Book Review: Vesco by Arthur Herzog

Vesco:

From Wall Street to Castro's Cuba

the Rise, Fall, and Exile Of the King of White-Collar Crime

by Arthur Herzog

      The world of big business and corporate finance is a shady place. When profits and personal gain are the primary motivations for success, then inevitably a company will attract some questionable characters. Greedy, sharky narcissists and grifters sometimes claw their way to the top. Slick deal makers invade the boardrooms and moral guardrails get flushed down the toilet. Our culture of economics celebrates those who accumulate the most wealth regardless of their character or usefulness to society as a whole. Organized crime syndicates are little more than the shadow side of big business. It is no surprise that such an environment would attract some pathological predators. It is also no surprise that some libertarian lunatics will lionize these scumbags for being an exotic breed of amoral heroes. Vesco by Arthur Herzog gives a biographical account of one such sleazy businessman who eventually ended up on the lam.

Robert Vesco had an unimpressive childhood. His family were part of the Midwestern blue collar class, living without frills or fortune. After getting bored with mundane factory work, Vesco got into the habit of buying businesses. He developed a talent for buying failing businesses and turning them around to be either resold or else used to buy other businesses. He built up a network of them and then set his sights higher, using the profits to buy his way onto the board of the Investors Overseas Service or IOS. This high-finance corporation was already being run by some shady people and had actually been banned from doing business in America. So Vesco tried to take over IOS and along the way, stashed investors’ money in offshore bank accounts and shell companies in the Caribbean and Central America. The American SEC caught on to what he was doing and tried to take him down. After a joke of a trial in which the government struggled to define what crime Vesco had committed, let along prove their case, the rogue businessman had already become one of the richest men in the world. Instead of risking more harassment from the government, Vesco fled the country, spending most of his time making banking and business deals in the Bahamas and then making a semi-permanent move to Costa Rica.

That much of the biography is interesting if you can manage to extract so much meaning from Herzog’s text. Unfortunately, there are three identifiable problems that muddy up the narrative waters. One is that a lot of space is taken up with details of banking and corporate business management. There is nothing inherently wrong with that and it would be expected in a book about white collar crime. The problem is that it is alienating to readers who are not familiar with these business practices which can be assumed to be most people. Herzog doesn’t explain this side of the story sufficiently enough for those of us who have never been inside a corporate boardroom. Another problem is that Robert Vesco disappears for a long stretch from his own biography. Herzog goes into too much detail about the lifestyles of the IOS managers, especially that of Bernard Cornfeld who dominates such a long portion of the writing that you might forget who this is meant to be a biography of. And that is not the only time that happens in this book. The third major error is that the author writes about how Vesco has such a charming and attractive personality, but this never comes across in the writing. The book actually lacks sufficient detail to drive this point home. Herzog could have included more personal testimony or anecdotes from people who knew Vesco to make him come to life more as the central figure of the story rather than being so one dimensional.

Robert Vesco settled in Costa Rica after the American government put pressure on the Bahamas to extradite him. There he made friends with the president Jose Figeres Ferrer. Vesco was the wealthiest man in that tiny, impoverished nation and Figeres urged him to invest money in the national infrastructure. Subsequent presidents warmed up less to Vesco but tolerated his presence as long as he didn’t meddle with the national media. Public opinion in Costa Rica was divided and the presence of Vesco was a prominent news item for several years. Despite living lavishly, Vesco’s fortunes were growing smaller and he began investing in more dangerous business ventures like drug smuggling and arms running to keep himself afloat. He got too hot for the Costa Ricans to handle, so after secretly bouncing around from Antigua and Panama to Nicaragua, he eventually settled in Cuba. It can be said that the communists allowed him to stay in Havana simply to annoy the American government, but they probably wanted some of his money and access to his business contacts as well. The sections about Vesco’s life in exile are somewhat interesting, but again, he disappears from the story for unnecessarily long periods including passages about an illegal arms deal with Libya in which Vesco only had a tenuous connection.

