LITERATURE / Ron Jacobs : Crime Fiction and Capitalist Reality

Image from ForumFree.

Crime fiction and capitalist reality

Noir does not pretend that the society its protagonists operate in is worth saving. It's just the only one we have.

By Ron Jacobs / The Rag Blog / June 4, 2013

The novel is generally acknowledged to be a bourgeois form of literature. It wasn't until there were enough literate people with time for leisurely reading that this entertainment came along.

The crime novel reflects the bourgeois obsession with order and usually represents the concerns of that class. There is a crime against an individual that shakes up bourgeois society. A detective from the police force or a private investigator hunts down the perpetrator through a series of clues, makes the arrest and all is well again. Agatha Christie's novels are perfect examples of this.

Then there are the tough guy novels featuring men like Mike Hammer. In this type of story, the protagonist easily forsakes the niceties of bourgeois society in his crime solving. Naturally, this alienates the police and the bourgeoisie, but he still gets the job done, captures (or kills) the criminal, and allows the middle class to get on with their lives.

This representation is occasionally turned around and the protectors of order -- the police and courts -- are the criminals and by association so is the system they work for.

This is noir. Noir does not pretend that the society its protagonists operate in is worth saving. It's just the only one we have. This is where the novels of a few current writers exist, and where mine are intentionally placed.

Writing about Italian noir for World Literature Today critic Madison J. Davis noted:

The traditional mystery, deriving from Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue and evolving through Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie to contemporary practitioners like Carolyn G. Hart and Simon Brett, requires a certain faith in the legal system -- or at least in a measure of justice parceled out to those who commit crimes. We live, however, in a skeptical world, in which even those who enjoy the puzzles and deductions of the traditional whodunit cannot see them as realistic. The events of the twentieth century have cracked, often splintered, our faith in the legal system and the triumph of justice, even in the good ole U. S. of A.

I would argue that the twenty-first century has brought us beyond even the skepticism Davis acknowledges. Indeed, skepticism seems almost quaint, when we read about hundreds of men being released from prison because they were jailed for crimes they did not commit. Their incarceration was not due to a mistake, but a conscious decision by authorities to match a crime to the victim they chose.

Every time news like this comes out, the credibility of the police as protectors of society diminishes. When working people see their friends and children going to prison for drug offenses while the wealthy usually avoid doing time, their perception of the legal system being rigged in favor of the wealthy and powerful is reinforced.

Since the police are the most obvious representatives of that system (and the individuals most citizens encounter) they are no longer perceived as much more than enforcers of the rights of the wealthy and powerful. This perception, long held by those considered The Other in society, is now part of the common parlance.

Indeed, television crime shows assume this in their portrayals of police departments and individual cops. Certain series, most notably David Simon's depressingly exquisite take on the corruption rampant in an entire city's political and legal system called The Wire, create a world where the incorruptible individual has no place.

This does not mean that the police don’t enjoy at least tacit support by a majority of the population; it does mean that the number of people who believe the police are not above criminality is much diminished from just a few decades ago.

The abuse of power by police during the protests of the 1960s and onwards; the revelations of individual cops like New York's Serpico regarding corruption and illegal arrests (among other things); the militarization of most police forces in cities and towns large and small; and the continued abrogation of civil liberties in the name of the war on drugs and the war on terrorism. All of these make the line between the police and the criminals they supposedly oppose very thin.

Despite the multitude of cop shows on television attempting to present police as protectors of order and the innocent and even the presence of movies like Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry series (which serve as propaganda for authoritarianism), many residents of modern society are convinced the police are not there for their sake.

Nor is the legal system. Occasionally a clever lawyer is able to keep an innocent person out of prison -- in real life and in fiction. Indeed, certain authors have made a good living writing legal thrillers that feature these kinds of stories.

More often than not, however, the police and the courts conspire to convict the person in the docket no matter what. It's not that the conspiracy is intentional; it's just how the system works. Police arrest a person for a crime and the courts do the rest. Without a good attorney -- something very few can afford -- the suspect's options are very limited.

If one adds a cop with a grudge, a judge with an agenda, or a politician with a law and order platform to the equation, that person in the docket does not stand a chance.

A few decades ago I was charged with "possession with the intent to sell" because I was sitting in an automobile when an acquaintance sold a small amount of marijuana to an undercover cop. This all went down not long after the state I was living in had passed a law that rendered the U.S. Constitution’s prohibition on unreasonable search and seizure null and void.

Anyone who was in the vicinity of anything having to do with illegal drugs was as culpable as the person actually involved with the drugs. So, since I was in the car when the drug deal occurred, I was also involved in the sale.

When I showed up at court on the charge, I asked my public defender if I should challenge the charge and plead not guilty. His response was simple. If I challenged the charge I would not win. He advised me to take a plea deal and do community service. I took his advice. The law was not interested in justice, just in throwing people in jail.

Much anti-capitalist and antiwar activity is already labeled criminal in an imperial society. This in itself means that characters participating in activities that fall into this category are already suspect. Meanwhile, the forces of law and order trying to stifle such characters have a leeway not provided the citizen, no matter what he or she is involved in.

The often violent reaction of the authorities to the Occupy Wall Street protests in Fall 2011 provides a recent example of this fact. A greater contradiction occurs when the forces of authority engage in criminal behavior in the pursuit of the forces aligned against the rulers the police are hired to protect. A further complication comes into play when criminal actions by the police are ignored or sanctioned while criminal acts by the targets of the authorities are not.

In a line quite familiar to most rock and roll fans (especially those who listen to the Rolling Stones) that calls every cop a criminal, this contradiction is even clearer.

Back to that incorruptible individual. Most noir features a private investigator. Like the accused, he or she is an individual who lives on the edges of the law. In a world where the law itself can be unjust, only those not in debt to the system designed to bring justice can find that justice.

Most often the investigator is one who works for hire with a set of morals that are immutable. In certain cases, like two of the novels in my 1970s trilogy, the investigators are regular folks determined to help a friend. Still, they are not without faults. Alcohol is often a vice these characters deal with.

Most recently, in Thomas Pynchon's foray into the genre with a book titled Inherent Vice, his private eye smokes a lot of marijuana. Early on, many of the so-called tough guys like Mike Hammer were sexist and racist. As the genre has evolved, so have the investigators. Like the society they operate in, today's investigators include Blacks, Latinos, Asians, and women.

Today's noir fiction is the story of a system and society in decline. Marxist Ernest Mandel published a book on crime fiction in 1986 titled Delightful Murder. In this book, Mandel looks at the genesis and development of crime fiction. We see the development of the criminal from a lone individual whose exploits shock and dismay, but whom heroic police agents can capture.

As capitalism moves into its monopoly phase, the lone criminal remains a problem, yet the real problem developing is an entire class of criminals. These are what Marx labeled the lumpenproletariat: that part of society whose sole task is surviving no matter what it takes.

Usually extremely poor, only occasionally employed in conventional jobs, and existing literally outside of society, the lumpen are the truly dangerous ones in the bourgeoisie's midst. They provide respectable society with their entertainments such as illegal drugs and sex, but must be controlled at all cost.

The investigator's position in society is closer to that of the lumpen than to any other stratum. He or she understands the justice of the streets is often not the justice of the courtroom. Of course, this position outside of society means there is nothing to lose in fighting the wealthy and powerful.

Mandel published his book before capitalism's latest phase was truly underway. That is, neoliberalism. This stage of monopoly capitalism is the nightmare that Rosa Luxembourg warned us about. Financiers who produce no product run the world.

Instead of creating work, their actions profit from the destruction of jobs and the impoverishment of millions. They launder the millions made by international drug lords while financing politicians who want to build more prisons and lock up those who use the drugs.

As far as the financiers are concerned, the working class itself is now a criminal class. Yet, we know better. It is the financiers and their class that are the true criminals. Still, they go free while workers go to jail for the crime of being poor. The conspiracy of the super rich is not an accident. They built the world that way.

Writers can choose to point this out or they can go along with the status quo. Good crime fiction on a neoliberal planet chooses the former. The task of those who write these tales is to point the finger at the true criminals. The police are only heroes when they bust the big guys. The system can only be just when it turns on its own.

At this juncture in time, this only seems to happen in stories. Unfortunately.

This essay appears as a foreword to all three novels in Jacobs' “Seventies Series.” (Fomite Press)

[Rag Blog contributor Ron Jacobs is the author of The Way The Wind Blew: A History of the Weather Underground. He recently released a collection of essays and musings titled Tripping Through the American Night. His novels, All the Sinners Saints, The Co-Conspirator's Tale, and Short Order Frame Up were published by Fomite Press. Ron Jacobs can be reached at ronj1955@gmail.com. Find more articles by Ron Jacobs on The Rag Blog.]

