My Log 246: I’ve been reading a raft of thrillers, mysteries and so on, and I report on what I can remember of them

Cover of The Winter of Frankie Machine In recent months I have read a large number of novels of what might be called the popular variety --- that is, most of them have been about crime or associated topics, thrillers, mysteries or the like. These books, so far as I am concerned, share the one characteristic that having read them, I immediately forget them, and when asked the day after I have finished reading one what was the subject, I am completely incapable of remembering anything, unless and until some trigger in the form of a theme or a character is supplied, when with luck it will all come flooding back.

Naturally, I often ask myself why I read these books: I suppose the answer is that it is because they are easy reading, do not require intense concentration to understand what they are about, and are pleasant to read.

(You might well interpret the foregoing as a comment on the ageing process: thirty or forty years ago I had no difficulty recalling the themes of books I had read, even months afterwards.)

A point that is worth making is that the writing of these sorts of books is often brilliant, the plotting precise and exciting, the hold on your imagination as you’re reading them is intense. In this category I have to name especially John Le Carré, the British author, Harlan Coben, Don Winslow, and Elmore Leonard, American writers of thrillers, and James Lee Burke, whose specialty is Louisiana and New Orleans, and who has written an excellent book on the aftermath of the Katrina hurricane in that great city.

I will deal with these books in order of the vivacity in which I can recall them:

The Winter of Frankie Machine, by Don Winslow: I finished this only today. It is a really excellent study of a man Frank Machianno who in his late middle age is running a popular bait shop near San Diego, cares very much for his daughter, his estranged wife and his mistress, and, as the book slowly develops from this idyllic opening, is a man who has retired from a legendary career as a Mafia hit man, to which he is being drawn back by the decisions of his Mafia bosses. He is old-style Mafia who believes in the loyalty oath and in doing what he is told by his bosses. But in these events he is cruelly betrayed by all those he has trusted. In his prime he was known as Frankie Machine, a name bestowed on him because he was always so phenomenally successful in the enterprises he undertook. The book suggests a close understanding between even the honest cops in the area and such old-style crooks as Frankie Machine, and the theme of the book is devoted to Frankie’s attempt to discover which of his bosses and associates should have decided to hit him when they summoned him to a meeting. And, of course, why. Eventually, inevitably, he faces the fact there is no escape from the fate they have chosen for him, but before he goes he delivers a remarkable message that resonates with me. I can tell you why, too. I often think of a book I read a few years ago called Gangster Capitalism, in which the author put forward the idea that all this stuff about organized crime had been invented by big business as a means of hiding the fact that the crimes of corporations are hugely bigger than anything done by the Mafia, a thesis that has been roundly endorsed by recent events, in which the global economy was brought to its knees by massive corporate frauds. Here is what Frankie Machine says: “Nilke pays twntynine cents to a child for making a basketball jersey, and then turns around and sells it for one hundfred and forty dollars. And I’m the criminal? …. You could take all the Crios, the Bloods, the Jamaican posses, the Mafia, the Russian mob and the Mexxican cartels and all of them put together couldn’t rake in as much green in a good year as Congress does in a bad afternoon. And you could take every gangbanger selling crack on every corner in America and they couldn’t generate as much ill-gotten cash as one senator rounding the back nine with a corporate CEO. My father told me that you can’t beat the House. And he was right. You can’t beat the White House or the House of Representatives, They own the game, and the game is fixed, and it isn’t fixed for us.”

I’m afraid that is only too true.

La Brava, by Elmore Leonard: Leonard’s mastery over his curious, stripped, bald prose seems to grow with each book. I have read a lot of them, now, and he has the gift of plotting, and keeping the plot alive until the last pages. La Brava is a sort of former cop who has remarkable commonsense and is also romantic enough to idolize a movie star of former days who he had found come to rest in a local hotel, under the care of a rich old man, Maurice. She is also vulnerable to the charms of a crooked waster called Richard Nobles with whom she dreams up a scheme to defraud Maurice. La Brava, in spite of his admiration for the woman, isn’t prepared to let her get away with it, and the plot deals with the working out of this story, which takes place in Florida. An excellent study of an unusual hero, La Brava, and of the usual street heroes and villains of a Leonard book.

A Most Wanted Man by John Le Carré

Our Kind of Traitor, by Le Carré: These two books, written in 2008 and 2010, prove that Le Carré has made the transition from the Cold War, the subject of his earlier novels about spies, to the world of terrorism with scarcely a false step. A most Wanted Man deals with a strange guy who turns up from the former Soviet Union, takes up residence with a pair of Turks living in Hamburg. He is immediately suspected by the German security services of being a prospective terrorist. He has some claim to money that had been deposited years before, after some dirty tricks to earn it, with the father of a British bank. The son now running the bank decides to give it to him, and the plot, always rather obscure in Le Carré, rolls on to its conclusion. It was when I was two-thirds of the way through the second book that I decided Le Carré’s prose is indeed sublime, and that he must be the outstanding novelist working in Britain today. But within a few pages, as he plunged into one of those interminable confrontations and questionings that he has always specialized in, I had begun to change my mind, Our Kind of Traitor begins when a young British couple holidaying in Antigua run into a very odd Russian fellow, who follows up their brief acquaintance when they both go to Europe. The man has a team around him, although their function is never entirely clear, but eventually the fellow is persuaded to climb in board a plane headed for London, and surrender, with all his information, to the British Secret Service, who are salivating at the idea of interrogating him. There is a final denouement that sends the story into a sort of comic tragedy, a sort of Le Carré speciality, one might say.

