agog

The Dark Side, Jane Mayer, 2008

This is the story of Dick Cheney a.k.a. Darth Vader and his omnipresent bullying lawyer and chief of staff David Addington and how the two of them after 9/11 took over the presidency and led the administration into the dark side from which it has never returned. Cheney is described as having changed into a paranoid, deranged fanatic after the attacks, living in underground bunkers emerging only to browbeat the few administration opponents into defeat and resignation. Neither Cheney, nor Addington, nor John Yoo, who gave legal cover to the administration from his justice department position, appear to have any respect for the constitution or for the law. Everything is about the powers of the imperial presidency. This account leaves little doubt that the power of the presidency resides securely in the hands of Cheney-Addington.

This work is a good companion piece to Nemesis, Shock Doctrine, Ghost Wars, and Legacy of Ashes.

The principle focus of the book is the capture and treatment of prisoners (illegal enemy combatants) in the war on terror both by the DOD military and by the CIA. It meticulously tracks the few cases have come to light and makes a compelling case that virtually nothing of value was learned by the torture inspired interrogation methods. Among the few cases are several cases of murder and numerous cases of innocent victims. Covered are the CIA special rendition program and black sites (unknown prisons) located throughout the world (including Afghanistan, Thailand, presumably Poland, and others) where the captured are held indefinitely beyond the reach of any law.

The book could have been about those heroes who tried to stand up to Cheney-Addington except these otherwise conservative actors always lose or their short lived victories are immediately undercut by new, equally illegal moves by Cheney-Addington. Bush is portrayed as a cowboy easily manipulated and largely outside the decision fray. Cheney presents him with a decision and Bush signs it. Condoleezza Rice and John Ashcroft, while supportive of Bush, are clearly outside the decision making loop. Of course good soldier Colin Powell was outside the loop.

When congress passes anti terror legislation sponsored by John McCain, Addington simply crosses out the parts he and Cheney disagree with (most of the bill) and have Bush issue a signing statement stating basically that he will not enforce the law. Later, when a bill is passed giving legal war crimes cover to the participants in the torture activity all the way up to Cheney, loose cannon McCain votes for the bill. (Maybe Bush is so ignorant of what is going on he doesn’t need cover?)

Korean lawyer John Yoo, who clerked for Clarence Thomas, was appointed to the Justice department key Office of Legal Council where he was in a position to write opinions which are considered legally binding interpretations of the law for the administration that act as “golden shields” or “get out of jail cards” for the administration. Most of these opinions including the torture authorization and the domestic surveillance opinion which end runs the FISA courts were kept secret even from those responsible for implementing the opinions.

When two cases on Guantanamo Rasul v Bush and Hamdi v Rumsfeld reach the Supreme Court, even Antonin Scalia votes against the administration. Other would be Luke Skywalkers here are Yoo’s successor Jack Goldsmith who almost has a nervous breakdown and resigns before he was able to rewrite Yoo’s secret torture opinion, William Waxman, Alberto Mora, and Phillip Zelikow. So far, Darth Vader has won every battle.

The Story of Forgetting, Stefan Merrill Block, 2008

A first novel deals with Alzheimer’s victims in Texas. An elderly hunchback remembers his dead twin brother and his brother’s wife that was also the hunchback’s lover. A daughter that the hunchback assumes is his own runs away to New York and disappears. The hunchback sells more and more of his family farm until only the decrepit house and barn are all that remain, surrounded by Dallas suburban mansions. He holds on in the hopes that the lost daughter will return. The hunchback’s mother and brother suffered from Alzheimer’s.

The novel alternates to a second character, a 15 year old boy whose secretive mother has come down with Alzheimer’s and is now living in a nursing home. The boy studies Alzheimer’s and discovers that a genetic variant known as EOA-23 an early onset familial disease (invented by the author) which originated with a prolific English noblemen in the 19th century. Some of his descendants have been traced to Texas. The boy must find out where his mother was born and her maiden name (both unknown to the boy’s father who met his mother in New York) to discover her true story. He starts interviewing known EOA-23 families looking for clues to his mother’s origin.

The hunchback and boy have in common stories told by their mother about a mythical land Isadora, a place without memory where nothing can be misplaced or lost. These stories seem to have been passed down through generations of families. The author ruminates on the mysterious workings of the mind where forgetfulness is necessary to pattern recognition and mental organization. We create a meaningful and recognizable world by forgetting most of what we perceive or experience. There are cases of people with the ability to memorize long lists of numbers or names or texts but who are unable to organize information or even understand what they have remembered. The author reminds us that forgetting is an essential part of how our minds function.

Mercury Under My Tongue, Sylvain Trudel, 2008

Short delightful novel by French Canadian writer Trudel now translated into English. Our hero is a precocious teenager wrestling with the big questions of life, especially the mysteries of girls. Unfortunately he has bone cancer in the hip and does not have long to find answers. He writes poetry (pretty bad), keeps a journal, and meets other young patients. This being Montreal, the care is good and caregivers wonderful. Our hero takes a dim view of religion, even rejecting reincarnation, and is able to give the visiting priest a drubbing and send him packing. Quite hopeful despite the topic.

