Book Review: Micronations by Mohammad Bahareth

Micronations 

by Mohammad Bahareth

      It’s not widely known that Ernest Hemingway’s brother Les once built a bamboo raft off the coast of Jamaica and declared it a nation called New Atlantis. Actually only half the raft was New Atlantis because the other half, he believed, was a territory of the United States, Under the raft was a sandbar which Les Hemingway thought to have bat guano on it. Based on an obscure American law from the 19^th century, any uninhabited island in international waters with bat guano could be claimed as American property. If that law isn’t batshit crazy than Les Hemingway certainly was for coming up with this scheme in the first place. It’s a good thing he didn’t try to liberate the American half in a war of independence because I don’t think that would have gone in his favor. He didn’t need to do that anyways because his raft and the nation of New Atalntis got blown away in a hurricane and ceased to exist.

Now if Les Hemingway was anything like his more famous brother, he might have been a lush. This is significant because I’ve nursed enough pints of Guiness in to know that if you hang around enough bars over the years, you will inevitably meet dozens of drunks on benders who will tell you what could be done to fix the country if only the right people would listen to them. Stoners aren’t any different only they’re more likely to lay around listening to Grateful Dead tapes while watching nature shows on TV with the sound turned down while they tell you what they’d do differently if they had their own country to run. Usually the legalization of drugs is the first and only idea they have If you’re getting doing bong hits with them, you probably aren’t listening anyway. What I’m really getting around to saying here is that every so often one of these guys gets up enough gumption to literally try to start their own micronation. Sometimes they succeed. Most of them fail. These days they mostly just end up on the internet. Mohammed Bahareth’s Micronations chronicles some of these attempts.

Like any good book of this sort, the author starts out by defining the concept of a micronation. There are people who declare themselves to be the king or leader of their own mini-state. Up until recently, many of them have laid claim to small pieces of land, empty islands, abandoned military towers, or boats anchored in international waters. Some of them don’t exist anywhere except in people’s heads or on websites. Some issue currencies, stamps, or passports and even go so far as composing their own national anthems, writing constitutions, and inventing their own languages. Most of them seek international recognition from other countries or the United Nations. It’s probably safe to say that most, if not all of them, are run by people who are completely nuts. The author would likely not agree with that last charge since he appears to be interested in founding his own micronation, although he doesn’t give any specific details in this book,

After Bahareth explains what micronations are, he explains what micronations are. Again. Nobody would argue that he isn’t an amateurish author. Then he proceeds to list and describe real micronations. Reading this is a trial at first since some of the entries at the beginning have nothing but geographical facts which were probably copied from Wikipedia. But the book gets more engaging in later chapters when he gives information about the history and ideologies that some micronations were founded on. The organization of the chapters is a little weird. One is about the strangest micronations and the following chapter is about the most famous micronations. But the two most famous micronations, The Principality of Sealand and The Republic of Minerva, are in the former chapter and I’ve never heard of the ones listed in the latter chapter so maybe the titles are out of order. I’ll give credit where it’s due though, because my favorite micronation of all, The Kingdom of Elgaland-Vargaland, gets one paragraph. Those guys claim their country exists in your mind and you enter their kingdom every time you fall asleep and dream. Now that’s some real psychedelia for you. I’d love to see how their parliament works.

While the beginning of the book is all about the shrimp sized sovereignties that exist, did exist, or tried to exist usually somewhere in the three dimensions of our physical universes, the ending of the book covers the tiny countries, bringing new meaning to the term “petit bourgeoisie”, that own no land and exist only as ideas or internet pages. This is where the meat of the matter really enters your mouth. I have no idea what that last sentence is supposed to mean, but I thought I’d throw it in there anyways. You see, a lot of these new micronations want to become officially recognized states. Some have claimed territories on Mars or distant comets, a few have laid claim to territories on Antarctica. Some want to build massive platforms on the ocean surfaces for seasteading ventures. Some wish to inhabit places where nobody in their right mind would want to live like New Jersey for instance. Also somebody has put together a United Nations for micronations and many of them seek recognition there as a first step to petitioning the real UN for acceptance. They even send mini-diplomats to micronation conventions. The next one is being held in 2025. For some of these people, this is all a big joke or an art project (same thing), but some take it quite seriously. At least, I think they take it as seriously as an internet role playing game can be taken and that’s what I think this latter grouping of tiny intentional communities mostly is. It seems like a hobby for those at the geekiest end of the nerd spectrum. On a more down to earth level, even if none of these people ever succeed in starting their own countries, I can see how this type of role playing game might inspire a political science scholar to come up with a plan or theory for improving the practice of governance in the real world. They say that when young children play house or cops and robbers they are actually preparing themselves for roles they might play when they get older (the kids who pretended to be robbers will probably go on to be businessmen and the kids who played doctor probably became perverts) and this micronation trip might just be a more sophisticated version of that.

This is not a well-written book. It’s published by a vanity press which is usually a good enough excuse to avoid reading something, but I am an aficionado of all things odd and obscure so I thought I’d give it a chance. The writing can be redundant to say the least. Sometimes one paragraph is repeated word for word following its first iteration. The layout is confusing and the organization of information doesn’t always make sense. It’s full of typos, misspellings, and bad grammar. But the author’s first language isn’t English and, according to his online biography, he is also dyslexic so I’ll cut him as much slack here as I possibly can. Besides he obviously has a passion for his subject matter and that enthusiasm shines through. If this isn’t a great book, at least it is unique and interesting. It may be best as a work of bathroom literature, but many people have to admit that they have some of their most philosophical inner dialogues while sitting solitary, taking a dump in the porcelain Republican party cranium (otherwise known as the toilet).

