Book Review

Forbidden Knowledge:

From Prometheus to Pornography

by Roger Shattuck

     What a mess. Forbidden Knowledge: from Prometheus to Pornography, as written by Roger Shattuck, is a book by a literary scholar who knows a lot but doesn’t know what to do with what he has learned.

The question Shattuck poses is simple and clear: are there things that humans should not know? His answer from the start is a clear and succinct “Yes, absolutely.” But as the book progresses he chips away at his own conclusion and leaves the reader doubting the author’s convictions.

Shattuck starts off in the ancient world, analyzing texts from the Greek and Roman mythologies. Prometheus, who gets punished for eternity for stealing fire from the gods, is used as a framework for the rest of the book. Just as importantly, Prometheus’s sister Pandora, the one who opened the forbidden box unleashing evil into the world, is also just as prominent. The moral he derives from these stories is that Prometheus and Pandora deserved to be punished because they did what they were forbidden to do. The result is that we all have to suffer because of their transgressions. Shattuck does not thoroughly examine any alternative interpretations of these myths, which are considered by some to be archetypal heroes’ journeys. Prometheus, for example, sacrificed himself to bring useful knowledge to humanity, a step along the way of human progress. From the start of the book, Shattuck runs the risk of losing his audience. If he does not want to preach to his own choir, the tastkof the author then is to win over the resistance. His next move in the argument is not helpful.

It is not hard to see a connection between Prometheus and Pandora to the Bible. Prometheus is an obvious progenitor of Jesus Christ, among hundreds of others. Pandora easily predicts the transgression of Eve in the Garden of Eden. He draws the same overly simplistic conclusions from the Bible that he got from Greek mythology: stay in your place or you will get punished and bring immense harm to everybody else in the world. This amounts to little more than circular logic. Even worse, Shattuck’s religious bias comes out into the open, freely displaying that, to him, dogma, belief, and obedience are more important than rational inquiry or exploration of ideas. To be fair, Shattuck’s analysis is more literary than theological, therefore he gets off the hook for not merely being a Bible-thumping, knuckle-dragging conservative. Up to a point, he does put some thought into what he is writing. But another further problem creeps into the text here. Just what does the author mean by “forbidden knowledge”?

Regardless, Shattuck takes a quick flyover of the Middle Ages to bring, what he calls the Wife of Bath Syndrome into his argument, the meaning of this being that when you tell someone that an act is forbidden, that makes them want to do it even more. This is derived from Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. This makes an easy transition to John Milton.

Shattuck first takes issue with Milton for his poem Areopagitica, a piece that celebrates and vindicates free speech. Then he goes into a fairly detailed analysis of Paradise Lost. We all know the story of Adam and Eve, but Milton famously brought the characters of Satan and Eve into full three-dimensionality. This isn’t the part that Shattuck fixates on though. After taking Eve to task for eating the forbidden fruit, committing the sin of disobedience, he makes an exaggerated claim, based on a stanza from the epic poem, stating that people should learn but never more than they need to know. Shattuck keeps beating this same drum throughout the rest of the book without ever analyzing it, testing it, or examining its useful application in practice. In one paragraph he even goes so far as to say the Hegelian triadic method of analysis involving thesis-antithesis-synthesis should be dropped for a dyadic thesis-conclusion method of argumentation, meaning counter-arguments and analytical reasoning should be abandoned in favor of argument by authority and acceptance of unproven axioms. Authorities became authorities because they were right, therefore authorities can never be wrong so just do as you are told and don’t ask questions unless you already know the answer.

What follows is analyses of several classic literary texts. Goethe’s Faust, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and Emily Dickinson. Like in the author’s discourse on Milton, a thorough breakdown of themes and literary stylizations are given, followed by some references back to Prometheus, Pandora, and Eve. The passages on Emily Dickson are especially problematic because they don’t expressly address the theme of forbidden knowledge. Shattuck actually praises Dickinson for not marrying the man who loved her. She follows Milton’s dictum that you should never know more than what you need to know. Dickinson is a role model for Shattuck; he gives her a patronizing pat on the head while telling her she is the good little girl he believes she should be. His reasoning behind celebrating her virtue is that she wrote a poem that he liked. The discussion gets no more complicated than that. This begs the question, what does this have to do with forbidden knowledge? Is marriage forbidden knowledge? Is marriage even a form of knowledge?

