Bobbleheads

My wife has, inspired by Stephen Colbert's series (more about him and his ilk below), installed a setting that changes all mentions of the D.'s surname to his original German ancestral Drumpf. Although I learned years ago at Ellis Island that the "they changed my name to so-and-so" is a canard, as what the immigration staff did was compare the passenger lists compiled in the foreign ports with the arrivals, it's understandable that in this case, the Teuton tribal variant morphed rapidly into a card-game slam.

But the greater issue, of the conflating of every damn other event since November's election to the Reichstag fire, the rise of the Leader, and fall of every pantsuited feminist parading "I'm with Her," rankles me. (see more in my next piece about the rhetoric indulged in by the left, against the trolls on the far-right.) While admittedly I must agree with said spouse in that others are far more likely than your scribe to face potential and actual restrictions under the new administration, I counter that under Her, She would have escaped most scrutiny, just as she was afforded the "get out of jail" card in the game that was the campaign, while her fellow-contestant Bernie was trapped and thwarted all along. We know who won this round of Monopoly, but either way, the neo-liberals play deep-state puppets.

So, the eagerness of the mainstream press to claim every "outrage" and to keep the CNN-MSNBC news drip flowing into the likes of many around me who stay plugged in, delighted and scared, must be set off by the likes of a rather dodgy alternative source. While its "Russia is happy" tone recalls the "useful idiots" co-opted to praise the glories of the CCCP in the West, David Walsh at this site sponsored by none other than the "Fourth International" does warn us well. The late-night comedians claim to send-up both sides, but they are hypocritical. They are backed by the MSM and their cronies.

The comics are working off a script provided for them by the Democrats and the media and political establishment as a whole. Stupid, irresponsible and conformist, they take the line of least resistance. In fact, in pursuing the campaign against Russia, they are able to feel at one with powerful political and social forces. It is a warm, comforting sensation.
Their wealth is a significant element in their political and social conformism. These are not individuals who want to rock the boat. O’Brien’s net worth is an estimated $75 million, Colbert’s is $45 million, Kimmel’s is $35 million, Fallon’s is $25 million, Olbermann’s is also $25 million, Maher’s is calculated to be between $23 and $30 million and Meyers’ is $10 million.
For eight years, these people shut their mouths about the crimes of the Obama administration against the populations of Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Pakistan and elsewhere. They kept quiet about the growing misery of the American working class. They proved themselves the worst sort of sycophants and toadies.
Now they’ve “come to life,” opposing Trump on the most unprincipled and reactionary basis. They deserve only contempt.

On the inevitable other hand,  I found in my e-mail an earnest rejoinder to that penultimate paragraph. Alexis Shotwell decries this: "Each of these criticisms deploys what we can call 'purity politics': because the person expressing the desire for another world is complicit or compromised, they are supposed to give up. Conservatives use purity politics to try to close down critique and action."

True, but so do her progressive pals. Those on MSM networks fail to engage other perspectives unless as token debate fodder, or as freaks. I recall how Jill Stein and Gary Johnson's positions were so mocked. Not that either candidate was free of folly, but the tone eliminated both as ranting idiots.

Would any socialist, left-libertarian, or anarchist earn any show or even a spot worthy of ratings? Can one conceive of a European nationalist, an Afrika separatist, return-to-Aztlan, or Hawaiian native rights advocate network host? How often are the works of Arundhati Roy decrying the collusion of NGOs/ philanthropy towards the Third World assigned by the tenured purporting to fight the power? Do they teach the many veterans I do, and invite their perspectives into a supposedly diverse setting?

While the faults of both the Democratic mainstream and both Her and her predecessor have been routinely ignored, so that air time rushed to the tweets and sputters of her train-wreck ranting foil. The DNC blames "fake news" for Her defeat. FB hires left-wingers to screen. We the bobbleheads are treated as if fools, granted suffrage and the right to fight for the military complex, but not afforded the ability to reason for ourselves. While I'm no cheerleader for our collective (il-)literacy or acumen, the distance between the hackneyed praise given us every four years by candidates contrasts with this diminishing of the abilities we are supposedly able to exercise for the survival of our society or globe.

"Former owner was a lit professor"

I found this title phrase annotated in a search for a book title that had understandably gotten botched, as I received in the mail today an edition published a year earlier (same publisher, but 1946 rather than '47!), one of many of the Divine Comedy. I've been researching various translations and naturally, the proliferation two-thirds of a century ago led to confusion then and now. The seller erred, I am sure, unintentionally, but now I am going back to try to find the right translation, one of so many. The reason for their abundance, now more than ever, may puzzle those who in a secularizing era still find fascination with Dante. My take on this examines why this draw to the other world in his poem also keeps lagging in the thick darkness of fiery and icy hell, rather than climbing back into the diurnal light of Mount Purgatory and then the eternal radiance, for most readers. But that will emerge, at least in my consideration, a few months from now. I am letting the piece sit, and sifting a few more versions and treatments, but the bulk of it is on the shelf, like wine or cheese, and I hope from aging it mellows, grows richer, and tastier.

Speaking of shelf, full already with books, including many attempts to render Dante's epic into modern terms, why add more? I already have to exile titles to the garage, and that years ago approaches the capacity my study and related bookshelves already have reached. I purchase, however, only a few books a year now. I get some to review, but even then, I reckon e-books will slowly diminish the physical stack, as they have in my music reviews, which I have to compile now with more research before the fact, often with MP3 song files and not even a P.R. blurb to help me. Takes the fun out of an advance promo CD, too, once music is soon streamed anyway by means of Spotify or the like, whereas at least books keep their appeal in physical form. But that plays into the problem here: don't I want fewer rather than more bulky bound books?

Why do I still gather some books, for keeps? Some merit purchase as references. Many are not in the public library system for checkout, being often academic or reference texts. I live far from any research library and lack access to scholarly resources. I lack, however, the bibliomaniac's impulse. While looking at my Irish on one side, medieval on the other, demarcations in my crowded room cheer me, or overwhelm me by their stolid acquisition, they are tools for me rather than fetishes. 

So, I ponder that epitaph in that abandoned copy of Dante. Mine too will someday be consigned to a posterity where I figure few if any will care for them. I wonder their fate, and I fear as I wrote in my previous entry that Ray Bradbury's prediction of "Little Sister"'s distractions rather than Big Brother's surveillance may mean the truer reduction of culture and learning to big-screen total immersion. For all her drippy chiding, Rebecca Solnit in this month's Harper's reminded me that we went from a fear of big screens in 1984, Orwell or Mac versions 1.0 to a love of small screens, distractions for all. As I try to find her piece (subscribers only, another indication of how not all information wants to be free, nor should it as I don't get paid for any reviews I type, and I don't begrudge the Bradbury or Solnit who makes a living as a writer) "Poison Apples," holiday traffic slows to 1984 modem speeds, aha.

