 82:

I've learned that even when I have pains, I don't have to be one.

Age 90:

I've learned that every day you should reach out and touch someone. People love that human touch - holding hands, a warm hug, or just a friendly pat on the back.

Age 92:

I've learned that I still have a lot to learn.
~~~

We all have a lot to learn. Let's keep learning!

Throwback Thursday: Confronting Evil

I recently came across this post that I wrote almost ten years ago in December 2009. It blew me away to remember that I once felt like this; to remember that I had utter confidence in the leader of our country to try to do what was right and just, whether or not I agreed with his interpretation of that. Those were simpler, more innocent times.

~~~ 

Wednesday, December 16, 2009

Confronting evil

I'm not a big fan of David Brooks and I admit I don't often read his column in The New York Times, but a couple of days ago, he wrote one which had a title that intrigued me. It was "Obama's Christian Realism."The gist of the column was that President Obama's thought processes are revealed by his speeches and that his public speeches, taken as a whole, have reflected a remarkably consistent philosophy throughout. It is essentially that there is evil in the world which must be confronted, and, as Brooks states it, that "life is a struggle to push back against the evils of the world without succumbing to the passions of the beast lurking inside."

This is what Brooks calls the liberal internationalist approach. It is an approach that demands that we, as a nation, act in concert with others to achieve our aims. From this philosophy grew our backing of NATO and of the United Nations and of many regional alliances around the world. It is an approach to international relations that served this country very well for more than fifty years and was really only abandoned in this century by the Bushies. President Obama now seeks to return us to that more solid ground.

Brooks reminds us that Barack Obama spoke out against the Iraq war in 2002 and he was booed for his efforts. Throughout his political career, regardless of the opposition he has faced, he has steered by the stars of his understanding of what is right and of human nature's core struggle between love and evil. He is a serious and complicated man, a man who is able to hold two opposing ideas in his mind without succumbing to frustration or self-destructiveness.

I don't always agree with this president. I often wish that he would be more forceful in dealing with some of the more infuriatingly self-centered and self-serving politicians who pontificate in the Senate. I wish that he would act more swiftly to right some of the wrongs that have become ingrained in our system of government over the past eight years. But I am resigned to the fact that he will act with all deliberate speed on his own schedule and that he will not engage in the kind of partisan retribution that has marked the worst of our politics in recent years, even if I might want him to, because it is against his nature and he believes it is wrong.

No matter what the outcome may be, it is comforting to have the country in the hands of a "Christian realist" who is able to see not only good and evil in black and white, but all those confusing shades of gray in between.