As far as the writing quality goes, the best part, meaning the clearest and easiest to follow, comes in the final chapter when Herzog goes to Cuba to interview Robert Vesco and show him a transcript of his biography. Actually nothing especially interesting happens there and the chapter does almost nothing to add to the bigger picture of who Vesco really was, but it is the best written part of the whole book. This is important because Herzog wrote about what he saw in Cuba. The rest of the book lacks that kind of vision. Herzog can’t be faulted for not being in the room with Vesco throughout his entire life, but the author never actually sees what he writes about. There are lots of listed details, but he never actually puts you, as a reader, right into the action the way a good writer does. Reading this book has the feel of trying to follow a TV show while sitting in a separate room and listening to it through the wall without any visual input.

Robert Vesco was a man who got into too much too soon. He obviously had a natural talent for business, but he moved too fast for his own good. He didn’t learn the lesson of Icarus whose wings made of wax melted when he flew too close to the sun. If Vesco hadn’t been so reckless he might have survived longer in the world of corporations and banks. Maybe he would have even gotten away with squirreling some money in offshore bank accounts. White collar crime is just as common as kids stealing candy from the supermarket and probably gets prosecuted less often.

Arthur Herzog’s Vesco doesn’t qualify as a great biography. It has too much detail about things I don’t understand without sufficient explanation to make them comprehensible and not enough detail about the things that make Robert Vesco interesting even though he can’t be sympathized with. Unless you have a burning passion for corporate business, financial institutions, and white collar crime, this probably isn’t a book worth your time.

 

Book Review: Flickering Light: A History of Neon

Flickering Light:

A History of Neon

by Christoph Ribbat

      A century ago, there was nothing that screamed out “modernism” or “high tech” more than neon lights. Even so, there hasn’t been a lot of research done into the way neon impacted culture. A technology that effected urban life, advertising, pop culture, art, and shifts in historical social attitudes deserves some study. The German author and scholar of American society Christoph Ribbat steps into this neglected space in his short work Flickering Light: A History of Neon.

The element neon is one of the noble gases. When charged with electricity it emits a magical glowing blue hue that is both bright in a way that commands attention and soft on the eye. This proprty of the gas was discovered by accident in a laboratory circa the turn of the 20^th century. By trapping it inside a transparent glass tube, it is contained and molded into the any shape desired by the artisan. The name of “neon” got attached to the technology of neon lights even though neon is only one of the gases used in them. Possibly this is because “neon” is rooted in the Greek “neo” which means new, connotating a leap into a futuristic society. Both the name and the appearance of neon lights were mind blowing to a world only just emerging from the 19^th century where electricity was scarce and rarely ever used. Despite the large scale industrialization of the modern world, the manufacturing of neon lights was a craft and an art form. The glass tubes were shaped by individual glass blowers whose hands and mouths were their main instruments. Each neon sign was, therefore, customized and unique with no mass production of any singular design.

Ribbat’s account of the history of neon lighting is mostly social though with less emphasis on its technical aspects. One of the interesting parts of the book is his explanation of the relationship between neon signs and big industrial corporations. Businessmen got a hold of it before anyone else could, therefore its primary purpose was advertising. America’s largest city centers, like New York and Chicago, were transformed into otherworldly atmospheres immersed in the glowing light. Times Square drew even more visitors than usual who came just to see the spectacle. Eventually Las Vegas got the same treatment after World War II and the technology spread overseas as well to major urban sources of power like Berlin, Moscow, and Tokyo. But art critics, sociologists, and architects decried neon for turning American appetites towards cheap, simplistic entertainment that dazzled the eyes rather than purveying meaning or deeper reflection. Mostly they hated it because it was the primary medium of advertising, the cheap commodification and commercialization of modern life.

