Book Review

The Soccer War

by Ryszard Kapuscinski

     If you are interested in remote and dangerous parts of the world, than The Soccer War would be a good book for you. Its author, Ryszard Kapuscinski, was a Polish journalist and war correspondent who got out to see the world before the communist system collapsed. In this collection of essays and dispatches, he writes about the times in Africa, Latin America, and the Mediterranean when he deliberately put himself into danger zones, sometimes almost getting killed, for the sake of reporting back to his home country, inform the communist world on what life can be like on the other side of the Iron Curtain.

The book starts on a fairly optimistic tone with one memorable essay about Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, the first Black African president to come to power in the post-colonial era. The author effectively captures the vibrant and energetic rally in which Nkrumah makes a speech. Kapuscinski then points out why post-colonial leaders were receiving so much attention in the 1960s; his take is that because of colonialism and slavery, the West effectively wiped out the history of African leadership. Post-colonialism was a time when the African people needed new heroes to reawaken their nations and lead them into the future. They had no heroes in their historical memory so they looked to the young and bold heroes of their present for inspiration.

In other essays, the author continues examining the theme of post-colonial leadership with chapters on Patrice Lumumba of Congo and Ahmed Ben Bella of Algeria. In the former essay, he fears for his life as Congolese mobs search for white people to lynch after the assassination of Lumumba. In the latter essay he writes about a coup that overthrows the revolutionary administration of Ben Bella. Both subjects are handled with sympathy and understanding for the people of those respective countries. In the essay on Algeria, he explains why post-colonial politics in the Third World are so troublesome. A young ideological visionary takes power and fails to lift his country up to greatness, an endeavor that takes time and stability. But progress happens too slowly, the populations grow frustrated, and agitation begins. The new politicians’ powers get sapped and drained as he struggles to maintain order and power while others challenge his authority in the form of coups and riots. Heavy-handed governing is the result which looks like repression to the citizens, so people rebel and a downward spiral of brutality begins. Any student of post-colonial history needs to read this essay because the author so clearly and succinctly evaluates and diagnoses the problem of political stability in the Third World.

Then, in this book’s titular story, “The Soccer War”, Kapuscinski tells about his time spent in Central America when the rowdiness of two soccer games between Honduras and El Salvador sparked a war between the two nations. With a kind of courage that seems almost bafflingly suicidal, the author demands to be taken to the front line of the war in the hills along the border. At the edge of the combat he flees into the jungle and finds a medical camp. He witnesses a strange sight when the Honduran soldier watch the death of a soldier, and mourn his passing without even knowing if he is on their side or the enemy’s. In the midst of all this chaos, Kapuscinski finds nothing but the sad reality of humanity. After making it back to safety, the author addresses the cause of the war as being a result of overpopulation and wealth-inequality in El Salvador, something that could be managed with effective governing. This means the war was entirely unnecessary.

Other chapters are less about politics and more about dangerous situations Kapuscinski had gotten himself into. He almost gets executed by Belgian soldiers in Burundi, burnt to death in Nigeria, and forced to escape from Ethiopia. But like the other essays, he always addresses these situations with pathos in an attempt to understand why these things are happening. His neutrality is uncanny and he never comes across as judgmental, even in the worst of times.

Kapuscinski’s writing is bold and endlessly gripping. If you are bothered by his machismo, just remember that he made all these journeys for the sake of learning what it means to be human. His nearly fatal attraction to danger can seem naive and even stupid at times, but his writing never gets arrogant; it is almost always about the other people and not about him so much. His writing style is reminiscent of Graham Greene with a little touch of Joseph Conrad thrown in, although it must be remembered that this book was translated from Polish so the translator should get some credit here.

The Soccer War reads a lot like an anthology of short travel narratives, but instead of hearing about some tourist’s extended vacation in Europe, some outsider’s alcohol or ganja fueled meanderings, or some backpacker’s treks through the wilderness, it is all about being at the wrong place at the wrong time and being their deliberately. It is more the author’s personal statement than a reliable work of journalism or history, but the insights he gives make this an excellent introduction to the study of post-colonialism and Third World studies. Or it might just be interesting to the general reader as well. In the end, it might make you feel as though life is lived more deeply, more richly, and more meaningfully at the peripheries of the world’s populations or the margins of human experience where you may not be safe but where you will experience the strongest manifestation of your will to live. 