Throwback Thursday: One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

I was thinking about this book earlier today and went back to read my review of it in 2014. Unfortunately, I found that, once again, I couldn't remember a lot of detail. The review brought it all back.

~~~

Monday, June 23, 2014

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez: A review

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

It's a good thing the writer and/or publisher decided to place a Buendia family tree chart at the beginning of this novel. Otherwise, it would have been impossible to keep track of all the Jose Arcadios, Aurelianos, Amarantas, Ursulas, and Remedios that keep recurring throughout the multiple generations of the family that we meet in One Hundred Years of Solitude. Even referring to the chart with each new chapter, it was not easy to keep them all straight.

But then there is nothing easy about this book. I first read it many years ago - in the '70s or 80s, I think - but when Gabriel Garcia Marquez died in April and I was thinking about the books of his that I had read, I found that I really couldn't remember much about this one except that famous opening sentence and the broadest of outlines of the story. So, I determined to read it again...and found it just as difficult as the first time around.

Difficult, yes, but it is an amazing work of literature. What an imagination the man had!

Marquez tells the story of the mythical town of Macondo through the history of the Buendia family. The patriarch Jose Arcadio Buendia and his wife Ursula Iguaran travel from the coastal town of Riohacha, through an interminable swamp, to find the spot where they will found their family and their town. One son, Jose Arcadio, is born on the trip. Another, Aureliano, was the first person to be born in Macondo. Still later, a daughter, Amaranta, is born.

Jose Arcadio inherited his father's headstrong, impulsive nature. He eventually left the family to chase his dream but returned years later claiming to have sailed the seas of the world. He later marries his adopted sister Rebeca.

Aureliano was thought to be able to predict the future and his premonitions always seemed to come true. He became a revolutionary, a constant warrior against the government. During his wars, he managed to find time to father seventeen sons by different women. All the sons were named Aureliano and all of them were murdered by unknown assassins before they reached the age of thirty-five. The original Aureliano was the colonel about whom that famous first sentence was written:

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.

(Spoiler alert: The firing squad doesn't get its man. Aureliano lives to a ripe old age.)

Amaranta, the daughter, grew up as a companion of her adopted sister Rebeca - who was actually a cousin. She learned to hate Rebeca because she became a rival for the affections of one Pietro Crespi during their teenage years. Amaranta never married and, at the end of her long life, she died a virgin.

All three of these characters were loners. Solitude might have been their middle names and that continued to be true of all the Jose Arcadios, Aurelianos, and Amarantas who followed.

Throughout the history of the family, incest is a recurring theme. Ursula lives in fear that a Buendia child will be born with a pig's tail because of this inbreeding. Finally, in the seventh generation, the final Aureliano is born with a pig's tail, but by then Ursula is no longer alive to see it. That Aureliano doesn't last long. As an hours-old infant, he is devoured by red ants before the town of Macondo itself is destroyed by a "biblical hurricane."

The Buendia family history is a human tragicomedy. The story does have its moments of humor spread throughout the tawdriness and the pathos. It has, in fact, all the rich variety of life and death, love and lust, war and peace, and all the other universal themes that are present in the history of humankind.

While deceptively simple in its delivery, One Hundred Years of Solitude blends the everyday with the miraculous. Thus, we have a young woman, hanging out laundry to dry, suddenly and inexplicably ascending into heaven never to be seen again.

Moreover, members of the Buendia family routinely live well into their second century, some reaching the age of 125 or even 145. And the spirits of the dead continue to hang around Macondo. It is a mythical and magical world and yet it is populated by ordinary people with commonplace concerns and passions.

Finishing this book, the reader is overcome by something that must be akin to battle fatigue. It is an overwhelming story full of so much detail that it seems impossible to absorb it all. It is difficult to say that one actually enjoys reading such a book and yet there is no denying that reading it is a stunning experience that leaves the reader with a sense of the profundity as well as the ultimate meaningless of life.

Perhaps, years from now, I will remember the distant afternoon when I finished this book for the second time and will discover that I am able to recall just a little bit more than the general outline of the tale.      

Throwback Thursday: Should journalists point out blatant lies that politicians tell?

Little did I know when I wrote this post back in the fall of 2013 that the problem that I was describing was going to get so much worse in the years to come. Television news was to become a megaphone for lying liars who could not speak without lying and it would never call them out for their lies. Instead, they blast those lies at an easily led public twenty-four hours a day. Is it any wonder that the public is no longer able to recognize the truth? What passes for "truth" these days is whatever you can get the most people to believe.

I never watch television news anymore. I gave up on it in 2016. I read that some television journalists now actually do call a lie a lie. Better late than never, I guess. Not Chuck "That's not my job!" Todd though. He's still peddling the same "he said, she said," "both sides do it" shit. 

~~~

Thursday, September 19, 2013

Should journalists point out blatant lies that politicians tell?

During a segment on "Morning Joe," former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell (D) speculated that most opponents of the Affordable Care Act have been fed erroneous information about the law. (MSNBC reporter Chuck) Todd said that Republicans "have successfully messaged against it" but he disagrees with those who argue that the media should educate the public on the law. According to Todd, that's President Barack Obama's job.

"But more importantly, it would be stuff that Republicans have successfully messaged against it," Todd told Rendell. "They don't repeat the other stuff because they haven't even heard the Democratic message. What I always love is people say, 'Well, it's you folks' fault in the media.' No, it's the President of the United States' fault for not selling it."  - from TPM

What is the responsibility of an ethical journalist when it comes to reporting news on which there are two diametrically opposed viewpoints? Do they simply report "he said, he said" and let their audience decide who is telling the truth? Or, if they have incontrovertible information that one side or the other is lying and misstating facts, do they have an obligation to say so?

