Pity the Billionaire

Thomas Frank. Pity the Billionaire: the Hard-Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right. New York: Henry Holt, 2012

Reviewed by T. Hatch

Columnist, author, and former editor of the Baffler Thomas Frank asks the question, in his latest book Pity the Billionaire, how is it possible that the political Right thrived in the 2010 elections despite the economic meltdown of 2008? Why then were the trajectories of the 1932 and 2008 elections so different?  One would think that the “newest Right” should have been as discredited as Herbert Hoover with no chance to win an election anytime soon. Yet, alas, they did.

Frank argues that the “newest Right” is something like a bunch of zombies in a cheesy Hollywood movie;  the undead have amazing recuperative powers. In early 2009 the chattering class was presiding over the funeral of the Republican Party.  By August of that year the Democrats were back on their heels playing defense at town hall meetings where health care reform was the topic.  By 2010 the Democrats were in full retreat suffering a historically devastating defeat in the midterm elections. “If you had brought the world’s teenaged anarchists together in some great international congress and asked them to design an ideal crisis they could not have discredited market-based civilization more completely than did the crash of 2008” (p.26).  Pity the Billionaire seeks to answer the question of why this counter-intuitive conservative resurgence in 2010 could have taken place.

The real genius of the newest Right has been to unleash the “cynical idealism of billionaire America” (p.44) on a country ready for its cold embrace.  The brilliance of equating “we the people” with derivatives traders and convincing the victims of the great recession that not only would it be wrong and a form of “class warfare” to criticize investment bankers, but that they should show some sympathy for the beleaguered billionaire class, is not to be underestimated.  This peculiar form of billionaire inspired populism maintains that markets are democratic systems with consumers and investors making their desires known through the naturally recurring phenomenon of price auction theory.  Whereas market populism used to be the domain of the wealthy, now it is for the masses.

A significant part of Pity the Billionaire is basically an ethnography of the Tea Party Movement. The Tea Party is little more than the petit bourgeois white supremacist wing of the Republican Party. With their own cable news channel as a megaphone,  and a corporate media that could not get enough of their eccentric act, they were effective in framing the issue as choice between a small business utopia and a government imposed socialism.  Frank, who has read C. Wright Mills carefully, well understands that small business is useful to big business as a mascot for the ideology of utopian capitalism. Using small business folklore as the basis for a populist front is the preferred methodology of the corporate robber barons.  In this respect the top down faux populism of the Tea Party represents this triumph of three decades of neoliberal ideology.

Whereas the top down construction of a phony populism was successful, the Obama administration’s efforts at bailing out the economy from on high, at the expense of multitude, were politically less so.  F.D.R. worked to save and restructure the economy from the bottom up.  Rather than placing itself at the forefront of the populist anger against Wall Street (breaking up the banks, stopping the foreclosures, jailing the criminals etc.) the Obama administration made itself the embodiment of cronyism, i.e., instead of another F.D.R. we got Clinton II.  Not only was catering to Wall Street an act of moral cowardice it was a huge tactical error which allowed the Right to gather itself and quickly counterattack.

The delusions of the Right are situated in the shibboleth of an unfettered free market. However, Obama and the modern Democratic Party are equally delusional. The Democrats cognitive break with reality is not based on economics but emanates from the world of political science according to Frank.  Their collective hallucination manifests itself in a “cult of centrism and compromise.” Like another tall gaunt politician of yesteryear, Obama must have imagined himself waving a piece of paper in the air proclaiming, “We have bi-partisan consensus in our time!” Frank states that “President Obama tries to stay on the good side of companies like Goldman Sachs and BP even as he desperately drives his hook-and-ladder around a world they have set on fire.” (p. 136) Fearful that he might be seen as a radical, Obama has dutifully carried the water for Wall Street.

Another explanation for the politically inexplicable may be that we were cheated out of seeing the full effects of the train wreck. The banking industry did not suffer the consequences of a collapse because the much maligned bureaucracy in Washington D.C. saved them.  The deus ex machina of the federal government saved the ungrateful lords of Wall Street. As thanks, the Right has been able to shift the blame from the scene of the crime to Washington D.C.

Find this book (and place a hold on it!) at the Free Library of Philadelphia: McN 12336742 (at about eleven branches, and checked out or on its way to a branch to be checked out.)

