A World at War

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

In the New York Times Book Review, William Vollmann ended his mostly positive review by proclaiming that, while Anthony Doerr is a talented writer, All the Light We Cannot See is not literature, only great entertainment. I am not sure what qualifies as literature in Vollman's opinion. But for me, a novel that can use the lives of two protagonists and a small circle of supporting characters to explore an event of the magnitude of World War II, and wrap it in in a thoughtful and emotional story that explores universal themes, is literature. That is exactly what All The Light We Cannot See does.

The story begins shortly before the war, and introduces the pair at its center, a French girl and a German boy. Marie Laure is blind and motherless, and lives in spare apartment in Paris with her doting father, a locksmith who works at the Museum of Natural History. A curious, quiet, intelligent girl, Marie Laure never falls into victimhood thanks to her father. A gentle, kind, and creative man himself, Etienne encourages his daughter's precocity and imagination, creating intricate puzzles for her to solve, building an exquisite miniature replica of her neighborhood to foster her independence, and providing a braille version of Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Their bond is beautiful and will both prepare and sustain Marie Laure through the dark days of the war that will deprive her of so much.

The other half of the pair is young Werner Pfennig, an orphan raised in a foundling home in the industrial Ruhr by a kindly Frenchwoman. Werner too is precocious, a boy with a mechanical mind. His genius and curiosity save him from the coal mines that took the life of his father, but these gifts will dangerously entrap him, eventually leading him to become a weapon of the Third Reich. When we first meet him, he and his wise younger sister, Jutta, are listening to a radio the clever Werner has salvaged. Deep in the night they hear the voice of a Frenchman, "the professor," who teaches them lessons in science, piquing their young minds. Through Werner, we see how a good person can be manipulated, molded, and used in the name of a greater cause. (Though of course, anyone who has seen the effect of hate television and radio on our own society over the past thirty years doesn't have to wonder how it happens.)

As the story unfolds, war comes and we see its effects on the lives of Marie Laure and Werner--as well as those they love--including the choices that confront them, the losses they suffer, the lessons they learn, and the true selves they discover buried beneath the terror and hardship of their days. There is also a monster--an officer who embodies the single minded destruction of the "1,000-Year Reich." There is humor and heartbreak, courage and denial, sacrifice and betrayal. There is beauty and poetry, terror and wonder, love and community. Doerr, too, explores responsibility--to ourselves, to our fellow man, to morality, knowing what is right and what is wrong, what is evil and what is good. His story will wrap itself around your heart, make you angry over the lives and the promise lost by this horrible time, and will make you marvel at the power of people to make a difference. All are lessons that sadly seem lost today, when the very idea of community is anathema to a portion of our citizenry.

Amazon and Indie Next chose the book as a best of the month, and it is definitely one of my favorites of 2014. And yes, it is great entertainment, too.

Help!

So the film version of the cultural tsunami The Help landed in theaters last week to a host of mostly good reviews. Its a feel-good story, and Americans certainly love feel good. Like a spoonful of sugar, it helps us confront difficult themes—racism, oppression, cowardice, and courage—go down easy.

Poignant and humorous, The Help is thoughtful entertainment. I liked the book, looked forward to the movie, and wasn't disappointed. If it's introduced some readers to the pain, fear, and common indignities suffered in the pre-Civil Rights Movement South, that's all to the good. Unfortunately, too many Americans know too little about history. And if there is one thing about history, it sure likes to repeat itself if we let it (e.g. "the Civil War wasn't about slavery" nonsense).

But while there are many who love the book, there are also a number of its detractors, especially from what the right would call the "liberal elite," (it hurts to write those words) such as Professor Melissa Harris-Perry, a wonderful MSNBC commentator.

I respect Ms. Harris-Perry enormously. She's very smart and very savvy, but I was disappointed in her rant about The Help with Lawrence O'Donnell on The Last Word the day the movie opened (8/10). She described the film as a "happy race" movie, that "wasn't" about black women. She called the maids "props" in the lives of the white women, and claimed that the story, "reduces racism to this sentimental notion." Sorry, what?

