A Fraternal Order Of Honorable Patriots

Title: A Fever in the Heartland

Rating: 5 Stars

In the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan began a rapid rise in, of all places, Indiana. On the surface, this seems odd. After all, especially in the 1920s, it’s not as if Indiana had that many Blacks, Catholic immigrants, or Jewish immigrants to speak of. In fact, many small towns where the KKK really flourished had virtually none.

If you think on it, it’s not that odd. It’s much easier to ‘other’ another group of people if you have relatively few dealings with them. You’re much more likely to believe in stereotypes or conspiratorial theories if the target is unknown to you. If you lived next door to a community of others, you might actually discover that they’re not that much other than you.

The 1920s were a turbulent time. Millions of men have come back from fighting a brutal war in Europe. Immigrants had been streaming to the US for decades. Women were newly discovering their independence and were fighting for outlandish rights like to vote and things like that. No longer willing to suffer under the Black code / Jim Crow of the South, millions of Black Americans were migrating North.

Given all of that, what was a white man to do? Well, apparently in the 1920s, you decide to resurrect the KKK.

It didn’t spring up out of nowhere. In 1915, DW Griffith released The Birth of a Nation. Without question, it was technically innovative. However, it was also extremely racist. Promoting The Lost Cause myth of The Civil War, Black characters, many of them white actors in Black face, were represented as dumb and sexually aggressive to white women. It glorified the rise of the original KKK. It was in the film that cross burnings first appeared (the original KKK did no such thing). In fact, the founder of the rebirth of the KKK, William Simmons, was directly inspired, along with fifteen other men, to restart the KKK after repeatedly watching the film.

At the same time, this was the time of Prohibition. The successful passage of Prohibition was due to one very single issue focused organization, the Anti-Saloon League (ASL). The ASL was particularly aggressive in going after immigrant alcohol like German beer and Italian wine. It also promoted the theory that alcohol made Black men more sexually aggressive, threatening the virtue of white women.

Indiana was a little bit special in that it had a semi-vigilante law enforcement organization already in place. This was the strangely named Horse Thief Detective Association. Formed during the times when horse thieves were actually a menace, by the 1920s this threat had mostly vanished (in one year, a grand total of four horses were reported stolen). Once the KKK restarted, this organization essentially became the enforcement adjunct to the KKK, able to burst into anyone’s house, destroy belongings, and threaten the inhabitants without warrant or any concern that law enforcement would try to stop them.

Into this steps D.C. Stephenson (nicknamed Steve). Called the Old Man, even though he was only in his thirties, he was a charismatic presence in Indiana. Sensing the KKK as a path to riches and power, he began to recruit. Joining the KKK cost $10. In addition, there was the cost of the hood and robe (apparently, you just couldn’t make your own). Steve became wealthy when he struck a deal with the national organization to receive a cut of each initiation dues and outfit.

With his efforts, the KKK grew like wildfire. In any given town, up to half of all white male residents would join. Across the state, the member count numbered in the hundreds of thousands. It was not just slack jawed yokels that were signing up either. Doctors, lawyers, police chiefs, newspaper editors, and district attorneys made up the member list.

With all of the cash rolling in, he was able to buy off politicians. Not only mayors, but Steve had control over the governor of Indiana. He had dreams of becoming a US senator with the ultimate goal of becoming President. Despite brave, solitary attempts to defeat him, Steve appeared to have an impregnable stranglehold on the state of Indiana.

There was only one problem. Steve was a monster. He abandoned a wife and child. He lied about his past. Even though he postured himself as morally upstanding, he was a raging alcoholic. Worst of all, when drunk, he committed acts of violent rape.

A local young woman, Madge Oberholtzer, caught his eye. She was a strong, independent woman that thought she could take care of herself. She went out with him a couple of times but was able to keep him at arms length. One night, after repeated calls to her house, she agreed to come over to his house. There, surrounded by drunk men, she knew she was in trouble. They pulled guns on her and forced her on a train to Chicago. While on the train, Steve savagely raped her, covering her body with bite marks.

Distraught, she begged to go home, but they wouldn’t let her. No longer wanting to live, she ingested poison. Worried that she was dying, the men brought her back to her home and dumped her on her bed. There, nursed by her parents and friends, she lingered for a month before dying a horribly painful death. Before she died, she dictated a dying declaration describing all of the events of that night.

Using that declaration, Steve was arrested for murder. This is history, so you can look up the result, but since the book is so new I don’t think that I’ll throw in any more spoilers than I’ve already done.

I did learn many new things about the 1920s KKK. First of all, not only were there women auxiliaries to the men only KKK, but there was an organization for children called the Ku Klux Kiddies.

The Republican refusal to denounce the KKK was a driving force that moved the Black vote to the Democratic party. That’s somewhat earthshattering to contemplate. The Republican party, the party of Abraham Lincoln, was formed for the primary purpose of abolition. The Democratic party, the so-called Copperheads, was the dominant party of the South. Making this switch was monumental. It was one of the early heads of the NAACP, disturbed that President Calvin Coolidge refused to denounce the resurgent KKK, that inspired the move. By 1932, some seventy percent of the Black vote went to Roosevelt.

I found one of the quotes from a KKK leader interesting. He called the undesirables “Italian anarchists, Irish Catholic malcontents, Russian Jews, Finns, Lithuanians, and Austrians of the lowest class”. Sure, anarchists, Catholics, and Jews. That’s pretty standard hate speech for the time. Finns, Lithuanians and Austrians seem to be a pretty specific call-out. It shows that anyone can be ‘othered’. With the growing right wing nationalist movements today, for those people that think that they can sit back and relax because bigotry can never reach them, understand that hatred has no rational limits.

Movements such as these need to hate something smaller to make them think that they have faith in something larger.