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

BOOKS / Ron Jacobs : Wu Ming Does the Middle Ages

Masterful job by writers' collective:
Wu Ming does the Middle Ages

The reader is propelled into a tale of spies for and against the Church; of bloody feuds between armies of the Church and peasant rebels; and of communities organized along principles we would now call communist.

By Ron Jacobs / The Rag Blog / May 14, 2013

The Middle Ages might not seem like an exciting period of human endeavor, even to historians. Popes, politics, and peasants are all one hears about in those survey courses taken in high school and college. The potential for intrigue and revolution seems remote and unlikely.

Wu Ming, the Italian author collective that originally wrote under the namd "Luther Bissett," have done a masterful job dispelling that perception. The group's novels Q and the newly translated Altai, not only bring this era alive, they dispel the perception mentioned above.

Q, the first novel in this duo opens in the years after Martin Luther attached his theses to that door in Wittenberg, Saxony. Immediately the reader is propelled into a tale of spies for and against the Church; of bloody feuds between armies of the Church and peasant rebels resentful of the Church’s submission of them; and of communities (indeed entire cities) organized along principles we would now call communist.

It is these communities that gain the wrath of everyone in power: the Holy Roman Empire and the Protestant establishment led by a wealthy class of merchants that is resentful of both the Church and nobility. Furthermore, this new class is also fearful of an enlightened peasantry and laboring class. Perhaps the most famous and most revolutionary of all those communities was the town of Münster, whose revolutionaries were led and inspired by Thomas Muntzer, John of Leiden, and the philosophy now known as Anabaptism.

In the pages of Q, Wu Ming renders in fictional form the Marxian position that the Peasant Wars of the period were not just about religion. In fact, as Marx makes clear, they were against feudal oppression and land -- always an essential element of every peasant and worker rebellion throughout history.

Q is the nom de guerre of a spy for the Vatican. El Alemain is the Anabaptist rebel who takes part in numerous battles against the powerful, works to disseminate anti-Catholic and democratic literature, conspires with enemies of the Church, and ultimately disappears only to turn up in Constantinople still on the run.

He is the character that ties the two books together. After disappearing at the end of Q, he shows up in the Constantinople of Altai ready to take on the Church once again. The more encompassing connection is the history.

The story begins in Germany with the book Q. With Martin Luther’s reformation well underway, those who feel that Luther’s demands have not gone far enough are setting up their own communities. Many of these communities are essentially communist and opposed not only to the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, but to the demands of the aristocracy and even the new Protestant gentry and early bourgeoisie.

In essence, these communities are mutual aid societies that take the anti-monetary elements of Christianity and make them the centerpiece of their gospel. There is no place in Europe where the sentiment is greater than in Münster, Germany.

Wu Ming explores this combination of cause and effect in the novels Q and the just released Altai. It is another spy who narrates the sequel Altai. A converted Jew working for the Church in Venice, he is falsely accused of sabotage and escapes. As it turns out, those who aid his escape have their own agendas. Although he rejects those agendas at first, he soon realizes that he agrees with them more than he disagrees.

After arriving in Constantinople he rediscovers his Jewish faith and fate, allying himself with another Jewish exile from the Holy Roman Empire. Together they plan a strategy they hope will create a refuge for all of those persecuted by the Church. In the process, Wu Ming raises issues of sexuality, power, freedom, and the problem of war.

As the description of the final battle for Cyprus and the desolation resulting from the Ottoman siege in Altai makes obvious, these are antiwar novels as much as they are adventure stories and fictional depictions of history. The desolation and sheer butchery is graphic and disturbing; enough to make almost any reader question the use of violence to achieve a worthwhile end.

The members of Wu Ming are master storytellers. Their ability to weave together their individual narratives and their tales into a complete novel (let alone two) is a marvel. The fact that the completed tale is so much more than its individual parts is testimony to their craft and their artistry.

As a writer, I remain intrigued and mystified by Wu Ming’s process and astounded by the result.

[Rag Blog contributor Ron Jacobs is the author of The Way The Wind Blew: A History of the Weather Underground. He recently released a collection of essays and musings titled Tripping Through the American Night. His novels, The Co-Conspirator's Tale, and Short Order Frame Up will be republished by Fomite in April 2013 along with the third novel in the series All the Sinners Saints. Ron Jacobs can be reached at ronj1955@gmail.com. Find more articles by Ron Jacobs on The Rag Blog.]

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

BOOKS / Gregg Barrios : Zadie Smith's 'NW' Speaks in the Polygot of the Streets

Zadie Smith's latest novel, NW,
speaks in the polygot of the streets

Smith never identifies the color of her characters -- well, not unless they are white.

By Gregg Barrios / Critical Mass / February 27, 2013

"Tread carefully over the pavements of London for you are treading on skin, a skein of stone that covers rivers and labyrinths, springs and cavern, pipes and cables, springs and passages, crypts and sewers, creeping things that will never see the light of day." -- Peter Ackroyd, Underground London

[NW: A Novel by Zadie Smith (2012: Penguin Press); Hardback; 416 pp; $26.95.]

Zadie Smith's 2012 novel NW was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award for fiction. Rag Blog contributor Gregg Barrios is on the Board of Directors of the National Book Critics Circle. 

Welcome to London’s NW -- home turf to Zadie Smith’s fictional wellspring. It’s the place where many of her earlier characters still reside -- from Archie Jones, Irie, and Alsana from White Teeth to Howard Belsey’s dad from On Beauty and Alex-Li Tandem from Autograph Man.

NW introduces a new cast of characters -- Leah, Natalie, Felix and Nathan -- all in their mid-30s, and with multi-racial roots -- this is a Smith novel after all -- and who grew up in the fictional council estate (housing project) of Caldwell.

Smith’s tells their stories with precise details and rich characterization, vividly capturing their individual personalities by utilizing a writing style suited to each. The opening chapter finds Leah daydreaming in a backyard hammock:

The fat sun stalls by the phone masts. Anti-climb paint turns sulphurous on school gates and lampposts. In Willesden people go barefoot, the streets turn European, there is a mania for eating outside. She keeps to the shade. Redheaded. On the radio: I am the sole author of the dictionary that defines me. A good line -- write it out on the back of a magazine. In a hammock in the garden of a basement flat. Fenced in, on all sides.

Her reverie comes crashing when the doorbell rings and a strange woman with a hard luck story asks for money. Through Smith’s deft descriptions, it is evident that the women are as different as night and day despite living in the same NW postal code. How Smith forges connections between them and the other denizens in da hood is part of what NW grapples with.

It isn’t for naught that the chapter is called “The Visitation.” It echoes the Biblical Mary visiting her older, barren cousin Elizabeth to announce her pregnancy and then to learn that her cousin is also in a family way. Throughout the novel, Leah will struggle with not wanting to have a child and with her denial that she may already be pregnant (“Blue cross on a white stick, clear, definite”).

Smith has acknowledged the influence of Forester’s Howards End on her novel On Beauty, and that the inspiration for NW comes from the novelist Virginia Woolf. Some critics have written that since Leah is part Irish, her narrative emulates a Joycean style. I prefer to consider that the NW postal zone is more akin to Faulkner’s fictional Yoknapatawpha County and his novel As I Lay Dying. Both employ stream of consciousness technique, multiple narrators and varying chapter lengths and voices. One section will have quotation marks, while another will do without the punctuation. NW speaks in the polyglot of the street and in slogans and the TV news sound bites of dinner parties.

In the novel’s first section, Leah works for a charity trust and her husband Michel, a French-African, is a hairdresser. They rent and have a dog Olive. Leah doesn’t want children, but Michel does. When they attend a posh party given by Leah’s lifelong friend Natalie, we learn the different roads they’ve taken. Natalie nee Keisha Blake has moved up in the world. She is a barrister who is happily married to an Italian-Trinidadian; they have two children.

At the party, Natalie appropriates Leah’s story about the woman who bilked her. Later Leah and Michel spot a man thought to be the grifter’s partner. A street row ensued, and Olive was repeatedly kicked. Natalie turns it into a bad after-dinner joke. (“- And then did you just both go your separate ways? ‘Thank you, I’ve been your potential murderer now I must be off...’”

Natalie is novel’s central character. She tells her story in “The Host,” a series of short, numbered (185) chapters. In the initial entry, “These red pigtails,” Keisha saves Leah from drowning by pulling her out of a city pool by her red pigtails. (Think Renoir’s "Boudu Saved From Drowning.")

There is a wonderful list (in # 6) of the girl’s middle school likes and dislikes. Keisha: Cameo, Culture Club, Bob Marley, world peace in South Africa. Leah: Madonna, Culture Club, Thompson Twins, no bombs. Oh, they list one another as their best friend. And to an unknown question, they both answer “Deaf.”