The most exciting part of this train wreck is the chapter on Albert Camus’s The Stranger. While Shattuck has a slightly different take on the book than my own, he claims that Meursault is a man who lives without any self-knowledge or self-reflection while my interpretation was more in line with traditional existentialism which means he goes through life refusing to make choices, we both agree that The Stranger is the most misinterpreted book in literary history. A lot of readers fail to recognize that Meursault is an unreliable narrator who lies to the audience and to himself as well. Also a lot of readers fail to see that he is not being sentenced to death for not crying at his mother’s funeral, as so many seem to think based on the lawyer’s testimony, but he is sentenced to death for the cold blooded murder of an innocent man. You can only make the case that Meursault is a hero if you ignore the fact that he committed the crime. But Shattuck’s larger point is that Meursault does not awaken to himself until he is put in the prison cell where he begins to grow in self-awareness for the first time. You could make the case that Meursault has forbidden himself from self-knowledge. But doesn’t that go against Shattuck’s thesis? If Meursault had transgressed his own self-imposed limitations, in pursuance of forbidden knowledge, he probably would have avoided getting himself into the trouble he did. Shattuck, in the most effective argument he proposes in his book, shatters his own argument in the process.

At the end of this first section, two things stand out. One is clear, the other not so much. The clear point is that Forbidden Knowledge is a work of literary criticism more than an examination of ethics or epistemology as it is originally presented. The second, and less clear revelation, is that Shattuck’s definition of “knowledge” is fuzzily defined and broadly includes the other concepts of “actions” and “experiences”. Therefore, Faust is transgressing the law of forbidden knowledge through the act of selling his soul to the Devil and Viktor Frankenstein is doing the same with the act of creating a human life in his laboratory. Both stories are about forbidden acts, not about forbidden knowledge. Furthermore, Emily Dickinson is celebrated for remaining a virgin and Meursault is punished for murder. Although it is possible to have knowledge of marriage and murder, sometimes both in some tragic circumstances, the knowledge and the act are not the same thing. Knowing how to build a nuclear bomb is not the same as the act of building a nuclear bomb. Imagining yourself saving a baby from a burning building is not the same as the experience of saving a baby from a burning building. If so, then everybody who knows how to build a bomb would be a bomb-maker and everybody who imagined themselves rescuing a baby from a burning building would be a hero. By logical extension, most men on Earth would thereby be millionaires and porn stars and we know that isn’t the case. Reality doesn’t work that way.

So half way through, can this book get any worse? Yes it can.

The second section addresses an unusual pairing of subjects, namely science and the Marquis de Sade. In the scientific chapters, Shattuck specifically addresses genetics and the mapping of the human genome. His writing on this topic is histrionic, paranoid, and sadly misinformed. Shattuck worries that genetic engineering will lead to some kind of evolutionary disaster without taking into account that geneticists have already taken the moral implications of their science into consideration. They aren’t a bunch of back-alley kitchen chemists who fund their projects by manufacturing low-grade crystal meth in abandoned trailers in the woods of Tennessee. He calls for congressional oversight and watchdog panels even though we already have these things in place. His biggest fear is that gene editing will inevitably lead to the creation of a monster in the same way Dr. Frankenstein created his own creature. Never mind that scientists have already asked these kinds of questions before setting out on their endeavors. What is truly worrisome is that Shattuck falls back on classic literature to say that the human genome should not be mapped. It should be left alone because Pandora opened her box, Eve ate the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge, and Viktor Frankenstein created a monster that killed all his friends. We can use Shattuck’s own advice against him. He could have prevented himself from making this error in judgment by not trying to claim expertise in a scientific field that he doesn’t understand. This doesn’t mean he shouldn’t learn about science. It means he shouldn’t condemn it when he doesn’t know enough about it to make an effective judgment.

