A Chinese artist’s memoir of joys and sorrows

1000 YEARS OF JOYS AND SORROWS: A Memoir by Ai Weiwei.  Translated by Alan H. Barr (2021)

Ai Weiwei is a well-known Chinese artist.  His father, Ai Qing, was a well-known Chinese poet. Between them, their lives cover a century of Chinese cultural history.

 Both wanted to explore the wider world outside China.  Both believed that art and poetry were for the masses and not just the elite.  Both believed in artistic freedom.  Both were imprisoned by the Chinese government for exercising that freedom.

The first half of the book is Ai Weiwei’s biography of his father.  Ai Qing was a loyal Chinese Communist who nevertheless believed writers could serve the Revolution best if they were true to their own vision.  The regime disagreed.

The second half is Ai Weiwei’s own story.  Unlike his dad, who was loyal to a cause, he was a rebel who confronted and rejected all forms of authority – governmental, cultural and traditional.  The video above, a trailer for a 2012 documentary, gives an idea of his defiant spirit.

“Art should be a nail in the eye, a spike in the flesh, gravel in the shoe,” Weiwei wrote. “The reason art cannot be ignored is that it destabilizes what seems settled and secure.”

My interest in the book was awakened by learning it is one of Edward Snowden’s favorites. 

The title of the book is based on verses from one of Ai Qing’s poems:

Of a thousand years of joys and sorrows,

Not a trace can be found.

You who are living, live the best life you can.

Don’t count on the earth to preserve memory.

Ai Qing was born in 1910, one year before the overthrow of the Manchu dynasty.  He loved poetry and art and persuaded his father to give him money to go to France for study in 1929.  

Ai Qing 1929

He lived in Paris among poor Chinese expatriates for three years, where he learned to speak French and love Russian literature.  He later said these were the happiest years of his life.  He returned three years later, having learned no marketable skills that would enable him to pay back his father.

When he got back, he moved to Shanghai, joined the Union of Left Wing Artists and was arrested just a few months later.  He wrote his first poems during his three years in prison.

For years after that, he lived hand-to-mouth, subsisting on low-paid teaching jobs or the charity of his father.  He managed to keep writing and was able to get some of his works published.

He was one of these poets who are inspired and driven to write, no matter what their circumstances.  The themes of his poetry were the suffering of the Chinese common people as a result of exploitation and war.

He was married, divorced and had relationships with various women.  He begat children who died in childbirth and infancy, probably as a result of poverty.  He somehow managed to get his poetry published.

In 1941, he made his way to Yunan and joined Mao Zedong.  Mao’s idea of the role of writers was that they were the propaganda arm of the revolutionary army and should be subject to military discipline.  

Ai Qing argued about this with Mao to his face.  He believed that writers could best serve the revolution by following their own inspiration.

Book note: The Russian art of war

THE RUSSIAN ART OF WAR: How the West Led Ukraine to Defeat by Jacques Baud (2024)

I’ve long said that Ukraine and its NATO backers will lose the current war because Ukraine’s forces are outnumbered and outgunned.Jacques Baud, a former Swiss intelligence officer and UN consultant, said they also are being out-thought.

In this book, he outlined the history of the war, discussed the strategies of the contenders and compares their strengths in terms of troop strength, organization, strategy and tactics, economic strength and armaments.

He concluded that the Russians are more powerful than the anti-Russian alliance in terms of being able to win a war in this particular time in that particular place.
He also said that Russians are more realistic in terms of their strategy and goals.

The Ukrainian goal is to restore its 1991 boundaries. The U.S. goal is to weaken Russia so that it ceases to be a great power.

The Russian goal is to eliminate the possibility of surprise attack from forces close to its borders.

In order to achieve its goal, Russia is demilitarizing Ukraine by killing Ukrainian troops and destroying Ukrainian armaments on a war of attrition.

Russia is virtually killing off a generation of young Ukrainian men. It also is to an extent demilitarizing NATO nations by forcing them to deplete their arsenals to support Ukraine.

The U.S. seeks to weaken Russia by keeping Ukraine in the fight at whatever cost—to Ukraine. In order to do this, it is promoting a false narrative that says Ukraine has a fighting chance to win.

This narrative is the key to getting continued political support for continuing the flow of money and weapons to Ukraine. That is why there is such an effort to suppress information and argument that runs counter to the narrative.

Objective observers foresaw that Ukraine’s counter-offense last year was doomed from the beginning, but Ukraine launched it anyway in order to show its foreign arms suppliers that it was still in the fight.,

How corporations are replacing democracy

SILENT COUP: How Corporations Overthrew Democracy by Claire Provost and Matt Kennard (2023)

Everybody knows that corporations influence and manipulate governments behind the scenes. In Silent Coup, two British journalists show ways in which corporations are actually replacing governments.

There are international corporate courts, whose decisions are binding on governments. The world is dotted with enclaves administered by corporations independent of any national laws. Even responsibility for public welfare and national defense is being handed over to corporations.

Few of these things are secret.  They are just ignored.  That is why the coup is a silent coup.

Corporate Courts

I first learned about international corporate courts when the Obama administration proposed the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement, a free trade agreement binding all the important nations bordering the Pacific except China.

The problem with TTP agreement was in the fine print.  Any time a TPP country’s government adopted a policy that impacted the profits of a foreign company, that company could go to a special arbitration board and demand compensation for lost profits.  

Public outcry prevented U.S. ratification of that agreement, but then I learned that NAFTA also contained an investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) provision.  In fact, the whole world is covered by a web of ISDS agreements.

They were the brainchild of a German banker called Hermann Abs who had headed Deutsche Bank.  He helped finance the Nazi regime, although he did not belong to the Nazi party itself.  He helped settle allied claims against Germany after the war.  He was highly respected by bankers and industrialists, including in the USA.

In 1957, he made a speech in San Francisco to a group of bankers and industrialists from all over the world, calling for a “capitalist Magna Carta,” a system of international law that would protect global corporations from revolutionaries and nationalists. 

He joined with a British Lord called Lord Shawcross to write a document called the Abs-Shawcross Draft Convention.  It was taken up in the 1960s by the World Bank, which created the International Center for Dispute Settlement (ICDS) and pressured its clients to adopt ISDS rules.

Provost and Kennard came across the ICDS when they went to El Salvador, which was fighting a lawsuit brought by a Canadian-Australian company called OceanaGold, which demanded compensation for environmental regulations that prevent them from digging a gold mine.

Book note: Under a White Sky

UNDER A WHITE SKY: The Nature of the Future by Elizabeth Kolbert (2021)

Under a White Sky is an informative, readable book, which I recommend.

It is a book about people tampering with the environment to counteract damage done by previous tampering with the environment.

These people risk unintended consequences in order to undo previous unintended consequences.

This is unavoidable, Elizabeth Kolbert wrote.  There’s no state of unspoiled nature to get back to.  Doing nothing is an option, but it is not a good option.  The best that can be hoped for is to minimize previous damage.

Her first example is the ongoing struggle to keep Asian Carp, an invasive species, from jumping from the Mississippi Valley watershed to the Great Lakes Basin.

Introduction of Asian Carp (four different species) into the North American environment was actually a suggestion by the great environmentalist Rachel Carson.