Money Can Buy Misery And Public Humiliation

Title: Unscripted

Rating: 4 Stars

This nonfiction work has drawn a lot of comparisons to Succession. It certainly deals with the ins and outs of a family controlling a media empire (in this case Viacom and CBS). However, Succession is pretty clearly based upon the Murdoch family. The saga of Sumner Redstone seems to be more closely aligned with the Sandy Furness character in Succession. Engaged in a hard fought war with Logan Roy, Furness ultimately suffers some kind of stroke and spends the final seasons a shell of himself, unable to communicate with anyone except for his daughter.

Unscripted starts with Sumner Redstone at his peak. Married and divorced twice, he seems to be, well, obsessed with women, or at least with sex. He pursues many women, often giving them gifts worth millions of dollars. In his late eighties, he’s seemingly convinced that he can live forever all the while maintaining the sexual vitality of a much younger man.

Let’s be clear, Redstone is not a nice guy. By controlling eighty percent of the voting share, he wields absolute power over Viacom and CBS. He’s been rich and powerful for so long that he’s lost all perspective. He’s completely estranged from his son and he treats his daughter, Shari, with barely concealed contempt. After being criticized for loudly spouting racist slurs at a crowded restaurant, he just shrugged his shoulders and said that it doesn’t matter, he’s going straight to hell anyway.

Shockingly enough, Redstone did not have eternal vitality. As he weakened, two women gained control over him. He was kind of technically engaged to Sydney Holland. Manuela Herzer was a former paramour that somehow managed to stay in his good graces. The two women moved into Redstone’s house and began to squeeze him for ever increasing sums of money. It’s estimated that the two women managed to get 150 million dollars out of him.

They began to scheme ways to get his entire fortune, most of which was locked in an supposedly ironclad trust for his grandchildren. They told him lies about his daughter to further alienate the two. They refused to let people visit him unescorted. They hired lawyers to get even more of his money.

In the midst of this Redstone continued to deteriorate. He lost the ability to speak. He appeared to be in serious cognitive decline. Bizarrely enough, even though he was in his nineties and severely impaired, the two women continued to hire other women to sexually arouse him.

Somehow, a couple of Redstone’s nurses got the message out to Shari that her father was being abused. Despite her father’s previous poor treatment of her, Shari and her cadre of lawyers took on the two women. Perhaps knowing that her children’s inheritance was possibly at risk might have played a role as well. Regardless, she did manage to drive the women away and reestablish her relationship with her father. Her attempts to claw back some of the 150 million dollars that the two women received from Redstone was not as successful.

At the same time that this was going on, Shari was trying to step into her father’s shoes as the controlling voice of Viacom and CBS. Both companies, bastions of the old boys network, had no interest in listening to Sumner Redstone’s daughter. In particular, CBS was ruled by Les Moonves. Considered a genius businessman responsible for leading CBS to a renaissance, he rebuffed all attempts by Shari to exert herself. Shari had a deep respect for Moonves’ talents but was frustrated that he continually ignored her. At one point, he got so annoyed with Shari that he instigated a plan that would have severely diluted the Redstone family voting power. Needless to say, this did not go over well and the two sides were planning to go to war.

However, Moonves, like apparently many (most?) powerful men in the entertainment industry, had a few skeletons in his closet. And by skeletons, I mean examples of horrible, criminal behavior. He went to lunch with one woman. On the drive, he pulled over, unzipped his pants, grabbed her head, and forced her to fellate him. There were other stories of times when a woman was literally on a casting couch and he would lunge and force himself on them.

In case you might be thinking, well, these are actresses and they must understand that this is the price of getting a role, well, no, but he also didn’t just limit himself to actresses. Being diabetic, he once went to a medical appointment with a doctor specializing in diabetes. When she turned her back to him, he snuck up on her, pressed against her, and started grinding on her. She pushed him away and he said, oh you’re going to be like that? He then went into the corner of the office and jerked himself off. He then left without saying another word.

When asked to comment on the doctor’s testimony, the head of CBS PR replied that Moonves (his boss, the CEO of CBS) was more of a blowjob guy than a masturbation guy. Here’s a pro tip for all of you thinking of entering the PR field: if you’re the head of PR for a very large company and this is your first response, then you’re going to have a very bad day.

Moonves tried to tough it out by claiming that all sex was consensual and denying the existence of proof. Alas for Moonves, there were literally hundreds of text messages that buttressed the story of his accusers. Over half a dozen women stepped forward with stories of abuse. Even though the accusations did date back decades, this was at the height of the #meToo movement. Moonves was done. He was fired for cause. His attempts to gain over one hundred million dollars in pay were not successful.

With Moonves resigned, Shari Redstone was able to install herself in a position of power both at Viacom and CBS. She forced through a merger that brought the two companies together again.

This was a fascinating read into the workings of wealthy, powerful people. Here are a couple of takeaways:

These are not happy people. Hundreds of millions of dollars does not purchase a proportional amount of happiness. Sumner Redstone spent a lifetime terrorizing people but then ended up under the thumb of two women that often verbally abused him into tears. Given his life story before that point, it was hard to feel sorry for him.

These are not smart people. Moonves in particular lied about things that were easily verifiable. Lacking a vision or a strategy, the Viacom CEO pretty much drove his company into the ground.

Sumner Redstone was the constant source of lawsuits in his last years. In nearly every case, the people arguing the case were put in the awkward place of arguing that at one point in time this non-verbal, barely cognizant person was totally in the right mind when making one decision but was severely impaired when making a subsequent decision. These decisions were, at times, a mere weeks apart.

At one point, unable to speak, Redstone was given a computer that had preprogrammed simple phrases that he could play by hitting a button. Some of the phrases were as simple as  Yes or No. His favorite phrase, which he consistently played whenever Donald Trump was mentioned, was Fuck You.