Long Lost, by Harlan Coben: This writer began with a series of amusing books about his hero, a retired basketball player turned agent, and parttime investigator, called Myron Bolitar. He has since branched out into more substantial books, but in this he revives Myron Bolitar, a character who has always been supported by a strange, brilliant, violent sidekick called Win, who can always be depended upon to rescue Myron from his worst mistakes. This one is about an old girl friend of Myron’s who has disappeared for some years, but suddenly summons Myron to Paris to help her with something. Myron, of course, agrees to go, and he begins to learn the complex truth about his girl friend’s life, including that she once had a daughter who was killed in a motor accident (for which the mother blames herself), although it appears that this girl might be still alive. It turns out she is not alive, but a girl who looked very like her was created by a sinister cult who wanted unquestioning acolytes and created them from the beginning. An odd book, with a plot that gets too involved in the last few pages, when it becomes difficult to understand it.

The Tin Roof Blowdown, by James Lee Burke: I have long thought Burke one of the finest writers of English at work today. He has created a gallery of characters notable for their humanity, the fact that they are neither good nor bad but a little of both, and by their complexity. His detective, Dave Robicheaux is one of these complex characters, subject to unreasonable rages and spells of irrationality, but always interesting. He uses the destroyed city of New Orleans as the scene for this latest tale, which is, as usual with this writer, worth reading just for the pleasure of his prose.

My Log 245: Canadians should welcome the possibility of a coalition to oust Harper and his mob

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It is a pretty fair bet that a majority of Canadians would welcome a declaration from the non-Conservative parties that they are ready and willing to form a coalition government should it be required following the coming election.

So why is Michael Ignatieff so coy about it? He must know that dozens of countries are in the habit of electing governments made up by coalitions of their leading parties, that coalitions are a totally normal phenomenon in the political history of many countries, and that there is nothing at all wrong or disreputable about the idea of a coalition.

What is strange, and almost disreputable, is that on the weekend when Ignatieff took over leadership of the Liberal Party, arrangements had been made which would have handed him the Prime Ministership on a platter, but he showed a distaste for the idea which I think we can still hold against him as he now goes to the polls to try to become Prime Minister.

Although Ignatieff does not appeal to me personally, I would certainly welcome it if he were to become the next Prime Minister: anyone but Harper is my motto. To a certain extent I agree with the sentiment expressed on Saturday in an editorial in The Globe and Mail, which calls attention to Ignatieff’s intellectual gifts, and asks Canadians to cease attacking him on the grounds that his previous employment has mostly been in other nations. I once interviewed Ignatieff’s father, who was a remarkable man, a Canadian diplomat of considerable achievements, a man to be admired, generally speaking. So I, too, find the Conservative advertisement that seems to call the validity of the man’s family into question in extremely bad taste, besides being poor politics.

What I object to in the Conservatives is their wide range of antediluvian ideas, usually expressed by people of limited capacity, who are Harper’s Cabinet team. Some of these people should be drummed right out of politics. Men like the minister of justice Vic Toews, who, when he speaks of crime, sounds like he is coming from a couple of centuries ago; Jason Kenney, a man who routinely manipulates people and their beliefs in his own political interest; John Baird, an attack-dog whose only redeeming feature is that he apparently looks after his constituents diligently; the finance minister Jim Flaherty, now at work trying to turn Canada into a facsimile of the United States, after having tried the same thing in Ontario. And many others.

Let’s hope we can get rid of this mob.

My Log 244: Richard Burton, instead of becoming the greatest actor of his time, became Elizabeth Taylor’s paramour

One of Elizabeth Taylor’s major achievements --- if that is the word --- was to solidify a tragic error made by her co-star, husband and obsessed lover, Richard Burton, which denied Burton the elevated status that lay before him as the greatest British actor of his time.

I remember seeing Burton play in a small London theatre early in the 1950s in a play by Lillian Hellman ---- Montserrat ---- after which T.C. Worsley, the eminent critic of the New Statesman magazine posed a pregnant question about Burton.

This remarkably gifted young actor stood at a crossroads, wrote Worsley, and now had to choose which path he would follow in his career: was he going to dedicate himself to becoming the greatest actor on the British stage, a role for which his talents suited him, or was he destined to depend on his personality tricks, and become merely a star? Was he, in other words, to become the latest in the line of pre-eminent actors that Britiain has given over the years to the theatre ---- from Irving, forward to Gielgud, through Olivier, Richardson, Redgrave, many others ----- or was he to take the easier path, depending on personality tricks, and thus become merely a star, rather than a notable actor?

We know the decision he came to: that great voice, that amazing presence, he directed towards Hollywood and the movies. And once there, starring with the beautiful Taylor, he chose, with bells on, to become the consort of the pre-eminent Hollywood star of his time.