After underestimating the aesthetic appeal of the neon glow after sunset, it fell out of style as it spread out of city centers and into the ghettos, the working class neighborhoods, roadside billboards, and rural towns. It went from being urban chic to low class advertising for cheap restaurants, dive bars, strip clubs, liquor stores, and adult video arcades. By the time World War II ended, the new generaton had forgotten the downmarket trend of neon lights and it came back into vogue for a stretch then declined again for being tacky and tasteless as it had once before. That is when postmodern artists discovered its value for visual stimulation.

The passages of this book covering the history of neon lights are the best parts. The passages dealing with other peripheral but related topics are less impressive. Ribbat’s concerns are with the downtrodden members of society or the people who live beneath the neon lights rather than the people of higher social standing who live behind or above them, often owning them. This means an examination of the poor, the prostitutes, the petty criminals, the drug addicts, and those living on the rougher side of life. This is an interesting subject to explore, but the problem is that Ribbat barely draws a connection between neon and the unfortunate lives these people have. Even worse, he derives all his information from works of literature rather than citing studies done by the sociologists of those times. Ribbat is obviously preoccupied with the aesthetics of neon, but by using works of fiction as a secondary source of information, however good they might be, makes these passages feel disjointed from the main theme of the book. Other sections of the book suffer in similar ways when Ribbat examines the use of neon as metaphor in poetry and song lyrics as well as props in movies. He gets a little too caught up in attempting to define the meaning of neon rather than treating neon as a medium that means little more than the visual impression it makes. Neon lights do act as signifiers of class status packed with meaning, but Ribbat’s analysis is not rigorous or methodical enough to make this clear. He does, however, include a good chapter on the use of neon lights in the visual arts starting in the 1960s.

Flickering Lights: A History of Neon has some chapters that are fascinating and some that aren’t. The best parts of the book do make it worth reading. As I finished, I was left with two thoughts. One is the sense of nostalgia that makes me wish to go back in time to see Times Square and Las Vegas when they were awash in a sea of flickering, glowing, buzzing neon. Those times when artistic creativity, industry, and advertising met in such a unique fashion are long gone and will never come back, at least not in that form. The other thought was how neon signs predated and predicted the gif files we now see on the internet. Designed to turn on and off, making sequential movements, like a flower blossoming and opening its petals or a race horse jumping over a hurdle, repeated endlessly in repetitive loops until someone cuts the power, the best and most elaborate neon signs had a similar visual impact to gifs which we now see on screens in advertising and social media posts. The biggest difference is the sheer, enormous size of neon signs that sometimes covered entire sides of buildings or extended upwards several stories into the sky. I do think society worked better when we were looking outward and up rather than fixating on a small screen right in front of our faces. The former implies growth and expansion while the latter implies shallowness, alienation, and narrow mindedness. Let’s bring those flickering lights back again.

 

Book Review: The Rajneesh Chronicles by Win McCormack

The Rajneesh Chronicles

by Win McCormack

     The USA had a lot going on in the 1960s and 1970s. Aside from the social changes initiated by the hippy counter culture and the New Left, American political hegemony and newly relaxed immigration restrictions resulted in an influx of exotic ideas, lifestyles, and practices. One result of this was the Cult Scare of the 1970s. Disillusioned with failed utopian dreams and an unfulfilled desire for structure and meaning, a lot of counter culturalists turned to new religious movements like the Hare Krishnas, the Unification Church, and The Family International. Traditional Christianity had proven to be dull and lifeless and people craved something new to reflect their changing values. But not all was well in cult land. Within one decade there were the Manson Family murders and the mass suicides of the People’s Temple in Jonestown, Guyana. Some high profile cults were accused of brainwashing, kidnapping, and dishonestly appropriating people’s money. The big Cult Scare was upon us. Within only a couple years after the Jonestown massacre, a new cult arrived on the scene and red flags were flying all over the place. They were the devotees of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and their leader’s intentions were no more noble than the aforementioned scoundrels. Win McCormack’s The Rajneesh Chronicles is a colleciton of magazine articles written contemporaneously to Rajneesh’s invasion and his eventual expulsion from America. 