At the height of hearing all of these horrible stories about Moonves, he would somewhat plaintively say that he was a good guy. If half a dozen women are coming forward with tales of abuse, then you’re not a good guy. It didn’t help that his all male board supporters blindly backed him, believing that he didn’t do anything that anyone else wouldn’t have done. Yeah, #meToo was long overdue.

If you’re rich, you’ll continually get paid even after you’ve long outlived your usefulness. Sumner Redstone would attend board meetings. In the beginning of his decline, he’d say something like good afternoon and then not say another word during the entire meeting. By the end, he wouldn’t even say that. Despite that, he was still getting paid ten million dollars a year to serve in his role.

Welcome to the meritocracy!

Mobius Lynch

Title: Lost Highway

Rating: 4 Stars

Every now and then, I go back and re-watch a David Lynch film. I’ve re-watched Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, Mulholland Drive, and now Lost Highway. My favorite is probably still the short What Did Jack Do? It legitimately made me laugh.

Lost Highway is probably most famous for the big switch in the middle. Bill Pullman plays Fred, a saxophonist. At the start of the film, someone buzzes his house’s intercom and says “Dick Laurent is dead”. He looks outside and no one is there. One morning, Fred’s wife Renee (Patricia Arquette with black hair (the hair color becomes important later)) goes out to get the paper and sees a plain brown envelope. Inside it is a VHS tape. When they play it, it’s a recording of the outside of their house. Another morning they find another tape and this time it’s a recording of them inside the house sleeping. They understandably are freaked out.

At a party, Fred has a strange conversation with a Mystery Man (Robert Blake, and yes, Mystery Man is his official film credit). Standing in front of Fred, the Mystery Man claims to be inside Fred’s house at that exact same moment. Fred calls his house, and sure enough, the Mystery Man answers. As can be imagined, Fred freaks out.

The next morning, another VHS tape is on the front doorstep. When Fred watches it, he is horrified to discover that it shows him standing over Renee’s dismembered body. Fred is convicted of the murder and is sentenced to die.

All of this is kind of weird but pretty straightforward. It stops being straightforward when a prison guard checks in on Fred’s death row cell one morning and discovers that, not only is Fred not in the cell, but another, completely different man is now there. The man is Pete (Balthazar Getty). Pete’s parents come to the penitentiary and take him home. Pete’s followed by a couple of detectives trying to figure out what’s going on.

The film now follows Pete. He’s an auto mechanic. One of his main customers is Mr Eddy (Robert Loggia). Mr Eddy appears to be some kind of gangster with anger management issues. We later learn that he puts out porn under the name of, wait for it, Dick Laurent. He has a girlfriend named Alice (Patricia Arquette with blonde hair (see, I told you)). There is instant chemistry between Pete and Alice and they commence a torrid affair.

Mr Eddy becomes suspicious and threatening. Alice convinces Pete to rob a guy (Andy) she knows. It turns out that Andy hosted the party where the Mystery Man met Fred. In a struggle, Pete accidentally kills Andy. Later, Alice taunts Pete. It appears that she’s been playing him the whole time.

Apparently the shock of the betrayal is enough to turn Pete back into Fred. Fred kills Mr Eddy. Fred then drives to his house, goes up to to the intercom, presses the button, and says “Dick Laurent is dead”. He then leaps into a car and takes off, with the two police that were following Pete in hot pursuit. The film ends with Fred driving maniacally down a dark highway while being pursued by the police.

Got all of that?

What’s interesting to me is that the two halves of the film, within themselves, actually kind of make narrative sense. What makes it surreal is the bridge between the two halves, when Fred turns into Pete and then turns back. There is some imagery that seems to imply that maybe Pete is some kind of psychotic break from Fred. At times during the Pete section, the film framing gets fuzzy and you can see Fred. Is perhaps the Pete section some kind of vision that Fred is having on death row?

Someone referred to this film as a Mobius strip. Most people probably know what it is, but a Mobius strip is a loop that contains a twist. This analogy makes sense to me because the film does loop back on itself. After all, the first words of the film and the last words of the film are exactly the same. Being a David Lynch film, it does so with a twist. The twist is the duality of Fred and Pete and what that actually means.

The Mystery Man is a whole other kettle of fish. Who is the Mystery Man? Is he the devil? Is he perhaps some dark spirit within Fred? Who knows?

For the role, Robert Blake shaved off his eyebrows and painted his face white. In his scenes, he never blinks. What’s fascinating to me is that Blake made those choices himself. Lynch told him to make his own choices and loved what Blake came up with. On the other hand, Blake, historically a notoriously difficult actor to work with, told Lynch that he would give Lynch absolutely no trouble because he didn’t understand the script at all.

Casting Robert Blake in 1997 was a bold choice. He hadn’t yet been tried for murdering his second wife, but by 1997 he was barely still acting. Lost Highway would be his last role.

More than other Lynch films I’ve seen, he employed stunt casting on Lost Highway. Notoriously, he cast Richard Pryor, clearly ailing from MS, as the auto shop owner. One of the performers in the porn film was Marilyn Manson. Henry Rollins appears as a prison guard. Gary Busey is Pete’s father. Although I didn’t actually see her, apparently Mink Stole of John Waters fame has a role. As per usual, Jack Nance, most famous as Eraserhead, makes an appearance. Robert Loggia was up for a major role in the earlier Blue Velvet, and when he didn’t get it, he left a raging, vitriolic message on Lynch’s answering machine. Eight years later, for Lost Highway, that message inspired an important scene where we see Mr Eddy completely lose his shit over a guy tailgating him.