Theoretically, despite the pauses timing me out as I entered that search term, as Andrew O'Hagan (born but seven years after me) counters "In Defense of Technology," we can remember the 70s, and for me much of the 60s, like lonely Eleanor Rigby. Whereas our connections now rest a click away:

"Communication was usually a stab in the dark: You might find someone to talk to about your favorite book, but more likely you wouldn’t, unless you moved to New York or took to wearing a sandwich board." Like him, I have no idea where my copy of The Smiths' "How Soon Is Now?" is in vinyl, but I have the digital version of it available in seconds. On the other hand, quite a few of my CDs never made it to digital, just as some LPs never made it to shiny disc, and in turn, unless every book makes as Mark E. Smith longed "the biggest library yet," not even Google and their damned spotty book previews will stop some of us holdouts from scrounging online for what neither libraries nor digital content providers can provide, or will bother to provide, a reliable copy in page, on hand.

Big Brother, Little Sister

Lately, some European artists protest as if only those who were born into or who affirm a particular identity can claim entitlement to act as, speak for, or depict that identity's experience. The somewhat forced diction of my first sentence indicates the similarly awkward expression of this reductive claim. Sharing on FB an article I found from the imploding New Republic (another story that fits in neatly), Exhibit B: Really Useful Knowledge and Europe's Art Censorship, my friend mentioned Ray Bradbury's novel as part of the warning about closing off alternatives, refusing controversy, and socially dumbing down our sensitivities.

Lots to discuss; a few excerpts to spark reflection. Ross Douthat, the resident conservative columnist at the New York Times (not imploding, but as a Sunday-only home subscriber, I note it's going to cost $9 weekly for that and digital access; my dad exploded, my wife recalls, when he saw we paid $3.50 for the treasured old-school paper--it sure was thick not that long ago--less than two decades ago.), discussed the impact of "vertically integrated media" as in the takeover of The New Republic by a Silicon Valley VC:

So when we talk about what’s being lost in the transition from old to new, print to digital, it’s this larger, humanistic realm that needs attention. It isn’t just policy writing that’s thriving online; it’s anything that’s immediate, analytical, data-driven — from election coverage to pop culture obsessiveness to rigorous analysis of baseball’s trade market.

Like most readers, I devour this material. Like most journalists, I write some of it. I’m grateful that the outlets that produce it all exist.

But among publications old and new and reinvented, it’s also hard not to notice that John Oliver videos — or, more broadly, the array of food and sports and gadget sites that surround Klein’s enterprise at Vox Media — aren’t just paying for the policy analysis. They’re actively displacing other kinds of cultural coverage and interaction, in which the glibness of the everyday is challenged by ideas and forms older than a start-up, more subtle than a TV recap, more rigorous than a comedian’s monologue.

That last snippet caught my attention. A few days after it did, Obama regaled The Colbert Report crowd, surely his demographic as any show on Comedy Central by default, with his ten-minute entertainment, pumping Obamacare while keeping his voters clapping. This made my wife and probably millions of fellow Dems happy, but shades of Nixon on Laugh-In saying "sock it to me," this left me disturbed. This capitulation, which others such as my son and his friends at dinner just applauded as a wonderful demonstration of how Our President handles the media and the message, to what the hipper and I guess alas younger folks "want" unsettles me even as it appears inevitable.

In turn, Tiffany Jones in concluding her article on "Exhibit B" cautions against what happens when "we" as in the same cohort Obama and Colbert and (at least most of) Silicon Valley appeals to make demands as to what "they" want to see as art, and what they want art to stand for, past or present:

The premise of art is that one can think up and convincingly construct for others, across time and place, a different life, another experience which becomes real to the reader or viewer because it has been written, painted, performed—not because the audience has been there, seen it, or done it themselves. Just think of all your favorite productions, books, or paintings and how they differ from your personal experience but seduce you into believing in them.

At their core, these calls for censorship dictate that only certain groups or people can create art because only they have the experience. Underlying these protests, then, is the idea that we, the audience, are not capably of empathy, and that the purpose of art is not is not to create and convince people of other worlds but to reflect the reality as the self-selecting chosen ones see it. It is an exclusive and divisive outlook, and it is one that ultimately negates the basis of art.

Fahrenheit 451 as read by Tim Robbins, as reviewed by Dave Itzkoff, revealed a subtlety I admit I was surprised to find in that author. I met him when I was in college and he spoke; he seemed very eager to promote literacy and love of the written word at our literary festival, but he also seemed to like himself a lot. Still, he signed my paperback of The Martian Chronicles (it was out on t.v. as a miniseries in the days we watched such on networks en masse, before DVR, DVD or even VCR).

Itzkoff wonders if Robbins is "phoning in" his reading of the book, and whether such a delivery of what remains a paean to the printed word should rather be preserved as Bradbury intended it. He goes on to consider the power of the moral, as the printed word did not capitulate to censorship (as perhaps art is in "Exhibit B" under pressure of P.C. dogma and a growing refusal to challenge certain religious oppositions to explicit or daring content, as well as the burgeoning industry bent on coddling us all against anything deemed disturbing, graphic, unsettling, or merely confronting our congeries of what we bundled up and thrust about as "identity" against presumably all who are less enlightened than us). Itzkoff concludes his review of Robbins' audiobook with a rousing recall to take up books, again:

But Bradbury knew, 60 years ago, that more seductive, less effective forms of information conveyance were coming to tempt even the most diligent and dedicated acolytes of the printed word, and that it was not a distant stretch from dismissing books as quaint and obsolete to banning them outright. As Captain Beatty explains to Montag, recounting how audiences’ attentions drifted from books to television, cartoons, “super-super sports” and “three-dimensional sex magazines”: “There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Technology, mass exploitation and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God.”

To the end of his life, Bradbury seemed surprised that he had to keep explaining that the novel was not about the dangers of government censorship or authoritarian rule; as he told his biographer Sam Weller, “ ‘Fahrenheit 451’ is less about Big Brother and more about Little Sister.” By this he seemed to mean all the small discouragements and impediments that take us away from our intellectual pursuits, whether peer pressure, encroaching technology or apathy. Fortunately, a few thousand years ago, we gave ourselves a sustainable and still reliable mechanism to provide shelter from these distractions, as well as the option to use it or not. It is a choice as simple, and as significant, as the decision to light up a mind or to extinguish it.

As for me, I close this brief scan of how the media play into our pleasures by considering the BBC series Black Mirror, as Layne and I binge-watched in three sittings its six parables to date about the pressure technology poses to break our cherished identity and control over our privacy and intimacy in the name of ethics; about a pair of contestants for an American Idol type of contest eerily extrapolated in a manner only half-explained, the better for it to grip you; about how memories can be recorded for instant recall; about the way that a loved one's words and voice, and then presence, might be resurrected and recreated; about how a pursuit for justice might well mingle with a fun day's excursion; and about how nihilistic, entertaining alternative candidate, as a cartoon, might be manipulated by shadowy powers that be. None end happily, but that is no spoiler, only true to life.

Lewis Buzbee's "Blackboard": Book Review

A product of the golden age when California's postwar public schools were ranked first in the nation, now a writer of children's books, Lewis Buzbee returns to where he started, nearly a half-century ago. From kindergarten, he moves through his elementary, junior high and high schools, before summing up his stint at three institutions of higher learning, and then his career teaching writing to extension students. Throughout, he briefly explains how education has developed, and he blends light analysis with his own quest as a student.

