The Apocalypse Will Not Be Televised

Title: Leave The World Behind

Rating: 4 Stars

If you check this book on Goodreads, you’ll see some truly polarized reviews. Those that hate it really hate it. I can understand why. This is not in any way a typical apocalypse novel. The approach that it took was much more interesting to me.

A married couple (Amanda and Clay) and their two children (Archie and Ruth) have planned a getaway vacation from their Brooklyn apartment. Somewhere far out on Long Island, they’re renting what appears to be a perfect vacation home. It’s so isolated that, not only does it not have any neighbors, it’s out of cell phone service.

At first, things go well. The house is beautiful. There’s a swimming pool for the kids to play in. There’s a hot tub that the adults can relax in at night. This appears to be the perfect escape from the chaos of the city.

That is until the second night. In the darkness, there is a very unexpected knock on their door. Being so remote, they’re scared to even open it. When they do, this discover an elderly Black couple (Ruth and G.H.). Despite Amanda’s knee jerk suspicion of them, they are clearly a sophisticated, wealthy, couple. In fact, they are the actual owners of the house that the family is renting.

G.H. explains that they were at an event in New York City when the city experienced an apparent blackout. Living on the fourteenth floor, they didn’t relish the idea of going up to their apartment, so instead, they decided to drive out to their vacation home and stay there until it clears up. G.H. understands that this is an inconvenience and offers to compensate Clay and Amanda.

Clay believes them and agrees to let them stay over Amanda’s objection. The next day the confusion over exactly who is the host and who is the guest leads to some tension between the two couples.

This tension dissipates while another tension begins to build when they discover that, although the house still has power and water, that all internet connectivity has broken off.

As time goes on, the children get increasingly annoyed and bored while the adults become more concerned. The few alerts that they receive on their phones are just short headlines about blackouts, and even more concerningly, one alert that is just gibberish.

The next day, there is a sudden loud boom that sounds across the sky, cracking windows. This unknown sound terrifies all of them. Very large herds of deer, and even more strangely, a flock of flamingoes, appear in the wilderness. At one point Clay goes out to get information but promptly gets lost. The only person that he encounters is a sobbing Hispanic woman speaking to him desperately in Spanish. At a loss of what to do, he simply abandons her. Later, the eldest child, Archie, begins to vomit and his teeth begin to fall out.

What is going on? Are they doomed? Are they overreacting to a disconnected series of events?

You might understand why the reviews of this book are so divided. If you’re a fan of apocalyptic fiction, you kind of have some expectations. Usually there’s a pretty clear description of the danger that the world is facing (be it nuclear or disease or zombies). The characters are often brave and resolute, looking to find solutions for the situation that they are in, even if there are no solutions.

Here there is none of that. By the end of the novel, the characters still have no idea of what’s going on. The reader has a bit more information because there is an omniscient narrator providing information that the characters do not possess. Even so, it’s not real clear exactly what the triggering event was. Terrorist action? State action? Environmental disaster?

The characters do not take heroic action. In fact, hardly any action takes place at all. They barely leave the house.

Ruth would like nothing more than to pretend that everything is OK and it will all work out. G.H., a wealthy financier, is looking for numbers and evidence from which to draw conclusions. Amanda, used to knowing what to do, is falling part in this situation where so little is known. Clay, a college professor, is finding out, when his family is in serious trouble, how useless of a modern man that he actually is.

Much of the unease of this novel comes out of their isolation. It’s not as if they’re living off the grid in a log cabin in the Yukon. They’re on Long Island. They’re just a couple of hours away from their homes. They’re staying at a beautiful, well appointed house. Even so, their lack of any connectivity to the outside world puts all of them on edge. We’re all used to having the world effortlessly at our fingertips. Abruptly with no cell service and no other internet connectivity available, they simply cannot cope. Desperately seeking data where no data is to be found, they grasp weakly at decisions that are almost immediately abandoned.

I can see why readers could be frustrated at the lack of action in this novel. At least while I was reading it, if anything this book felt somehow more realistic. I think that most people think of an apocalypse as a global event that is felt by all essentially simultaneously.

Given the size and complexity of our planet, that wouldn’t be the case. Some people could go days without really understanding the gravity of the situation. If my internet goes out, my first inclination is not to presume some catastrophic global cataclysm has taken place. This would go double if I’m out on vacation in some remote area that probably has spotty service to being with.

Put yourself in their situation. You’re in a nice house with power and water flowing. Your internet goes out, leaving you somewhat cut off from the world. How long would you want to live in denial until you can no longer do so?

It Can’t Happen Here…Again

Title: Prequel

Rating: 5 Stars

In the pantheon of American mythology, one of the biggest is that of the Good War. I’m talking of course about World War II. This is when we Americans all stood up against the threat of fascism and defeated it. It was, many believe, the last time that we were united as Americans.

What if I told you that, before the start of the war, many Americans not only thought that Germany was basically unbeatable but that Hitler had a lot of good ideas, especially around his treatment of the Jews?

The 1930s was a pretty messed up time in the US. In my last post, I wrote about the Business Plot. Several prominent businessmen, aghast that Franklin Roosevelt had the audacity to implement social programs intended to feed, clothe, and provide jobs to starving Americans, tried to initiate a military coup and assume power. Now that I’ve gotten old and have been reading histories for decades, I’d previously read about it. I’m guessing that a pretty small percentage of Americans have ever heard of it.

Similarly, I’d surmise that a small percentage know about this chapter of our history. Maybe a good number do know that there was a major pacifist movement in the US in the years before WWII. Some probably even know that our then national hero, Charles Lindbergh, was one of those pacifists. He went on nationwide tours to convince Americans to stay on the sidelines.

