A tale of two ladders, the "right" one and the broken one.

The books being reviewed:

Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism, by Anne Case and Angus Deaton (Princeton University Press)

Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope, by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn (Knopf)

The key point to me is this single sentence: "They can’t get beyond wanting to get people on the good ladder, and not dismantle the system of two ladders."

To Be Studied, or Pitied? Two books try to understand the other America, 
and stumble along the way, by Chris Arnade (The American Prospect)

It is easy to get lost in the frustration of navigating a demanding career as a well-educated professional. The absurd cost of college, the low-paying internships and adjunct positions that have to be navigated, and the out-of-reach real estate prices in the few neighborhoods close to those jobs can erase any thoughts of privilege.

For much of America these problems are luxuries, because they come with expectations of something better, and a feeling that someone will listen to you. You might be on the lowest rung of a ladder, but you are on the “right” ladder, and with enough hard work and enough complaining, you can move higher or change things.

Go outside the handful of neighborhoods where professionals cluster, and their problems will immediately seem small. Go to Gary, Indiana, and see street after street of boarded-up homes, abandoned after factories closed. Those who couldn’t leave, almost all black, now live in perpetual decline. Go to Wheeling, West Virginia, and see empty lots of discarded needles, thrown away by people numbing their pain.

In these communities, people are not on the right ladder. Hard work isn’t going to move them higher. Their complaints won’t be published in a New York Times op-ed, and won’t generate thoughtful discussion. Instead they will often be dismissed as the lazy, dumb, racist, or angry ramblings of someone who doesn’t know their place.

snip

While a good job is essential and a more robust health care and social safety net helpful, large parts of America have lost a sense of stability and purpose. The ladder they are on has one rung. That rung is shaky, and they know it. Their parents used to climb that ladder, moving from part-time jobs in high school to a factory job that enabled them to buy a home, marry their sweetheart, build a family, go to church, join a softball league, and then watch their children and grandchildren do the same thing. That ladder didn’t require college. It didn’t require getting into a résumé arms race with your neighbor, and certainly not a bunch of people 8,000 miles away.

Now that ladder is broken, and the people who left town, who went off to Princeton or Yale, climb a ladder that goes into the stratosphere. Many of them look down at the people they left behind and sneer, or laugh, or express pity, if they bother to look down at all. It is humiliating and strips people of their dignity.

A windfall of targeted programs and expanded empowerment zones and a greater social safety net, while helpful, won’t solve this problem. The two ladders are the problem. People who are on the “bad” ladder are not there only because they didn’t have the right opportunities. Many of them didn’t want to go to college. It’s not their thing, it isn’t what they value. They have different priorities, ones that put a premium on faith, place, and family.

Understanding that is hard when you are in academia.

snip

Despite this hard work and genuine empathy, the authors can’t break out of their worldview. They can’t get beyond wanting to get people on the good ladder, and not dismantle the system of two ladders. They don’t emphasize devaluing the meritocracy, as Case and Deaton do, but rather take on the easier feel-good task of figuring out how to get talented young people on their preferred path. Or to use their metaphor, have access to the escalator, so they can escape.

BOOKS: Goran Vojnovic's novel Yugoslavia, My Fatherland is a must-read.

Marshall Tito's post-WWII Yugoslavia ("Land of the South Slavs") experiment called for the reboot of a shabby pre-war monarchy into a non-aligned socialist federal state that would take numerous nationalities professing three major religions -- Albanians, Bosnian Muslims, Macedonians, Croats, Hungarians, Montenegrins, Serbs, and Slovenes -- and cast them somewhat forcibly into a melting pot, meanwhile doling out just enough regional autonomy to keep the area's numerous historical demons at bay until economic modernization (supposed worker control of economic enterprises within the socialist framework) proceeded to such an extent that these evils of the past would fade away amid a new identification as Yugoslavs.

For a while, and to an extent, this program succeeded. The second global war was particularly devastating for Yugoslavia, which was founded at the conclusion of the Great War (WWI), with little time to regroup before another period of sustained violence began. An array of Yugoslav partisan groups fought the Germans as well as each other, and in many respects a civil war raged alongside the larger international struggle.

Tito's faction emerged from the chaos, and because the Red Army was not needed to liberate Yugoslavia, Tito was given the leeway to steer his own path. Scores were settled, and by 1948 the necessary postwar rebuilding afforded an interregnum.

In retrospect, it seems clear that while the Yugoslav police state was softer than those required to maintain order in the East Bloc, the country's economic reforms never really became substantive apart from propaganda value. Tito was a gifted juggler, but after he died in 1980 economic stagnation pried the lid off the socialist contract, and federalism became a means of exiting Yugoslavia rather than the way to keep nationalism contained beneath the broader umbrella.

Serbia's Slobodan Milošević came to be blamed by the outside world for his out-sized role in the horror to follow. A more sober reading of the record doesn't absolve Milošević; rather, it places his power-mongering in proper context of similar opportunism on the part of his brethren. The victims inevitably were the powerless.

The preceding provides background for this novel by Goran Vojnovic, which I read while we were in Croatia and Slovenia, which declared independence simultaneously in 1991 and provided the pretext for civil war's renewal in obsolete Yugoslavia. Slovenia slipped away with little bloodshed, primarily because there wasn't a Serb minority for Milošević's goal of annexation. There was such a minority in Croatia, and consequently that's where the real atrocities first unfolded, later shifting to Bosnia and Kosovo.

Ultimately Vojnovic's narrative is concerned with fate. Are we as humans destined to endlessly perpetuate the worst aspects of our natures, or can we step away from them? The author has created a character, Vladan Borojevic, who learns enough to formulate this question about fate. It remains unclear whether there's an answer, for him or any of us.

I highly recommend this book to anyone seeking understanding of what happened in Yugoslavia in the 1990s. For a more detailed rendering of the geopolitical factors, check out Slobodan Milosevic and the Destruction of Yugoslavia, by the retired American diplomat Louis Sell, which I read earlier this year.

Yugoslavia, My Fatherland by Goran Vojnovic: Balkan brilliance, by Eileen Battersby (Irish Times)

At last comes a work which will be required reading within and beyond the Balkans

Having spent years grieving for his father who went to war and never came back, Vladan Borojevic, the narrator, appears to have become an adult, estranged from Dusha, his silent mother, and life in general.

His father’s death was reduced to a curt announcement made by a widow who had already disengaged herself from her son, the narrator, and eventually married again to begin another family. Vladan, in a relationship with a bright young microbiologist, drifts along, fixing coffee machines and when he thinks of it, attending lectures for a degree he is half-interested in. One day he decides to Google his dead father and is shocked by the findings.

Benedict points fingers. Ray Mouton points back. I'm with the writer, not the church hierarchy.

On several past occasions I've tipped my chapeau to writer Ray Mouton, author of the novel In God's House and a tireless crusader for institutional accountability amid the Catholic Church's seemingly endless pedophilia scandal.

Today I'll do it again, but first let's have a glance at the pope emeritus Benedict's diversionary tactics.

A former pope blames the swinging sixties for clerical crimes, by "Erasmus" (The Economist)

A jarring blast from the past

JUST AS Pope Francis struggles to stop his well-regarded papacy being overshadowed by charges of laxity over child abuse, his predecessor has emerged from retirement to make an unexpected intervention. Benedict, the pope emeritus who turns 92 next week, has blamed a surge of criminal acts against children by clerics on the sexual revolution of the 1960s.

He offered this diagnosis in an essay of nearly 6,000 words that was published in a German monthly, Klerusblatt, and rapidly retransmitted across the Catholic media. The stated purpose of this contentious piece of writing, which varies from personal reminiscence to dense theological argument, was to assist the deliberations of the current pontiff, who convened a global meeting on child abuse in February after reports of dreadful crimes and cover-ups in countries ranging from Ireland to the United States, and from Chile to Australia. But many supporters of Francis, as well as those who observe the church from outside, will find the older cleric’s analysis far from helpful. Benedict resigned unexpectedly in 2013, becoming the first pontiff to step down for 600 years, and he has lived quietly in Rome since then ...