What passes for journalism in today's environment demands that reporters take the first option. "He said, he said" is all we hear on most broadcast news shows. No analysis, no background, no additional information provided by the reporter to help his audience discover the truth - just one argument juxtaposed against its opposite. This is a grave disservice to the consumer of news and a grave disservice to society as a whole.

Journalists are, we assume at least, in a better position to know all the facts of a story than the average Joe or Jill in the street. I certainly don't have the time or resources to research every important news story that comes along or to ferret out the truth on controversial subjects. I rely on trusted sources to provide me with information and guidance.

But what if the sources we rely on are lazy or are taking their guidance from some central authority which gives them daily talking points that they must adhere to in their reporting of the news? What if our "journalists" are unworthy of the name and instead are complicit in pulling the wool over the eyes of their audience?

Television news reporters today, and to a certain extent print reporters as well, seem to have given up any obligation they ever felt to be truth tellers. They appear to feel no obligation to do the work of finding out what the truth actually is and passing it along to their viewers or readers. Thus, they will report with a straight face a blatant lie about some subject - the Affordable Care Act is the big one of the moment - and will never by word or deed inform their audience that they KNOW it is a lie. And then, when the public is confused about the subject, they blame someone else, as Chuck Todd blamed the President for not "selling" the program.

If reporters simply reported the truth about what the program does and will do, it seems highly unlikely that "selling" would be necessary, because poll after poll shows that when people are asked about the individual parts of the law, they overwhelmingly approve of it! As Jason Linkins writes in The Huffington Post, "But informing the public is the full-time job of journalists as well. The notion that a journalist can possess the means to mitigate public confusion on any topic and pass on doing so is just unfathomable to me. In many cases, the information you need to perform that task is hard-won."

Certainly, the Administration has an obligation to help inform the public, but that doesn't relieve journalists of their obligation to report the truth and to point out obvious lies ("death panels!") to the public. Unfortunately, I don't see the Chuck Todds of the journalism world having the courage or the work ethic to shoulder that responsibility anytime soon.

Throwback Thursday: Dune by Frank Herbert: A review

I read recently that a remake of the movie Dune is in the works and will be released next year. The first version, released in 1984, was not a great success. I remember seeing it in the theater and being rather underwhelmed, but I saw it several years later on television and actually sort of liked it. It's a bit of a cult favorite these days.

The books were quite another matter. I LOVED the books! I read all in the series authored by Frank Herbert, though I never moved on to the ones authored by his son after Herbert's death. They were great works of the imagination and there seemed to be quite a bit of truth there that was relevant to our own society. That relevance may be even more evident today than it was when the books were first published.