As with nearly every David Lynch film I’ve seen, the fluid nature of identify is a major theme. We have the confusion of two distinct actors playing two different parts that might actually be the manifestation of just one character. We also have the same actor, Patricia Arquette, play two different characters. However, given the linkage between Fred and Pete, we can probably infer some kind of similar linkage between Renee and Alice.

I’d probably give the nod to Mulholland Drive, but this was another fine example of David Lynch playing games with the neo-noir genre.

Magic Realism Forrest Gump In India

Title: Midnight’s Children

Rating: 2 Stars

I’m going to say right off the top that this is an unfair rating. Midnight’s Children is considered one of the best novels of the twentieth century. Whether it’s the Modern Library Top 100 Books or the Time magazine All Time 100 Novels, you’ll find Midnight’s Children. Not only did it win the Booker prize but it won The Best of the Booker twice (in 1993 and 2008, in celebration of Booker prize anniversaries). It is a mammoth, beautifully written book.

Having said all of that, it really didn’t do it for me. I’m absolutely willing to accept that this is my shortcoming. A work of this complexity requires a significant amount of work and dedication. It could very well be true that a second, more careful reading will change my mind.

This is the story of one family in India during the twentieth century. From a strictly historical perspective, there’s a lot going on during this time in India. Indian soldiers fight in World War I. India as a nation has to fight to become free and then manage its own postcolonial future. While this is happening, there is religious violence that ultimately sparks a partition splitting India and Pakistan, and then later, Bangladesh from Pakistan. Wars are fought between India and Pakistan. National leaders are assassinated.

In the midst of this are the three generations of an Indian family. The first generation is Aadam Aziz, an Indian but German trained doctor navigating Western / Eastern cultures. He marries Naseem Ghani.  She gives birth to five children, three girls and two boys. One of the girls, Amina, marries Ahmed Sinai. They have a son and a daughter. The son, Saleem, is born at midnight on the day of Indian independence.

The story is told by Saleem. It’s his life story. He is reciting it to his companion, Padma.

All children born in India during the midnight hour of their independence day have somehow become endowed with special powers. A girl is so beautiful that everyone immediately falls in love with her. Another can effortlessly change sex. Yet another can travel through time. A boy has such prodigious knees that he becomes a great warrior. For some reason, Saleem’s gift does not manifest itself until he gets into an accident. From that point forward, he can see into anyone’s mind.

Armed with this gift, he proceeds to organize these special children (aka Midnight Children) via his telepathy. It’s not exactly clear what he’s planning to do (he’s not sure himself). It’s all moot anyway because, against his will, he undergoes nasal surgery. A physical characteristic of Saleem is that he has a prodigiously sized nose that is constantly running. His surgery clears up his nasal congestion, but in so doing, for some reason he loses his telepathic capability.

Onward and upward to further adventures. He spends time in the contested Kashmir region. A Muslim, he and his family are, at one point, driven to Pakistan. He later ends up back in India.

Major events happen in India and Pakistan. For example, there are wars, military takeovers, and assassinations. Saleem seems to always be on the scene of these disasters or somehow feels responsible for them. One of the wars between India and Pakistan led to the dropping of bombs. In his retelling, the bombs only landed in areas that killed all of his family except himself.

By the end of the novel, all of the midnight children are either dead or have been sterilized and had their gift somehow surgically removed. Saleem is married to Padma but is immediately separated from her and then  ground to dust by thronging millions, many of them being characters that have previously appeared in Saleem’s story.

The novel is quite complex. There is the weaving (and re-imagining) of historical events in India into Saleem’s personal narrative. There is the magic realism of the midnight children’s gifts, as well as actual magicians, visions, ghosts, witches, and even the appearance of a succubus or two. There are several postmodern elements. Saleem comments on his narration as he recites (metafiction). At various times, he says things that are proven to be factually untrue (unreliable narrator).

There are so many characters in the novel that I would lose track. One would pop up and then reemerge a couple of hundred pages later and I’d be struggling to remember the context in which they originally appeared.

Saleem went on such a wide set of wanderings that it was hard for me to stay engaged. At one point, because of his nose, he served in the army as the dog in a dog unit. Another point, he quit talking and seemed to become a modern Buddha. He had a finger chopped off in an accident.

These plot threads would just kind of peter out. What was the purpose of the midnight children? Why were they created? We aren’t told and we’ll never find out. One day Saleem could organize them and then one day he couldn’t. Was this supposed to be a metaphor for India losing its mystic way? It’s not clear. Saleem’s mother had a lifelong affair with a poet named Nadir.  To quash it, Saleem arranged for a cuckolded husband to find out that his wife was having an affair. In a rage, the husband wounded his wife and killed her lover. Learning of it convinces Saleem’s mother to end her affair with Nadir. OK?

With such a large number of characters and so many divergent plot branches (I haven’t even mentioned The Most Charming Man In The World and his struggles when he finds a claimant to his throne), it was hard for me to buckle down and read it.

This was a book that I had to drag myself over the finish line to complete. Who knows, maybe in a couple of years, I’ll be motivated to re-read it with a much closer eye and a happier result.

I Fought The Pandemic And The Pandemic Won

Title: The Premonition

Rating: 4 Stars

When history looks back, it’ll be one of the great mysteries. Before COVID hit, countries were ranked in order of pandemic preparedness. The US was ranked number one. Given the size and scope of our federal government and the fact that the US, by far, has the most expensive health care system in the world, this ranking seemed to be a no-brainer. However, when COVID hit, even though the US has just five percent of the world’s population, it ended up having twenty percent of the deaths. So many other countries with so much fewer resources did so much better. What went wrong?

Lewis’ book doesn’t so much answer the question but has profiles of those that desperately wanted to make a difference but were thwarted by ego, confusion, denial, and bureaucratic malaise.