The former attorney Mouton cross-examined at Facebook.

Though Pope Benedict was fully in charge of the cover-up from April 1981 when he was known as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger and was appointed to serve as Prefect for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith until he ascended to the papacy in 2005 upon the death of Pope John Paul II, a papacy he resigned from in disgrace, Benedict casts himself as one who can contribute to "a new beginning" regarding this issue.

Totally overlooking the facts as proven by Vatican documents that pedophilia in the priesthood has been prevalent in the priesthood since the fourth century, Pope Benedict blames society form the 1960's to the 1980's, absurdly claiming that in 1968 pedophilia was diagnosed as "allowed and appropriate." If anyone but a pope or former pope made such a statement they themselves would be diagnosed to be a madman.

Following is my 2015 overview, including a bit about how I came to know Mouton.

---

Catching up with writer Ray Mouton, his novel, and the Catholic Church's pedophilia scandal.

“Hundreds of thousands of people have been deeply wounded and even destroyed. This plague of destruction would have continued unchecked had there been no Ray Mouton. In 1985-1986, Ray and I worked together daily when I was a canon lawyer in the Vatican Embassy. Ray fought fiercely to save children from the church. This is much more than a novel. It is an answer to the painful “why?” Why did this happen? Why did bishops put image above innocent children? I remember all Ray gave of himself, how he fearlessly spoke truth to power, and was never intimidated by the formidable opposition he encountered.”
-- ​Rev. Thomas P. Doyle, Leading Authority On Clergy Abuse

This morning while making coffee the face of Ray Mouton popped into my head. I'm highly honored to know this man. Two years ago around this time, I was reading Ray's novel, In God's House. My subsequent review of the novel is reprinted below.

In 1984, Ray was the lawyer chosen by the state of Louisiana's Catholic Church hierarchy to defend the first priest ever to be charged in secular court with child molestation. Looking back on the perspective of the present day, we obviously know what became of all this, and that Ray's appointment with destiny was the first tiny peek inside a truly massive (and ongoing) scandal.

I wasn't expecting to be moved to such an extent by Ray's book, but I was -- and remain so. For more background, go here: Church abuse case haunts lawyer who defended priest, by Evan Moore (Daily World in Opelousas LA)

 ... Mouton no longer attends services — not since the case of the Rev. Gilbert Gauthe, whose horrific crimes against children in the Diocese of Lafayette set off a wave of scandal in 1985 that reached across the USA all the way to the Vatican; not since Mouton defended Gauthe and almost ruined his life in the process.

Now, he enters churches only to light candles, candles for the children.

At Ray's page on Facebook, he still provides regular updates about a sad story seemingly without end, but his Thanksgiving message yesterday was decidedly upbeat.

It is with great gratitude that I reflect on the support all of you who follow this page have for the victims, the truth, and justice.

This has been a good year for the cause for all who stand on the side of people who were victimized as children and stand on the side of truth.

Thirty-one years ago when this journey began for me, Fr. Tom Doyle, and Fr. Michael Peterson, there were less than a handful of people on the right side of history.

Today, millions of people are on the right side of history, and progress has been made and will continue to be made.

Each of you should embrace yourself on this day and be grateful for the courage God has given you to confront the most powerful institution on earth on behalf of those who once believed they were powerless.

A lot remains to be done. A lot will be done. Justice will be done.

My review was published on January 30, 2014.

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ON THE AVENUES: Ray Mouton and his novel, In God's House.

By virtually anyone’s reckoning, Ray Mouton’s non-fictionalized life story would have been noteworthy, even without The Case.

A native Louisianan with deep and colorful roots in the state, he lived the All-American dream and became a highly proficient, well-paid lawyer with all the trappings of success. Then, one day in 1984, Mouton was asked by the Catholic Church to defend an ordinary parish priest who’d gotten himself into a bit of a fix.

It proved to be more of a problem than anyone knew at the time – that is, anyone except the Catholic Church itself, because Ray’s appointment with destiny turned out to be with a wayward cleric named Gilbert Gauthe, who was a serial sexual abuser of young boys, and whose trail of tears had been repeatedly covered up by his superiors.

Now, for the very first time, the family of a victimized boy was refusing the usual hush money and insisting on their day in court, and the ecclesiastical higher-ups grudgingly realized they had no choice but to hire a mouthpiece.

Ray Mouton was that lawyer, and the rest is history.

In initially studying the case, Ray brought along his own prejudices. He’d been brought up solidly Catholic, and at the start he assumed that Gauthe was the exception to the rule, and a lone bad apple. Obviously, the priest needed professional psychological help (a concept barely registering with the Church at the time), and the best way forward seemed to Ray an insanity plea for his client, with time served in therapeutic custody, allowing for the children to become adults before Gauthe was again seen on the street.

But as Ray peeled back the dusty layers, the shape of things began changing. The Church hierarchy knew all about Gauthe, and had moved him from parish to parish to stay one step ahead of his irredeemable proclivities.

What’s more, there were numerous other pedophile priests in Louisiana alone, and it began to dawn on the lawyer that his own back yard was the metaphorical tip of an iceberg, one that we have since seen stretching to the horizon, as far as the eye could see … and the official policy of the Roman Catholic Church, whether written or whispered, was to deny the extent of the problem, to bury it, and to seek to preserve wherever possible its own autonomous sacred position beyond the arm of the secular.

---

Shortly thereafter, amid a pea soup fog of legal warfare, Ray joined forces with two reforming priests, and they conducted their own investigation of the molestation scandal, presumably with the blessing of the Church. Predictably, their findings were suppressed, and it is likely that their chief opponent at the Vatican was none other than Cardinal Ratzinger, who subsequently became Pope Benedict XVI.

Ray’s personal life became a casualty of these escalating revelations. It’s true that as a bayou Icarus, he might have crashed to earth in any event, but when he arrived at this intersection with history, the narrative current swept him along with it. He lost family, possessions and career. Significantly, he reclaimed his own life over a period of years living abroad, and then later took back the pedophile priest story in the form of a novel, In God’s House.

In God’s House, while a fictionalized version of real-life events, contains more than mere germs of overall truth. European reviewers (currently there is no American publisher) have called it a page-turner, and compared the novel’s tone to that of John Grisham’s legal thrillers, and these descriptions are apt. Perhaps more importantly, the novel is a Hollywood screenplay waiting to happen.

Destinations Booksellers might be able to score you a copy of In God’s House, and if not, it can be ordered on-line. I recommend it highly.

---

I’ve referred to the author as Ray because I know him, albeit casually.

In 1998, I checked off a personal bucket list entry by arriving in Pamplona, Spain, a day before the annual commencement of the Festival of San Fermin, and then remaining all the way through the revelry, until it was over -- eight days of hard partying even if one refrains from running with the bulls.

I probably wouldn't have gone to Pamplona -- wouldn't have tripped over the comatose bodies of Eurotrash, wouldn't have eaten Pyrenees trout stuffed with ham, wouldn't have drained bottles of anise-like Pacheran -- if not for my cousin Beak's trailblazing.

When Don landed his tenured position in Florida and started attending the festival on a yearly basis in the early 1990s, he immediately fell in with the anglophile expatriate coterie and met numerous and memorable aficionados, including a fellow American, Ray Mouton, author of a very well-regarded book about San Fermin.

That's why I have the pleasure of counting Ray among my acquaintances, and although I have not been to Pamplona for a while, and Ol' Paco still lives abroad, he's every bit as interesting as his press clippings suggest.

In 1998, on the festival's final night, with the week-long lunacy gradually settling into a post-coital reverie, the three of us had a quiet dinner for the first time in eight days, and then went for a cool, breezy walk at sundown atop the old wall that protects the old town from incursions from the valley below. Ray's arm was in a sling, because during the encierro, he'd been trampled -- not by a bull, but by another human being. The tales of his life's adventures were vastly entertaining, and it was an unforgettable end to an all-in.

I trust the novel helped exorcise a demon or two, assuming any still remained; Ray’s a tough hombre. Nowadays, you can follow him at Facebook and receive regular updates on pedophile cases, sadly as yet unfolding. He is a pitiless commentator as it pertains to the complicity of adults, and a tireless advocate for youthful victims.