That he drank himself to death in doing so would appear to indicate that he was not altogether happy in his choice. But the fact is, Taylor apparently so entranced him that he played the courtier to her queen as the major role in his life.

Thus, the British stage was robbed of a man who stood ready, with his superb gifts, to become its leader. Instead, he gave us some remarkable performances in films --- mostly notably, in the Edward Albee play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? --- but he frittered away his talents in a succession of other trivial films, while, off-screen, he frittered away the immense sums he made in gloriously vulgar presents to his lover, Elizabeth Taylor.

Ah, well, such are the decisions sometimes made by people who do not live up to the great gifts bestowed on them by nature. He no doubt became notorious for his extravagant lifestyle, but there was little evidence that he took much satisfaction in that status.

Mark up one success to the temptress whose larger-than-life persona has been so celebrated in recent days since her death.

My Log 243: Conservative tough-on-crime doctrine an insult to public’s intelligence

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I have read a shocking thing in the newspapers this morning that seems to impugn the intelligence of “the older voter”, and, as an older voter myself, I want to refute it.

Apparently the Conservative Party thinks it has appealed to “the older voter” because it has promised to build more prisons. It seems to me that only an idiot could respond to the naked vote-pandering represented by the promise to build more prisons, especially since the government has refused to give any indication of how much these prisons are going to cost.

Even leaving the cost factor aside, I would hope that older people have enough commonsense to know that prisons are not the answer to crime, that Canada is not in the grip of a crime wave, that no more prisons are needed, that what is needed is a more sophisticated system that would keep more people out of jail, not put more people back in, and that for the government to pretend to be “tough on crime” by building more prisons is an insult to the intelligence of the people of Canada.

Many years ago --- 1961, to be exact --- I interviewed the man who headed the prison system in Sweden. He told me that in the whole country only 2,500 people were locked up. In many of his prisons --- some of which I visited myself --- the prisoners had the keys to their rooms. He asked me, “You will be wondering what happens when someone walks out…. Well, it doesn’t really bother us. We catch them, and they suffer for having walked away.”

At that time Canada was decades behind the Swedes in the development of a humane system of punishment for crime. In the years since we have made some progress, I believe, although I have also visited some of the maximum security prisons we have built, and talked to inmates who were being literally driven mad, many driven to suicide, by the strict, authoritarian regime foisted on them.

I would assume that older people, having lived longer than most, will have had time to absorb some of the information about crime, punishment, incarceration and the like, and have come to the conclusion that, although it is a difficult area of life, the tough-on-crime school, as exemplified in the United States, does not begin to approach a solution. Surely most old people must be among those who would abhor seeing us join the United States as the country that incarcerates the greatest number of people in the world, creating huge numbers of people stained with the label of criminal, for often relatively minor offences for which they are jailed for many, many years. Ridiculous.

Let me give an example of how our system is still, in so many ways, inadequate. My son is a lawyer in Toronto. Recently he was called upon to defend a man who had never had a proper defence, although he had been arrested, charged, tried and convicted many times. This man, a black schizophrenic, was one of those unfortunate mental patients who have been left to wander our streets, having been turned out, many years ago, of our mental hospitals.

This man was held in jail for eight months awaiting trial. When finally arraigned, he was presented to the court wearing prison clothes, in spite of the fact that his lawyer had several days before delivered street clothes for him to wear before the jury. The prosecution team kept presenting him in prison clothes until the judge threatened to make an order demanding that he be given the street clothes. This was a pointer to the negative attitudes adopted to this unfortunate person by our established system of law.

In the end, he was acquitted by the jury on all charges. But that was not really the end of it. The authorities who had charge of him dumped him in the lobby of the courthouse. He was a free man, supposedly, but he had nothing except the clothes he stood up in: nowhere to live, no money, no support system, no one to care for him. His victory, not to put too fine a point on it, was a phyrric one. Is this justice? Is our legal system even about justice? Can we not conceive of a system that takes into account not only the rights of the victims of crime, as the Conservatives always say they are insistent on, but the rights and lives of everyone who runs up against the legal system?

When I was a young reporter, and required to attend courts to report the proceedings, I very quickly realize the world is divided into two classes: the people who know how to look after themselves, and that large segment of the population that just cannot look after itself, that has no idea how to run their lives, people who are constantly in debt, who are desperately shifting to keep themselves afloat, and who end up in the courts of law, and in our prisons.

It is an insult to the public’s intelligence for the Conservative government to pretend that they are dealing with the problems of these people by building more prisons in which to lock them up.

On that ground alone, the Conservative government deserves to be beaten in this coming election.

My Log 242 : My months of relative silence caused by personal preoccupations, while the world around us all is turning to ratshit

The relatively few readers of my Web site will have noticed in recent months that I have written really little. That is because in the last 12 months I have been journeying around the world, having visited New Zealand a year ago, then Croatia, then twice to Austin Texas to visit my eldest son, then to Costa Rica for a month earlier in this year to visit my daughter, and just last week, for a week to Cuba with another of my sons.