The final chapter on the Marquis de Sade is confused, muddled, and lacking in direction. Shattuck defines pornography as “works of art or literature whose sole purpose is sexual arousal”. He uses that as a starting point but then never sufficiently examines whether Sade wrote pornography or not. Considering that Sade’s oeuvre consisted of a mixture of sex, violence, and philosophy, it might not be so easy to pigeonhole him into the category of “pornography”. Sade’s lesser known works consisted of essays, novels, short stories, and plays that contain almost no sex at all in them. Furthermore, it is not obvious that Sade actually wrote with the intention of sexually arousing anybody. Most readers react to his writings with a combination of disgust, amusement, and boredom and unless you are a complete sicko, you probably won’t be sexually aroused by any of it. If Sade was a pornographer, he wasn’t a very good one. It is probably that Sade’s main intentions were to shock and offend rather than turn them into practitioners of his poorly articulated philosophy.

Shattick’s intentions in writing about Sade are not especially clear. Once again, he analyzes a lot of content without giving a definite purpose for it. He claims that reading Sade makes one take the risk of turning into a pervert or a sadist and that living in the kind of world Sade imagined would be a disaster for everybody even though such a fantasy world could not possibly exist. But do we really need to be told this? Do we really need to have someone explain to us why having sex with a mutilated baby corpse is wrong?

Shattuck’s two biggest worries are that some psychologically imbalanced people might try to imitate what Sade wrote, citing Ted Bundy and the Moors Murderers as examples since they were inspired by the Marquis. The other is that Sade might become part of the literary canon. His concern is based on the fascination that some obscure French modernist intellectuals, and Camille Paglia too, admire Sade for various reasons. It isn’t likely that Sade will ever sit comfortably in the ranks of Homer, Voltaire, and Dickens any time soon, especially not in this era of political correctness. American college students probably think a literary canon is a big gun that shoots books anyways. Most people of the internet generations don’t even have a long enough attention span to read a Sade novel.

Shattuck doesn’t think Sade should be censored, but he should be kept away from those who are potentially psychopathic, as if we can easily spot them as they grow into adulthood. Imagine the courts granting a restraining order on some twelve year old kid, preventing him from accessing 120 Days of Sodom because the judge fears it might turn him into a serial killer. By the same token, we should suppress operas by Wagner because they might inspire another Hitler. Charles Manson was inspired by Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People. Maybe we should restrict people’s access to that one too. Has Shattuck put any thought into what he is saying? And again, his critique of Sade is more about forbidden acts of sex and violence and less so about what the perpetrators of these acts actually know. Ultimately we are the ones who should be forbidden from knowing about Sade. Shattuck himself should never be forbidden from reading those books though, and why he is exempt from such restriction is never explained. I suspect it is because, like many conservatives, his moral grandstanding is a smokescreen to prevent people from thinking he actually enjoys pornography.

Forbidden Knowledge is a pointless mess. The arguments are not well-supported, terminologies are not well-defined, and logical conclusions are not drawn. It is primarily a work of literary criticism, even though a lot of the literary analysis has no direct connection to the position that the author argues for. He never addresses real issues of forbidden knowledge like the necessary secrecy of governments, corporations, the military, or espionage agencies. He also never addresses the need to keep personal data private, a necessity that is more endangered now that we have digital technology and people are willingly giving up private information to vampiric data mining companies for the sake of being popular on social media. I wouldn’t fault Shattuck for that, however, because he wrote this book before the internet became the dominant entity in our lives. Roger Shattuck has an incredible range of knowledge, but his range is too deep and not wide enough. He can’t see past his own nose. Maybe he would have done himself better by pursuing more of the forbidden knowledge he prevented himself from knowing.