One of the key passages in Ray’s novel comes when the fictional attorney is asked to describe his analysis of the situation. He replies simply: There are criminals, and there are children. As long as this continues to be the case, it is a case that Ray will continue fighting. I hope our paths cross again, some day.

---

(to conclude, a 2016 follow-up) 

Chernobyl: "Three new books reconsider the impact of the worst-ever nuclear catastrophe."

It was a minor concern at the time. I'd be visiting Eastern Europe in 1987 and traveling in the general vicinity of Chernobyl. It wasn't being flippant to ask: what's the real fallout from the nuclear disaster?

After all, the USSR was hardly "open" at the time. There was no way of knowing how accurate the official reports might be.

In the end I said to hell with it and followed my wanderlust. Thirty years later the memory came to a brief reference.

It’s strange what you remember, and what you don’t. The train came to a stop in Warsaw well after 9:00 p.m., and we congregated on the plaza in front, waiting for our guide and the bus to the Hotel Nowa Praga.

There was a women dressed in peasant garb, standing behind a rickety wooden table by a shoddy cement wall. She was selling admirably healthy strawberries, and none of us had Polish złoty to spend on her wares.

Barrie didn’t ruminate. Taking stock of the situation, he produced a few dollar bills that she happily accepted as illegal tender in honor of the wonderful Mr. Reagan, depleting her stock to nothing.

Then Barrie grandly announced the reason for her bountiful crop: Undoubtedly these were Chernobyl strawberries, fertilized with the fallout from the nuclear disaster the previous year.

We ate the nuclear strawberries, each and everyone, laughing all the way to the hotel.

Then, and now:

Loth to sacrifice production targets, Soviet planners ordered slaughterhouses to mix radioactive and clean meat to make sausages. The Soviets were not alone in circulating poisoned wares: Greek wheat contaminated by the fallout was eventually blended into consignments of aid shipped to Africa and East Germany. Even now, Ms Brown joins pickers in the forests of northern Ukraine who combine “hot” and clean berries so the crop meets radiation requirements for exports.

The Economist's review of three books about Chernobyl is elegiac and economical, proper words harnessed to sentiments for mulling over a stiff drink. Kudos to the author.

The tragedy of Chernobyl (The Economist)

Three new books reconsider the impact of the worst-ever nuclear catastrophe

... The weather was unseasonably warm on that fateful Saturday, and Pripyat was in a festive mood. Locals planned to attend weddings or to stroll into the idyllic forests they had come to love. An engineer who arrived in 1971 described the surroundings reverently: “Silence and a sense of primeval creation.” Then the safety test scheduled for that morning went tragically wrong. Anatoliy Diatlov, the plant’s deputy chief engineer, called the ensuing meltdown “a picture worthy of the pen of the great Dante”. While monitors in Sweden picked up radiation just hours after the explosion, it took the Soviet government three days to release a terse statement: “There has been an accident at the Chernobyl atomic-electricity station.”

What I read in 2018.

There's never enough time to read, although 2018 has been a good year by my usual annual standards.

I read 16 books in all in 2018, and managed to write a word or two about most of them (links below).

Here they are, by evenly balanced category.

Novels
Life: A User’s Manual, by Georges Perec
The Tin Drum, by Günter Grass
Earthly Powers, by Anthony Burgess
Act of the Damned, by António Lobo Antunes

Biography & Autobiography
Krazy: George Herriman, a Life in Black and White, by Michael Tisserand
Not Dead Yet: The Autobiography, by Phil Collins (audio book)
Grant, by Ron Chernow
Gabriele D'Annunzio – Poet, Seducer & Preacher of War, by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

Drink & Food
Great Beers of Belgium, by Michael Jackson
The Guinness Story, by Edward J. Bourke
Soul Food: The Surprising Story of an American Cuisine One Plate at a Time, by Adrian Miller
Ambitious Brew: The Story of American Beer, by Maureen Ogle

Travel, History and Geography
To Hell and Back: Europe, 1914-1949, by Ian Kershaw
Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese, by Patrick Leigh Fermor
The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution, by Yuri Slezkine
Kosher Chinese: Living, Teaching, and Eating with China's Other Billion, by Mike Levy

Which one was best?

That's like being asked to choose a favorite child, but having issued the disclaimer, probably The House of Government and The Tin Drum were most memorable, followed closely by To Hell and Back and Life: A User's Manual.

The most unexpectedly affecting was Krazy, which came completely out of left field. Since childhood I'd been hearing about the Krazy Kat, and never bothered learning anything about the comic strip or its author. Michael Tisserand's biography of George Herriman has rectified this imbalance, and I'm grateful to Cary Stemle for making me aware.   

As for what comes next, the first selection of 2019 hasn't been chosen. However the second is queued and ready for late January: The Avignon Quintet, by Lawrence Durrell, to be read in tandem with my friend Jon. 

ON THE AVENUES: Three books by Polish writers.

ON THE AVENUES: Three books by Polish writers.

A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.

In recognition of our ongoing Polish travels, today's column combines two previous posts: "ON THE AVENUES: Two books by Polish writers" (22 March 2012) and "Book review: Pornografia, a novel by Witold Gombrowicz" (5 February 2014).

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Pornografia, a novel by Witold Gombrowicz, translated by Danuta Borchardt.

By the second world war’s end in 1945, the Polish capital of Warsaw nearly had been obliterated from the face of the earth, first razed by the occupying Nazis, and then flattened by Soviet armies in the process of annihilating the retreating Germans. Poland would again rise from non-existence and take its place as a Soviet satellite, but not just yet.

Two years earlier, with the worst still yet to come, the situation was becoming grim for the capital’s artsy urbanites. Two intellectuals languishing in Warsaw’s wartime malaise, with little to do apart from debating abstractions and drinking vodka, are offered the chance to perform an obscure errand (never explained), requiring them to leave the city and travel to the country estate of a provincial squire, whose bucolic days of regional pre-eminence also are ticking down.

After a sweaty, grinding train trip, they find themselves far removed from their familiar milieu, riding around in horse-drawn carts and observing, though not genuinely embracing, the time-honored, unchanged agricultural lifestyle. Rural Poland has yet to be touched directly by the war, although the tumult is keenly felt, contributing to a palpable sense of paranoia. Verily, things aren’t what they seem. Then again, they seemingly never are in works by Witold Gombrowicz, whose novel Cosmos I read in 2012.

Appropriately, Pornografia’s narrator also is named Witold Gombrowicz, and yet in this instance, truth is certifiably stranger than fiction. The real-life writer was far away at the time of the fictional story. He had boarded a cruise ship destined for South America just days prior to Germany’s invasion of Poland in 1939, and was unable to return after his country’s quick collapse, as it was dissolved and divided between the Nazis and Soviets. Abruptly stateless, Gombrowicz remained abroad, living in Argentina until 1963, and spending the remainder of his life in France.

Perhaps his personal experience with the surreal helps to explain the deep psychological issues inherent in novels such as Pornografia and Cosmos, where a thinly veiled collective delirium seems always to be simultaneously obscuring and exposing the motives of his characters.

In Cosmos, two city slickers visiting the sticks become fascinated with patterns of cracks running across a plaster ceiling, and are obsessed by conspiracy theories pertaining to their host family. Similarly, Pornografia’s two bored Warsaw escapees shift their attention to Henia, the 16-year-old daughter of the estate’s owners, and Karol, son of a neighbor and also 16, who is working on the farm again after an abortive stint (also never explained) in the resistance forces.

She’s a good looking girl, betrothed to an older lawyer from a nearby city. He’s a good looking boy, neither completely adolescent nor a full-fledged adult. They’re a fine couple, except they’re not; Karol and Henia have known each other since childhood, and are chums, though never before regarding one another romantically.

Fevered and voyeuristic, and with a dash of their own latent homoeroticism added for good measure, Witold and his friend Fryderyk convince themselves first that Henia and Karol belong with each other – not in spite of her fiancé Vaclav’s continual presence, but precisely because of it – and hatch an elaborate plan to choreograph the union.