     This book is somewhat annoying from the start. It begins with a timeline of events in the rise and fall of the cult. Reading lists like this can rarely be fun, especially when you know nothing about the people involved. It just is not an engaging way of telling a story. But it is necessary since the magazine articles that make up the bulk of the book do not run in chronological order. Reading them on their own would be messy and confusing without the timeline to guide you. 

     But anyways, the story starts at a controversial ashram in Pune. India where Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh attracted followers, mostly naive Westerners with lots of money, where he twisted standard Eastern practices like yoga and meditation to his own ends. Sexual orgies and other darker things were a large part of what went on. After having trouble with the Indian government over tax fraud, Rajneesh moved to America where his cult took over the isolated farming town of Antelope, Oregon and began building their own city called Rajneeshpuram. Needless to say, the people of Antelope didn’t take too well to the orange-clad so-called sanyasins, especially since they outnumbered the locals and eventually took over the city council and school board. The passages on the politics of Rajneesh are somewhat muddled and incomplete so if this part of the story is truly interesting to you, you might want to look to a better source for information. 

     Rajneesh himself mostly disappears from the articles after his arrival in America. He decides to take a vow of silence and appoints the sociopath Ma Anand Sheela to run the Rajneeshpuram cult. Narcissistic, machiavellian, and cruel, she runs the commune’s affairs like a true tyrant and eventually gets arrested for attempting to poison a city called The Dalles by putting salmonella in restaurant salad bars and the water reservoirs. 

     The best parts of this book detail the lifestyle and practices of the cult. Characteristics that mark Rajneeshpuram out as a typical cult include sleep deprivation, information control, unpaid and intensive physical labor, use of trances and altered states of consciousness, control over sexual behavior and diet, and, most importantly, infallible leadership. Encounter therapy groups involving physical violence, verbal abuse, sexual assault, and psychological trauma were used to break down members’ egos thereby dismantling their sense of individuality and the ability to think for themselves. Ecstatic trances involving yoga and dancing were used to facilitate an emotional bond with the larger group. Rampantly promiscuous sex was used to prevent individuals from forming intimate friendships or romantic relationships. Long work hours, sleep deprivation, and poor diet were used to make people too weak to think clearly or rebel. The questioning of leadership led to harsh punishments. They even built their own private crematorium to dispose of dead bodies due to the number of people dying from exhaustion or other causes that have never been revealed. Meanwhile, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and Ma Anand Sheela lived high on the hog with expensive jewelry, luxurious houses, a massive fleet of Rolls Royces, and frequent steak dinners at expensive restaurants in places nearby. It was an open secret that Bhagwan’s taste in girls was similar to that of Jeffrey Epstein’s. 

     The last section of the book backtracks to 1980 when the Rajneeshees first arrived on the shores of California where they infiltrated and took over a new age church. Considering the millions of dollars Rajneesh had brought over from India, you might wonder why they felt a desire to do such a thing. They had enough money to buy their own land and build their own church without having to dispossess anybody of their own space. But the beach-front chuch had luxurious grounds and beautiful architecture as well as a senile minister who had fallen in with Rajneesh while traveling in India. More importantly, the sanyasins used this as a test run for later taking over the town of Antelope. While this is an important part of the Rajneesh story, the internal affairs of a new age church’s board of directors is not exciting to read about. It is made worse because the author writes as if he can’t wait to finish writing so he can go home and do something more exciting like mowing the lawn or watching TV. 

     In fact, most of the writing in this book is dull. The story of this dangerous cult that fell apart before its leaders got chased out of America is interesting enough on its own to keep a reader engaged. But the writing is dry and lifeless. A fascinating story gets turned into a work of journalistic mediocrity. It’s like listening to somebody making a speech in an unemotional, dead monotone. Aside from that problem, it would have been nice to learn more about the biographies of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and Ma Anand Sheela since almost nothing about their lives previous to the cult is mentioned. 