The Cracked Bell

Tristam Riley-Smith, The Cracked Bell: America and the Afflictions of Liberty. New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2010

Reviewed by T. Hatch

Riley-Smith’s Cracked Bell is a breezy tour de force that at times seems like a panegyric to the “American Dream” which offers little original, or profound, in the way of insight or analysis.

Enough praise.

In the first instance the argument that the gap between the “American Dream” and the “American Crisis,” that cultural dissonance between the ideal of freedom and its more prosaic reality, which Riley-Smith cleverly analogizes with the crack in the Liberty Bell, is less than compelling. What are we talking about?  The attempt to reconcile the divergence between nationalist ideology and everyday life is present in many societies.  Implicit in Riley-Smith’s argument is the idea of American exceptionalism.  What exactly is unique to the Americans then? Yes, the American consumer is primus inter pares among the consumers of the world but only by virtue of a convergence of accidental historical circumstances.  Is the American public irrationally enamored of their beloved military? Clearly, yes they are. But, given the opportunity everybody loves a parade.  It’s just that Americans have had the ability to spend more lavishly on theirs. It is hardly noteworthy then that Americans are overweight, under-educated, adore successful imperialism, and spend too much time and money at Walmart.

Noteworthy however are the various instances of an empirical misreading of history which betray a right-of-center political bias. Due to the confines of brevity I will restrict myself to  three.
Riley-Smith writes that in the wake of Hurricane Katrina “A vengeful mob had taken over the Big Easy within hours of the thin veneer of law and order being removed.” (p.70)  This “mob” in his view was made up of the angry and frustrated armed consumers of New Orleans’ underclass. They were also irrational insofar as “Few of the looters had homes in which to install the commodities and there was no electricity to power them. This was postmodern shopping, deconstructed to the point where it became a form of performance art – an end in itself” (p.70).

How about the “looters” who were taking bottled water and food from closed and abandoned stores merely for survival?  What kind of postmodernist spectacle was this?  And this talk of the “mob” is very much in keeping with the reporting  by the corporate media in the immediate aftermath of Katrina.  Ironically there is no mention of the “gangs” of armed whites making an exit from the city impossible or the police violence against unarmed Blacks.  I feel that these offensive remarks by Riley-Smith should be immediately treated with both Michael Eric Dyson’s Come Hell and High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster and Spike Lee’s documentary film When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts.   The neglect and overt hostility with which the Black population of New Orleans was treated in the wake of Katrina was clearly much more about race than missed shopping opportunities; this seems to have alluded Riley-Smith.

On the subject of political correctness Riley-Smith argues that it came about as an attempt to counter the “excesses” of racism, sexism, and homophobia et cetera. He opines that “However, the phenomenon tends to reinforce these varieties of intolerance and introduces a new form of illiberal behavior that suppresses the public expression of views that are deemed beyond the pale” (p.229). Riley-Smith is certainly not alone in this type of irresponsible and risibly paranoid palaver which has continued more or less unabated for about twenty years now.

Is there a ministry of political correctness somewhere enforcing its dictates on those who are innocently engaged in a moderate and thoughtful discourse of racist, sexist, and anti-gay bigotry? Just like the mythical gerbils in hospital emergency rooms and soldiers returning home from Vietnam to be spat upon by anti-war protestors, nobody has ever met an actual victim of political correctness.  Yet there are legions of actual victims of racism, sexism, and anti-gay bigotry making Riley-Smith’s false equivalency that much more pernicious.

As if to demonstrate that there are multiple ways to read history, Riley-Smith holds out Larry Sommers and his asinine comments about the inability of women to perform mathematics and engineering at a high level, reflecting something more than gender discrimination, as an example of left-wing intolerance. Ah, Larry the lefty. When he is not out marching in a May Day parade or organizing a general strike he’s practicing that brand of left-wing intolerance which makes any revolutionary proud.