Actually, considering how shallow and ignorant most Americans are these days, more people could benefit from the pursuit of knowledge rather than the pursuit of likes on the internet. There’s plenty of information out there to be known and a lot of this forbidden stuff is of trivial importance but at least it gets people interested in reading. Real knowledge consists of how to separate quality information from garbage and having what it takes to use it effectively once the reader has apprehended it. Leave censorship to cult leaders and authoritarians who exert control over people by restricting their access to information. Freedom comes from the pursuit of knowledge be it good, bad , or ugly so don’t hold yourself back just because some puritanical control freak doesn’t like whatever it is that interests you.

 

Book Review

Gravity's Rainbow

by Thomas Pynchon

     I will say the same thing about Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow that I said about another of his novels, The Crying of Lot 49. You need to read this book a minimum of three times before you can really start to get it. The first time is just to see what’s there and to familiarize yourself with the text. The second time is to identify the narrative structure and the scheme of the story. The third time is when all the fine details emerge and the book really comes to life.

What eventually does emerge, after the third time through, is a loosely-structured, picaresque story that takes place at the end of World War II. It involves an ordinary and unremarkable man named Tyrone Slothrop, who is under surveillance. The reader gets introduced into a work with a countless number of characters, subplots, situations, symbols, show tunes, and commentaries, most of which may or may not add up to a complete and comprehensible picture. If it sounds like an overwhelming mess, that’s because it is and that is also why the novel is brilliant.

As it all begins, Tyrone Slothrop’s presence is barely noticeable. He doesn’t actually show up until three quarters through the first of the four sections. What does show up is his map of London covered with stars like the ones you get in kindergarten for getting all the answers right on your homework. As we a re led to believe, Slothrop puts each star on a place where he had sex with a woman. The stars multiply rapidly and the British secret service take notice because they have a similar map with stars located in the exact same places. But the spies’ map marks all the places where German bombs fell on London. These just happen to coincide with the places where Slothrop got laid. As they monitor his map, they feed the information to a team of researchers in a former mental hospital called “The White Visitation”. The team is managed by a bitter, sexually frustrated control freak named Pointsman, a Skinnerian behaviorist psychiatric researcher who also overseas a team of psychics and mediums whose seances are used to coordinate information with the statisticians and scientists in the vicinity. They are attempting to figure out how Slothrop is able to predict, through his sexual behavior, where each German bomb will fall.

Take note of a few things in this first section. The heavy snowfall introduces the color white as a symbol of death that persists through the whole book. BDSM is introduced as a symbol of colonial domination. Behavioral psychology experiments are also used to raise the question of whether humans can be controlled or not. Connections are made between science, technology, and multinational corporations. Also, the secret service and their colleagues at the White Visitation are involved in making a movie of some sort. Other themes that are introduced are the proximate relation of opposites that never correspond in full and the circularity of life. As one scientist points out, the stars on the maps of London are supposedly a record of Slothrop’s lovemaking, the place where bombs fall, and also the places where births are given. Then of course, there is the Rocket.

One of the great things about Pynchon’s writing is that he always states his main ideas in ways that are loud and clear. That is why his novels need to be read more than once; you can not identify what is being said loudly and clearly unless you are able to recognize how this is being done and familiarity with the text is what makes this possible. In the Case of Gravity’s Rainbow, there is a scene towards the end of the first section in which the captains of German industry attend a séance. The message they get from the medium, who later dies and makes contact with the psychics at the White Visitation, is that they need to learn about synthesis and control. This is also a message to the reader that these are the main themes of the novel.

But going back to Slothrop, we learn, if his memory serves him correctly, that during his childhood a behaviorist psychologist named Laszlo Jamf conducted Pavlovian experiments on him. But instead of conditioning a dog to drool, Jamf experimented with conditioning Slothrop to get an erection in the absence of sexual stimulation. As Slothrop progressed through life, ending up at Harvard studying rocket engineering, he always had a suspicion that he was being watched by people who were keeping records of when he got aroused. Then when World War II broke out, the American military stationed him in London for an undisclosed reason. It is there that we learn the private thoughts of Pointsman, a man who is obsessed with control but impotent and unpopular with women. Pointsman, being jealous of Slothrop’s sexual prowess, assigns himself the task of destroying the bumbling American soldier.