That is the first reason for my silence, but there is a second: I have been working for the last few months over the text of a proposed book I am engaged in writing, and that has occupied most of my creative energy. The book is to be about a remarkable Canadian couple who, at the age of 25, arrived in England in the early fifties with $1,000 and the vague intention of opening a coffee house. They were not particularly qualified for that job, and had relatively little work experience of any kind. They had neither of them got through high school, but they shared a spirit, a sort of wacky optimism, and a remarkable flair which enabled them, within ten years, to have created in their Troubadour coffee house a place that attracted the enthusiastic loyalty of a wide range of all classes of people from lonely old people living in one room to the most creative artists of the realm, to the dropouts, eccentrics and dissidents who, now in their twilight years, are still insisting there never was a place like the Troubadour they knew and loved, and there never will be another place like it.

I am collaborating with the survivor of this couple, Sheila Van Bloemen, whose husband Michael died two years ago. I used to hang around the Troubadour a lot in the 1960s, when I was a correspondent for The Montreal Star in London. But I left London in 1968, and was out of touch with its owners until after I read an account of Michael’s life on the obituary pages of the Globe and Mail.

Some of my old-time readers may remember I wrote a piece at that time on my former Web site about the coffee shop and its remarkable owners, and that led to my finding Sheila and her family of children and grandchildren, still living in Dubrovnik, Croatia, to which beautiful little town she and Michael had retreated when the very success of the coffee shop --- there were lineups every night to get into the place --- began to choke them. The story of their café is a story of how a place that was never run as a commercial enterprise could succeed in business (I am tempted to add the line from the American musical….without really trying.) At any rate, I talked to a 70-year-old man last week who told me: “I worked there for four pounds a week for years, and it never once occurred to me it was a job. It was just my way of life. There will never be another place like the Troubadour, believe me.”

So that has been occupying my energies for a few months, but progress is relatively slow, partly because both Sheila and I are in our eighties, but also because it takes time to re-connect with people who are still alive (many are not) who remember a place that was cherished by them half a century ago.

So, okay, that is my apology for having neglected what I believe I must now call my blog. I began this as a personal Web site 15 years ago, before the word blog was ever heard on earth. I regarded it as a sounding off board, a place where I could exercise my somewhat compulsive need to write, to write about anything and everything that fell to hand. I never thought about the audience, or even if there was much of an audience. Some wise person once said that a writer needs only an audience of one: I always knew I had at least that many readers, and was content with it. When blogs arose I did try to join them (although I was somewhat put off by a guy who wrote me “welcoming me to the blogosphere”, something I had never heard of and had no wish to join) but I found the technology too hard to master.

A year or so ago I decided that maybe I could attract more readers by joining the blog, and my remote adviser, Doug Perry, of Vancouver, who has been a long-time, faithful reader, helped set me up in the simplified blogging system that now exists. So I switched from a free-standing Web site to Blogger.com (an outfit owned by Google, apparently, as like so much else on the Net), and I made the switch. Although so far I see no evidence at all that I am read by more people than before. Never mind, one will do….

Okay, while I have been disporting myself in these personal adventures, all around me the world is going to ratshit. I spent this morning looking at the videos on the BBC Web site of the tsunami as it hit Japan. What a terrifying spectacle, what a terrifying event. As one of my sons remarked, it turned the world into junk. As it swept through the works of human kind, it reduced everything to one common denominator: junk. Everything we have created was reduced by this wall of water just to meaningless stuff. Flotsam, as someone said on the BBC a few minutes ago, and jetsam, I could have added (always quick with a cliche). Great buses, cars, lorries, houses, telegraph poles, buildings --- everything that stood before it was simply destroyed and carried off until the wave of water itself --- black by the time it had passed through the cities ---- was scarcely discernable under the load of junk it was carrying.

I have to admit, when I was in Costa Rica for a month, living along the beach, the possibility of a tsunami was never far from my mind. It seems a tsunami is the most devastating natural event that could confront any human life --- simply the power of nature, sweeping us all before it. I recommend anyone who has not done so to view these videos on the BBC’s Web site. They are awe-inspiring. The latest news, given a few moments ago is that the death toll has reached 12,000, with many more still missing. And more than 400,000 people have been forced by the earthquake and the tsunami out of their homes into temporary shelters,. Quite evidently, it will take Japan years to recover from this drastic event.

At the same time I have been fascinated during these last few months by the events in the Middle East. Of course, these must have aroused different feelings in each of us. For me, the Egyptian revolution --- at the moment far from achieved --- and the extraordinary discipline with which it was carried out, put an end to any residual reservations I might have carried from my childhood about the capacity of Egyptians. I am sure many, especially older people, must know what I mean. When I was a small child, our brothers and friends were called from New Zealand to go to Egypt to fight the invading Germans. Of course, we were told, the Egyptians themselves were incapable of defending themselves, or doing anything else much that was of any value. In the common parlance of so many Western countries, the Egyptians were Wogs --- Wily Oriental Gentlemen, was what I was told as a child was the derivation of the name --- they were ruled over by a corrupt, fat King Farouk, and they were a useless bunch that had to be rescued by our muscular, upright New Zealand boys from their own incapacity.