In the Santa Clara, pre-Silicon, Valley, he began in 1962 at Bagby Elementary, one of many sprawling, open-aired, low-slung, baby-boom, suburban schools, this one built a year before he was born. He finds much the same expanse today, and he juxtaposes his younger self as he stands in the same classrooms. The poet and creative writing instructor that he is now surfaces, as in this passage: "Mrs. Babb would be grading papers at her desk, and I would be standing just outside the classroom door, thwocking the erasers together, teacher and student working in concert somehow, me watching the words and numbers and ideas from the previous week as they drifted across the playground." While whiteboards and dry-erase markers replace the chalk-dusted, eraser-powdered, durable black or green boards, those lasted two decades, he tells us, while today's stolid computers may be turned over every two or three years now.

He shows how kindergarten, as a garden to cultivate the minds and bodies of children, grew from German reformer Friedrich Froebel in 1837; the roots of "school" burrow back to the ancient Greeks, who used the word for learning together as derived from the one for "leisure time", denoting what for millions of children elsewhere in the world may still be an unachievable dream, the freedom to learn.

This opportunity, when Mrs. Babb called upon young Lewis to show his work at the black or white board, comes with struggle. "School can, in its best form, allow us to move beyond our terror."  Buzbee relates his own fear of "showing" math problems, and he reminds us how school, with supportive teachers (one can never fully account for the same patience in one's classmates), can overcome our uncertainties. He reveals how not only at Ida Price Middle School but in his bass guitar lessons on the side, being a successful learner demands one take risks. He mastered skills by memorizing times tables, musical scales, or French conjugations. These mental exercises, as with a guitarist figuring out riffs, cut grooves into the mind by repetition. These years of drill and discipline, as he recounts from lessons in junior high and at Branham High in San Jose, turned him away from a working-class household, where he struggled with doubt, into a confident, college-bound student.

Part Two tells of his shift from orientation to matriculation. While the transformation as a young adult in the mid-1970s was less swift than the two years of junior high, where he entered liking Bobby Sherman's sappy "Honey" and left humming the Beatles' menacing "Helter Skelter", Buzbee kept testing himself. After a year at the University of California, Santa Barbara, he returned to the Bay Area to be near a girlfriend while attending the local junior college. He praises evenly the highlights of both places, followed by the completion of his degree as an English major at nearby Santa Clara.

After that, he rejected a career as a high school English teacher for one as a writer. Successful enough to live in San Francisco, he returned to the classroom to teach creative writing, first at Berkeley and then the University of San Francisco in extension programs. He adds his own continuing education as a student, this time learning how to draw. Meanwhile, he compares the progression of his daughter, Maddy, with his earlier journey through California's public schools. They have changed, certainly.

Educated at a Montessori kindergarten, a French immersion grade school, and a Friends junior high, Maddy represents a generation raised by parents unwilling to commit their children to decaying city schools even as they wish they could improve. As my wife and I are the product of Californian public schools in that golden age (and former teachers in the Los Angeles schools ourselves in a far more tarnished era full of cutbacks, unrest, population growth, and declining standards among both faculty and students), we had sought alternatives, however rickety or utopian, for our children, educated within our city's similarly declining system. So, I understand Buzbee's dilemma. He may sidle past certain problems; he tries to solve others. He concludes with seven strong recommendations.

First, he would halve K-12 class sizes. Doubling salaries, while tripling those in junior high, he would have new teachers mentored, giving sabbaticals every fifth year. He'd happily, showing his NoCal leanings, tax away to pay for this, as well as classrooms reliably hot in winter and cool in summer, stocked with supplies, and surrounded by open space. (One casualty of urban overcrowding on many Californian campuses is the loss of fields and P.E. for overstuffed two-story, rather than open-plan, classroom structures resembling motels, by the by. He does admit that desks have increased in size, to account for the spike in childhood obesity.) Finally, Buzbee would enable daily time to stare out the window. He'd also abolish bake sales to raise funds for strapped schools.

This ambitious plan, with a touch of Swift's "Modest Proposal". pivots around the simple fact that schools are not factories, and mechanization is not the answer to what human enterprise can do. As a father of a private high school student, Buzbee assures us he will be happy to pay higher taxes so that the rest of the public school youngsters in California (and the nation) can enjoy the golden age of education which he, myself, and millions once did. If only my sons, his daughter, and millions of our neighbors' children (and adults) could do so now. (Author's website; PopMatters 8-5-14/ Amazon US)

Chris West's "A History of Britain in Thirty-Six Postage Stamps": Book Review

When I saved up my allowance as a nine-year-old, my first purchases were the boxed Ballantine paperback set of The Lord of the Rings for $2.85 and a secondhand Scott's stamp catalogue, the latter sold cheap as it was one year outdated from a local philatelist's shop. Those two red hardcover volumes set me back $7.50, but I lost myself there in as many imagined realms as mapped in Tolkien's trilogy. Staring at the small, monochrome images of stamps, I had to create in my mind's eye the magenta, umber, or carmine hues as distinguishing issues. My favorites were from British territories and protectorates and Crown Colonies. I'd scan their chronological entries, until the kings and queens stopped. Then, I'd switch from, say, Bechuanaland to Botswana, and watch as independence triumphed, titling the first issue of the new nation.

I learned a lot about history and politics. Similar lessons Chris West incorporates into his snappy survey of three dozen British stamps. These offer a cultural tour around the United Kingdom, since 1840.

With (once-?) typical English efficiency, the Penny Post came about nearly the same moment a new queen ascended the throne. Rowland Hill, a liberal reformer eager to spread literacy and offer a cheap method of sending letters which did not rely on the fluctuating fees demanded from the recipient from the postmaster, pitched his proposal. Overhead then as now proved low compared to distance; the expense lay in overheads. These would be reduced by a standard fee, a non-negotiable surcharge.

Hill's three reasons convinced the Royal Post Office. It might lose money at first due to the loss of postmasters' income, but the cost would soon convince many more to use a fixed-rate service. In turn, businesses would save. Finally, families separated by industrialization and urbanization could stay in touch. They did. The first issue, the Penny Black with the young Victoria in profile, sold 68 million in its year of production. Its successor, the Penny Red, over the next forty years sold 20 billion; starting in 1881, the Lilac sold 33 billion. In London by 1857, twelve daily deliveries allowed rapid exchanges of letters or postcards, and that city counted for a third of British correspondence.

Most chapters, however, depart from a stamp itself to summon up its era or a dramatic event. For instance, the Irish famine pairs with a depiction of a Penny Red postmarked there. Doughty Victoria's profile alters and her inked color changes over long decades, but given the similarity of the designs for much of the period charted, there is not as much to discuss about these stolid stamps themselves. When topics emerge, as with later commemoratives, West remains chary about what he explores.

Is there a need for 75,000 words which prefer to retell modern British history more than how stamps altered key moments of it, however tacitly? Perhaps, if one prefers West's subtlety. From each selected stamp, he surveys its illustrative era. He finds in each brisk chapter a vignette or perspective which suits his broad-minded humanism. He astutely credits earlier generations when, as with Rowland Hill or Charles Dickens, they asserted the sustenance of humanity in the face of relentless mechanization. He selects (if, frustratingly, with no references to any of the anecdotes, local history, or factoids he shares so often) stories which narrate in a thoughtful tone the mindset of his forebears.