That might seem innocuous. However, does it still seem innocuous when you learn that many of these pacifist organizations received their funding from Nazi Germany? How would you feel about Lindbergh if you knew that, in his speeches, he said that it was Jews that was trying to drag Americans into the war?

This is really only the tip of the iceberg. Nazi Germany figured out, early on, that, if it was going to be successful in a European war, it was critical for the US to remain on the sidelines. It was willing to take pretty drastic steps to keep the US out of the war. This included embedding agents into our country, recruiting and funding US citizens to serve as front men, seducing US congressmen to their cause, and spreading millions of dollars in their fight to keep the US out of the war.

This story talks about that, but the focus of the book is on the fascists among us. There were influential people that legitimately wanted the US to have its own home grown Hitler. There were people absolutely convinced that there was a Jewish cabal secretly running this country that needed to be liquidated.

Some of this I already knew. Much of it I didn’t.

Let’s start with Henry Ford. Ford was a rabid antisemite. He bought a newspaper pretty much for the sole purpose of disseminating antisemitic thoughts. Most notoriously, in this paper, he printed, in full, the book Protocol of the Elders of Zion. For those lucky enough not to have heard of it, this is a book that describes a plot for Jewish global domination. He did this even though by the time he published it, it had already been debunked.

After the Nazi party rose to power, its leaders began to look around for ideas on how to handle its Jewish population. As shocking as it sounds today, the Nazis drew much of their inspiration from American laws. Specifically, they eagerly researched our laws regarding eugenics and, even more so, our Jim Crow laws. The fact that the US, despite having a Constitution that bestows citizenship and apparent equality for all, could have laws that disenfranchises and discriminates against a specific class of people proved to be an almost exact fit to the aims of the Nazi party.

Sure, Germany had its thuggish Brown Shirts. Italy had its equivalent Black Shirts. The US never had anything like that, right? Well, let me introduce you to the Silver Shirts. Formed by a man named William Dudley Pelley, by the mid 1930s they were a large force. In many ways, they were the QAnon of their time. Instead of Deep State Democrats, their paranoid focus was on the Jews. They believed that the Jewish conspiracy included things like vaccinations to weaken people, corrupt youth through teaching, destroy family life, create indecent art and literature, and undermine religion. Sound familiar? All that’s missing is a JFK Jr reference. They were well supplied with weapons, including plans to mass produce a nasty club known as a “kike killer”. Lovely people.

Although Germany invested a lot of money in their activities against the US, it turns out that some enterprising US politicians found a way to stretch its money even farther. From the earliest days of our republic, US congressmen had franking privileges. Basically, anything that was read in to the Congressional Record could be reprinted at very low cost. Once reprinted, the congressional franking privilege meant that any member could mail out the printed copies for zero cost. Now, they can only mail it to their constituents. However, there is a loophole in that if a congressional committee orders the reprint, then it could be mailed nationwide for free.

Nazi agents, specifically a long time German agent named George Viereck, cultivated close relationships with like minded congressmen. He would write a pro-Nazi speech and have a congressmen or a senator read it into the record. Once read in the record, it could be reprinted and mailed out to potentially millions of Americans, all at the US taxpayer expense. By the time that WWII started, there were some two dozen congressmen that were happily mailing Nazi propaganda to US citizens.

There were several congressmen that were more notorious than others. First of all, there was Hamilton Fish. If you recognize the name, it’s because there are Hamilton Fish’s going all the way back to 1808 (they’re currently up to Hamilton Fish V). There are multiple generations of Hamilton Fish’s that served in Congress. Well Hamilton Fish III was deep in with Viereck. His Chief of Staff later went to prison for perjury during the franking scandal.

Ernest Lundeen was a US senator also caught in the franking scandal. It was believed that many of the speeches that he gave were actually written by Viereck. When the franking scandal hit, he knew that he was in trouble and was in a panic. Luckily(?) for him, shortly after that he died in a very mysterious plane crash. Immediately after the crash, his widow entered his congressional office apparently for the sole purpose of scooping up all of Lundeen’s correspondence with Viereck. Nothing to see there, I’m sure.

Lundeen was a piece of work in other ways. Usually a senator’s congressional staff is steadfastly loyal to their senator. In his case, not so much. He required each of his staff to kick back a percentage of their salary to him. For instance, if a secretary made $150 a week, every week they’d have to give Lundeen an envelope containing $15 in cash. As they made more money, they’d have to kick in more. There was apparently not a lot of sad faces in his office when they learned of his death.

The final politician that I want to talk about is Wild Bill Langer. He also was caught up in the franking scandal, but it’s his back story that I found fascinating / amusing. He was governor of North Dakota. While governor, he got caught up in a kickback scheme. He was charged (federally), convicted, and sentenced to eighteen months in prison. Langer rejected the conviction, rejected the court order removing him from office, declared martial law, declared North Dakota’s independence from the US, and barricaded himself in his office. After his supporters threatened to shoot his lieutenant governor, Langer resigned. Despite all of that, he later was re-elected governor and then elected to the US senate. That is an interesting career!

In case it’s not obvious, the book is entitled Prequel because Maddow believes that we’re living in similar times. Instead of Nazi Germany, we have Russia actively trying to manipulate us to undermine democracy. Around the world, it appears that fascism, in one form or another, is on the move while democracy seems in danger of failing. Perhaps we can learn from a previous time in our history where such a threat seemed on the rise.

Much like Maddow’s previous book Bagman, much of the information in this book had already been discussed in a podcast series. In this case, the podcast was named Ultra. Despite already having listened to Ultra, I still thoroughly enjoyed reading this book.

