Vote as You Please, But Please Vote

My friend Fran Smith, a Hillary supporter, and I, a late convert to Obamaism, recently had an e-mail debate that to my mind encapsulates the dilemma that many of us face today. Fran has kindly given me permission to reprint our dialogue.

Fran: I actually don't know what kind of leader Obama would be. All I know is what kind of a speaker he is. What am I missing? Besides a drink of the Kool Aid...

Me: Good point, and I don't have an answer -- that Kool Aid is mighty tasty. I guess it really comes down to my sense that I know what kind of leader Hillary would be: Enormously competent but freighted with sixteen years of history. Obama promises at least initially to give us a break from that history. If it were just Hillary, I'd be more enthusiastic. But I'm just not sure I want to put up with four to eight years more of Bill Clinton, who will be there no matter what she can do to control him.

Fran: Yes, I get that about Bill and Hill and the baggage. But a lot of the "divisiveness" and "polarization" of Bill's administration that I keep reading about came from the mad-dog right-wing smear machine. Yes, the Clintons provided plenty of ammunition, but none of their sins comes close to what we've witnessed and endured and pretty quietly put up with these past eight years. Monica vs. Iraq? Hillary's clumsy health care efforts vs. torture, White House secrecy and the war on civil liberties? I think it's revisionist history -- and a delusion -- to think that the attacks and divisions were about the Clintons, and not first and foremost about the Republicans, and that Obama could somehow float above the partisan nastiness. If the Dems win, it may take the Republicans a while to regroup, and that would be an excellent thing. But if and when they do, they will go after whoever holds that office, with the cynical, vicious, deceitful win-at-any-cost tactics that are their M.O. At least with Hill, we know we have a fighter and survivor.

Me: You get no argument from me on the basic point that Republican nastiness (and incompetence and lust for power and so on) is to blame for what we've endured. Or that it won't resurface whatever Democrat is in the White House. But given a choice between two competent and attractive candidates (Hillary and Obama), I have to go with the one who has the better chance of giving us at least a brief respite from the brutality of right-wing attacks. The Republican Party is in disarray right now, but I fear that nominating Hillary will give them a point to rally around. Nor do I see any sign that Obama is any less capable of fighting and surviving whatever the right-wing attack machine may throw at him. He's already had to deal with the "Barack Hussein Osama" nonsense and the e-mails about his being a covert Muslim and so on. It's the enthusiasm I sense from younger voters and his ability to inspire -- even if it's only rhetoric, which can only take you so far -- that I think will help him along. It's why people remember JFK so fondly, even though he really wasn't a very good president. You felt something at the time that gave you a sense of promise. I feel it with Obama. With Hillary, I just feel the tug back into the Clintonian past -- and even though that past was better than the Bush years, I just don't much want to go back there.

Fran: You get no argument from me on your basic points, either. We agree on pretty much everything except which way to vote today! Kind of like Clinton and Obama....

Me: And may whoever it is win, and win big, in November.

What to Read Next

Critical Mass, the National Book Critics Circle's blog, has a regular feature it calls Good Reads. It surveys the membership as well as some eminent authors to come up with a list of top choices in fiction, nonfiction and poetry among the current books. Their current picks are these:

Fiction

1. Denis Johnson, Tree of Smoke (Farrar Straus & Giroux)
2. Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Riverhead)
3. J.M. Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year (Viking)
4. Geraldine Brooks, People of the Book (Viking)
5. Steve Erickson, Zeroville (Europa)

Nonfiction

1. The Rest Is Noise, by Alex Ross (FSG)
2. Brother, I’m Dying, by Edwidge Danticat (Knopf)
3. In Defense of Food, by Michael Pollan (Penguin Press)
4. Musicophilia, by Oliver Sacks (Knopf)*
5. The Shock Doctrine, by Naomi Klein (Metropolitan)*

Poetry

1. Elegy, by Mary Jo Bang (Graywolf)
2. Time and Materials, by Robert Hass (Ecco)*
3. Gulf Music, by Robert Pinsky (FSG)*
4. The Collected Poems, 1956–1998, by Zbigniew Herbert (Ecco)
5. Sharp Teeth, by Toby Barlow (Harper)

*There was a tie for fourth in nonfiction, and for second in poetry

I can endorse the list, even though I've read only one of the titles (Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food). My own choices, which didn't make the final cut, were:

Fiction
The Commoner, by John Burnham Schwartz (Talese/Doubleday) -- My review of this fine novel should be up next weekend.