He fairly calculates the imperial balance sheet for standards of living after the seizure of Hong Kong from the Chinese. West shows how the Army Form B 104-82 sent to the family of a dead soldier (fallen officers by contrast merited telegrams) at the cost of a George V Penny Red epitomized the bureaucracy of mass slaughter. "There was a hand-stamp for 'killed in action.'" Regarding the results of a 1919 "Homes fit for Heroes" campaign to house the returning troops from the Great War, West notes how "the results can be seen in most English villages (down the road from the war memorial)." Speaking of war, his only foreign inclusion, a two million over-stamp of a 200 Deutsche Mark 1923 issue, allows him to consider the relevance of hyperinflation to what replaced the Weimar Republic.

I agree with West as to his favorite. Monarchs tend not to amuse as much once one sees them over and over as the subject on a stamp, but what he terms 1953's "Gloriana", after Benjamin Britten's opera praising the coronation of Elizabeth II, remains handsome. Elegantly, it presents the new queen facing us, her calm gaze composed, her posture proud, her ermines and orb resplendent. This final design from the talented Edmund Dulac softens even this Irish (with a small-r) republican reviewer.

Addressing a British audience, West never mentions why these stamps always show a monarch but never list their origin. Great Britain premiered the adhesive stamp, so by the International Postal Union's decision, the kingdom did not have to name itself on it. Intriguingly (West again does not account for this), the British monarch, usually unnamed, is always depicted. For many reigns, this convention meant that the stamp tended to fill up with a regal profile. Only in the later twentieth century, as that royal figure herself sought rapport with her subjects in a post-imperial era, did Queen Elizabeth find her image shrunk to a cameo. As such, on most commemoratives she remains today, he her head usually enduring as a tasteful silhouette at the margins, a presence I find symbolic. 

Tellingly, British business confidence, even on Her Majesty's stamps, weakened by the second decade of her reign. 1962's "National Productivity Year" cannot overcome its dull theme. The queen's portrait takes up the right half. Arrows rise up superimposed over an outline of the kingdom at left, and the N-P-R initials jostle for supremacy at center. The 3d version, West must admit, had "white blobs" on the map, so parts of the realm were submerged as if into inland lakes. On some printings, Kent crumbled into the sea; on still others, "the Queen has a nasty white spot on the end of her nose".

Fortunately, the Beatles boosted revenue. West's fondness for a "true Summer of Love" during 1966, when Revolver appeared, while the Kinks' "Sunny Afternoon" provided the season's theme for Swinging London, makes England's World Cup triumph proclaimed on a stamp all the more splendid.

What follows, for what West's iconic David Bowie evoked as a mood of "Life on Mars", dampened prospects post-Yoko. Unions walked out, factories groaned, prime ministers sagged. Dismayed by unemployment, Britons tried to rally. A decimal system replaced ancient pounds, shillings, and pence, so the stamps had to match the new currency. A first day cover features all decimal definitives (the standard design with a uniform image for all denominations) with its own rubber stamp below. "Posting delayed by the Post Office Strike 1971." Inflation jumped from 4% in 1972 to 25% by 1975.

Few authors may find common ground strutted by Sid Vicious and Margaret Thatcher, but West joins them by their individual ambition. Confronting a British system no longer working, both resented conformity to outmoded models: one musical, one economic, maybe both political. West carefully examines the controversial legacy of the Iron Lady, whose mark probably left a far firmer imprint on British society than the Sex Pistols and all the spiky kids united. As with the British taking of Hong Kong in light of its subsequent prosperity, West aligns Thatcher with her embrace of "Victorian values". He asks if his nation indeed can survive without a "sound currency" and a thriving support of the entrepreneurial spirit which, after all, inspired reformers such as Rowland Hill as well as Maggie.

Another high-profile woman's entry onto the national stage at precisely this very contentious time would be commemorated with its own complex iconography, behind the simplified or soon polarized media manipulation of a much younger blonde. Princess Diana's ambitions to seek not Charles' sense of inherited duty but her own personal "authenticity" in West's analysis account for her own divided legacy. As "the People's Princess" she sought to connect with causes, such as landmine eradication or AIDS patients, driven by her own wish for exposure, and self-satisfaction in a difficult role she made public, or which was made so inevitably for her. West aligns this drive with her struggle against a fairytale wedding aftermath, one that trapped her. He notes how all five issues after Diana's death feature photographs from only her last ten years. That way, no royal family had to be included, or cut. Instead, as a representative of her post-1960s generation, Diana occupies the full stamp frame, alone.

Stamps serve as a synecdoche for Great Britain's challenges and creations, if affording a small peephole more than a panorama. West's philatelic appendix explains how from the stamps featured the eager may acquire "space fillers", or experts with more money better specimens, or for "the philatelist "who thinks they have died and gone to heaven" mint condition rarities. One wants more about the lore of stamps, much more. West might have provided a more consistent ratio between the historical events and royal dynasty these stamps memorialize and the humble, if often marvelously designed (considering their artistic merit, too few commemoratives enrich his sample) stamps themselves, with their quirks and trivia. However, as a welcome reminder in our wired age of the value and charm these little stickers possess, A History of Britain in Thirty-Six Postage Stamps illustrates the kingdom's ambitions and the inherent modesty of its eccentric title. (PopMatters 10-17-23; altered a bit for Amazon US 10-22-13)

Joe Queenan's "One for the Books": Book Review

Following his acclaimed memoir about finding solace in reading while growing up in a 1960s Philadelphia housing project, Joe Queenan returns with a (very loosely) collected jumble of related recollections, paeans to an impressively eclectic array of authors, satires of book clubs and Amazon raters, and a recurring worry disguised as a vow that Middlemarch will prove to be the last book he ever finishes.

Mr. Queenan's records of obsessive reading confront us as Amalie Nathomb and Moacyr Scliar jostle Poe, O.J., and Stieg Larsson for name recognition. Devotees of Rimbaud, prepare for Tom Tryon. The range challenges any reader of equally catholic addiction. His humorous take on bibliomaniacs plays erudition off of enthusiasm appealingly, coming from a fellow who "looks like a cop" instead of the refined critic he proves, underneath his Irish Catholic, blue-collar--if now very suburban and silver-haired in Tarrytown on the Hudson--bluster.

Closing Time in its exploration of reading as youthful release serves as a prequel to One for the Books; both casually clichéd titles hint at deeper resignation and mortality. Both books relate familiar themes--abusive and alcoholic families there, escape through books here--but enliven them with wit, verve, and idiosyncratic prose. Still, this newer account swerves, cobbled from shorter scraps instead of structured from the ground up. As with many books he takes down a peg, his own results from his manic pursuit tend towards satisfying, rather than “astonishing”.  Narrating them, he plays with a garrulous but measured narration (mingled with poignancy) assumed by certain Irish or their American cousins, counting those not only published writers: raconteurs, autodidacts, fanatics, or otherwise employed. 

Engaging as the bemused Mr. Queenan certainly remains, he as with many such tellers features wry episodes that survive on the page better in aphoristic bursts or testy exchanges with half-wits. Mr. Queenan’s barbed, cynical style may prickle by its carefully snide or (self-)mocking tone; those outside his “clan” may shrink from what we raised inside it wink at or sneer towards as “malarkey”—depending on our relation to the self-aware, deceptively casual, tale-teller.