Hostile Takeover Of Democracy

Title: Amsterdam

Rating: 2 Stars

I’ll talk about the film Amsterdam but I’m actually more interested in the historical events that inspired the film.

Amsterdam came out in 2022. I’m surprised that I totally overlooked it. After all, it was written and directed by David O Russell. Despite his occasional abusive treatment of actors (eg nearly got in a fight with George Clooney), he has made such notable films as Three Kings, The Fighter, Silver Linings Playbook, and American Hustle.

The film is loaded with star power. Just check out this list of actors: Christian Bale, John David Washington, Margot Robbie, Chris Rock, Anya Taylor-Joy, Zoe Saldana, Mike Myers, Michael Shannon, Timothy Olyphant, Rami Malek, Ed Begley Jr, and Robert De Niro. Hell, Taylor Swift even has a small part. It’s kind of insane.

Dr Burt Berendson (Bale) and a lawyer named Harold Woodman (Washington) meet in France during World War I. They become friends and are both seriously wounded in battle. Nursed back to health by Valerie Bandenberg (Robbie), the three become fast friends and Harold and Valerie become lovers.

After living in Amsterdam, eventually Burt and Harold decide to head back to the states. Many years later, at the behest of his daughter (Swift), they are asked to investigate the mysterious death of a general (Begley). As they report to his daughter that the general was poisoned, she is pushed in front of a car by an assassin (Olyphant).

Wrongly suspected of her death, Burt and Harold are on the run and seek to clear their names. In so doing, they discover a plot by a group of businessmen to bribe a beloved general (De Niro) to give a speech and to lead his former soldiers into a coup against Roosevelt. The general has no desire to be the front man for this group of businessmen. Burt, Harold, Valerie, and the general must all work together to thwart the plot. Will they keep America from falling into fascism?

The film should have been right up my alley. It’s based upon a real historical event (more on that below). It’s chock full of high quality actors. It’s a period piece set in the 1930s, always an interesting time.

For me, it all just added up to meh. It’s as if the film couldn’t decide whether to focus on the three way friendship of Burt, Harold, and Valerie or the plot of the businessmen. In either case, I didn’t feel particularly invested in either plot line.

The actors seemed to be lost. I’m not sure what Christian Bale was doing with his role other than some semi-stereotypical Jewish doctor. Similarly John David Washington was at best stolid as Harold. Robert De Niro didn’t bring anything special to the role of the general. Michael Shannon and Mike Myers were somewhat amusing as American and British spies. Taylor Swift seemed to be stunt casting. Even Anya Taylor-Joy, who I have enjoyed in pretty much everything, seemed to be grasping at the role of a businessman’s wife with the hots for the general.

The exception is Margot Robbie. I’m not exactly sure what a movie star presence is, but whatever it is, she has it. She lights up whatever role that she’s given, be it Barbie or Babylon or Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, or Harley Quinn in any of those films. Here she brings the character of Valerie to life.

Other than Robbie, there simply wasn’t enough to recommend this film.

What about the historical event that it was based upon?

In 1932, there were businessmen that were aghast at the policies of Franklin Roosevelt. They earnestly believed that providing aid to the hungry and the unemployed was somehow going to be the gateway drug to socialism.

They were willing to put up money to effectively overthrow FDR and install a puppet fascist dictator that they would actually control. Among the people involved in the plot were allegedly a former presidential candidate, a JP Morgan partner, an heir to the Singer corporation, and oddly enough, Prescott Bush (yes, that would be George HW Bush’s father and George W Bush’s grandfather).

How were they going to find this dictator? Well, they decided that the best way would be to find a very popular retired general. This general would read a speech (written by themselves, of course) that would be a call to action. He would encourage his army of supporters to march onto Washington. There, this army would push FDR aside and the general would be installed as Secretary of General Affairs.

The general that they decided to approach was Smedley Butler. On the one hand, it seemed to be a brilliant choice. After all, he was a bona fide army hero. He fought in numerous engagements and won not one but two Medals of Honor. Earlier, he had been part of the Bonus Army that had marched on Washington DC.

On the other hand, it was a horrible idea. First of all, he was a Democrat who supported FDR. Not only that, but in his post military life, he’d turned against the forces of capitalism. He believed that his military activities were not in the interest of the American people but in the interest of American business. In fact, he wrote a book called War is a Racket (which I wrote about here). He called himself a ‘racketeer for capitalism’.

When approached, Butler played along for a while and then testified in front of a congressional committee. As expected, this caused quite a stir. Despite that, no one was arrested or prosecuted. After all, these were rich people.

I find it interesting that this, the story of how a group of elite businessmen tried to overthrow our democratically elected government, is not more well known. If anything, this tells us that we should be vigilant not only to external threats but to internal ones as well.

A Logo That DGAF

Every now and then, when I’m driving around, I’ll pass by a store or pass a truck that has the most zero fucks corporate logo of all time. I’m talking, of course, about Sherwin Williams. Check it out:

I mean, just look at it. We’re in the year 2023. It’s been over fifty years since the Environment Protection Agency has been established. It’s been over fifty years since the first Earth Day. We’ve been sorting our garbage for recycling for decades. We use low flow toilets. We’ve switched to LED light bulbs. We’ve been working for decades to make our air and water cleaner. Compared to the 1970s, significant progress has been made in making our planet a better place to live.

And then there’s the Sherwin Williams logo. It shows our lovely planet. A paint can (with SWP, for Sherwin Williams Paint) is being spilled all over the planet. Excess, wasteful paint is dripping off our forlorn planet. The paint is blood red. The topper of course is the slogan. After all, what can be a better corporate goal than to cover the earth in paint?