Smith never identifies the color of her characters -- well, not unless they are white. A subtle dig at how other-than-whites are described in more traditional novels. In a telling short entry, Smith succinctly describes Keisha’s mindset growing up in a white world:

18. Sony Walkman (borrowed). That Keisha should be able to hear the Rebel MC in her ears was a kind of miracle and modern ecstasy, and yet there was very little space in the day for anything like ecstasy or abandon or even simple laziness, for whatever you did in life you have to do it twice as well as they did ‘just to break even, a troubling belief held simultaneously by Keisha Blake’s mother and her Uncle Jeffery, know to be “gifted” but also beyond the pale.

Keisha reinvents herself as Natalie and escapes from the Caldwell projects. But as the novel progresses, Smith seems to be asking -- But at what a cost? Natalie’s entry 179: “Aphorism. What a difficult thing a gift is for a woman! She’ll punish herself for receiving it.” Natalie will do the same thing with her gift (an oblique reference to the late Amy Winehouse).

Zadie Smith.

Enter Felix in the section titled “The Guest.” Felix is a native of the Caldwell projects. His story is told in a traditional narrative style. Neither Leah nor Natalie knows him, but they will by the novel’s end. This chapter chronicles Felix’s last day alive. It begins as he delivers a book to his father that his new lady friend Grace has bought for him.

The book is a photographic record of Garvey House, an actual hostel for troubled youth in northeast London where Felix and his siblings grew up with their Black revolutionary parents. Felix then takes a walk through the old neighborhood on his way to buy a used car for the repair shop where he works part time.

This section contains some of Smith finest writing and could well stand alone outside the novel’s frame, but it is also integral to it. I kept hoping Smith would speak through Felix (with his parents' activist past and his dream of becoming a filmmaker) of the recent London Riots and British film hit Ill Manor – that speak of the disenfranchisement of today’s multiracial Brit youth.

Some readers may see the 32-year old Felix as a sacrificial lamb, a Christ-like figure hinted in the book’s religious-tinged chapter titles, “Visitation,” “Host,” “The Crossing.” (The thrust of the narrative here resembles the Stations of the Cross.) A few hours before his death, his pays a visit to Annie, his older, former lover intent on ending their relationship since he has found Grace (pun intended):

Felix what is this pathological need of yours to be the good guy? It’s very dull. Frankly, you were more fun when you were my dealer. You don’t have to save my life. Or anybody’s life. We’re all fine. We don’t need you to ride on a white horse. You’re nobody’s savior.

Hours later, he lays dying at a bus stop, the victim of a blotched robbery and assault, his life unreeling in jump-cut not unlike Belmondo’s end in Breathless: “Five and innocent at this bus stop. Fourteen and drunk. Twenty-six and stoned. Twenty-nine in utter oblivion, out of his mind on coke and K.”

Natalie becomes addicted to an online hook-up website where “she was what everyone was looking for.” Her Cinderella story turns Grimm after her husband discovers her sexual addiction. She finds herself down and out on the London underworld in “a big T-shirt, leggings, and a pair of filthy red slippers, like a junkie.”

A former classmate Nathan Bogle, a drug-dealer and perhaps a pimp for the woman who rang Leah’s doorbell, recognizes her. At first, they enjoy rediscovering their mutual past. She tells him how Leah was in love with him. “She’d never admit it but the man she ended up marrying -- he looks like you.” Nathan isn’t having any of it.

Oh Nathan ‘member this, ‘member that -- truthfully Keisha I don’t remember. I’ve burned the whole business out of my brain. Different life. No use to me. I don’t live in them towers no more. I’m on the streets now, different attitude. Survival. That’s it. Survival. That’s all there is.

Nathan is ultimately the dark messenger not the message -- all the while singing, “If I Ruled the World (Imagine That).”

The final section is a return to “The Visitation.” Carnival is in full swing. Leah and Natalie reestablish their on-again, off-again friendship. When Natalie enters Leah’s backyard carrying her dog Spike, she greets them: “Look at you, mother and child. Look at you. You look like the fucking Madonna.”

Smith wrote NW during her pregnancy, so it isn’t surprising that her characters both male and female have bringing children into the world on their mind. All throughout NW, its characters constantly talk about wanting or not wanting children, of mothers that abandon their kids, of irresponsible fathers that procreate but avoid responsibility, and of a loony who sings, “If I ruled the world. I’d free all my sons.”

Reading NW evokes memories of that series of British documentaries from 7UP to 56 UP (most directed by Michael Apted). Starting at age seven, a group of children from different socio-economic classes were filmed every seven years to see how they and their friends and families changed over the years and if socio-economic variables predetermined their future. Smith in NW (30 something) accomplishes the same in one majestic swoop. Imagine that!

[Gregg Barrios is a journalist, playwright, and poet living in San Antonio. Gregg, who wrote for The Rag in Sixties Austin, is on the board of directors of the National Book Critics Circle. Contact Gregg at gregg.barrios@gmail.com. Read more articles by Gregg Barrios on The Rag Blog.]

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

BOOKS / Ken Wachsberger : 'Second Chances' is Pro-Choice Novel

The pro-choice novel:
'Love Means Second Chances'

By Ken Wachsberger / The Rag Blog / May 3, 2012

[Love Means Second Chances by Susan Elizabeth Davis (2011: Bread and Roses Collaborative); Paperback; 256 pp.; $16]

Susan Elizabeth Davis has written a self-consciously political novel complete with website and blog that she hopes will become a literary weapon in the pro-choice arsenal. At a time when women are having to defend themselves from humanist instincts straight out of the Dark Ages, her timing couldn’t be better. As a life-long activist for women’s rights, in particular to control their own bodies, she is the right person to write it.

Love Means Second Chances takes place in 1992 with flashbacks to 1972. Christy gets pregnant with Ramon even though she’s on the pill because for a brief period she was on antibiotics for strep and the antibiotics rendered the pill ineffective. Impending motherhood puts a crimp on Christy’s ambition to be an opera singer, not a pipe dream by any means as she is currently a student at Juilliard.

Christy tries to keep the news from Carole, her mother, a devout Catholic, because Christy’s game plan includes getting an abortion. To complicate matters, Christy herself is the result of an accidental pregnancy that Carole chose to not terminate over the objections of her impregnator-turned-reluctant-husband Jimmy, whose own dream of becoming a football player, along with Carole’s dream of becoming a nurse, was terminated by the pregnancy that wasn’t.

In addition to alienating her from Jimmy, Carole’s pregnancy led to a split between Carole and her father -- her mother already was dead. So Carole became close to her mother-in-law, Mary Louise, a strong advocate of the woman’s right to choose, who supported Carole over her son Jimmy during Carole’s pregnancy and is now supporting Christy over Carole during Christy’s pregnancy even though the first case led to a non-abortion and the second is leaning toward an abortion.

The book revolves around the interactions among the three generations of women and their different responses to Christy’s pregnancy and decision to have an abortion. To Carole especially, it awakens long-suppressed anger that stemmed from her own pregnancy in 1972. Hence the flashbacks.

A side issue but one almost equally perplexing to the avid Catholic Carole is the announcement by her sister Liz, a divorced mother of three teenage boys, that she finally has found true love to Barbara -- not, if you are confused, a man with a woman’s name.

The story begins during the Christmas season. In fact, it is Christy’s vomit attack in her parents’ bathroom Christmas morning that finally confirms Carole’s suspicion that Christy is pregnant.

The strength of this novel is less on the action than on the dialogue. Davis becomes every one of the women when they are speaking. She gets inside their heads and their hearts and enables them all to be sympathetic, believable characters. As a life-long feminist activist in abortion rights, there is no doubt where Davis stands on the issue of a woman’s right to choose. Nevertheless, she attempts to be fair with all of the women.

But she doesn’t confuse “fairness” with leaving the reader thinking that all positions are equal. Davis wrote Love Means Second Chances in order to be a voice for choice in the abortion debate. With confidence and no modesty, she admits that she wants her book to join the long list of those that have changed social conditions and perceptions, including Uncle Tom’s Cabin, The Jungle, Invisible Man, and The Women’s Room.

So, in a cathartic scene, Liz asks Carole, “Will you love [Christy] less if she has an abortion?” Carole admits she hadn’t even considered that line of thought but, no, of course, she would not love her less. “The pain in her heart felt like it was being ripped out of her chest. Giving in, Carole sobbed uncontrollably, gasping for air as her worst fears dive-bombed her like demons.”

Davis chooses this moment to place the Catholic Church’s opposition to abortion into historical perspective when she speaks through Barbara, who tells Carole

Before 1869, the Church did not consider abortion a mortal sin. In fact, during the Middle Ages Thomas Aquinas wrote that abortions could be performed until the time of quickening -- when the baby begins to move in the fourth month. So it’s only been since the Church felt its power and influence were waning in the 19th century that it took a stand against abortion.