She thought the carp would be a good alternative to pesticides to control the growth of aquatic weeds and algae.   Aquatic weeds were choking some rivers so badly that not only boats, but swimmers, were unable to get through them.

Asian Carp accomplished their intended purpose. The carp ate up the weeds, but they also ate up and crowded out native fish, mussels and other water life.

On the Illinois River, Asian Carp are nearly two-thirds of estimated fish biomass, Kolbert wrote; on other tributaries, the proportion is even higher.

She wrote that one species can grow to more than 80 pounds, eat half its weight in a day and lay hundreds of thousands of eggs.  Another species can grow to 100 pounds.

There is an ongoing struggle to keep the carp out of the Great Lakes Basin, which is connected with the Mississippi watershed by means of the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, which was originally constructed to divert sewage and other pollution away from Chicago beaches.

The canal was originally so polluted that it was toxic to fish.  But thanks to the Clean Waters Act and the work of Friends of the Chicago River, it is now possible for the Asian Carp to survive.

The carp are held back by massive fishing, which can yield literally tons of carp in a few days, and by an electrified fence on the Chicago River.

The irony of all this is obvious, but Kolbert does not criticize Rachel Carson or the diggers of the Chicago and Ship Canal.  They did the best they could on the basis of what they knew.  This is life.  This is the human condition.

US defeat in Ukraine and the coming world order

THE UKRAINE WAR AND THE EURASIAN WORLD ORDER by Glenn Diesen (2024)

I’ve long felt that I’m living at a turning point in history, comparable to the eve of the French Revolution or the First World War.  There are so many things that can’t go on as they are, although what will or should replace them is not clear.

Glenn Diesen is a Norwegian political scientist whom I watch frequently on podcasts on The Duran web site, such as the one above.  His new book is a history of relations among nations, the reasons for the imminent end of the U.S.-backed “rules-based international order,” and how the Ukraine conflict fits into this.

The first printing of the book seems to be sold out.  Rather than wait for a second printing, I ordered a PDF version of the book, which is something I rarely do.

Diesen says there are two basic frameworks for relations among states.  One is hegemony, when the most powerful state imposes order on all the rest.  The other is a balance of power, with no one state allowed to dominate all the rest.

After the fall of the Roman Empire in the West, the aspirational goal of Western European Christians was unity under the rule of the Pope and a reconstituted Holy Roman Empire.  The Pope crowned Charlemagne as successor to the Caesars in the year 800 CE.  His empire broke apart after his death, but was reconstituted in 962 CE by Otto I and continued as Europe’s dominant power for centuries.

In theory, all the other kings and nobles were vassals of the Emperor and subject to the rule of the Pope.  Conflicts between Pope and Emperor lessened the prestige and power of both, and the goal of European unity faded and was sometimes resisted in practice, but did not entirely disappear.

A turning point came with the Thirty Years War in 1618-1648.  It began as a religious war in which Catholic Austria sought to suppress rebel Protestant German princes.  Catholic France and Protestant Sweden joined the conflict, and it became the bloodiest conflict in European history prior to the 20th century.

The war ended with the Treaty of Westphalia, in which it was agreed that the rulers of each principality has the right to determine their subjects’ religion without outside interference.  This was the origin of what is called the Westphalian system.  In this system, each ruler agrees to respect the others’ sovereignty and right to exist.

Is liberalism doomed? Should it be?

THE NEW LEVIATHANS: Thoughts After Liberalism by John Gray (2023)

There are two famous writers named John Gray. The first one is the author of books about men from Mars and women from Venus. The second one is a British philosopher with a cult following, who share his deep skepticism about almost everything.  The second John Gray is the author of The New Leviathans.

One thing Gray is skeptical about is the future of liberalism.  This is a topic much on my mind, so I decided to try his latest work.  He begins by defining liberalism as follows:

• It is individualist, asserting the rights of the individual against any collective body.
• It is egalitarian, claiming equal rights for all regardless of status.
• It is universalist, claiming equal rights for all regardless of race, religion or nationality.
• It is meliorist, affirming the possibility of continual, gradual improvement in the human condition.

This accurately represents liberalism, as I have believed in it ever since I was old enough to have political convictions.  I still believe in liberalism, but, of late, I have come to doubt its future.

I worry about liberal over-reach — the attempt to make every claim on society a matter of rights.  

I believe there are certain basic rights, including freedom of speech, freedom of religion and the right to a fair trial, that are fundamental, and not to be overridden by a majority vote.

But the more things claimed as a matter of fundamental rights, the weaker public respect for rights becomes, and the less possibility for resolving issues through negotiations, compromise and the democratic process.

This brings me to the other problem with liberalism.  The principle of  “I’ll respect your rights if you respect mine” is proving to be less inspiring than nationalism, religion, racial and cultural identity and utopian political creeds.

Himself a hard-core atheist, Gray points out that the values of liberalism derive from the values of Christianity, which affirms the value of the individual soul, the equality of all humanity in Christ and the value of human kindness and good works.

As belief in Christianity fades, liberalism’s days are numbered.

The New Leviathans is full of references to another arch-skeptic, Thomas Hobbes, author of the original Leviathan (1651).  Hobbes was skeptical about nearly everything – human goodness, human reason, the meaning of concepts such as “humanity.”  He never directly criticized the Christian religion, but he never affirmed his faith in it, either.

Human beings, according to Hobbes, are incapable of living together peacefully.  Left to themselves, they will be like children in a schoolyard without adult supervision to control bullies and gangs.  They need a strong government to control them.  This is a Leviathan, an artificial beast composed of many individuals.

The only fundamental right, according to Hobbes, is the right of self-defense.  If a government can relieve the citizen of that responsibility and enable him to live out his life in peace, he wrote, that is as much as can be expected.  The form of government doesn’t matter.

Present-day liberals are less and less able to exercise the authority needed to maintain a stable social order, Gray wrote.  They are being supplanted by the so-called neoliberals and by the “woke” tendency, and by Russia and China, the new Leviathans.

Book note: A nice, readable detective novel

THE LAST DETECTIVE by Peter Lovesey (1991)

I used to do a lot of reading for pleasure. Now I hardly do any.  There are a number of reasons for this.

One is that I am preoccupied with trying to understand the current world crises, and, the more I read, the more aware I become of gaps in my knowledge.  It is like an addiction.  The more I learn, the more I realize I need to learn.

Another is that I have less time for reading because on average I sleep 10 hours a night and sometimes take naps during the day.  So I have less time for reading, as well as for necessary choices.

In the early years of my retirement, I read one or two books a week.  Now I’m doing well if I get through one or two a month.

However, a couple of weeks ago, I picked up a nice, readable detective novel, without any wider social significance, from a free book exchange.  Once I started reading, I found it hard to put down.

The Last Detective is what is called a “police procedural,” detailing the investigation of a crime from beginning to end.  Its hero, Peter Diamond is a detective of the old school who works for the police force of the English resort with of Bath.  He is under a cloud after having been wrongfully accused of abusing a suspect, and his eager-beaver assistant is after his job.

The story begins with a report that the body of a naked woman was seen floating in a nearby lake and proceeds through recovery of the body, identification of the body, determination that the death was due to foul play, identification of suspects, charging of one suspect, and prosecution and trial, which nearly results in a wrongful conviction.

All of this might be dull, but in fact is entertaining because of Lovesey’s knack for creating quirky characters and Peter Diamond’s jaundiced observations about life.