In 2015 for the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of the first book, I reread it and wrote my review. I was just as gobsmacked by the book the second time around as when I first read it all those years ago.

~~~  

Friday, August 28, 2015

Dune by Frank Herbert: A review

Dune by Frank Herbert
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Dune, Frank Herbert's epic science fiction novel, winner of many awards and considered by some to be the best science fiction book ever written. Thus, 2015 seemed the appropriate time to once again return to Arrakis, the planet that once mesmerized my reading self.

I first read the book about 35 years ago and it completely captured my imagination.

The world described by Herbert is some 21,000 years in the future and the human race is now living on countless habitable planets. This universe is ruled by a collection of aristocratic Great Houses and they, in turn, owe their allegiance to Padishah Emperor Shaddam IV.

This society has seen fit to prohibit artificial intelligence and advanced computers, and, instead, humans have adapted their minds to effectively become those advanced computers. They are capable of extremely complex tasks, including mental computing.

The Bene Gesserit, a powerful matriarchal group, hopes to further the human race through controlled breeding. One of their number, Jessica, is the concubine and only mate of Duke Leto Atreides. The Atreideses come from a planet called Caladan, a world with plenty of water.

Arrakis is the opposite of Caladan. It is a desert planet, but it produces the most valuable commodity in the empire. That is a substance called melange, or spice. Controlling the production and trade of spice ensures power and wealth.

The Padishah Emperor grants Duke Leto control of the spice operations on Arrakis. Although Leto realizes this is probably a trap, he cannot refuse. He moves his household to Arrakis and the real action of Dune begins.

Many have remarked upon the parallels between the planet of Arrakis (Dune) and the Middle East of our Earth. Both are covered in vast areas of desert. In fact, Arrakis is practically nothing but desert. Both have a plentiful supply of a valuable commodity: Spice in the case of Arrakis and oil in the case of the Middle East. Each has a group of its population that is nomadic. In the case of Arrakis, it is the Fremen, who have adapted beautifully to living on this desert planet.

Duke Leto sees the Fremen as an asset and knows that if he can gain their loyalty, he will have the key to controlling Arrakis. He never lives to accomplish that goal, but his son, Paul, will in time become the leader of the Fremen and so much more. Paul, as the foreigner who adopts the ways of the desert-dwelling Fremen and leads them to military victory, has overtones of the career of T.E. Lawrence.

The parallels with the Middle East and with Arab and Persian culture continue right through to the language that Herbert gives the Fremen. So many of their words, titles, and names are derived from Persian and Arabic - words like jihad, Shaitan, Mahdi, Bashar, Hawat, and erg. Even the Fremen name that is given to Paul, Muad'Dib, sounds faintly Arabic. It gives one pause to wonder what would be the reaction of the right-wingers if this book had been written in the early 21st century instead of the middle of the 1960s. I expect they might seek to ban it at the very least. It would be called a dangerous incitement to terrorism. Context matters and the world of the 1960s was certainly more accepting of the Middle Eastern references than many parts of our society today would be.

Dune was the first in a series. Frank Herbert went on to write five sequels. I read and loved them all. His son has carried on the franchise after Herbert's death, but I haven't read any of these later books. As is often the case, I think, the sequels never quite live up to the original. And Dune was original.

Looking at the book from today's perspective, one of the most interesting parts for me is the ecological and environmental aspects of it. The secret that the Fremen carry is that they have a grand plan to change their desert planet. They will transform it into a world more like Caladan, where humans can live in the open without special suits and where water flows on the surface of the planet. They realize that they will not live to see the culmination of their efforts but they have faith that generations to come will enjoy the benefits of their plans.

Today, we have something of the reverse transpiring, where people in power ask why we should worry about global warming. (And, of course, many even deny that it is happening.) After all, we're all right. Who cares about those generations to come? The Fremen would be appalled by such a selfish philosophy.

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Throwback Thursday: What rock did these guys crawl from under?

Looking back at some of my old blog posts from years ago, I came across this one which is just more evidence that there is nothing new under the sun. Intolerance and hate have been with us forever and were alive and well nine years ago - as they are today.

~~~

Monday, February 22, 2010

What rock did these guys crawl from under?

I don't even know how to begin to say anything sensible about this state legislator from Virginia:

State Delegate Bob Marshall of Manassas says disabled children are God's punishment to women who have aborted their first pregnancy.

He made that statement Thursday at a press conference to oppose state funding for Planned Parenthood.

"The number of children who are born subsequent to a first abortion with handicaps has increased dramatically. Why? Because when you abort the first born of any, nature takes its vengeance on the subsequent children," said Marshall, a Republican.

"In the Old Testament, the first born of every being, animal and man, was dedicated to the Lord. There's a special punishment Christians would suggest."

So children that are born with disabilities are God's punishment on the mother.

And then there was this statement by a member of the House of Representatives from Iowa:

Steve King To Conservatives: 'Implode' IRS Offices

Rep. Steve King (R-IA) told a crowd at CPAC on Saturday that he could "empathize" with the suicide bomber who last week attacked an IRS office in Austin, and encouraged his listeners to "implode" other IRS offices, according to a witness.