As ridiculous as all of this is, Riley-Smith’s take on the American Empire - or if there actually is an empire - stands out as the most absurd part of this deeply flawed book.  To examine the nature of U.S. imperialism what better place to start than the American Enterprise Institute.  The AEI, which is widely regarded as the headquarters for the neoconservatives, is a dispassionate enough spot in Riley-Smith’s judgment to get at the essence of U.S. militarism.  As evidence that there is not in fact an American Empire Riley-Smith sites neocon Robert Kagan.  He identifies him as merely from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and neglects to mention his Skull and Bones affiliation or his connections to numerous publications including the Weekly Standard and Commentary.  Nor does he let the reader know that as a co-founder of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) he was a signatory to the now infamous letter to President Bill Clinton in 1997 urging immediate military action against Saddam Hussein (because of the threat that the dictator’s possession of weapons of mass destruction represented to the United States).

Riley-Smith proudly avers that for an anthropologist, as far as the possible existence of the American Empire is concerned, what is primarily of interest is not whether the empire actually exists but what the Americans think about the empire. Further, he considers it a paradox that “The champion of liberty is compelled to develop an engine of war to safeguard cherished freedoms at home” (p.211).  What Riley-Smith calls a “paradox” one could label as hypocrisy;  insofar as one is interested in imperialism from the viewpoint of those who support it, why not a discussion of rape from the perspective of the rapist?

Riley-Smith, not surprisingly, concludes his analysis with a statement that Americans possess the power to overcome the American Crisis and put themselves back on the path to the American Dream.  This is a positively cheery way to describe an empire in decline.

What's up for 2012?

Books I haven't managed to write about yet include Solzhenitsyn's In the First Circle, a book I was pleased to have read in the past few months, and found to be everything. I hope to follow this up with his last collection (I think), Apricot Jam and Other Stories. In November, I read The Art of Fielding, a first novel by Chad Harbach. Zen and baseball ... how can you go wrong? Set on the campus of Westish College, which is situated in the crook of the baseball glove that is Wisconsin, Harbach's novel is about mindlessness and mindfulness, the varieties and complexities of male relationships, the complexities of relationships, and a great and enjoyable read.

I'm looking forward to revisiting a favorite novel and reading new novels by favorite authors. I recently learned that Dean Bakopoulos is teaching at Grinnell College. I read his 2005 novel, Please Don't Come Back to the Moon when it first came out and it has stayed with me all of these years. I just received it and his newest novel My American Unhappiness as Christimas presents. They are both at the top of my list. I am also looking forward to Ha Jin's new novel, Nanjing Requieum, and David Guterson's new novel Ed King. Ann Patchett has  a newish novel, State of Wonder, as does Umberto Eco. Jonathan Lethem and Stanley Fish both have collections of essays to be explored, and I'm thinking of dipping into Vladimir Sorokin's Ice trilogy, Peter Ackroyd's London Under, Alina Bronsky, The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine, and R. Zamora Linmark's Leche.

Sounds like a happy New Year. Let the Favorite Books and Book Review know what you're going to be reading in 2012.

A Visit from the Goon Squad

Jennifer Egan. A Visit from the Goon Squad. New York: Anchor Books, 2011.

R. Stuhr

As a Pulitzer Prize winner (and a "national best seller"), this is an already much written about book. In October, I heard Jennifer Egan read a chapter from this novel at the Free Library of Philadelphia. One of the qualities she talked about was the way each chapter shifts focus to talk about a character who appeared in a minor role in another chapter. At the time I was reading In the First Circle, which uses the same technique. So, I thought, well, interesting, but not new, Solzhenitsyn was way ahead of her. But, it was a good reading, and I bought a copy of Egan's book on my way out. I was not at all disappointed. The narrative, in the form of distinct chapters all connected by a consistent cast of characters, moves backwards and forwards in time. We see the characters from a variety of perspectives and at different points in their lives, but the spaces are not all filled in. Aging forever-young producers age and wither, as younger aspiring characters find their way into middle age.  Some remain true to their ideals, others sell out, still others seek a settled life after years of wandering. The excesses of the seventies and eighties fade and evolve into the excesses of the 21st century. Along with fashions and fetishes, technology remains in a state of revolution reaching all ages, bringing people closer together while at the same time creating buffers to provide distance. In the culminating chapter, Egan takes her readers into a Shteyngartesque not-so-distant future, in which the youngest downloader on record is three months old, connect and transmit are no longer meaningful concepts, and words such as friend, real, change, and story are "shucked of their meanings and reduced to husks." Everyone is looking for something, and maybe it is something that they can see, hear, and touch.