I enjoy detective stories set in foreign countries or different historical eras.  In order to hide the clues, the writers have to provide a lot of detail about life in the particular time and place.

The Last Detective is part of the Soho Press’s Soho Crime Series, which caters to readers of with this taste.  It publishes detective story series set in various locales and eras, including World War Two Germany, 1920s Bombay and Mormon Utah.  There are 20 Peter Diamond novels, of which The Last Detective is the first.

Good for Soho Press for doing that!  But as for myself, I am no longer up for long reading projects, whether it be detective story series or science fiction future history series.

G.K. Chesterton and distributive justice

THE OUTLINE OF SANITY by G.K. Chesterton (1926)

G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936) was a famous writer and colorful character.  He championed Christianity, tradition and the common sense of the common person and debunked the intellectual fashions of his age.  Even people who disagreed with him enjoyed his writing.

In The Outline of Sanity, he wrote about an economic philosophy called Distributism, which never caught on, but dealt with issues that are still current today—business monopoly, increasing economic inequality and standardized mass production. 

The basic principle of Distributism is that private property ownership is a human right, and therefor property should be widely distributed instead of concentrated in the hands of a few. 

That’s not the reality, at least not in today’s USA.  According to one measure, the top 5 percent of the U.S. population owns 72 percent of the wealth, and the bottom 80 percent owns 7 percent.

My friend John Belli thought Distributism would be a good topic for the discussion group I lead at my church.  Maybe it will.  Meanwhile here is a rough sketch of Chesterton’s book,

Chap. One – Some General Ideas

A great nation and civilization [i.e., the British] has fol­lowed for a hundred years or more a form of progress which held itself independent of certain old communications in the form of ancient traditions about the land, the hearth, or the altar. It has advanced under leaders who are confident, not to say cocksure. They are quite sure that their economic rules were rigid, that their political theory was right, that their commerce was beneficent, that their parliaments were popular, that their press was enlightened, that their science was humane.

In this confidence they committed their people to certain new and enormous experiments; to making their own independent nation an eternal debtor to a few rich men; to piling up private property in heaps on the faith of financiers; to covering their land with iron and stone and stripping it of grass and grain; to driving food out of their own country in the hope of buying it back again from the ends of the earth … till there was no independence without luxury and no labor without ugliness; to leaving the millions of mankind dependent on indirect and distant discipline and indirect and distant sustenance, working themselves to death for they know not whom and taking the means of life from they know not where.

Capitalism was a system that had just sprung up without anybody planning it.  Communism, in contrast, was an ideal system that was supposed to cure the evils of capitalism.  But Chesterton said Communism is just like capitalism, only worse—more concentration of power, more regimentation and standardization, fewer individual rights and not even a pretense of democracy.

Private things are already public in the worst sense of the word; that is, they are impersonal and dehumanized.  Public things are already private in the worse sense of the word; that is, they are mysterious and secretive and largely corrupt.  The new sort of Business Government will combine everything that is bad in all the plans for a better world.

Chesterton opposed both Communists and capitalists.  Both were enemies of widely-distributed private property.   Chesterton’s alternative to both was a wide distribution of property, so that everybody had some, but nobody and no group had so much that there wasn’t enough for all.

Communists and capitalists agreed this was unworkable.  They came together in saying that small business, small farms and self-employed craftsmen were doomed to be swallowed up, one way or the other, and nothing could be done about it.

We still hear this argument today.  Chesterton didn’t believe in historical inevitability.  The economic system of his day was constructed by human beings and he said that, if human beings can construct something, they can deconstruct it.

Chap. Two – Some Aspects of Big Business.

[Capitalism is] that economic condition in which there is a class of capital­ists, roughly recognizable and relatively small, in whose possession so much of the capital is concentrated as to necessitate a very large majority of the citizens serving those capitalists for a wage. 

In Chesterton’s day, and in our own, owners of monopoly businesses claim they exist because of their greater efficiency.  He denied this.  Business monopolies are often created by dumping — selling at a loss to run a small competitor out of business.  Or by simply buying the small competitor and shutting it down.

A Palestinian history of Zionism and its wars

THE HUNDRED YEARS’ WAR ON PALESTINE: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017 by Rashid Khalidi (2020)

Palestinian scholar Rashid Khalidi, a member of the faculty of Columbia University, has written a history of Zionism from the point of view of the Palestinians, a view that we in the USA rarely if ever hear.  

He is a member of an old Palestinian family, with roots going back into the Ottoman Empire, and his history is, in part, a history of his own family.  I emphasize the personal history in this post, although he himself mentions it only in passing. 

We in the USA are told that Israel’s history is a story of a heroic struggle by Zionists against Arab terrorists to establish a safe haven for Jews from Nazis and other antisemites. Alternatively, we are told it is a history of a tragic unavoidable conflict between two peoples, Jews and Palestinians, with equal claims to the same territory.

Rashid Khalidi said neither story is true.  He said the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is an ongoing colonial war waged by an indigenous people against conquerors from afar.  In his story, the Jewish settlers of Israel are equivalent to the Dutch and English settlers in South Africa and the French settlers in Algeria.

Zionists were never underdogs, he wrote.  They had the backing of the British Empire and then of the United States, as well as a powerful global network of supporters and donors.  

Palestinian Arabs never had anything equivalent, he wrote.  Even Arab governments that gave them lip service always had their own agendas.

His book is organized around six specific historical episodes, which he called “declarations of war” against the Palestinian people.     

GE’s Jack Welch and U.S. deindustrialization

THE MAN WHO BROKE CAPITALISM: How Jack Welch Gutted the Heartland and Crushed the Soul of Corporate America—And How to Undo His Legacy by David Gelles (2022)

Jack Welch, the CEO of General Electric from 1981 to 2001.  He was admired by corporate America and hated by working America.  Fortune magazine named him “Manager of the Century.”  His nickname among employees was “Neutron Jack.”

Welch’s mission, according to David Gelles in his new book, was to dismantle what’s called “stakeholder capitalism,” which is the theory that corporations benefit when employees, suppliers and their communities and not just stockholders have a stake in their success, and they all work together as a team.

He succeeded all too well, not only through his management of GE, but through the influence of GE-trained executives who went on to manage other companies, and his own role as a celebrity management guru.

We’re now living in Jack Welch’s USA, a nation of industrial decline, increasing poverty, increasing inequality and dysfunctional institutions.

That’s not to say Welch single-handedly broke capitalism.  There are many fingerprints on the wreckage.  But he is both a prime example and one of the driving forces behind the deindustrialization of the USA.

Gelles’ book doesn’t tell much about Jack Welch as a person.  What it’s about is the story of the impact of his style of management – why it came to be accepted, how it affected General Electric, how Welch disciples affected other companies and where Welch-ism stands today.

When Welch took over General Electric in 1981, it was a prime example of successful stakeholder capitalism in action. It produced everything from television sets, refrigerators and toasters to jet engines and nuclear reactors.  Its output accounted for a full one percent of U.S. gross domestic product.

Thanks to its long history of unbroken profitability, the 400,000 employees of  “Generous Electric” could expect lifetime employment if they worked hard and were loyal to the company.

But Welch didn’t believe in loyalty.  He actually forbid the use of the word “loyalty” in corporate communications.  He didn’t want GE workers to think of their jobs as secure.  He didn’t want teamwork.  He wanted them to compete with each other based on rewards and punishments.