It really is an amazing logo. Did you ever wonder how it came about? Or why the company still uses a logo that is so explicitly anti-environmental?

Well, it’s not accidental.

Sherwin Williams is a really old company. It was founded way back in 1886 by, yes, Henry Sherwin and Edward Williams.

The first corporate logo was a chameleon. That kind of makes sense. After all, it is a color changing animal. Apparently that was a bit too sophisticated of a logo for those times, so in 1893, they changed the logo to a much more overtly descriptive:

It’s a little crude, but you see the pattern being set. It was obviously still missing something. So, in 1910, they came out with:

This solves not one but two problems. First of all, using the phrase Cover the Earth really makes obvious that the grand vision of the company is to completely paint every surface on the planet (oceans, continents, your pet cat). That really needed to be said because, as you can see from the logo, only the Northern hemisphere was really getting the full treatment. Secondly, by labeling the paint can with SWP, it makes it clear that Sherwin Williams sees itself as the company with the gumption to take on that job. All else that is required is to make the paint red so that it looks like the Earth is bleeding. This was done in 1926.

When I started researching the story behind the logo, I assumed that Sherwin Williams is just one of those fuck you eco-hostile companies. I figured that they were somehow aligned with big oil or with the Koch brothers.

Imagine my surprise to discover that this was not true. It has received the Green Chemistry award. It’s given to those companies that incorporates the principles of green chemistry into chemical design, manufacture, and use. Sherwin Williams was one of the first companies to produce lead free paint. There is little VOCs (Volatile Organic Compounds) in their products. As far as paint companies goes, they appear to be trying to be good corporate citizens.

In fact, in 1974, they decided that the whole let’s cover the Earth in paint might not be great advertising (you know, with the rise of environmentalism and all of that). They came out with a new logo looking like:

The good news is that the logo no longer associates Sherwin Williams with trying to despoil the planet (yay!). The not so great news is that the logo, um, sucked. It’s just about the most uninspired, generic logo that, I’m guessing, millions of dollars and a team of middle managers could come up. It appears that those are two strips of paint coming out of the L’s? Whoa, slow down there with the imagery, Skippy!

That didn’t last long. Apparently there was a high customer demand to bring back the drenched in blood planet (?). Regardless, in 1982, in yet another example of corporate bureaucratic malaise, they decided to combine the two logos into one:

So, yes, here’s the worst of both worlds. You have the bloody dripping planet AND a hugely unimaginative corporate logo. Finally, in 1999, they ditched the silly logo and replaced it with the simpler Sherwin Williams font and that is where we are today.

So, there you have it. A long twisted tale of a corporation being saddled with a distinctive anti-environmental logo but seemingly powerless to do anything about it.

One more demonstration that the power of the “Woke” faction that MAGA supporters everywhere believe is driving our country to its complete destruction appears to be, on the whole, quite meagre.

Huck Finn Gone To Seed

Title: Suttree

Rating: 5 Stars

I’ve just about read all of Cormac McCarthy’s novels. I think that the only ones that I had left was this one and his last, Stella Maris. Published in 1979 and written over a period of twenty years, I have to say that Suttree is the most Cormac McCarthy novel that I’ve ever read.

First of all, it’s absolutely beautifully written. It’s McCarthy novels like these that have critics make so many comparisons to Faulkner. The words just flow on the page. His landscape descriptions seem drawn by a painter.

Here you see his fondness for arcane and obscure words. On nearly every page you’ll encounter a word that’s new to you. I find it best to read McCarthy much as I read Shakespeare. You just kind of have to accept the fact that there are going to be words that you won’t know. Many times you can puzzle out the meaning by the context in which it appears. Other times you can’t. You might be tempted to put the book down and go a googling but in so doing you’ll find yourself being pulled out of the narrative.

Being a brilliant composer of the English language, you might think that McCarthy would create narratives populated by intelligent, sophisticated characters living a life of leisure (I’m looking at you Henry James). McCarthy loves living in the muck. His characters are often grotesque. His plots are full of characters making horrible choices with worse consequences. The occasionally hideous underbelly of living life in the 1950s Knoxville is on display here. Although elegantly written, there is no shortage of racial / sexist epithets and crude descriptions of body parts.

The story centers around Cornelius Suttree. Educated with a wife and a child, he has abandoned them and is now residing on a derelict houseboat living as a fisherman. The novel opens with Suttree out on his boat retrieving his trap lines. As he fishes, in front of him, a suicide victim that jumped into the river is pulled out with a grappling hook embedded in his head.

A second character named Harrogate first meets Suttree when they are in prison together. Harrogate is first in prison having been caught, um, red handed, having sex with nearly every watermelon in a farmer’s patch.

Those are pretty much the first two images of the novel. Especially for early McCarthy (I’m thinking of Child of God most especially), this grotesque imagery is par for the course. The fact that these images are described and written so beautifully both makes the imagery that much more grotesque but also darkly funny.

Combining extremely dark humor with tragedy is another hallmark of McCarthy. Make no mistake about it, this book is grim. By the end of the novel, many of the characters are dead, often violently. Suttree’s child dies. A young woman that Suttree was having an affair with dies in a landslide. A sex worker that Suttree had another affair with loses her mind. Suttree sinks ever deeper into the filth of the life that he has chosen, getting hopelessly drunk, nearly always impoverished, and almost dying of typhoid fever.

Amidst all of this grimness is dark humor. In some parts of the novel I found myself laughing out loud. The situations that the characters find themselves in are often ridiculous. The characters, even as they are flailing about, often display and express a knowing, ironic self awareness.