If you haven't yet read this novel, find a copy at your local library or book store.

Swamplandia!

Russell, Karen. Swamplandia! NY: Vintage, 2011.

R. Stuhr

I had the good fortune to hear Karen Russell speak at the Free Library of Philadelphia on a cold, rainy Tuesday night in November. She was funny and self-deprecating and, although I've been saving as many pennies as I can as of late, I couldn't resist buying not only Swamplandia!, but her first collection of short stories, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves (have not read this one yet). She chose to read an interesting segment of Swamplandia!--one that was central to the novel but was in many ways a diversion. Reading it out of context gave the uninformed little clue as to what the novel was about, and it startled me when I got to that section in my own reading of the novel. But having said that, the novel is much more serious in theme and tone than I would have expected from Ms. Russell's own demonstrated sense of humor. But this is just an observation and in no way a criticism. I was not disappointed by the book even though my taste tends to veer away from the  gothic sagas of eccentric families raising their children without any of the usual mores and codes. I think of, for instance, Mosquito Coast by Paul Theroux. And yet, Russell does not forgive or absolve the parents for their neglect and ultimate abandonment of the children. What becomes of them, what they suffer, is serious and life changing. At the same time, we can recognize the desperation and helplessness and good if mistaken intentions of the parents. In fact, we never really learn the whole story or discover the paths that brought the parents together. How did the mother feel about her life? What did she give up and did she have regrets? What were her choices?

Swamplandia! has a dual narration. Segments are narrated in the first person by Ava, the youngest child, and other segments are in the third person. It was always a little jolting to shift from "he" to "I." Early in the novel, the family's tenuous existence catapults toward disaster after the untimely death of the mother. Kiwi, the oldest son, eventually leaves their island and Alligator park (the island and park are both Swamplandia) in the Florida Everglades to try to earn money to save the family from bankruptcy. The middle child, Ossie, a teenage daughter begins communicating with the dead, and Ava, barely in her teens, tries to fill the gap left by her mother. When the father leaves for a few weeks to take care of business (work a second job on the mainland), Ossie drifts off to seek a lover among the dead and Avis to find her sister with the swamp's "bird man." This is the most gripping and poignant part of the novel. The reader is no better informed as to the qualities of the bird man, whether or not he can be trusted and relied upon, than Ava is as she counts on him to help her find her sister and needs him in her state of complete abandonment by all members of her family. As they go deeper into the swamp in search of Ossie the landscape and Ava's situation become more terrifying.

In the meantime Kiwi has gone to the rival amusement park, The World of Darkness, and struggles in the world of minimum wage to earn something to send back to his family.

To say more would be to give too much away. Suffice it to say that Russell is an outstanding story teller, who keeps you turning pages, but gives your mind something to work with and ponder as you read. Her characters have depth and the lines and details of the plot are revealed through their interpretation of events.

Swamplandia! is available as a printed book to be checked out and also as an electronic book to be downloaded from the Free Library of Philadelphia.

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Dennis Lehane's Novel The Given Day

Lehane, Dennis. The Given Day. NY: HarperCollins, 2008

By Walt Giersbach

Tribulation in a Boston Dimly Remembered

The police/mystery novel has always been suspect as literature, even when Umberto Eco and Jasper Fforde transcend genre into a more literary level.  Dennis Lehane skirted this genre tag skillfully in Mystic River; Shutter Island; Darkness, Take My Hand; and Gone, Baby, Gone, creating well-rounded characters who functioned in realistic, inventive story lines.  But, often, his writing remained “mysteries.”  His work in The Given Day, however, exceeds all his former portraits of troubled people trying to function in his troubled Boston area.

Lehane takes the reader back to a relatively unexplored time just after The Great War and influenza epidemic, but before the ‘20s roared in.  In his treatment of the time and place, he was compared in The New York Times to John Dos Passos and The U.S.A. Trilogy.  Boston’s police department was being paid 1908 poverty-level wages, could be ordered to put in 70-hour weeks, and worked in vermin-infested quarters.  Worse, it was a time when strikers found themselves at the mercy of police nightsticks and attacks by goons, African-Americans didn’t walk through white neighborhoods, anarchists were blowing up buildings, and Nativist cultural attitudes poisoned the civic weal.  The Irish — in Boston, at least — ran the civil service at the expense of the Italians and “Bolsheviks” and for the benefit of the Anglo Brahmins.