The recent events in Egypt gave the lie to that calumny for ever. I was never able to believe the idea that the revolution they conducted was leaderless. It was too well disciplined, its spokespersons were too eloquent and organized, its amateur soldiers and adherents were too determined and focused. That their overthrow of the corrupt president should have led to similar uprisings around the Arab world is hardly surprising. One of its peripheral effects has been to reveal the hypocrisy of Western pretensions to be democratic (while supporting to the hilt the oppressive dictators who have ruthlessly enriched themselves and stolen from the people they have ruled), and this revelation comes on top of the meltdown of capitalism that has so affected the lives of people everywhere, that the very foundations of our society appear to have been shaken if not undermined.

Although not quite. On this subject, readers would do well to consult an article by the estimable Matt Taibbi in the latest issue of Rolling Stone magazine, called Why Isn’t Wall Street in Jail? The answer, briefly, is that the same people who ruined the global economy are still running things, and have mounted a ferocious effort to destroy public sector unions throughout the world, a classic case of blaming the victims for their own crimes.

Link of the Day Mar 2 2011: Chris Hedges writes in truthdig that the key to changing the world lies with an aroused public, as North Africa and Wisconsin are showing right now. Read his article.

(“We are wasting $700 million a day to pay for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, while our teachers, firefighters and police lose their jobs, while we slash basic assistance programs for the poor, children and the elderly, while we turn our backs on the some 3 million people being pushed from their homes by foreclosures and bank repossessions and while we do nothing to help the one in six American workers who cannot find work. These wars have taken hundreds of thousands of lives. They have pushed millions into refugee or displacement camps. They have left young men and women severely crippled and maimed. They have turned our nation into an isolated pariah, fueling the very terrorism we seek to defeat. And they cannot be won. The sooner we leave Iraq and Afghanistan the sooner we will save others and finally save ourselves.”)

My Log 241: Wonderful French novel lays bare the brutality of the First World War, and provides a sensitive portrait of post-war France

I have just read a wonderful novel by the late French writer, Sebastian Japrisot, known more for his mysteries than for straight novels.

The book, A Very Long Engagement, published by Strauss and Giroux, New York in 1993, deals with a horrendous incident during the First World War, when five French soldiers, convicted of having mutilated themselves, were dragged up to the front line trenches, then shoved over into no-man’s-land on the assumption that the Germans would kill them, and they would die a dishonorable death.

That was the incident, but the book is more about the efforts of various women associated with the five men to discover exactly what happened to them. Essentially it is a disquisition on love, and the meaning of love. The central character is a woman known as Mathilde Donnay who has been crippled since suffering an accident at the age of three. As a teenager, she became the lover of a young man, Jean Etchevery, a fisherman, before he was hauled off in the last days of that hopeless, misguided war, to serve his country. The evidence was that although he hated the war, and wanted to escape from it, he did not deliberately mutilate himself, but suffered an accident that maimed him and resulted in his hand being amputated. His plea that he was innocent, however, was not heard by commanding officers bent of finding scapegoats, and he was forced into a group of 28 convicted men, from which 15, and finally five, were picked for this particularly gruesome end.

Mathilde is reluctant to believe her fiancé is actually dead. So she sets herself to discover the identities of the other four men, and of those who have survived them. Her first success comes when a man approaches her with his story of having been part of the detail assigned to take the men to the frontlines. This man has personally written down letters dictated by the men, which he shares with her. This provides her with addresses that she approaches independently. She discovers she is not the only one on this quest. One woman, in fact, wife of a former convict, has identified the men who made the decision to persecute these five, and has already murdered two of them without giving it a second thought.

So the tale opens out throughout the book, giving rise to graphic descriptions of the horrors inflicted on soldiers during this most terrible of wars. Her researches even take her into contact with members of the German enemy forces, the testimony of the last days of these men building and building inexorably throughout the tale.

Eventually, she learns that not all five of the men were killed: the question becomes, which of them survived. The denouement of the book is dramatic in the extreme.

This is a brilliant anti-war novel, marvelously written, and gripping as much as any mystery novel that Japrisot, the penname of a writer called Jean-Baptiste Rossi, ever wrote. I once read one of Japrisot’s mysteries, intriguingly called The Lady in the Car With Glasses and a Gun, and I have always numbered it among my favorite mysteries. Mr. Japrisot has proven in this book to be a writer of magical strength and maturity, to whom the comparisons made with Flaubert by some reviewers are not out of place.

Link of the day, Robert Fisk joins those commentators who sound a note of warning about the Egyptian army. Read his article A Tyrant’s Exit. A nation’s Joy, in the Independent, London.

(“…the military's high command are men of the old order. Indeed, most of the army's highest-ranking officers were long ago sucked into the nexus of regime power. In Mubarak's last government, the vice- president was a general, the prime minister was a general, the deputy prime minister was a general, the minister of defence was a general and the minister of interior was a general. Mubarak himself was commander of the air force. The army brought Nasser to power. They supported General Anwar Sadat. They supported General Mubarak. The army introduced dictatorship in 1952 and now the protesters believe it will become the agency of democracy. Some hope.”)