Going beyond Catholicism, Barbara continues

Abortion is as old as civilization. Women have been giving themselves abortions in every culture on every continent since the beginning of time... Abortion was the primary means of birth control in this country until it was outlawed in the 19th century. It was only after doctors began to specialize in gynecology and obstetrics and wanted to stop midwives from interfering with their business that it became illegal.

As a kicker she notes that Italy has the highest abortion rate of the European countries. “Those sisters are not afraid to take care of themselves if they don’t want to be pregnant.”

I can see the old men who head the Catholic Church hierarchy attacking the credibility of that entire scene. After all, who is it who is attacking Church doctrine? A lesbian! Whether intended or not, good for Davis for showing no fear here in mixing controversial issues.

But to her credit she never treats the abortion issue lightly. Davis agrees with anti-choicers who would argue that abortion can hurt women emotionally. A powerful scene takes place in Christy’s home when Carole comes over to talk after she has had time to cool off and reflect. As Christy prepares tea in the kitchen, Carole waits in the front room. They both pray to the same religious icon as they psych themselves up to represent different sides of the conversation:

Carole: “Holy Mary, Mother of God, help me... find the right words... to tell Christy that I love her, even though I don’t like what she’s doing.”

Christy: “Holy Mary, Mother of God, please don’t let Mom overpower me... Help me stay strong.”

Later, in the clinic after the abortion, Christy waits with other women who have undergone the same experience. There is not a whole lot of laughing. As each woman is discharged, the attendant says, “I don’t want to see you here again” (as opposed to what an anti-choice novel might have the attendant saying: “Shall we make an appointment for your next visit?”).

Six months later, seemingly a long time after the abortion, Christy experiences an emotional breakdown when singing an aria from Madame Butterfly where Cio-Cio San gives up her love child and kills herself.

The message from these scenes is clear. Not every pro-choicer uses abortion as birth control. It is a painful process even for women who choose to undergo it. These women actually experience real feelings of grief, anger, and sadness. No one is evil and no one “wins.”

Nevertheless, each woman has to make her own choice, for her own personal reasons, and deal with the resulting consequences, not have it mandated by the church or the state and deal with those resulting consequences, which, anti-choicers choose to ignore, also are painful.

I have to admit I’m happy that Davis confronts the Catholic Church directly. I don’t care what practicing Catholics do relative to their own abortions or non-abortions. I do care that Catholics and other religious anti-choicers think they can tell Jews what to do about ours.

In Arizona, for instance, Governor Jan Brewer recently put her signature on a “life begins at menstruation” bill. The joke by Yippie Abbie Hoffman was that “Jews don’t believe a fetus has life until it gets its graduate degree.” A funny joke perhaps but, in the abortion debate, when life begins is a non-issue for Jews.

Menstruation, you say? Fine if that gives you some perverted thrill. But don’t deny women from my religious family the right to control their own bodies, as our religion permits, just because your religion claims that ownership of your women’s bodies should be in the hands of old men who supposedly don’t have sex.

Catholic law as argued by the hierarchy and their followers is absolute on the issue of abortion: “We don’t give a damn what it does to the woman; all power to the fetus.” The position on abortion in Jewish law is nuanced but it ultimately comes down to “The mother’s life comes first.” Catholics call what they want to practice religious freedom but when they force their mythology and their dogma onto us it becomes religious imperialism.

So which is better, fetus-first Catholicism or mother-first Judaism? There obviously is no correct answer to please everyone, which is why the First Amendment right to freedom of religion is so important. But that right doesn’t apply only to Catholics. If Catholic law has a valid place in the debate about health care, so must other religions, and no religion’s dogma should be enshrined in federal or state law to the detriment of any other.

I look forward to reading my first Jewish pro-choice novel. Love Means Second Chances is a model of how that can be done.

[Ken Wachsberger is a long-time writer, editor, political activist, and member of the National Writers Union. He is the editor of the four-volume Voices from the Underground series.

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

FICTION / Marc Estrin : The Machine

THE MACHINE

By Marc Estrin / The Rag Blog / September 27, 2011

The government murder of Troy Davis this week -- under odd evidential circumstances -- has once again thrust capital punishment up for public discussion.

As my contribution to death penalty abolition, I recently wrote The Good Doctor Guillotin, a novel about the first use of the guillotine during the French Revolution -- an occasion sufficiently removed from current politics as to allow the issues to be seen more clearly.

Tobias Schmidt was the machine's builder, a piano maker. And Charles-Henri Sanson was the executioner of Paris.

The novel itself is intricately woven, but here's a stand-alone short chapter describing the testing of the machine before use. It may provide some food for reflection:


29. The Machine

It was 14 feet high, its beams and posts painted blood-red -- a nice touch, that. It would be called “End of the Soup,” “Old Growler,” “Sky Mother,” “the Last Mouthful.” It would be called by the feminine form of someone’s name, someone who had repudiated it. As if it were his daughter. Assemblymen called it the "Timbers of Justice.”

The victim, once attached to the plank, his head in the fatal window, would become a part of it, a cog in the machine of egalitarian justice. His blood would be shed not by the unsteady hand of his fellow man but by this lifeless, insensible, infallible instrument, a doctor’s idea become oak and iron.

The materials gathered, over the course of a week Tobias Schmidt and two hired workers constructed the frame. Two four-sided posts were grooved and chiseled as guides for the falling blade. When the 70-pound holder and 15-pound blade came back from the blacksmith, they were fitted loosely between the posts and the posts joined by an upper crossbar with a hole for the rope. A lower crossbar was angle-braced to its stand for stability. Rope guides were placed.

On the back side of the device, the executioner’s side, another crossbar was attached to hold the lunette -- two wooden pieces, each with a half-circular hole to contain the client’s, the patient’s, the package’s neck. The diameter was that of Pelletier’s. A smaller one for women could be substituted as needed. When fitted together, the pieces formed a lovely “little moon” whose upper half could be lifted on a hinge to permit a head to enter.

That was it. Simple. A weighted blade and its frame. Though it required two strong men to carry it, it could be loaded onto a heavy cart and transported wherever it was needed, along with its separate bench, long and strong enough to hold a giant—or an ox—and fitted with thick leather straps.


Before dawn on Tuesday, April 15, 1792, a sound of clattering wheels was heard on southern streets two miles from the center of Paris. It was a four-wheeled wagon, drawn by two horses, carrying a long object covered with heavy black cloth and tightly bound with chains. Four guardsmen with bare swords on horseback rode silently in front of the wagon, and four behind. Bringing up the rear was a smaller wagon with several sheep. If going to market, they were being taken in the wrong direction. They advanced slowly, gray and black in the pale early morning.

The procession was heading for the suburb of Bicêtre, just outside the city gate, home to the great hospital for venereal disease, its hospice for the needy poor, and its maison de correction, locked wards for hardened criminals, some awaiting execution.

When seen from a distance, Louis XIII’s building looks quite imposing. Set on the brow of a hill, from afar it retained something of its former splendor and the look of a royal residence. But now, three Louises later, the palace had in fact become a hovel. Its dilapidated eaves were shameful and its walls diseased. Not a window was glazed but only fitted with crisscrossed iron bars through which, here and there, pressed the harrowed face of a patient or a prisoner.

Already waiting in a small inner courtyard were Charles-Henri Sanson, with two assistants, Tobias Schmidt, and the doctors Antoine Louis and Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, the latter most reluctantly.

Early-morning eyes gawked from behind bars as the first sheep’s head was placed in the lunette, its neck the size of Pelletier’s. The upper half moon was locked in place. One of the assistants let loose the rope from its tie-off so Sanson could better observe.

Disaster: The heavy blade jerked stickily into motion, jolted downward between the grooves, and sliced into the animal without killing it. All mental ears were stopped against its terrifying cry. Sanson was dismayed. He had the blade wound back up and released again. It bit into the neck again but did not sever it. The victim howled. Once again the blade was raised and dropped, but the third stroke only caused a stream of blood to spurt from the sheep’s neck, without the head falling.

Five times the blade rose and fell; five times it cut into the sheep, which cried five times for mercy. It remained standing on the platform, an appalling, terrifying sight. Sanson straddled it and hacked away with a butcher knife at what remained of its neck. Twenty pounds of lead shot were added to the blade-carrier, and three more sheep were neatly dispatched thereby. The march of science.

After nightfall Schmidt took the machine back to his workshop in the Cour du Commerce, Rue St.-André-des-Arts, just opposite the printing shop in Number 8 where Marat’s paper was printed. He lined the grooves with brass for a smoother drop and bolted more weight to the blade assembly.

Two days later, on April 17, assisted by his son and his two brothers, Sanson repeated his experiments on the improved machine, this time with three human cadavers from a military morgue, three well-built men who had died in short illnesses that had not caused them to grow thin.