This first section is the most clearly written part of the novel. This is significant because it is here that all the major themes and characters get introduced, later to reemerge as the narrative moves on. The writing really does follow a narrative arc, like a rainbow or the trajectory of a rocket. As this arc climbs upwards, the literary threads all begin to intertwine as a clear picture of interconnections come into view, but as it descends, the details become less clear, the characters less distinct, details become fuzzy, the themes and interconnections less certain. Slothrop comes closer and closer to solving his own riddle and then the entropy sets in full force.

What is Slothrop’s riddle? He is searching for the Nazi-manufactured V2 rocket S-Gerat with the serial number of 00000. He thinks that finding this rocket will help him solve the mystery of what happened to him when he was a child and why there always seem to be people following him and arranging the events in his life. This plot comes into sharper focus when the secret service move him, again for some undisclosed reason, to the Hermann Goering Casino on beaches of the French Riviera. Notice that Slothrop, in his quest to find the source of the V2 rockets, moves below and counter to the route they take to London; the rockets are manufactured in Peenemunde, Germany, and shipped to Holland where they are launched to land in London while Slothrop moves from London to the Mediterranean coast, then up to Zurich and onward to the northern seacoast of Germany.

While on the beach, Slothrop rescues the Dutch prostitute and spy named Katje from an attacking octopus and becomes suspicious that the situation was staged so the secret service could film a movie of it. After that, other events at the casino appear to be staged for the same reason and Slothrop’s paranoia increases. What also happens in France is Slothrop’s frequent changing of costumes begins. It should be noted that Slothrop’s behavior and personality remain constant throughout the book no matter what outfit he is wearing. In his case, the clothes do not make the man. They are only superficial differences. The surface appearance does not synthesize with Slothrop. They are two parallel lines that come close to each other but never truly connect. This is a postmodern theme that runs through the whole book.

At a party, Slothrop meets up with a black marketeer who sends him on an errand to find a smuggler named Springer in Switzerland. At this point, the scientists and spies at the White Visitation can no longer control Slothrop because they do not know where he went. Slothrop becomes a hero because he has proven, through his own individuality and initiative, that a single person can resist and even break free from control by corporate and governmental powers. Furthermore, Pynchon is possibly telling us that Slothrop achieves freedom through hedonism; his constant pursuit of sex and drugs is what leads him out of the prison of modern technocratic domination. But something else is also pulling Slothrop along the road to freedom. While in Switzerland, he obtains a file from another espionage agent that gives details about Laszlo Jamf, the S-Gerat V2 rocket 00000, and an industrially produced material called Imipolex-G. This last detail rings a bell and Slothrop thinks that if he can learn more about it, he will know everything he needs to know about himself. He leaves for Germany in search of the rocket.

Germany, in the third section of the novel, is dubbed the Zone. The Nazis have lost and the war is coming to an end. The country is in chaos as barriers and boundary lines are breaking down. Slothrop is not the only one pursuing the S-Gerat rocket. Enzian is the leader of the Zone Hereros, a group of German colonial subjects from Namibia that were saved from genocide and brought to Germany by Weissmann, the Nazi general overseeing the building of the V2 rockets in Peenemunde. Enzian has a vision that if he can get ahold of the 00000 rocket, he can start a new religion to correct and replace the false beliefs of Christianity, thereby allowing the Black Hereros to colonize Germany. Enzian also has a Russian half-brother named Tchitcherine who was sent as a Soviet linguist to develop a written alphabet for the Kirghiz languageas part of a colonialist prject. While at a ceremonial poetry reading with the Kirghiz tribesman, he hears a poem about the Kirghiz Light, a mystical flash that caused the poet who witnessed it to go blind. Was it a flash from an atomic bomb? We can never know, but Tchitcherine gets sent to Germany and he also goes in pursuit of the V2 rocket, which he believes to be the source of the Kirghiz Light, while also nurturing plans to kill his half-brother Enzian.