Mohammed Bahareth’s Micronations isn’t a widely read book and it isn’t destined to be. That’s why I’m happy to have read it and why it has a prominent place on my bookshelf which gets more crowded by the week. And to all you barflies, boozehounds, lounge lizards, saloon swillers, and barroom political scientists whose livers are pickled in gin and tonics who have had a few and start spilling out over the sides to whatever schmuck in unlucky enough to be occupying the stool next to you, if your topic of conversation is how great it would be if you could run your own country, or even just be king for a day, I propose a toast in your honor. Let’s all do a shot of hooch and a round of rotgut for everyone chased with a bottle of mad dog. You’re all invited when I take the oath of office as the first president of The People’s Republic of Mike Hunt, population of one.

 

Book Review and Literary Analysis: Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany

Dhalgren

by Samuel R. Delany

      “I don’t know where I fit in in this world. I’ve been wandering for years, finding no place to settle. My memories are incomplete. I can’t even remember my own name. Am I hallucinating? Am I going crazy? I’ve heard about a place somewhere in the Midwest where people like me have found a home. I think I’ll go there and see what happens. And, by the way, who wrote these words anyway? Me?” At some point the central character of Samuel R. Delany’s monumental novel Dhalgren must have thought things like these. But don’t expect any clear answers to his questions. You have to figure the answers out for yourself. But then, how do you even know you’ve come to the right conclusions?

Part of the confusion is that this novel doesn’t necessarily start at the beginning. The beginning may be somewhere in the middle or near the end, but then again, maybe the beginning really is at the beginning. You can never really know. The protagonist can’t remember his own name or who he is, but he goes by the name Kid, Kidd, or sometimes the Kid. This name was given to him by Tak, a gay leather BDSM guy who acts as the local welcome wagon when Kid and others enter the city. Tak is a strangely matriarchal figure, not just because he is a man, but he also brings the nameless main character into the city of Bellona like a midwife bringing an infant into the world and, like a mother, giving him a name: Kid, something we call a child. When they have sex, Tak insists Kid sit on his lap and bite his nipple until he draws blood, an inversion of Christian iconography of the Christ child on the lap of Santa Maria, and a sado-masochistic inversion of breast feeding in which blood stands in for a mother’s milk. Tak introduces Kid to the world and the people of Bellona, sometimes acting as a teacher and sometimes a nurturing matron in leather and spikes, providing food, shelter, and healing when Kid needs it most. Early on in the book, you become aware that Delany has a talent for character building and word building too. There is nothing shallow in the way he writes Kid and Tak into the narrative, and this is true of many others along the way, even those who are of minor importance.

Now here’s a real problem. If I analyze everything, even limiting myself to the most important themes and elements, I will end up with a book review that is twice as long as this 900 page novel and I don’t want to do that.

But the setting is important. Bellona is a post-apocalyptic city where something bad, we’re not sure what, has left it mostly abandoned with a smoke-filled sky even though it appears there are no big fires anywhere. It is completely cut off from the rest of America where life continues on as normal. The remaining inhabitants are four main groups. The two most prominent are African-American people and various remnants of the 1960s counter cultures, namely bikers, hippies, and beneficiaries of the sexual revolution. The counter culturalists and African-Americans interact the most freely. The other two categories of people are a small band of middle class families and a small group of upper class intelligentsia including an order of monks in an isolated monastery. These upper and lower classes mingle less often. All these groups of people are outsiders in some way.

Tak introduces Kid to a hippie commune dedicated to distributing food they lift from abandoned stores. He doesn’t quite fit in with them, but hooks up with another peripheral friend of theirs named Lanya who becomes his girlfriend. She is multi-talented, highly intelligent, free spirited, plays the harmonica, and likes to be naked, a fully realized embodiment of the female hippy who is too individualistic to actually be a part of any one group.

As the story progresses, Kid become the leader of a gang called the scorpions. Their name is never capitalized suggesting that it isn’t actually their name, but rather a subcultural designation like “thugs” or “gangbangers”. These scorpions resemble the Hells Angels only they are interracial, in fact most of them are Black, and they only have one Harley Davidson which they can’t ride because there is no gasoline in Bellona. They squat communally in abandoned houses they call “nests” and spend most of their time eating, getting drunk, and having sex. Sometimes they go out on runs which usually involve nothing more than looting and vandalizing abandoned stores. When Kid joins the scorpions he meets his other lover, a teenage boy named Denny who becomes a third partner in the relationship with Lanya.

Kid is a richly detailed character. He is half Native American Indian and a former inmate of a psychiatric hospital. His two outward emblems of identity are a chain with various jewels, lenses, and stones wrapped around his body and an orchid, a type of weapon he wears strapped to wrist and holding five razor sharp blades which he uses in fights. He acquires these two objects the way a character might come across a magic ring and enchanted sword before setting out on a Grimm’s fairy tale style quest. Aside from recovering his memory and name, Kid’s two main ambitions are becoming the leader of the scorpions and becoming a poet. He accomplishes both. He becomes the gang leader, taking over from a guy named Nightmare, by proving his courage in a run on a department store, but he becomes a poet for a reason he doesn’t choose. The mayor of Bellona is looking for a poet laureate to represent Bellona and Kid is the writer he finds through a scout. Since he is the only writer around, and a charismatic individual who actually writes about Bellona, his poems get published even though they are probably not great writing. This novel, as it touches on the craft of writing, is in part a self-referential work of literary criticism, a use of the novel to philosophize about the writing process.