With Fryderyk in the driver’s seat, constructing an ever-more elaborate web of instigation, the ensuing quasi-theatrical campaign becomes progressively creepier. But there is more to the teenagers than meets the eye of the visitors, who conclude that only by manipulating their youthful innocence can the interminable wartime muddle of the adults be made sensible -- except that the children turn out to have seen and experienced far more of the world than is immediately evident.

It only strengthens the Warsaw duo’s resolve, and the plot moves tautly toward a conclusion, one complicated by two unexpected developments.

If Witold Gombrowicz did not meet Rod Serling, he should have. The two could have discussed the razor’s edge of sanity, in the twilight zone, where reality and imagination meet … sometimes with palpable consequences.

---

Cosmos, by Witold Gombrowicz.

Most often, the act of writing is purely vocational, although conveying coherent thoughts in memos, reports, post-it notes and tweets is a certifiable skill, one not always as simple as it seems.

Instruction manuals are a prime example. Most of them are illustrated with drawings, lest mere words fail in their intended purpose – or in case the product’s purchaser is unable to read the directions, whether owing to illiteracy in a native language or speaking a different tongue altogether.

Obviously, writing can be a forum for artistic expression and experimentation. This is the genre of writing as art, which human societies tend to value just enough to keep the idea alive amid the everyday vulgarisms of popular cultures everywhere.

As an example, there is Witold Gombrowicz’s Cosmos. It was the exiled Polish writer’s penultimate novel, published in 1965, and although not every reader takes the time to peruse introductions and forwards, the new edition’s comments by translator Danuta Borchardt are very much worth reading.

Borchardt’s translation was prepared directly from the original Polish language edition (not subsequent French and German translations used for the original release of Cosmos in English), and this is especially important for a novel that above all else explores nuances of language, perception and expression – hence its experimental nature, and an overall theme paralleling that of the old Seinfeld television series: In the end, it’s about nothing.

Cosmos has been described as utterly plotless, and while there actually is one, it is quite sparse. At an indeterminate time (probably the pre-war 1930’s), two students from Warsaw arrive in the southern Tatra Mountains to spend their summer holiday. They randomly board with a local family, and quickly are drawn into the household’s daily life. Eventually they accompany their hosts for a weekend outing in the woods, and abruptly, the story comes to an end.

As recounted by the narrator, who is one of the two students, the novel’s progression is resoundingly interior and solipsistic, occurring within his own increasingly meandering consciousness, as opposed to taking place in any setting approximating the world outside. Far fewer real-life interactions are recounted than episodes of brooding and imagined ruminations. It is almost as though a dazed victim of malnutrition or high fever is describing the altered state of reality as it seems to him, which may or may not jibe with actuality.

Philosophically, it makes perfect sense: Is there a reality outside our minds, and can we ever know anything about it?

In Cosmos, this search is by turns comic and tragic. The city-dwelling students react to their own ennui and the relative boredom of their bucolic interlude by concluding quite early in the narrative that a vague conspiracy is taking shape around them, and they become tantamount to bumbling detectives, self-assigned to track obvious clues to their source.

These clues include a dead bird, literally hanged by wire from a tree branch (who would do such a thing?), suggestive patterns of water stains on a ceiling, a scar that has shaped the mouth of the plain housekeeper into something suggestive, the way her altered mouth is suggestively linked to the mouth of the young married daughter’s, and a pile of haphazardly jumbled garbage in the shed. Their conclusions lead to minor, awkward mishaps (and one more serious), but little of consequence comes from it.

The only true jolt comes at the end, has nothing whatever to do with the expanding conspiracy inside their heads, and is barely mentioned.

The novel’s characters occupy perfectly normal spaces in a mundane world, and do their best to define themselves accordingly. They fail – and life goes on. For those properly respecting the value of melancholy in daily life, Cosmos is an unsettling read. It left me contemplating vignettes from my own past, times of irresolution and disgruntlement, especially when exhaustion or weakness had convinced me to invest more psychic energy into imagining an outcome than might possibly justify a conceivable result, even if it were to happen (and never did).

In Cosmos, no one is saved. Then again, we seldom are.

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In Search of Lost Meaning: The New Eastern Europe, by Adam Michnik.

While the Communist-era career paths of Adam Michnik in Poland and the late Vaclav Havel in Czechoslovakia were not precise mirror images, both played epochal roles in their respective countries as the Iron Curtain wound inexorably down.

As indicated by Havel’s forward to this collection of essays, there always existed considerable mutual professional admiration between the two noted revolutionaries, even if Michnik did not become head of state, or found himself cast in the position of rock star, like Havel.

Instead, Michnik was the supreme revolutionary multi-tasker, performing a series of invaluable jobs for the Solidarity-led opposition to Poland’s Communist regime, generally in a subordinate position. He served as journalist, jouster, jester, rabble-rouser, intellectual, organizer, virtual poet laureate and all-purpose public figure, eventually assuming a role approximating that of being his country’s conscience, and appropriately, these essays are primarily concerned with the conscience (and consciousness) of Poland’s history both before and since socialism’s collapse in 1989.

Clannish fractiousness in Poland is the stuff of European legend, and Michnik confronts it head-on, tracing the origins of “gutter” (or “septic tank”) politics from the inception of modern Poland in the aftermath of the First World War to the institutionalized abuses of Communism, and recurring during the past twenty years. Irrespective of ideologies and governmental forms, Michnik sees his country as a place where a pathological need do settle past scores too often usurps all future considerations.

He would feel right at home in New Albany, wouldn’t he?

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Recent columns:

October 23: ON THE AVENUES: I'd like nothing more than to go for another ride with Kevin.

October 18: ON THE AVENUES: As long as the Democratic hierarchy keeps the Human Rights Commission under its thumb, it's hard to be optimistic.

October 11: ON THE AVENUES: Clamming up is hard to do, but I'm trying my best.

September 30: ON THE AVENUES SPECIAL EDITION: As David White's mayoral campaign begins, let's briefly survey the electoral landscape.

Barbara Ehrenreich, her book, the ethics of dying and the weirdness of wellness.

Here's another essay that defies brief summary.

Megan Erickson reviews Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer, a book by Barbara Ehrenreich, and while I can pluck a few passages, you are encouraged to click through.

As an aside, Friedrich Hayek is still dead -- and resides in Hell.

Okay, not really; there's no such thing as Hell.

But it's the thought that counts. "Death-dying elites" seem to have accepted a numerical matrix and commensurate dollars-and-cents value on every calorie meticulously recorded. Where we find time to live amid these ongoing calculations remains a mystery -- and this comes from a guy who owns a FitBit.

So, if you'll excuse me, the drinking lamp is lit.

The Great Equalizer, by Megan Erickson (The Nation)

Barbara Ehrenreich and the ethics of dying.

 ... In Natural Causes, Barbara Ehrenreich explores the stories told by death-defying elites to make her own biological and political point: “no matter how much effort we expend, not everything is potentially within our control, not even our own bodies and minds.” In death, we will once again be equals—and so an egalitarian politics also means accepting this outcome.

At 76, Ehrenreich tells us, she is old enough to die, and over the past few years she’s given up preventive screening for breast cancer, scaled back her punishing exercise regime, and chosen to spend her time doing the things that bring her joy, like hanging out with her grandchildren. For Ehrenreich, this embrace of death is not merely a matter of biology but also of politics and ethics: “You can think of death bitterly or with resignation, as a tragic interruption of your life, and take every possible measure to postpone it,” she writes. “Or, more realistically, you can think of life as an interruption of an eternity of personal nonexistence, and seize it as a brief opportunity to observe and interact with the living, ever-surprising world around us.” Accepting death, for Ehrenreich, means being able to live more fully.

snip

Natural Causes was inspired by a particular moment in Ehrenreich’s life: her acceptance of her own mortality. But that moment gives way to a broader inquiry into the biological, social, and political implications of the American denial of death. In fact, one reason the book is so compelling is that Ehrenreich moves fluidly back and forth between discussing our physical limitations, our social and political limitations, and the relationship between the two.

snip

The interdependence and chaos created by the body also lead to the same conclusions as the interdependence and chaos created by modern life: We can’t just go it on our own.