The book is broken up into three parts. The first part takes place in the years before COVID. Several people saw the SARS pandemic that was centered in Asia and were spurred to action. For all of the justifiable grief that his presidency has incurred, the pandemic plan starts with George W Bush. During the summer of 2006, President Bush read John Barry’s The Great Influenza. This book is a history of the 1918 Spanish Influenza. Shocked at the scale of the carnage, Bush demanded to see the federal government’s pandemic plan. When presented with it, Bush called it “Bullshit”.

A White House team was quickly formed to update the document. Frustrated by the attempts to create a strategy by committee, its leader, Rajeev Venkayya, basically sat down one Friday night and wrote a new one over a span of six hours. This document was immediately used by Bush to justify a seven billion dollar program. Hence, John Barry’s book became known as the seven billion dollar book.

It’s interesting that even back then the importance of closing schools was understood. The scale of the public school system is pretty amazing. There’s something like 70,000 public transportation buses in the country. Compare that to the fact that there are 500,000 school buses. There are 50,000,000 children in public education, half of whom take a bus. Doing any kind of social distancing without taking this into consideration seems foolish.

Can I just take a moment here to remark how unbelievable it is that a Republican President saw a serious gap in planning and thought that the federal government had a role to play in plugging it? We’re talking George W Bush here, a man not exactly known for his big government liberal instincts. The fact that I find this astonishing shows how far the Republican party has strayed from the path of common sense government that it once trod.

The second part of the book concerns the time immediately before the COVID outbreak is widely noticed in the US. The third part are the desperate measures that some people took to control the contagion in the face of both state and federal government indifference.

First of all, let’s talk about the villains. The Center for Disease Control (CDC) does not come out looking good here. By the time 2020 rolls around, they are painted as academics just interested in publishing papers. They refuse to make any decision without data. The whole point of pandemics, especially those featuring a disease that has a long latency period before showing symptoms, is that they move so fast and so invisibly that by the time that you have data it is way too late. The CDC had this world class reputation as being the source for all diseases, but when the time came for them to move, they proved to be a Potemkin village of pandemic leadership.

The federal government takes a fair amount of blame. Even though a pandemic plan had been created way back in 2006, there was no impetus to implement it. During the Trump administration, the National Security Council pivoted to focus only on adversarial threats. They literally fired the people that were in charge of identifying and managing pandemic threats. The CDC was reluctant to declare the COVID a pandemic, not only because of a lack of data, but also to avoid infuriating President Trump.

Private companies also have their share of blame. Slow moving, bureaucratic, and driven by profit motive, they were slow to ramp up affordable testing. Just in time supply chains worked just perfectly until the chains were slightly disrupted, at which point they nearly stopped working completely. During the time of panic, fraud took place. Desperately searching for medical swabs to perform tests, suppliers instead provided Q-Tips and eyelash brushes.

Into this mess were a small number of people who called themselves the Wolverines (after the rebel teenagers in the film Red Dawn). Some of these men, like Richard Hatchett and Carter Mecher, were part of the original team that help build the federal pandemic plan during the W Bush administration. Bob Glass got into pandemic modeling as a result of one of his daughter’s school science projects. Charity Dean was a California county public health director that insisted on practical, hands-on approaches to health crises.

The Wolverines were not a formal team. They’d exchange e-mail and would get together on telecons to discuss what was going on. Over time, more and more people joined the team. Most of the joinees wouldn’t even talk. Anthony Fauci was one of the listeners. Through this completely ad hoc committee, some important decisions and directions were established.

Despite the best efforts of these people, many mistakes were made. The decision to close was made much too late. By the time that decision was made, COVID had already spread widely throughout the country. Testing was too slow to ramp up, meaning that either COVID was missed if the patient was asymptomatic or vital hospital beds were wasted on those that just had the flu.

Despite the fact that the federal government has this reputation as being a monolith, in fact community health is managed by local public health officials. Unfortunately, many times, these officials are retired doctors simply looking for a sinecure in their sunset years.

All of these factors, plus others, meant that, by the year 2023, over 1.1 million Americans had died of COVID.

In my Goodreads summary, I called it the Big Short but with doctors and a pandemic. If you enjoyed reading the Big Short, you’ll probably enjoy this as well. As in both, Lewis profiles a small number of rebels that are fighting against a bureaucratic, monolithic, and generally clueless system.

Dishonor Among Spies

Title: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

Rating: 4 Stars

This is one of those few times where I read an author back to back. This all started a week or so ago when I rewatched the film Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy based upon the John le Carré novel. I remember that I originally watched it in the theater several years ago. At the time, it was OK, but I wasn’t that thrilled with it. Rewatching it now, I enjoyed it much more and was inspired to reread The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (which I just wrote about) and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.

As I wrote in the previous post, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is one of my favorite novels, regardless of genre. Although I wouldn’t place Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy in that same class, it’s still an entertaining read.

At the beginning of the novel, we learn that the previous head of the British Secret Intelligence Service (known as the Circus), a man named simply as Control, had been fired and shortly thereafter died after a convert mission that he was running off the books blew up in his face. In the resulting scandal, his right hand man, George Smiley, had also been booted. Before that mission, Control had been acting strange. Although clearly dying, he’d been pushing himself doing all kinds of research into previous busted spy rings and failed operations.

The political minister that oversees the Circus has received a disturbing report that a high ranking mole has infiltrated the Circus and is revealing all of its secrets to the Soviets. Knowing that he can’t trust anyone, he turns to the disgraced Smiley to informally investigate and report back his findings.

Smiley can only rely upon one also disgraced but still employed member of the Circus (Peter Guillam) and one former police inspector to conduct his investigation. Guillam manages to clandestinely remove some key documents from the Circus that Smiley then uses move his investigation along. Due to his long years of service, Smiley can also interview long gone former members of the Circus to get even more information.