In regards to the writing process, Delany presents us with a puzzle in the form of a notebook which Kid finds when he is with Lanya. It is a ragged spiral bound notebook which has writing only on the right side pages (for bibliophilic nerds who actually know anatomical terms concerning books, the right hand side of the page is called the “recto”). The author of these writings is never revealed, but we do know they contain extensive commentaries on literary criticism and, by a possible interpretation, they are also pages from the novel Dhalgren itself. Something else in these pages written by the unknown author is a list of names, some of which bear close but not exact resemblance to the names of other characters in the book. One of these names is Dhalgren, which may or may not be the name of a journalist that Kid meets at a party given in his honor. Are the contents of this notebook the writings of Kid, being part of the memories that he lost? There are clues that suggest Kid’s real last name is Dhalgren and that the journalist is actually himself and the author of the entire novel. Does that make Kid a literary persona of Samuel R. Delany? But wait a minute, aren’t all the characters personae of Delany? Is that true of all authors? Can an author write characters that are actually not a part of their own mind? Before I expand on this meta-meta narrative framework, let me just point out that the blank pages on the left hand sides (called the “verso” in book nerd language) are where Kid writes the poems that will later be published by the mayor.

One key to understanding this book might be the chain that Kid wears wrapped around his body. Several characters wear these chains and Kid learns early on that it is considered impolite to ask anybody what they mean. These people are all symbolically connected through these chains. What the lenses, stones, and beads attached to them actually do is distort visual imagery when looked through, refracting light, fracturing appearances, and redirecting eyesight during the act of looking. If these objects are different occurrences strung together in the narrative of the novel, then it is an indication that what we read is a distorted and fractured view of what actually happenes. We use language and memory to interpret the world and neither can be entirely accurate since they approximate and distort the world the way the stones distort visual imagery. This distortion can be seen in several ways, one of which is the shifting of narrative voices. In the earlier chapters, there are points where the narrative changes without warning from third person singular to first person with the first person being the voice of Kid. The final chapter of the book switches over entirely to first person narration which tells us that Kid is the author of Dhalgren, especially because the last section is made of fragments relating back to other parts of the story complete with meta-critical commentaries, reworkings of passages, corrections of spelling errors and typos, and other editorial notations, all of which are presumably written by Kid. This suggests that the final section contains contents from the right side pages of the notebook he writes his poetry in. This narrative chaos forces the reader to think in terms of narrative distortion, shifting planes of reference, and redirecting of attention which can be compared to the way the objects on the necklace distort visual perception when held in front of the eye. This alteration of narrative lines also indicates another theme in the novel: the questioning of Kid’s sanity.

As Kid wanders through the novel, he constantly frets about whether he is insane or not. We know that he was once diagnosed with a mental illness and forgetting your own name isn’t exactly healthy or normal. If that isn’t insanity, it certainly indicated an identity crisis at the very least. Kid’s mind also appears to play tricks on him. Streets and buildings seem to move to different locations when he isn’t looking, for example, and then there are a series of fortean anomalies. A woman he has sex with turns into a tree, two moons appear at the same time, one day passes for him whereas one week passes for everyone else, and then the smoke in the sky clears as a giant red sun appears over Bellona then goes away. These can’t be simply attributed to insanity and hallucination because, at least with the moons and the sun, everybody else in Bellona sees them too.

My contention is that these anomalies are merely literary devices, especially because they occur at major turning points in the development of Kid as a character. For instance, one morning Kid and Lanya go off on their own. Kid takes a bus to a department store where the scorpions are preparing for a run that involves breaking into the skyscraper which is guarded like a fortress from the top floors by members of the middle class. Kid joins the scorpions and, through his actions, sets himself apart from the others in terms of courage, intelligence, and fighting ability. During the span of this day, Lanya is out searching for Kid, but for her this span of one day lasts an entire week that ends when they meet up in the evening. Previous to this time warping, the two had spent most of their days together having sex. This shift in time perspective happens when they reach a crossroads in their relationship and go their separate ways for a bit which is further enhanced by the fact that Lanya is against the idea of joining the scorpions. The time distortion represents a major turning point in how Kid and Lanya see each other,

The most memorable anomaly is the appearance of the giant red sun, the most mind altering, entrancing, and emotionally intense passage of the novel. My interpretation here is that this event symbolizes another major turning point in the story of Kid’s life. As the sun begins to rise, Kid leads the scorpions to the balcony of a house so they can watch. The sun is so intense that it scares everybody, some to the point of dread and tears, and yet Kid, feeling fear the same as the other, remains calm simply knowing that if it is an indication of impending doom, there is nothing he can do about it. But what really happens is that this coincides with Kid’s ascension to the leadership of the scorpions, taking over the mantle from Nightmare. The sun appears when he reaches his goals of becoming a famous poet and becoming the leader of his gang. At the same time as the sun’s appearance, one scorpion also kills somebody and a sniper begins firing from a rooftop at African American people on the street.

Now take a step back for a second and look at this from another angle: if Kid is the writer of this novel, than these anomalies and the people who say them might be creations of his imagination. Or maybe these things really did happen. But if he is the writer, editor, and narrator of his own story should we take these anomalies at face value as hallucinations, or did the writer write the witnessing of these events into the story to prove that other people saw them in order to ward off accusations of insanity, a possible defense mechanism protecting his own ego from dissolution. By forcing us to think on different levels about the possible reality, hallucination, or symbolism of these anomalies, Delany draws our attention to the fact that we edit our own personal narratives, adding details and leaving out others, in a way that a writer makes choices when writing a novel. It is human nature to embellish stories so where is the dividing line between truth and fiction? Is the line between sanity and insanity really all that clear? The shifting narrative planes make you see the story from Kid’s point of view in a way that make you think like a person who might be insane while wondering if this is really insanity or just human nature. Or just a bunch of literary devices. Anyways, the reason I think these anomalies are nothing more than literary stylization is because of the chain that Kid wears wrapped around his body.