Nonfiction
Coal River, by Michael Shnayerson (Farrar, Straus) -- See here for my review.

Sadly, like most people, I know nothing about contemporary poetry.

Old King Coal

The following review ran today (in a version very nicely edited for space) in the Dallas Morning News. This is the unedited version.

COAL RIVER
By Michael Shnayerson
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 321 pp., $25

Court cases thread through Michael Shnayerson’s new book like veins of coal through an Appalachian hillside. In discussing one of them, he observes that that the judge made “a small point, like a caveat buried near the end of a book review.”

So let’s not bury our caveats, the most important one being: “Coal River” will make you angry.

It will make you angry especially if you’re disturbed by the Bush administration’s radically pro-business approach to energy policy and the environment. Of course, if you’re an admirer and a beneficiary of those policies, Mr. Shnayerson’s evident bias against them will also make you angry.

For while his book is billed as the story of a handful of people in the hills of West Virginia who protested the damage being done by a coal company to the mountains where they and their ancestors had lived, Mr. Shnayerson has turned it into an indictment of government policy, of power-hungry politicians and businesspeople, of bureaucratic inertia, of Wall Street’s obsession with fattening the bottom line, and of the callousness with which the poor have been treated for generations. The people of West Virginia, he writes, “are for the most part too poor and too cowed after a century of harsh treatment by King Coal to think they can stop their world from being blasted away.”

He means “blasted away” literally. “Coal River” focuses on the practice of mountaintop removal – the blasting away of the tops of mountains to get at the rich veins of coal beneath. It is a practice that became more common after Don Blankenship became chairman, president and CEO of Massey Energy, a company whose ruthlessness was a byword in the state. It was a ruthlessness that went unchecked, Mr. Shnayerson asserts, “The coal companies could set those blasts as close to homes as they liked, damaging foundations and walls, ruining wells. No law governed them in that regard.”

The result was visible and lasting damage to the environment. After the blasting began, one woman “was astonished to see the hollow’s entire animal population come foraging right by her house in the valley: bobcats and bears, squirrels and possums. … When she fed them, they hung around for more, pets whether she wanted them or not.” And environmentalists argued that the burning of coal, however obtained, “was the single greatest cause” of the looming calamities of global warming.

Those who protested mountaintop removal, who argued for laws and regulations, often found themselves outcasts in their own communities, where people who had jobs feared losing them – or that Massey would retaliate against friends and relatives who worked there. The mountain culture is “libertarian,” as Mr. Shnayerson puts it – distrustful of outsiders and collective efforts. And after years of being worn down, they simply doubted that anything could or would be done. As one of the protesters put it, “The way they’ve done it is by dehumanizing us, so that the rest of America doesn’t care about us. That’s how they got away with slavery for so long. When they say, ‘Don’t go to West Virginia or Kentucky, those people are ignorant and inbred,’ then who cares if my grandson is sleeping nights in his clothes because he’s worried there’ll be a flood or mudslide?”

Mr. Shnayerson has found an easy villain for his book in Don Blankenship, who would seem on the face of it to be the very emblem of corporate greed, a man who received “roughly $27 million in pay and perks for 2006 – despite a 30 percent decline in the company’s stock for the year.” But Mr. Shnayerson humanizes Blankenship, describing his hardscrabble childhood in the hills he was now blasting away. “Coal River” is not a simple diatribe, but rather a carefully reported and compellingly written account of a complex and intricate economic, political, social and environmental problem with no easy solutions or quick fixes.

Most of all, the book is a remarkable piece of the sort of investigative journalism that has grown sadly more rare as newspapers retrench and reshape themselves. Mr. Shnayerson is a contributing editor for Vanity Fair magazine, where much of the material in the book originally appeared. It’s a fine irony that a publication known for its celebration of glitz and glamour, fattened with ads for luxury goods, should also be the source of such an incisive and sympathetic portrait of the exploited poor.

Talkin' 'bout My Generation

The Mercury News today had one of those perfectly obvious "news" stories on its front page, about how Obama, Clinton/Romney, and McCain represent three generations: Gen-X, the Baby Boomers, and the Silent Generation. My first reaction was, Well, duh. But my second was to feel my old gray hackles rise at the labeling of my own cohort as the "Silent Generation."

The article defines the "Silent Generation" as those people born between 1925 and 1942, and claims that it "was overshadowed by the 'GI Generation' that preceded them and fought World War II, and the baby boomers who came after them."

Well, first of all, a lot of people born in 1925 and 1926 also fought in World War II and Korea. And the baby boom is usually dated from 1946, when GIs came home and started raising families.