Mr. Queenan uses his passion for reading above all other pleasures (except perhaps his hometown Philly teams) to examine the power books deliver, not in e-book but printed form, with all their memories associated with spines, marginalia, covers, and fonts. "They are physically appealing, emotionally evocative objects that constitute a perfect delivery system."

The first chapter looks at amassing books, the next at libraries. There the likes of James Patterson have to share shelf space next to Proust; this confusion of proximity vs. merit also plagues misled buyers in bookstores and clueless denizens of book clubs. They cannot agree to choose but  potboilers, self-help twaddle, survivor narratives, earnest life lessons, or sagas with endlessly ethnic and/or annoyingly plucky protagonists. Habitues of such circles fail to savor the serendipity found sidling from one title to another in a space where books are handled, not downloaded in a click. 

Mr. Queenan dismisses the sub-literate abilities of the dilettante or those swayed into fulsome blather by covers, titles, trends, and marketing: "a book is a series of arguments between the author and the reader, none of which the reader can possibly win. This is especially true of James Joyce."  Mr. Queenan aspires for seriousness and silliness, and he shows from his thousands of purchases abundant examples of both natures happily fulfilled. This takes, naturally, a dogged devotion for him, and the third chapter invites us along to watch him reading more than one title at a time. A "Platonic book list" in endless revision occupies the mind of every true book lover calculating another thirty-five years at the task, but by his seventh decade, Joe Queenan must narrow down his stacks.

That action will close this volume, but its impact resonates back into previous sections. Bookstores in chapter four beckon, in Tarrytown, small-town Ontario, at the late Borders, and in Manhattan. He writes where he bought each title, and he cherishes the associations the artifact inscribed evokes. Out of years of accrued reminders of those among whom he enjoyed or endured his books, life deepens.

"Prepare to Be Astonished" promises excitement. Joe Queenan's quips on blurbs and their flaws and possibility--he delves deep into Latin American literature based solely on who praises what on one cover, so on and so on--wander wonderfully, if very erratically. "Life, which in my youth had been unstintingly entertaining, now felt more and more like a Smith & Wesson cocked to my head, so if I had plans to read The Decameron and Finnegans Wake before I checked out for good, I would have to start being a bit more choosy." Yet, his affection for "bad books" (many he admits foisted on him rather than chosen) reveals his less lofty ambitions, to find between the covers a lifelong affection. 

In another, even more rambling, if suitably so, section ostensibly on writers' homes, his French visits join with more mundane jaunts to Hartford and Scranton. He detours into how he stayed way ahead, initially with typically relentless concentration, to dive into Swedish crime mysteries far in advance of the current Scandinavian Whodunit Boom; he relegates The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo to the pile of "voyeuristic porn". Somehow, this chapter winds up back in Paris, despite itself.

An acknowledgment nods to seven publications where parts of this collection first "appeared in different form": this book resembles a spirited cut-and-paste job. The energy of the assembler makes up in part for the rough edges of the collage. But the overall pattern, for all its varied, off-beat, and enticingly broad perspectives, does not always align as a book would if conceived as a single whole.

Yet the last two chapters combine the personal with the critical well. Mr. Queenan asks his family and friends for their reading habits and preferences, and from that questionnaire, he ponders how his own predilections do or do not reflect those with whom he lives. This topic feels much fresher--this reviewer has never found it in a similarly if never as impressively scattered life hunched over books. Joe Queenan, as a relevant aside (one of dozens, which rescue the ramshackle bits, and may repair them), recommends no more than two-hundred pages for any mystery, tops. Advice well-worth peddling. 

Preparing to move from his house when McMansions invade Tarrytown, he packs up his enormous accumulation of books. Finally, he has to figure out which to keep. Operation Winnow's intricate rationalizations for what one holds on to and what one lets go of will make sense only to those of us as meticulous as Mr. Queenan as to what books represent before, during, and after they are opened.

To nobody's surprise, the endeavor flounders. An impression of towers of books and boxes of more surrounding a beefy, feisty, but outnumbered author, who must drag himself away from reading to write to earn enough to spend on more to read (unless those volumes he gets, bad and good, for free as a reviewer, to be noted by this unremunerated reviewer with mingled envy and sympathy), lingers for the reader--and surely a fellow traveler along spine-filled canyons of high shelves--who closes these reflections.

"Reading is the way mankind delays the inevitable," he concludes. "Reading is the way we shake our fist at the sky." Closing time arrives again, with the author still at closure, sorting through his shelves. Joe Queenan meets his match, and in these pages, we glimpse the thousands of beloved or fondly despised books which, distilled into allusions, memories, and anecdotes, enrich his life and our own.
(New York Journal of Books 10-25-12)

Mary Peck's "Bhutan: Between Heaven and Earth": Book Review

From visits totaling seven months from 1999 to 2005 to this Himalayan kingdom, Mary Peck's fifty-six black-and-white photographs, each on its own right-hand page facing a blank left, command attention. Many have captions placed as endnotes; a few do not. This removal of words from image (except four brief poems, one by Gary Snyder, another by W.S. Merwin, and a pair of his translations from Muso Soseki) allows the reader to look at the landscapes, people, ceremonies, and architecture as if witnessed first-hand.

In her afterword, "Bhutan's Curve of Time," Peck relates how directions were given by Bhutanese. Each of her inquiries led to a local range of instructions--by a resident. "Just walk into that cloud." one man told her. (130) Beyond circumscribed limits, hemmed in by gorges or peaks, paths or landmarks, the estimates faded, and new ones emerged with the next encounter, the next person down the trail.

Karma Ura situates his nation within these same furrowed contours. As a distinguished civil servant charged with the think tank implementing the nation's evolving Gross National Happiness policy, Ura explains in his thoughtful forward the scope of GNH. He sums up the country, full of micro-climates from one valley to the next. He notes how "the food chain is more or less completed within one's own valley." (5) Therefore, the mythology, community, and the land are integrated over generations to support the people in a intimate, in-depth knowledge-- differing from the fragmented skills promoted today as a solution to education and modernization.

GNH philosophy, holistic, seeks value beyond quantification. Documents back to 1729, Ura reminds us, mention happiness as "the purpose of government." (8) If people are happier locally, their relationships thrive. Goods, houses, and money might not matter as much as personal and communal fulfillment. Certainly a fresh perspective, contrasted with the relentless, increasing, and often sole pursuit of economic growth posited in our own societies as the ultimate indicator of success.

With television approved only just before the millennium, and the Internet now making inroads as electrification accompanies roads into more of the previously remote interior where most Bhutanese still live, the challenges already faced in its rapidly expanding capital, Thimphu, may repeat in villages and hamlets. India and China trade exert enormous pressures on a region with a fragile ecology and strategic situation, combined with its agricultural, hydroelectric, and forested resources. "All that Bhutan has is a very long history of isolation," Ura observes. (11) It lacks "our own huge center of gravity," and its culture and traditions must not only be preserved, but kept integrated into everyday life. Not as trinkets or dances for tourists, but as decentralized, sustained, and relevant ways of living as arranged by those best suited to do so: the local people themselves.