For Ehrenreich, this is demonstrated by the very nature of health. It’s only because of the collective medical advances of the past century or so that people living in a postindustrial world can conceive of “wellness” as a natural state and nature as harmonious or wise. Sure, herbal remedies, breastfeeding, and at-home childbirth are “natural,” but so are famine, epidemics, and high infant- and maternal-mortality rates. (The first-century philosopher Epictetus instructed parents, “When you kiss your child, say to yourself, it may be dead in the morning.”) Today, with good reason, we expect children in postindustrial societies to survive their parents, and we have the dedication of rigorously trained doctors and devoted scientists to thank for that. But this doesn’t mean that nature itself is on our side or that medicine and science will be able to save us. From this recognition, Ehrenreich begins to weave together an ethics rooted in not just accepting but embracing the realization that humans are united in suffering, that we will all experience the ravaging effects of nature and time, and that rather than try to run from that knowledge by controlling our minds and punishing our bodies, we must address it together, as a society.

snip

Ehrenreich also insists that viewing health care differently will allow us to see the ways in which the inequalities produced by class, race, and gender are much more central in determining one’s health than individual choices and screenings. It is not the specific choices of a poor person that lead to diabetes, cancer, obesity, and so on, but rather those inequalities produced by capitalism. While physician and Rockefeller Foundation president John Knowles may have pronounced in 1977 that most illnesses can be chalked up to a person’s bad habits, and thus the “idea of a ‘right’ to health should be replaced by the idea of an individual moral obligation to preserve one’s own health,” Ehrenreich wants to remind us that it’s almost always not just one’s own choices, but also the randomness of nature and the inequalities produced by human societies, that have the power to destroy us.

These days, Knowles’s view of health is everywhere. It is a common line of reasoning found in the health-care and related industries, which are eager to “empower” consumers through the use of apps, personal devices to monitor everything from steps to sleep to heart-rate stats, and discounts offered by insurers for annual exams (the utility of which, like preventive screening, is now the subject of scientific scrutiny). But it’s a line of reasoning that is also often used to justify opposition to the creation of a national health-care system.

snip

And here we arrive at Ehrenreich’s final point. Since nature operates randomly and is not often guided by individual choices, we must act together as a society to try to equalize health outcomes as much as we possibly can. (And even then, they will still be grotesquely unfair.) Contemporary society, Ehrenreich writes, is “so deeply invested in the idea of an individual conscious self that it becomes both logically and emotionally impossible to think of a world without it.” And yet, “there is one time-honored salve for the anxiety of approaching self-dissolution”—not endless rounds of chemotherapy, or the insistence that you’re a fighter and that you’re going to make it, which has practically become the recommended etiquette for those with a cancer diagnosis—but the submergence of “oneself into something ‘larger than oneself.’”

snip

Natural Causes may be a book that offers little comfort to many. But it is radical. It’s now strange, almost quaint, for those of us living as consumers in a capitalist society to be told to accept the fragility of our bodies and place our faith in the power of our collective humanity. Given that most of us are supporting others and will likely have to do so for the rest of our lives, whether it’s our children or our parents without Social Security, the need to postpone death is not antisocial; it is a pressure felt by anyone who’s not an heiress. But Ehrenreich gives us something else instead, reminding us how important it is to build social “utopian” supports that can mitigate the pain of a dystopian body. In this way, Natural Causes is, if nothing else, the culmination (though hopefully not the last book) of a career spent insisting on a common-sense morality that is actually visionary.

ON THE AVENUES: The books I've been reading during the winter months.

ON THE AVENUES: The books I've been reading during the winter months.

A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.

I keep telling myself that if I can get back to writing about books and music while the memory is fresh, it’s better than waiting until year’s end. As such, here is a quasi-quarterly recap of reading to date in 2018.

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Ambitious Brew: The Story of American Beer, by Maureen Ogle

The middle 2000s were years of retrenchment in the revolutionary struggle for better beer. The “microbrew” boom of the late 1990s receded during 2000-2002, the same period when the dot com bubble popped.

To many observers at the time, it seemed that better beer had been exposed as a fad, rather than a trend. I was never among the naysayers, and in my mind the “craft” beer explosion of the two-thousand-teens has served as malty-sweet vindication, although the now ubiquitous India Pale Ale category embraces the bitter side of the flavor spectrum.

Ogle’s book was published in 2006, and is to be viewed as a summary of American beer history prior to the contemporary “craft” blitz, which she didn’t see coming – although in fairness, very few among us foresaw the intensity of the impending explosion.

Her book is a solid introductory text, entertainingly written, and covering the major American beer history themes: Colonial upbringings, German immigration, the triumph of lager, Prohibition, the recovery of brewing amid major post-war socio-economic changes, and finally a gradual grassroots revolt against conformity, beginning in the 1960s and coming to fruition in the 1990s.

Gabriele D'Annunzio – Poet, Seducer & Preacher of War, by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

Jon Faith and I crossed paths at the Public House a quarter-century ago, and it’s safe to say we bonded over books and reading. The occasional pint of beer merely served as a coincidental, unintended metaphor.

He recommended this biography of d’Annunzio (1863 – 1938), and we read it concurrently in February.

As Americans, we simply don’t possess a personage to compare to the Italian poet, journalist, soldier and erotic raconteur, and I doubt my ability to convey the extent of his singularity. It’s a very mixed bag.

Apart from an undoubted skill at the literary arts, d’Annunzio was among the first to grasp the utility of social media stardom. The period of his life coincided with the rise of increased literacy in Europe: mass-circulation newspapers, reasonably priced books and periodicals, motion pictures and radio. He understood these avenues, and milked them mercilessly for self-aggrandizement.

As a fervent and plainly unhinged nationalist, d’Annunzio melded thuggish rhetoric with grandiloquent operatic stagecraft, obviously presaging the advent of Benito Mussolini, who was a rapt but coldly calculating observer of d’Annunzio’s life as performance art.

The poet-turned-warrior’s seeming star turn came after World War I, when he joined a motley band of nationalists and freebooters in seizing the disputed city of Fiume (Rijeka), turning the Italian population against intermixed Slavs, and assuming control of what passed for a government.

The results were tragi-comic, like “Duck Soup” by the Marx Brothers folded into Charlie Chaplin’s “The Great Dictator.” However, it isn’t funny; people were injured and killed as a result of d’Annunzio’s learned pretensions, and his susceptibility to being used by opportunists.

After a few months, the Italian military expelled d’Annunzio and his increasingly anarchic legions, and the poet retreated to a ramshackle estate in the southern foothills of the Alps. Marginalized, aging and afflicted with brain-rotting venereal disease, the fading writer was tolerated and subsidized by Mussolini’s ascendant fascists.

Fittingly, d’Annunzio’s adult existence was carefully curated public fodder, from lascivious, serial philandering to genuine heroism in wartime. Eight decades after his death, he remains a divisive figure in Italy – and surely this would please him immensely.

Act of the Damned, by António Lobo Antunes

I was looking for a book by a Portuguese writer to take with me to Portugal, did a bit of googling, and came up with this short novel. It could not have been a better choice.

It helps to know that in 1974, Portugal shook off more than 40 years of right-wing, authoritarian dictatorship. Isolated and impoverished, the country set about divesting itself of colonial remnants like Angola and Macao, and devising a strategy to re-integrate into Europe. The ensuing instability and dislocation raised the specter of a Communist takeover.

Where would Portugal land?

This time of uncertainty is the setting for Lobo Antunes’ novel, which chronicles the rapid disintegration of a dysfunctional, formerly prosperous landowning family. The patriarch is on his deathbed; in fleeting moments of consciousness, he catalogues the shambles of his personal life.

Fearing the arrival of bloodthirsty and confiscatory (also, non-existent) Communists, his moderately well-to-do offspring have gathered to await the old man’s death – and it needs to happen fast, because they’re scrambling to take the money and flee to Spain or Brazil.