Harrogate especially finds himself in ridiculous situations. He engages in a series of get rich schemes that never quite seem to work. Learning that Knoxville is giving out a bounty for rabid bats, he attempts a scheme to kill dozens of bats at a time. Knowing that Knoxville actually rests upon a set of caves, he endeavors to spelunk through the caves to find one located under a bank vault. In the caves, coming upon a concrete wall, he resolves to dynamite the wall with a predictable lack of success. His final scheme involves stealing nickels from a large number of payphones in the Knoxville area. He gets caught in this final theft and must spend years in the penitentiary.

This is not original to me, but as I read this, I was struck by its echo of another comedic novel about living on a river in the South. Of course, I’m talking about Huckleberry Finn. As with Finn, this novel is a series of misadventures by misfits. It’s a much darker, more tragic version, but even so, I like to think of Suttree as being basically Huck Finn all grown up.

To close, I’d like to include a paragraph from Suttree. It’s kind of a long one, but I found it both amusing and representative of McCarthy’s writing style at this point in his career.

Mr Suttree it is our understanding that at curfew rightly decreed by law and in that hour wherein night draws to its proper close and the new day commences and contrary to conduct befitting a person of your station you betook yourself to various low places within the shire of McAnally and there did squander several ensuing years in the company of thieves, derelicts, miscreants, pariahs, poltroons, spalpeens, curmudgeons, clotpolls, murderers, gamblers, bawds, whores, trulls, brigands, topers, tosspots, sots and archsots, lobcocks, smellsmocks, runagates, rakes, and other assorted and felonious debauchees.

The People That Need To Read This Book Will Never Read It

Title: Myth America

Rating: 4 Stars

I feel that I should start by explaining the 4 star rating. I think that this is an important book that normally would get 5 stars. The problem is that it is a collection of essays from a variety of historians. Some of them did a better job of understanding the assignment than others. Therefore, since not all of the essays were uniformly of high quality, I had to take a star demerit.

The idea behind this book is that our brains are full of American myths. This really isn’t even a liberal vs conservative argument. There are some American beliefs that are nearly universally accepted. In fact, I’ve heard many of these beliefs repeated by politicians of both parties, talking head pundits, and just reporters in general. These myths are generally accepted as unchallengeable truth.

Just think of some of the ideas that are discussed in this book: American exceptionalism, Reagan Revolution, the magic of capitalism, American socialism, United States as an empire, and white backlash. Regardless of your political affiliation, these are all topics that, unless you’re pretty well read with contemporary historians, you feel that you understand and that you have a good grasp of.

Other myths discussed are topics that are more prevalent among those of a certain political belief: the border, immigration, Confederate monuments, and yes, voter fraud.

There are about twenty such topics discussed in this book. Each topic is written by a different historian. Many of the historians have significant expertise in their assigned topic. For instance, the essay on immigration was written by Erika Lee, author of the excellent America for Americans. The essay on American as an empire was written by Daniel Immerwahr, author of How to Hide an Empire. Necessarily, their essays in this book are the Cliff Notes version, but you can read with confidence knowing that they’d already done the deep research required for their books.

This is one of those books that I kind of want to keep in my back pocket. Whenever someone starts talking about with great, undeserved confidence on one of these twenty topics, I just want to take the book out and point them to the chapter that deals with that subject. I know that it wouldn’t do any good. People who have had these myths hammered into their heads for decades are not about to be dissuaded by some pointy-headed ivory tower historian and their ‘facts’.

By now I’ve read a lot of history written by historians that make a point of not just accepting common wisdom that has built up over a period of decades. They go to the original sources and perform their own critical analysis. In so doing, they discover many interesting things.

The immigration question is always interesting. A lot of people think that today’s immigrants should legally immigrate like our own forefathers did. The common archetype of an immigrant is a Mexican that slips across the border to steal our jobs and/or use our public services.

There are several things wrong with this thinking. The fact is that, if your forefathers came to our land before 1924, there (unless you were Chinese, which is a whole other story of American racism) was no concept of illegal immigration. If you set foot in America, you were de factor a legal immigrant. In fact, the US border patrol was not even established until 1924.

In fact, the immigration law of 1924 severely reduced European migration to the US (specifically the then ‘shit hole’ countries like Greece / Italy / Poland, etc). This reduction of supply had a corresponding increase in the demand for low wage migrate workers. With companies looking for alternatives, it was this law that resulted in the dramatic increase of the use of Hispanic labor. Businesses would (and still do) advertise in the Central American countries for available jobs in the US. Nowadays, my understanding is that a significant percentage of immigrants attempting to come to the US originate from Venezuela. US Venezuelan policies are one of (though certainly not the only) the reasons for its state collapse that is forcing people to leave. This is just one example of how US foreign policies actually have a blow back effect on problems like immigration. Reading this chapter on immigration makes it obvious how misguided the simple narrative of brown people coming for our jobs (in a caravan no less!) really is.

Similarly, the chapter on American Socialism was eye opening. When people think of Socialism, they probably think of Lenin and Stalin. They think about gulags. They think about someone coming in, confiscating all property, and giving it to those that are not deserving. They think about people that don’t want to work for a living and just want the government to do everything for them.

Aside as a boogeyman strawman to keep people working at their dead end jobs, this myth, upon simple reflection, is pretty silly. In fact, American socialism was involved in such (at the time) radical concepts like: a woman’s right to vote, health insurance for the elderly (ie Medicare), old age insurance (ie Social Security), minimum wage, workplace safety laws, and fighting for civil rights for all (ie people of color and women). When you read about Socialism as practiced in the US, the consistent theme is that it is championing ideas that are a decade or two in front mainstream thought. If you really want to blow a hard core conservative’s mind, simply tell them that the Pledge of Allegiance was written by a Christian Socialist (Francis Bellamy).