Lehane’s rich narrative — in 700 pages — leads inexorably to the police strike of 1919, large-scale rioting in the city, families dissolved by “traitorous” behavior, and wanton murders.  Police officer Aidan “Danny” Coughlin; the African-American, Luther Leonard, who left wife and child after murdering a cocaine dealer; and the immigrant Irish maid, Nora, form the triumvirate of characters working to survive in this turbulent environment.  .

Lehane slowly lets the historical period unfold through the eyes of Babe Ruth, shortly to leave the Red Sox, and shoehorns the Great Bambino in and out of the novel.  Babe’s character is wonderful history, which Lehane has researched beautifully, but unfortunately it has little to do with the story’s development.

By creating this universe called “Boston 1918-19,” Lahane time-travels us into an alternative history that is both distant and familiar.  The streets, department stores and place names are all identifiable today.  While this is entertaining — and emotionally involving — it remains questionable whether Lahane is over-dramatizing the venality, mayhem, cultural biases, and civil breakdown of his city and forebears.  Enjoy The Given Day as drama and enlightenment on issues that plague us today, not history, in spite of the author’s bibliographic sources.
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Reading Lehane’s work (of seven novels and a collection) made me reflect that there are books that launch a neophyte writer’s career, those that put air under the author’s wings, and finally the literary triumph that puts the writer at the top of his game.  The Given Day will give any reader pause to examine the cultural baggage we carry as Americans and that which has been smuggled into our luggage by strangers.  The Given Day is a dense literary work firmly nestled in a fascinating time when the country began to turn another corner.


From the Book Review: Dennis Lehane's most recent novel is Moonlight Mile. You can find Given Day and other Dennis Lehane novels at University of Pennsylvania Libraries and at your favorite branch of the Free Library of Philadelphia


http://www.dennislehanebooks.com/

Read other reviews by Walter Giersbach at the Favorite Books and Book Review and find out about his fiction at  Allotropic Lucubrations

Will Rogers: A Political Life

Will Rogers: A Political Life by Richard D. White, Jr. Texas Tech University Press, 2011.

Review by J. Hewitt

Will Rogers was an improbable example of the classic American Dream come true.  This book looks at this very public figure as a political animal.  Rogers’ charm and wit propelled him into vaudeville and onto the Broadway stage in the 1920s.  After the rope tricks got stale, he began spicing up his stage act with comic comments about current events. The public and the politicians responded favorably to his gentle, and often shrewd, observations gleaned, in the beginning, from his daily reading of multiple newspapers with breakfast.

As Rogers’ inoffensive barbs brought more fame, he became favored by influential political bosses.  They wanted to be associated with a figure who the public viewed as reflecting the common sense ideas of middle America.

Will Rogers became one of the most popular entertainers in the 1920s and 1930s.  He starred in silent and talking films.  He had a weekly radio program so popular that President Franklin D. Roosevelt scheduled several of his ‘fireside chats’ to follow Will Rogers’ program.

Not an ideologue, Rogers was a life-long Democrat and shared much of Theodore Roosevelt’s worldview. He believed that the United States should stay out of other countries’ troubles while protecting the United States from conflict with a strong military. He did not believe in disarmament conferences, Prohibition, the Ku Klux Klan, or women’s suffrage.  He did believe in using fame to help others, charitable causes like the Mississippi floods in 1927 and the Depression, expanding commercial aviation, baseball, travel, and the New Deal.

Richard D. White’s book seeks to discover how this poorly-educated young man from the Cherokee Nation, now part of Oklahoma, became a confidant of presidents, kings, and princes while preserving his public reputation as just a regular joe.  Using newspaper archives and media accounts of Will Rogers public activities, White gives an account which at times is giddy with admiration and at other times speculative about Rogers’ activities on behalf of U.S. Presidents, but never dull.  Writing in colorful style peppered with Rogers’ one-liners, he makes a persuasive argument that Will Rogers is a unique, even an iconic, character in the American experience.

Available at  at 15 branches of the Free Library of Philadelphia

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With Liberty and Justice for Some

Glenn Greenwald. With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful. New York: Henry Holt & Company, 2011.