As he does so, he discovers that he is traipsing along the same path the Control had before. He suspects that one of the four currently highest ranking members of the Circus is the mole. Not only that, but he believes that their crown jewel Soviet spy, codenamed Merlin, is actually a Soviet disinformation campaign to cover for their highly placed mole. Smiley develops a plan to both trap the mole as well as Merlin.

In the early months of this blog, I nominated Kim Philby as the person of the twentieth century (read here). While writing about his many, shall we say, sideways achievements, I did not mention that pretty clearly this novel has at least some roots in his decades serving as a double agent for the Soviets while rising through the ranks of MI6.

In this novel you see the dirty, boring, stolid work of spying. There is no James Bond in George Smiley. He’s just a plodding, patient interviewer and analyst that has a brilliantly byzantine mind that can make connections from many different seemingly unrelated threads. He’s not dashingly handsome. He’s an elderly, overweight, muddling person that looks to be just another milquetoast faceless bureaucrat. He’s not a lady killer. In fact, he’s separated from his wife after she’s had multiple affairs, including with one of his good friends at the Circus that happens to be one of his prime suspects.

If there’s a thread through The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, it’s betrayal. In the former novel, the protagonist, Leamas, learns that what he considered the most important part of his career was actually a charade and that his last mission, which he thought was to bring about the downfall of his hated East German enemy was actually a last ditch effort to prop him up. It was Smiley that spun the devious web that Leamas found himself caught up in.

This time it is Smiley who is betrayed. First of all, by his beloved wife Ann. Smiley also got caught up as collateral damage in Control’s operation, an operation designed by Merlin and the Circus traitor precisely to discredit and force Control out.

The Circus traitor (for some reason, I’m preserving the surprise even though the novel is close to fifty years old) has betrayed his country for decades. He’s betrayed Control. He’s betrayed all of his co-workers. Most personal of all, the man sent on the blown operation that ended up shot and tortured by the Soviets was a close friend, protégé, and possible lover of the traitor. This is betrayal at all levels.

How does the novel compare to the film? As I said in the first paragraph of this post, I enjoyed the film much more on a second viewing. In the film you see the problem of trying to condense a five hundred page novel into a two hour screenplay. Much nuance was lost. Although I haven’t watched it, in 1979 the BBC created a much acclaimed multi-part series of the novel. I’m guessing that having five hours to tell the story would have been a richer experience. Also, as a minor quibble, I didn’t really buy Gary Oldman as the quietly invisible Smiley. The BBC production featured Alec Guinness, who at least to my mind would seem to be a more reasonable Smiley. For those two reasons, I have to give the edge to the novel.

Over the years, I’ve read several le Carré novels. Their hallmark is a jaded, unadorned view of intelligence work. Along with The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, the novel Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is a stellar example of his output.

Betrayal In The Wilderness Of Mirrors

Title: The Spy Who Came In From The Cold

Rating: 5 Stars

Written sixty years ago, I’ve now read this book at least three or four times. Not only is it my favorite spy novel but it’s one of my all time favorite reads.

It’s the story of Alec Leamas. The novel starts with him as head of the Berlin MI6 station. The novel, written in 1963, is set in its current day. It’s the height of the Cold War. Leamas has created a network of clandestine agents in East Germany. One by one, his agents are discovered and murdered. He’s down to his last agent, his most successful agent, a man named Karl Reimeck. As Reimeck attempts to flee East Berlin, Leamas sees him shot down at the border crossing. He knows that Hans-Deiter Mundt, the brutal head of East German counterespionage, ordered the murder of Reimeck and the destruction of his spy ring.

Mundt has not only beaten Leamas but has destroyed his career. Leamas returns to London in disgrace. With no interest in a desk job, Leamas just wants out of the service. The head of MI6, a man referred to as Control, asks Leamas to stay on for one last mission.

In this role, Leamas acts drunk and dissolute. He gets discharged from MI6 for theft. Once out, he descends even further, nearly homeless, eventually getting in a fight that results in a jail sentence.

His fall from grace is noted by the communist intelligence agencies. Leamas is recruited by one of these agencies. He agrees to betray his country and ends up in East Germany. This is all part of the grand plan to convince the East Germans of Leamas’ bona fides as a turncoat. The plan is that, with Leamas’ testimony along with a couple of other apparent clues that seemingly validate Leamas’ story, it will be enough for one of Mundt’s adversaries in the East German agency to denounce Mundt as a double agent, resulting in his execution.

While planning this mission, the East German agent, Jens Fiedler, is identified by Control as the most likely candidate to take the bait and run with it. Indeed he does. Over several conversations, Fiedler becomes increasingly convinced of Mundt’s guilt. Fiedler builds up a dossier implicating Mundt, eventually arresting him, and putting him on trial in front of a tribunal.

Here’s the obligatory spoiler alert for a sixty year old novel. Mundt really is a double agent for MI6. Leamas’ entire time as head of the Berlin MI6 station was a sham. His network was killed as the necessary cost of protecting Mundt. The leaders of MI6 made sure to put enough holes in Leamas’ cover story that Mundt was able to easily blow it apart at trial. Leamas, having gained respect for Fiedler over time, tries to save him, but in trying to save him just provides more evidence of Fiedler’s guilt. It’s only when Leamas looks at Mundt’s hard, smug, slightly smirking face that he realizes how much of a pawn that he was in an MI6 game that he didn’t even know was being played.

The first time that you read the novel, this reveal is shocking. It’s well hidden. Through the characters, you feel sympathy for Fiedler, even though he’s a staunch communist. Mundt, on the other hand, is hated. He is brutal, kills, and tortures without remorse. He is harshly antisemitic. As Mundt tortures Fiedler, he whispers his hatred of all Jews into his ear.

