Our Kind of Traitor by John le Carre': A review

Our Kind of Traitor is typical John le Carre' - intricately plotted, provocative, intelligently written and seemingly springing right off the pages of today's newspapers.

In the aftermath of the Lehman Brothers collapse and the onset of world economic crisis, we find a young English couple, Perry and Gail, having a vacation in Antigua. There they meet a Russian named Dima, who, it appears, is linked to the Russian mafia and who may be seeking a way to slip away from their clutches. He engages Perry to play a game of tennis, a game that is watched by Dima's extended family and bodyguards. After the game, he begins to test Perry to see whether he might be his ticket "out". He wants to know whether Perry is a spy or has any connections to the vaunted British Secret Service.

No, and no. Perry, the academic, is not a spy and has no connections but he is intrigued by Dima and upon returning to England, he manages to contact the Secret Service and tell them about him. Dima has called himself the world's number one money launderer and, as such, he has much information which he is offering to the British if they will get him and his family out.

Just how a certain section of the British Secret Service plans to do that, using Perry and Gail as a conduit of information and as cover for the escaping Russians, makes up the bulk of le Carre's story. It is a complicated story, the plotline worthy of le Carre's best. The suspense builds as the day of the great escape nears and its prospect of success is endangered by personal complications of some of the characters. Will the Russian and his disparate family ever see the shores of England or will the bad guys win again?

John le Carre' can hardly be said to be brimming over with optimism at the state of the world. The last three of his books that I have read, The Constant Gardener, Absolute Friends, and now this one, have all been infused with a deep pessimism about the way of the world and whether it is possible to find justice in such a world.

John le Carre' has, of course, had a long and successful career writing about the men and women who move in the shadowy world of espionage and who try in their own complicated way, playing games within games, to make things come out right. He was the master of the great spy novel during the Cold War years. Now that the world has changed, he still is.

The mendacious Steve King boasts of Republican leaders' mendacity!

As reported by TalkingPointsMemo, Rep. Steve King never spoke truer words...and doesn't even realize it!



Mendacity:
–noun
1.The quality of being mendacious; a disposition to lie or deceive; habitual lying.
2.A falsehood; a lie.

I'd say that pretty well sums up much of this new Republican Congress, or as they might be more rightly called this Keystone Congress. The old Keystone Cops look absolutely competent in comparison!

Broken promises already

For days now, the Republicans have been trumpeting their intention of reading the Constitution aloud on their first day in charge of the new Congress. They have also been on all the news outlets talking about their "New Rule" that any bill considered by the House must have a statement about its Constitutional authority. They tout this as something entirely different. It isn't. The old rules of the House already required a statement about the section of the Constitution which covered each bill it considered.

But these are the people who revere the Constitution so much that they consider it Holy Writ, handed down by God directly to the Founders, unchanged and unchangeable. (Just ask Antonin Scalia. But that's another rant.) So, of course, they - and we - were really, really excited about the prospect of actually hearing this sacred text read aloud in the People's House. We waited with bated breath.

We're still waiting. They didn't read the Constitution in the House today. They read selected portions of the Constitution. And the new House Republicans were so excited about the event that this is how they looked during the reading:


This is the Republican side of the aisle. Where is everybody? Well, John Boehner, for one, couldn't possibly be bothered with listening to a reading of even part of the Constitution. No, he had to hold a press conference.

So one day in office and already they are breaking their promises. I wonder if the tea partiers will notice? More importantly, I wonder if the news media will notice? I would guess that it is highly unlikely. I tell you, it's enough to make a grown man weep.

Wordless Wednesday: Cutie!

Not all Minnesotans are above average

For years, I've listened to Garrison Keillor on the radio talking about his hometown in Minnesota where "all the womean are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average" and I guess I had bought the fiction that somehow Minnesotans are special and "above average". We now have living proof that that is not true. We have Michele Bachmann.

The Republican congresswoman from Minnesota is following in the footsteps of her idol, Sarah Palin. (I fully expect that any day now she will be announcing that she is running for president in 2012.) Her grasp of history is certainly on a par with Palin. An article in Salon.com today makes that perfectly clear.

