Book Review & Literary Analysis: Looking for Mr. Goodbar

Looking for Mr. Goodbar

by Judith Rossner

      In the 1960s something happened in America that was called the Sexual Revolution. Alongside that, and sometimes overlapping with it, something else called Women’s Liberation gained momentum too. It was a time of social upheaval and times of such rapid social change bring risks because society runs wild into the wilderness without a map, without any plans, and without any guidelines to help ensure a safe transition into a new cultural mode of living. Some young people might struggle under a double burden as they try to find their place in a rapidly changing culture while also trying to find their place in the world, setting the stage for the role they will play for the rest of their lives. In Judith Rossner’s novel Looking for Mr. Goodbar, Theresa is a young woman, caught in the turbulence of this transitional time in American society.

The novel starts off with Gary Cooper White confessing to the murder of Theresa in a New York City police station. Cooper is a drifter from Florida, struggling with his own sexuality as he is in a relationship with another man, although he picks Theresa up in a bar for some fast and easy sex. The climax of the story opens the novel. What does this tell the reader? The murder is not the main point of the story. By putting it at the beginning we are quickly informed that the build up to this climax is what is most important.

So then we need to learn who Theresa is. As a child, she is alienated from her family. She has polio which leads to scoliosis and eventually a long stay in the hospital as surgery is needed to straighten her spine. She grows up feeling like an outsider with a permanent scar on her back and a slight limp which some men think makes her look sexy. In late adolescence, Theresa begins to connect with her older sister Katherine and begins to follow in her footsteps which is not necessarily in Theresa’s best interest. Katherine is promiscuous, uses drugs, gets into wife swapping, and has at least two abortions after getting pregnant without knowing who the father is. These passages in between the murder and Theresa’s first heart to heart talk with Katherine are the weakest parts of the book. Rossner writes like she can’t wait to get on into the juicier parts of the story and the result is some vague and muddled writing that suffers from lack of detail.

But things pick up when Theresa heads off to college. The naive young student gets targeted by a sleazy professor named Martin Engle who hires her to do his work for him, namely grading papers so he doesn’t have to. She walks directly into his trap, yet she does so willingly. The bed in his office is one among many clues of what is to come and mixed in with those clues are a lot of hints of how it will end up. Theresa wants to be seduced by Engle, but she doesn’t want to get dumped by him when she graduates and he moves on to another freshman who takes her place in his bed. All the subtleties of this affair are handled well since so much is obvious without the author explicitly saying so. You know that Engle is a skilled and experienced seducer of young college students. You know how the affair will end before it even starts. You know how it will effect Theresa even though she is smart enough to know what she has gotten herself into. But what works most effectively is how the process of seduction works. Engle searches out and finds Theresa’s primary vulnerability. He convinces her to explain why she limps and takes so much aspirin so she responds by showing him the scar on her back while telling him about her scoliosis. He offers her sympathy and emotional support in a way that come off as completely sincere. You can guess the rest.

After graduation, Theresa finds work as a grade school teacher, showing her compassionate and responsible side. At night, she prowls the singles bars of New York, picking up strangers for one night stands. This double life she leads functions as both a literary structure and as a psychological conflict for her as the book progresses. She eventually gets caught between two men. One is a grossly stereotypical working class Italian named Tony (as if there are no other possible names for Italian men in New York). He is crude, rough, insensitive, and a little bit dumb. Of course, he is amazing in bed so Theresa can not resist him even though she finds his personality to be revolting. The other man she sleeps with is James, an Irish Catholic lawyer who once considered joining the priesthood. James is intelligent and sensitive, but also a bit conservative. He isn’t too conservative though as he sees merit in some of the social changes happening around him. He even has extra-marital sex with Theresa although she finds it dull. She respects him for his mind and enjoys his company, but when he proposes marriage to her, she can not accept. Tony is the body, James is the mind. This dichotomy is cliché enough to make you role your eyes, but at least that unimaginative formula is filled in well with quality content. Both Tony and James are nuanced characters and through them we learn about all the fears and insecurities that Theresa has as she frets about what to do about the two of them. These psychological depths of Theresa are handled well with delicacy and sympathy by the author who brings us into the most intimate parts of Theresa’s mind, showing us how and why she is so unhappy and confused. When Theresa is on the verge of a nervous breakdown, she starts looking for ways to improve her life. And then...we already know where it goes. The process of developing Theresa as a character and portraying her self-consciousness and inner conflicts is the most subtly written part of the novel and also the strongest part of Rossner’s prose. With a non-judgmental approach, Rossner draws her as both fragile and strong simultaneously in a way that makes up for some of the more pedestrian aspects of the story.

Some people might be tempted to say this is a morality tale or a work of propaganda showing us what happens to women who engage in non-traditional lifestyles. This reading couldn’t be farther from the truth. It is more of a zeitgeist novel, examining the immediate effects of the social upheavals of the 1960s. For one thing, it shows how traditional family life is not necessarily compatible with the changing times of America. Theresa’s family does not give her the sense of self-esteem she needs to navigate the adult world and so she indulges in the risky behavior of using men for random sexual thrills. Her traditional family does not prepare her for the responsibilities that are necessary for relationships. James, her suitor, is also aware of the shortcomings of the old ways of living. Rossner indicates why the social movements of her time are appealing. By doing so, she raises questions about women’s roles in the family, women’s choices about when or if to get married, and whether women should be allowed to choose when, or even if, to have children. At the center of all this is the question of women’s sexuality and what it means on an individual level. Women need to be allowed to enjoy sexuality as they see fit, but they also need to consider the consequences and responsibilities that go along with it. Also of importance is the support women can give to each other. Theresa’s friend, another teacher at her school, invites her to a women’s discussion group where she learns that other women are struggling with the same problems she is. From them she learns that other women struggle with the issue of accepting their bodies, a central theme in this novel because of the scar on Theresa’s back and the way men notice her limp. This struggle to feel comfortable with her body is one of the roots of her feelings of anomie. Rossner is not writing to morally condemn Theresa; she is writing to provide a snapshot of her time in order to say that there are good and bad aspects of the social changes taking place. She is saying “Let’s stop for a minute, evaluate the situation, and decide what the best road to follow is from here on.” She isn’t necessarily saying that free love or extra-marital sex is wrong, but she is saying that we need to proceed with caution because this is new territory that contains significant risks.

The meaning of Looking for Mr. Goodbar is unique. It forges a middle path between hipster chic and stodgy, narrow-minded conservatism. Its evaluation of the Sexual Revolution and Women’s Liberation leaves the question of where to go from here unanswered, but also indicates the possibilities of good or bad paths to be followed. It was obviously intended for a commercial audience although it is more articulate and far better than 99 percent of the junk found on the best seller lists of the past 100 years. As American society continues to pass through sweeping social changes, you might be tempted to think the issues raised in this novel are outdated and specific only to that time, but the theme of an individual finding their place in a changing world, running into the wilderness without a map, is one that is timeless. The details may be outdated, but the dilemma is as old as the human race. It may make you wonder if the confusion we are suffering through as a society isn’t so unique after all.