He introduced “stack ranking” of employees.  Managers were supposed to rank employees in terms of performance.  Each year the top 20 percent were marked for advancement and the bottom 10 percent were fired.  So GE workers no longer had a stake on GE’s overall success; they in fact had a stake in fellow employees’ failure.

Employees were no longer regarded as assets.  They were regarded as costs, and GE’s aim was to keep the cost as low as possible.  Productive workers of profitable business divisions were laid off to achieve financial goals.

What if the Jewish state was in Europe?

JUDENSTAAT: The novel of the Jewish state in Germany by Simone Zelitch (2016)

Palestinians frequently say that they sympathize with victims of the Holocaust and their desire for a Jewish state, but they see no reason why it should be erected in their land, while the Germans, the perpetrators of the Holocaust, enjoyed 75 years of unbroken prosperity.

Judenstaat is an alternate-history novel in which there was no Balfour declaration and a Jewish state was founded not in the Holy Land, but on German soil.  It is a literary curiosity, not for everyone, but I found it interesting.

The novel is not a parallel or counterpoint to the history of the actual Israel.  Rather it is a meditation on Jewish destiny and European history. It also is a murder mystery.

The founder and first president of Judenstaat is one Leopold Stein, a representative of the Socialist Labor Bund, a real-life revolutionary Jewish organization founded in 1897 and primarily based in Poland, Lithuania and Russia.

Bundists fought persecution of Jews, but they also fought for the rights of all working people and not in a utopian future, but in the here and now.  Its motto was, “We are here.”

Stein somehow makes his way to Yalta in 1945 and gets permission from Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin to agree to establish a Jewish state on German territory, as retaliation and reparations for the crimes of Nazism.

Stalin sees a nonaligned but friendly Jewish state as a potentially useful window to the West, like the Hong Kong Autonomous Zone in China.

The Judenstaat is not religious and does not claim continuity with ancient Israel. It claims to be the nation of the Ashkenazi, descendants of Jews invited by Charlemagne in the Rhineland.  

Judenstaat claims the heritage of the great German-speaking Jews’ contribution to European culture, starting with Moses Mendelssohn and including Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein, and interprets the Holocaust as a repudiation of that liberal culture.

The official language of Judenstaat is German, not Yiddish or Hebrew.  The flag of Judenstadt is a yellow star upon a field of blue-and-white stripes, like the uniform of an Auschwitz prisoner.

The protagonist of the novel is Judit Klemmer, a documentary film-maker assigned to make a film commemorating the 40th anniversary of the founding of Judenstaat in 1948.  

In the process of gathering information, she learns that the official version of Judenstaat’s history covers up inconvenient facts.  She also picks up clues to the unsolved murder of her husband, a member of  Judenstaat’s despised Saxon minority.

The Saxons are the previous inhabitants of the land on which Judenstaat is established.  Most of them have left, as part of the ethnic cleansing of German populations which, in actual history, took place in East Prussia, Silesia and the Sudetenland. 

There was no life-and-death struggle with the Saxons and no legacy of decades of conflict and threat.  So, unlike the real Israel, it is not militaristic.  Its people don’t feel under threat.

A truly great American political novel

ALL THE KING’S MEN by Robert Penn Warren (1946)

All the King’s Men is a great novel loosely based on the life of Gov. Huey Long of Louisiana.  I read it as part of a reading group hosted by my friend, Linda White.

It is about the rise and tragedy of the charismatic politician, Willie Stark, and the education of his henchman, the cynical ex-newspaperman, Jack Burden.

One of its central themes is the question of ends and means in politics.  Another is the question of whether people are self-determining or are prisoners of fate.

It is great on many levels—for its rich prose style and descriptive writing, for its insights into human character, for its documentation of American life in a certain time and place, and for the author’s musings on the meaning of life.

Its central character, Willie Stark, like the actual Huey Long, was what we now call an illiberal democrat. 

He cared nothing for civil liberties, the rule of law or democratic procedures; he stopped at nothing to win.  

But he did care about the poor rural people of Louisiana and did things to improve their lives.  He elevated them, and they elevated him.

Stark’s opponents, like Long’s, were themselves ruthless and corrupt, but Stark did not complain of unfairness.  Instead he beat them at their own game.

As with Long, college-educated liberals fought him because they saw him as a dictator, which, to a great extent, he was. 

Unlike Long, Stark was a disillusioned idealist, who entered politics with a naive, high-school-civics view of life.  Political bosses got him to run for governor to split the vote of an opposing machine candidate.

When Stark realized how he was being used, he got drunk and gave a speech expressing his bitterness.  That speech inflamed the crowd, as his earlier speeches never had done.

He was politically reborn, but, as a kind of mirror opposite of a born-again Christian, into a sense of sin rather than escape from it.

Unlike philosophers who believe that people are born good and become corrupt, he believed people are born in corruption “from the stench of the didie to the stench of the shroud” and somehow create goodness out of evil, because their original state of corruption is the only thing to make good from.

Stark believes that everyone has a guilty secret, no matter how high-minded they think they are, and this secret can be discovered.

He is frustrated because none of his “king’s men” understand his motives – neither the high-minded reformers who can’t stomach his methods, nor the corrupt machine politicians he actually works with, nor Jack Burden, the narrator and co-protagonist of the novel.

Unlike the hyper-active and purpose-driven Stark, Jack has drifted through life.   He once suffered an episode of what we would call clinical depression (the “Great Sleep”).  He lacks ambition and thinks all human action consists of automatic reactions to circumstances (the “Great Twitch”)

He is taken into Stark’s inner circle because he befriended Stark before he began his ascent.  He is put to work using his investigative skills to dig up dirt on Stark’s opponents.  He justifies this to himself by trying to think of himself as a searcher for truth.

The museum of banned books

Some of the exhibits:

Mein Kampf, the bible of Nazism.

The Anarchists’ Cookbook, a do-it-yourself book for terrorists.

Thirteen Reasons Why, a novel that allegedly encourages teen suicide.

The Satanic Verses, because it is offensive to Muslims.

Winnie the Pooh, because it is offensive to Xi Jinping.

Grammars and dictionaries of forbidden languages.

The coming of the super-intelligent computer

Source: K-Tech Centre for Excellence.

THE MASTER ALGORITHM: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World by Pedro Domingos (2015)

HUMAN COMPATIBLE: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control by Stuart Russell (2019)

NEW LAWS OF ROBOTICS: Defending Human Expertise in the Age of AI by Frank Pasquale (2020)

∞∞∞

A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. 

A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. 

A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

==Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics.

The future is already here.  It’s just not evenly distributed.

==William Gibson

∞∞∞

Artificial intelligence presents us, the human race, with a problem:  How do we control an entity that is more intelligent than we are, that we don’t fully understand, that’s not fully under our control, and that can enhance its own powers?

Computers were once logic made manifest.  They could perform calculations with a speed, accuracy and complexity beyond the power of any unaided human operator, based on the ability of their circuitry – the AND, OR, NOR and NAND gates – to duplicate the work of logicians and mathematicians.  

The computer programs were purely mechanical, purely deterministic based on their circuitry, completely understandable in principle if you delved deeply enough.