Reviewed by T. Hatch

Salon.com’s blogger extraordinaire Glenn Greenwald tells the story of how we as a country have allowed a culture of elite immunity to flourish.  With Liberty and Justice for Some, he makes a rather old-fashioned argument. American political liberty rests on the assumption that the law reigns supreme. And, if the fundamental requirement of the rule of law is equality then the last forty years of American political history has made a mockery of this idea. The promise of America’s founding has been forsaken by the emergence of a two-tiered justice system.

Greenwald pinpoints the descent into the corrupt culture of elite immunity beginning with Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon. It was the Nixon pardon which became the template for justifying elite immunity. President Ford, who if you believe Seymour Hersh (and Greenwald does), was selected as Agnew’s replacement because of his willingness to protect Nixon.  It was Ford who made the impassioned plea of empathy for Nixon i.e. because he had been through so much already and because the country needed to “look forward.”  In essence this call for empathy was a disguised appeal for aristocratic privilege that was granted and used as a perniciously burgeoning precedent.

The shenanigans associated with Nixon era criminality were followed closely by successively more brazen acts.  The law-breaking that went along with the Iran-Contra scandal (its subsequent cover-up and pardons) followed by the refusal of the Clinton administration to do anything about it gave way to a crescendo of felonies and war crimes committed by members of the Bush #43 administration.

In addition to crimes disguised as policy decisions receiving immunity, membership privileges were extended to the “corporate partners” as well.  The political criminals of George W. Bush’s administration merely had to utter the word “terrorism” and the Democratic Congress swiftly and obediently complied in allowing immunity to be extended to telecom corporations which had violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) with uninhibited impunity. The telecom immunity battle was the point at which politicians and corporations perfected immunizing private sector elites.  

In keeping with tradition and violating the law himself to do so, President Obama overlooked the crimes of the Bush administration because he had “a belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.” (p. 54) One need not wonder what would happen to a defendant in criminal court (naturally not from the political or corporate elite) who tells the presiding judge that while dozens of people saw him shoot another down in cold blood he is “looking forward” now.  The defendant would almost certainly be joining the 1% of the adult population in the United States that are currently in jail or prison.

Then there was the late financial criminality of Wall Street run amok.  Unlike the Savings and Loan debacle of the late 1980s which resulted in the Federal government bailing out the cousin of the banking industry to the tune of $150 billion, the 2008 meltdown which occasioned a bailout at least seventy times larger, no one has been sent to jail or even charged with a crime. Greenwald quotes Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibi: “The only thing to remember is that all the ones who got us into this mess – Rubin, Summers, Goldman in general – are now being put in charge of the cleanup by a president who spent 18 months on the campaign trail pledging to end the influence of money in politics.” (p.117) Much like his former Senate colleague Charles Schumer of  New York  (a.k.a. “Senator Wall Street”) Obama was not about to turn the party over to “crazy, anti-business liberals.”

Whereas the Bush administration only threatened to prosecute whistle blowers the Obama administration, attempting to become the undisputed champion of elite immunity and privilege, has aggressively carried out these threats.  The Obama war on Wikileaks and PFC Bradley Manning is an illustration of this practice. “If you create a worldwide torture regime, illegally spy on Americans without warrants, abduct people with no legal authority, or invade and destroy another country based on false claims, then you are fully protected.  But if you expose any of these lawless actions by publishing the truth about what was done, then you are a criminal who deserves the harshest possible prosecution.” (p.262) 

Greenwald makes what can be construed as a basically conservative argument.  While he admits that there has never been anything like equality before the law (we achieved universal suffrage in this country about the same time we all bought color TV sets) he nevertheless decries the abandonment of the de jure ideal of the rule of law.  Greenwald does a solid job of recounting the “what” of history but he does not attempt to reckon with the “why” in this book. Sometimes art is short and life is long but the question of why is it that the American political class bothers less and less with a pretense of legality is of interest.

Doing my best to avoid a Marxist-smarty-pants-post-hoc-ergo-propter-hoc conclusion is difficult. I think Slavoj Zizek’s contention that we are in a post-ideological epoch certainly has some validity.  Accordingly, it is not “hurray the beast ideology is at long last dead” as much as it is “we are so totally in control at this point that we don’t have to pay lip service to any nonsense about equality anymore.” A decadent political culture which allows a proud war criminal such as Dick Cheney to go on television, openly admit to his role in the crime of waterboarding while mocking the authorities who failed to lock him up, is evidence of a political system that not only tolerates but encourages open displays of obscene arrogance.