Ura concludes with a reflective rationale for GNH. He registers the alleviation of poverty, the rights given both genders, and the control of environmental impacts. He argues against "a comfortable standard of living" measured by income or expenditure as the truest marker of well-being. Instead, he links the potential of his fellow citizens to "integrity, wisdom, and foresight." Perhaps surprisingly for readers of this book, Ura avers that such qualities may emerge even today from an historically "orally based culture" where the best and the brightest need not be literate to be community leaders. (13) For him, in the Buddhist perspective, this study via each person's "incipient" nature as a potential Buddha enables the Bhutanese to probe into understandings of the mind and perception, desire and its origins, which transcend the monetized frenzy of the rest of the world.

While a short read, this combination of Dr. Ura's essay with Mary Peck's photographs, enriched by a more eclectic reading list that goes beyond Bhutanese borders for regional eco-criticism, is recommended. For images in complementary tones, with a longer narrative that delves into similar issues, see (my Nov. 2012 review of) Bhutan: Hidden Lands of Happiness by John Wehrheim.(Amazon US 12-17-12)

"Bhutan: Taking the Middle Path to Happiness": Film Review

"Gross National Happiness" increasingly grows familiar as a catchphrase to sum up Bhutan's ambitions to orient its Himalayan fastness within harmonious precepts as taught by Buddhism and shared equitably among its peoples to assure mutual comfort, educational advancement, and spiritual progress. This project comprises this one-hour video produced by Thomas Vendetti and John Wehrheim. With Dr. Vendetti's experience with mental health outreach for the Hopi and now the residents of Maui, and Mr. Wehrheim's career as a hydroponics engineer who has worked in Hawai'i and Bhutan, one understands their professional connections that linked them to explore this kingdom's initiative under its benign monarchy to promote entry into the modern world while keeping traditional lifestyles, and as they are perched between a covetous China and a teeming India.

This geographical situation demands caution. Its ecological treasures require caretaking. Compared to the recent fate of other Buddhist realms, Tibet, Ladakh, Mustang, and Bhutan's neighbor, Sikkim, the need to preserve ancient wisdom, careful tourism, and economic growth makes this land a unique case study, the last jurisdiction where Tantric Buddhism enters into the governance of the nation.

Part 1 introduces the environmental imperative, and then segues into culture, water, and governance. The feel is very much what you'd see on public television or as an educational film. That is, there's no dramatization or re-enactments, no need to pump up an inherently worthy subject. The Prime Minister, Lyinpo Yeshey Zimba, and a musician-Performing Arts director, Jigme Drukpa, take turns narrating their country's plans. The Dalai Lama's prescriptions for happiness append this as a short feature. All agree: the pleasures of this world can be beneficial, but their best attainment is by that which limits greed and sustains nature.

I watched this prefaced by a bit of familiarity from books. (See my reviews of Radio Shangri-La by Lisa Napoli, Beyond the Sky and the Earth by Jamie Zeppa, So Close to Heaven: the Vanishing Buddhist Kingdoms of the Himalayas by Barbara Crossette, Bradley Mayhew's Lonely Planet and Francoise Pommaret's Bhutan: Himalayan Mountain Kingdom (Odyssey Guides) guidebook.) But like most Westerners, I lacked direct sight of this place. Color within native costumes, the architecture sustained in the old style for all new buildings, and the soft scenes of mist and scree all unfurled. Robert C. Stone's cinematography conveys some of the vastness of high peaks and narrow valleys, ravines and rivers cutting into sheer stone.

Out of this landscape, after learning of John Wehrheim's expertise (besides the script, he's written and photographed well his 1991-2006 stints there in "Bhutan: Hidden Lands of Happiness"--some of its evocative black-and-white images enrich the film), I can better relate to why hydro-electric energy takes up part 3 of the running time. Its facilities largely out of sight underground and in narrow gorges, they now harness but 5% of the potential power. More than the zero of a few years ago, but far more could be used to sell off to India, neatly capturing the snowmelt and profiting the inhabitants of a land needing revenue with so little arable land in such a vertically dominant spot.

My wife wondered as she watched if there was more to Bhutan's story; she hinted it seemed too simple. Hints of tension arise elsewhere; part 2 mentions that the advent of television in 1999 sparked a rise in crime and strife, so this piqued my curiosity. It's natural not to want to highlight this in a film about the pursuit of happiness, but more might have been given to the problems that modernity brings, as well as the trap that Bhutan may feel as it's aiming for freedom while positioned between two superpowers bent on making this century their own in a globalized, more heartless, system.

The 2008 film ends in an open-ended manner. The four parts or "pillars" of the Happiness plan along the Middle Path of moderation preached by the Buddha organize it, and after each, some music is shown. Western musicians join in as a celebration for the King's birthday occurs, and this concludes the documentary. I was not sure why the film wrapped itself up when it did, but this may suggest the striving of the kingdom will always be softened by the chance for festivity and community, aspects again necessary along with electrification, healthcare, literacy, and education (delightful that birth control is often taught to villagers by monks--a great touch!) as must-haves on the four-part plan. (Amazon US, 10-24-12; film's website. See also his book of photos and narrative on "Taylor Camp")

Fernando Báez' "A Universal History of the Destruction of Books": Review

This Venezuelan librarian answers what a history student, at Baghdad's university in 2003, wonders after the library's been looted of every volume: why does man destroy so many books? The book begins and ends in Iraq, where the earliest texts we have survive, only because of the flames that consumed and preserved their clay tablets. Twelve years of research results in the first "single history of their destruction" (7). Intriguingly, the author has "concluded that the more cultured a nation or a person is, the more willing each is to eliminate books under the pressure of apocalyptic myths" (18) Bibliophiles often can be biblioclasts. We all, he insists, in dividing up "us" vs. "them" negate each other, and play into censorship, exclusion, and eradication as we cannot tolerate criticism or opposition.

Translated in pithy style by Alfred MacAdam, it's a fluid and direct overview. Uruk, where the first surviving books can be found in Sumer, represents the creation simultaneous with the destruction of texts. Tablets were baked in the fires of battle, between 4100 and 3300 BCE. Little survives from so many ancient eras: 75% of Greek manuscripts lost; 80% of Egyptian texts vanished. This grim catalogue continues, as we find patterns repeated from the start of civilization, as invaders and barbarians plunder and eliminate no less than the kings and the clerics.

It's a study perhaps better sampled, as Báez suggests, rather than taken start to finish. The nature of the topic makes an uneven, incomplete, and enigmatic treatment-- appropriately if frustratingly-- for the material. The tone's not always scholarly; there's moments of verve that ease the flow of often disheartening lists of the losses that have been incurred by fire, insects, weather, and ideology. Qin Shi Huang's forces in 213 BCE carried out a typical binge: "Functionaries went from house to house seizing books, which they then burned in a bonfire, to the joyful surprise of those who hadn't read them." (68) Augustus the emperor "burned more than 2,000 Greek and Roman works he didn't like. He was a severe critic." (77) "The life of Yakov ben Judah Leib Frankovich was that of any fanatic: unsettled, no security, immodest." (178)

You learn about Nicolas Turrianos, who in copying codices for the Spanish king Philip II enabled "a special collection of forbidden books made up of volumes sewn shut so that no one could read them." (174) Or, how the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, after Stalin's security chief Beria's death, sent subscribers a postcard of the Bering Sea to paste over the entry on that now disgraced chief of Soviet security.