 

Book Review & Analysis: Kill All Normies by Angela Nagle

Kill All Normies:

Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right

by Angela Nagle

      It had to happen. As the internet grew in popularity and became an all-pervasive part of American culture, subcultures of young people coalesced around ideological identities, just like they used to in the offline world. As these subcultures grew in number and strength, eventually they clashed in online spaces with battles over speech and representation acting as a proxy for territorial domination. Angela Nagle’s Kill All Normies is said to be the first work of sociology to document and analyze these subcultures, showing how and why dialectical concepts of liberal and conservative, left wing and right wing, and libertarian and authoritarian have broken down and been replaced by definitions we haven’t come to terms with yet.

In the earlier days of social media, chat rooms, forums, and video games, the seeds of a new free speech movement were sown. Free speech advocates included tech-utopianists, anarchists, libertarians, hackers, trolls, activists, and others who saw the internet as a self-regulating communal space where any restrictions on speech were unwelcome. What could possibly go wrong? Sites like Something Awful, Reddit, Tumblr, and 4chan allowed users to anonymously post whatever they wanted, so it wasn’t long before things like racism, gore, and illegal forms of pornography began showing up. Some of the people posting these things were trolls or pranksters with no ideological commitments other than a desire to shock and offend people in the name of humor.

Then came the watershed moment of GamerGate. If you don’t know what GamerGate was, it is probably a good sign that you actually have something interesting to do with your life other than spending excessive amounts of time playing video games. But it is the conflict and turning point in online culture that defined the subcultures that Angela Nagle writes about. GamerGate happened when a teenage girl attempted to open the way for other girls to participate in online games which, until then, had been an exclusively male space. This started a flame war in which the girl got bombarded with hate speech, harassment, death threats, and doxxing. The conflict split the tech-utopianists into rival factions roughly divided along lines of right- and left-wing ideologies.

On one hand, various white supremacists, neo-nazis, incels, and right-wing libertarians gathered under the banner of free speech. But free speech for this ilk was never about the freedom to speak truth to power as the Free Speech Movement of the 1960s originally set out to be. Rather it was about the right to be as offensive as possible and then whining when people pushed back against their vitriolic drivel. There were a lot of trolls who were simply posting racist or sexist jokes for the sake of being obnoxious, but some more strategic actors saw potential in this free speech movement and began recruiting the trolls into active politically oriented organizations. It was a harvest of internet idiocy that became known as the alt.right, although I think “alt.wrong” is a more appropriate designation. The full-time, persistently annoying babbler Milo Yiannapoulis brought this gathering of douschebags to the attention of Steve Bannon at Breitbart News, forming them into a constituency with ideas that filtered into mainstream politics, snowballing into what we now know as the MAGA movement and forming the cult of personality around Donald Trump, the worst president America has ever had. One of the sparks that lit the fire of a fascist uprising in America was started on an internet forum by a bunch of socially inept jerks who couldn’t get laid.

The left-wing online community didn’t exactly meet the challenge of the alt.right in a mature fashion, unfortunately. Made up mostly of radical feminists, gender identity activists, so-called Social Justice Warriors, the self-appointed PC police, and “woke” activists, this new group of leftists were little more than a gang of middle-class white mean girls who chased most of their would-be leftist allies away from the left, sometimes directly into the welcoming arms of the alt.right. Characterized by a strong authoritarian streak and a penchant for refusing to tolerate anybody who disagreed with them, they were anything but liberal and, in fact, eventually rejected liberalism as a form of fascism. Logic and the free exchange of ideas were never their strong points. They became advocates of censorship and supporters of some really bizarre ideas. Nagle points out that they claim there are more than fifty genders, some of which are supernatural or based on cartoon characters, all of them being legitimate except for the category of cis gendered males. Females who act like cis gendered males are perfectly acceptable though, as if that makes any sense. Even worse, these bullies have cannibalized their movement and isolated it from the rest of society rather than making adjustments to it. People who try to associate with them get attacked on grounds of ideological impurity and chased away. Reminiscent of the Red Queen in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, their constant refrain is “off with their heads.” They also bear a strong resemblance to Robespierre in his Reign of Terror at the end of the French Revolution when everybody he thought of as being insufficiently revolutionary, which was most people, were sent to be beheaded on the guillotine. Their ideas and behavior were so bizarre that a lot of people who might have been sympathetic to their cause turned tail and ran in the other direction. Nagle explains this as a form of social capital, in which social prestige and privilege are made to be a scarce commodity so that those who have it can horde it, using it as a weapon of power and domination.

Angela Nagle does not just report on what she found in her online field work. She provides a theoretical framework as a framework for interpreting these subcultures. The main idea comes from the Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci and his theory that culture preceded politics. Societal changes originate in social movements and cultural shifts then proceed into the realm of politics. What the alt.right did that was lacking in their leftist counterpart was use strategy to push their outre beliefs and practices into the mainstream. The left, on the other hand, isolated themselves from mainstream acceptance by pushing most people away from their clique. The free speech fascists were better at utilizing online tools to further their agenda whereas the politically correct left whittled themselves down to irrelevance by acting like tyrants. If One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest serves as a possible metaphor here, the online left took on the role of Nurse Ratched and the alt.right took on the role of Randall McMurphy.

Such a classic novel and movie, espousing classical liberal ideas about freedom and individual liberties, being used as a reference point here is not as far fetched as you might suppose. The alt.right were influenced by other leftist counter-cultural figures like Michel Foucault, Mario Savio, Abbie Hoffman, and Robert Anton Wilson and so concepts of transgression and rebellion are brought into the discussion. Nagle claims techniques of past radical leftists were stripped of their contents and adapted to right-wing ideologies in a bizarre counter-shift away from the growing authoritarian tendencies of the radical left. Nagle also brings the Marquis de Sade, Nietzsche, the Surrealists, the Beat Generation, and Georges Batailles into her discussion of transgression since they advocated the complete liberation and free flow of the id. The unrestrained pursuit of human desires, no matter how destructive, was the modus operandi of the tech-utopianists’ free speech milieu on 4chan before it became a recruiting ground for MAGA fascism.

The author’s theoretical analysis takes up most of this short book, but still lacks depth in the end. She identifies ideological patterns and introduces a simple theory to anchor her discussion, but then doesn’t proceed much beyond its initial introduction. Her conclusion is also objectionable. As a moderate feminist, she claims that rebellion is a strictly male-dominated activity-space and that transgression has used up its usefulness as a means of critiquing society and therefore should be abandoned. While you could make the case that rebellion has been primarily done by men, history has provided no shortage of women who rebelled against the establishment. The fictional character of Eve transgressed when she ate the forbidden fruit. The 19^th century Russian anarchists called People’s Will were led by two women. We’ve also had Emma Goldman and the Suffragette Movement. Angela Davis was a prominent Black Power activist in the 1970s. The arts have provided transgressive works by Frida Kahlo and Diane Arbus. Musicians like Wendy O. Williams, Lydia Lunch, and the Riot Grrls of the hardcore punk scene have been just as loud and provocative as any male counterpart you can think of. The list goes on and on. If we abandoned rebellion and transgression then our society would stagnate and change would be impossible. Just because transgression can be embraced by people she disagrees with that doesn’t mean that it has no place in the human experience. If the alt.right has their way and turns America into a fascist dictatorship, then transgression and rebellion will be necessary to save our country from self-immolation anyhow.