There is also the story of Pokler, a rocket scientist who cares nothing about Nazi politics or anti-Semitism, but also wants to help develop the rocket because he believes it to be a means of transcendence. For him, Nazism is a means to a higher end. He believes the future of the world lies in rocket science which will allow the human race to leave the planet, reaching a higher stage of civilization in outer space. But Pokler has a sexual fetish and Weissman uses it to control him; Pokler is a pedophile who molests his daughter. Weissman lets him spend time with her whenever he wants something done, but as the years go on, Pokler realizes that each time a different girl is brought to him, probably because his real daughter was killed in a concentration camp. As this realization dawns on Pokler, the novel’s arc begins its descent and things begin falling apart.

Sexual fetishism is a theme that plays out throughout the whole book. Whether it be BDSM, sex toys, incest, pedophilia, coprophagia, or any other paraphilia, the behaviorist psychologists have caught on that people can be controlled by limiting their exposure to their fetishes. The more specific the fetish, the more control can be exerted over an individual. In contrast, Slothrop is liberated because he has no specific turn ons; he simply takes whatever sexual partners come his way, therefore his sexuality is a means of liberation rather than a mechanism of control.

As Slothrop continues on a series of misadventures, all involving sex and drugs, one character criticizes him for being paranoid, meaning he sees connections between things that are not connected. Slothrop goes into reverse and starts to think that there are no connections between anything. Furthermore, he also loses interest in his pursuit of the S-Gerat rocket. Despite his waning interest, Slothrop picks up some more information from an aging, mentally unstable German actress named Margherita Erdmann. From her he learns that Imipolex-G is a plastic invented by Laszlo Jamf and used as a binding unit in the S-Gerat rocket. Jamf wanted to invent something that transcends and dominates life, so he synthesized the material without the use of carbon which is the building block of all organic life on Earth. Not only does this plastic transcend life, it also can be shaped and molded into any form you please. For this reason, Jamf gets sent to America where he conducts experiments trying to shape and mold Slothrop, and human society as well, using behaviorist psychology, turning people into plastic to be manipulated by the technocrats who control the world. Do all the references to film and cinema have something to do with this? The passage about Imipolex-G ties together all the previous references to science, technology, and industrialization from the previous parts of the book. Here we learn that World War II is all a performance being put on to make it possible for the military industrial complex to take control of the world behind the scenes. A cabal of leaders from chemical, military, energy, transportation, and pharmaceutical companies have conspired to control the rest of us who are unfortunate enough to have no access to the realms of corporate power. Governments are just a smokescreen and World War II is just a way for the multinational corporations to make money. In fact, because of this cabal, the rockets being used to bomb London were made with materials manufactured by a British corporation.

But then one character explains that Laszlo Jamf never existed; he was created in the paranoid mind of Tyrone Slothrop to help him make sense of the world he lives in. But what if that character was lying about Slothrop’s delusions? What if that character was the one who was delusional? In the works of Thomas Pynchon there are no final answers. Weren’t they really out to get Slothrop anyways? When a couple of British doctors go searching for Slothrop in a German whorehouse, they find Marvy, the fat racist redneck idiot from Texas, and castrate him thinking he is Slothrop. This was done on orders from Pointsman. If that isn’t certain enough, we at least get a sense of what sector of the American population Pynchon isn’t proud of as Marvy is the butt end of cruel jokes throughout the whole story as he deserves to be.

In the final section of the book, Slothrop has faded away out of the narrative. There are suggestions that he has turned into the Horned God Pan as he lives in the woods without clothes and plays his harmonica rather than panpipes, which he almost loses in a creek. This refers us back to the beginning when Slothrop drops his harmonica in a toilet while attending Harvard while Red and Charlie, references to Malcolm X and Charlie Parker stand by and watch as he tries to get it out in one of the grossest passages of the book. There is one further mention of Pan in later pages. Perhaps Pynchon is suggesting that freedom from the military industrial complex can be achieved by a return to nature. The 1960s counter-culture makes an anachronistic intrusion into the latter half of the text.