And, while you may recognize the name of the venerable Swiss library at St Gall, I doubt if many will have heard of the first woman formally canonized, St. Wiborada. She threw herself on top of her buried books after the Huns set fire to the abbey. Her mutilated body was found above the library's contents, protected by her foresight beneath the earth. For this, she's venerated as the patron saint of librarians.

While the Nazi desecration gains attention, along with the Islamic and Christian efforts to silence those texts that challenged hegemony, you also learn about both sides in the Spanish Civil War, or Latin American and Bosnian examples, perhaps less documented. Chinese and Soviet biblioclasty, by comparison, received much less space than I expected, and the sustained attention to particular countries or centuries does become sporadic. This may be due to the outbreaks, followed by recoveries, and then-- unfortunately-- usually more outbreaks of fanaticism, that become never predictable throughout five thousand years of purportedly civilized society.

Báez, ending a brief chapter on "the natural enemies of books," notes how fragile transfer to CD or flash drives may be. Even if we can save 14 million volumes on a disc, all it takes is a single scratch and we've lost everything, once more. E-Books are no insurance against loss, for hackers will supplant Huns in coming centuries.

This survey moves, in Borgesian fashion like the allusion in its title, mainly by such anecdotes, short essays, and dutiful lists of what patrimony we have lost. The chapters progress largely chronologically. They often contain factoids and reflections that delight or-- more often-- depress, but the ability of a reader to use this compendium as a reference source may be limited. The index lists only book titles and proper names; the endnotes guide the inquirer to further reading, but the many references and asides in the text to other texts, lost or found, cannot be pursued easily. Citations outside of the endnotes absent, one cannot follow the leads that Báez creates, a strange self-referential system that again may recall Borges, as we're forced to take the author at his word about words we can or cannot track elsewhere. (Posted on 10-23-2008 on Amazon US.)

Chris Hedges' "I Don't Believe in Atheists": Book Review

Don't trust leaders, to quote whom Hedges does not, Bob Dylan. "The refusal to acknowledge human limitations and our irrevocable flaws can thus cross religious and secular lines to feed both religious fundamentalism and the idolization of technology, reason and science." (16) Hedges, a Harvard Divinity School graduate and son of a Presbyterian minister, tires too of mainstream Christianity's pulpiteers, with their "habit of speaking on behalf of people they never meet." (4)

He harps on Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens for their advocacy of attacks against the Islamic fanatics. He mistrusts Richard Dawkins' or E.O. Wilson's faith that we will evolve into a more perfect human community able to alter its genes and improve its makeup. "Dreams of fantastic miracles and collective salvation, whether through science or God, will accelerate our doom, for they permit us to ignore reality." (32)

He cautions us to narrow our hopes, to mitigate disaster and promote cooperation rather than to incite conflict against a billion Muslims or another billion Christians. The Enlightenment may direct humanists into a futile expectation of earthly liberation equal to that preached by those following Jesus, Marx, or Muhammed. Hedges quotes Karl Popper: "It appears to me madness to base all our political efforts on the faint hope that we shall be successful in obtaining excellent, or even competent, rulers." (qtd. 39-40)

Instead, he urges humility, and counters a progressive perfection or fundamentalist salvation. He suggests that the Hindu or Buddhist cyclical distrust of linear marches to a better purpose may provide a better model than what some call the "Whig version" that we always improve upon our ignorant ancestors, and that we are smarter and wiser. Of course, Hedges acknowledges the move away from slavery towards women's suffrage and greater human rights, but he doubts the leaps in power that geneticists anticipate.

He goes on to explore literary and philosophical reactions to the modern enterprise. Conrad shrinks back from its horrors; Beckett's protagonists exist in a "perpetual middle" where we live--they see it better than we do from the fringes. Hedges distrusts grand narratives and epic schemes. For, no matter who is elected, "neither Christian fundamentalists nor the new atheists question the rape and pillaging of the country by corporations and the dismantling of our democracy." (87) Utopia by salvation or ideology or the free market's flatteners is always anticipated, promised to us while always delayed.

Anesthetized, we wait. The enemy first must be defeated. "The war on terror is another in a series of campaigns by those who practice barbarity and violence in the name of utopia." (I note that I learned yesterday that the US spends about half of all the military expenditures in the world.) However, while Hedges condemns our current war, he also dismisses pacifists, and this confused me. He reasons that in WWII they gave comfort to an enemy they sought to resist, but I remained puzzled about Hedges' own position regarding war. I assume for a just cause he's for it as a necessity to counter the inherent evil that penetrates our irredeemable selves, but this point became obscured.

These chapters jump around, and his chiding tone does weigh this slim book down. He tends to repeat and tends to generalize. I wondered if more nuanced thinkers whether believers or atheists might be better foils for him. See my review of a nuanced take, Michael Krasny's "Spiritual Envy: An Agnostic's Quest," for a 2010 study which many readers sympathetic but not swayed entirely by Hedges may appreciate.

Hedges near his conclusion poignantly cites Proust's madeleine, Schopenhauer's comparison of our personal past to a novel dimly recalled, and our ability to strive for goodness despite the failed pieties of fundamentalists and the arrogant hubris of those who'd change the world if only believers could be eliminated from it. He castigates us, who "sit for hours alone in front of screens. We are enraptured and diverted by bread and circuses. And while we sit mesmerized, corporations steadily dismantle the democratic state. We are kept ignorant and entertained." (175) (See my Amazon US remarks about his similar lament in "Empire of Illusion.")

Amusing ourselves to moral death and intellectual regression, for Hedges, Americans fall behind as the image-based culture advances. He may be a bit simplistic here, for if you read this review of him on a screen, it's full of words, but his larger point that literacy declines as diversions increase remains arguably true. He closes by reminding us how few who profess faith bother with dogma, and his illustration of Catholic dismissal of papal bans on contraception (and often abortion) speaks to this tendency. Hedges figures that post-Darwin, the churches have lost the battle to convince moderns that God's in charge of all creation.

But, he admires the broader religious contributions to moral inquiry. He regards their mission to "unfetter the mind from prejudices that blunt reflection and self-criticism" as admirable. (184) He aligns these with the Greek admonition to "know thyself." He rejects absolutism, and preaches awareness of "our limitations and imperfections" to counter the utopian dreams. Humility for humanity shows, he concludes, "the limits of reason and the possibilities of religion." (185)

(P.S. I've reviewed, among thousands of others on Amazon US, the authors he criticizes: Daniel Dennett, "Breaking the Spell"; Sam Harris' "The End of Faith" & "Letter to a Christian Nation"; Christopher Hitchens' "god Is Not Great"; Richard Dawkins' "The God Delusion." Posted to Amazon US 11-5-10 & Lunch.com 12-5-10. My reviews, more recently, on Krasny, and Hedges' overlapping "Empire of Illusion," also appear there.)