All I can say is that Kill All Normies is successful at accurately documenting and introducing its subject matter from a sociological standpoint. Its theory is simplistic and incomplete, but for the purposes of this brief study it is functional. Forget about Angela Nagle’s conclusion. This book is a beginning inquiry into the subject of online subcultures and their spread offline into the broader society; it does not exhaust its subject. Finally. There is one big gap in the analysis that needs to be confronted. Why is age not mentioned as a factor in these online communities? She is obviously writing about either teenagers or immature adults, so why is the subject of adolescent social behavior never brought into the discussion? The larger question is, why would such a small group of geeky kids have such an outsize influence over the course and conduct of the host society? Teenagers don’t know enough about the world to make rules for the rest of us. We already know that when young people try to fix the world’s problems, disaster can often be the result. Allowing this to happen in our time says something about where we are as a nation and the negative social impact the internet can have if we don’t keep it in check.

 

Book Review & Literary Analysis: The Wolves of Paris by Daniel P. Mannix

When left alone in their natural habitat, it is rare for wolves to ever attack humans. Most often, such attacks happen as a result of people naively trying to keep wolves as pets. Medieval French history books provide us with an outlier though. If scholars of these texts are to be believed, then a wolf led a reign of terror on Paris in the mid-15th century. The cult author Daniel P. Mannix tells this story, embellished with his own imagination, in his novel The Wolves of Paris.

As a young pup, Courtaud is introduced as a hybrid between a dog and a wolf, housed in the cellar of a citadel during the 100 Years War between England and France. The mutt is being raised to be a hunting dog in a team owned by the baron of the estate. One day, a band of Roman brigands breach the rubicon, enter the castle grounds, and slaughter all the people living there. They also kill most of the livestock and Courtaud is lucky to be spared as he escapes the violence before all the others dogs he knows die. Courtaud may be an animal, but if you think your childhood traumas compare in scale to his, you might want to reconsider.

During the winter, as the solitary Courtaud wanders alone in the Ardennes, a hunter comes after him, but after getting crushed in an avalanche, Courtaud samples his flesh, getting his first taste of human meat. This is a decisive moment in this soon-to-be outlaw’s dietary habits.

After wandering for some time in the northern mountains of France, Courtaud encounters a pack of wolves. He has to fight for his place in the pack and finally proves himself worthy after several scraps with the leader. He keeps fighting and eventually forces the alpha cane lupo to abdicate and Courtaud becomes the lord baron king of the pack. Along the way, he falls in love with a saucy young she-wolf named Silver and a wolf romance ensues. Although Mannix uses human traits to described the wolves’ behavior and point of view, there isn’t any gender identity crises here. This pack is made up of masculine men and effeminate women, by ferocious wild animal standards, without the gender confusion issues of 21st century America poisoning their thoughts. Otherwise, this section of the story goes into the lifestyles, habits, and behaviors of the wolf pack. It is almost like reading a script from a TV show on Animal Planet, but is also serves the purpose of developing Courtaud’s character.

The next big turning point comes when a band of hunters invade the forest where Courtaud and company live, hunting all the deer out of existence in order to stock their castle full of venison in preparation for the coming winter months. Since the deer are the wolves’ main source of food, the pack is brought to the brink of starvation and begin preying on people in a village to feed themselves. As horrifying as this may seem to members of the human race who don’t ordinarily think of themselves as a meal, it is clear to see that they are the cause of their own problem. Not respecting the wolf pack’s boundaries and killing off all their food results in the wolves’ retaliatory transgression into human territories as a last ditch attempt at survival. You may feel justifiable empathy for the victims, but Mannix shows how it is the human’s ignorance of nature that leads to their own demise.

The villagers then organize a hunting party to track and kill Courtaud, but eventually fail. This passage in the book can be challenging because Mannix introduces a lot of vocabulary related to the niche of hunting for sport in Europe. He puts you through a lot of trouble to learn new esoteric words that you know you will never use again unless you take up further study of the subject. It makes for awkward reading, but doesn’t last long enough to ruin the whole book.

Courtaud and the pack continue wandering in the wilderness, searching for food, until they reach the walls of Paris and occupy the hill of Montparnasse. They eat the corpses of dead bodies thrown outside the walls, attack livestock herders, linger on the sidelines of a battle in a nearby village in order to eat the men slain in the siege, and get chased off Montparnasse after losing a battle with a gang od wild boars. Eventually, they even breach the walls of Paris to find people to eat. It is a very action-driven novel punctuated by scenes explaining the desperation of hungry predators. But these predators are not portrayed as evil. They are simply acting according to their nature.

One of the great things about this novel is the way it tells the story from the wolves’ point of view. If there is any such thing as a charismatic wolf, it is embodied in the lead character of Courtaud. Mannix never overdoes this either. The language he uses to describe his version of events is sparse and simplistic, giving just enough detail for comprehension, but not so much that it becomes overdone. After all, how articulate could your average wild wolf actually be? A proper balance between accessibility and realism is maintained. We also see the human point of view, one which is not entirely unsympathetic. We can understand how they come to fear and hate Courtaud, but we also see how their shortsightedness, superstitions, Inquisition-style religious sadism, and stubborn insistence on continuing the 100 Years War make their situation a lot more dangerous than it needs to be.

Another great thing about this book is the descriptiveness. If you’re a sucker for nature writing, there is plenty to appreciate here. The atmosphere of the Ardennes is well done but the portrayal of shadowy, snow-clad forests and pastoral countrysides is even better. The gory scenes of wolves gorging themselves on deer and European homo sapiens is unsettling enough, but not overly-indulged in to the point of being campy. Again, it is another fine balance that Mannix has struck. Not all the description is great though; the prose starts slowing down towards the end of the story as if the author got tired of writing about one gruesome fight and feast after another. Thankfully he knew when to stop writing because dragging this on for too long would have turned it into a tedious bore.

Despite its brutality, The Wolves of Paris accomplishes what the author intended to do. He creates a sympathetic lead character in Courtaud, making him out to be not so much a villain but more of a force of nature doing what it needs to do out of a will to survive. Writing about a wolf from a wolf’s point of view, especially using human vernacular, is a risky undertaking. It could become pretentious, far fetched, or even cute (meant in the most derogatory sense of the word possible), but it doesn’t. Despite some clumsy and awkward passages, Daniel P. Mannix strikes all the right chords in a finely tuned balance. While not being one of the greatest novels ever written, it is a unique exercise in multiple perspectives. Obscure and underrated, let it remain that and be a secret gem for the few who venture into this territory.

 

Book Reiew & Analysis: The Infernal Machine by Matthew Carr

The Infernal Machine:

A History of Terrorism

by Matthew Carr

We’ve heard a lot about terrorism in our times. The 21st century started out with a bang when Al Qaeda hijacked airplanes on September 11, committing the worst atrocities on American soil since the attempted Native American genocides of the 17th and 18th centuries. Following that attack, Western countries were subjected to a long string of smaller acts of violence and Israel had to put up with sporadic suicide bombings that prevented anybody from feeling a sense of safety or security. Since Islamic terrorist campaigns have run their course, a new problem has arisen in America in the form of right-wing domestic terrorism that went on the rise after Barack Obama got elected president. But as Matthew Carr demonstrates in The Infernal Machine, terrorism is nothing new and, if sticking to its standard definition, might be caused by similar environmental factors in most cases.