 

Book Review

The Crying of Lot 49

by Thomas Pynchon

     First off, let me say that if you haven’t read Thomas Pynchon’sThe Crying of Lot 49 more than once, you’re not in a good position to be talking about it. This has nothing to do with how intelligent you are and has everything to do with how Pynchon’s prose operates. The book is full of noise. By that I mean non-sequiturs, irrelevant information, plot threads that are abruptly dropped and re-appear almost randomly at unpredictable times, disorienting grammar and all kinds of other things. This is appropriate because a major theme of the book is communications theory and the entropy that interferes with the transmission of information. This may be hard to grasp the first time through, but once you see the broad outline of the novel, you can begin to sort out the noise from the message and maybe even begin to consider what message Pynchon is attempting to convey.

My personal take on the story is that it is not simply about one thing; it is about many things and the reader has to evaluate the bombardment of information thrown their way on their own terms to get a sense of what it all adds up to. But while it may be about many things, communications theory being one of them, the easiest theme to grasp ahold of is the identity crisis of Oedipa Maas and what her exodus out of the shallow suburban lifestyle says about America.

So who is Oedipa Maas? She is a housewife in Southern California, married to a disc jockey named Mucho Maas (you have to know Spanish to get the joke and even then it isn’t funny). Her ex-husband, Pierce Inverarity, has just died and named her as co-executor of his will, something that sends Oedipa down a rabbit hole of conspiracy theories that causes her to re-evaluate what her life in America really means. “Inverarity”, by the way, is Scottish vocabulary meaning “a clever or knowledgeable person”; this is the type of Pynchonian fascination for obscurity that makes the writing so intriguing. She heads off to San Narciso, a town built around Inverarity’s factory and then goes up to Oakland and San Francisco on a journey to learn as much as she can about a secret society. Along the way, she encounters a string of men who each provide her with a piece of a puzzle she tries to solve. The dilemma is that there is no certainty that the pieces, when assembled, will add up to a coherent picture. They may actually be pieces of different puzzles, accidentally assembled to make a confusing conclusion. They may not even be pieces of a puzzle at all, instead being unconnected bits of information that Oedipa is sticking together to form her own story. Oedipa may very well be a paranoic, a person who makes connections between things that are not connected. She may be delusional or she may be having a psychotic breakdown. In the end, the novel does not provide any definite answers so the reader has to decide for themselves.

For the sake of brevity, I will leave out a lot of information and list some of the high points in the plot and what I believe they represent in terms of constructing a statement about Oedipa’s journey. Oedipa visits San Narciso and meets up with her lawyer who takes her to a bar where they witness a ceremonial distribution of mail. After finding a mysterious symbol on the bathroom wall, a trumpet with a mute in it signifying “silence”, she realizes she has stumbled into the domain of a secret society called W.A.S.T.E. which is run by an underground mail service called “Tristero”. In Italian, “tristero” can mean a holding room like a storage closet, a warehouse, or the room in a post office where the mail waits to be taken away; it can also mean “a sad man”, a meaning which ties in directly to the final scene of the novel, an auction where lot 49 is “cried”. Lot 49 is a collection of counterfeit stamps in Inverarity’s collection that appear to have been issued by Tristero.

After a day’s outing at a beach, a chance encounter with an acquaintance of her lawyer’s, Oedpipa learns that Inverarity purchased the bones of a military platoon that had been drowned in an Italian lake; he bought the bones from the Mafia and used them as material for manufacturing cigarette filters. This further leads Oedpa to attend a play at night, vaguely reminiscent of Titus Andronicus, about an Italian prince who gets unjustly disinherited from the king’s throne when his father dies. A secret organization named Trystero comes to his defence and goes to battle against Thurn and Taxis, the people who are in power. Trystero loses and the dead soldiers are dumped into a lake. Their bones are later harvested and made into black ink for use in the illegitimate king’s pens.