Soon to be available at the Free Library of Philadelphia. Check your library or local book store.

The book review heard David Harvey, professor of geography and anthropology at CUNY,  speak last night as part of the Penn Humanities Forum series of lectures. His lecture followed the same themes outlined by Hatch above, emphasizing the growing and solidifying disparity in wealth in this country and around the world. His most recent book is available at Penn Libraries. Harvey, David. The Enigma of Capital: And the Crises of Capitalism. Oxford [England: Oxford University Press, 2010. HB95 .H37 2010

Favorite Books and Book Review welcomes your reviews and comments about books you care about.

The Altruism of Imperialism

Jean Bricmont. Humanitarian Imperialism: Using Human Rights to Sell War. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2006.

Richard Seymour. The Liberal Defence of Murder. London/New York: Verso, 2008.

Samantha Power, "A Problem From Hell:” America and the Age of Genocide. New York: Perennial Harper Collins, 2002.

Reviewed by T. Hatch

Robespierre once argued that “nobody likes armed missionaries.”  That was in the context of an argument with Brissot de Warville (and those of his ilk generally known as Girondins) who, anticipating elements of the Bush administration, advocated a preemptive attack on the royalists who had run away from the Revolution and their foreign enablers.  Further, according to Brissot, this act of liberation could only be greeted with enthusiasm by the burghers of Koblenz.  To indelicately state the obvious the people of Koblenz were much like the people of Baghdad in not greeting their “liberators” with open arms; while Brissot arguably got what he deserved George W. Bush has really good seats to Texas Rangers baseball games and a presidential library. To heighten the indignity,  history has robbed Brissot of the credit of formulating the Bush Doctrine.

Samantha Power who currently runs the Office of Multilateral Affairs and Human Rights as Senior Director of Multilateral Affairs on the staff of the National Security Council argues that it is the moral responsibility of the United States government to intervene militarily to prevent genocide.  Who could be against the prevention of a genocidal slaughter?  The problem is that this “responsibility to protect” argument transcends simply intervening to halt genocide and allows the ideological cover for a less exalted form of imperialism on the part of the world’s leading interventionist.

Power was reportedly one of the leading advocates of a humanitarian intervention in Libya inside the Obama administration.  At the time of this writing Muammar Gaddafi has been freshly killed and the era of despotism has been vanquished.  The problem is that what started as a humanitarian military intervention to save the civilians of Benghazi has “worked” to achieve regime change. This template for humanitarian imperialism is now far more likely to happen again. Just as Brissot and Bush couched their plans for conquest in humanitarian language so the Obama administration has made imperialism an altruistic activity.

In “A Problem From Hell” Power chronicles the efforts of Raphael Lemkin, who originated the term genocide, to bring the issue to the attention of the world.  The United Nations adopted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in December of 1948.  Springing into action the United States Senate became the ninety-eighth nation to ratify thirty-eight short years later.

One of the most endearing parts of Power’s book is the story of Senator William Proxmire’s relentless struggle to have the Genocide Convention adopted by the Senate.  Proxmire, a democrat from Wisconsin, used his one minute speech in the Senate 3,211 times to argue for the ratification of the Convention.  Finally, in 1986 that ratification occurred.

Richard Seymour, also known for his blog Lenin’s Tomb, in The Liberal Defence of Murder directly criticizes Power for paying no attention to the worst crimes of Western states e.g. Guatemala and East Timor. She also somehow forgot to include the atrocities in Indochina committed by the U.S. which were quasi-genocidal.  Seymour asserts that “The assumption that the US military will have the answer to genocidal violence wherever it is occupying cannot work without this historical forgetting.” (p. 219)

Seymour argues the process by which the U.S. government launches imperialistic wars of conquest, while at the same time comparing itself favorably to Oxfam, began with the first Gulf War in 1991. The idea that Empires can be trusted to perform good deeds out of a sense of altruism is absurd.  The Gulf War was the real beginning of the exaltation of humanitarian intervention. It is from this point that a straight line can be drawn to the logic of humanitarian intervention in Yugoslavia, which in turn laid the groundwork for the debacle in Iraq. 

