Politics
“Blood Trail,”By C.J. Box
2008, G.P. Putnam’s Sons
$24.95 hardbound, 301 pages
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Here’s a book that probes some of the less-noticed wounds of America’s culture wars with all the delicacy of a 105 mm howitzer.
It’s part of a series of eight detective/mystery novels about a Wyoming game warden, Joe Pickett, who works directly for the governor — a Democrat, oddly enough — named Spencer Rulon.
In this story, someone’s killing hunters and mutilating their bodies in particularly nasty ways. With a state economy that depends so much on the hunting industry, Rulon gets Pickett involved in the hunt for the hunter who hunts hunters.
Sorry, couldn’t resist.
“One Woman’s Army: The Commanding General of Abu Ghraib Tells Her Story,”
By Janis Karpinski with Steven Strasser (2005, Hyperion, $24.95 hardback, 242 pages.)
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If you’ve ever wanted to know what it would be like to achieve all you ever hoped, then to have it all ruined before your eyes, this book can fill you in.
Janis Karpinski is the ill-starred (ahem) general of the 800th Military Police Brigade, of whom a few soldiers apparently cooperated in the abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib.
This past Thursday, Karpinski spoke of these and other events at an event arranged by the Mid-South Peace and Justice Center.
Leading up to the Abu Ghraib scandal, she had a remarkable military career, of which her book supplies a comprehensive precis.
In 1960, during the Eisenhower administration, at the age of seven, she decided she wanted to be a soldier — after finding World War II mementos of her father in the attic of her Rahway, N.J., home.
“I put the the had on my little blonde head and stood up straight, feeling as tall and proud as my father had in the flush of victory after a great European war,” she writes. (P. 1)
Little did that child know how hard it would be for her to achieve anything like the military accomplishments she envisioned.
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“The Secret History of the American Empire: The Truth About Economic Hit Men, Jackals, and How to Change the World,” by John Perkins(2007, Penguin Group, 365 pages, paperback, $15)
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If you had a hard time relating to Michelle Obama’s modesty with regard to American accomplishments, this book may surprise you.
In this tome, you get a crystal-clear peek at how rapaciously U.S. corporations have exploited and abused peoples and resources on every continent of the planet — except Antarctica and Europe.
Here’s a story told to Perkins by someone claiming to be “jackal” (a CIA-sponsored mercenary) named “Brett”:
“I walked into El Presidente’s office two days after he was elected and congratulated him.
“He sat behind that big desk grinning at me like the Cheshire Cat.
“I stuck my left hand into my jacket pocket and said, ‘Mr. President, in here I got a couple hundred million dollars for you and your family, if you play the game — you know, be kind to my friends who run the oil companies, treat your Uncle Sam good.’ Then I stepped closer, reached my right hand into the other pocket, bent down next to his face, and whispered,’ In here I got a gun and a bullet with your name on it — in case you decide to keep your campaign promises.’
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“The Great Derangement:
A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics, & Religion at the Twilight of the American Empire,”By Matt Taibbi(Spiegel & Grau, New York, $24, hardback, 270 pages)
This book has some real gems of insight — wisdom, even.
Check this one out, for example:
“When the government sees its people as the enemy, sooner or later that feeling gets to be mutual. And that’s when the real weirdness begins.” (P.132)
Unfortunately, such valid points are scattered thinly — and with considerably more verbiage — through 270 pages of smarmy, self-righteous, arrogance trying to masquerade as humor.
Don’t get me wrong, I did laugh at some of this.
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”The Age of American Unreason”By Susan Jacoby
2008, Pantheon, $26
Hardback, 356 pages
My first encounter with the term “intellectual history” came within the past three years.
I was searching through the online faculty directories at area universities, trying to determine the specialties of various history professors, so I could get their expert opinions on a wide array of current events and places — from Appalachian poverty to Zambian politics, as it were.
I looked at Rhodes College’s Web page for Prof. Lynn Zastoupil. Under “Areas of Expertise,” it listed “European Intellectual History.”
“Cool,” I thought. “That would be a fun area to work in. Imagine researching, writing and teaching that all day.”
I have an uncanny ability to find the least remunerative fields fascinating and fun. The newspaper business, for example.
A century ago, I’d have been jumping into the buggy whip and horse-drawn wagon business with a great deal of enthusiasm.
So, Susan Jacoby’s latest book provides an unwelcome, sobering two-by-four upside the head for anyone who might think that the life of the mind is something the American public is ready to embrace on a large scale — after seven years under a president who can’t properly pronounce the word “nuclear.”