There is one small problem: the fortune is long gone, purposefully squandered over the preceding decades by the dying patriarch, who resolved to spend it all on gambling and prostitutes rather than leave it to his fractured descendants.

It’s serious business, indeed, but the skill of Lobo Antunes lies in managing somehow to inject abundant comedy into what is, for the most part, a horrific narrative.

All the while in the background, resembling a Greek (Portuguese?) chorus, are the lives and activities of ordinary people. As depicted by the author, they’re mostly unmotivated, larcenous, promiscuous and casually cruel – not entirely from malice, but owing to sheer boredom.

Whether urban or rural, these bystanders are hardly militant in the political sense. Rather, the Portuguese are exhausted by the pervasive time-stands-still stagnation of the country’s long period of patrimonial degradation.

I’m reminded of Vaclav Havel’s musings on the erosion of civic identity and responsibility in Czechoslovakia during Communism, and how the cancer might be reversed. Has it?

As a warning, Lobo Antunes deploys an experimental structure and dispenses a surplus of black humor. If you’re looking for a feel-good happy endings, it’s probably best to look elsewhere.

Kosher Chinese: Living, Teaching, and Eating with China's Other Billion, by Mike Levy

In 2005 or thereabouts, Levy begins a two-year assignment in the Peace Corps as an English language instructor. His destination is Guizhou University in the city of Guiyang, smack in the middle of China’s vast interior, where the rapid Westernization steamrolling the country’s coastal regions hasn’t yet completely penetrated.

However, enforced modernization is in motion, and given the relative isolation of the region, a clash of cultures and ethnic groups is underway. In both human and environmental terms, the cost seems immense.

Levy is both Jewish and an above-average basketball player, and many of the book’s finest moments revolve around these elements, which render him more exotic than the average, seldom-seen American. His students organize Jewish-themed gatherings, and he is recruited as a ringer for the university basketball team.

It is said in China that the Chinese will eat anything on four legs, and in certain regions, the dinner table itself isn’t safe. Consequently, Levy’s outing to Guiyang’s vast traditional market in search of cheese for pizza-making is an episode that vegetarians and the squeamish may wish to skip.

Through it all, the chaos and dislocation of rapid modernization is never far from the story; everything is in flux. While not a source for deeper truths, Levy’s account is fine for the genre, reminding me to read more often about non-European places and things.

Soul Food: The Surprising Story of an American Cuisine One Plate at a Time, by Adrian Miller

Miller is America’s “Soul Food Scholar, and in his award-winning book he explores a culinary art form with roots in the historic realities of slavery. It’s factual and celebratory, all at once.

“Soul food is really the interior cooking of the Deep South that migrates across the country. I think of soul food as an immigrant cuisine and ultimately a national cuisine, because black folks just landed in all parts of the country. But in terms of the difference between the two, soul food has more intense flavors. It's going to have more spice. It's going to be sweeter. It's a matter of intensity.”

Unity through food and drink is an excellent place to begin, and reading a book like this one will make you terribly hungry.

Soul food is classic fusion, combining elements of West African, European and Native American traditions. I’ve learned about the origins of cornbread in the context of milling techniques; the evolution of catfish; how mass hog butchering led to chitlins in the “pay” packet; yam varieties versus sweet potatoes; which greens are preferred and whether pork’s inclusion truly is negotiable; and why “red drinks” are standard issue.

---

Next on the reading list is another book to be consumed in tandem with Jon: The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution, by Yuri Slezkine.

According to the publisher, “On the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, (it’s) the epic story of an enormous apartment building where Communist true believers lived before their destruction.”

The annual heavyweight summertime novel will follow Slezkine. It is The Combinations, a novel by Louis Armand, and I can barely wait for it, because I'll always be that little kid standing in the library, gazing at the shelves, and wondering if there'd ever be enough time to read them all. Now that I know there won't be, I must try even harder.

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Recent columns:

March 8: ON THE AVENUES: Necessity was the mother of NARBA, a food and drink invention in need of re-animation.

March 1: ON THE AVENUES: Scoreboard daze of old.

February 22: ON THE AVENUES REWOUND: Money is the ultimate bully (2015).

February 15: ON THE AVENUES REWOUND: No more fear, Jeff (2015).

SHANE'S EXCELLENT NEW WORDS: "The quip and the dread: Why English is such a great language for puns."

Here's one for the Punny Pastor, but first, if the meaning remains unclear ...

noun

1. the humorous use of a word or phrase so as to emphasize or suggest its different meanings or applications, or the use of words that are alike or nearly alike in sound but different in meaning; a play on words.

2. the word or phrase used in this way.

I can't think of a single pun for us as an introduction.

The quip and the dread: Why English is such a great language for puns (The Economist)

Gamers now even take part in world champunships

Away With Words: An Irreverent Tour Through the World of Pun Competitions. By Joe Berkowitz. Harper Perennial; 273 pages.

LAST week’s issue of this paper contained the following headlines: “Rooms for improvement” (in a story about British housing); “Though Mooch is taken, Mooch abides” (on the firing of Anthony Scaramucci); and “LIBOR pains” (on interbank loan rates). The Economist is not alone in its taste for wordplay. Our colleagues at the Financial Times routinely sneak subtle jokes into their headlines (July 17th: “Why China’s global shipping ambitions will not easily be contained”) while those at the tabloids indulge themselves more obviously. On the arrest of a famous golfer for drink-driving: “DUI of the Tiger”.

These authors are fortunate to work at English-language publications. For English is unusually good for puns. It has a large vocabulary and a rich stock of homophones from which puns can be made. It is constantly evolving, with new words being invented and old ones given fresh meanings. And it is mostly uninflected, allowing for verbs and nouns to switch places. Moreover, other than the occasional customary feminine pronoun, for ships, say, or nation-states, it has no gendered nouns, which makes it easier to play with innuendo and double entendres. (Chinese is another good language for punsters, which is a boon for those keen to avoid the country’s censors. Puns are especially popular around Chinese new year.)

Newspaper editors get paid to write silly jokes for an audience. But over the past few years a growing band of amateurs has taken up the sport. In New York a monthly event called Punderdome features jokesters with pseudonyms such as “Punder Enlightening”, “Jargon Slayer” and “Words Nightmare” who compete over the course of four increasingly absurd rounds. Similar competitions exist in Washington, DC, (Beltway Pundits), Milwaukee (Pundamonium), San Francisco (Bay Area Pun-Off) and elsewhere. The annual O. Henry Pun-Off in Austin, Texas, which started in 1978, bills itself as the genre’s World Championship. (Word Champunship, surely?)

But who would pay to watch people make puns? That was how Joe Berkowitz, an editor at Fast Company, an American business magazine, reacted when he first discovered Punderdome. He went on to spend a year travelling round America, attending pun-parties and interviewing humour experts and comedy writers. The outcome? “Away With Words”, a faintly anthropological examination of puns and the people who make them. The chief attraction of these competitions, he reports, is that they create a space for something “people feel like they’re not supposed to like and ought not to do” ...

Books: "The Rage of White Folk ... how the silent majority became a loud and angry minority."

Four recent books are reviewed. I'm including what amounts to the preamble, and you are encouraged to set aside 20 minutes to give Hahn's thoughts the time they deserve.

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The Rage of White Folk, by Steven Hahn (The Nation)

How the silent majority became a loud and angry minority.

Long banished from the political lexicon and long marginalized in analyses of American life (unless modified by the term “middle”), class has been thrust back into the mainstream of public discourse. Although the country’s growing inequalities in wealth are partly responsible for this turn, the apparent attraction of the white working class to an assortment of politicians on the right—Donald Trump chief among them—is clearly a driving force. Which is to say that, for many political observers, “class” seems to be most appealing when it can be attached to what is regarded as bad or irrational behavior or, perhaps, to some notion of “false consciousness.”