She basically considered it to be blonde mean girls with Southern accents behaving badly. She brought up lynchings, rapes, beatings, murders—all terrifying realities in the Jim Crow South that were not at the forefront of the film, though they were mentioned or eluded to. It's true, the movie wasn't Mississippi Burning. But it certainly wasn't Birth of a Nation. Harris-Perry overlooked the point about the soul-destroying pain of daily humiliation, of being made to feel invisible and second class every moment of your back-breaking life. Those wounds, while not visible, don't really heal. And those wounds are also carried through generations. I also think she denigrates the courage and strength of both the black maids willing to speak out despite their terror, and that of Skeeter, the young white woman determined to bring their story to light—a quest that puts her at odds with her society, her friends, and even her own family.

Harris-Perry's response reminds me of the whole brouhaha over the Academy Award-winning foreign film Life Is Beautiful. "How can you make a 'comedy' about the Holocaust?! There is no humor in the Holocaust—the film trivializes this profound tragedy," critics hurled. Just as every exploration of the Holocaust does not have to be Shoah, not every depiction of the Jim Crow South has to be Eyes on the Prize. I don't believe either The Help or Life Is Beautiful trivialize their subject matter; I think each helps humanize it and offers a sense of identification and empowerment. You hate the suffering of the main characters, you despise the inhumanity of their oppressors. You weep for the injustice of their lives.

I was also taken aback by another of the film's criticisms, this one voiced in the mostly positive review in the New York Times:

"What does remain, though, is the novel’s conceit that the white characters, with their troubled relationships and unloved children, carry burdens equal to those of the black characters."

Huh? Showing that the white women didn't lead perfect lives only underscored the point that they were far from the superior beings they believed themselves to be. And delusional—they didn't consider themselves racist because they didn't carry a rope.

At a time when we seem to be refighting the Civil War with words rather than guns, it's worthwhile to be reminded that while we have made progress, we are not a post-racial society. It takes courage to achieve real change—the courage to speak out despite the cost and the courage to reach out, to listen, and to spread that knowledge. I think in it's own small way, that is what The Help attempts to do.

Readin', 'Ritin', Ridiculous

"American education is going to be reformed until it rolls over and begs for mercy."

Thus began Gail Collins' amusing and ultimately horrifying column on the state of our public education in the 5/11/11 New York Times. As a proud product of public schools, the great niece of an educator, and the sibling of a public high school teacher, I'm enraged. I'm tired of teacher and union bashing, of the disdain of the Very Serious People (as Digby and Krugman call them) in politics and the media towards public education, including the Times. (I guess they still aren't over those scorching negotiations with their unions all those years ago.) I'm enraged that so much of education is about teaching to the test or not offending special interests, from minorities (see the revised Huckleberry Finn replacing all references to the "n word" with "slave") to Bible thumpers (no, creationism is not a theory equal to evolution.)

Just like all those conservatives who hate government but want to control it (can you say feeding at the public trough and sharing the oats with your rich BFFs), it's amazing how many people who know little about public education—whether it's never having taught or never having attended public school—believe they have the solution: privatization via charter schools. Bullpucky. No Child Left Behind, vouchers, charters—they are all designed to destroy public education and dumb down children, who will be the next generation of voters (if they bother to register when they turn eighteen, that is). Movies like the highly hyped Waiting for Superman tell only part of the story—the part meant to get your blood boiling at all those lazy, privileged dumb teachers who hide behind their unions to keep their jobs.

Education is in trouble, no doubt about it. I've seen the difference between what I learned and was required to do in school and what has passed for education for my stepdaughter, a senior at one of the city's three elite public schools. I've listened to the complaints of my brother and his colleagues, and watched as their hands have been increasingly tied when it comes to the classroom. I blame the changes in our culture, combined with the traditional anti-intellectualism inherent in our national character. And I blame those who hate anything public and those who want privatization for profit for fostering common mistrust and hatred of teachers, one of the last bastions of strong unionism left.