Among the spectators were the two doctors concerned, along with Michel Cullerier, the chief surgeon of Bicêtre; Philippe Pinel, the resident alienist; several physician members of the National Assembly; and delegates from the Council of Hospitals of Paris. Strapped to the bench, the three corpses, good soldiers all, were successfully beheaded without protesting, to the applause of most of the onlookers.

[Marc Estrin is a writer, activist, and cellist, living in Burlington, Vermont. His novels, Insect Dreams, The Half Life of Gregor Samsa, The Education of Arnold Hitler, Golem Song, The Lamentations of Julius Marantz, and The Good Doctor Guillotin have won critical acclaim. His memoir, Rehearsing With Gods: Photographs and Essays on the Bread & Puppet Theater (with Ron Simon, photographer) won a 2004 theater book of the year award. He is currently working on a novel about the dead Tchaikovsky. Read more articles by Marc Estrin on The Rag Blog.]

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Lamar W. Hankins : The Bowdlerizing of Huckleberry Finn

Huck and Jim. Image from Teachers.ash.org.
The bowdlerizing of Huckleberry Finn

By Lamar W. Hankins / The Rag Blog / January 19, 2011

A recent commentary by Leonard Pitts in the Miami Herald explained a significant problem with publication of a new edition of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. The new edition removes all use of the words “nigger” and “Injun,” substituting less offensive words.

In Pitts’s view, the scrubbing of these words robbed the novel of its authenticity by ignoring Twain’s purpose in using the language that he chose and ignoring the social, cultural, and historical context in which the novel takes place.

Pitts explains, “Huck Finn is a funny, subversive story about a runaway white boy who comes to locate the humanity in a runaway black man and, in the process, vindicates his own.” I’ve always had a similar view of the novel, but it never occurred to me until reading Pitts’s words that I had had an experience similar to Huck’s, of becoming aware of another’s humanity, an experience shared by many others and one that may be universal.

I lived in Vidor, Texas, a rural community with a well-deserved reputation for racism, until I was four years old, when my family moved to the oil refinery town of Port Arthur. When I was seven, my parents, both of whom worked at refineries (my father as a machinist, my mother as an RN), hired a black woman to look after me and my younger brother. During the summer that I was 10 years old, I had many serious discussions with her about the ways of the world, especially about race relations and how African-Americans had been treated throughout the South since the beginning of this country.

My guess is that Lutricia Valore was about 25 years old in 1955. We called her by her nickname, Lou. The culture at that time in the south permitted even young children to address black women by their first name or whatever other informal name might apply. Lou cooked our food, cleaned our house, supervised our play, and took care of us when we had an accident or were sick.

She was my first sociology and history teacher. She told me about slavery. About having to sit in the back of the bus. About “separate but equal” schools. About being mistreated and disrespected by many whites. About segregation. About the slums in which she and her two children and husband lived. About the frequent humiliation she felt.

After reading Leonard Pitts’s words, I realized that Lou had transformed herself in my child’s eyes from the hired help to a person with fears, concerns, problems, and joys common to all human beings. She was my caretaker and became my friend. When she told me about how she was treated, I reacted first with disbelief that such a kind, decent person would be treated so badly. Then it made me angry. I wanted to do something about it, not recognizing that 10-year-old children can’t rectify society’s wrongs. I started looking around to see if I could find any of the circumstances she had described. I did not have to look far.

When I observed the city buses going down the street, I saw that all the blacks were in the back and the whites were in the front. When I went to the Weingarten grocery store with my mother, I saw the water fountains, side by side, one marked “Whites only,” and the other marked “Colored.”

In my first public rebellion against the established order, I decided to drink from the “Colored” fountain to see if the water tasted different from that in the “Whites only” fountain. I knew that my action violated accepted custom, but I did it anyway, and no one complained. I continued drinking from that fountain as long as my family shopped at that store. Later, when I rode the city buses to junior high school, I purposely sat in the back.

As a result of what I had learned from Lou, I continued my rebellion through the years by arguing about the nature of slavery with a junior high school history teacher and about job discrimination with a Sunday school teacher who did not want blacks working at the refinery because they would compete with him for jobs, an unrecognized acknowledgment that blacks could be as qualified as he to do the same work.

Huck Finn recognized Jim as a person of value because he came to know him at a basic human level. He saw that Jim had to make decisions about right and wrong, good and bad, fair and unfair, just as he did.

Both Jim and Huck were seeking freedom. To each one, freedom meant something slightly different, just as it means different things for different people all over the globe. And the novel deals with other human problems as well, including lying, deceit, cruelty, moral values, the role of family in a person’s life (Did Huck and Jim become a family?), selfishness, and hypocrisy.

All of these human issues are important for both children and adults to figure out for themselves. If a novel set shortly before the Civil War can help us discuss these issues, it has to be of value. If we take away from it its context, we rob it of some of that value as an educational tool. If some people are offended by the words common to the period and those words are censored, what does that take from the novel? For one thing, it blunts the razor-sharp edge of Twain’s depiction of racism in America.

We haven’t been able to have a broad, serious discussion about race and race relations in the 125 years since Huckleberry Finn was published. After all, we are still arguing about the reasons for the Civil War, in the face of documentary evidence that slavery and race were at its heart.

Now, we learn that a production of the play Joe Turner’s Come and Gone by the late, widely respected African-American playwright August Wilson is being forbidden by the superintendent of schools in Waterbury, Connecticut, because it contains the word “nigger” in several places.

Removing offensive words from the pages of Huckleberry Finn or any other literary work will make that important discussion about race less likely, and if our children read such works in a bowdlerized form, there will be no reason for them to even confront what such language is all about.

[Lamar W. Hankins, a former San Marcos, Texas, city attorney, is also a columnist for the San Marcos Mercury. This article © Freethought San Marcos, Lamar W. Hankins.]

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Marc Estrin : Music Hath Charms...

Music hath charms to
soothe the stinking breath

By Marc Estrin / The Rag Blog / December 13, 2010

A recent revelation: rehearsing the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto, I was in the cello section mentally drooling over the carpet of harmonies we were laying down under the solo violin during the gorgeous slow movement. Not much to concentrate on other then how very beautiful this moment was.

As I breathed in the slow movement of the Mendelssohn, I realized that this music, this moment, and others like it, were SPECIFIC antidotes to the poison spewing from the mouths of politicians. I realized too, that without my frequent hits from the music inhaler I would probably be dead, or at least reduced to zombiedom. My life's balance was suspended between the poison of politics and the healing of music, which interaction created a space for my writing.

I had long been aware of “the healing power of music” inasmuch as it was the arena of "music therapy" and the tool of music therapists. But I had never been so acutely aware of its specific purgative and remedial effect.

Coming up soon are Beethoven's two birthdays, December 16 and December 17. As one of the characters in my novel, Insect Dreams, says: “Extraordinary people do extraordinary things.” (Not to be coy, there are two different documents with two different birth dates. I celebrate both.) And this week, too, Donna and I begin rehearsals for a New Year's Day performance of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, which will hopefully become a tradition here in Burlington, Vermont. In any case, Beethoven is often on my mind.

It's somewhat predictable, then, that the combination of Beethoven, music, and healing would find its way into my writing. I want to share with you this week a particularly ridiculous scene based on a particularly amazing piece of music -- a movement of the A minor String Quartet which Aldous Huxley called “proof of the existence of God." The movement was labeled by Beethoven “Heiliger Dankgesang eines Gesenenen an die Gottheit, in der lydischen Tonart”–a "Holy Song of Thanks from a Convalescent to the Godhead, in the Lydian Mode."

Beethoven was known to have serious stomach problems which bothered him increasingly as he aged. I put this all together and came up with the following note in my recent novel, The Annotated Nose.

The hero, Alexei Pigov, has become the Glenn Gould of the accordion. He is befriended by a fellow lab tech, William Hundwasser, who exploits and markets his strangeness, creating from him the public figure of a medieval plague doctor come to heal The Contemporary Plague. Here he is in Hundwasser's lab, experimenting with Beethoven on Hundwasser, and Herman, the tarantula:

44. Studying tarantellas and subtly applying them was my first experience of being a healer. Hundwasser kept several in a terrarium in his lab as a conversation starter for the “pretty young things in their white lab coats” he enjoyed cultivating. I began with one named Herman.

Herman was a dancin’ fool. He (?) would jump out of hiding -- or hibernating, or estivating, or whatever tarantulas do for sleep -- at the first peep of the accordion, and would then stand thoughtfully, taking the music into his ganglia. Then he would begin to sway, and after a minute to dance, and to dance appropriately to whatever I was playing, almost in rhythm, but definitely fast for allegros and slowly for adagios. When I stopped, he stopped -- and waited. He could outwait me. When I left, I would just leave him there, waiting.

I figured if an insect person could react this way, with so few nerve cells, human persons must be able to process such signals with far more complex consequences than simply dancing.