The article outlines one of Bachmann's latest fictionalized autobiographical accounts. (There have been many.) It tells how she had a Damascus Road style conversion from being a flaming liberal to being an enlightened Republican. Strangely enough, it is all Gore Vidal's fault.

You see, back in the '70s, Vidal wrote a historical novel called Burr. Cynicism is Vidal's stock in trade as a writer and this book was typical of that. He wrote about Aaron Burr and the other founders of the republic in such a way that indicated that they were complex human beings, not always paragons of virtue. They could be calculating and morally corrupt, not unlike many politicians today. Well, impressionable young Michelle was trying to read that book on a train while she was campaigning for Jimmy Carter in 1976. But all of a sudden, in a flash of insight, it came to her that this book was an ungodly founder-hating work that was so violent in its anti-American rhetoric that it redirected her whole political belief system!

She now says about that experience:

"I knew that that was not representative of my country, and at that point I put the book down in my lap… and I said, you know what, I think I must be a Republican. And from that moment on I recognized that it was the Republican Party, and conservatives in particular, who really got America … unashamed about the values that the founders lived and died and shed their blood and their treasure for; because when they wrote the Declaration of Independence, the greatest document, in my mind, ever written by political geniuses, they wrote that it was a Creator who gave us our rights."

And so a baby Republican was born and today that baby has grown up into the crazy lady who represents a district in Minnesota where the voters are most assuredly not above average since they elected her.

What Bachmann found so offensive about that book back in 1976 was its irreverent attitude toward the founders. But then, the book was clearly labeled as fiction, as is Bachmann's characterization of those men as saints. They weren't. They could be petty and mocking and nasty towards each other and, if they could do it, why shouldn't a 20th century writer be able to write about them in that way?

Bachmann purports to believe a fictionalized rose-colored glasses account of our history and the founders of the country. It suits her purpose and her narrative of her own life. I wonder, though, what Thomas Jefferson or, for that matter, Aaron Burr, would make of Ms. Bachmann. I somehow doubt that their view of her would be equally rose-colored.

Resolved: No more self-flagellation

It's that time of year when everyone resolves to start eating right and exercising and to lose ten pounds. Or a hundred, as the case may be. I, on the other hand, have made only one resolution for 2011. It is, quite simply, that I will stop beating up on myself.

You see, I am my own worst critic. And, yes, I can just hear someone out there - maybe several someones - saying, "Not while I am alive!" But, no, I really am. Always have been for as long as I can remember. I'm not sure why that should be true or what made me this way, but I forever criticize and second-guess myself and blame myself for failures. Failures of relationships, failures in my career, personal shortcomings...you name it. I've agonized over it, shed tears over it, wished that I could take it all back. But I can't.

My Epiphany came three days early this year. Today I finally realized the past is past. It's over. I can't change what has happened. I can only learn from it and try to do better in the future.

It's not that I'm a bad person. I have never gone around deliberately hurting people or animals or causing havoc in the lives of others. In fact, I'm a pretty good person, a moral person. My intentions are to always do what is right and just and honorable. If I sometimes fall short in the execution of those intentions, it is because I am human.

And so, for 2011, I have decided to quit dwelling on the past and just forgive myself for everything and move on. A new year and a new slate. When, on some future sleepless night, I start to slip back into my old habits of recrimination against myself, I will remind myself, "That was the old me. I've stopped all that. I did the best that I could - the best that I knew how to do at the time and I WILL NOT second-guess myself!"

I think that I am not the only one who needs to make this resolution. How much precious time do we waste in reliving the past and replaying those hurtful scenes in our heads, in judging and finding ourselves wanting? To be self-aware, to regret our mistakes is one thing, but to wallow in them and allow regret to rule our lives is not healthy and not helpful. We wouldn't do that to anyone that we loved. Why do we do it to ourselves?

If you are one of those people, one of my fellow sufferers, I invite you to make this resolution along with me. Make it and mean it! Forgive yourself and move on.

There. I feel ten pounds lighter already.

Silent Sunday: Forster's Tern