The White Backlash essay was interesting primarily in how it reframed the issue. The myth is that progress in civil rights (be it race or sex) goes too far and it forces white men to respond (hence the backlash). By framing it in this way, the argument seems to blame the civil rights movement for the white reaction. Simple reflection gives the lie to this argument. After all, people have the choice to respond or not. They were not forced to do anything. White men have the agency to choose their actions. Somehow making the civil rights movement the cause of this reaction obscures the fact that it was the agency of the white power structure that responded to civil rights progress.

I could go on but I need to wrap this up. Since it’s so timely, the chapter on voter fraud was a nice close to the book. It has two main theses. One is that actual individual cases of voter fraud is stunningly low. In one study of a billion individual votes, thirty-one cases of fraud were found. The fact that Trump and his acolytes claim millions of illegal votes is, not only outrageously stupid, but is also incredibly dangerous because it rips away at the very foundation of our democratic system. The fact that tens of millions of people believe this lie astounds me and depresses me.

The second thesis is that the real voter fraud that not only is taking place now but has taken place for 150 years is voter disenfranchisement.  Over this entire time, there have been flagrant actions to strip citizens of their right to vote. Whether it’s the old school methods of poll taxes or literacy tests or the newer methods such as automatically purging voter rolls for invalid reasons, the goal is the same: to suppress the vote of people of color. As the old saying goes, if you can’t beat them, then cheat.

Although I enjoyed reading this book, it actually did leave me a little sad. The thought that kept going through my mind as I read it formed the basis of the blog title. The people that need to read this book are the very people that will never read this book.

The Spy Who Was Overlooked

Title: Agent Sonya

Rating: 4 Stars

This was actually a very good biography. In fact, I probably would have given it five stars except for the fact that I (and this, I understand, is totally on me) don’t really enjoy biographies that much. I’m much more of a narrative history person, even though the reality of history doesn’t really match a narrative form. History doesn’t really have a beginning, a middle, and an end. For instance, when does WWII start? Well, most Americans would say Pearl Harbor. If you’re British or French, you probably think the invasion of Poland. If you’re Chinese, you probably go even further back and point at Japan’s invasion. Of course, there are historians that think that WWII is just a continuation of WWI. And so on and so on. Even so, I like my histories to feel like a story.

Besides the fact that biographies start with a birth and end with a death, the narrative thread isn’t as compelling. A biography is essentially a series, she did this and then she did that and then she went ahead and did some other thing. Even in the most exciting of lives, there are periods where not a lot happens. Sometimes when something does happen, it’s due to some external factor that isn’t really relevant to the person, so it seems kind of random.

So, all of that to say, if you are a fan of biographies, then I think that you will really enjoy Agent Sonya. Even though I’m not a fan, I did enjoy reading it and some sections of it were quite compelling.

That’s not particularly surprising. Ben Macintyre has pretty much made a career out of writing about spies (eg Agent Zigzag, Operation Mincemeat, A Spy Among Friends, The Spy and the Traitor). I found A Spy Among Friends to be particularly good. His one flaw, and I’ve mentioned it before in previous posts, is that he tends to fall in love with the spies that he writes about. His writing sometimes border on the hagiographic. You see this occasionally in Agent Sonya, although in fairness, she did lead a pretty amazing life.

You can say that Ursula Kuczynski was born to be a socialist spy. Born in Germany to a Jewish family in 1907, as a teenager she saw the fierce battles between communists and fascists in Germany’s young republic. Her family were all anti-fascist, so there was no question that she’d take up the banner of communism. In 1929, she married an architect named Rudi Hamburger. With architectural jobs scarce in Germany, her husband jumped at a job opportunity in China.

While in China, she met Richard Sorge. If you do not recognize the name, he is considered one of the top spies in the twentieth century. The leading Soviet spy, after his time in China, he ended up in Japan. There, posing as a drunken German Nazi, he wormed his way into the higher echelons of Japanese government. It was Sorge that told Stalin that Japan had no plans to invade the Soviet Union. Stalin used that information to shore up his Western defenses. It was also Sorge that told Stalin that Germany was going to invade the Soviet Union. I believe he even told Stalin the date. For whatever reason, much to his regret, Stalin ignored Sorge. Ultimately, Sorge was discovered by the Japanese, horribly tortured, and executed. Interestingly, the Japanese were willing to trade Sorge for some of their captured spies but the Soviets continued to deny knowledge of Sorge. It’s believed that Stalin ordered this so that Sorge’s invasion warnings, which would have been very embarrassing to Stalin if exposed, would stay hidden.

Back in China, Sorge recruited Ursula to spy for the Soviet Union (and also became one of her lovers). Codenamed Sonja, this became her life for twenty years. Starting in Shanghai, she also spied in the Chinese city of Mukden, Warsaw, London, Geneva, and Oxford. During this time, she also made several trips to Moscow for additional training.

Amazingly enough, for a good chunk of this time, her husband Rudi did not know that she was a spy. Ultimately, he did learn of her double life and decided to join her. By this time, their marriage was finished so they never spied together. Given how singularly incompetent Rudi was at spying (he was usually immediately discovered and was so ineffectual that the Soviets suspected him of being a double agent and he spent many years in a Soviet Gulag), this was probably for the best for Ursula.

Even though her marriage to Rudi ended, she did have several more relationships. She eventually ended up having three children from three different men. All during the time that she was spying, she was also the dutiful mother doing her best to raise her children.