The opening chapter establishes a definition of terrorism. Generally speaking, it is an act of violence that is committed with the intent to force political change. There are a couple key concepts for the book. One is that of “asymmetrical warfare” or the revolt of the powerless against their perceived oppressors, a matter of punching up at those above. The other is “propaganda by deed”, meaning that terrorists don’t literally commit acts of violence in the belief that they will have an immediate impact on political policy. Rather their actions are symbolic and meant to be disruptive of an abstract idea. Not all terrorist attacks deliberately target people, sometimes being limited to property destruction or sabotage. Other times, an attack may be accompanies by a press release or the publication of a manifesto. In more extreme cases, they are meant to provoke a sense of unease and paranoia throughout society, sometimes in hope of a long-range destabilization of the political order. Terrorism is a form of unconventional warfare and, from the author’s point of view, and not necessarily that of others, it is a strictly modern phenomenon. It is also a common misconception that terrorist organizations are formed by poor or downtrodden people; most often they are led by ideologues coming from the educated middle or upper classes who elect themselves to be the vanguards of revolutionary change. Matthew Carr ends the first chapter by claiming he intends to examine the root causes of terrorism.

From there he launches into a fairly comprehensive history. It all started in 19th century Russia when a group of upper class activists, some of which worked in the medical profession, set off a series of bombings. These people were anarchists and called themselves People’s Will. They set a precedent for a style of rebellion that has lasted until the current day despite the fact that most terrorists are unaware of its placement on a historical continuum. Other prominent terrorist groups rose up out of the anti-colonialist and nationalist struggles in the early modern era. Carr covers the Mau Mau in Kenya, the Irish Republican Brotherhood, the Algerian revolutionary war, and the 1948 Israeli bombing of the British colonial headquarters in Jerusalem. At the peak of early modern terrorism is the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo by the Serbian nationalist teenager Gavrilo Princip, an act of violence that resulted in World War I. These chapters on the early to mid 20th century are the best in the book. While Carr does a spotty job of analyzing the causes and dynamics of these conflicts, he does a good job of laying out the historical events and the impact they had on contemporary politics.

As the narrative moves along in the later 20th century, his study of urban guerilla movements and Left wing radicalism gets a little bit weak. He brings up the IRA, the Basque separatist group ETA, and the rise of Islamic terrorism, mostly in relation to Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi and Yasser Arafat’s push for Palestinian liberation from Israel. But most of this section gives accounts of First World activist groups like the Weather Underground in America, the Baader-Meinhof gang in West Germany, and the communist inspired RAF in Italy; all of these groups were involved in hijackings, bombings, robberies, kidnappings, and murder. Obviously none of them were successful.

While telling the stories of bumbling Left wing ideologues, he also delves into the extreme reactions of the dominant cultures. Sometimes he indulges so much in the retaliatory violence of the oppressors that the terrorists get overshadowed and it becomes easy to forget what the book is actually about. Carr might be trying to show that the dominating governments are often more cruel and brutal than the terrorists themselves, but he goes a bit too far and overstates his case. The idea emerges that even though the terrorists commit deplorable crimes in the name of freedom fighting, they ultimately have legitimate grievances and are therefore partially justified in what they do since they have no other way of fighting injustice. That assertion rests on thin ice as Carr’s narrative approaches the 1990s and 2000s.

There were several prominent terrorist incidents in the 1990s that get brought into the discussion, but two of them merit special consideration. One is the Aum Shinrikyo sarin gas attacks on the Tokyo subways. Technically this shouldn’t even be considered a terrorist attacks in the strict definition of the word since the group was a religious cult led by a blind yoga teacher who claimed to be Jesus. They believed they were taking the people who died of gas poisoning to Heaven, saving them from the imminent apocalypse. They made no political demands and appeared to be acting solely out of a bizarre millenarian conviction. Despite the atrocity, it is a bad choice of events to include this book as it doesn’t relate to the stated subject matter which is political in nature.

The other major event was the Oklahoma City bombing done by Timothy McVeigh, a Second Amendment fundamentalist and right wing extremist who declared war on the American government by blowing up an office building, killing hundreds of children in its daycare center and a bunch of office workers too. While Carr, rightly condemns the actual bombing, he writes about McVeigh with sympathy, saying he was so overcome with fury that he felt like he could do nothing else. His sympathetic treatment of McVeigh is quite off-putting since you can assume that most Americans, to some degree, feel that the American government is unjust, but most of them are sensible enough not to commit an act of terrorism to express their frustration. McVeigh was not the ordinary, angry citizen that Carr makes him out to be since something is obviously lacking in the mind of someone who could commit such an atrocity. There is more to this than simple political anger. But as Carr continues on in his analysis, another pattern to his thinking emerges: he blames just about every terrorist attack on governmental injustice and never on the psychological shortcomings of the terrorists themselves. He almost exclusively links every terrorist attack from the 1960s onward to the governments of America and Israel. Carr’s hidden political agenda comes out into the light of day in his defense of McVeigh and the right wing militia movement that has grown ever since.

Carr’s bias becomes even more evident in his analysis of the attacks of 9/11. Again, he condemns the actual violence while lending an ounce of sympathy to the idea that Al Qaeda were targeting America solely because they disagreed with the American presence in the Middle East and their support for Israel. He never mentions Al Qaeda’s stated intention of establishing a new caliphate to rule over the Muslim world, nor does he bring up the fact that American intelligence forces had tried several times to assassinate Osama bin Laden in the 1990s. Certainly America’s presence in the region had something to do with it, but it isn’t the complete story. If Carr had done more research he would have known that.

Carr’s case is weakened also as he tries to make a tu quoque (appeal to hypocrisy) logically fallacious argument by stating that 9/11 was somewhat justified because what America has done in the Middle East is far worse than the hijacking of the airplanes and the mass murder of thousands of people in a single day. The committing of one crime does not justify another. Taking an eye for an eye leaves everyone blind, as Gandhi said. Of course, if you are an Islamic fundamentalist or an apologist for Islamic fascism, ordinary logic doesn’t apply since power acquired with violence is the ultimate goal. Even worse, the author from there degenerates into entertaining conspiracy theories, accusing the government of hiring the terrorist to attack America in a plot that involved the CIA in secret American training bases and supposedly teaching them to fly in an aviation school in Florida that he says doesn’t actually exist. Carr claims the group’s leader, Mohammad Atta could not have been an Islamic fundamentalist because he liked cocaine, vodka, nightclubs, and prostitutes, but then again it is easy to see how this lifestyle could make a man so psychologically divided against himself that he could want to commit suicide in the worst possible way. Straight out of Alex Jones’s Infowars, he claims the hijackers weren’t even on the planes that day. These are some of the easier to understand conspiracy theories proposed by Carr. Others are too nonsensical to even follow. At least he does admit that the official version of the event could be possible, but his descent into this conspiracy theory maelstrom just makes him look naive and dumb by the end of the book.