As said before, the chains with their ornaments are worn by many people in Bellona and it is considered impolite to talk about them. Kid believes the people who wear them are special in some unexplained way. This gets reinforced when the psychiatrist Madame Brown offers him a job moving furniture for her friends, the Richards family. She tells him she is doing him a favor because he wears his chain. She later reveals that that is not the truth; she only told him that to conceal the real reason she offered him the job. She tells him that the chains actually mean nothing. This is also reinforced when Tak brings Kid to a warehouse where massive amounts of these chains are being stored. Anyone who knows where this warehouse is can get an ornamented chain to wear. They are nothing but cheap trinkets. It is possible the reason no one who wears them wants to talk about them is that there isn’t anything special about them and they just don’t want to admit that. So if the chains are a metaphor for the novel itself and the objects attached to it have no value other than the purpose of distorting the viewer’s vision, then we can conclude that the anomalies and some other details in this novel have no intrinsic meaning other than ornamentation. The anomalies dazzle the mind, but if the reader looks too deeply into their meaning, they get sidetracked from the more important elements in the story.

This brings us to the passage where the two moons appear in the night sky. There is a backstory and a subplot related to this. During a riot in the African American neighborhoods, a Black man named George Harrison gets photographed having sex with a white teenage girl named June Richards in an alley. The photograph is printed in Bellona’s newspaper which describes it as a rape. But the situation is complicated because it may not have been a rape considering that June wanted to have sex with George Harrison. His name is interesting considering he has nothing to do with the now deceased guitarist for The Beatles. Maybe the author chose that name as an element of distraction, a symbolic dead end. There is one night when George Harrison is hanging out in a bar and June is outside because she is stalking him for the purpose of having another sexual encounter, negating the accusation that she was raped. When Lanya confronts George Harrison about this, the Black man himself, who has the status of a celebrity in the community partly because nude posters of him are being circulated by the female minister of a church, explains that the controversy isn’t that he raped her. The controversy is that American society has anxieties and fears regarding Black sexuality and, just as much, there are fears and anxieties surrounding women’s sexuality. So when a Black man and a white woman are exposed for having consensual interracial sex, the society reacts with accusations of rape. So what happens when June comes close to catching up with George Harrison at the bar is that two moons appear, one a nearly full with a sliver of shadow over its left side, the other gibbous with its two horns pointing right. This is an anomaly because the Earth’s shadow would project onto the same sides of the two moons but they don’t. This is because June and George Harrison are going off in two different directions without meeting even though they are in close proximity to each other. The people in Bellona immediately assign the name “George Harrison” to the new moon to emphasize this point. The symbolism is so obvious that you have to second guess your interpretation to check if it makes sense or not.

The character of June Richards links into another of the novel’s many subplots. June lives with with her parents and her brother in an apartment building. Kid gets hired to move their furniture from their apartment into another one because the people downstairs make too much noise. The people downstairs are actually a nest of scorpions. While helping to move a sofa, the son falls down an empty elevator shaft and dies. After the scorpions help Kid pull the corpse out of the shaft, he begins to get closer to them. And we find out that all is not right with the Richards. The scorpions say they hear strange noises coming from their apartment, suggesting the possibility of domestic violence or incest. Mrs. Richards is a nervous woman who talks endlessly but cautiously when Kid comes to work for her. Her goal in life is to be a great housewife and a socialite who entertains friends at dinner parties. She is also agoraphobic and never leaves the apartment. Mr. Richards leaves every day to go to work, but he lives in Bellona where there is no work and probably does nothing more than wander around alone, a perfect portrait of a middle aged man who feels lost in the world and tired of his life. They also have an older son named Eddie who he kicked out of the house. We later find out that Eddie joined the scorpions. The Richards are a perfect portrait of a middle class American family. They hold together by never talking about their problems and never directly confronting reality. Beneath the surface, they seem like people who are about to explode. When their son dies, they cope by leaving his body to rot in another apartment and pretending he never existed. Strangely, their friend Madame Brown insists that they are a perfectly well-adjusted family.

Madame Brown is a minor character, but by the end you begin to realize she is not a reliable source of information. That is why you might not believe her when she tells Kid that he is mentally ill because her own judgments and perceptions are always lacking.

The Richards are a middle-of-the-road American nuclear family and Kid realizes they are not his people. Mrs. Richards serves spam on wonderbread for dinner, acting as though they are elegant despite the moldy corners she has to cut off to make them edible. The way she cuts off the mold is like the way the family acts willfully ignorant in order to maintain the illusion that they are happy. They may be typical of Americans outside Bellona, but inside Bellona they are outsiders because the city is populated with outcasts. The Richards represent what the counter cultures of the 1960s were rebelling against and Bellona is an enclave of the refugees from those counter cultures.

Bellona’s post-apocalyotic atmosphere demarcates it as cut off from the mainstream outside world where everything functions as normal. Yet all is not bad there and it seems to hover between utopia and dystopia as a kind of purgatory. The 60s counter cultures valued individual freedom yet also valued communal relations. They believed in free love and the right to have non-traditional sexual relations. Some dreamed of a society without money or police. They wanted to party and do drugs without having to work at meaningless jobs. All of these are aspects of Bellona. But then when murders or riots happen, there is nothing that can be done about it. Material possessions have no value because everything is free. Nothing gets accomplished because society has no purpose. Scorpions commit acts of violence and vandalism simply because they have nothing better to do. Illnesses and injuries can not be properly treated because there are no doctors or medicine. Bellona represents what a society would look like if the counter cultures finally had their way. It is up to you to decide if Bellona is a success or not.

Delany’s prose is entrancing. It is the type of writing that glides along smoothly with alliteration used to give it a subtle rhythmic continuum of language. It moves along steadily and slowly and once you get into its groove you never really get out of it until the end. It reminds me of what Stanley Kubrick said about the slow pacing in 2001: A Space Odyssey and Barry Lyndon; they move at the pace of life. If Delany had written this with a faster pace, I fear all the complex layering of meaning, themes, details, and interconnections would end up being nothing but a jumbled mess. There are a small number of passages that suffer in their execution though. Mostly these are the passages with excessive descriptions of sex. The first night that Kid and Lanya spend together is long, but it isn’t that bad. This is partly because Lanya is totally hot and I’d be chasing her tail myself if it wasn’t for two factors, one being that I am happily married and wouldn’t cheat on my wife, the other being that Lanya is a fictional character in a novel which renders the first factor null and void anyhow. The other sex scenes, and one where Lanya and Denny throw pieces of a board game at each other, just go on for too damn long.