As you probably know, Beethoven suffered from chronic abdominal problems and severe intestinal inflammation. Fortunately Hundwasser suffered similar symptoms. An experiment was staring me right in the face. The famous Heilige Dankgesang in the A minor quartet, the “Holy Song Of Thanks From A Convalescent To The Godhead," was written after recovering from a serious bout with abdominal pain. Surely the tones, the great ideas of that movement, beyond being “proof of the existence of God” (Huxley), the successive integrations of disparate elements, must have something to do with disease, and with (Beethoven’s) stomach disease in particular. It was worth a try.

I made an accordion arrangement of the three adagio sections, and played them daily to Hundwasser during lunch break. We used the animal room for privacy. He just sat and listened. I suppose the rats listened too, but I had no parameters to measure the effects on them.

Hundwasser, however, had lots of parameters. Or, like the hedgehog, one big parameter: the number of Rolaids he popped each day. It took a week or so before R began to drop. From an average of 20 to an average of 12. On weekends, no music, R rose again. Come weekdays, it began to fall by Tuesday. In a sustained three week experiment, no days off, R fell to 3, then climbed to 12 again with a week off. We were on to something.

Neither of us had the time for a full and lasting cure, but after we stopped the experiment, he bought a record of the Budapest playing it, and has used that routinely to calm his symptoms. Saves him money on Rolaids, and he can listen while washing the dishes during the rare moments that he washes the dishes.

Flush with success, I looked more closely into the tarantella situation, the Antidotum Tarantulae. I would need to study the phenomenon first hand.

But there aren’t a lot of tarantula bites in Manhattan. There aren’t many tarantas [women bitten by tarantulas] to whom I could offer treatment -- especially if it were just an experiment by a newbie. What to do?

Herman to the rescue! I could get him to bite me, and then, in the heroic tradition of the great doctors and medical researchers, I could try to cure myself. I admit such research is small potatoes compared to the guy who shoved a catheter into an arm vein and guided it up into his heart, or the guys from Walter Reed’s team who invited malaria mosquitoes to bite them, so they could test drugs, or even the guy who gave himself ulcers so he could prove it was bacteria that caused them. Small potatoes unless I died. But I know that though tarantula bites were toxic, they were not often fatal.

And of course, we have to remember Dr. Curt Conners, aka, the Lizard in Spiderman Comics, who lost his arm in a war, and experimented with reptilian DNA to try and grow it back, a great example of be careful what you wish for: the therapy caused him to mutate into a creature half-human and half-reptile. He became a villain, too, and even uglier than I am. I wondered if I might turn into a tarantula person -- from the saliva -- but it wasn’t very likely.

I knew this self-experimentation would be looked down upon at the Berg Institute for Experimental Physiology, Surgery and Pathology, even though experimental physiology, surgery and pathology was exactly what I was doing. So it was 1 A.M. when I let myself into Hundwasser’s lab, took Honey [his accordion] out of her case, and aroused Herman with the traditional slow, lamenting introduction to Borodin’s Polovetsian Dance #2, “The Wild Dance of the Men."

Out he came on cue, staring at me through the Adagio, and when the fast part started, gave a shiver, and went into nothing short of a frenzy, leaping high off the terrarium floor, doing 90º, 180º, 270º, and 360º spins in the air, landing on his feet, rolling over on his back, and dragging himself miraculously by hyper–extended forelegs reaching up, over and behind his head, engaging the sand. It was so amazing, I almost forgot what I had come for. He must have been a Polovetsian spider, or at least have Polovetsian blood, perhaps from the Russian steppes.

When the both of us stopped to get our breaths, I thrust my left arm into the terrarium, and, though normally a pacifist, he leaped at it, and sunk his fangs in midway between wrist and elbow. Good Herman! I had to pull him off. Within a minute and a half, I was, as they say, possessed by the spider.

Though being somewhat atypical myself, I was that night afflicted with all the typical tarantula bite symptoms: feelings of prostration, anguish, psychomotor agitation, clouding of my sensory apparatus, difficulty standing, stomach cramps, nausea, paresthesia, muscular pains, extraordinary itching, and best and worst of all, vastly heightened sexual desire. I took a cab home; the cabbie thought I was way-drunk.

Lying in my bed, I felt wounded and weary, and aware of the deep tediousness of all things. Still, after a short sleep, I was able to drag Honey out of her case, and begin a medley of tarantellas I had learned.

Somewhere toward the end of the 1490s, the great Neopolitan scholar Alessandro d’Alessandro described the treatment of stricken tarantas by the local folk musicians: “they play different dances according to the nature of the poison, in such a way that with the victims entranced by the harmony and fascinated by what they hear, the poison either dissolves inside the body and dissipates, or else is slowly eliminated through the veins.” And with (wouldn’t you know it?) one of the Neopolitan tarantellas, I could feel just that effect, a veritable exorcism, a return to life, possibly to love. By the next day I was weak, but feeling basically normal via my iatromusical practice.

Plague doctoring is not so much different, though I suffer less, and my patients suffer more.

[Marc Estrin is a writer, activist, and cellist, living in Burlington, Vermont. His novels, Insect Dreams, The Half Life of Gregor Samsa, The Education of Arnold Hitler, Golem Song, and The Lamentations of Julius Marantz have won critical acclaim. His memoir, Rehearsing With Gods: Photographs and Essays on the Bread & Puppet Theater (with Ron Simon, photographer) won a 2004 theater book of the year award. He is currently working on a novel about the dead Tchaikovsky.]

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Marc Estrin: Don't Tase Me, Bro...

Killer Klowns. Image from Out of the Grave.
Don't Tase me, bro...

By Marc Estrin / The Rag Blog / September 18, 2010

Another Taser-related death this past week, this time, not of an ancient great-grandmother in a wheelchair, but of a healthy young man. Those involved with toting up the corpses count more than 500. Google "Taser deaths" for their names and ages.

Tasers don't kill people. Cops with Tasers kill people. Cops with other weapons kill people too.

In contrast to the United States, British police don't routinely carry lethal arms. Only a limited number of specialist officers are permitted to use guns in special situations. Britain's Home Office said being unarmed is part of the "character of the police" in the U.K. The "character of the police" chez nous is something rather different. With our taste for arms sales and permanent war-making throughout the world, could we expect it to be otherwise?

In looking through SKULK last week for its 9/11 resonances, I came across this chapter I had forgotten about. I present it for your bleak amusement:

EIGHTEEN:

Modest Doubt Is Call'd The Beacon Of The Wise

Could they do this? Did they even approve of it being done? Violence? Large-scale, possibly lethal violence?

Teresa had never even hunted or fished with Daddy: the idea of threading a worm on a hook had always seemed too yucky. Richard had the comical habit of crushing plastic milk containers with his hands: stomping on them seemed unseemly. Now they were challenged to embrace something like...the Truth. Teresa heard Thomas Aquinas urging her from potency to act. Richard felt ripeness was all, and things were very close to ripe.

But both were now smitten by a sudden cloud of fear and abdication. And it was in this eddying cloud that they now accompanied WSU’s speaker, Rashid Khalidi, towards Levitt Arena on an otherwise cloudless early evening for his talk on “The New American Empire."

Why book the Shockers’ home basketball court? Because Khalidi was tall in stature in the academic world? No. Because He was a Shocker (to some) himself? No. Because this was the summer session’s culminating major-speaker event? No. It was because Buildings and Grounds had for some reason denied Richard’s request for Wilner Auditorium, though its schedule seemed open. No matter, Richard thought, Levitt will be fine, if slightly less comfortable in the bleachersswirlin and folding chairs. Desmond Tutu had spoken there last year, and Khalidi would make a nice followup.

But meteorological cloudlessness was a poor predictor of the gathering storm: streaming up Hillside along with Rashid, Teresa and Richard, were tens, then hundreds of sign-carrying students and community folks. Some wore yarmulkas, most wore crosses, and a scant few sported kuffiyehs, the traditional Palestinian headscarf. Uh-oh, T&R thought, looks like a religious war. Khalid was unruffled. “My fans,” he reassured them. Au courant, though. The yarmulkas and crosses seemed to populate the same side of the path, while the kuffiyehs and assorted peaceniks lined up sparsely on the other. Law enforcement was nowhere in sight.

ISRAEL BASHERS NOT WELCOME!; TERRORISTS OFF CAMPUS!; EXTREMISTS OUT OF WICHITA!; STUDENTS WILL NOT BE INTIMIDATED!; A NAZI SPEAKER ON TISHA B’AV -- SHAME! SHAME!; NEVER FORGET!; CHRIST SHALL OVERCOME! read signs on one side of the walk.

DIVESTMENT FROM ISRAEL! TROOPS HOME NOW!; WAR IS TERRORISM!; GO SOLAR, NOT BALLISTIC!; ASSES OF EVIL (with pictures of the principals)!; ENFORCE U.N. RESOLUTIONS IN PALESTINE!’ ANYTHING WAR CAN DO, PEACE CAN DO BETTER! read signs on the other.