Diane Ravitch, a former assistant secretary of education, was an early proponent of standards and a leading voice in the reform movement. In her must-read book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System, she repudiates her former beliefs and explains why the latest reform craze is bad for public education, bad for students and teachers, and bad for the future of our democracy. She takes on NCLB, privatization, overtesting and the notions of tying teacher performance and pay to test results, the philosophy behind the latest "reforms," and the the billionaires funding it. She doesn't forget the media sycophants eager to bash teachers and the current state without looking deeper into the issues, and especially into the motives of all those rich saviors and the results of their beneficence.

It frightens me to watch states like Florida, Idaho, and others determined to push teachers out of the classroom and replace them with computer screens. Sorry, but you can't get the same kind of knowledge exchange that happens between a flesh and blood adult and a student. A computer screen and a dumbed down course isn't quite the spark to ignite latent curiosity. It just makes money for the people who create the online courses. And don't even get me started on cheating. Rampant enough among students with live teachers, it can only be easier when there is little to ensure that work was actually done by the student.

And then there are those farsighted legislators in place like Texas, who don't think all children should be educated or don't believe that teachers need any experience to teach, or the new Tea Party governor in Maine who wants to keep wages low by decreasing the minimum wage for teenagers and removing the limits on the number of hours they can work each week. When you've worked 40 hours a week, how can you possibly care enough to stay awake in class. But this is America! Of course for-profit can do it better! They have no other incentive besides the best interests of children, right? If you believe that, I've got a bridge to sell to you.

The goal is to keep people people ignorant and economically frightened. If you don't know, you can't fight back, and it's easy to confuse with lies that tap into base fear. Democracy depends on an educated citizenry. But then who wants democracy anyway?

Embrace the dark (book that is)

I love books. I love to sell books.  One of the greatest pleasures is reading a great book and sharing the joy with colleagues, friends, family. So it really bugs me when I hear people making snap judgments—"Eeeeewwww. Who wants to read a book about __________."

Who wants to read a book about a Catholic priest accused of molesting a child?
Who wants to read about the health care crisis?
Who wants to read about a sex offender?
Who wants to read about a bad marriage that ends in murder/suicide?
Who wants to read about . . . ?

Well, when you put it that way . . . Pshaw. Are we such trained seals that all we can see is the ew factor? I don't want to think so. I hope not. Because those "who wants to read" mentioned above are some great books.

The Catholic priest? That's Jennifer Haigh's new novel, Faith, just out now. I love Haigh; she's a terrific writer who has reached and grown with each book. Yes, a priest is accused of a heinous crime. But that is only the entry point into a story about family, society, religion, choice, and yes belief, especially in ourselves and those we love. Once I started, I couldn't put the book down. That doesn't happen often these days.

The health care crisis? That would be Lionel Shriver's So Much for That, a gripping, darkly humorous, and poignant story that asks the question: how much is one life worth? It puts a human face on the high cost of for-profit insurance and it's not pretty, but it sure is well done and it sure makes you angry. Many critics did not get this book. Poor them. But the nominating committee for the National Book Awards did. Though it didn't win the top prize, it got the notice it richly deserves. I raced through this one too. So deceptively easy to read, so devastating in its message. Yet hopeful too. Really.

The sex offender? That's Russell Banks' new novel, Lost Memory of Skin, coming out in October. A heartbreaking portrait of our punitive modern society, it's the story of a young sex offender named the Kid, and the sociology professor who befriends him. A portrait of the outsider caught in circumstances greater than himself, it's a novel that will make you sad, make you angry, and make you think. You won't look at shows like To Catch a Predator in the same way again.

The marriage/murder-suicide? That is the extraordinary Caribou Island by David Vann. Painful? Yes. Wrenching? Yes. Devastating? Most definitely. And a breathtaking, brilliant, insightful, intense, and powerful tale of two hurt people who can't go on yet can't let go, set against the background of the beautiful and dangerous Alaskan wilderness. Vann brings into focus the myths of rugged individuality and the empty promise of the frontier in an existential tale of unfulfilled dreams and stark reality. Vann is brilliant—the Europeans know it. Many American critics have noticed. It's time readers shared in his mastery too.