Dhalgren is a deep and difficult novel for a lot of people. I would argue that following what is happening is not what makes it difficult, but interpreting it is what makes it daunting for some. It is maximalist in its contents. It is full of ambiguity and symbols that may not symbolize anything at all. The beginning and end overlap in a way that I haven’t even touched on here. It forces you to question your own sanity as you see Bellona from the point of view of a man who might be insane even though he oten makes sense. You might go insane yourself if you try to interpret every lead this novel offers so you have to decide what themes to pursue. Delany doesn’t offer any final answers and its open-endedness may be one of its greatest strengths. If somebody were to ask what this whole novel is about, I would answer that it isn’t about one thing; it is about a whole lot of things and you have to choose what it means to you. This might bother a lot of readers who want definite answers from what they read, but that is better for the small number of us who get deeply absored in it while pursuing a unique literary experience. Dhalgren isn’t for everybody. It’s only for a few.

 

Book Review and Analysis: How Soccer Explains the World by Franklin Foer

How Soccer Explains the World:

An Unlikely Theory of Globalization

by Franklin Foer

     Can sports explain the world? Let’s take an indirect approach at answering that question. In the Middle Ages, Europe’s landed aristocracy settled disputes by building up mercenary armies of peasants, giving them weapons, and directing them in battle like pieces on a chessboard. Military commanders were lazy rich people who bought their ranks rather than earning them based on skill or prowess (does this sound familiar today regarding big corporate business?). Other members of the idle rich class sat on the sidelines of these petty wars, cheering on their allied battalions while the unfortunate peasant soldiers, who would probably prefer to be at home relaxing, slaughtered each other in the mud, all for the benefit of the land-owning barons and dukes who profited from these skirmishes. This style of warfare was a part of the political system known as feudalism, though there was a lot more to it than that. But the theory here is that these pointless and brutal wars eventually looked like petty sadism that wasn’t too popular with the peasantry who grew the food that was leeched from them by the aristocrats, so the practice was sublimated into games and what we now call team sports. So can contemporary soccer explain how we got from feudal warfare to the most popular worldwide pastime? You would need a certain amount of education and cultural literacy to be able to make that connection, so the answer would have to be a reluctant no, at least not for most people. Therefore, the title of Franklin Foer’s book How Soccer Explains the World should be ignored if you plan on getting anything out of this.

We don’t hear much about globalization these days. In fact contemporary right wing faux populism could well be a reaction against it. But twenty years ago, when this book came out, globalization was a big topic of discussion especially because 9/11 was still fresh in everybody’s minds. So Foer approaches his subject matter with that world view in mind. After all, aside from the Olympics, soccer is the most global sport. This is a very loose framework for this collection of essays, not a thesis to build an argument around.

Foer starts with discussions on hooliganism. We all know that soccer teams attract gangs that fight like boneheads with other gangs who support rival teams and sometimes the violence spills out into the streets where anybody or anything unlucky enough to be in their way could get smashed. Some of these gangs have ties to organized crime mafias or nationalist political movements. The first essay is about Serbian war criminal Arkan (may you never rest in peace) and how he brought all these elements together. The author, while embedded in the hooligan culture, also shows how Catholic and Protestant rivalries in Glasgow manifest in sectarian gang violence. These chapters leave some unanswered questions, like whether soccer makes ethnic or tribal conflicts worse or if it functions by containing them in localized conflicts rather than allowing them to flood out into the wider societies. The author doesn’t actually pose this question and doesn’t go deep enough to help you draw your own conclusions either. These essays are simply sketches based on interviews done with people he sought out.

There are a couple essays dealing with racism in soccer that stand out as the best in this collection. One is a historical piece about a Jewish soccer team in Austria before the Holocaust. Their motivation was to overcome the stereotype of Jewish people being physically weak and non-athletic. Another essay examines the life of a Nigerian footballer who dreamed of making it big by being hired to play in Europe, only to be slimed into playing for a team in Ukraine where he wasn’t welcomes with open arms. Thus, Foer addresses the issue of the internationalization of soccer to the point where teams are made up of players hired from other countries while local athletes get little or no representation in their home countries. The dream of globalization bringing the whole world together hasn’t worked out the way we all hoped it would.

Then we get some chapters on Brazilian soccer and the endemic corruption involved in its management. One sleazy team owner worked his way into politics and ran his team into the ground through graft and financial mismanagement. And of course no proper book about soccer in the 20^th century would be complete without at least mentioning Pele. The world’s greatest footballer raised himself out of poverty by being the cleanest and most entertaining player. After making his fortune in America, he returned to Brazil and entered politics in an attempt to eliminate corruption from sports. The system got the better of him and he ended up falling into corruption like the rest of them.

This makes a transition into the subject of management and team ownership. The subject of soccer transitioning from a working class spectator sport to an upper class one complete with clubs being flush with money from investors and advertisers. This all has a deleterious effect on the relationship between the teams and their fans, many of which can no longer afford to attend matches. This all ends with a chapter on the promise of soccer as an instigator of political change in Iran where the Iranian Revolutionary Guard have been unable to steer women away from attendance at games.