But even taking the article on its own terms, the inappropriateness of the label "Silent Generation" is obvious. There's a chart that goes with the story (the Merc loves charts) headed "Generations compared" that lists, among other things, "Prominent contemporaries" for each of the generations. And the prominent contemporaries of the "Silent Generation" include Martin Luther King Jr. and Bob Dylan. If those guys were "overshadowed" by anyone in either the preceding or following generations, I'd like to know who.

I suspect that the "Silent Generation" label was coined by a baby boomer, a member of a generation that loves to celebrate itself. Baby boomers seem to believe that they changed the world, when most of the work was done for them by the generations that preceded theirs.

Take for example the famous baby boom triad of "sex and drugs and rock 'n' roll." That there was a sexual revolution there can be no doubt. But the groundwork for it was laid by Alfred Kinsey -- who was born in 1894. Sexual Behavior in the Human Male was published in 1948, and the followup on human females in 1953. It was the Silent Generation that made them bestsellers. As for drugs, it was Timothy Leary (born 1923) and Richard Alpert (aka Baba Ram Dass, born 1931), who ushered in the psychedelic era.

Oh, and where to start with rock 'n' roll? The article has already spotted us Bob Dylan (1941), but there would have been no good rockin' tonight without Chuck Berry (1926), Fats Domino (1928), Ray Charles (1930), Little Richard (1932), James Brown (1933), Elvis Presley (1935), Jerry Lee Lewis (1935), and Buddy Holly (1936). Not to mention a couple of Brits: John Lennon (1940) and Paul McCartney (1942).

In fact, almost everything the boomers claim as their own has its origins in the previous generation.

Feminism? Gloria Steinem (1934) and Germaine Greer (1939) built on the work of members of the generations before them, such as Betty Friedan (1921) and Simone de Beauvoir (1908).

Anti-war protest? Not one of the Chicago Seven was a baby boomer. Abbie Hoffman was born in 1936, Jerry Rubin in 1938, Tom Hayden in 1939, and so on.

Civil rights? Think Martin Luther King Jr. (1929) and Malcolm X (1925), James Meredith (1935), Eldridge Cleaver (1935), John Lewis (1940) and Julian Bond (1940). Rosa Parks was born in 1913.

Campus protest? Mario Savio of the Berkeley Free Speech movement was born in 1942.

The Merc article lists as the baby boom's "prominent contemporaries" George W. Bush, Madonna and Bill Gates. I think I'll stick with my contemporaries.

And Then There Were Two

A friend of mine who supports Obama, and who is quite knowledgeable about the Clintons, had this to say recently: "I have a problem with Bill as the spouse of the nominee. I think he's capable of doing something, unconsciously or simply carelessly, to sabotage Hillary." That was, in fact, written before the South Carolina primary, and before Bill did exactly that in his attacks on Obama. And now the media are making much of The Snub -- the supposed cold shoulder that Obama gave Hillary at the State of the Union. Of course Maureen Dowd wrote one of her calumniating columns about The Snub, and today I turned on MSNBC too early -- before "Countdown" came on -- and heard my ineffable namesake yapping away about it, too. It seems that Bill Clinton is capable of sabotaging everybody. (Most of all, himself.)

I did, in fact, mail in my vote for Obama in the California primary, after much waffling among the three of them. But I found myself wishing for a candidate who combined Obama's charisma, Hillary's expertise and John Edwards' passion. I was almost as sorry to see Edwards drop out today as I was delighted and relieved to see Giuliani make his exit. Edwards got a bad deal almost from the moment Obama announced his candidacy, and the vapidity of the media coverage of his candidacy was infuriating. The $400 haircut, for god's sake. (I'm reading Willie Brown's memoir, Basic Brown, for a review. Brown talks about how he never felt any kind of disjunction between wearing $5,000 Brioni suits and fighting for the poor. I wish Edwards had had the same kind of chutzpah. But I'm not sure anyone but Willie Brown could pull it off these days.)

The truth is, I'm suffering from Clinton fatigue. I guess I'll have to get over it, because I still think she'll get the nomination. If she can keep the Big Dog in his kennel, maybe it will be all right.

Mansfield Misfire

Mansfield Park is sometimes called Jane Austen's "problem" novel, the problem being that its moral vision is so very different from ours, and its heroine seems so much less like our contemporary than Emma Woodhouse or Elizabeth Bennet do. Austen herself admitted that Fanny Price was a heroine that no one but she would like, but she also said Mansfield Park was the favorite of her novels.