However, despite his evil nature, Mundt is invaluable to MI6. Therefore, they are perfectly willing not only to sacrifice the innocent Fiedler but also, at a very deep level, betray Leamas, who has given the service the best years of his life.

Both Control and the other MI6 leader, George Smiley, seem to be, on the surface, small, fussy men with the absentminded natures of Oxford dons. This makes their actual cold blooded, pitiless ruthlessness that much more shocking. The two of them are truly playing five dimensional chess where the chess pieces are actual human lives.

When you reread it, you can see the little cookie crumbs that Le Carré drops throughout the text. A small, nondescript, bespectacled gentlemen seems to pop up at certain key moments. Leamas seemingly randomly ends up at a place that leads him to compromise his cover to a woman. This woman is visited for no apparent reason by Smiley. The seeds of the betrayal are woven as subtext as we read about the trap that we think Leamas is laying.

Le Carré (real name David Cornwell) was actually working in MI6 while writing this novel. Its success led him to quit the service and launched his very successful writing career. Since I’ve never been a spy, let alone one during the 1960s Cold War, I certainly can’t attest to its authenticity, but the amoral, world weary, ends justifies the means themes that run rampant through the novel seem to have the feel of truth.

I’m not alone in loving this novel. It won the Edgar award for best mystery novel. Various best crime lists place it in their top ten. Outside of the crime/spy genre, Time magazine named it as one of their 100 best novels.

If you want a fictional look at the spy world during the 1960s Cold War, this is definitely the place to start.

Martyrdom By The Feds

Title: Waco American Apocalypse

Rating: 4 Stars

For those of us of a certain age, it’s hard to believe that it’s been thirty years since the Waco siege. To commemorate this milestone, Netflix released a three part documentary. The documentary is informative both for those that were too young to remember it as well as for those of us for whom it’s a fading memory. The documentary doesn’t take sides. Surviving Branch Davidians, ATF agents, FBI negotiators, members of the FBI Hostage Rescue Team, family members, and journalists were all given a chance to express their points of view.

Taking place in 1993, an argument can be made that the events of Waco was one of the key events that birthed the modern right wing militia movement. You can draw a very straight line from Waco to the Oklahoma City bombing. In fact the Oklahoma City bombing, not coincidentally, took place two years to the day of Waco’s fiery inferno. Shocking to me, there was actually footage of Timothy McVeigh, the OKC bomber, at Waco, selling right wing propaganda bumper stickers. Not so directly, much of the vitriol that the far right throws at the federal government and federal law enforcement officers today can be traced to the actions of Waco and the earlier Ruby Ridge.

If you want to watch an informative documentary on one of the dark, weird events in American history, it is worth your time. Watching it thirty years later allowed me to be able to relive these events with a certain intellectual and emotional detachment.

First things first, let’s get real. Martyr or not, David Koresh was not a good guy. Having taken over the Branch Davidians, he ruled over the members with an absolute cultish authority. He dissolved all marriages. He claimed all women as his own. He had sex with girls as young as thirteen, if not younger. Convinced that he was the messiah and that Mount Carmel was going to be his Golgotha, he amassed an arsenal. He had over a million rounds of ammunition on site. Not only that, he had illegally modified automatic weapons and possessed illegal items such as hand grenades. There is no doubt in my mind that he should have been arrested, prosecuted, and convicted of many crimes.

It was the fact that he was buying and selling illegal guns that got the ATF’s attention. They had a plan to rush in, catch the Davidians unawares, make arrests, and secure the area with minimal risk of violence.

Unfortunately, a local postal worker that happened to be a Davidian got wind of this plan and rushed to the compound to warn Koresh and the others. So, you have this heavily armed group led by a self appointed messiah who believes that the federal government is going to come and martyr him and what is he told? He is told that the federal government is about to come after him with full force. He prepares for the final battle by arming and stationing his followers around the compound.

Here’s the thing. The ATF knew that their plan was blown. Their plan relied upon surprise to be successful and they knew that they no longer had it. They should have cancelled the operation and waited for another opportunity. Instead, because of some combination of bureaucratic inertia or some deluded sense of their own superiority, they went ahead. It was a bloodbath. Several ATF agents were killed. Koresh himself was wounded.

This started the siege. Negotiators were brought in to try to bring about a surrender. Some children and some women did leave the compound. There was one key moment when it looked like the deal was done but then Koresh decided that God had told him to hold off. There was another moment where yet another deal was about  to be brokered. More people left but then the militaristic members of the FBI began parading around their armored vehicles, crushing Davidian automobiles, and blaring music and sound at the compound, effectively scuttling any chance at that deal.

At the top level, the FBI could never decide upon a consistent approach. They instead had two completely contradictory paths. One was the hostage negotiators with their slow, patient, empathetic attempts to establish a connection with Koresh and the Davidians. The second approach was the FBI Hostage Response Team (HRT). These were hard guys that would have been content to put a bullet in Koresh’s head and call it a day. Having these two so different simultaneous approaches obviously decreased the possibility of a successful mission.

There is still mystery, to this day, about the last day of the siege. On that morning, armored vehicles ventured into the compound and fired tear gas into the building. The intent was to drive the Davidians out and to force a mass surrender. The armored vehicles tore through the building like it was made of paper. Shortly after that assault, multiple simultaneous fires started spreading throughout the building. Because of the danger of combustible explosives, fire engines were not allowed to the scene. The building burnt to the ground. Very few Davidians escaped.

To this day it’s not clear how the fire was set. A surviving Davidian claims that it was the armored vehicles. However, the fact that multiple fires were started, including one fire that was upwind, casts doubt on that. There was audio tape (I’m not sure how it was procured) in which you can hear Koresh talking about fuel and setting fires. Given that martyrdom was his goal, it would certainly make sense that they would choose mass suicide.