Link of the day: Feb 12 2011: Gideon Levy, in a brilliantly insightful article in Haaretz, the Israeli daily, proves that not everyone in Israel is in denial. Read his The Middle East Does Not Need Stability as an accurate description of the politics of this stagnant region, and of how the West is on the wrong side.

Link of the day Feb 9 2011: In another prescient piece, the inestimable Pepe Escobar, of Asia Times Online, punctures the euphoria of the Egyptian protesters, warning that the torturer is still in power, and the army is the central instrument of unshaken power. A dose of reality for all of us who live in high hopes. “For the moment the army is more than comfortable with Sheik al-Torture running the show. And so are the democrats in Washington,” writes Escobar.

Author and radical: William Blum Image via Wikipedia

Link of the Day: Feb 6 2011: American radical William Blum ruminates on the fact and myth of American Exceptionalism. “I've devoted a lot of time and effort to the question of how to reach the American mind concerning US foreign policy.,” writes Blum. “To a large extent what this comes down to is trying to counterbalance the lifetime of indoctrination someone raised in the United States receives. It comes in news stories every day.”

(“But war can be seen as America's religion — most recently Pakistan, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Yemen, and many more in the past — all non-believers in Washington's Church of Our Lady of Eternal Invasion, Sacred Bombing, and Immaculate Torture, all condemned to death for blasphemy, as each day the United States unleashes blessed robotic death machines called Predators flying over their lands to send "Hellfire" (sic) missiles screaming into wedding parties, funerals, homes, not knowing who the victims are, not caring who the victims are, thousands of them by now, as long as Washington can claim each time –- whether correctly or not — that amongst their number was a prominent blasphemer, call him Taliban, or al Qaeda, or insurgent, or militant. How can we reason with such people, the ones in the CIA who operate these drone bombers?”)

(2) I have long admired Pepe EscobAr as one of the best-informed of foreign corresopondents writing anywhere. His articles in the online Asia Times have brought commonsense and informed insight to Asian affairs for years, Today in an article entitled “Masters of Hate Locked and Loaded” he pinpoints the dangerous lunacy of the American right-wing, and its responsibility for triggering the Tucson massacres.

Links of the Day, Jan 14, 2011

In the present depressing political environment in the United States, it is something of a comfort to know that many individuals, resisting the current malaise, are writing cogent and brilliantly argued articles of refutation.

Today I make links to several of these articles:

(1) Lawrence Davidson is a professor of History at West Chester University, Pennsylvania, whose analyses of current events are consistently pointed, progressive in tone, and clearly argued. Today he considers the political impact of the Tucson murders, and the responsibility for them, shared between right-wing, hysterical Republicans, and tepid, cowardly Democrats who have confronted violence with mere passivity.
This man is always worth reading.

My Log 240 Travels in Texas and Costa Rica throw a mirror up to the modern world and its travails

One of Costa Rica's attractions Image via Wikipedia

I have been away from Ottawa since December 20, when I went to Austin, Texas, to visit my son, and thereafter to Costa Rica to visit my daughter.

The visit to Austin coincided with a couple of horrible events in my son’s life, the first being the death by murder of one of his closest friends, formerly a drummer in his band, and one of the sweetest guys you could meet anywhere.

Billy Maddox had retired from the band because a heart condition made it impossible for him to tour, But my son Ben had stayed in touch with him, and become his good friend. Billy lived with his wife in a lovely house in the countryside around Austin. His death occurred when they discovered an intruder in his house who, it turned out, was a neighbour well known to them who, apparently being off his meds, as they say in the US, threw a rock through their door and invaded their house. When Billy spotted the guy and realized he knew him he went to greet him, but was attacked, and by some sequence of events I have not heard explained yet, the end of the affair was that Billy lay dead from a gunshot wound, and the neighbour, too, had been wounded and was in hospital. All that a stranger can say is that if no one had had a gun, no one would be dead.

This tragedy was compounded a couple of weeks later, after my departure, when Ben told me that the lead singer of a band with which he had worked every Sunday night for some years had committed suicide. This is a band comprised largely of old-timers. It is probably one of the great rock-a-billy bands in the world, whose members are delightful fellows, and I can imagine the shock that must have passed through the band members on learning of the tragedy that had befallen their comrade.

Although murders and deaths by suicide happen everywhere, one can scarcely avoid making generalizations based on the American love of guns. This is something that is baffling to the citizens of most other countries, especially of Canada, the closest neighbour of the U.S. We, too, have our share of such incidents, but the U.S. appears to be at the head of the death-by-shotgun list by a considerable margin.

It has been interesting to come to Costa Rica, generally acknowledged to be the most civilized of the republics of Central America, which has succeeded in changing its government by election, without coups or military intervention, for many decades. This is the country that earned itself the remarkable distinction of being the world’s only sovereign state to have abolished its army. That it has retained its constitutional purity for so long surely cannot be unconnected to this remarkable decision. In every other Central American republic --- the catalogue is long ---- Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras, Panama ---- violence became almost a way of life, as either a military-style government, or an elite that did not hesitate to use violence to retain its control of the political situation gave the region a bad name for instability and violent repression.