     The Rajneesh Chronciles is one of those books where the story is good enough to stand on its own  while the delivery is subpar enough to make reading it a chore. Anyhow, most reasonable people would consider Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and Ma Anand Sheela to be grifters, but maybe they really did understand the Truth with a capital T. That Truth has nothing to do with spiritual enlightenment and everything to do with an understanding of human nature and the world we live in. The Truth is that a vast number of people are suckers and sheep and are easily led around by people who take advantage of them out of pure selfishness. Gurus like Rajneesh are enlightened enough to know that these people will gladly give away their money and their freedom of mind if it means access to unlimited sex and religious experience. When the infallible teacher arrives with a taste of what it is they want, they get trapped and the ones doing the trapping don’t have their best interests in mind. Freedom means being neither predator nor prey. Maybe that is the ultimate form of enlightenment. 

     

 

Book Review: Conspiracy: Why the Rational Believe the Irrational by Michael Shermer

Conspiracy:

Why the Rational Believe the Irrational

by Michael Shermer

      Did you know that the September 11 hijackers were given visas upon arrival by high level CIA agents? And nobody knows where Robert F. Kennedy was on the day John F. Kennedy got shot. Hilary Clinton uses email to send coded messages about trafficking children through a pizzeria in Washington D.C. The moon landing was a hoax. Global warming is a hoax. The Jews are using space lasers to cause global warming to turn the public against the oil companies. Osama bin Laden was not a real person; he was an actor who lives in Miami. The airplanes that crashed into the World Trade Center on September 11 were a hologram. Bigfoot is a man who escaped from the CIA’s MKUltra mind control program and the authorities are suppressing the truth by telling us he is only a legend. Princess Di was assassinated. Elvis Presley is still alive; people have seen him hitchhiking and if you rearrange the letters of his name it spells “lives”.

Sooner or later we all hear ideas like these and most of us roll our eyes and think ”How could anybody be stupid enough to believe this nonsense? They must be mentally ill.” Suppose somebody tells you that people who believe in conspiracy theories are neighter stupid nor insane and suppose that person is also a scientist and journalist with a background in psychology. The conspiracy theorists would invariably say that he is one of THEM and is trying to conceal the actual truth that the secret cabal that runs the world doesn’t want you to know. The rationalists, however, would would want to hear how he explains the psychology of conspiracy theorists and that is what we get in Michael Shermer’s Conspiracy: Why the Rational Believe the Irrational.

There is a difference between conspiracies and conspiracy theories. Conspiracies involve two or more people plotting to use deceit or dishonesty for a specific purpose which mostly involves making money or forcing some kind of political change. Shermer rightly points out that conspiracies are happening all the time and all around us. Two men making plans to rob a bank are conspiracists. It was a conspiracy when Donald Trump’s supporters spread disinformation to convince people that the 2020 election was stolen. A conspiracy theory, on the other hand, is a story told to explain inconsistencies or in real events. People make connections between things that aren’t connected or they fill in information gaps with fantasies. Sometimes contradictory accounts of events cause speculation that the official story as told by the media is a deception meant to suppress what is really going on. To be honest, there really are times when the media does that, sometimes it’s deliberate and sometimes it isn’t.

Michael Shermer doesn’t save the best for last. The most important and interesting part of the book where he examines the reasons why people believe in conspiracy theories is at the front. He draws on social and evolutionary psychology as well as the scientific method to make his case. Conspiracy theories are a form of backwards rationalization. The scientific method demands that we gather evidence and use it to draw a conclusion that explains the evidence. That conclusion is then subject to tests of veracity by other scientists. It isn’t a perfect system but it is the best we’ve got at this time. Conspiracy theorists start with a claim and then seek out or fabricated evidence to prove it. If the evidence doesn’t support the claim or legitimate counter-evidence is provided, the conspiracy theorists don’t abandon the claim or adjust it to fit their evidence as they should. Instead they defend the claim and seek out more evidence to support it. No matter how many times they get disproven they will never abandon the faulty claim.