This detail of the play may seem obscure, but I think it is deliberately buried under a ton of noise in the prose to make it difficult to locate. The named “Tristero” changes to “Trystero”, the importance of which is that “tryst” means “a secret meeting” with a “trystero” being a man who engages in such meetings, usually for the sake of secretive sexual practices. The name “Thurn and Taxis” also bears significance since it refers to a real aristocratic family in southern Germany who extended their power by building the first trans-European mail system, believing that controlling long-distance communication is the key to controlling the continent (and now we have the World Wide Web, to whose benefit?) The words “thurn” and “taxis” in German also have a vague connection to ideas of surveillance and control. But the real meaning I am getting at here regarding communications theory is related to the bones in the lake. Inverarity uses the harvested bones for cigarette filters while the king in the play uses them to make ink; here we have a contrast between the transitory, ephemeral smoke of spoken words and the permanence of the written word. The entropy in the system is that spoken words, like smoke, disappear immediately, fading into nothingness as people forget them while the written word can, theoretically transmit information across long periods of time. However, the entropy herein is that lies, distortions, misinterpretations, or misinformation can be transmitted and mistakenly regarded as truth. One hundred percent accuracy can not be guaranteed. Everything we think we know about the past could be wrong.

After the play’s finale, Oedipa approaches the director, Driblette, in the dressing room and confronts him about the existence of Trystero. He dismisses the idea of their existence, telling her that as a director, he is like a film projector, projecting his inner mind onto the play’s actors and controlling their movements as he sees fit. He has no interest in conspiracies or secret societies, but he does send Oedipa on her way to seek out alternate copies of a book that anthologizes dramas; the book contains the original script for the play and alternate editions of it each have their own omissions hat Oedipa interprets as clues to solving her mystery. The idea of projecting reality onto the world also corresponds to two passages involving Oedipa, one in the beginning where she is interpreting a painting by Remedios Varo, and one near the end where she is considering the possibility that she is delusional.

Then Oedipa travels up to San Francisco to find a scientist named John Nefastis who has invented a Maxwell’s Demon box, a contraption in which positively and negatively charged molecules circulate in equilibrium by sorting out the strong ones from the weak. Nefastis explains that there is no connection between the entropy in the second law of thermodynamics and the entropy in communications theory except for the fact that the same algebraic formula is used to explain both laws. Hence, it is only through a symbol that a link can be formed between the materiality of physical motion and the non-materiality of contents in the coding, transmission, and decoding of information in communications, the meeting ground of form and content, the vessel that moves information from transmitter to receiver. The balance between positive and negative molecules in Maxwell’s Demon is a state in which there is no noise in the system so that perpetual motion is inevitable and certainty can be expressed in language. Oedipa tries to determine if she is a “sensitive”, a person who can communicate with the demon in the box, but there is too much noise in her system; she is disconnected from ultimate truth and certainty.

So she spends all day and night traveling around San Francisco in search of more information about Trystero and encounters the symbol, seemingly everywhere she goes. She finds the symbol wherever society’s outcasts, riffraff, and unwanted are located, alongside the the mentally or physically disabled, the ugly people, the unhappy, the homeless, the lonely, the unloved, the lumpenproletariat more or less. As the sun rises, she encounters a drunken sailor on the verge of death who gives her an envelope marked with the W.A.S.T.E. symbol, explaining his letter is a love letter written to his lost wife; he tells Oedipa that his dream of reuniting with her is the only thing that has kept him alive for so many years. He asks her to drop it in a secret mailbox under a freeway which resembles a garbage can ( a waste container?) from which she follows the postman who collects the mail and delivers it, then returns her to the apartment of John Nefastis.

The sailor’s fantasy of reunion directly links to what Oedipa’s psychiatrist, Dr. Hilarius advises her while in the throws of a psychotic breakdown. She approaches him to sort out whether or not she is going crazy in her pursuit of Trystero. She suspects it could all be a fantasy, but he advises her to hold onto her fantasies because, like the sailor, our lives have no meaning without them. There is no ultimate truth and there is no destiny for each individual. This realization is what led to the shattering of Dr. Hilarius’s illusions resulting in his nervous breakdown. Oedipa may be having delusions, but those delusions are the only thing giving meaning to her empty life. After randomly encountering some anarchists and fascists who all appear to be linked to Trystero, ready to start a revolution and overthrow the government, she decides her sympathies lie with Thurn and Taxis and the rest of the book is about how she pursues what she believes to be her rightful inheritance of her ex-husband’s estate. But wasn’t the prince in Driblette’s play wrongly disinhertied from the throne? Maybe she is one of the losers of America like all the lonely people she saw in San Francisco. Is Trystero closing in on her? She wants to believe she is destined for something great, but there is no way she can know what is true. And neither can the reader; there is too much noise in the system, too much going on, too much information, too many patterns that may be imaginary so that we can never know with any certainty or clarity what it is all about. But if we clear out all the interference in the prose, there are messages there, or are we, as readers, creating patterns, misinterpreting words, finding order where there is none? Is America a nation of people like Oedipa? A nation of people who think they are destined to be rich, famous, powerful, special in some way when the reality is that we are all a bunch of nobodies? Are we a nation that fantasizes about greatness to protect ourselves from the truth that we aren’t anything special? Or are we a nation of haves and have-nots where the haves have everything and the have-nots have nothing but dreams?