This has been all the more remarkable in that, for many decades, these tin-pot dictators and insanely violent militias were supported through thick and thin by the great propagandist for democracy, the United States, who, in fact, trained their violence-prone elites, the purpose being to have in power in each of these states an elite that would defend the interests of American companies. Here it was that the phrase “banana republic” was coined to describe the most contemptible of governments, usually of small helpless countries dominated by the United States.

Today Costa Rica seems to be well within the American orbit, depending for its income to a large extent on American and Canadian tourists escaping from the northern winter. Whole sections of the country, esecially along the coastlines, seem to be populated by what are known locally as Ex-pats (namely, Americans), many of whom are rich, maintain expensive homes and hotels, and generally have transformed small communities to take care of their needs. Thus one is never far from a gym with high-cost equipment, necessary for the perspiring American visitor, or the local health-food store, to take care of their many New Age fads, and so on. The country has regulations forbidding foreigners from working, although they are permitted to establish and own businesses, a fine distinction that makes it difficult for them to staff the businesses they have founded.

Still, the way of life does appeal to your laid-back types, many of whom are Americans, of course: so coastal villages are full of young men with long (or shaven) hair, long shorts, and surfboards, taking advantage of the big seas that crash into the Pacific coast.

My daughter, when she first came here, found herself in one of these ex-pat communities on the Pacific Coast, but was repelled by the drug-infested nature of life there, and withdrew. She has recently established in a nice little town called Samara, most of whose inhabitants are Costa Ricans who speak no English. Unlike her father, tone-death to foreign languages, my daughter picked up Spanish effortlessly without a single lesson, and she seems to be thriving in the local heat.

Just a few reflections on the meandering travels of an old man….

Link of the Day: Why Washington Hates Hugo Chavez, an article in Information Clearing House by Mike Whitney. In Chavez's Venezuela the basic needs of ordinary working people take precedent over the profiteering of cutthroat banksters. Is it any wonder why Washington hates him?

(“The details of Chavez's efforts have been largely omitted in the U.S. media where he is regularly demonized as a "leftist strongman" or a dictator. The media refuses to acknowledge that Chavez has narrowed the income gap,eliminated illiteracy, provided health care for all Venezuelans, reduced inequality, and raised living standards across the board. While Bush and Obama were expanding their foreign wars and pushing through tax cuts for the rich, Chavez was busy improving the lives of the poor and needy while ending off the latest wave of US aggression.

(“Washington despises Chavez because he is unwilling to hand over Venezuela's vast resources to corporate elites and bankers. That's why the Bush administration tried to depose Chavez in a failed coup attempt in 2002, and that's why the smooth-talking Obama continues to launch covert attacks on Chavez today. Washington wants regime change so it can install a puppet who will hand over Venezuela's reserves to big oil while making life hell for working people.”)

Link of the Day: January 1 2011: A warming piece of info to start off the year: Juan Cole outlines the Top 10 Myths about Afghanistan. And there is an eleventh: what the hell is Canada doing there?

Link of the Day: An interesting socialist analysis of the Cancun climate conference: Patrick Bond of the University of KwaZula in South Africa, writing a Socialist Project bulletin, says that Climate Capitalism Won at Cancun, But Everyone Else Loses, as unworkable elite proposals set back the fight against global warming.

(“Most specialists agree that even if the unambitious Copenhagen and Cancun promises are kept (a big if), the result will be a cataclysmic 4-5°C rise in temperature over this century, and if they are not, 7°C is likely. Even with a rise of 2°C, scientists generally agree, small islands will sink, Andean and Himalayan glaciers will melt, coastal areas such as much of Bangladesh and many port cities will drown, and Africa will dry out – or in some places flood – so much that nine of ten peasants will not survive.

(“The politicians and officials have been warned of this often enough by climate scientists, but are beholden to powerful business interests which are lined up to either promote climate denialism, or to generate national-versus-national negotiating blocs destined to fail in their race to gain most emission rights. As a result, in spite of a bandaid set of agreements, the distance between negotiators and the masses of people and the planet grew larger not smaller over the last two weeks.

(“To illustrate, smaller governments were ‘bullied, hustled around, lured with petty bribes, called names and coerced into accepting the games of the rich and emerging-rich nations,’ says Soumya Dutta of the South Asian Dialogues on Ecological Democracy.”)

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Link of the Day: Read an Article from the Canadian newspaper, Windspeaker, outlining 13 reasons why Canada did not merit a seat on the UN Security Council. Most have to do with the Harper government’s shoddy treatment of the rights of native people in Canada and around the world.

(The article is written by four prominent men in the field: Grand Chief Ed John, the North American representative to the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, Matthew Coon Come, former National Chief of the Assembly of First Nations and Grand Chief of the Grand Council of the Crees (Eeyou Istchee), Warren Allmand, P.C., O.C., QC, former minister of Indian Affairs and former president of the International Centre for Human Rights and Democratic Development, currently teaching international human rights at McGill University, and Paul Joffe, international human rights lawyer.)