IN THIS REVIEW

HILLBILLY ELEGY: A MEMOIR OF A FAMILY AND CULTURE IN CRISIS
By J.D. Vance

WHITE TRASH: THE 400 YEAR UNTOLD HISTORY OF CLASS IN AMERICA
By Nancy Isenberg

WHITE RAGE: THE UNSPOKEN TRUTH OF OUR RACIAL DIVIDE
By Carol Anderson

THE NEW MINORITY: WHITE WORKING CLASS POLITICS IN AN AGE OF IMMIGRATION AND INEQUALITY
By Justin Gest

The attention isn’t entirely misplaced. As early as the Democratic presidential primaries in 1964, George Wallace showed strength among ethnic working-class voters in Northern states like Wisconsin, and, running as the candidate of the American Independent Party in 1968, he won votes among unionized industrial workers as well as rural and small-town white Southerners. The defection of white working-class ethnics from the Democratic Party was one of the keys to Ronald Reagan’s victories in 1980 and 1984, and many of the defectors—“Reagan Democrats,” as they’ve come to be known—refused to return to the Democratic fold even after Reagan left office.

By the time Donald Trump entered the presidential campaign, the frustrations and hostility of white voters across the Rust Belt and outside major metropolitan areas seemed to be boiling over; many readily embraced Trump’s economic nationalism and aggressive posture toward a range of perceived enemies at home and abroad. It was these white voters, pollsters and political professionals tell us, who enabled Trump to eke out his electoral-vote victories in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania and, with them, the presidency.

The apparent political muscle of white working-class voters in the United States has been further validated by the rise of the radical right across Europe, and especially by the surprising victory of the Brexit vote last summer and the formidable run that Marine Le Pen of the National Front made for the French presidency this spring. In both cases, it seemed that older white voters from declining industrial districts, many of whom had once voted for the Labour Party in Britain or the Socialists and Communists in France, moved to the right, venting their discontent at the consequences of globalization and immigration—a so-called populist wave, as many media outlets described it.

Scholars and writers haven’t been slow to sink their teeth, both descriptively and analytically, into this phenomenon. In fact, over the course of Trump’s campaign, a burst of new works of memoir, history, and sociology—-including J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, Nancy Isenberg’s White Trash, Carol Anderson’s White Rage, and Justin Gest’s The New Minority—appeared to have anticipated the emergence of the white working class as a significant political actor. Each of these books offers a different vantage point from which to view the discontent of white working-class people; taken together, they provide us with a look into the travails, anxieties, and developing rage of a constituency that is often depicted as helping to fuel this period of political reaction. With the exception of Gest’s book, they illustrate some of the limits that emerge when the phrase “white working class” is invoked and, as a result, remind us of the dangers of homogenizing white workers politically. They also serve as a reminder of just how little we still know about the moment we are in ...

BOOK REVIEW: Chop Suey – or how Chinese food came to be taken for granted in America.

BOOK REVIEW: Chop Suey – or how Chinese food came to be taken for granted in America.

Chop Suey: A Cultural History of Chinese Food in the United States, by Andrew Coe (2009).

Before considering the myriad factors that brought Hot and Sour Soup to Dubuque, allow me to observe that using the term “melting pot” as a metaphor for the assimilation of immigrants in America remains as problematic as ever.

After all, mixing together various brightly colored paints does not result in a rainbow; rather, it yields a dull, uniform gray – or Miller Lite, which is even worse.

Besides, haven’t most Americans tended to prefer a selective and purely personalized interpretation of this doctrine?

For them, a melting pot is wonderful in theory, and less desirable in practice. Usually the serial bigots among us recommend that several among the rainbow’s hues be excluded. So it invariably goes – and we constantly fail to make good on our founding mythology.

Still, some melting pots make more sense than others. Though not without significant asterisks of their own, pursuits like music, sports and food are among those areas of shared interest that have been known on widely scattered occasions to enable the better angels of America’s traditionally spotty nature.

Andrew Coe’s 2009 book Chop Suey: A Cultural History of Chinese Food in the United States entertainingly traces the lineage of Chinese cuisine’s adaptation to local conditions on the North American continent.

It has been a Long March, indeed.

From origins in xenophobic fear and derision, we’ve come to the stomach-warming point of finding a Chinese restaurant, buffet or food truck in just about every American town with a population of 1,000 or more – sometimes two of them, as well as a gradual flanking movement toward greater authenticity, as with the “authentic” Chinese menus offered by Louisville restaurants like Jasmine and Oriental House.

I profiled these restaurants for an upcoming edition of Food & Dining (Louisville), and happily sampled diverse edibles that are seldom seen at the buffet table: Sour Pickled Fish Soup, Turnip Cakes, Pockmarked Granny Tofu and Tong Choy (water spinach).

Coe’s account is chronological, and it begins in 1784 with a snapshot from history. The author’s point is simple, in that the ubiquity of Chinese food and dining in America during our contemporary era has been achieved only after the Chinese have traveled distances both physical and cultural, often far more arduous than those traversed by other arrivals.

When American maritime traders docked in Guangzhou first encountered China’s venerable and ancient cultural norms, they might as well have been encountering civilization on Mars. It likely would have seemed ludicrous to all involved at the time to so much as imagine any degree of future assimilation between east and west.

In particular, Americans (like most other westerners) found Chinese food and drink to be inedible, undrinkable and uniformly horrendous, although for the sake of commerce, they immediately commenced scouring the Pacific Rim for profitable foodstuffs like bird’s nests and sea cucumbers.

(Kindly note that sea cucumbers are not vegetables. They’re echinoderms, or bottom-feeding marine animals, with a texture and consistency not unlike escargot. At Oriental House, you can get them braised with shiitake mushrooms in a savory oyster sauce.)

In the early 1800s, a handful of missionaries engaged in the emerging search for Chinese souls reached the conclusion that supping with the natives might aid in their cause (in fact it didn’t) and their written accounts, while generally negative, at least introduced the topic to western eyes.

Chinese laborers began debarking in San Francisco during the Gold Rush. The culinary habits they brought with them never failed to inspire reactions, at best apathetic, though more often displaying a revulsion borne of racism, but gradually over time a process of adaptive evolution was triggered.

Over the next 50 years, a trickle of all things Chinese led to the establishment of minor footholds throughout America, finally migrating to the urbanized eastern seaboard in the late 1800s. Here, in immigrant-packed New York City, support came from an unexpected source: self-identified “Bohemians,” the hipsters of their time.

As social trendsetters, these “Bohemians” found Chinese food and dining to be sufficiently voguish for their flightiness, helping to foster the idea that Chinese restaurants were acceptable. Soon the city’s respectable middle-class salaried clerks were taking their girlfriends out to the Chop Suey house, and a brand new date night was born.

In turn, Chinese restaurateurs proved forever mutable, perfectly willing to adjust their recipes to American (read: overwhelmingly timid) tastes. Delightful incongruities ensued, as with the symbiotic affinities between immigrant Chinese and the Jewish diaspora, and an early example of “don’t ask, don’t tell” as it pertains to ingredients.

Beginning in the 1930s with Japan’s murderous attack on China, restrictions on Chinese immigration to the United States were relaxed. Japan became a shared enemy once America entered World War II, and afterward, even greater numbers of political exiles were welcomed during the coldest periods of the Maoist era.

By the 1950s, the Chinese restaurant menu (and its trademark cardboard carry-out boxes) had become almost iconic, with a stereotypical template of sorts. Egg Rolls, Chow Mein, Moo Shu Pork and Moo Goo Gai Pan were palatable and inexpensive. Many of these were Americanized variants of Cantonese recipes, though there might be a slightly spicier dish or two from Szechuan or Hunan. Fortune cookies were mandatory, and only the truly adventurous departed from knives and forks.

Chinese food was exotic, safe, kitschy -- and the restaurants were open on holidays. Chinese restaurateurs represented the triumph of the free market at a time when the Red Communist hordes still seemed a genuine threat to the American way of robber baron capitalism.

Unsurprisingly, the modern era in Sino-American culinary relations began in 1972 with Richard Nixon’s seismic and epochal visit to the People’s Republic of China.

Coe extensively documents the transformative phenomenon of Nixon in China. There were secret pre-trip missions and top-level planning sessions. Forever savvy, Tricky Dicky let his prospective hosts know that he’d eat anything they placed before him – and with Mrs. Nixon, he undertook to learn the rudiments of chopsticks.