Who Knows. In the Greek drama Oedipus was prophecized to kill his father and marry his mother, but he set out to prove the prophecy wrong. But circumstances drove him unwittingly to do what he did not want to do; he had a destiny and the destiny caused him to be blind in the end. Oedipa Maas, in the context of the narrative, has no mother or father that ever gets mentioned. Could that mean she has no destiny? No prophecy to fulfill? Does that liberate her or cause her to be blind despite it all? There can be no answer to these questions, no conclusions, no certainty, no truth, no closure. The communication system doesn’t allow for it. The deconstructionists have won. The Socratic phenomena has no noumena. Maybe you can contact Thomas Pynchon and ask him what it all means. Haha, then again, maybe not.

Reading Pynchon novels takes commitment. This is no literary one night stand. If you do not come back again and again to his writings they will never mean anything to you. But if you choose to build up that relationship, it will clarify and become a lot stronger. Now go read the book again before you try explaining it any more. 

 

Book Review

The Brilliant Disaster:

JFK, Castro, and America's Doomed Invasion 

of Cuba's Bay of Pigs

by Jim Rasenberger

     It’s not always easy deciding how to review a history book. You can’t give the author credit for creating a good story because they are simply telling us about something that already happened, presumably in the real world. You wouldn’t ordinarily compliment a history writer’s writing skills either; usually people who are creative with word-smithing pursue careers as authors of fiction or poetry. In fact history writers are often not very good at crafting language since what they say is supposed to be more important than how they say it. I guess you have to consider how well they bring history to life and demonstrate the importance and relevance of that history. Jim Rasenberger does just that in The Brilliant Disaster. He shows us how John F. Kennedy bungled the Bay of Pigs invasion and the effects it had on his presidency and the reputation that America had in the world as time went on as a result.

In his writing, Rasenberger knows how to introduce important elements into the story he tells without going too deeply down side roads that are relevant only up to a certain point. His handling of Fidel Castro and the Cuban Revolution is important to this history, but he doesn’t go into an overwhelming amount of detail regarding them. Castro himself is a fascinating enough figure and the story of the Revolution is well-worth reading about, but the author here introduces just enough information to suit the story. The same can be said about the 1960 Presidential election between Nixon and Kennedy. Rasenberger shows how Kennedy, by putting the problem of Castro and Cuba in front and center stage, dealt a master blow to Nixon, ensuring his victory at the polls. Kennedy’s campaign was a small work of genius for a number of reasons, but the author sticks to the important parts.

The remainder of the first half of this book is mostly relevant, but it has a tendency to drag at times, plus the things he did right that I mentioned in the previous paragraph turn into problems later in the narrative. Lots of detail is given regarding the committee set up to plan the Bay of Pigs invasion, although in this part the author goes a little too far. He writes as if the life stories of people like Allan Dulles, Richard Bissell, and Arthur Schlesinger are central to understanding what happened, and to a certain extent they are, but the over-abundance of detail about their pasts, their personalities, and their lifestyles makes for a few slow passages along the way.

Then there is the planning itself. High-ranking members of the CIA did a poor job of planning the invasion. Their intelligence gathering was haphazard, their strategy was not well-thought out, and their expectations were misguided. They really were a team of over-confident amateurs. While Kennedy met with them and advisers from his cabinet, most of which were not shy about drawing attention to the flaws in the plan, they hemmed and hawed about what to do then they hemmed and hawed some more. After that they hemmed and hawed about the hemming and hawing until the story becomes frustratingly dull and you just want the action to begin.