That suicide bomber with whom Mr. King "empathizes" murdered one innocent American citizen whose only crime was to go to work that day. He also seriously injured several others who committed that same crime.

I guess the only thing I can possibly say is, thank God they are not from Texas.

Throwback Thursday: The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert

Five years ago this month, I read The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert. It's a book whose theme has stayed with me in the five years since. Today there is even more evidence that Earth is undergoing the sixth extinction (that we know about) in the history of the planet and, in fact, that that extinction is snowballing. It is not a comforting thought.

~~~

Thursday, February 27, 2014

The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert: A review

The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"In pushing other species to extinction, humanity is busy sawing off the limb on which it perches."
                                 - Stanford ecologist Paul Ehrlich

As far as science has been able to determine, there have been five mass extinctions of life on Earth in the history of our planet. The first of these occurred at the end of the Ordovician period of the Paleozoic era about 450 million years ago. The second occurred less than 100 million years later in the late Devonian period. There followed the End-Permian extinction of some 250 million years ago, the Late Triassic extinction of 200 million years ago, and finally, the last one and the one we are most familiar with, the End-Cretaceous extinction which occurred about 65 million years ago. That's the one that wiped out the dinosaurs. (Well, almost - except for the ancestors of birds.)

The best evidence seems to indicate that all of these extinctions except for the last one were the result of climatological events, often relatively sudden events to which plants and animals did not have time to adapt. The cause of the fifth one was also a change in climate but it was brought about by a collision with an asteroid. That cataclysmic event so altered the climate of the planet for a time that many, many species died out either suddenly or over a period of years.

Scientists believe that we are now in the midst of the sixth extinction which Earth has endured and that this extinction is entirely human-caused. Elizabeth Kolbert writes in this book about how our species has altered life on the planet as no other species has before. It's not just that we are changing the climate for the worse, although that certainly is a big part of it, we also have altered the face of Earth and the chemistry of the oceans to the detriment of very many species.

One of the biggest problems that we have created for other species is simply the fact that we move everything around and wherever we go on Earth, it seems that some species hitch a ride with us. So a species from Asia that would never under normal circumstances make it to the Americas is brought here either wittingly or unwittingly and it wreaks havoc. Kolbert points out that the most endangered family of animals on Earth today are the amphibians. They are being wiped out by a fungus that has been spread around the world by humans.

Kolbert writes about a dozen species, some of them already irrevocably lost and others on their way out. Through these very personal stories of that wonderful bird the Great Auk, the Panamanian golden frog, staghorn coral, the Sumatran rhino and others, the reader is moved to begin to understand the enormity of what is happening. What we are causing to happen to our world.  

It all reminds me a bit of another subject that I wrote about here recently - the nihilistic ramblings of Rust Cohle, one of the detectives on the HBO series, "True Detective." At one point, he delivers this soliloquy:

I think human consciousness is a tragic misstep in evolution. We became too self-aware, nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself, we are creatures that should not exist by natural law. We are things that labor under the illusion of having a self; an accretion of sensory, experience and feeling, programmed with total assurance that we are each somebody, when in fact everybody is nobody. Maybe the honorable thing for our species to do is deny our programming, stop reproducing, walk hand in hand into extinction, one last midnight, brothers and sisters opting out of a raw deal.

Reading Kolbert's book is enough to make one think that perhaps Cohle is on to something there.

It is somewhat surprising to learn that the concept of extinction is not a very old one. Kolbert points out that it was first articulated by Georges Cuvier in the revolutionary Paris of the 18th century. As always it seems, with any new scientific idea or concept, it took a while for it to be accepted, but later work by paleontologists has confirmed Cuvier's findings.

This is a well-written book which can popularize scientific concepts and principles for a mass audience. It is an easy read and a fairly short one at less than 300 pages. Kolbert includes extensive notes and bibliography for those who wish to read more on the subject.


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(Update: There is an interesting article entitled "The Mammoth Cometh" in The New York Times Magazine today about the effort to recreate some extinct animals through cloning.)

Throwback Thursday: Exit Music by Ian Rankin

I'm currently reading Ian Rankin's latest John Rebus novel, In a House of Lies. It dropped into my Kindle queue on New Year's Eve and I pounced on it. It'd been a while since the last Rebus book and I was thirsty for a visit with my old friend.

All of which got me to thinking about when Rankin retired Rebus eight years ago. He published what was supposed to be his last book featuring the iconic Edinburgh detective, Exit Music. He moved on to other protagonists including Rebus' protege, Siobhan Clarke, and an anti-corruption detective named Malcolm Fox. 

But Rankin learned, just like that other Scottish writer of detective fiction, Arthur Conan Doyle, that there are some detectives that just refuse to shuffle off the stage.

These days Rebus, who always aged more or less in real time, is nudging his eighth decade, fighting COPD, a consequence of all those years of cigarettes and booze, and still emotionally connected, even in retirement, to the job that is his life, though it is no longer called the Lothian and Borders Police; these days it is Police Scotland. 

And he's still trying to put his nemesis, "Big Ger" Rafferty, behind bars. His final exit music hasn't been written yet.