Today’s most advanced artificial intelligence programs are far beyond that.  They can reason empirically and not just logically.  They can learn on their own without human input.  They can reprogram themselves and develop capabilities their human masters did not plan on.

Computer expert friends of mine say that the ever-evolving, ever-changing AIs are more like organisms or ecological systems than they are like machines.  

But they are not sentient.  They don’t think their own thoughts.  They don’t have desires and emotions as we do—at least not insofar as we humans can tell. 

AI is so embedded in our society that few of us would want to shut it down altogether, or even know how to do it if we wanted to.

If you’re an urban, middle-class American, AIs are involved in almost every aspect of your life. 

AIs determine the placement of products on supermarket shelves.  AIs correct your grammar when you use word processors.  AIs diagnose illnesses.  AIs help prospecting companies find oil, gas and mineral deposits.  AIs make social media and on-line games more engaging and addictive.

AIs help marketers plan advertising campaigns, politicians plan political campaigns, stockbrokers plan investment strategies and generals and admirals plan military strategy.  They can beat grand masters at chess and Go.  They confer so many competitive advantages that it is hard to imagine them being rolled back.

This may be just the beginning.

The goal of top AI researchers is artificial general intelligence (AGI), or super intelligence.  This would be an AI that can reason as humans do and perceive the world as humans do, in terms of sights and sounds, but a million times more powerfully, and to be able to do it not for specialized purposes, as current AIs do, but for any human purpose.

Such an AI would not necessarily be a conscious, living being, but it most likely would be a convincing imitation of one, and not all computer scientists rule out the possibility of actual sentience.  

If biological life and consciousness somehow emerged by themselves in a mysterious way from complex organic molecules, maybe another form of life and consciousness—not necessarily one we could recognize—could emerge from complex electronic processes.

Be that as it may, a powerful force would be unleashed into the human environment, a force with huge potential for both good and evil, which humans would not fully understand and could not fully control. 

What we would need to worry about is not a real-life version of Skynet. computers deciding to replace human beings.  AIs are altruists.  They don’t have goals or drives save those that are programmed into them.

 The danger would be unintended consequences, the story of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice writ large.  Whether that is an immediate danger, a long-range danger or an imaginary danger, I do not know.

Book note: John Le Carré’s Silverview

SILVERVIEW by John Le Carré (2021)

John Le Carré (David Cornwell) was a fine writer and a fine storyteller.  He was briefly a member of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (MI-6) and his alternate-history version of the SIS, the Circus, makes readers feel as if they were given inside knowledge.

I was a great fan of Le Carré’s novels from the Cold War era—Call for the Dead (1961) through Smiley’s People (1979), but less so of his subsequent novels, although I did read a few.

With the earlier novels, even though Le Carré shows the British intelligence service as frequently ruthless, amoral and treacherous, there is something at stake in the covert war against the Soviet and East German spy services.  They are fighting a equally powerful and ruthless enemy.  True, the combatants’ espionage is mainly against each other, but their battle has meaning.

The Little Drummer Girl (1983), The Night Manager (1993) and The Tailor of Panama (2001) are about innocent people getting caught up in the machinery of international intrigue.  The title character in  A Perfect Spy (1986) is perfect because he has no loyalties.

Silverview was Le Carré’s final novel, published after his death.  It is in a lot of ways a perfectly typical Le Carré novel.  It is a good for what it is.

A political innocent, Julian Lawndsley, gets mixed up with a man of mystery named Edward Avon.  Meanwhile a semi-retired spymaster named Stewart Procter is assigned to deal with a “security breach.”

It’s not immediately clear what the security breach consists of, or what, if anything, is at stake.  Nobody says, “If [such-and-such vital information] falls into the hands of [such-and-such evildoers], the result will be [something terrible].”  Rather the aim is to close the security breach before questions are asked in the House of Commons.

Procter’s search leads him to Lawndsley, and together they learn Avon’s life history and true purpose.  He escapes their net.  It isn’t clear whether this is a good thing of a bad thing.

Le Carré was a fine sociological observer, especially of the British class system.  Henry James and Anthony Trollope might have liked this aspect of his work.  His spies are mostly members of what in the USA is called the professional managerial class.  

He shows his characters’ class markers — what they eat, what they drink, what they wear, what schools they and their children attend, what fashionable political and social views they hold.

In the USA and (I presume) other countries, the backbone of the armed forces are military families, families whose members serve in the military generation after generation.  Le Carré’s Silverview shows us espionage families, whose members serve in the secret intelligence services generation after generation.

This novel also can be read as part of the “condition of England” genre of novels.  The novel series as a whole, including this one, can be read as the decline of British power and growing British subservience to the United States.  

I understand the Le Carré was an opponent of Brexit and a believer in the European Union.  The current state of the EU must have been a great disappointment.

Julian Assange in depth and in context

THE MOST DANGEROUS MAN IN THE WORLD by Andrew Fowler (2011)

SECRET POWER: Wikileaks and Its Enemies by Stefania Maurizi, translated by Lesli Cavanaugh-Bardelli (2022)

I’ve read two more books about Julian Assange that I recommend.

Andrew Fowler, an Australian journalist, wrote about Assange at the height of his fame and success. He provides Assange’s back story and insights into his sometimes difficult character.

I never thought Assange’s personality traits mattered when it came to assessing the political impact and legal defense of his work.  Also, he has been the target of systematic character assassination.  

But he’s an interesting person, and Fowler’s warts-and-all portrait is a fair and balanced look at Assange, the man.

Stefania Maurizi, an Italian journalist who worked closely with Assange, took up the story where Fowler left off.

She puts him in the broader context of the struggle for transparency in government and privacy for the individual during the past decade.  Assange isn’t the only person who’s been imprisoned for truth-telling.

If I had to recommend just one book about Assange, it would be Maurizi’s.

Assange was an original thinker and a brilliant programmer.  In his 20s, he was a member of a hackers’ club called the International Subversives.  Assange managed to hack into top-secret U.S. military sites, including the National Aeronautics and Space Administration computers.  On the day of a space launch in 1989, the computers NASA lit up with the words, YOUR COMPUTER HAS BEEN WANKED.

This was quite an achievement, inasmuch as the public Internet did not exist.  Assange was arrested, tried and let off with a warning, inasmuch he hadn’t done any harm or made any money out of his prank.

During the late 1990s and early 2000s, there was a movement called the Cypherpunks, of which Assange was a part.  Their dual objectives were complete privacy for the individual and complete transparency for governments and other systems of authority.

Wikileaks was the realization of that ideal.  A whistle-blower could leave secret information with Wikileaks without anyone, including Wikileaks itself, knowing who they were.  Wikileaks could then, after verifying the information, throw light onto hidden power.

Among Wikileaks’ early exploits were exposes of African dictators, the Church of Scientology, crooked Icelandic bankers and Sarah Palin’s private emails.  

The organization’s most consequential disclosures – the the Collateral Murder video, the Afghan War Logs, the Iraq War Logs, the Cablegate disclosures and the Guantanamo Bay files – came from a single individual, a conscience-stricken Army private we now know as Chelsea Manning.

It’s interesting, for what it’s worth, that two of the world’s most important truth-tellers are a transgender woman, Chelsea Manning, and a gay man, Glenn Greenwald.  But Manning, unlike Greenwald and the others, did not start out as a social activist.  She was an ordinary person who was unwilling to be silent about atrocities.