Then it does. An army of Cuban exiles were trained by the CIA in Guatemala then launched an attack on Cuba from an airbase in Nicaragua. They tried to establish three beachhead landings in southern Cuba’s Bahia de Cochinos, the Bay of Pigs. Murphy’s Law went into effect and everything that could go wrong did go wrong. The Americans left the Cuban soldiers stranded while Castro’s superior forces proceeded to slaughter them. Meanwhile back in Washington, Kennedy and company did what they did best...hemming and hawing. Some of the soldiers were rescued, but a lot of them got caught and imprisoned by Castro’s military.

The details of the invasion are the strongest part of this book. Other books on the Cuban Revolution, Castro, Kennedy, and relations between America and the island nation to the south of Florida, tend to analyze the role that the Bay of Pigs played in other developments, but so far this is the most detailed account of the actual combat that happened at sea and on the ground that I have encountered so far.

The rest of the book explains how the failed invasion affected Kennedy’s self-confidence within the first year of his presidency. It also examines how the Bay of Pigs influenced American foreign policy in the years to come, especially regarding the Cuban Missile Crisis and later Cold War politics. Most significantly, the last section tells the story of how the USA, after being humiliated by Castro and the Cubans, were able to negotiate with them to get the Cuban exiles returned to American soil.

Overall, this is a book about John F. Kennedy and the CIA. Without delving into any kind of political or ideological muckraking, Rasenberger explains how CIA incompetence condemned the Bay of Pigs invasion before it began. He lays most of the blame for the operation on them while reserving a proper amount of disdain for John F. Kennedy too. But his analysis of Kennedy’s thinking is nuanced. This isn’t a work of character assassination; he shows how some of the dilemmas posed by the Cuban Revolution put Kennedy between a rock and a hard place, but he also shows how Kennedy shot himself in the foot a few times by getting himself into such dangerously tight situations to begin with. Interestingly, Rasenberger comes to the enlightening conclusion that Kennedy’s legacy will always be tethered to Fidel Castro. You just can’t understand JFK if you can’t see how closely Castro and Cuba shaped almost everything he did during his term in office. Even his assassination was tied to Cuban politics because Lee Harvey Oswald believed himself to be acting on Castro’s behalf when he pulled the trigger. Finally, Rasenberger does a great job of demonstrating cause and effect in the chain of events. Early in the book, he shows how Kennedy’s dismissive attitude pushed Castro into the arms of Khrushchev and the Soviet Union, forgetting the dictum that you should keep your fiends close but keep your enemies closer. This is sad because Castro was open to the idea of maintaining peaceful relations with America after he seized power. He eventually embraced communism because the Americans didn’t take him seriously. Contemporary Cuba is just as much America’s tragedy as it is Castro’s. The author also makes a good case for saying that, while Kennedy has often been hailed as a hero for his management of the Cuban Missile Crisis, it was also his disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion that resulted in the Cuban Missile Crisis to begin with. This fact is something that Kennedy supporters are often unwilling to acknowledge.

So while The Brilliant Disaster has its setbacks, especially in reference to the painfully slow first half of the book, it succeeds in giving a uniquely vivid picture of this historical moment, analyzing the importance of the Bay of Pigs, and using a cause-and-effect methodology to demonstrate how the historic events unfolded. Now I think it would be interesting to read about the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis from a Cuban point of view. In the end, I must say that the more I read about the Kennedy presidency, the less impressed I am by his political skills. For all the charm and intelligence he brought to the White House, there was something seriously lacking when it came to decision making. Maybe America’s first television president should have gone into acting instead. Maybe he could have even done our country a great favor by convincing Ronald Reagan to forget about politics and further his career in Hollywood instead. 

 

Book Reviews

The Bohemian Grove and Other Retreats:

A Study in Ruling-Class Cohesiveness

by G. William Domhoff

     Towards the end of the 19^th century, a social club called the Bohemian Club was founded. They bought a small piece of land in the Redwood Forest of California as a place of retreat and it was named Bohemian Grove. The club opened its doors to a limited number of people, only artists and writers, to provide social support for each other. However, being the starving artists they were, they soon had trouble paying rent. Reluctantly they began admitting wealthier businessmen into their ranks for the purpose of facilitating art sales. Soon enough, the businessmen took over and the true bohemians were out although the wealthier members maintained an appreciation for the arts and entertainment as the central purpose of the club. Fast forward about one hundred years and the summer retreat of Bohemian Grove has become an annual gathering for the wealthiest, most powerful businessmen and politicians in America and, by logical extension, the entire world.