The Chinese gracefully spared their guests the most exotic extremes of the Chinese diet, as summarized by the proverb: "Anything that walks, swims, crawls, or flies with its back to heaven is edible."

But just in case, when Air Force One landed in Beijing, it came fully provisioned with steak, eggs, potatoes, plenty of standard-issue western booze and Nixon’s private chef.

At the time, the mere sight of an American president on television using chopsticks in the banquet hall of the enemy was the stuff of bedazzled fascination. The tentative political rapprochement was meant to put the Soviet Union on notice, but the practical cultural effect was a mainstreaming of heretofore mysterious China in American eyes, and a renewed interest in Chinese food.

By the time the USSR crumbled, China was on its way to becoming a global economic powerhouse. Today there are more than 40,000 Chinese eateries in America, perhaps 80 of which are doing business in metropolitan Louisville. Our melting pot predictably transformed their hot pot into “La Choy makes Chinese food swing American” (yes, the product as yet exists), but now the pendulum is beginning to swing back.

At establishments like Jasmine (Szechuan cuisine) and Oriental House (Cantonese, including a large selection of Dim Sum), the standard issue Americanized dishes are served to the cash register’s steady hum, but their “authentic” Chinese menus are written in English and filled with regional specialties that make it possible to explore examples of deliciousness ranging beyond General Tso’s comforting chicken.

No longer must intrepid foodies reconnoiter the kitchen to point and eat. I came to Coe’s book late, but it’s invaluable for those who like to think about what they’re eating and drinking.

A Leon Trotsky biography encore -- now with documentary film.

About the 2007 film:

His name often falls secondary to Karl Marx and Vladimir Ilyich Lenin in popular contexts, but actually, Leon Trotsky bore every bit as much responsibility for spearheading the Russian Revolution - and (despite the eventual failure of Communism in the U.S.S.R.) retained a saint-like reputation among the Russian people that persisted for generations. Unlike John Reed, for example (who saw in the October Revolution a chaos that lacked order and systematization), Trotsky perceived the Revolution as only one in a carefully-planned series of steps that would lead to an eventual world revolution - a vision that gave him a permanent place in the hearts of many leftists. This documentary tells Trotsky's story chronologically, making much use of archival material, period quotes, and newly-shot footage. In lieu of a reverent approach, it examines the many and varied responses to Trotsky, in order to keep him multifaceted and bring him as close as possible to contemporary audiences.

The video serves as a fine, albeit brief introduction to Trotsky. Far better for those who have the time, there's this book. Has it really been five years since I read it? The review was published here on June 14, 2012.

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ON THE AVENUES: “Trotsky,” by Robert Service.

A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.

During the tadpole stage of his murderous career, temporarily employed as a robber of banks and trains for the greater good of Bolshevism, the man who eventually came to be known as Joe Stalin paused momentarily for a cigarette and a tumbler of Georgian Gold.

Reflecting on the vagaries of life, he concluded that when his number as dictatorial kingpin was called, he’d not make the same mistake as the Tsars by being unduly soft on dissenters like himself.

Students of history are too well aware of the consequences of Koba’s smoke break revelation. There’d be no country-club internal exile under Uncle Joe -- not as when Tsarist police would arrest, try and convict agitators, and then ship them thousands of miles to Siberia, their reading collections largely intact, mail only lightly censored, and sometimes with entire families in tow. Yes, Siberian winters are brutal, but the Tsars permitted touchy-feely amenities such as stoves and food – astounding luxuries during the horrific Gulag era to come.

We know there are numerous factors helping to explain why the centuries-old Romanov dynasty was successfully overthrown in 1917 by an otherwise motley crew of ragtag Marxists. The Russian Empire was making baby steps toward economic viability, but was rotten to the core when it came to the ability of its ruling class. 

Like a celiac loose in a bakery, Nicholas II rushed into the one situation guaranteed to irreparably weaken his grip: Total war, in the form of the World War I, a mind-numbing conflagration that exposed every socio-economic fault line in Russia and created whole new opportunities for cultural collapse.

Furthermore, precisely because the Tsar did not customarily murder his opponents – although occasionally, selected conspirators were executed as a warning, including VI Lenin’s beloved brother – revolutionaries were able to continue plotting and scheming against the established regime from afar in Siberian huts, Viennese housing blocks and even American dockyards, maintaining forward momentum in spite of their own incessant bickering, which regularly reached unfathomable extremes of hair-splitting and factionalism not witnessed since the heyday of medieval theology.

Significantly, despite this state of congenital disorganization, these scattered cadres loosely arrayed against the Tsar possessed certain individuals of undeniable talent and skill. Our post-Bin Laden world as yet remembers Lenin and his eventual successor, Stalin. There were others now seldom recalled (Bukharin, Radek, Kamenev, Zinoviev) who found themselves in just the right place, and at precisely the right time, to grab an opportunity to alter history.

These and other Bolsheviks were capable of “capitalizing” on the Tsarist regime’s terminal weakness, and among them was a truly indispensable figure, whose tireless work as an intellectual prepared the conceptual grounds for revolution, but also rising to occasions of physical action and personal courage during two critical periods: First against the Provisional Government that followed the Tsar’s abdication, and then during the bloody Russian Civil War following the war in Europe’s end.

He was Lev Bronstein, known to us as Leon Trotsky, son of a reasonably well-to-do Jewish farmer, and bitten by the Marxist bug while still in school, becoming transformed almost overnight into a tireless writer, master orator, monomaniacal polemicist and later, presumed heir to Lenin’s chair of leadership.

It was not to be. For all of Trotsky’s brilliance, he abhorred the gritty realities of a politician’s life. Stalin reveled in them, and after isolating his only true rival, he removed him – first from the fledgling USSR, and in due time, from the ranks of the living.

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The prolific British writer Robert Service’s biography of Trotsky recently passed across my nightstand, and it is a generally useful corrective to previous hagiographies.

Today Trotsky is remembered primarily for the exotic locale and grisly method of his passing in 1940: In Mexico City – exiled, marginalized and in decline – Trotsky was assassinated by a wily operative of Stalin’s, who penetrated the aging revolutionary’s heavily armed compound by wooing a pining spinster within the entourage, and did the deed with an axe, up close and personal.

I believe that history always still matters, but specifically, the life of Trotsky remains relevant to us largely because the manner by which he was discarded by the figure arising from the revolution he spearheaded. It has been suggested by many observers that if only Trotsky had “won” his fight with Stalin for control of the party, the world would have been spared the subsequent horrors of the latter’s sociopathic regime.

Service makes clear that this point of view is mistaken. 

It is true that Trotsky and Stalin famously differed on the parameters of the revolution; true believer Leon viewed it as “permanent,” with the victorious Soviet vanguard obliged to spread the contagion world wide, while Joe, ever pragmatic and self-serving, saw no issues with first consolidating control within the confines of the USSR, especially if this facilitated his position as supreme overlord.

However, the two did not ever substantively disagree as to the violent methods required to negate resistance to the party’s control. For that matter, neither did the sainted Lenin, whose early death (from natural causes) prompted the tussle for succession. Possibly those “parasites” opposed to the historically inevitable victory of the workers’ state would not have been exterminated in quite as great numbers had Trotsky ascended to the apex, but this is a difference only in degree. Like Stalin, Trotsky probably would not have been troubled by the additional zeroes.

Service’s biography provides a broad overview of Trostky’s existence apart from his life’s mission of revolution, although the central question of the man’s remains unanswered: Exactly how did this child of a Jewish kulak in the countryside acquire his taste for the interests of the urban proletariat? Was it ethnicity, embarrassment or excitement?

Or, was it purely evangelical?

While no original thought on my part, it is remarkable the extent to which the total commitment and relentless fanaticism of Trotsky’s generation of Marxists resembles institutional religious belief before and since, in turn inspiring similar-hued reactions; think about the Spanish Civil War’s intensity of horrific violence in a death clash between competing “–isms”. In polarization, whether economic, racial, political or religious, doesn’t there always exist a tragic potential for this degree of single-minded, all-or-nothing rage?

By the way, did you know that this is an election year in L’America?