Both sides seemed to share a strong commitment to the exclamation point. The three of them ran the gauntlet.

The Levitt basketball court had a small stage constructed at one end, as for other large events like rained-out graduations, and Richard and Khalidi took their seats on the well-flowered platform. At 7:40, having allowed ten minutes to accomodate the late-arriving crowd, Richard stood to open the evening.

“Ladies and Gentlemen, Students and Faculty, Members of the Community,” he began, “it gives me great pleasure to introduce the final speaker of our Contemporary Issues series, a man who himself has become a contemporary issue. Rashid Khalidi is Edward Said...

Some cheers and boos from the audience. Richard admonished it gently with his famous Groucho waggling-of-eyebrows.

“...Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies and Literature at Columbia University. Professor Khalidi has written more than seventy-five articles on aspects of Middle East history and politics including pieces in the New York Times [some boos], the Boston Globe [a different set of boos], the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, and many journals. He has received fellowships and grants from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation, and is a recipient of a Fulbright research award. He has been a regular guest on radio and TV shows, including All Things Considered [applause from the liberals], Talk of the Nation, the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, and Nightline.

“His latest book, Resurrecting Empire: Western Footprints and America’s Perilous Path in the Middle East, examines the record of Western involvement in the region and analyzes the likely outcome of our most recent Middle East incursions.

“Let’s give a warm welcome to our guest, and I’m sure that, in spite of the controversial nature of his topic, we will show him the respect and hospitality for which Kansas is so justly famous. Ladies and Gentlemen, Professor Rashid Khalidi.”

General applause, with a scattering of boos and cheers. Operation Rescue, The Mid-Continent ADL and WSU Hillel stood up in back with their signs.

Khalidi began with many thank yous for the honor of the invitation, invited questions and discussion after his talk, and launched passionately into his topic.

“Since September 11, we've heard a lot about the ‘intelligence failures’ that left the United States unprepared for the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. But these failures were not simply the result of poor espionage or bureaucratic incompetence. They reflected a deeper failure to understand a region and its historical wounds, a number of which -- though not all -- were inflicted by the Western powers.”

Serious pre-uproar among the audience. Khalidi remained calm, but did respond:

“I hope you will agree that the future of America's relations with the Arab and Muslim world depends a great deal on public education. Yet the very people who are in a position to perform this vital task have instead found themselves under siege from the media, from extremist pressure groups and craven politicians. Our crime? Challenging those formidable authorities on the Arab world, George W. Bush and Ariel Sharon.”

Standing and yelling from the audience:

“Anti-semite!”

“If you don’t like it here, go home!”

“Nazi Jew-killer!”

“Terrorists off campus!”

Richard stepped forward, and took the mike from the lectern.

“Ladies and Gentlemen, this kind of behavior will have reverberations country-wide. Internationally. This is an institution committed to academic freedom! Please, please, reserve your comments until after Professor Khalidi’s talk, and then keep them polite. Believe me, the whole world is watching.” He inserted the mike once again in its holder and took his seat. Khalidi, continued, apparently unflustered.

“Back in 1992, a decade before 9/11, a group of right-wing thinkers from the administration of the first George Bush created the Project for a New American Century, PNAC. I strongly suggest you google them, and study their documents closely. Their platform demanded that the United States take advantage of the fall of the Soviet Union to achieve unchallenged, unchallengable domination of the planet, and control of its dwindling resources. They called on America to substantially increase its military budget, to deny other nations the use of outer space, and to adopt a more aggressive and unilateral foreign policy that would allow it to act offensively and preemptively in the world. The elimination of states like Iraq figured prominently in this grand vision.

[Applause and a quickly abating “U-S-A! U-S-A!”]

“In a widely-circulated 1998 letter to President Clinton, the members of PNAC -- Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Eliot Abrams, Richard Armitage, Richard Pearl, Robert Zoellick, William Kristol and Francis Fukayama among them -- challenged the president to move forcefully and militarily to remove Saddam Hussein.
[Again some applause, with annoyed shushing from the liberals.]

“And in their defining document, 'Rebuilding America’s Defenses,' written in September 2000 -- a full year before 9/11 -- they acknowledged that the process of transformation was likely to be a long one, absent -- in their own chilling words -- ‘some catastrophic and catalyzing event like a new Pearl Harbor.’ One year later that event would arrive.”

It was time for the Blintz Brigade, a group whose motto was “Cream Pies Are For Cream Puffs!” From left and right, two nightmare gaggles of gabardined clowns invaded the platform, firing blintzes at the speaker, splattering his dark suit with crème fraiche (“For The Blessed, Nothing But The Best!”), and greasing the ground with doughish offal.

Now a blintz is no mere crêpe. The baked and semi-hardened dough raised second-degree welts and third-degree contusions on Professor Khalidi’s face -- and let loose bedlam in the audience.

Richard sprang from his seat, and Teresa ran up on stage to help battle the clowns. In the arena, folding chairs clattered as the yarmulkas attacked the kuffiyehs, and the crosses attacked them both and one another. Neutrals scattered at first, then tested out testosterone in random directions. Even women have testosterone.
Enter the campus police. Exit the campus police. This was more than they could handle.

The uproar grew from forte to fortissimo as the entropy increased. The clowns had disappeared. Poof! On stage, Richard and Teresa were madly wiping down the distinguished professor with hankie and scarf.

Sirens without, and onto the stage poured the burly Wichita police in an overly-tactical rear-entrance maneuver. With macho seriously compromised from slipping all over the spent blintz shells, they nevertheless succeeded in throwing an orange net over Teresa, Richard and Khalidi before confronting the audience. This latter they did from the edge of the platform, using academy sharpshooters to practice with the new paint-ball and itch-powder 12-gauge shotguns. The chaos on the court was enhanced by scratching and sneezing and wiping of semi-enameled eyes.

Paint transmuted into war-paint, during which the orange-net enforcers, donning ski-masks, resorted to the old-style tactics of punching, kneeing and kicking their capturees. “This is what you get when you fuck with us!” one blue-garbed protector informed Teresa.

Yet more sirens, and more again. The Kansas State Police had not had a chance to try out the $5.3 million worth of advanced tactical weapons they had amassed from the Homeland Security Gift Shop and Cafe. The gym-space echoed anew with concussion grenades; rubber bullets bounced off walls and public; bean-bags (aka FBs, or “flexible batons”) crescendoed the havoc while wooden dowels percussed from skulls to floor.

Was there reaction? You bet!

Anarchists in the crowd organized an ad-hoc protest by stripping naked and arranging themselves non-hierarchically in a peace sign, and were soon trampled by old hippies in tie-dyes and pony-tails shouting ancient slogans, and threatening to call the ACLU.

This was too much for the mid-level officers, who up till now had let the rookies rock and roll. Out came the temporarily-blinding strobe lights, and then the Tasers which, in case you haven’t been following, fire barbed darts which deliver a 50,000 volt jolt. Those hit lose muscle control (including sphincters), and collapse instantly. The gym floor became littered with bodies, clothed and un-.

Still there was resistance from the quickly-erected holding pens. Insufferable: chanting and most provocative of all, videotaping and flashbulbs. It was time for DARPA-level crowd control using weapons that had never been used, not in Wichita, not in Kansas, not in the continental United States, save possibly at the U1a Facility at the DOE's Nevada Test Site -- and maybe not even there. Semi-conductor lasers to create plasma “flash-bangs” stunning and disorienting the target; heat-compliance weapons -- directed-energy prototypes that would instantly raise body-temperature to an intolerable level. Taser-type darts variously tipped with four varieties of incapacitating, psycho-active drugs.

But alas, before any of these could be brought into play, the gym lights went out. The clowns had struck again. Several hands copped major feels on Teresa. This was not to her liking. Richard’s hammerlock was tightened through the net, and Khalidi was only just recovering from the baton-twirling routine especially for Ragheads. Then the sprinklers came on strong, dampening the mood and the firepower. And a Jewish clown laugh-track filled the room, with arena loudspeakers cranked up to max -- which is pretty loud.

Then silence. Blackness and wetness and silence. The evening seemed over. The police withdrew, fading out under cover of darkness, walkie-talkies crackling obscurely, diminuendo to nothing. The audience walked, limped, staggered, crawled, swam for freedom.

The next day, the Wichita Eagle quoted Mayor Mayans as declaring the police action “a model for homeland defense,” and noted that all officers had demonstrated “a tremendous amount of restraint,” and were thus able “to refrain from arrests.”

Of the three on the platform, one began to entertain modest doubts about remaining in his adopted country, while on a related subject, the other two harbored no more doubts whatsoever.