Supporting American or European power against aspects of global power deemed even more barbaric was irresistible for some.  The “nouveaux philosophes” i.e. Bernard Henri Levy, Andre Glucksmann, Bernard Kouchner (“Mr. Humanitarian Intervention”), and Alain Finkielkraut were galvanized by a logic of “lesser evilism.” Formerly left-wing intellectuals accommodating themselves to capitalism has led to what Seymour has labeled an “energetic depoliticization of the issues.”  Politics as thus been reduced to a disingenuous discourse of human rights.

Jean Bricmont in Humanitarian Imperialism Using Human Rights to Sell War argues that the well-meaning advocates of humanitarian intervention provide “moralistic cover for the cynicism of a Donald Rumsfeld.”  Since the West is all about “widespread indifference to criminal policies pursued with a perfectly clear conscience” (p. 57) the doctrine of the “responsibility to protect” is perfectly suited to these nefarious ends.  This is the epoch when the U.S. Navy can advertise itself as “a global force for good.”  Moralizing rhetoric combined with cynical practice has flourished remarkably in places like Afghanistan.

Bricmont maintains that ideology is the most effective form of social control in a democratic society; a free press is a brilliant propaganda tool in the service of imperialism.   So the defense of human rights serves as the righteous basis of Western imperialism in its offensive against the former socialist bloc and Third World countries escaping from the cold embrace of colonialism. He goes as far as to suggest that humanitarian interventionism has become today’s new opium.

There is a stunning hypocrisy in what liberal imperialists will defend.  Most U.S. Democrats, European Social Democrats, and Greens defend democracy domestically but call for the dictatorship role for a small group of countries on the international level (Obama being the modern version of Gladstone in this respect).  An international Herrenvolk democracy has been created; American liberal ideology has conquered the world. Because Bricmont believes that there is nothing more hopelessly utopian than the notion that there can be stability in a world under American hegemony, he proposes an organization for our time. The watchdog organization that he proposes would be called “Imperialism Watch.”  Its mission would be to denounce wars and war propaganda as well as the economic pressures and other maneuvers that make injustice thrive and prosper. 

All of this might lead us to ask a couple of relevant questions.  Was Rachel Corrie a true example of humanitarian intervention as Richard Seymour suggests? Or, when President Romney launches his first humanitarian assault to whom should he rightfully give credit?

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Not a False Note Is Played: Peggy Ehrhart's Sweet Man Is Gone

Ehrhart, Peggy. Sweet Man Is Gone. Gale Cengage, 2008

Reviewed by Walter Giersbach

Peggy Ehrhart immerses the reader in a world of musicians, what they go thorough to get their gigs, and the tribulations of trying to get your band to the point where it pays the bills.  Never fear if you’re not an avid music fan.  Her allusions and descriptions are transparent and easy to grasp.   Ehrhart, herself a guitarist, nails this world down cold, then adds the literary challenge of an amateur sleuth wanting to solve the murder — make that two — of friends.
   
The atmosphere and ambience of Sweet Man Gone are right on, from the dingy bars of the Lower East Side to the cheap pads of the Upper West Side to the rundown flats in Hackensack.  Nostalgia flowed over me as I recalled streets I walked and places I hung out long ago.  Her plot flows seamlessly — and often dreamlike — as she drives her clunker in and out of the city, from practice studios to blues bars to crash pads.  Interestingly, there’s not a false note of irony, cynicism, or authorial disbelief in her writing.  Hers is a beautiful portrayal of a lonely woman just trying to make it while loving the blues too much.

The plot unfolds smoothly, building bit by bit as a novel of character evolves into a fast-paced crescendo of discovery.  And, like a classic whodunit, the killer isn’t revealed until the last pages.
   
Sweet Man Gone is a very refreshing antidote for those suffering an overdose on Dennis LeHane, Dashiell Hammett, James Patterson and other hardboiled crime writers.

ISBN-10: 1594146683

Available at three locations at the Free Library of Philadelphia or from your local library or bookseller. Interested in other books by Peggy Ehrhart? Check out her Web page.

Follow Walter Giersbach's own short fiction and ideas at
http://allotropiclucubrations.blogspot.com/

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