Some of the greatest books probe the darkness of human nature. They aren't easy reads, but anyone with a brain doesn't want easy as a steady diet. Novels tell us truths about ourselves, reflect the realities we don't choose but are often forced to cope with. Whether it's Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy or the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Road, Robert Stone's Outerbridge Reach, Emma Donoghue's The Room, the novels of Faulkner, James Salter, Camus, Ishiguro, and the authors listed here, deep dark fiction is challenging, exhilarating, and unforgettable. I joyfully embrace this dark world and wouldn't miss these books and writers for the world. If you want a great meaty book—it's out there waiting for you.

Depression deja vu

So this morning on NPR, I got to hear Steve Inskeep interviewing economist Joseph Stiglitz. I couldn't believe that Inskeep posited to the economist that Keynesian economics and supply side economics are basically the same. Um, no, not at all.

Mr. STIGLITZ: If you're spending money for investments to increase the productivity of the economy - infrastructure, technology, education - that has two affects. It grows the economy today, puts people back to work, but it also increases the future potential output of the economy. And when you increase output, both today and in the future, that means more tax revenues, and that means it's money well spent, even from the narrow fiscal perspective.

INSKEEP: Mr. Stiglitz, isn't that the flip side of the Republican argument - or the conservative argument, let us say - which essentially is if you want to make the economy grow, cut taxes and ultimately the people will invest the money and there'll be so much more economic growth, you'll get more tax revenue coming in. Isn't that the same argument?

Um, sorry, Steve, it is NOT the same argument. Thirty years of supply side economics have proven that cutting taxes on the wealthy does not produce more investment, more jobs, and more revenue. Supply side economics have resulted in the teeny tiny top of the pyramid getting richer and hoarding that money—or investing it in places like Cambodia and China, with fewer environmental regulations, lower wages, few to no employee protections, etc. We have the highest unemployment rate since the Great Depression and instead of encouraging deficit spending—building bridges, reinforcing levees, fixing roads (from city streets to the interstates), keeping teachers in the classroom and cops on the street—a solid third of this country, those who will believe that Obama is the antichrist and that all democrats are terrorists, led by the Very Serious People of the media (those who make a lot of money like Inskeep himself) argue we need austerity. We can't afford to spend more now to invest in the future, spur growth, and get the economy growing.

Amazing that the WPA and the CCC among the many other govt established programs put people to work, put money back into the economy, and actually produced things of lasting value, from the hiking trails in many national parks to the TVA to a wall that still protects the erosion of a hill in my hometown neighborhood. Deficit spending worked because 1) we had a president who stood up to his enemies and the naysayers, and 2) the hurting middle class identified with the "unfortunate many, rather than the fortune few," as renowned New Deal historian Eric Rauchway writes in his terrific short history, The Great Depression & the New Deal: A Very Short Introduction. 


Rauchway offers a concise and cogent overview and analysis of the events that led to the Depression and the government's response under both Hoover and FDR. It is just disheartening that a number of people in this country believe that we have too much regulation and that government is the problem, the enemy holding us back from overwhelming prosperity.  Do we really want to go back to a time of child labor, no workplace safety, no minimum wage, no meat inspectors, unfettered polution—to unchecked social Darwinism. Wasn't the crash of 2008 warning enough?

Rauchway reveals that Roosevelt wasn't really a traitor to his class. He wanted to preserve our democracy and the institution of capitalism and protect it from the forces sweeping across Europe, from Bolshevism to fascism. But to do so, all Americans had to have a stake in our economy.