The strongest part of Carr’s writing is the historical overview of terrorist movements and their impact on the wider society. The weakest part is his analysis and causal explanation. He uses the injustice of America and Israel as a one-size-fits-all explanation and tries to fit everything into this tiny little box, restricting his ability to see nuances that might be obvious to others. It is entirely true in some cases that terrorists might have legitimate grievances and it might be true that some of them feel so overcome with anger at the world situation that they feel they need to do something drastic to initiate change, but using that as a foundation for all analysis of terrorist activities is amateurish and overly simplistic. To say that Mau Mau, the IRA, Baader-Meinhof, Yaser Arafat, Timothy McVeigh, and Al Qaeda all start from the same place ignores the individual circumstances of each case and dismisses by default a lot of important details that would contribute to a fuller understanding of what happened each time. Carr’s stated intention of explaining why terrorists do what they do ultimately fails, mostly because his analysis is predicated by a weak, inaccurate premise that also completely leaves psycho-sociological explanations untouched. Finally another big weakness of this book is his constant references to the depiction of terrorism in literature, movies, and popular culture as if that would have anything to do with the causes of terrorism.

So The Infernal Machine has some big flaws when it comes to actually explaining terrorism. It does have some merits though in how it provides a narrative timeline and overview of this political problem. It serves as a good introduction to the subject matter, but otherwise is poorly thought out in its analysis. It is commendable to stand up in defense of the underdogs at times, but it is a mistake to think that all underdogs are equally worth defending. It is also fallacious to attribute their status as underdogs to only one cause as well. Sometimes it is their own fault that they are underdogs, sometimes it isn’t. It has to be looked at on a case by case basis. Matthew Carr’s constant gratuitous references to movies and popular culture make me wonder if he spends too much time watching TV. If he had spent less time doing that and more time researching his subject matter, he could have come up with a more convincing argument in his favor and a book that is less hastily thrown together.

 

Book Review & Critical Analysis: Algorithm by Jean Mark Gawron

Algorithm

by Jean Mark Gawron

magine what life would be if Earth were governed by an algorithm. Life would be stagnant and predictable, possibly even a bit decadent, because the code would manage human events to the extent that nothing out of the ordinary could ever happen. Embedded in the code, however, is a flaw allowing for a certain amount of uncertainty to circulate throughout the rigid structure. Such is the world portrayed in Jean Mark Gawron’s Algorithm, a proto-cyberpunk novel from the 1970s that draws heavily on computer programming and language theory that shows why uncertainty is not only inevitable, but maybe also desirable in the maintenance of human societies.

The plot revolves around a rumor that an assassin will be visiting the city of Monotony during the annual Carnival celebration. The main characters in the narrative go on the hunt to track down the assassin, each having their own personal motivation for doing so. Their hunt reveals a lot about who each one of them is and what they hope to achieve if they catch the assassin.

One of the first things to note is the multiple layers of the setting. Monotony is actually a misspelling and mispronunciation of “Manhattan” and the inhabitants believe they are the distant ancestors of New York City, a place that has vanished long ago in the past. They speculate that Monotony is located someplace south of the historic Manhattan. Otherwise it is a mixture of ancient Rome and a high-tech urban dwelling in the future. Like Rome, Monotony is built on several hills. On one of them Whore Hall is located, a giant temple structure with columns that could easily serve as a temple to Venus. Like both Rome and New York, it is in part a canvas for writers of graffiti. Other resemblances to Rome are the city walls and gates of entry as well as the network of caves and catacombs below. These underground tunnels connect up to the interior of the Pleasure Dome where most of Carnival is celebrated, a combination of ancient Pagan festivities and the Acid Test dances of the 1960s or rave scenes from the 1990s. Inside the city walls there is also a Roman-style amphitheater, the place where the story begins and ends. Notice the three levels of the city: the hill tops, the level ground, and the subterranean tunnels; they are symbolically important to the meaning of the story.

Then there are the characters. The man of most consequence is Danton, named after the French Revolutionary leader who got sent to the guillotine for trying to stop Robespierre’s Reign of Terror. Gawron’s Danton is less incendiary though as he is the leader of a biker gang called the Proets. It isn’t exactly clear what the Proets are actually about as they don’t seem to actually write any poetry, prose, or anything else. One character also points out that they are never actually seen riding their motorcycles even though they are always in close proximity. In one passage they do discuss putting on a play though. But Danton is definitely a writer because we learn he suffers from writer’s block. He hopes to find the assassin because he believes it will either inspire him to write again or else leave his past behind and become poetry rather than writing it, a hint that Danton may be a prophet. Danton is not from Earth; he was brought there as a missionary soldier and left behind when the WUTs invaded Earth.

The WUTs are people from the other planets in the solar system who have formed a unified government. They are again planning on invading Earth and they have sent a spy named Potocki to report back on the conditions there. Potocki provides some insight into the nature of life on Earth. For one thing, he explains the meaning of the word “assassin” and plants doubts in the other characters’ minds as to whether there really is an assassin coming or if the word has alternate meanings to what they think it means. Another observation he makes is that the citizens of Monotony are passive observers and do little to take charge of life in their own city. They don’t need to because the algorithm does the governing for them. Finally, he expresses confusion over how they survive since they have no religion and no god and he believes such a thing is necessary to stabilize society. What he doesn’t realize is that they are ruled by an algorithm that renders religion unnecessary.

Other characters of note are the Juggler, a man who encounters Danton at several points throughout the story. He acts as though he wants to be the assassin, but he never seems to fulfill the role. There is also a paranoid schizophrenic named Savage who believes he is the assassin, but, like the Juggler, he also never proves to be what he believes he is. Then there is Guillemet, whose name means “quotation marks” in French, a seven foot tall giantess who has aroused the romantic interest of Danton. She is employed as a bodyguard and hopes to kill the assassin to protect the people of Monotony, although her true intention nis to get away and find a better place to be.

Furthermore, we learn the life story of Novak, the mathematician who wrote the algorithm that controls Earthly society. While writing the code, Novak was having marital problems and then one day when he entered a cave beneath the city wall, he got attacked by a monster that slashed his face with its claw. Novak received a laceration from his ear to his chin in the shape of a question mark. So while writing the code, this frustration, the attack, and the injury unconsciously found their way into the formula as a flaw that injected a principle of uncertainty into the algorithm. Since the code governs through repetition, Danton visits the same cave later on and encounters something that attacks him there just as Novak got attacked. It is uncertain whether this was a serious attempt at assassination or not.

Since Novak knew he was going to die, he built a computer named Alphy to embody his algorithm and regulate society. Alphy has two main terminals, one in a hidden section in the catacombs, the other in Whore Hall where it is monitored by the brothel madame whose name is Wunder. Alphy acts as the dramatic chorus of the novel, but speaks over everybody’s heads in a complex and abstract language that often confuses more than it clarifies contrary to the traditional purpose of a chorus. It is hard to tell if there is more signal than noise in what it communicates, but a couple ideas do emerge to help in explaining the meaning of it all. One is an explanation of quantum mechanics and the search for a grand unified theory. The dilemma of that branch of physics is that subatomic particles at the micro level of matter act in unpredictable ways that make little sense to their observers. In contrast, objects at the macro level are predictable because they follow the established laws of physics. There is no known way, as of yet, to explain the connection between the macro and micro levels of existence. If we graft this onto the society of Monotony, we get a similar dilemma. To Potocki, the spy from the WUTs and to the reader, the characters in the book have erratic behaviors patterns, motivations, intentions, and emotions that are difficult to apprehend. We try to make sense of these people even though they don’t act in ways that are familiar to us, just like subatomic particles that baffle the observations of physicists Even worse, the act of observing alters the behavior of the observed. On another level, the pursuit of the assassin alters the way that the assassin appears to its pursuers. To what extent do our observation of the characters in this novel alter our perception of the lives the lead? Are we, the readers, the macro level that is disconnected from the micro level of the world they inhabit? Is that why they are difficult to comprehend?