One thing interesting was the interviews of the surviving Davidians thirty years after the fact. Decades later and they still seem to think that not only was Koresh right but that he was also just (and maybe even the Messiah). Listening to one of the members (now a middle aged woman) justify Koresh having sex with a twelve year old girl was kind of shocking. I look at Koresh and I see just another of a long line of narcissistic, apocalyptic people using religion as their vehicle to power. It’s hard for me to fathom still having such faith in a man thirty years after his death.

If I needed to sum up Waco in one sentence, I’d say that Koresh and his followers wanted to die a violent death in the name of God, and the federal government, through missteps and incompetence, gave them the opportunity for it to happen.

The Jack LaLanne Of American Literature

Title: The Passenger

Rating: 5 Stars

You probably have to be a certain age to get my blog title. For those lucky enough to not be of a certain (advanced) age, Jack LaLanne was the first person that tried to get America into shape. He had a daily television show that ran from 1951 to 1986.  It would be just himself and his wife doing very basic exercises. I remember watching him growing up. He continued even as he grew older. In his 60s and his 70s, he continued to perform feats of strengths. One of his favorite stunts was to, while handcuffed and shackled, tow some significant number of rowboats (containing people) for distances of up to a mile. He lived to be 96. He exercised right up to the day before he died.

This brings us to Cormac McCarthy. At the age of 89, he just released a truly remarkable novel unlike his previous work.

Before I talk about The Passenger, let’s talk a bit about Cormac McCarthy. He published his first novel way back in 1965. For decades, he toiled in obscurity, beloved by a few literary critics and literature professors. Some of that lack of mainstream success might have had to do with his subject matter and style.

First of all, his style can be difficult to read. He eschews most punctuation. Hilariously, he has apparently never used a semi-colon, considering it “idiocy”. Many of his novels contain untranslated Spanish. He loves to use long gone, antiquated words. If his works fit in anywhere, they could best be described as Westerns, a genre that hasn’t garnered a great deal of respect. Finally, there’s the subject matter. In Child of God, we’re introduced to Lester Ballard, an alienated necrophiliac. In Blood Meridian (considered his magnum opus and one of the great novels of the second half of the twentieth century), you have horrifying, graphic depictions of extreme violence between Southwestern Native American tribes and a band of scalp hunters. On top of that, he was notoriously media shy. He was not quite at the Thomas Pynchon or JD Salinger level of anonymity, but he was in the same ballpark.

All of this was not a great recipe for mainstream success. Much of that changed with the release of All the Pretty Horses, the first of his border trilogy. Although still challenging to read, the subject matter was more accessible and the violence slightly downscaled. That was just enough for the breathtaking, lyrical beauty of McCarthy’s prose to shine through.

Following the release of The Border Trilogy, McCarthy achieved even more success with the novels No Country for Old Men and the post apocalyptic The Road. Both of these (as well as All the Pretty Horses, and believe it or not, James Franco wrote and directed a low budget adaptation of Child of God) were made into film. I believe No Country for Old Men even won Best Picture. Even more shocking, in Time magazine I once read an interview with McCarthy and the Coen brothers.

He’d really come a long way. Now, sixteen years after his last novel (The Road), at the age of 89, he released The Passenger (as well as a companion novel, Stella Maris, that I have not yet read).

The plot (if you can call it that) starts with Bobby Western, a salvage diver. He and another diver named Oiler are sent down to investigate a plane that has crashed into the sea. They go down and they appear to be the first ones on the scene. They have to cut their way into the plane. When they do, they discover that one body is missing and the flight data box has been removed. Shortly after that, mysterious men arrive to interview Western. His apartment shows signs of being searched. Oiler mysteriously dies. Western’s funds are tied up by the IRS. He feels that his only escape is to live off completely off the grid.

In a different plot thread, we learn about his sister, Alicia, who committed suicide some years ago. Alicia and Bobby had apparently fallen in (unconsummated) love. Years later, Bobby is still grieving her. In this second thread, we learn that Alicia was a brilliant mathematician capable of insights that Bobby, himself a talented physicist, could not comprehend. Alicia was haunted by hallucinations. Most prominent of them is a flipper limbed man named Thalidomide kid that brings in various amateurish vaudeville styled hallucinations to entertain Alicia.

And that’s about it. If you come to a McCarthy novel expecting linear stories or even closure, you should check that expectation at the door.

I can’t get over how different this novel, at least to me, seems to be from his previous novels.

Reading the novel, I hear so many echoes, whether intentional or not, to other great artists. One of the characters, Long John, is positively Falstaffian in his love of food, language, and life. At one point he references a line from King Lear (“Too soon old and too late smart”, although it’s also an old German saying and since the Westerns were German, maybe that’s the reference?). The hidden unexplained conspiracy of the missing passenger and the unnamed government officials hounding Western strikes as a Pynchon level expression of paranoia, if not actually Kafkaesque. The text is rife with the puns and wordplay from a Pynchon novel as well. McCarthy’s deep dives into theoretical math and physics strikes me as something coming from the mind of David Foster Wallace. There’s even a short digression into the JFK assassination, in case you were missing a Don DeLillo Libra note in the text.

At the same time, it’s uniquely McCarthy. The exquisite descriptions of landscape are here. The deep thoughts expressed with words that seemingly glide over the page are here. And yes, the lost and obsolete words of some bygone age make appearances in the text. It is quite simply beautifully written.

One other thing that surprised me is the humor. Given his usual subject matter, McCarthy’s novels often have a dark humor. Here, there are sections (like when Western finds and converses with the half mad hermit Borman) that are laugh out loud funny.

So, I have to hand it to Cormac McCarthy. At the age of 89, nearly sixty years after his first novel was published, the fact that he can write such an innovative and creative novel that left me so surprised is an amazing accomplishment.