The final section of the book also ties back to the first section in other ways too. Slothrop is first introduced as he eats some disgusting candies with an elderly woman in her London apartment and at the end the statistician Roger Mexico deliberately ruins a dinner party by describing the most disgusting foods he can think of. This is one of the most hilarious passages and I can not describe it any way that can do it justice. Are these passages connected? Kind of, not really, but maybe. That is how the book operates. There is also the final scene where an audience is watching Hansel and Gretel being performed in a London theater, but the end of this scene takes place closer to the beginning of the book. The scheme of the book is circular, turning back in on itself in Joycean fashion.

The themes of the book are also fuzzy. We learn towards the end that Slothrop’s map may not mark places where he got laid after all. The scientists at the White Visitation try to locate all the women he slept with and are unable to do so. The only one they can find is the old lady who gave him the disgusting candy. It is possible they were misreading the situation all along. And how would that explain the parallels between Slothrop’s map and the secret service’s map? Is there something they overlooked? Again, two parallel lines that never actually join together.

Then of course, there is the story of Benny the Bulb, a seemingly randomly inserted non-sequitur of a story that explains a lot of what Gravity’s Rainbowis about. Benny is a disobedient light bulb who tries to lead a conspiracy against the company that manufactured him. But the other bulbs aren’t too bright. Haha, get it? That’s Pynchonian humor right there. They refuse to go along with him. Still, he insists on rebelling by switching off at times of his own choosing. He is the bulb that sees the truth of the world and how the industrial corporations control everything, but he is powerless to do something about it so he spend his lifetime, if light bulbs actually have life times, simmering in impotent anger. Just like so many people in the world who have reached the same place as him. But wait a minute...weren’t there other bulbs in the narrative that went out at random times? Or am I remembering something that wasn’t there? If it’s true, then were all those bulbs part of Benny’s conspiracy? If it’s not true, am I being paranoid? Am I having false memories or am I more accurate than I think? In order to understand the novel, Pynchon makes you paranoid so you can see the point he is making about paranoia.

There is so much more to Gravity’s Rainbow. It would be impossible to cover it all here. There is a bewildering amount of information, none of the plots ever reach completion, we never learn what happens to most of the characters. That is what life is like. It is impossible to tell if all the interconnections are connected or if we, like Slothrop, are using paranoia as a mechanism to make sense of the world we live in. My interpretation of it all is that Pynchon is telling us that paranoia is a normal response to a world that is consistently uncertain, incomprehensible, and without any final answers. Maybe he also means to say that a little paranoia might go a long way in making each of us, as individuals, more free. 

 

Book Review

The Soccer War

by Ryszard Kapuscinski

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Book Review

The Crying of Lot 49

by Thomas Pynchon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Book Review

The Brilliant Disaster:

JFK, Castro, and America's Doomed Invasion 

of Cuba's Bay of Pigs

by Jim Rasenberger

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Book Reviews

The Bohemian Grove and Other Retreats:

A Study in Ruling-Class Cohesiveness

by G. William Domhoff

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Book Review

Rats, Lice and History

by Hans Zinsser

     Warfare has always been a part of human existence. So has disease. What if I were to tell you that the two are inextricably linked? That is the point that science historian Hans Zinsser attempts to prove in his semi-classic study Rats, Lice and History. While he makes a sweeping and somewhat superficial survey of Western civilization, he does have enough scientific credibility to prove his point.

This book does not get off to a great start. Although written in the 1930s, the author writes with a prose that resembles Victorian era essays using baroque sentences that meander on for a bit too long with elaborate detailing and excessive description. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, I happen to like some 19^th century literature, but it feels a little out of place in the context of this mid-modern text. The first two chapters also left me wondering where the book would be going since they had almost nothing to do with rats, lice, or history. The second chapter, in particular, was a rant against modernist styles in literature where the author makes it clear that he has no appreciation for the likes of T.S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, or James Joyce.