Written in the 1970s, The Bohemian Grove and Other Retreats, written G. William Domhoff, is a sober-minded analysis of what the Bohemian Grove is and how it fits in with the power structure of American society. It is written from a structural-functional point of view and covers such topics as who is allowed to belong, what they do during the time spent at the retreat, spin-off clubs that serve a similar purpose, and how it works as a part of the networking system of corporate and government power.

The first half of this brief book is the most compelling as it gives as much detail about the two weeks each summer when the elite gather for rest and relaxation. The environs are nothing short of majestic, suggesting some sort of Elysian Fields or a heavenly forest. It kicks off with a staged ritual pageant to banish worry from the world, a spectacle that Sir James George Frazer would classify as a scapegoating ritual. Richard Nixon famously said that it was the gayest thing he had ever seen. The rest of the time is spent being entertained with music, comedy, and theater, drinking lots of alcohol, socializing, partying, attending lectures, and letting go of all the cares in the world. Domhoff then gives a detailed analysis of how the camp is structured and how its members interact with each other.

The other significant part of the book’s beginning is an examination of who is allowed to join and attend the summer retreat. Attendees of the Bohemian Grove are entirely male. Most are heads of the biggest corporations in America. Other smaller groups are politicians, presidents of prestigious universities, and entertainers. A waiting list of 800 applicants is kept, though few of them ever get accepted. Prospects with literary, artistic, musical, or acting talent get jettisoned to the top of the list, although only those with conservative styles are allowed in; Frank Zappa or William S. Burroughs would never make it, Bing Crosby and Bob Hope would and actually did. 95% of Grove members belong to the most conservative wing of the Republican party.

The author goes on to describe two other similar private social clubs that exist for similar reasons, the Rancheros and the Roundup Riders. These outfits, rather than being art and entertainment oriented, have cowboy themes. The members dress up like Hollywood cattle ranchers and go on extended rides through the forests and deserts of Colorado. Yes, there is something a little bit childish about all this. Although less prestigious then the Bohemian Grove, they have attracted some big names of the corporate and political elite as well; Ronald Reagan belonged to the Rancheros, for example.

The final section of the book is a brief overview of how the Bohemian Grove and the other two clubs function as networking centers for those who rule America. The members insist that these clubs are simply places for them to unwind and escape from the stresses of life at the top echelons of society, but Domhoff says they also use these events to field new ideas off the record while making connections with others who can further their careers in the ranks of power. To Domhoff this is a crucial function because by relaxing, enjoying themselves, and getting to know each other as people, the members form emotional bonds that make them more comfortable and well-established in their pursuit of wealth and power.

Being written in 1971, this is a dated text, although it is safe to assume that there haven’t been any dramatic changes in the Bohemian Grove over the last fifty years except in some of the details. Based on information collected from unnamed informants, it gives a clear picture of what the Bohemian Grove really is and what goes on there. Domhoff’s work has since come under fire, mostly from Marxist sociologists who claim he is not radical or incendiary enough, but you have to consider the possibility that dealing with political and economic inequalities might be more effective if we understand the nature of the monster we are fighting. Otherwise you might end up doing little more than shooting in the dark and changing nothing. (Notice how little left-wing radicals have accomplished in tearing down the capitalist system over the last 100 years) Besides, not everything in academia has to be about blind devotion to revolutionary politics.

In recent times, the Bohemian Grove has drawn attention from all kinds of kooks, conspiracy theorists, and right wing hucksters like Alex Jones who once sneaked into Bohemian Grove and filmed it. His immediate impulse was to commercially produce videotapes of it and sell it to the suckers who follow him. What Bohemian Grove and Other Retreats accomplishes is bringing to light what this group really is, a combination of a summer camp, a spa resort, and a private club with some elements of a fraternal order. It could possibly be considered a secret society because, for no other reason, its membership is so elitist and closed off to the likes of you and me. It certainly is not a satanic cult like the MAGA morons insist it is. That does not mean that Domhoff dismisses the Bohemian Grove as a harmless party for the corporate business rulers of the world; if anything, he insists this makes it even more dangerous for the functioning of a government that is meant to be by the people for the people when in reality it is being run by the corporate elite for the corporate elite. Like George Carlin said, “It’s all one big club and you and I ain’t invited.”