The Roosevelt Administration wanted the market to work more equitably, to allot to workers and consumers higher wages without government's direct intervention. to achieve this end the New Deal fostered the growth of worker and consumer organizations empowered to bargain collectively, and therefore more effectively, for a better deal in the marketplace. A simple theory supported this policy: if business had grown ever more organized and therefore efficient at cutting its cost, so should the buyers of products and sellers of labor also organize and learn efficiency. 

We are a society, which I know is anathema to many Americans. It's amazing to me that we have become so cruel—so accepting of poverty, of misfortune, of torture, of greed. The bloviators on talk radio and cable news and the likes of Ayn Rand just tap into and bolster the ego's selfish nature (remember Wall Street and Greed is good?). We have gone back in time nearly a century, to refight this  battle between the haves, the have-mores, (W's base) and the rest of us. The battle for control and the ultimate prize is our democracy. Rauchway illuminates Roosevelt's convictions and his courage:At the 1936 Democratic National Convention, Roosevelt

declared war on "the privileged princes of the new economic dynasties. . . . These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power. Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power." 

Sound familiar? As he sums it up so very well:

Despite Roosevelt's care in constructing the New Deal, despite the restraint and caution and respect for American federalism of the New Deal's every measure, despite the overriding evidence in both word and deed that the Roosevelt administration came time after time to rescue American capitalism and had no intention of replacing it, Roosevelt met at best foot-dragging, often disengenuous cooperation; as the New Deal succeeded and the Depression lessened, outright hostility from members of his class who (it turned out) regarded even slight shifts in the social order as portents of Anarchy.

It is amazing and heartbreaking that, like the Civil War, we have to wage this war for fairness and economic justice and opportunity for all again. And unlike in the 1930s, when people saw themselves in their neighbor, the Americans of 2011 see themselves as better and removed from their neighbor. Many blame the unemployed for being unemployed and identify with the rich rather than realizing that tomorrow their number might be up. Though these words were spoken eight decades ago, they hold true for the U.S. in 2011:

in Madison Square Garden on October 31, he said, "Tonight I call the roll—the roll of honor of those who stood with us in 1932 an still stand with us today. Written on it are the names of millions who never had a chance—men at starvation wages, women in sweatshops, children at looms." And arrayed against them "the old enemies of peace—business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering. They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. . . . They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred. I should like to have it said of my first Administration that in it the forces of selfishness and of lust for power met their match."

If only. It's deja vu all over again, and this time, the rich have even more money, more power, more influence, and a bigger voice with which to poison and confuse a dumbed-down nation.

We Are All the Outsourced

And the latest skirmishes in the dismantling of the American working and middle classes . . .

Two articles in the New York Times today, one about employee wages being squeezed, one on the outsourcing of lawyers. Oh, for the rage of Howard Beale.

All this outsourcing began thirty years ago when blue collar manufacturing jobs moved to the unregulated, anti-environmentally protected, anti-union South. And don't forget how the most "beloved" president in American history launched the first of many salvos in the battle to destroy organized labor, firing striking air traffic controllers. But while the South prospered for a little while, the good times eventually stopped rolling. Those shuttered factories of the rustbelt were mirrored in places below the Mason-Dixon line when those solid blue-collar jobs moved to Mexico, Thailand, Vietnam, and China. We shouldn't be making televisions and clothes, the economic experts told us. We should be a nation of technocrats, idea men and women.

Fast forward to today, as increasing numbers of white collar jobs—those idea jobs—are being offshored in professions once thought sacrosanct. IT workers were hit first more than a decade ago, then the med tech guys, engineers, and banking support staff. Now, it's the lawyers' turn.

It's nice to know that, while globalization pays workers in those "rising" countries a few dimes more a week today, it is also depressing American wages—and with it Americans' pride and their hope for the future. American labor is like those beautiful, fecund marshes that Saddam Hussein drained and turned into desert. Sure, Americans aren't perfect. But they do work hard. Very hard. Yet that fact matters little to Wall Street and its shareholders. The economy has become a zero-sum game. And most of us know which side is which. Unfortunately, too many citizens are so confused or willfully ignorant or blinded by greed or the false dream that, well, hey one day they'll be rich too, to fully appreciate what is happening even as they watch their own livelihoods erode. But why truly understand when it's easier to blame a "usurper socialist" faux president with a foreign-sounding name.