[Marc Estrin is a writer and activist, living in Burlington, Vermont. His novels, Insect Dreams, The Half Life of Gregor Samsa, The Education of Arnold Hitler, Golem Song, and The Lamentations of Julius Marantz have won critical acclaim. His memoir, Rehearsing With Gods: Photographs and Essays on the Bread & Puppet Theater (with Ron Simon, photographer) won a 2004 theater book of the year award. He is currently working on a novel about the dead Tchaikovsky.]

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Marc Estrin : Unholy Ground

UNHOLY GROUND

By Marc Estrin / The Rag Blog / September 11, 2010

Here it is 9/11 again, and the world is all caught up in a debate on whether our "attackers" are being "insensitive" in demanding a presence at "ground zero" -- or two blocks away, or 20, or on the island of Manhattan.

Although I'm a fiction writer, it's hard for me to get involved in this debate concerning counterfactuals, sides taking passionate sides on the ethics of a fairy tale. Though it is interesting to thrash out whether Jack was right to steal the giant's magic harp, the fact is that there was no giant; there was no harp; there was no Jack. At least not as real people in this marvelous story.

While there may have been some middle-easterners involved in some way (though the evidence is unclear), the concrete-set notion that "19 Arab highjackers with box cutters attacked us" is -- to anyone who has looked at the physical and circumstantial evidence -- perfectly silly, and certainly not grounds for an anti-Muslim crusade.

This is not the place to present the mountains of evidence against the "official story" of 9/11. For a brief fact sheet on the collapse of the three buildings, one might go here.

Suffice it to say that planes do not "vaporize" upon crashing, and steel buildings do not symmetrically collapse at free fall speed from airplane strikes or fire -- or from no airplane strikes and tiny fires, as in the case of Building 7.

I began serious study of 9/11 issues back in 2004 after my reading of David Ray Griffin's first book, The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions About the Bush Administration and 9/11. Here is my review from back then.

In the six years since, I have read many articles, watched many videos, and had endless discussions with smart people about this issue. And I've concluded two things:

1. The official story is transparent junk.
2. It's very difficult to get anyone to question it.

And while firm conclusions are a bit evasive -- at least around the edges -- about who actually "did" 9/11, much evidence points to those with motives, materials, authority, and opportunities to pull it off. The prime suspects combining all these are personnel and agencies of the U.S. government. But it will take an independent investigation to look into that. Nevertheless, it is very likely that "ground zero" is not only not "sacred," but is rather intensely unholy, smelling of sulfur.

Given #2 above, it's not likely that an independent investigation will happen soon -- at least in the U.S.

So what should a novelist do? Since the MSM will not cover it, I decided to write SKULK, a comic novel about 9/11 issues. Maybe, I thought, the material could get beyond the truther choir out into the fiction-reading public. An end-run, as it were, around let's-not-go-there-ism. Though the story is ridiculous (but rich), the websites mentioned by the schemers are real. Were a reader to be curious enough to check them out, he or she would be standing at the edge of a vast sea of real information generally out of public view.

So for this 9/11, I thought I'd share a short section of SKULK in which Skulk -- Teresa Lee Skulkington of the Connecticut Skulkingtons -- convinces her boyfriend, Prof. Richard Gronsky, of Kansas State University, that America needs a "teaching moment," and that 9/11 truth is it.

Our heroine was originally modeled on Ann Coulter, and this scene germinated after I was told (I cannot vouch for this) that AC was -- improbably -- a Deadhead! So here, in a chapter called "The Wheel, our dynamic duo, high on Uncle Sam acid tabs, are recovering from a complex trip. Gronsky's pet project is to get Kansas to secede from the union. I'll explain anything else that needs explaining in [square brackets].

And at the seventh hour, they rested. The Dead cd had been retired. Richard lay sprawled out on the couch, eating green, green guacamole, singing to himself his favorite verse from Carmina Burana over and over like some tape loop at Kaufmann’s. [the department store where a mysterious year-round Santa Claus works]
Rex sedet in vertice
Caveat ruinam!
Mmmm, mmmm, mmm, yowsa...
Nam sub axe legimus
Hecubam reginam.
“Yes.”
She, on the other hand, was over-tired-revved, sitting in the chair, her arms around her knees, her head down, wrapped in teeming brain.
“You know that article you read me?”
“Unh unh.”
“The article about the kid and the water?”
“No. What kid? What water?”
“Hydrogen oxide or whatever.” [a conspiracy theory about the government putting di-hydrogen oxide in the water]
“Oh, yeah, yeah. What about it?”
“The Free State of Kansas is never going to happen...”
“What do you mean?” he loudly objected.
“Hold on there. Hear me out, hear me out.”
Richard closed his eyes.
“The Free State of Kansas is never going to happen -- without some kind of shock, some huge consciousness-raising about the true state of things.”
“Isn’t Dubya enough?”
“No, no, no. Read your own goddamn Frank book. [Skulk has come down to Kansas to disprove Thomas Frank's book, What's the Matter with Kansas?] Rove has got the status quo sewn up. We’ve got to break...”
“Could we talk about this tomorrow?”
“This is tomorrow. Look at the sky. And you’ve got an eight o’clock class. So perk up!”
She poured what was left of the chardonnay in his lap.
“Look,” she continued, “the American public is very sweet -- especially Kansans -- and Love is All -- and all -- but they’re...I don’t want to say ‘stupid’. Let’s just say they’re a little hidebound in what they take to be the present. The official version of the present.”
“Let’s give ‘em all some Uncle Sam...” he suggested.
“Yeah, well they’ve had too much Uncle Sam already. They need to -- what do you academics say? -- unpack him. See what’s really in there.”
“But that’s ridiculous. They won’t,” Richard observed.
“They will if they are shaken up enough. Enough to see through some of the more obvious lies.”
“Like?”
“Like all the 9/11 stuff, liberal bonehead. What could be more explosive?”
“They’ve already been shaken up by 9/11.”
“Yeah, and they’ve circled the wagons. Around Dubya and the gang.”
“That’s predictable. People always support...”
“But what if they realized that Dubya and the gang were the ones that did it? I mean in some way did it?”
“What?”
“9/11.”
“Unh unh. I’m not going there. And no one else will either.”
He rose exhaustedly to his feet and began pacing.
“Look,” she lectured, “who ordered NORAD to stand down? Have you seen the early photos of the Pentagon? It’s only a little, tiny hole. Where’s the plane? Melted? Where are the engines? Engines don’t vaporize from burning fuel. How did two giant skyscrapers…”
“Three.”
“Three -- collapse from fire when no steel buildings had ever collapsed like that before in the history of buildings? C’mon. Weren’t you suspicious when you saw all that on TV?”
“No. I was horrified.”
“Hey, these are the guys that took us into war to stop Saddam from dropping nuclear bombs on us. And they’ve got people still swallowing it.”
“These are the guys?? These are your buddies, your father’s friends. I can’t believe you’re saying this! You! Ms. Fierce Right-wingnut.”
“Yeah. Well that was then and this is now. Post. Don’t you want to see the Free State of Kansas?”
“Yes, of course.”
“So we need to shake our dear citizens out of their lethargy. Fight the mass psychosis.”
“How?”
Teresa sat down in Richard’s place.
“I don’t know.”
“Good.”
“But I do know this: Things seem pretty benign here at home, right? -- at least for Dubya and the gang. But a haystack soaked with kerosene also looks benign. It doesn’t smell that way -- but then neither does the country. But it appears content to just sit there -- until you toss in a match.”
“And you want to be the match.”
“We want to be the match.”
“The 9/11 stuff.”
“What else? It’s the smoking gun.”
“I see.”
Richard plopped down next to her on the couch. They both sat in silence for several minutes, each concerned with conflagration.
“What was that place called with the French name that John Brown...where somebody slaughtered somebody else?” she asked out of the blue.
“Marais des Cygnes,” he answered, Swamp of the Swans. Why? You thinking of slaughtering somebody? Your once-beloved vice-president, when he comes to speak at Raytheon next week?”
“No,” she said, taking him seriously. “That would bring down a police state big time. Homeland Security über Alles. No, we need some kind of teaching moment. And it can’t be seen as a terrorist act.”
“A teaching moment.”
“You’re supposed to know about those. I just thought it was a nice name.”
“What?”
“Marais des Cygnes.”
“Oh.”
“It’s like you and me. You the swamp, and I the swan."

How much Uncle Sam will it take to get people to understand the workings of Uncle Sam?

[Marc Estrin is a writer and activist, living in Burlington, Vermont. His novels, Insect Dreams, The Half Life of Gregor Samsa, The Education of Arnold Hitler, Golem Song, and The Lamentations of Julius Marantz have won critical acclaim. His memoir, Rehearsing With Gods: Photographs and Essays on the Bread & Puppet Theater (with Ron Simon, photographer) won a 2004 theater book of the year award. He is currently working on a novel about the dead Tchaikovsky.]

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...