Franklin Foer is an investigative journalist and these essays read like what this book really is: a collection of magazine articles, quick and easy to digest, accessible, ephemeral, entertaining, and not too deep. It’s like iceberg lettuce, cheap and filling but not loaded with nutrients. It would be safe to say that each essay portrays an aspect of society that is an outgrowth or an intersection with the culture surrounding the sport; it wouldn’t be accurate to say that Foer uses soccer to explain much of anything happening outside this culture. One thing is certainly conclusive though: soccer and the dark side of the human psyche are intimately connected. How you feel abut this book in the end might have a lot to do with how you react to the disconnection between the title and its contents. I, personally, was a little disappointed. I’m not interested in watching soccer since it looks to me like a bunch of guys kicking a ball back and forth for an hour or two and I’d much rather be doing something fun like having sex, so I was hoping for something a little more introspective and it didn’t deliver on that point.

How Soccer Explains the World is light reading. It’s conceivable that soccer can explain the world, but that doesn’t happen in this book. It provides some snapshots of the culture of the sport, but as a reader you will be left to sort out the information and what it means on your own. It’s interesting for what it is and I can’t say it’s bad writing, but it isn’t literature to be taken too seriously. Maybe it’s something to be read on a long bus ride, in an airport terminal, in the waiting room at the DMV, or if you have some obnoxious friend who insists on making you listen to Jordan Peterson lectures. Maybe its something to keep your mind busy when your proctologist insists on not using general anesthesia during a colonoscopy. Anyhow, I’d rather read about why most Americans don’t know who David Beckham is or why they get lost if you talk about Manchester United, Arsenal, or Juventus. I’d also like to know why Brits gets so red-in-the-face angry when Americans use the word “soccer” instead of “football” considering that “soccer” is a word of British origin that was used by them until they switched to “football” in the 1980s. Can soccer explain why people like to fight over such petty trivialities? It must be the narcissism of small differences. I’d like to read a book that explains that. 

 

Book Review & Analysis: The Jewels of Aptor by Samuel R. Delany

The Jewels of Aptor

by Samuel R. Delany

      At the young age of 20, classic science fiction author Samuel R. Delany wrote his first novel. The Jewels of Aptor proved to be an auspicious beginning. Post-apocalypse fiction is nothing new and it probably started as a literary reaction to the Cold War in the years right after the nuclear bombing of Japan at the end of World War II. Fantasy fiction is nothing new either. Who knows when that genre actually began. Was it The Epic of Gilgamesh or the Egyptian Book Of the Dead? It was definitely something ancient. I imagine the fantasy genre as we know it today also took off in popularity during the Cold War as a means of escapism from the perceived threat of nuclear war. The ever-innovative Delany ties the two concepts together in this short debut.

The tone and framing of the story are set in the opening chapter when a female student and her teacher sit on a beach discussing religious concepts of good and evil, the Taoist symbol of yin and yang, and the art of Da Vinci depicting both the ugliness of Christ’s crucifixion and the beauty of the Mona Lisa. The identity of the girl and her teacher and the significance of the beach become more relevant towards the latter parts of the story. The theme of the co-existence and interdependence of good and evil, light and dark, is primed to be its meaning, at least theoretically.

The novel quickly shifts to the wharf of a seaside city named Leptor where we get introduced to the main characters. Geo, a poet and a student, is walking at night with his friend Urson, a large sized man, when a young boy tries to rob them. After that incident. They get hired for a mission on a ship called the Argo which is probably a reference to the Greek mythological poem The Voyage Of the Argos. The young thief, who has an extra set of arms and no tongue, gets hired as their companion after agreeing to work with them instead of against them. The thief, who cannot talk but can communicate with telepathy, is given the name Snake. The priestess who hires the group sends them on to retrieve her daughter, named Argo, supposedly being held captive on Aptor by Hama, a rival religious group. They are also assigned to steal a jewel from the temple where she is being held. The priestess of Argo is in possession of a jewel that comes from a set of three. Another one belongs to Geo, and the third is the one she is after. Possessing all three simultaneously will give her ultimate power. Sound familiar? I’m guessing that Tolkien’s The Lord Of the Rings is a major influence on this novel.

One major line that the story follows is that of solving the mystery of what exactly is going on. Who the priestess and Snake are, why Snake’s tongue was cut out, and why so few people ever return from Aptor alive are used as literary hooks to engage the reader. The other major line the novel follows is that of finding the temple where the daughter and the jewel are kept; from that angle the story is mostly just fantasy, action, and adventure, a lot like the exotic fantasy/sci-fi stories that appeared in pulp magazines during the Golden Age of science fiction. After sailors on the Argo start getting murdered, Geo, Urson, and Snake escape from the ship and land on Aptor where they meet a Black man named Iimmi on the beach. Aside from simply adding another member to the group, it isn’t obvious why Iimmi is included in the story. He doesn’t do anything that couldn’t be done by the others and he doesn’t detract from the story either. He simply just seems to be an extra character. The fact that he is Black doesn’t carry any obvious meaning either as the book isn’t really about racial relations. All I think is that Samuel R. Delany is African-American and wanted to include a Black character for that reason, even if Iimmi is just an arbitrary one. Anyhow, he gets along perfectly well with the other three so maybe that is the whole point.

What happens throughout the rest of the book is mostly action, pure and simple. The world of this novel is a post-apocalyptic one where civilization had been destroyed leaving only traces of things like crashed airplanes, burned out cities, and nuclear waste, all of which are present on Aptor. Nobody knows precisely what happened although it is suggested it was nuclear war, something that caused surviving people and animals to mutate in all kinds of fantastic directions. So as the band of men hack their way through the lush jungle, they encounter the ruins of that past civilization, fighting off all kinds of monsters and befriending some others.

When they enter a derelict city, they get contaminated by radiation then get rescued by a religious order made up entirely of blind women clothed in white. The females imprison them, but they plan to escape after learning the priestess intends to sacrifice them to their goddess. As interesting as this passage may be, I found a flaw that I couldn’t square with the rest of the story. The women in the temple heal the wounds the men receive after being exposed to radiation and I wonder why they do this considering their ultimate plan is to kill them. Furthermore, Geo and Iimmi are both scholars of the same religion so the temple women allowed them to read the manuscripts they keep in their library. Those two things don’t add up in light of what they intended to do with the men. Is this the yin circle inside the yang, or can it just be written off as short sightedness on the part of the author who was 20 at the time of writing? My guess is that it is the latter.