Shermer points out that the human mind did not evolve to perceive reality and instead evolved for survival in a potentially hostile environment. This means our ability to rationalize is intact, but it is inaccurate and distorted. It is like saying a car with a damaged engine is still a car and it is a car that drives but it doesn’t drive as well as it should. Conspiracy theories are a form of rationality, but they are rational in a way that maximizes our fight or flight response rather than giving us a clear perception of reality. We don’t live in the jungle anymore and we don’t need those survival instincts like we once did. Learning to think scientifically, however, does not guarantee that we won’t draw false conclusions or believe in things that aren’t true, but it does increase our chances of reaching realistic conclusions.

Shermer outlines three main reasons people believe in conspiracy theories in the most interesting section of this book. One has to do with tribalism and group identity. When people think of belonging to a group as more important than individualism or truth, they tend to say they believe in things they don’t really believe. A lot of MAGA supporters don’t actually believe that the election in 2020 was stolen, but they say they do because they fear being ostracized by their group. Likewise, a lot of Nazis in Weimar, Germany did not believe the Jews were part of a plot to conquer the world, but they agreed to it because they valued membership in the Nazi party more than they valued truth. There is an overwhelming amount of sociological data that supports this thesis epecially regarding religious or political affiliation.

Another further problem is proxy conspiracy theories. A person who doesn’t trust the government is more likely to believe that John F. Kennedy was assassinated by the CIA, Are 51 is secretly hiding UFOs, or that the Bush administrated orchestrated the September 11 terrorist attacks. The conspiracy theory acts as a localized substitute for the broad belief that the government is deceitful and can’t be trusted. Confirmation bias plays a large role in this error of rationality, especially since a person who believes one conspiracy theory is more likely to believe other conspiracy theories, specifically the ones that pertain to their particular preoccupations. Of course, most people would agree that our government is deceitful and corrupt but most of these same people are not conspiracy theorists. But what this proves is that most people have the potential to fall into the rabbit hole of irrational thinking. In fact even the most rational and logical among us probably already have at some point in their lives. No one is immune from believing in conspiracy theories.

Yet another explanation for conspiracy theories comes from evolutionary psychology in the form of constructive paranoia. During early periods of evolution, the human mind adapted to be overly cautious about encountering danger. It was better to be paranoid by mistakenly thinking a boulder was a grizzly bear than to not be paranoid and think a grizzly bear is a boulder. Running away from a boulder is harmless while running away from a bear can save your life so it better to err on the side of caution. In the modern world, people believe chemtrails are being used to brainwash us, black helicopters are spying on us, vaccines are being used to inject tracking devices into our bodies, and communists are poisoning our drinking water with fluoride. All of these theories are demonstrably false. Besides, why use black helicopters to spy on people when we have the internet that does a more efficient job at a much lower cost? Data mining isn’t even kept secret; tech companies openly admit to surveilling us. But the issue here is that conspiracy theories can acts as a defense against perceived dangers whether those dangers are real or fantasy. We live in a world full of dangers and your average person can’t always tell which ones are true existential threats. That is why people become paranoid over things like immigrants, unfamiliar religions, or new technologies.

Other topics covered in this book are the personality types of conspiracy theorists (usually people who feel alienated from the power structure), the history of conspiracy theories, the history of real conspiracies, and how to tell the difference between conspiracies and conspiracy theories. One thing to remember here is that the more people who are involved in a conspiracy, the less likely it is to be successful and likewise the more elaborate a conspiracy theory is the less likely it is to be true. Occam’s Razor is one of the greatest tools we have for the evaluation of reality. Furthermore, humans are story tellers and we use narratives to make sense of the world. Science and rationality are complex, abstract, and boring for most people so they fall back on the default mentality of story telling to make sense of things. If an explanation sounds like a mythology, a fairy tale, or a Hollywood movie, it is probably a conspiracy theory and not true. I would go as far as to say that conspiracy theories are urban legends, a modern form of mythology or folklore. People once used the invisible world of supernatural creatures to explain the workings of a world they didn’t understand; now people invent stories about the people in power, working secretly behind the scenes, for the same purpose. Religious people may be more susceptible to conspiracy theories than the rest of us. Anomalies get explained, confusions get cleared up, and that is done in a way that obscures reality and truth or ignores it completely.