Another major explanation we get from Alphy is that the word “assassin” has no fixed meaning. As the characters try to discover who or what the assassin is, the definition of the word changes too. This is initially pointed out when Potocki explains that “assassin”, :killer”, and “murderer” may all be related categorically, but they don’t necessarily mean the same thing. This appears to be an illustration of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s theory of language games. Wittgenstein claimed that words, in and of themselves, have no meaning and only an arbitrary connection to whatever it is they are meant to signify. Semantically, the meaning of a word is entirely dependent on its context and how it is used in a sentence, its semantic environement. Hence, the uncertainty over the word “assassin” and who decides who the assassin is. Many people in the story die or get killed, but probably none of their deaths would be considered an assassination especially because many of them are accidental. Two characters claim to be the assassin, but neither of them are. Wunder could be the assassin even though she doesn’t actually kill a person. It is also suggested that the assassin is a mathematical formula or possibly the grand unified theory that unifies the behavior of matter at the micro and macro levels. By extension, is the assassin an interpretation of the novel that ties all its confusing elements together into a neatly packaged whole that makes complete sense? Why would you even use the word “assassin” to signify such an idea? It is only suggested by Alphy though and never fully explained, leaving interpretations open to question.

So if Wittgenstein’s language theory is the theoretical underpinning of this novel, what is the implication for Novak’s algorithm that governs Monotony? First off, syntactical structures are algorithms that are filled in with lexical items to form sentences. So the connection between algorithms and language is clear. A computer code is an algorithm whose structures are filled in with lexical items formed by numbers, letters, commands, diacritical marks, algebraic formulas, symbolic logic, mathematical structures and so on and so forth. If the lexicon of language is semantically unstable in its meaning, and computer code is written using a language, albeit one of its own (actually if you study the history of computational linguistics and transformative generative grammar you will know that computer code is written relative to English), then computer coded algorithms are permeated with uncertainty despite their relatively stable structural appearance. So while Monotony is guided by a repetitive algorithm, we get a connection from Rome to Manhattan to Monotony, Novak and Danton are joined by their actions, and the WUTs are going to repeat their invasion of Earth with the anticipation that the results will be similar the second time around. The macro cycles of history are stable and redundant while the micro particles, the individual people, behave according to their own motivations which are context-dependent and sometimes opaque to outsiders. If you can separate the noise from the signals provided by the author, the meaning of the novel emerges as a theoretical outline inherent in the sometimes inexplicable occurences in the story. We might conclude that the uncertainty principle contained in Novak’s algorithm is what prevents life in Monotony from stagnating to the point of collapse. The pursuit of the assassin and the coming invasion of the WUTs are what gives the characters’ actions direction, meaning, and purpose. Of course, this interpretation could be entirely wrong, maybe even a self-serving projection of my own inability to find meaning in my boring, repetitive life. And besides, algorithms, like cultural patterns, only function by being invisible to plain sight. The certainty of interpretation may be an impossibility.

This is not a novel for everybody. The author immediately drops you into an unfamiliar world without a map or any guide posts to show you where you are going. He throws massive amounts of information at you, forcing you to make decisions about what is junk and what isn’t. There are repetitive symbols like triangles, compasses, and the number three that pop up all over the place without any clear connection, making you wonder if there even is a connection or if you are trying to find one where there isn’t, just for the sake of honing the chaos into comprehensibility. This is a book of information overload without a clear meaning and no explicit explanation as to what it is about. You as a reader have to connect the dots without even knowing with certainty that you are connecting the proper dots in the proper way. It doesn’t spoon feed you a story or an explanation and may be too cerebral for your average science-fiction reader since it approaches the maximalist complexity of writers like Thomas Pynchon or David Foster Wallace. And like those authors’ major works, this is a book that needs to be read twice in order to really be understood. It probably isn’t as good or as saturated in meaning as a Pynchon novel, but it does reach in that direction.

So Algorithm is a big postmodern mashup that combines elements of hard science fiction, cyberpunk, psychedelia, Federico Fellini-style phantasmagoria, order and entropy, and communication theory derived straight from The Crying of Lot 49. It’s abrasive, frustrating, and mystifying, but if you like solving complex puzzles and language games, especially ones involving fuzzy logic and out-of-the-box thinking, the challenge of it all makes it worthwhile. Lazy readers stay away. This one is hard work.

 

Book Review

The Last Days of Louisiana Red

by Ishmael Reed

     There is a chapter in Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra portraying a tightrope walker. The tightrope walk is an attempt the man makes to leave the commonplace behind, to explore new possibilities, to see new lands, to expand the parameters of life, to move on to something better...a higher state of existence. However, below the tightrope is the audience, made up of the masses of the narrow-minded, the simple folk, the ordinary citizens, the littlepeople, the flies of the marketplace as Nietzsche calls them. They aspire towards nothing but mediocrity and the maintenance of the status quo. These people resent the tightrope walker’s attempt at finding a new way of life, so halfway through the stunt, they pull him down from the rope so that he dies in the fall.

Ishmael Reed, in his novel The Last Days of Louisiana Red, transplants this dilemma to a different context. He applies it to the African-American community in Oakland during the 1970s where the politics of the New Left, Black Power, and the feminist movement are in full swing. I don’t know if Reed consciously borrowed the allegory of the tightrope walker from Nietzsche or not (probably not), but it does serve as a legitimate point of comparison. Ed Yellings, the businessman who starts the Gumbo Works business, can easily replace the tightrope walker; Ed Yellings gets murdered early in the book, but as it is, he stands in for the upwardly mobile element of the African-American community in the post Civil Rights Movement era. He represents the builders and founders of an African-American economic class that is self-deterministic and independent of white America. And s the envious mediocrities of Nietzsche’s town, the ones who kill the tightrope walker, correspond to the Moochers, Reed’s portrayal of the radicals and activists, some of which come from privileged backgrounds, who refuse to build a better society and instead insist on simultaneously destroying the society that exists while demanding that everything be given to them because they are an oppressed minority. This conflict might sound shocking to younger readers who weren’t alive in the 1970s, especially considering it is being articulated by Ishmael Reed, an African-American author, but he is addressing a real social problem with detrimental consequences in the real world.