Chris Hedges' "Empire of Illusion": Book Review

This dispiriting chronicle castigates our doltish nation (‘ours’ being ‘America’s’), ruled by corporations, dulled by entertainment, and stupefied by magical thinking. Chris Hedges repeats the mournful litany that dominates his previous books condemning the dumbed-down state, its media stooges, and its capitalist manipulators. While never pleasant and rarely the least bit optimistic, Hedges’ wide-ranging survey, with many citations gleaned from his fellow intellectual cadre, assures if nobody else the few literate citizens whom he believes may survive a slide into mediocrity and idiocy that awaits us as a probable American future.

Hedges amasses interviews, citations, what he has read, and what he ponders about the collapse of democracy and literacy. The results here benefit somewhat from wider range of example than his standard journalism, which examines these topics relentlessly if intelligently. These chapters, which often resemble extended and sometimes discrete articles, sum up his cultural concerns, after his two decades as a foreign correspondent and now as a think-tank resident based in Princeton, New Jersey. Although a prep school and Ivy League graduate, his roots in a working-class Maine family widen his perspective. While one never forgets how his erudition and privilege has distanced himself from the common folks he includes alongside the professors and pundits whom he quotes liberally, in more than one sense of the term, Hedges tries to listen to the concerns of everyday people. He transcribes WWE pro wrestlers, porn stars, harried undergraduates, and the unemployed who line up at food banks.

His book opens with an examination of the cult of wrestling, the pull of instant fame, and the lure of “reality” t.v. upon the masses. Hedges decries magical thinking as a “currency not only of celebrity culture, but also of totalitarian culture.” He fights the seductive but blind faith in a secularized version of a born-again solution, which promises tough times never stay for long and recovery always awaits those who believe in themselves.

Next, he reports on the porn industry, stressing the latter term, the production and commodification of the human into the deadened, the corpse, the willingly debased and utterly compliant woman. Her degradation worsens as “gonzo” films for the Net replace the awkward scenarios of “adult movies” from a few decades ago with endless cruelty and graphic violence. As one producer admits, he “makes stupid content for stupid people.” For an audience with short attention spans, porn serves as a synecdoche for a fan base seeking necrophilia, however airbrushed, shaved, and shot. This chapter marks the nadir of Hedges’ dour encounters; he notes in his appendix but oddly does not cite in the chapter David Foster Wallace’s similarly exhaustive examination, published as “Big Red Son” in Consider the Lobster (2005). Both Hedges and Wallace by alienated scrutiny render porn into disembodied form.

This defines Hedges’ strategy: to defamiliarize by meticulous accumulation of facts, interviews, and block quotations. However, by chapter three, in his critique of the educational-corporate complex, this weighty approach threatens to dull the reader. Hedges prefers to lump great chunks of what he has admired by similarly astute observers into his reports. In his contributions to Harper’s or The New York Review of Books, Granta or Mother Jones, such topics in their magnified scale but briefer versions might not diminish one’s attention span. Over dozens of pages, with less variety in tone or perspective, even sympathetic readers may wish for some comic relief, some saving grace of levity.

However, Hedges’ grim recitals linger beneath the stolid prose that often resembles a strong if often impassive honors’ thesis. Now and then, passion breaks through the objective surface. Sadism, he laments, “runs like an electric current” through trashy tv, porn, the “compliant, corporate collective.” Proclaiming a false promise of social harmony for all, driven by markets towards affluence for a very few, today’s elite students prepare to shuffle numbers and negotiate contracts, but they have sold out to any hope of insight morally or intellectually. They fuel an endless war economy that funds so many research institutions. They feed the beasts of Wall Street and White House.

Those from the working classes trying to pay the tuition at lower-tier colleges gain much less notice in Hedges’ collegiate chapter, but they may face franchised dead-end jobs resembling that held by Anthony Vasquez, a UC Berkeley student who worked for FedEx Kinko’s. He describes his forced immersion into the coercive harmony of “positive psychology” peddled by management gurus in universities and before boardrooms. Vasquez regards happy talk as “a euphemism for ‘spin,’” for employees get so disoriented by this cult of work circles and mandatory group-think that “they forget they do the work of three people, have no health insurance, and three-quarters of their paycheck goes to rent.”

How can everyday workers in a crumbling economy off-shored and outsourced compete? Globalization’s leading commodity, furthermore, trades in arms and weapons. Across an increasingly securitized state, Hedges warns of democratic meltdown (this book first appeared in hardcover in 2009). He appears to almost welcome social collapse as a fitting reward for America’s imperial folly.

His final chapter wanders across an America gutted by the rich and lied to by its leaders, some elected, many more invisible to those who represent a citizenry fooled by free-marketeers pretending that deregulation and self-regulated markets (unless Wall Street or Detroit need a bailout) represent the post-Cold War fulfillment of our freedom. He fears that we may not “radically transform our system to one that protects the ordinary citizen and fosters the common good, that defies the corporate state.” Instead, his final pages explore how the Christian far-right may align with the capitalists to “employ the brutality and technology of our internal security and surveillance apparatus to crush all dissent.”

This prediction may be dismissed as scare quotes by some. This book leaves it unclear how our bankrupt ethical, political, social, and financial systems can be saved from those who can patrol the nation. They may censor opposition, distort dissension, and mock protesters, if the media workers as he shows do control the networks through which nearly all our news emerges, according to Hedges.

“We let the market rule, and now we are paying for it,” he insists. He quotes Charlotte Twight’s summary of our charade of voting, where for many in our nation today, the winner of American Idol matters more than who wins an election, as “participatory fascism.” That is, the common people are given the pretense of entering a game in which the true winners are those who remain the real elite, hidden in the curtains, behind the glitz.

Decrying a “Peter Pan culture”, Hedges believes neither in a saving deity nor a secular system. He asks for his readers to trust in love, and simple verities that outlast chaos and the collapse of civilization. He returns to his favorite theme, that the true divide is not between red and blue states; neither is it between race, class and gender, nor rural and urban. What separates a saving remnant from the rest? A few will remain literate and marginalized, apart from those who have given into the illiterate masses.

This conclusion may leave readers wondering what readers can do. Awaiting the apocalypse, he finds no solutions, no twelve-step plans to salvation. He does not deliver any platitudes about hope and change.

Hedges despairs at the pain that awaits those of us who stand up and demand humane alternatives to the dystopian spectacle broadcast by the wealthy and funded by the corrupt. He forces us to tally up the damages for unchecked environmental destruction, diminished resources, and a decline in incomes, prestige, and lifestyle. America’s buy now, pay never mentality racked up debts financial, spiritual, intellectual, and emotional which demand reckoning. As in his earlier books, Hedges shouts a wake-up call after our long national binge. He ends with only a fragile defense of hope against all these power elites can summon against the human spirit, which stumbles blearily on a chilly morning after the party’s over.

[I also reviewed his "I Don't Believe in Atheists" at Amazon US 11-3-10 and my blog. Above review featured at PopMatters 2-3-11: "Pay Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain"]: http://www.popmatters.com/pm/review/136018-empire-of-illusion-by-chris-hedges/. On Lunch.com 2-20-11 and on 2-5-11, in revised and condensed form, it's up at Amazon US with a lot of others divided on the book's merits.