~~~

Thursday, April 7, 2011

Exit Music by Ian Rankin: A review

Anyone who follows my book reviews is probably already aware that I am a big fan of Ian Rankin's Inspector Rebus series. Mysteries are my favorite genre and the Rebus series is really one of the best, in my opinion. Rankin can always be counted on to give us believable characters and situations and always there is in the background the wonderfully funky and historic city of Edinburgh, a smallish town in a smallish country where everybody and everything seems intertwined. And always in the middle of it all is Rebus, a cop who hates being hamstrung by rules, but a cop, who at his core is a very moral man. That's what drives him crazy.

What keeps him sane is the music. Rock music. It is the background noise of his life. It tells the story of his alienation, his lost loves, his broken marriage, the daughter who has drifted away, the dead friends, the ghosts of cases without a "result." Those ghosts haunt him at night as he sits in his favorite chair in his living room, a tumbler of malt in one hand and a cigarette in the other, and music from his vast collection of CDs streaming from his audio system.

But now the music that John Rebus is hearing is Exit Music. He is one week away from retirement from his long inglorious career with Lothian and Borders Police. He's trying to interest his partner DS Siobhan Clarke in his collection of "no results" so that she will carry on with them when he is gone. He's also shadowing his great nemesis "Big Ger" Cafferty in hope of finally finding something that will put him away for good. He had been able to send Cafferty to prison a couple of times in his career, but never for long enough. Now he's out and, to all appearances, a legitimate businessman. Rebus doesn't believe it.

Then, right in the middle of his last week and his wrapping up of loose ends, a dissident Russian poet who is in Edinburgh gets himself murdered. At first it seems like a simple mugging, but as Rebus and Clarke dig deeper, things get more complicated. Things get even more complicated with a second murder of a man who had been recording the poet's appearances at book stores and other venues. Are the two murders related?

Finally, just after he has had a late night meeting with John Rebus, "Big Ger" Cafferty is brutally attacked and left for dead. Initial evidence points to Rebus as the attacker. Will he be able to finish out his last week with CID without being arrested for assault with grievous bodily harm, or even murder?

Rebus is now nearing 60, but is just as irascible as ever. He can't even get through his last week on the job without being suspended. Of course, when did a minor impediment like a suspension ever stop John Rebus? He goes on with his investigation as if nothing had happened.

This is the 17th and final entry in the Rebus series. I guess we knew it had to end sometime, and it's probably best that Rankin puts his detective out to pasture before he begins to repeat himself. He's probably heartily fed up with the old boy after all these years and ready to move on to other things.

Still, I will miss him and I shouldn't be surprised to find myself wondering how Rebus is coping with retirement. Somehow I suspect it would not be a pretty thing to watch.