Still, it's not so problematic a book that adapting it for the movies or TV should result in such terrible hashes as the two versions I've seen: The 1999 film written and directed by Patricia Rozema and the British TV version that aired on PBS Sunday night. The movie is better: Frances O'Connor is a good choice as Fanny, and the film at least follows something that resembles an outline of the novel. The chief difficulty with the film is that Rozema tries to interpolate into it a contemporary New Historical view of the book, pointing out that its wealthy idlers are wealthy and idle because of the exploitation of slaves in the West Indies. It's an intellectual premise that Rozema fails to translate into dramatic sense.

In this scene from the film, Sir Thomas (Harold Pinter) returns home to interrupt the theatricals. Jonny Lee Miller is Edmund, Embeth Davidtz Mary Crawford and Alessandro Nivola Henry Crawford. The conversation about breeding mulattos is, of course, not in the novel:


But at least the film version provokes you into thinking about something. The TV version allows for no thought. It's as if the adapter, one Maggie Wadey, was embarrassed by Fanny Price -- whom admittedly some readers regard as merely a prude, a prig and a wimp -- and is determined to turn her into a Harlequin romance heroine, with cleavage enough to catch any man's eye. Billie Piper, so wonderful as Rose on "Doctor Who," is miserably miscast in the role. She's made into a boisterous little child-woman, with a mad crush on her cousin Edmund (who is at least attractively embodied by Blake Ritson). She's supposed to be the conscience of the household, but when it comes to the amateur theatricals that are the moral crux of the novel, in the TV version she doesn't hold out against them as obdurately as Austen's Fanny Price did. And with this, the TV version crumbles into pointlessness.

Moreover, Wadey utterly botches one of Austen's greatest characters, the poisonous Mrs. Norris (Maggie O'Neil), reducing her to a figure sitting to one side doing her needlework and making the occasional mildly anti-Fanny remark. So when she gets her final comeuppance -- one of the novel's most satisfying moments -- we hardly even notice. A Mansfield Park without a Mrs. Norris is like a Snow White without a wicked stepmother.

Mary Crawford (Hayley Atwell) is another of Austen's great creations. In the novel, she's the embodiment of cleverness and wit -- an Elizabeth Bennet without a soul. Here, she's only a rather attractive woman twirling a parasol and being mildly snippy about Edmund's plans to be a clergyman.

This version also omits Fanny's journey -- her banishment -- home to Portsmouth: a key episode for the character, who discovers in the squalor of her old home how much she values Mansfield Park and all it represents. It's an essential contrast that no amount of flowery talk about how beautiful Mansfield is can compensate for.

In short, I don't think I've seen a worse travesty of a great novel. (Well ... maybe Demi Moore's version of The Scarlet Letter.)

The Man Who Should Have Been President

Instead, we spent the last seven years with the other guy.

Words, Words, Words

I'm always late to the party, but I just discovered the Language Log blog, which I've added to my blogroll. Wonderful, witty commentary on the things people say. But I'm still searching for an explanation of why we call it dog food on the one hand, but chicken feed on the other.

Issues? Gesundheit!

The Onion gets at the essentials:


Poll: Bullshit Is Most Important Issue For 2008 Voters

Riding the Rails With the Robber Barons

My review of this book appeared today in the San Francisco Chronicle:

THE ASSOCIATES: Four Capitalists Who Created California
By Richard Rayner
Atlas-W.W. Norton, 224 pp., $23.95

Some stories are too good to be true, so they probably aren’t. But true or not, one that Richard Rayner tells about the California railroad baron Collis P. Huntington is key to Rayner’s portrait of the man. Huntington was in Paris in 1893, when a reporter asked for his opinion of the city’s most famous landmark.

“ ‘Your Eiffel Tower is all very well,’ Huntington told those French reporters. ‘But where’s the money in it?’ ”

Rayner begins his brisk little book “The Associates” with that story and concludes it with a similar anecdote about Huntington’s eye for profit. So although it’s nominally about the “Big Four” who made their fortunes from the building of the Central Pacific Railroad – Huntington, Leland Stanford, Charles Crocker and Mark Hopkins – Huntington so frames and dominates the book that it might have been called “He Saw the Money in It.”

Huntington even saw the money in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln: “Confusion and dismay were another opportunity for him to exercise his habitual wiles,” Rayner observes. He exploited the chaos in Washington by pushing through an override of the Railroad Act of 1864 that would have halted the Central Pacific in Nevada. Instead, it drove on to Utah. Rayner’s Huntington is the driving force of the railroad: “Out of the narrowness of his concerns sprang a grand and greedy vision, and he was working toward it even while the success of the central stem of the enterprise, crawling forward through granite and blizzards, looked hugely uncertain.”