The sex life of H.G. Wells

H.G. Wells (Photo via The Guardian, Getty Images}

A MAN OF PARTS: a novel by David Lodge (2011)

A Man of Parts is a fictional biography of H.G. Wells.  The title is based on two possible meanings of the word “parts.” It can mean talents and achievements, as in “a man of parts,” and it can mean “private parts,” the sexual organs.

Wells was well-endowed in both senses of the word.  He wrote more than a hundred books and, according to Lodge, had sex with more than a hundred women. 

Like Bertrand Russell, Wells was an advocate of scientific rationality, technological progress and sexual liberation.  All three things are dominant forces in the world we live in today, although not necessarily what Wells and Russell wanted.

The novel begins in 1944 with Wells terminally ill with cancer.  He refuses to leave his flat in London during the Blitz because that would be a moral victory for Hitler.

Wells is working on a long essay, The Mind at the End of Its Tether, which is a cry of despair about the future of the human race.

His former mistresses, Rebecca West and Moura Budberg, and his grown children worry about his health and morale, while he and Rebecca fret about the personal problems of their grown son, Anthony.   

The focus of the novel then shifts to Wells’ reminiscences of his boyhood, and his quarter-century of success prior to World War One.

The central narrative takes two forms.  One consists of Wells’ replies to a voice in his head that interrogates him about how he  conducted his life.  The other is an unfolding of the events of his life as they seemed at the time, without foreknowledge of the future.  

The book ends with a return to World War Two London, Wells’ final days and what his friends thought of him after he he died in 1946

Nick DiChario’s modern Italian folk tales

GIOVANNI’S TREE: New Italian Folktales by Nicholas A. DiChario (2023)

I’ve been looking forward to reading this book, and I read it with great enjoyment.  Nick is a wonderful storyteller, and there’s something about his prose style – his word choices, his metaphors, his ironic wit, his compassionate sense of the weaknesses of human nature – that makes his stories a pleasure to re-read.

All nine stories are set in the fictional Sicilian il Villaggio delle Ombre (Villlage of Shadows).  They span history from pre-Roman times to the present day.  

The village is sheltered by a magic tree, which was fertilized by fine wine and offers protection from the ravages of time.  It is inhabited by an immortal witch named Brunilda.  She will give you anything you ask, for a price, but her clients find that what they asked for was not what they wanted, and the price was harder to pay than they figured on.

Other inhabitants include a devil, a wood sprite, a zombie, a sentient sweater, a World War One soldier in suspended animation in a block of ice, a baron’s beautiful daughter who is immune to the law of gravitation, and a giant well-groomed female rat who is manager of the local branch of an Internet company.

Nick is known as a science fiction writer, and his stories are published in science fiction magazines and other science fiction venues, but his stories are different from the fantasy fiction you’d typically find in the science fiction section of chain bookstores.

When science fiction writers venture into fantasy, they usually treat the supernatural as something with predictable laws, analogous to chemistry and physics, as in the Harold Shea stories of L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt.

Nick DiChario

Nick DiChario’s stories are nothing like that.  They are like the traditional folk tales, in which the supernatural is awe-inspiring, mysterious and highly dangerous to anyone except the pure of heart.

The stories are full of humor and wit, but I put them down with a bittersweet feeling.  As one of the blurb writers said, Nick’s writings depict life’s blessings—good food and wine, family, friendship and love—and also reflect a knowledge of how easily they can be destroyed by heedlessness, overreaching and the wheels of fate.

This is true “magic realism”—human nature presented with stark realism in all its complexity, but the reality heightened by the magical context.

Nick is a native and resident of Rochester, N.Y.   He has a blog.  I’ve been acquainted with him for a long time.  I’ve followed his career with great appreciation for his unique and quirky imagination and his dedication to his art.

I own and recommend his two novels, A Small and Wonderful Life (2006) and Valley of Day-Glo (2008).  I can’t understand why they’re not cult classics.  Maybe they are, and I don’t know it.  However this may be, he has surpassed himself with Giovanni’s Tree. 

Do we need a 21st century debt jubilee?

“AND FORGIVE THEM THEIR DEBTS”: Lending, Foreclosure and Redemption From Bronze Age Finance to the Jubilee Year by Michael Hudson (2018)

Michael Hudson is an economist who says that the chief economic problem in the world today is that individuals and nations owe more debt than they ever can repay.  And “debt that can’t be repaid, won’t be repaid.”

He has written in many books and articles that, unless there is a writedown of debt, lenders will grow richer and richer and the indebted public will grow poorer and poorer until there is an economic collapse.

In this 2018 book, he argues that debt write-downs actually were economic policy in the ancient Near East, and are supported by the Hebrew Bible and the teachings of Jesus.

The saying on the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia, “Proclaim liberty throughout the land,” is a quote from Leviticus 25: 10.   According to Hudson, this refers forgiveness of debts and freeing of slaves (who are enslaved because they can’t pay their bills) in the periodic Jubilee year.

Such language is now interpreted as an aspirational goal, but Hudson maintains it was intended as policy.

There is reason why, in the Ten Commandments, there are separate commandments for “thou shalt not commit adultery” and “thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife.”

It meant it was a sin to try to acquire one’s neighbor’s wife as a bondservant in return for payment of debt, along with his ox, his ass, his manservant or maidservant or anything else that is one’s neighbor’s.

When the Lord’s Prayer said, “Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors,” Hudson says, it meant literal debt forgiveness as well as forgiveness of sins.   The word for “debt” in many European and Near Eastern languages is the same as the word for “sin.”

This goes against the grain of present-day thinking, in which debt repayment is regarded as an absolute moral obligation.   True, bankrupts normally don’t have to fear debtors’ prison, as was the law in early 19th century England, let alone be sold into slavery, as was the case in ancient Greece and Rome.

But student debt is not dischargeable in bankruptcy and debtors’ prisons are coming back in the form of sentences for contempt of court.  Debt slavery still exists for individuals in some parts of the world, and the international banking system does not show mercy for indebted poor nations.

If an obligation is absolute and unlimited, it is equivalent to a religion.  Debt repayment is regarded as an absolute obligation, and compound interest makes it a potentially unlimited one.  It really is a kind of religion, the service of Mammon.   And the Bible teaches that one cannot serve God and Mammon.

What it was like when the Nazis came to power

THE OPPERMANNS by Lion Feuchtwanger (1933) translated from the German by James Cleugh (1934) with an introduction by Ruth Gruber (2001)

The Oppermanns is about a wealthy, emancipated German Jewish family and their blindness to the rising threat of Nazism until it was nearly too late.

Lion Feuchtwanger, a famous German Jewish author, wrote it as a warning to the world and especially to the world’s Jewish community.  I read it as part of a reading group that wondered whether it has a warning for us today.  I think it does.

The Oppermanns are the third generation of a Jewish family that owns a well-known chain of furniture stores.  They consist of four siblings, Martin, an honest businessman; Edgar, a distinguished physician; Gustav, an intellectual dilettante; and Klara, married to a cynical East European Jew named Jacques Lavendal.

There also is a younger generation – Martin’s son Berthold, who embodies the best of Germany’s cultural heritage; Edgar’s daughter, Ruth, a Zionist; and Jacques’ son Heinrich, who is interested mainly in football.