Ed Yellings’ Gumbo Works is an instant success. The gumbo is sold in a restaurant and manufactured in a factory but little is said about these establishments. This lack of detail is, I think, one of the many flaws in the novel. The business is actually a front for a secret voodoo operation which involves the defeat of Louisiana Red who is not actually a character but more like a spirit of sorts that brings negative energy into the African-American community. Ed Yellings becomes a millionaire and raises a family of four children in a mansion. Wolf grows up to be a business man, following in his father’s footsteps in preparation to take over the company. Street is a Black Power-type radical and criminal who is obviously a caricature of Eldridge Cleaver. The passage about Street committing murder then fleeing to Algeria where he is given a villa free of charge by the government is lifted directly from that Black Panther Party leader’s life. Sister barely figures into the story but probably represents the Back to Africa ideal of the 1970s since her clothes are African-inspired and she associates with a Nigerian friend. Minnie is the one who plays the most prominent role in the story. Based on Cab Calloway’s classic jive anthem “Minnie the Moocher”, she is a prominent member of the Moochers, but she falls out of favor with them because she shows up at rallies to give speeches about ontology and epistemology and other pseudo-intellectual crap that puts people to sleep. She represents the feminist element of the radical Left and insists she is entitled to take over Gumbo Works even though she has no knowledge of business. The inclusion of all these representatives in one family is of symbolic importance. Not only do African-American people bond by colloquially referring to each other as Sister and Brother, but but the idea of the community as an extension of the family makes Reed’s whole point more clear. He is depicting the African-American community as a family which is supposed to be closely knit and supportive of each other despite their individual differences yet at the same time he is showing how this family is one that is dysfunctional.

Ed Yellings gets assassinated, his factory gets burned down, and the two brothers shoot each other while Minnie insists that she inherit everything her father left behind. This is not the way families are supposed to work.

So far it sounds like a lot of interesting and legitimate ideas are introduced into the story. And it is true, a lot of them are interesting and legitimate and there is an abundance of them. A lot of them barely go anywhere after being introduced though. Sister is the easiest example of this as she only makes two brief appearances and doesn’t contribute in any significant way to anything that happens. Street and Wolf are not developed much more as characters either. Street’s only purpose in the book seems to be for the sake of mocking Eldridge Cleaver without mentioning him by name. Some of the supporting characters actually do a lot more than the main members of the family. Nanny, a woman from Louisiana, gets hired to raise the family but her ulterior motive is to groom Minnie for the sake of disrupting Gumbo Works. Nanny is a representation of the old, southern African-American way of life that the urban professional class wants to leave behind. She is actually a practitioner of voodoo and intends to spread the chaos of Louisiana Red through the Oakland Black community.

Nanny’s opposition is Papa LaBas, a houngan who is brought in to replace Ed Yellings as head of the Gumbo Works corporation. The two are engaged in a magical combat that is an updated version of the voodoo war between Doc John and Marie Laveau. The history and folklore surrounding those two legendary figures from New Orleans is sufficiently explained in one chapter. You might remember Papa LaBas as a catalyst of the action in Ishmael Reed’s previous, and far superior novel, Mumbo Jumbo. Aside from running the company, his most memorable part is when he gives Minnie a marsh and misogynistic lecture about how Black women should stay in their traditional places. His twisted logic is that women are already powerful because they provide men with sex, something which makes men obedient and submissive. I suppose that line of reasoning works if you are the type of sex-obsessed man who thinks with the wrong head, but for those of us with a more diverse range of interests, it comes off as a rather infantile view of sexuality and power.

The author’s misogyny is extreme, even by 1970s standards yet it is totally in line with what a lot of African-American men were thinking at that time. Black hyper-masculinity and sexual potency were big components of the Black Power movement and those were the progressives of their time. Read up on the Black Panther’s approach to women and sexuality if you don’t believe me. One Black Panther, I forget who, famously said, “The only place for Black women in the Revolution is on their backs.” The more conservative members of the Black community then, as represented in this story, were even more traditional and domineering in their approach to sex and gender politics.

By far, the most interesting characters are Kingfish and Elder, representatives of the lumpenproletariate who Reed despises. These two clownish characters refuse to work and survive by collecting welfare and committing petty crimes like stealing, burglary, scamming, and begging. They are obviously capable of being useful but refuse to indulge in thing like employment, instead paying for beer and weed by swiping tips off the tables in restaurants. “Owning a business is something that Black people don’t do,” says one of them. This is the type of attitude Ishmael Reed is addressing in this novel in an attempt at correcting it for the sake of his people. Kingfish and Elder stand out here because they are the most direct and clear criticism offered up by Reed and they work well as comic relief.

The least successful character is Chorus, a man who acts as the chorus of the story, explaining what is happening and what is yet to come. He provides counter-narratives about Isis and Osiris, the Egyptian deities, and Antigone, the Greek daughter of Oedipus. These plots correspond to what is happening with Minnie, Ed Yellings, and Papa LaBas. But the stories are confusing and poorly narrated. The purpose of a dramatic chorus is to clarify a story, but in this case Chorus muddles the narrative to the point where skipping these chapters might actually make the book easier to read.

I am wondering if this novel was originally intended to be a play written for theatrical production. The inclusion of Chorus, as well as a scene in a theater where Minnie heckles the performers (sound familiar Leftist millennial students at Berkeley?) are obvious references to the theater. But the whole story is told through dialogue the way a stage performance would be. Even the assassination, the shootings, and the fire at the factory are explained through conversation rather than shown as part of the narrative. This might have been conceived of as a play but written as a novel for some reason I can’t comprehend.

The aforementioned lack of detail is a real weakness. As previously mentioned, the violence and the fire are relayed to the audience by speech. There is also no description of the restaurant or the factory. Even worse, for a book about voodoo, it is disappointing that the actual rites and ceremonies are not described. Rather than having these things talked about in casual conversation, actually showing them visually bulks up the writing, fills in the blank spaces, and makes the story more complete. It allows the audience to experience these events emotionally and creates depth by drawing us into the environment and the action. If the characters only talk about these things than we just move on to the next page without really connecting with them in our imagination.

The other big problem is that Reed introduces too many ideas but never follows through on them. The different characters all represent different aspects of the African-American community but they are little more than hollow receptacles of ideas. What they symbolize is obvious but beyond the symbolism they have no life of their own. With such underdeveloped characters and themes, it is hard to tell if Ishmael Reed is being fair in his critique or not. You can find plenty of things to criticize in the Black bourgeoisie, the Back to Africa ideal, the gangster, the Black Power movement, and the feminists but there are a lot of things those people got right too. By not addressing all sides of these issues, the author does a disservice to his claims by making his criticism look shallow, uninformed, and rudimentary.

The Last Days of Louisiana Red is the follow up novel to Ishmael Reed’s most celebrated work Mumbo Jumbo, a novel that deserves all the praise it gets. The main idea of that book is that if white people stand back and give African-American people enough space then their culture will grow and thrive. I think the main idea of The Last Days of Louisiana Red is that, now that Black people have sufficient space to grow and thrive, they have to deal with some problems internal to the Black community. Notice how prominent a role the white people play in Mumbo Jumbo and how marginal the white people are in Louisiana Red. Reed has progressed to a new set of parameters here. But this latter novel is less successful because he introduces too much information into those parameters. It is like a chef making a pot of gumbo and using every ingredient he finds in the kitchen so that no individual flavor stands out and whatever is there in the pot doesn’t blend in with everything else. Reed could have left a lot of the content out to give more room for the important ideas to take hold or he could have expanded the novel to three times its length to fully develop everything he introduces. Otherwise, he does raise a legitimate issue, that of some members of the African-American community working against its greater interests. even if Some of his criticisms, particularly of feminism, are not entirely justified. I like to think that Reed is too good an author to write this kind of book since he certainly showed what he is capable of in Mumbo Jumbo, but in comparison this just ends up being another novel that doesn’t live up to its potential. 