With Huntington as primus inter pares, the other three Associates often fade into the background of Rayner’s narrative. Hopkins, as Huntington said, “was strictly an office man,” though he was not above burning the ledgers of the Central Pacific when a congressional committee came snooping. “Huntington blithely announced that the company records had been lost. ‘My partner Hopkins is a peculiar man,’ he said. ‘He considered the paper no longer worth saving.’ ”

The corpulent Crocker is presented as a genial con artist, “the most approachable of the four men.” When a commission came to inspect the construction of the railroad, Crocker showed them the best-laid sections of the track, then invited them in for a ride while the train sped over the parts that had been poorly constructed. The inspectors were fooled, and Huntington was pleased to hear it. “ ‘I think you must have slept with them,’ Huntington wrote to Crocker. ‘There is nothing like sleeping with men, or women either for that matter.’ ”

At least Hopkins and Crocker are given credit for doing something. Rayner portrays Stanford as a blowhard and a bit of a wuss, mocked by the other Associates for his laziness. “As to work he absolutely succeeds in doing nothing as near as a man can,” Crocker said of Stanford. His desire to stay put on his Peninsula farm was especially irksome: “Huntington wanted Stanford to base himself in Salt Lake City, to make an ally of Brigham Young, and hire teams of Mormons for the advance surveys. Stanford dithered. He’d become father to a son, Leland Jr., and didn’t want to leave home.” Still, Stanford was in Utah when the golden spike was driven, and made what Rayner calls “a speech pompous even by his own standards.” Huntington was at his desk in New York “as the cannons boomed and church bells began to ring out.” He left “the champagne and absurd hullabaloo to Stanford and the others.”

“The Associates” is part of Norton’s “Enterprise” series, described by the publisher thus: “Intended for both business professionals and the general reader, these are books whose insights come from the realm of business but inform the world we live in today.” This may explain the boys-will-be-boys tone with which Rayner, a British-born novelist who lives in Los Angeles, treats his robber-baron protagonists. He notes the criticism of the Associates by writers such as Ambrose Bierce and Frank Norris, as well as the San Francisco Chronicle’s attacks that led a friend of Huntington to denounce the newspaper as “a disgraceful sheet” that “believes in no honor except its own – that is to say, none at all.” Rayner also makes obligatory mention of the railroad’s exploitation of Chinese laborers, its destruction of Indian lands, and its bloody battles with settlers over land rights. He comments that contemporary analysis of the Associates and the way they worked is “ideologically pulverizing. It cuts to the heart of how we feel about business and whether political power is, or should be, the handmaiden of economic power.”

And yet the Machiavellian Huntington is something of a heroic figure in Rayner’s telling, a man who pulled off what Rayner calls “one of the great high-wire acts in the history of American business.” Stanford, the “dithering” Associate who seemed content to enjoy his wealth, is mocked as “the businessman/politician as actor, always aware that he was playing a part, … whereas Huntington was the pure product of his era, a restless commingling of intelligence and energy, of cunning and drive. Much later, in the 1880s, Stanford used his money to found the university that bears his name. Today, he’d most likely have bought a sports team.”

That’s hardly fair. Stanford may have been a windbag and he was certainly no saint, but his grief over the death of Leland Jr. was deep and genuine. And there’s a fine irony that this “laziest” of the Associates, in his impulse to memorialize his son, endowed an institution that immortalizes his name while those of the other Associates have faded. Mark Hopkins is recalled mostly because of the hotel on Nob Hill that stands where his mansion once flaunted his wealth. Crocker’s name dots the Bay Area landscape less prominently than it did before Wells Fargo gobbled up his eponymous bank. And Huntington’s name has been preserved chiefly on the plaques identifying the paintings he left to the Metropolitan Museum in New York. (He saw the money in them, but he couldn’t take it with him. It was his nephew, Henry, who used the wealth he inherited from his uncle – he also married his aunt, Huntington’s widow, merging their fortunes -- to memorialize his own name in the great library at San Marino.)

“The Associates” is a slim and lively pop history, full of fizz and sweeteners. It will do if you’re curious and uninformed about the Big Four, but its superficiality should leave you hungry for the substance of what is clearly one of the great American epics.

Afterthought: "Eponymous bank"? Wasn't he a jazz pianist?