Who will be left to buy all those televisions and Wiis, all those smartphones and tech gear? Not the growing number of citizens scraping out a living on the salaries paid in the service industries. For years, state governments and corporations reneged on funding workers' pension funds and funneled their workers' contributions to the great rigged casino that is the markets. Instead of stabilizing taxes (or horrors, raising them on the wealthiest who benefit the most), they cut them. You can have a free lunch with all the trimmings, they told eager Americans who, like children, want everything—but don't want to have to pay for it. Now, as the gaping holes caused by their poor governance become glaring apparent in budgets written in red ink, they use the old tried and true, blaming it all on the workers and their greedy demands. Of course it's nonsense. Yet again, a gullible and blind electorate go along, saying yes! workers just expect too much.

The only winners these days are the wealthy who have gamed the system. These ruthless robber-barons are well on their way to taking America back to the time of William McKinley, economically, politically, and socially. They are supported by those on both sides of the aisle in congress who blame the unemployed and the uninsured for their plight while giving billions in corporate welfare to big agribusiness, big banks, and big pharma. It's not pretty, and it's not going to get better anytime soon, not if people vote in the very types who caused this mess over the course of four decades in the first place in the November midterms.

And so it goes.

More Workers Face Pay Cuts, Not Furloughs, New York Times August 4, 2010

Outsourcing to India Draws Western Lawyers, New York Times August 4, 2010

Defining Prosperity Down, Paul Krugman, New York Times August 1, 2010

A Sin and a Shame, Bob Herbert, New York Times July 30, 2010

Women, Afghanistan, and the Taliban

This past weekend, the New York Times ran a disturbing article entitled Afghan Women Fear Loss of Modest Gains. (I'll link at the bottom; I've become an acolyte of The Shallows, but more on that later.) During the 90s, I used to joke with the males in my family that if I'd been born in a place like Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, I'd have been stoned to death for being, well, an outspoken, independent female. I couldn't imagine being restricted in my movements, forbidden from venturing outside without a male family member. Not being able to work or go to school or take a bus alone, whenever I felt like it. But these are just a few of the depredations millions of Afghani women endured as they were forced into the shadows by the Taliban's peculiar view of Islam.

But while these women were shrouded into burkas and forgotten by the world—many of them alone, without men to protect them—somehow they survived. In an eye-opening and inspiring new book, former ABC journalist and producer Gayle Tzemach Lemmon introduces us to one of these Afghani women, a girl barely out of her teens named Kamela Sediqi who created a dressmaking business that kept her family alive, and helped support a number of others like herself. The Dressmaker of Khair Khana details how Kamela devised the idea for her home-grown business and the risks she took to make it work. Yet Kamela wasn't alone; the Taliban of course allowed women doctors—they had to since a woman cannot be touched by a non-familial male—and others to "earn a living." But only in the shadows, behind the locked doors of their homes. And one wrong move could have spelled disaster.

As we debate the pros and cons of our involvement in Afghanistan and the costs of the war, Kamela's story is a reminder of what's at stake beyond our own designs. It reveals the essential contribution millions of women—mothers, sisters, daughters just like us—offer their nation and its future; the strength and motivation, courage and audacity to create, to build, to believe. Hillary Clinton has promised we won't abandon these women again. But history is not on these women's side. Next time you wonder why we are in Afghanistan, think about Kamela and her sisters. Think about yourself and the young women you know. There are no easy answers, but as The Dressmaker of Khair Khana shows, the stakes are very, very real. Sure, these women can survive once again. But don't they deserve better from their own nation—and from us?

Watch the headlines now, and look for The Dressmaker of Khair Khana in March 2011. You won't look at Afghanistan in the same way again.

The Dressmaker of Khair Khana

Afghan Women Fear Loss of Modest Gains, NYTimes July 30, 2010