Throwback Thursday: My Brilliant Friend

We have been watching the HBO production, My Brilliant Friend, based on Elena Ferrante's work. Like many Ferrante fans, I was concerned about how television would treat the work and if it would be able to adequately interpret in video this intimate and interior literary portrait of a female friendship in a brutal patriarchal society. I needn't have worried. At least in my opinion, they have done quite an admirable job.

Part of the key to the successful production was to film it in Italian, the language in which the books were written, with English subtitles. This can be a clunky way of presenting material, but in this case, it works to help establish the fraught atmosphere of Naples in the 1950s. It was a time and a place where violence was part of the everyday lives of the people. Particularly the lives of women and children. It was a society were bruises on the faces and arms of women or children were not even noticed because they were so common and taken for granted. This is the atmosphere in which the two brilliant girls in the story lived and which they had to overcome. 

I read My Brilliant Friend three years ago in December, 2015. Here is my review.

~~~

Monday, December 21, 2015  

My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante: A review

My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

With the publication of The Story of the Lost Child in 2015, Elena Ferrante completed her quartet of extravagantly praised "Neapolitan Stories." It seemed about time for me to get on board with reading the books to find out what all the shouting was about.

My Brilliant Friend, published in 2012, was the first of the series. It begins with the main protagonist, Elena, learning that her friend Lila has disappeared, not for the first time. Elena and Lila are now in their 60s and Lila's latest disappearance causes Elena to reminisce about their long friendship and the events which marked and shaped their lives. My Brilliant Friend is a telling of those reminiscences.

Elena and Lila grew up on the outskirts of Naples. It is the 1950s when we meet them. Both girls are six years old. They live in a neighborhood where violence is an everyday fact of life. Men settle their inevitable disagreements on the streets with fisticuffs, knives, or guns. Then they go home and continue to take out their anger on their families, beating their wives and children. A child turning up at school with bruises, or a wife doing her shopping with a black and blue face and arms are not instances to be remarked upon - it's just the way of the world.

In this fraught atmosphere where girl children are, on one hand, guarded as priceless treasures - any man or boy who dares to even look at one risks his life - and, on the other hand, seen as totally worthless for anything except as wives, mothers, and household drudges, Elena and Lila dream big dreams. They are both extremely intelligent and competitive with each other. Their competition pushes each of them to try to achieve more both academically and in other areas of life.

This book takes the girls through their teenage years. It is a meditation on the diverging and converging paths of their friendship over the years, and, through their friendship, we see their neighborhood, their society, beginning to change. The girls rely completely on each other even as their paths in life diverge and their destinies become separate in surprising ways. They remain always the best of friends, each knowing that her friend is the one that she can call on if she is in need.

The girls' neighborhood is home to a bewilderingly huge cast of characters. I found it difficult at times to keep all the names straight, but the author has helpfully included a list of the characters and their relationships and interrelationships at the beginning of the novel, so if the reader gets too confused, she can always return to that list.

Some of the major influences on Neapolitan society, as it is explored in this book, are tradition (of course), the Church, and an organized crime group known as the Camorra. All are intertwined and have their role to play in the highly structured and stratified way of life of the inhabitants. Both Elena and Lila, each in her own way, struggle to escape its tentacles.

I begin to see why these books have been so highly praised and I look forward to reading of the further adventures of Elena and Lila in 2016.

If I had to select one word to describe My Brilliant Friend, it would be "fascinating." I was fascinated by the narrative from the first few lines. The plotting is masterful, invisible almost, and the narrative details and characterizations are abundant to the point of being almost overwhelming at times. The reader feels totally immersed in the stultified society in which these two brilliant girls are growing up and trying to find their way. Ferrante's style of writing renders her portrait of the two and their neighborhood in meticulous and unforgettable detail.

My only criticism of the book is that it seemed to lose a bit of its steam toward the end. I think one of the most difficult things for a writer to do is to write a bang-up ending that brings all the loose threads of the narrative together and provides a satisfying conclusion for the reader. In this case, since there are still three more entries in the story of Elena and Lila, perhaps the writer can be forgiven for easing off a bit on the ending. 

Throwback Thursday: The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam by Barbara Tuchman

Six years ago, in July 2012, I read and reviewed Barbara Tuchman's book, The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam. It hit me right in the solar plexus. Rereading my review today, a couple of days after our most recent election, I was once again struck by Tuchman's clear-eyed view of history and of human nature. Her observations are just as fresh today as they were when this book was published in 1984 or when I read it in 2012. I venture to predict that they will remain fresh as long as humans continue to exist.

A couple of sentences of my own review seem particularly cogent and applicable today, also: "When we see or hear evidence that contradicts our ingrained beliefs and what we want to believe because it makes us feel good, we just ignore it. That is the essence of human folly."