There also is a minor character, an Oppermann furniture salesman named Herr Wolfsohn, whose apartment is coveted by a Nazi neighbor.

At the outset of the novel, all of them, except brother-in-law Jacques, regard themselves as secure, both as German citizens and as members of their social class.  Jacques compares them in their blindness to French aristocrats on the eve of the French Revolution.

Two of the characters – Berthold and Gustav – stand up to the Nazis and both are crushed.  The other Oppermanns escape, with enough of their wealth to reestablish themselves in other lands.  

They are sad that their beloved Germany is no more, but they are still better off than the vast majority of people, Jewish or not, left behind in Germany.  They are good people as the world goes, but they don’t appreciate how (relatively) fortunate they are.

I have more sympathy with meek, semi-comical Herr Wolfsohn, who gets a chance to immigrate to Palestine and accepts the challenge of learning Hebrew and reinventing himself as a farm laborer.

The central moral question of the novel, asked a number of times in different ways, is whether Berthold and Gustav were heroes or victims.  Or, as young Heinrich puts it, is it better to be “decent” or to be “sensible”?

Berthold and Gustav defied the Nazis in the name of truth and justice, and paid a terrible price.  But, as Heinrich noted, their courage, integrity and self-sacrifice changed nothing.

He resolves that he will not risk his life for the sake of any principle unless, and only then, taking the risk will achieve something that will justify the risk.

Lion Feuchtwanger himself tried to be an effective opponent of the Nazis, while keeping himself out of their hands.  He was in fact interned by French collaborators with the Nazis after the fall of France in 1940, but managed to escape and live to write another day.

Austerity, fascism and the ‘science’ of economics

THE CAPITAL ORDER: How economists invented AUSTERITY and paved the way to FASCISM by Clara E. Mattei (2022)

Back in the 17th and 18th centuries, physicians had a universal remedy for serious illness.  It was to bleed the patients until they improved.

Mainstream economists have a similar prescription for national economic woes.  It is called “austerity.” The elements are holding down wages, letting prices rise, cutting public spending (except on the military and police) and raising taxes (except on the rich).

Austerity contributes as much to economic health as bleeding to biological health.  That is to say, austerity has, so far as I know, an unbroken record of failure in promoting economic recovery. So why hasn’t the economics profession abandoned austerity, as the medical profession abandoned bleeding?

That is because the purpose of austerity is not what its proponents say it is.

Clara E. Mattei, an economist herself, wrote this book to expose austerity’s overlooked, though not hidden, agenda.

She did it in an original way, by looking at the imposition of economic austerity in the immediate aftermath of World War One in two countries, Britain and Italy.

Among the victorious allies, these two countries were at opposite extremes.

Britain was the center of a vast empire comprising nearly a quarter of the world’s population and land era.  It was Europe’s leading industrial and financial power.  It was the birthplace of Adam Smith and free-market economic liberalism.  And it was known for being politically stable.

Italy, in comparison, was poor, powerless and backward.  Revolutionary parties were strong and had a good chance of coming to power. 

The Great War, as people then called it, upset a lot of people’s assumptions about how economies worked.  

Governments found the law of supply and demand worked too slowly for effective war mobilization.  Central planning with price controls worked much better.  

People began to think similar policies might achieve the goals of peace.   Some of them acted on their high hopes.

In the years immediately following the war, Britain seemed on the verge of radical change, and Italy on the verge of revolution.

Change was prevented by taking economic policy out of the hands of voters and into the hands of supposed economic experts.  In Britain, this was done by legal means.  In Italy, it required a violent coup by Mussolini’s Fascists.

But the actual economic policies followed by the two countries were similar.  Mattei pointed out how Mussolini was praised by Britain’s leading mainstream economists.

The new American power elite

THE NEW POWER ELITE by Heather Gautney (2023)

Heather Gautney, a sociology professor and policy adviser to Senator Bernie Sanders, has undertaken to update and improve upon C. Wright Mills’ classic 1956 work, The Power Elite.

In some ways, she succeeded; in others, not.  

Mills analyzed three power elites – corporate, military and governmental.  He showed how they were largely independent of public accountability and public control, and were unrepresentative of the public at large.

Gautney contends that there is actually only one elite, an oligarchy of wealth, to which other elites are subordinate.  

The secret of this elite, she writes, is that it has persuaded the rest of us to accept neoliberal ideology. Neoliberalism is the principle that the interests of lenders and investors must be protected no matter what the costs.

She also says that while Mills described the origins, nature and sources of elite power, he failed to show how elites influenced policy and what they specifically did that was against the public interest.

Her book is just the opposite.  It is light on big-picture systemic analysis, but provides a vast mosaic of elite corruption, scandal, failure, exploitation and manipulation.

I found the cumulative effect of her examples coming one right after the other – bam! bam! bam! – to be powerful, even though I already knew about almost all of them.  I can only imagine the impact on those to whom all this is new.

But she failed to notice certain important things – notably the emergence of a new power center based on secret police and covert intelligence agencies, influencing elections, journalism and social media.

Also, her book is overly Trump-centric.  Trump is rich, powerful and destructive, but he is not at the center of the American elites.  Members of the real power elite regard him as a nuisance and a disrupter who has to be gotten rid of.

∞∞∞ 

The New Power Elite opens with brief accounts of the U.S.-backed coup in Chile in 1973 and the New York City bankruptcy in 1975.  Both were examples of the suspension of democracy (the Pinochet dictatorship, a banker-run receivership) to protect business interests, which is the core of neoliberalism.

Chapters 1-3 are about The State.  They tell of the misdeeds and failures of presidential administrations from the late 1970s to the present.  For me, reading them was a trip down memory lane – supply-side economics, the air traffic controllers’ strike, “grand bargains” on Social Security, NAFTA, Workfare, the Patriot Act, Abu Ghraib, Enron, No Child Left Behind, the Katrina disaster, “too big to fail” bailouts, Obamacare, tax cuts for the rich, COVID-19 failures, Build Back Better…all milestones on a downward path.

Gautney sees Donald Trump as a culmination of leadership failure.  His election was made possible by the failures of Bill Clinton, G.W. Bush and Barack Obama.  But, as she notes, Trump was not on the side of the people who voted for him.  

He immediately broke his promises to protect Social Security and raise taxes on the rich.  He appointed ridiculously unqualified people to head departments, defunded vital government functions and kept the country in a constant uproar over irrelevant issues.  

He has driven the U.S. political, financial, journalistic and academic establishments crazy.   Since 2016, American politics has been about their fight to bring down Trump.  They are using all possible means except dealing with the unaddressed problems that enabled him to be elected in the first place.  

The long chain of failed impeachments, indictments and legal actions against Trump remind me of the Russian aristocracy’s attempt to kill Rasputin.  The repeated bungling and failure would be comical if so much wasn’t at stake.

The American power elite

THE POWER ELITE by C. Wright Mills (1956)

C. Wright Mills was a sociologist who wrote like a novelist.  Both these traits are shown in his great work, The Power Elite, which was about the structure of American power. 

Mills did a detailed study of the men (all of them were white men) who occupied the top position in the great American corporations, in the military and in governmental administrations.  He also compiled lists of the 90 richest Americans of 1900, 1925 and 1950.  

These were the individuals who made the fundamental decisions that determined whether there would be peace or war, full employment or widespread unemployment and the priorities of the nation as a whole.