After escaping, the small band of scholar-adventurers wind up in another temple, this time inhabited entirely by men wearing black robes. Well, almost entirely since there is one female there. And guess who she is. Upon their return to the ship of Argo, all the mysteries are solved, all the questions are answered, and all the meanings are explained. That last aspect is a little weak since the meaning of the whole book is about a religious, mystical insight involving the island of Aptor, but that insight isn’t especially profound. Older, experienced readers won’t be impressed. This novel doesn’t offer anything as mind-blowing as the works of William Blake. If you want to approach that level, I would advise you to check out the later novels of Samuel R. Delany which do go pretty deep.

As juvenile as the whole story may be, this first novel does have a lot to offer. Delany’s ability to describe imaginary places and creatures so vividly is far beyond the ability of most writers of fiction, possibly even genius. Aside from top quality world building, the character development is of a high standard as well. Once the characters are introduced, it is impossible to forget them. But the story does start to drag about the time the group reaches the temple of Hama on Aptor, mostly because there is so much action paired with so little meaning in a novel that starts off promising loads of symbolism and mystical insight, but later becoming obvious that it is unable to deliver on those points. Also the plot hooks are introduced effectively, but lack originality; you can imagine this stylistic element being inspired by Delany reading detective novels while in high school. That’s not necessarily bad; it’s just that it marks the writing out as the work of a naive artist. It almost gives the impression you might get from the plot development of a Scooby Doo episode.

One interesting thing to note is the parallels between this early novel and Delany’s later magnum opus Dhalgren. The poet and group leader Geo easily corresponds to the poet and gang leader Kid in that novel. Urson also bears a strong resemblance to the character Nightmare. The ambiguous identity of Snake is a theme that crops up all over Dhalgren while the student and goddess incarnate Argo, being held in the temple of Hama bears a resemblance to the reanaissance woman Lanya. The three jewels that can be used as both weapons and lights are a little like the strings of jewels worn by some characters in Dhalgren. And the post-apocalyptic city on Aptor is a pre-configuration of Bellona.

Despite its flaws, The Jewels of Aptor is a fun novel to read and fans of Samuel R. Delany’s later works will find it interesting because a few of its elements show up in his later works. It doesn’t embody any profound or meaningful ideas, but the author obviously tried. For a 20 year old, this actually is a major accomplishment. I’ve taught college level writing courses myself and I don’t want to discourage anybody by saying this, but I have never had a student who showed as much promise as an author at that age than Delany did in this novel. He must have been born with a natural talent.

 

Book Review & Analysis: It Came from Something Awful by Dale Beran

It Came from Something Awful:

How a Toxic Troll Army Accidentally Memed Donald Trump into Office

by Dale Beran

      I once heard somebody, I forget who, say that the internet is like a city having good neighborhoods and bad neighborhoods, the latter should only be approached with caution or avoided altogether. Although it’s an overly simplified simile, it does contain some truth as there are some websites that just aren’t good places to visit. I’d like to extend the simile further by saying that aside from good and bad neighborhoods, all cities have sewers too. The sewers of the internet are the chan message board websites, most especially the /r/ thread on 4chan and just about everything on 8chan. `Dale Beran’s It Came from Something Awful details the development and history of these internet sewers and the role they played in the rise of Donald Trump and the alt.right.

To begin with Beran gives a brief history of American counter-cultures from the 1960s to the 2000s. He brings up the hippies, the punks, and what he claims to be the nihilist zeitgeist of the 1990s, mostly in relation to grunge music and the overlap with the growing incursion of the internet into American life. His explication of these counter-cultures is flimsy and he doesn’t seem to know much about them. His declaration of the 1990s as being a decade of nihilism is a strange way to define a counter-culture too; he seems to be confusing the concepts of a youth subculture with a counter-culture, the former simply being whatever trends the sub-class of young people are following and the latter being a cultural group that forms in direct opposition to the beliefs and practices of the dominant host culture. But so be it. This book isn’t really about those social movements anyways. The most legitimate aspect of this book’s opening is the tie almost imperceptible ties between the hippies and two prominent aspects of the later internet culture. One connection is the creation of usenet groups in the 1970s, something developed by nerdy hippies with a fascination for computers. The other is the practice of hacking developed by phone phreaks who invented ways of using digital technology to steal phone services from AT&T.

Beran makes the connection between the original usenet groups, newsreaders, and the chan sites which originally developed in Japan. Then a message board website called Something Awful came on the scene. Young American computer nerds with a fascination for Japanese manga and anime began to use it and eventually left due to content restrictions established by the moderators. They started their own site called 4chan and everything went to hell from there. Considering that Something Awful is mentioned in the title, that pioneering discussion forum doesn’t play a prominent role in this historical narrative; maybe this book could have had a better title.

Most of 4chan’s users were teenagers, some as young as twelve, who had maximal computer skills and minimal social skills. The worst of these kids congregated on the sub-forum /r/, which stands for “random”, becoming a free for all where anything gross, offensive, or darkly humorous was posted. These geeky, socially awkward, sometimes autistic gamers and socially challenged digital jerks were originally apolitical, but something brewed to the surface of their clique. A group of hacktivists developed, organized a protest against the Church of Scientology, helped coordinate the Arab Spring, and initiated the Occupy Wall Street movement which turned out to be a revolutionary dud. These hacktivists grew to become the anarchist-libertarian hacker collective that came to be known as Anonymous.