~~~

Monday, July 23, 2012

The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam by Barbara Tuchman: A review

George Santayana wrote, "Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it." The extraordinarily pessimistic theme of Barbara Tuchman's book, The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam, seems to be that we are all incapable of learning from history and so we are doomed to repeat its errors over and over and over again, ad infinitum. All of human history has been a march of folly with occasional flashes of insight and brilliance which allow us to advance a bit. Tuchman finds plenty of examples to support her thesis.

Her definition of folly within the context of the book is the pursuit by governments of policies contrary to their own interests, despite the availability of feasible alternatives. She begins with a general discussion of several examples from history and literature such as Rehoboam, a king of ancient Israel whose obstinance in refusing to listen to the just complaints of his people resulted in the loss of the ten northern tribes of Israel, and Montezuma whose vacillation and failure to heed the warnings of his advisers caused the loss and ultimate demise of the Aztec kingdom. She then proceeds to longer and more detailed discussions of four specific examples of incredible folly.

The first is the prototype for all follies that come after: The Trojans accepting the "gift" of the wooden horse from the Greeks. The horse was brought inside the gates of the city in spite of ample warnings from multiple sources not to trust "Greeks bearing gifts." Priam did not heed the warnings and his city fell.

The second example is that of the Renaissance popes whose decadence and emotional and intellectual distance from the common people led to a revolt by those people against the Church and, ultimately, to the Reformation.

In the third example, the British lose America. It is incredible to read of the series of political blunders, miscalculations, and miscommunications that led inexorably to the decision of the colonies to separate themselves from their Mother Country. It need not have happened. The colonists had time and again signaled their willingness to contribute to the Treasury; they simply wanted to be consulted about the manner in which it would be done and they wanted representatives in London to defend their interests. King George and his advisers would not accept their request and paid a heavy price for their refusal.

Finally, we come to the folly of the American experience in Vietnam. It began in 1945. Vietnam had been a colony of France and, after the humiliation of World War II, the French were determined to hang on to it in spite of common sense dictating otherwise. Ho Chi Minh had been trying since just after the first World War to gain independence for his country. He had attempted to present a petition to that effect to the "great powers" after that war, but they refused to accept it. A pragmatic patriot, he later joined the Communist Party when he saw that as a means for achieving independence. Through all the years of his and his followers' struggle, the French and later the Americans seemed to fail to understand the depth of their commitment to being free of foreign overlords. The Americans had forgotten their own 18th century experience with the British.

The American experience in Vietnam began in the Truman Administration with the deployment of 35 "advisers." For the next twenty years, those numbers would gradually grow until they exploded during the Johnson presidency. Reading of the decisions of Lyndon Johnson just makes one shake one's head even today. How could such brilliant men be so stupid? How could they utterly fail to heed all the warnings and assessments of those who knew the country, the region, the history, and the people? Well, how could the Trojans have accepted that Greek horse? When we see or hear evidence that contradicts our ingrained beliefs and what we want to believe because it makes us feel good, we just ignore it. That is the essence of human folly.

Reading this book made me wonder what Barbara Tuchman would have had to say about the last decade of American history. What would she have written about this country's reaction to the events of September 11, 2011; the wars, the abrogation of the individual's constitutional rights, the imprisonment without trial, and, yes, the torture? There are those who like to spout about American "exceptionalism" as if we somehow stood outside of history. We don't. Our follies prove it.