Her time in Geneva was the period of time before the general European war broke out. A devoted anti-fascist, she infiltrated a couple of agents into Berlin. Amazingly enough, the two agents would eat lunch at the same restaurant as a lightly guarded Hitler. They began to form plans to assassinate him. Before they could, Germany and the Soviet Union signed their non-aggression pact. Considering Ursula’s lifelong anti-fascist philosophy and the horrible things that the Nazis were already doing to its Jewish population, this was a tough pill for her to swallow.

Ultimately, she ended up in England. There she was the spy handler for one of the most notorious spies of the twentieth century, Klaus Fuchs. Fuchs was a brilliant physicist that made substantial contributions to the development of the atomic bomb. However, he was upset by the American and British plans to collaborate on the development and to exclude their WWII allies, the Soviet Union. Thinking that this was unfair and dangerous to world peace, he turned over hundreds of pages of detailed atomic plans to Ursula, who promptly forwarded them onto the Soviet Union. Doing so accelerated the Soviet’s development of atomic weapons by at least five years. Her reports were so important that they crossed Stalin’s desk.

In her two decades of spying, she was never caught. One major reason was her sex. It was hard for the spy catchers to imagine that a woman, especially that was, by the time she was in England, raising three children, could have the courage and ability to do such dangerous work.

Another reason was incompetence. She was a known communist. Her family, several of whom were part of her spy network, were all communists. This was not a secret. It was known that Fuchs handler was a woman. Even a semi-serious search would have yielded incriminating evidence like radio transmitters in or around her house. There were people in MI5 that were suspicious of her. She was even interviewed by the head spy catcher of MI5. Despite his fearsome reputation, he interviewed her and never seriously considered her a suspect.

When Fuchs was arrested, Ursula knew that her time was coming to an end. Although convinced that MI5 was breathing down her neck, she, along with her children, was able to board a plane to East Germany. There she was feted like a hero.

She was born in 1907 and died in 2000. She risked her freedom, her life, and her children’s freedom to serve the Soviet Union, a country that came into being after she was born and disappeared before she died. Ursula was a fascinating woman that was recruited by one of the most significant spies and then later handled another of the most significant spies of the twentieth century.

A Socialist Attack On The Patriarchy

Title: Daisies

Rating: 4 Stars

Having finished the top twenty-five films of the BFI Sight and Sound list, I’m now continuing on with my journey. Next up is Daisies, coming in at twenty-eight.

Keeping in line with, I’d say, most of the films in the BFI list, this is another weird one. This film was made in Czechoslovakia in 1966. I was about to say that this is the first film on the list made in a country that no longer exists, but then I remembered Man With A Movie Camera was made in the USSR. For both films, it’s interesting what filmmakers could get away with in a heavily censored political system.

One common factor in both films is a lack of plot. Daisies can best be described as a series of vignettes featuring two young women, both named Marie (apparently in the official credit, one is credited as Marie I the brunette and Marie II the blonde).

The film opens with military planes strafing the ground interspersed with the gears of large machinery. The film closes with bombs and the destruction of war.

In between, the two Maries embark on a series of adventures. In several of them, they flirt with much older men that buy them dinner. The end result of these vignettes is that the Maries abandon the older men at the train station. In another scene, they upstage a dance duo at what appears to be a 1920s era dinner club. The two Maries are seemingly always on the lookout for food and occasionally commit acts of theft. At one point the women get upset that a farmer takes no notice of them and worry that they’re losing their identities. In one of the final scenes, they sneak into a dining room where a massive banquet has been prepared. There they engorge themselves and start a food fight. After mysteriously landing in a sea needing to be rescued, when they are back in the banquet room they try to clean up their mess.

If this all seems disjointed, well that’s because it is. It’s a short film, coming in at under eighty minutes, but even so, given the nonlinear nature of it, it would have been a tough go if the film had lasted much longer.

In a film like this, you can’t measure it by how exciting it was or how much time you spent on the edge of your seat. What matters is what thoughts it inspires in you as you watch it.

One of my first as I watched this was how the Hays Code had straightjacketed American films for decades. I can only imagine that young American cinematic auteurs would have gone to some art house to watch a film like this and be slack jawed. These were films that just weren’t allowed to be made in the US. By 1966, the Hays Code was not long for the world (going away in 1968). Seeing a film like this and then comparing it to the staid American films being made at the same time make it apparent that the Hays Code did not go away a day too soon.

This is interesting to me considering the fact that it was made under a Socialist regime. There was strict censorship in place, but the film was approved, made and broadly released.

I’m guessing that it might have passed muster because it can be interpreted as a message against consumerism, which is much more closely aligned with capitalism than socialism. The two women eat to excess, take advantage of wealthy men, and seemingly live at best amoral lives. Possibly the socialist censors saw this as a condemnation of Western values.

The film satirizes the patriarchy. It’s most obvious as the women take advantage of the wealthy, stuffy old men that buy them whatever they want to eat with a clear intention of getting something, most likely sexual favors, in return. The men are inevitably thwarted when, at the train station, the women trick the old man onto the train and then jump off or get on the train at the last moment, leaving the old man to futilely run after the train. At one point the two Maries pretend to cry as they see off one of the old men, but once gone, they scornfully laugh.

The Maries themselves are stereotypes of empty, doll like women. In the opening scene, there is a creaking sound overlaying the women’s movement that recreates the sound of a marionette. The women speak in high pitched, squeaky voices. Their mannerisms and makeup are grossly exaggerated.

In a couple of scenes they are both eating apples which would seem to be a pretty obvious nod to Eve tempting Adam in the Garden of Eden. Is there a better metaphor for the weakness of the patriarchy than the story of Adam’s fall?