As stated earlier, the initial chapters are the most interesting and useful. The case studies and histories are also worth reading. My only problem with the early chapters is that if you are familiar with Michael Shermer through his podcasts, columns in Scientific American, his Ted Talks and TV appearances, or his work as editor in chief of Skeptic magazine, there isn’t anything new to be found here. Otherwise the chapter on how to talk to conspiracy theorists is weak. It reads like the kind of advice you find in pop psychology self-help books like How to Win Friends and Influence People and doesn’t actually offer any helpful advice. I tend to avoid talking to conspiracy theorists anyways because it always ends up being a waste of mental energy. And while I can accept Shermer’s claim that conspiracy theorists are sane and rational people, the idea does have its limitations. When I hear from people that believe the world’s events are controlled by the Illuminati, the Zionist Occupied Government, the New World Order, or the Bilderberg Group who are actually shape shifting lizards from outer space or that the deceased John F. Kennedy Jr. will appear on stage at a Rolling Stones concert and announce that Donald Trump has been secretly reinstated as president according to a secret clause in the 25^th amendment to the Constitution, I have to wonder if the limits of sanity and rationality have been crossed. Who would be stupid enough to believe these things? But as a book, it is well laid out and organized. It is clear in its claims and supporting evidence and works as a solid, comprehensive guide to the subject matter. As such, it’s probably better for someone who is new to this field of study since it is so accessible to the general readier.

Conspiracy is a good book and it definitely needs to be more widely read, especially in this day and age when the internet is being used to spread disinformation at an alarming rate. And for those who think that conspiracy theories are harmless, think again. A tradition of anti-Semitism has led to mass murders all throughout Western history. The Great Replacement Theory resulted in the riot in Charlottesville and a mass shooting at a synagogue in New Zealand. Pizza Gate led to a man shooting up a pizzeria in Washington D.C. because he thought there were children imprisoned in the basement. Donald Trump’s Great Lie resulted in an attempted coup in the Capitol to overturn a legitimate election. So many conspiracy theories have resulted in violence and in some cases extreme acts of mass murder such as the Holocaust during World War II. Hannah Arendt has said that conspiracy theories are a necessary condition for totalitarian governments to thrive. You might think it’s harmless to believe that Elvis is till alive or that UFOs are real, but if you get polio because you refused a vaccine on the grounds that vaccines are being used to brainwash and control the population, you might stop and wonder where you went wrong.

 

Book Review & Analysis: Scar Lover by Harry Crews

Scar Lover

by Harry Crews

      It’s better to burn out than to fade away. Or so sang Neil Young in his classic song “My My Hey Hey”, a tribute to Sid Vicious even though the name is changed to Johnny Rotten to fit the rhyme scheme of the lyrics. So when reading the earlier works of Harry Crews, you might be forgiven for thinking the Southern Gothic master of grit lit would be more likely to burn out. He came from a rough town and lived a rough life on a steady diet of whiskey and cocaine. But when reading Scar Lover, one of his last novels, you find that he faded away instead.