Not everybody on 4chan went along with this move towards the radical activist Left. Some of them took their offensive racist and sexist humor to a new level, turning into politics and embracing white supremacy. Another subgroup known as incels began to form. These were boys who spent too much time watching porn and developing neurotic complexes because they reached the age of eighteen without losing their virginity. One of them joked that if you reach the age of thirty without losing your virginity, you become a wizard, and eventually a community of wizards grew around that concept. I’d say that’s a pretty cool joke despite it all. If the incels ever came up with anything clever, that was it. They branched off into what is now known as the manosphere, a sector of the internet that is inherently misogynist, prurient, traditionalist, and extremely right wing. The better of these incels started working on self-improvement to make themselves more attractive while others formed the Pick Up Artist community. Even worse, some became chronic whiners and women-haters, sometimes even turning to murder to vent their frustrations. Out of this toxic milieu of masculine stupidity came things like the Pepe the Frog cartoons, a contemporary symbol of inadequacy similar to what Charlie Brown was in previous generations, and other practices like shitposting, bullying, and trolling. Trolling itself turned into a type of right wing online activism.

So far so good, at least in terms of the narrative thrust of this book. This first half is well-detailed and interesting to those of us who had no knowledge of these chan websites when they were in full swing. The second half of the book is a little less exciting, mostly because the subject of the 4chan trolls falls into the background and the politics of MAGA , the alt.right, and the alt-light take over the story.

The connecting thread between the 4chan trolls and Donald Trump runs along two lines, according to Beran. One line runs from the trolls to Steve Bannon, publisher of Breitbart News, and white supremacist trust-fund baby with a ridiculous haircut Richard Spencer. Remember him? He’s the one whose video went viral after an antifa activist punched him in the face, setting off a flurry of Punch a Nazi GiFs and memes. These jerks were lurking on 4chan while the GamerGate scandal hit and saw these loser trolls as fodder for a right wing uprising. And they were right. The other thread involved Pepe the Frog whose meme got appropriated by white supremacists. When Dumb Donald Trump posted a Pepe the Frog meme on Twitter, the alt.right felt vindicated. This army of autistic internet losers, who previously saw themselves as the biggest nobodies in America, had caught the attention of the then-presidential candidate.

Then Douschebag Don got elected and it felt like America had been blasted with a nuclear powered stink bomb. Paramilitary militias, street gangs, and fraternities began popping up, looking a little too much like an American version of the Nazi brownshirts. The 4chan trolls, once acknowledged by Trump, were forgotten by him and began to fade from view. When they showed up at the Charlottesville white trash Unite the Right rally as pranksters wearing bizarre, inside-joke costumes, the fascists and the media ignored them.

Meanwhile, aging adolescent activist geeks were entering universities and behaving there the way they did online: the clique of stuck up juveniles with an overly-inflated sense of self-importance that they were. Without any awareness of how their actions were affecting others, they would shout down anyone, be it professors, guest speakers, or other students who they didn’t agree with. Rather than following the liberal educational tradition of examine an issue from all sides before forming an opinion, they sought to control all discussions and indoctrinate people with their ideologies. They had grown up blocking or deleting anybody on social media who they didn’t want to hear from and tried to apply the same method in the offline world. Unwittingly, they pushed a lot of people away from the Left and some of them went straight into the welcoming arms of the right. Cancel culture didn’t defeat sexism, racism, and homophobia; it exacerbated them and led to the election of the worst president in American history.

Most of the second half of the book is less about the online troll and activist cultures and more about the disastrous practices of the alt.right and the failed Trump presidency. This part is clearly written and true to what was reported during those shameful four years. But if you have been following the news all along, there is nothing here you wouldn’t already know. It will be valuable as a historical document in the future, but so soon after this happened the memories are too fresh for this to be of great interest. Anyways, I really don’t want to remember the Trump presidency but I feel like we have to because as the 2024 election approaches, we are faced with a second term with this senile wannabe autocrat and we aren’t out of the danger zone yet.

Dale Beran doesn’t go into much detail about political theory in this book, but there is one passage that is key to explaining a lot of what happened. Based on the works of Hannah Arendt, he explains that liberals believe in maintaining the political system while making constant adjustments in a move towards a better and more just society. Left wing extremists want to tear down the whole system and replace it with something else. Fascists are those who wish to maintain the political system, but feel they have been robbed of their rightful status in it so they seek to purge it of the unwanted elements of society who they feel are cheating them out of their entitled privileges. This is where we stand now with MAGA and the alt.right who want to purge America of immigrants, liberals, non-Christians, and people who aren’t white. Beran doesn’t attempt to define fascism so much as he attempts to explain the social conditions that make it appeal to conservatives on the right. He also opens the possibility that Leftist identity politics could lean towards fascism if the cause of purging white heterosexual men from the power structure takes hold. Whether this threat of identity politics is real or imagined is not relevant because a large portion of white people perceive it as real and perceptions count more than truth in their consequences. The mean-spirited, Nurse Ratched-style of scolding, shaming, guilt tripping, and preaching is only throwing fuel on the fire. We are at a point where Leftists need to re-evaluate their approach and tactics if they don’t want to be marginalized and buried for a long time to come.

For a long time I’ve been saying that the internet brings out the worst in humanity. In a small way, It Came from Something Awful partially justifies that view. It has allowed the worst elements in society to meet up in chat rooms where they indulge in vile ideas. These people strive to be the filthiest pieces of feces in the sewer and their ideas can spread rapidly around the world, faster than at any time before. The internet is so vast that these diseases can go unchecked since it is impossible to monitor everything happening on the net. Dale Beran shows how the internet has amplified the voices of the most rotten elements of society to a volume where so few voices of reason can ever be heard. And yet some of these chan trolls are lonely, scared teenagers, suffering from depression or other problems, who turned to these online spaces because they felt they had nowhere else to go. Adults need to do a better job of listening to young people. They can be listened to and understood without being elevated by technology to a position of power they shouldn’t be in. Until that starts happening, I fear things will only get worse, Welcome to the future.