My Log 239 : The film Inside Job is an amazingly detailed analysis of the economic meltdown and who caused it

It was entirely appropriate that on the same day that I watched Inside Job, the remarkable film dissecting the corporate crooks at the heart of the economic meltdown, President Obama should have achieved the biggest sellout of his career in office so far by agreeing to continue with the Bush tax cuts for the richest Americans.

What is left of Obama’s promises during the election? The candidate of change? The man who was going to change how business is done in Washington? The scourge of the lobbyists?

Words fail me. But they did not fail Charles Ferguson, who wrote, directed and researched this amazing film. Relentlessly, Ferguson lays out the facts of the American economic situation in 2008, and with a bewildering series of factual quotes, statements and advice given to the government and the biggest financial institutions by a variety of highly paid officials, he lays the blame for it all where it belongs --- on the people running the government’s supervisory agencies, on the CEOs of the biggest banks, insurance companies and (for want of a better term) institutions whose sole purpose in life, apparently, has been to accumulate more and more wealth into as few hands as possible.

I admit I am not an unbiased observer of these events, or of this film: I have believed since I was a youth that banks and insurance companies stand at the apex of the political devils I would like to see slain. I have quoted many times my high school teacher, who, in a rush of enthusiasm during one class, said to us schoolboys during the last days of the war, “There will be no millionaires in the future, you know. That is over.” A slight mistake of judgment on his part, but one that I wish had proven to be entirely true.

Anyone who, like me, has always believed that the the process of money making more money, is inherently evil, will see in Ferguson’s film the apotheosis of his dreams. Capitalism has finally been revealed for all to see as a system of governance that depends on human greed, pride and manipulation, and is thus inherently at odds with more humane ideologies that take into account that we are our brother’s keeper, and that everyone, by virtue of his or her existence, should have the right to a decent standard of living, to a job, food, clothing and shelter, and enough leisure to allow for the exercise of one’s inherent talents, whatever they may be.

This doesn’t even enter the capitalist mind, preoccupied as it always is with its objective of paying dividends to its investors, and (as the Ferguson film shows so clearly) of maintaining a world free of any interference in the wealth-producing system.

The so-called leaders who established the conditions for the recent meltdown include certainly Reagan, Thatcher, the Bushes, father and son, and Bill Clinton, who put the crown on the developing process of deregulation, and used the occasion to reduce social and welfare benefits payable to those who have fallen behind in the rat-race.

These leaders allowed sharp businessmen to create the instruments of accumulation which, ipso facto, meant a reduction in the amount of created wealth that was available for social benefits. I recall writing about this some years ago when reviewing the remarkable book, The Short Twentieth Century, by the British historian Eric Hobsbawm. Hobsbawm commented on how foolish was the prevailing assumption that a nation that was creating more wealth in the 1990s than it had in the 1970s, was nevertheless supposed to be no longer able to afford social benefits that had been affordable in the 1970s. Why had this happened? Because the private sector, these kings of enterprise who have since plunged the world economy into chaos through their greed, had managed, with the connivance of right-wing leaders, to obtain control over a greater proportion of the wealth created by the work of ordinary citizens.

And they weren’t about to share it….

This is the story so brilliantly told by Ferguson in his film. As one sits and watches this unfolding of the story of corporate greed, and stupidity from the so-called arbitrators and officials who should have been warning of the approaching holocaust, one’s heart literally sinks into one’s boots. How can such a thing have happened? How can we have elected leaders so opaque, so insensate in their right-wing ideologies, as to pull the whole pack of cards down around all of our necks?

Perhaps the greatest shock in the film comes at the end, when Ferguson remarks that the new administration in the United States, rich in promise of change, takes office, and nothing really changes. Why not? He asks. The answer is sick-making. “Because it is a Wall street administration,” he says. Then he runs through the list of personalities who have already appeared in the film as villains in the creation of this chaos, who have been appointed by the U.S. government under Obama to keep on running things. Summers, Paulson, Geithner….the list goes on an on, as it had previously in Michael Moore’s film Capitalism, A Love Story. Moore devoted a whole screen to pictures of the dozens of executives from the one firm, Goldman Sachs, who had been seconded over the years into the ranks of government turning the U.S. government, for many years past, into a sort of Goldman Sacks hierarchy.

The only thing I can think to suggest in face of the revelation of such infamy from government and business, is to recommend a reading of Howard Zinn’s remarkable book, A People’s History of the United States.

Zinn details how the elites in control of American society at the time framed the constitution so that they could control the emerging nation, and establishes that they have been running things ever since, in their own interests. But there has always been a tradition in the United States of vigorous opposition to the control of the elites, on behalf of which many thousands of protesters have died.

Unfortunately, a friend with whom I watched Ferguson’s film kept asking me, “Where is the protest? Where are the protesters?” A question to which I have no ready answer.

Faced with conditions that in former times might well have led to revolution, the people appear to have been bought off, or brainwashed, or something, cowed into silence before what confronts all of us.

Thank heaven, also, for Julien Assange and his heroic decision to publish the reality of government behaviour in the modern world.

I am also reminded of Arundhati Roy’s wonderful conclusion that “the only thing worth globalizing in the modern world is protest.” We should get busy on that job….