Moving on from there, Zinsser gives a lengthy overview of trade practices, disease, and warfare as they occurred in ancient times. We hear about the usual Greeks, Romans, and Christians up through the Middle Ages to the voyages of Columbus. By this point in my life I’m getting a little bored of every history scholar writing as if the world outside of Europe didn’t exist before World War II, but I just have to accept that that is how history used to be studied. In any case, the author points out that the use of ships for trade and war did a lot to spread disease since stowaway rats carried infected fleas that regarded the sailors as nothing more than food. Yes, like it or not, people are food.

One of the strongest points of the book’s first half is that diseases often weakened and killed more soldiers than combat actually did. He even goes so far as to make the point that disease could have been a more decisive factor in fighting than military strategy, skill, or execution. Now that is an idea that should deflate the myth of the courageous warrior. The science of the matter is that having large groups of people, be they confined on boats or engaging in military campaigns, in close proximity to each other make it easy for fleas and lice to spread sicknesses throughout the population at a rapid pace. Soldiers returning home or mingling with the people they conquer spread the diseases into the civilian population and then we have epidemics like the Black Death. You have to admit the idea is plausible and with Zinsser’s background in biology, he uses his knowledge of entomology to support the point.

After about one hundred pages of what eventually sounds like a bunch of babbling about wars, the narrative really takes off as Zinsser examines historical writings to locate the first mention of typhus. There isn’t much in the historical record that corresponds with the modern understanding of typhus symptoms and its origins are murky at best, but he develops a theory, one that he admits is not strong, that typhus originated in Asia and was spread by sea merchants to Western Europe via Cyprus during the Renaissance.

From there, Zinsser takes a big leap into the subject of human-animal relationships with chapters describing lice, mice, rats, and fleas which, along with humans, form a pentangonal track for typhus to travel along. His opinion of lice is surprisingly sympathetic while his take on rats is not so hot. Lice, he claims, are actually neutral vectors that catch typhus from humans. When they reproduce, they pass the typhus on to their offspring which spread among the human population and spread the disease further amongst humans. Typhus actually kills the host lice so spreading the disease does not benefit them in any way. They are innocent vermin that just happened to get caught in the crossfire of a war between humans and a disease. Rats, on the other hand, are nothing but pests according to the author. He thinks they serve no purpose in the world other than to cause problems. They are, in fact, part of the food chain and being the scavengers that they are, their ecological function in the world is to clean up the messes left by other creature like us. That is why they thrive in places that are full of human-made garbage. Useless? I hardly think so. But regardless of what you believe, the truth is that mice carry the fleas that transmit typhus to rats and those fleas transmit typhus to humans. The humans transmit it to lice and the lice transmit it to other humans. It’s a grim way of looking at people, but we do have to be reminded from time to time that we are not the magnificent species we claim to be. We might actually be little more than a dangerous parasite if looked at from Planet Earth’s point of view. In any case, this portion of the book is fascinating and brilliant; you can really see Zinsser at his best in these passages.

The rest of the book is all about typhus and he gets around to pointing out how bad of a problem it was during World War I. This brings up an interesting dilemma. If this book was inspired by the aftermath of World War I, is it fair to say that the event overly influenced the author in his analysis and conclusions? Or did the post-war realities shine a light onto a previously unexplored matter of human history, medical science, and entomology? I can’t say for myself because I know absolutely nothing about typhus or the science of epidemics. But I can say this book made me look at humanity in a new light which is saying a lot considering the thousands of books I have read in my lifetime.

Since the 1930s, scientists have learned a lot about typhus and other illnesses so it is fair to assume that some of the information in this book is dated. But Rats, Lice and History poses a significant question about human nature and our history. If wars are the primary way in which diseases spread and become epidemics or pandemics, wouldn’t it make sense to fight less of them or even eliminate them altogether? I have no idea how we could accomplish that, but if that question is the biggest takeaway you can get from this book, then the message transcends any dated scientific ideas it may contain. I’d say that the way Hans Zinsser presented just enough evidence to make that question stick in my mind is reason enough for it to be worth reading, even almost one hundred years after its initial publication.