He concluded that members of these elites were not representative of the American people in their social origins, they had goals and incentives that didn’t coincide with the interests of the American people, and they were not accountable to the American people.

The corporate elite emerged in the years following the Civil War and was in full bloom by 1900.   Back then, Mills’ research showed, a typical corporate CEO was a company founder, an heir of a company founder or a lawyer or some other expert hired by the board of directors for his expertise.

By 1950, the typical corporate CEO was someone who had come up through the ranks of a corporation, Mills found.  He was someone whose goals and viewpoint on life were formed by the corporation itself, which were a desire to preserve the corporation and increase its profitability.

Most of them had college educations, which the majority of the public did not.  Most of them came from well-off backgrounds, but even the ones born into poor backgrounds were shaped by the views of their peers.

Even the public had come to regard business success as the supreme value.  Corporate structures have not proved to be as durable as they seemed to Mills, but the cult of success remains

The military elite emerged during World War Two.  Before then, Mills said, the Army and Navy were separate from the rest of society and proud of being non-political.  But in the 1940s, they emerged as key decision-makers, a strong shaping force in the economy and a political force.

Even more than the corporate elite, members of the military elite had a special identity, which was shaped by education at West Point or Annapolis and by rising through the ranks.

Mills noted that the top military leaders exercised their power and influence in secret, which meant that there was little or no check on it.  Decisions of peace and war were made without public knowledge or public accountability.

There also was what President Eisenhower was to call the military-industrial complex.  Generals, corporate executives and top politicians were part of the same social circles.

The military remains a strong power, but it has, to an extent, been superseded by the power of the secret intelligence and power agencies.  As Mills noted, the power to act without accountability is a strong power.

The third important power structure is the power of governmental administration, but it is different from the other two.  

Governmental administration became powerful as a result of the New Deal and World War Two, but it never was an independent power.  Civil servants had no voice in policy.  That was set by appointed officials who usually were chosen as representatives of particular economic interests.

There was nothing in the USA like the British Foreign Office or the Exchequer, which had their own views on policy and provided continuity during different administrations.  

In the USA, for example, experts on China were driven out of the Foreign Service by political demagogues, Mills wrote.  Ambassadors were almost all political appointees, rewarded for their service to political parties.

Other governmental departments also were subject to politics, which was dominated by business interests.

American power elites have evolved and mutated, but there is a clear from the elites of the early USA to the elites of Mills’ day, and from Mills’ elites to those of present-day America.

Book note: Water for Elephants

WATER FOR ELEPHANTS by Sara Gruen (2006)

Water for Elephants is another good novel I happened to come across in a neighborhood free book exchange.  I got a lot of pleasure out of reading it.

It is about a man named Jacob Jankowski at two stages of his life. The novel alternates between 1931, when he is 23 years old and has run away to join a circus, and the early 2000s, when he is in his 90s and in a nursing home, hoping to be taken to the circus.

Both the circus scenes and the nursing home scenes have a you-are-there quality that shows extensive research and also deep understanding of circus history, the Great Depression and the male psyche.  

But the novel is not just a documentary.  Sara Gruen was highly inventive, although she said the wackier parts were taken from real circus history.  She said Rosie, the lovable but devious elephant, a central character, is based on biographies of real-life elephants. 

Circus life back in the 1930s was a hard life.  The circus companies lived most of their lives on their railroad trains.  They’d stop a location, rapidly set up the big tent, do their acts and move on without delay to the next stop.

Members of the fictional Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth lie and steal, and are cheated and exploited themselves. But they have talent, discipline and esprit de corps.  They stretch the limits of the possible..

The fictional Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth has a rigid class system.  At the top are the Bosses, including the colorful and sociopathic Uncle Al, who is owner and ringmaster, and the charming and vicious August Rosenbluth, equestrian director and superintendent of animals.

Next come the Performers, the clowns, trapeze artists and lion tamers.  They include the beautiful Marlena, an equestrienne who has an act with liberty horses – that is, horses without halters who obey commands given motions of a whip.  Performers work hard for low pay, but they never miss a meal and seldom miss a payday.

Below them are the Workers, who set things up and take them down, feed the animals and clean their cages, and deal with the public.  They, too, have skill and discipline beyond the ordinary.  

The Flying Squadron can raise and take down the Big Top in the same day, travel overnight to the next town, and do it all again the next day.  Patches are skilled at mollifying unhappy customers before they cause trouble.  

They live payday to payday, and pay doesn’t always come.  Gruen wrote that it was customary back then for circuses to hold back part of workers’ pay until the end of the season, so that they wouldn’t quit. Older workers become ticket takers when they are too old to do physical labor.  

If their work is unsatisfactory or they make trouble, they are subject to being thrown off the train when it is in motion – sometimes when the train is passing over a trestle, which makes survival unlikely.  

Octavia E. Butler’s 21st century

PARABLE OF THE SOWER by Octavia E. Butler (1993)

PARABLE OF THE TALENTS by Octavia E. Butler (1998)

Octavia E. Butler, who died in 2006. was one of the outstanding science fiction writers of her time, and the most successful black woman SF writer.  

Two of her 1990s novels are getting renewed attention because because they seem prophetic of what the 21st century USA is becoming. 

The first book in the series, Parable of the Sower, depicts complete social breakdown in the 2020s.  The second, Parable of the Talents, depicts the rise of murderous religious nationalism in the 2030s.

We meet the protagonist, Lauren Oya Olamina, in 2024 at the age of 15 through a journal she keeps.  She has already decided to found a new religion, called Earthseed.  It would be based on the idea that “God is Change,” but that it is possible to shape God.  Its long-range goal would to spread human life throughout the universe.  All the chapter epigraphs are based on excerpts from its sacred book.

Civilization is breaking down, especially in California, due partly to catastrophic climate change.  The new President, Charles Morpeth Donner, has a plan to restore prosperity by privatizing government services, ending environmental and labor regulation, and allowing indentured labor.

Lauren is black, as are most of the central characters.  She suffers from a condition called hyperempathy,  which causes her to literally feel any physical pain she witnesses.

She lives in a walled community in southern California, Robledo, which is led by her father, a Baptist minister, who preaches mutual aid, armed self-defense and self-sufficiency, such as making bread from acorns.

Eventually the community is overrun by insane pyromaniac drug addicts, who are seen by some of the homeless poor as a liberating force.  Most of the community, including Lauren’s father, are killed.  She and two other survivors flee north on foot.  

Only 18, she emerges as a tough, competent Heinleinesque leader.  She lead a growing band through perils from robbers, rogue police, cannibals and feral dogs.  This part of the novel is a very enjoyable action-adventure survivalist story; it is a real page-turner.

Among those who join her band is a middle-aged physician named Bankhole, who falls in love with Lauren and eventually marries her.  They reach a Bankroll family property in northern California.  They stop and found a new community named Acorn, based on the Earthseed religion.  

Most, however, are only weakly committed to Earthseed.  The community is held together by Lauren’s charisma and leadership, not a doctrine.

Parable of the Talents is set sometime after Lauren’s death and is told through excerpts of Lauren’s journals as framed by the commentary of her estranged daughter, Larkin.  It details the invasion of Acorn by right-wing fundamentalist Christians, Lauren’s fight to survive their religious “re-education,” and the final triumph of Earthseed as a community on its way to a distant planet.