This novel is full of scars in a similar way to how his earlier novel A Feast of Snakes use ubiquitous snakes as a literary device. The main character, Pete Butcher, doesn’t have any visible scars. Instead he has a self-inflicted mental scar due to an accident when he hit his younger brother Jon in the forehead with a hammer, leaving a scar there and causing permanent brain damage to the poor kid, kind of like an unintentional lobotomy. Jon got put away in an institution and their parents died in a fire while trying to sell a pig to raise enough money to support Jon. So Pete blames himself for the demise of the family. He becomes sullen and withdrawn, indulging in self-hatred, pushing away anyone who tries to get close to him. An elderly man named Mr. Winekoff who is kindly and friendly, but also nosy and a bit daft tries to bring Pete out of himself and Pete doesn’t react with kindness. But Mr. Winekoff (Is that meant to sound like “wank off”?) serves as a bridge between Pete and the family next door where an attractive young woman learns about Pete from Winekoff’s gossip. Her name is Sarah and she introduces herself to Pete. Later they fall in love and he moves in with her and her parents, a hard working and honest man named Henry Leemer who makes a living by chopping wood and her mother Gertrude Leemer who returns from the hospital after having her breasts amputated because of cancer.

When Henry Leemer dies, Sarah and her mother are faced with the dilemma of what to do with his body and how to use their inheritance money. This is when George and Linga become important to the story. George is Pete’s friend and collegue; together they share a miserable job unloading freight cars. George is Jamaican and has horseshoe scars branded across his back which he believes give him magical powers. His wife Linga is an obeah woman and cult leader with colorful, decorative scars all over her face. I can’t tell if they are actually tattoos or not as Harry Crews doesn’t explain it in much detail. Anyhow, Gertrude Leemer decides to put Linga in charge of the funeral ceremony and the disposal of Harry Leemer’s body. Unfortunately, Linga is a grifter and Gertrude Leemer has also put her in charge of managing the inheritance money. On the good side though, Linga has also agreed to help reunite Pete with his lost brother Jon.

So far so good. The character development is strong. It deals with flawed but realistic people who have realistic dilemmas. Pete is a broken man but he isn’t beyond repair and Sarah has the strength of character to help him with what he needs. Henry and Gertrude are unique and strong in their own ways as are George and Linga.

But the narrative kind of fizzles out when Linga enters the story. Initially Harry’s corpse had been taken to the morgue, but Gertrude decides she wants to cremate him herself. So Linga and her husband George take Pete to the funeral parlor to retrieve Mr. Leemer’s dead body. For some reason I can’t comprehend, Crews stretches this segment out to an unnecessary length. They go on a long car ride to the funeral home, take lots of breaks to smoke weed, and carry the body out to the car. In fact, the narrative stops for their pot smoking breaks so many times it becomes redundant without serving any useful purpose in the story. For all its detail and page count, this stretch of prose doesn’t enhance either the character development or the plot in any way that is necessary. We do learn how domineering Linga can be and how she uses threats and intimidation to get her way, but this could have been said more effectively with less wordage. The same can be said for the funeral ceremony they hold in the swamp. It’s all a bit morbid and macabre, but Crews doesn’t overdo those elements in order to keep the characters’ humanity in the forefront. But again, this passage is extended unnecessarily so much so that it would have had a more powerful impact if it had been shorter.

In the end, all conflicts get confronted and Harry Crews demonstrates how a woman who is ordinary but strong and sincere can work the magic that is needed to bring out the best in a man, namely her future husband Pete Butcher. In contrast, Linga, the exotic obeah woman who practices magic, is nothing but a money grubbing leech and her magic is nothing but a smokescreen to hide her true nature. Crews shows us how the real power of a woman is in the everyday world right in front of our eyes. It doesn’t dazzle the senses, but it is potent and it is there if we look for it. The biggest problem I had with all this was that the story has no real confrontational climax at the end. As the story goes on, it is clear that Pete doesn’t believe in Linga’s magic and sees her for the con artist she is, but he never actually gets into a fight with her over it and the end of the story is weak as a result.

Scar Lover is obviously the work of an aging author. It doesn’t have the manic energy or the shock value of Harry Crews’ earlier novels. But you can tell he has grown as a person by the time he wrote it. While the themes and content are more mature, the actual prose suffers from a lack of energy. It’s still Harry Crews and his fans will probably find something to like here, but it doesn’t live up to his earlier works. It’s best if you read some of those before picking this one up.