 

Book Review & Analysis The Shadow World by Andrew Feinstein

The Shadow World:

Inside the Global Arms Trade

by Andrew Feinstein

Just after World War II, big business, the military, and the trans-Atlantc governments began working together to rebuild their militaries. It became obvious that the industrial production of war materiel is profitable and more profits results in more power. Within a decade, America had entered the Korean War and, soon after that, the war in Vietnam. In the latter of those two invasions, the public became aware of the relation between capitalism and military conquest and the term Military Industrial Complex emerged into common usage. After all, businesses manufacture arms with the intention of selling them for profit, but the arms have no inherent value unless they get used and so they either get rolled over to another buyer or used on the battlefield. Some weapons also fall into the hands of grey or black marketeer brokers or dealers, finding their way into the Third World and put used to commit all manner of atrocities and human rights violations. The end of the Cold War and the fall of the Soviet Union also put a lot of guns into circulation worldwide since organized crime gangs with easy access to unguarded military bases, mostly in Ukraine and other former Soviet republics in Central Asia, grew rich by selling guns on the black market. All of this is documented in The Shadow World by the South African, former ANC parliamentarian and human rights advocate Andrew Feinstein.

The whole story in this book really starts after World War II when an ex-Nazi military officer used his contacts with the network of war criminals in South Africa to form the Merex corporation. Merex emerged from the dust of the great war as a semi-legal company that grew in stature due to their willingness to ship arms to militaries in troubled regions of the world. By the 1990s, they were doing business with dictators in Africa and all sides of the Yugoslavian civil war out of an office in Virginia. With help and protection from Western governments, they brokered and sold weaponry in deals involving intelligence agencies, terrorist groups, organized crime gangs, logging companies, and legitimate businesses. Sometimes American manufactured arms ended up in the hands of enemy nations in places like Iran and Afghanistan.

Then on the more legally sanctioned side, Feinstein explores the Al Yamamah arms deal made between BAE Systems of the U.K. and Saudi Arabia in which state of the art air force defense systems were sold to the latter nation at cut rate prices. BAE initially scoffed at the transaction but after copious kickbacks were paid and the Saudis agreed to dramatically lower the price of crude oil, the deal went through. BAE and other weapons manufacturing companies saw the potential for reaping massive profits by budgeting bribery into their expense accounts and Al Yamamah became a template for maximizing business deals in the nations of the Global South.

The importance of Al Yamamah becomes easier to understand as Feinstein explains how American weapon dealers pressured South Africa and Tanzania into purchasing anti-missile defense systems that they ultimately had no use for. This was done by funneling money into the bank accounts of corrupt politicians, all done through slush funds, overcharges, and hidden charges in legitimate banking transactions. Then sometimes it was simply a matter of handing over a suitcase full of money to the right person. The author shows how damaging this kind of corruption can be to a developing nation since in the case of Tanzania, the government cut money out of their budgets for education, infrastructure development, and job creation programs in order to purchase military technology they couldn’t even use. You also have to wonder what effect this corruption can have on a population of people who are trying to build their nation and uplift themselves out of poverty. It either sends the message that corruption is the way to get things done or else you might as well give up trying in life since if you have no access to influential people or lack any kind of service you can offer in exchange for large sums of money, you are hopelessly doomed to poverty. When people feel like they’ve got nothing to lose, it shouldn’t surprise you if they turn to crime, terrorism, or religious extremism in order to get by.

The middle passages of this book are dull. The author goes into extensive detail about the economics and legality of international arms dealing. Everything written here is relevant and important to his case, not to mention well-supported with extensive citations, but it is the kind of dry writing that slows the whole book down.

It picks up again when Feinstein gets into the role of the U.S.A. in the arns trade be it legal, illegal, or some combination of the two. One major topic covered is the Reagan era involvement in the Iran – Iraq War. Even though America was supporting Saddam Hussein at that time, they were also profiting from the war by selling arms illegally to Iran in what became known as the Iran – Contra Scandal. To add an even sleazier layer onto the story, the arms America sold to Iran were Soviet manufactured weapons purchased from Poland, considered and enemy Eastern Bloc nation at the time, in order to fund a fascist dictatorship in Nicaragua that overthrew a democratically elected government. So America bought arms from communists, sold them to an Islamic fundamentalist enemy state in order to pay for a Latin American dictatorship in order to stop communism. Brilliant.

But the dealings of the George W. Bush administration make Ronald Reagan’s senile international buggery look moral in comparison. Long before the election in 2000 and the September 11 terrorist attacks, Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld were drawing up plans for the invasion of Iraq. All three men had deep ties to the oil and arms industry, being former board members and executives of companies like Haliburton and Lockheed Martin, and they filled the Bush cabinet almost entirely with executives from the arms industry. Feinstein points out how the Bush – Cheney team were little more than war profiteers whose personal fortunes increased from millions to billions during the Iraq War against former U.S. ally Saddam Hussein. American soldiers got killed, maimed, and psychologically scarred for that. And the fact that, aside from war profiteers, there were no winners in the Iraq War, only losers.

Along with that, the author explains the menage-a-tois between the arms industry, congress, and the American military. Congressional spending on war materiel is grossly exaggerated beyond any practical needs and members of all three institutions pass through the revolving doors between them as many corporate executives become lobbyists, politicians, or military bureaucrats. Massive amounts of money pass through hands in the form of earmarking and pork barrel spending, two terms that serve as euphemisms for legalized bribery. There are a massive number of pigs feeding off the arms industry trough and most, but not all of them, have deep ties in the Republican party. Those are the same Republicans who make millions by doing nothing more than licking the grease off their own palms while whining about the loafers on welfare who get nothing but crumbs from public assistance. Is this the projection of a guilty conscience? A mean-spirited mockery of the American lower classes? A cynical ploy to polarize American society by humiliating and scapegoating America’s most downtrodden citizens? A professional psychologist could answer that question providing they aren’t being given the squeeze by some conservative funding organization.

So how can a book like this be evaluated? It can’t really be approached from a literary perspective since that isn’t its purpose though it can be said that, despite a couple parts that drag, most of it is engaging and well-written. It is hard to evaluate the content as well unless you have the means to fact check this dense mass of information, all of which is extensively documented with legitimate citations. For the most part, it all sounds plausible as hell even though most of the information is far beyond our abilities to verify. It can be a frustrating read too because most of us don’t have the ability to do anything about the issues raised in this study.

The Shadow World is an outstanding work of quality muckraking. It hits hard and clearly presents a dilemma that needs to be addressed. We live in a world of complex societies that interact in complex ways. Militaries are necessary as are the war materiel they need to function. But like anything else, the military can be misused and abused, sometimes resulting in unnecessary wars, genocides, mass murder, and terrorist attacks. On top of all this, there are corporate profiteers who value bloated profit margins over quality of life like an aristocratic class of psychopaths. All the while, their greed is satisfied under the guise of providing a legitimate and necessary service. As a reader you may not be able to don anything to fix this absurd situation that is utterly devoid of heroes, but this book does feel as though it contains important information and gives you a chance to evaluate your moral stance in relation to politics, economics, corruption, and violence. Maybe that is all a narrative like this can do until the human race finds a saner way to live.