It’s interesting that the only time that the two Maries seem to experience actual angst is when the farmer seems to ignore them. Are the two Maries so used to having the male gaze upon them that when it stops that it disturbs them? For a woman, is no longer being the target of the male gaze a glimpse of their own mortality?

Speaking of mortality, the fact that the antics of these two young women are bookended by scenes of destruction and mechanization seem important. Is the film saying that the two women’s gluttony and what could almost be called their nihilism is a rational response for the time that they live in? Recall that in 1966 the world was in the midst of the Cold War, where mutual assured destruction was the military doctrine of the day. It seemed, if not likely, at least feasible that the world could end in nuclear conflagration. Given that, just living for the moment and gorging yourself on whatever you can get your hands on could be considered a rational response.

One thing that I probably haven’t adequately described is how the two Maries are agents of chaos in whatever vignette they’re in. As I was watching it, I kept flashing back to the Marx brothers, specifically Chico and Harpo. The two Maries, unlike Harpo, both talk. However, like Chico and Harpo, they seemed to like nothing better than to go into a staid, conventional situation and then, with their hijinks, knock it on its head. Like the Marx brothers at their best, there is almost a nihilist element to their chaos. They do it just because they can.

I gave it a 4 star rating. It’s not exactly a film that I would sit down and watch on a Saturday night with popcorn. However, I did find it interesting for what I believe that it was trying to say. I also appreciated the historical context in which it was made. At times, I did find the two Maries to be funny and entertaining. It is, like other films on the BFI, so unconventional that its unconventionality made it more interesting. For all of those reasons, it was a film worth watching.

An Invisible Man Struggles To Be Seen

Title: Invisible Man

Rating: 4 Stars

The novel starts with the unnamed narrator claiming to be invisible, living in an underground room lit with stolen electricity. He then describes how he ended up there.

A promising high school student in the South, he is asked to give a speech to the local white leaders. Before he can give his inspirational speech, he has to participate in a battle royale where he and other young Black men are blindfolded and forced to beat each other. Bruised and bloody, he gives his speech, and as a result receives a new briefcase and a scholarship to a Black college.

A success at the Black college, he’s given the plum assignment of driving a wealthy white trustee around campus. This seemingly innocuous assignment turns into a nightmare when he exposes the white trustee to the sordid underbelly of the Black neighborhood. Incensed at his naivete of allowing this to happen, the college president banishes him from the college. The president sends him up to New York City with a handful of sealed letters that will ostensibly introduce the young man to figures of prominence and allow him to work his way back to the college.

However, the sealed letters actually condemn the young man. It’s only after he reads the unsealed last letter that he realizes that he’s been betrayed. Now nearly penniless, he gets a job at a paint factory. On his first day, he mixes paint with very few instructions. When that unsurprisingly goes bad, he’s sent down to the basement boiler room. There he gets into a fight with the other worker. Their inattention to the gauges causes boilers to overheat and explode. He then wakes up in a hospital where he is given electroshock therapy.

Released, he stumbles around Harlem in a daze until taken in by a maternal woman. As he still struggles to find work, he stumbles upon an eviction of an elderly couple. An unruly crowd begins to form. He speaks up and his words inspire the crowd to violent action.

In the ensuing chaos, the narrator escapes but someone catches up to him. Inspired by his words, the man, Brother Jack, encourages him to join something called The Brotherhood. An organization modeled after communism, its mission is to inspire workers of all colors to rise up and revolt. He becomes known for his charismatic speeches. However, another organization, led by a man named Ras the Exhorter, accuses him of just being a Black sellout to an organization dominated by a white power structure.

Eventually, the narrator comes to the same conclusion regarding the Brotherhood. In the meantime, another young Black follower of the Brotherhood has also become disenchanted with it and is now illegally selling dancing Sambo dolls on the street. Caught the police, he fights back and is shot and killed.

As a result of the police killing, nearly all of Harlem is in a state of riot. Having to hide from both the Brotherhood and Ras’ forces, the narrator goes around in disguise. Chased, he ends up in a coal bin. Two white men seal him in. Trapped in the underground, the narrator realizes that none of the identities that he has assumed is true to himself. Calling himself an invisible man, he resolves to stay underground until he figures out how to communicate his invisibleness to all of the other invisible people out in the world. By the end of the novel, he is ready to ascend back to the world.

Invisible Man makes many lists of the great novels of the twentieth century. Why?

For one thing, it’s a novel that is striving to be more than a so-called ‘race novel’. It follows more in the tradition of a picaresque novel. A picaresque novel is the story of a young character that makes his way using his wits in a society that stands against him. Taken right from wiki, properties of a picaresque novel are:

• Told in first person
• The main character is of low class
• There is no plot; just a loosely connected sequence of adventures
• Satire is prominent

By those rules, Invisible Man seems pretty picaresque to me. By writing a novel (especially in 1952) featuring Black characters in a known, defined literary structure, it forces the reader to not just pigeonhole it as a so-called Black novel but to also think of it as part of the overarching stream of literary tradition.

Even so, this novel is about many facets of the Black experience. Here in one novel, you see Black lived experience in the South, in a Black college, being set up to fail at work, being experimented on by medical professionals, being used as a front man for a white organization, and the compromises and sacrifices that a Black man has to make just to exist in a world built for them to fail. However, you also see a maternal woman lovingly tend to a young man, you see young men bond together in a shared sense of mission, and you see the capacity for ambition, power, and leadership that lurks in the narrator’s heart.

By the end of the novel, the narrator has cast aside everyone and everything that was trying to force himself into a predetermined role and is willing to stand on his own.