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“Waging Peace: The Art of War for the Antiwar Movement”
By Scott Ritter
Nation Books 2007, Paperback, $13.95174 pages.
Although it may not seem likely, if you simply look at our career choices, the author and I have much in common, so take this review with a large grain of salt — perhaps enough to dehydrate several white-tailed deer.
It’s true that he’s a former United Nations weapons inspector and well-respected expert in all things military, which in the United States perhaps ranks at the top in terms of popularity and respect among American citizens.
And I am now and have always been just a journalist, a job which Americans often rank below lawyer and used-car salesman in terms of popularity and respect.
But in support of my argument that we might have been separated at birth, I submit the following:
He’s an Air Force brat, as am I.
He’s an ex-jock, as I was in high school.
He’s a committed, principled individual who believes in pursuing both peace and justice, and I think it’s fair to say that I share those qualities.
And I think it’s fair to say we’re both thoroughly disappointed with the state of our nation.
The following is a transcript of a wide-ranging interview I conducted Wednesday with Scott Ritter, the former United Nations weapons instructor and vocal opponent of the war in Iraq.His most recent book is “Waging Peace: The Art of War for the Antiwar Movement,” (2007, Nation Books), a copy of which sat on the table at Quetzal as we talked. Also present were Jacob Flowers, executive director of the Mid-South Peace and Justice Center, George Grider, the center’s board chairman, and Dr. Jose Davila, a Christian Brothers University mechanical engineering associate professor who also happens to sit on the center’s board.Ritter was in town to speak at CBU on Thursday on the topic, “U.S. Foreign Policy in the Middle East: Iraq Occupation and Target Iran.”Q: How did you get into this position of being a person who’s anti-war, being an officer in the Marine Corps, going from that to being antiwar? It seems to me that there would be some epiphany involved, and I wanted to see what that would be for you.
A: “I don’t know that there’s an epiphany. I like to define myself more as pro-integrity and pro-America, and I don’t think the two should be inherently separate. I think that anybody who has spent time in the military or who has been into war has an appreciation for the reality that war is. Anybody even who has spent time in the military and hasn’t been to war understands through the preparations for war what is entailed by going into war, and I think it would be a sick individual indeed who would embrace this and cherish this. War is about the killing of people and the destroying of property. So, I don’t see any inherent contradiction between being a professional Marine, sworn to uphold and defend the constitution, trained to do that which is necessary in its defense, being against war.
“American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America”By Chris HedgesCopyright 2006Free Press
Paperback, $14
274 pages
The sentence that’s key to understanding this Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter’s book appears on the last page of the new paperback edition, which is actually part of an interview of the author that appeared Jan. 8, 2007, in Salon.com:
“I don’t know how much it’s apparent, but it’s an angry book.”
That it is.
But it’s not particularly informative about the link between the Christian Right and the “fascist shift” described in Naomi Wolf’s “The End of America” (see my review here).
The vast majority of Hedges’ book describes the various ways in which pillars of the Christian Right condemn the left, the independent woman, the homosexual, the Muslim — and exploit the poor, the female, the old and the non-white.
In this, Hedges is, ahem, preaching to the choir, I think.
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After a witty introduction by Rhodes College’s Dr. Dan Cullen, New York Times columnist and author David Brooks quipped that he’d agreed to speak here during this busy presidential campaign year as long as the introduction wasn’t funnier than his own speech.
He needn’t have worried.
Brooks had spoken at Rhodes before, back in 2000, when he was touting his first bestseller, “Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There.”
A University of Chicago history grad, Brooks coined the term “bobo” as a contraction of “bohemian” and “bourgeois,” signifying how the cultural descendants of the yuppies had acquired a patina of faux outdoorsy, casual, peasant authenticity as they simultaneously scaled the economic heights via their new economy careers.
Rather than buying expensive furs or cars, as the yuppies of the 1980s would, bobos bought “working” farms in gentrified rural areas and acquired the most expensive versions of common items (think Viking good, Kenmore bad).
$13.95 paperback
176 pages
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This may be the most important book you’ve never read.
In it, point by point, footnote by footnote, Rhodes scholar Naomi Wolf builds an eerily calm case for an assessment that the United States is at the precipice of fascism.
Wolf rightly notes the ambiguity of the word “fascism,” which conjures up the notion of goose-stepping SS troops and military dictators carrying several pounds of military decorations on their chests. She quotes the Columbia Encyclopedia’s definition, which includes the following sentence:
“Its essentially vague and emotional nature facilitates the development of unique national varieties, whose leaders often deny indignantly that they are fascists at all.”
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