Montreal

The Post War Dream, Mitch Cullin, 2008

This novel combines the struggles of an aging Korean War veteran to purge himself of his war demons (he witnessed - participated in? the Hangang Bridge Massacre where American soldiers bombed and shot peasants fleeing from the North and for which the American have recently apologized.) He is wounded shortly thereafter in an incident that kills a bigoted red neck Texan. He returns from the war with a purple heart and and a war hero story. Implausibly he returns home to Minnesota to a brass band and parade hero’s welcome. In reality, the Korean War started our long term indifference to the fate of veterans as America began its entry into increasingly meaningless wars. To escape home and his bitter father-in-law (he joined the military to escape the first time), he travels to Texas to attend a memorial service for his dead “buddy”. He invents tales of the incident and his friendship for the family and girl friend then falls for the girl. Fast forward fifty years and the couple are retired to a gated Disney-like golf course retirement community near Tucson. (woe to anyone caught harboring their grandchildren in this mecca for the aged) There his wife discovers she has stage III ovarian cancer. Equally implausibly the couple have no financial worries at all as she undergoes years of chemo and experimental treatment. The tale climaxes during a blizzard where the golf course ponds are frozen over and the entire state of Arizona is paralyzed. (During our time in Phoenix, the temperature dropped barely below freezing one time which killed and damaged much of the vegetation in all our yards. We’re still waiting for that blizzard.) A real downer this one.

Peace, Richard Bausch, 2008

Monte Cassino 1944

Bausch’s newest novel deals with the experience of a few American soldiers sent up the mountain near Cassino on scouting patrols during the Allied drive north through Italy. Short but compelling look at the horrors of war up close. One of the characters concludes that Stephen Crane got it wrong in The Red Badge of Courage.

Draining the Sea, Micheline Aharonian Marcom, 2008

Los Angeles River Construction

A most unusual and challenging novel. The narrator lives in Los Angeles, the son of an Armenian (1915 Turkish Massacre) and a Lebanese (Civil war throughout the 1990s) mother and an American father. The narrator reflects on paradise (Los Angeles) which usurped its river and drained lakes to make the modern city possible. The author is obsessed with another massacre occurring in a remote Indian village in Guatemala in 1982. The massacre has no photos, no video, no outside western witnesses and is only known from first hand accounts. The narrator believes himself to be in love with a young pregnant girl who was killed along with her unborn baby in the massacre.

Guatemala Genocide

The title comes from a saying attributed to General Rios Montt, military dictator in Guatemala:

The guerrilla is the fish. The people are the sea. If you cannot catch the fish, you have to drain the sea.

General Rios Montt

McMafia, Misha Glenny, 2008

This well researched look at global criminal empires highlights the darker side of the Chicago School’s Shock Doctrine. When the Chicago boys set out to massively transfer the worlds wealth into the hands of a few oligarchs, they simultaneously undermined state apparatus of regulation and control and brought about the most massive increase in organized crime in human history. The increase was not only in scale but in violence and capability as former secret police and world class martial arts athletes found themselves in need of new employment. The pinnacle of this worldwide movement was reached under Yeltsin who moved control of vast reserves of oil and natural gas to his handful of oligarchs. Realizing they needed protection that the state could no longer provide, the oligarchs turned to private organized criminal elements, who for 10% of the profits, were very effective at protecting the fortunes of the new Billionaires. Overnight, criminal organization found themselves rolling in wealth undreamed of by earlier criminal elements. Enter the Billionaire godfathers. Clearly this great wealth could not be left lying around the highly unstable financial institutions of the shocked states and Reagan and Thatcher come to their rescue deregulating the world’s financial institutions allowing movement and laundering of mind boggling Billions through places as diverse as Switzerland, Dubai, Tel Aviv, and tiny South Pacific Islands. Now needing to be able to travel anywhere in the world, Russian mobsters rushed to become Israeli citizens so they could get widely accepted Israeli passports. Even non Jewish Russians joined the rush to get a passport. So gratful were the Russian mob bosses to Israel, they jointly agreed not to engage in criminal behavior inside Israel as long as Israel continued to launder their Billions.

We start our tour in the Balkans where the mobs were cooperating fully through multiple wars and ethnic strife, even smuggling goods and people directly through the front lines of the wars. Moving to the Crimean Sea, he notes that the breakup of the Soviet Union and loss of control is now endangering the Sturgeon as Moscow’s new Billionaires gorge on caviar. A tiny sliver of Moldova, Transnistria split into an independent criminally dominated country. The Russian fourteenth army and its vast arsenal were located in this area and chose to stay in the new state providing arms and force to ensure the independence of the new state. Putin has called Transnistria the black hole and it is one of the biggest arms sources in the world. Most people have left the tiny country which boasts a world class soccer team than performs at home before 4,000 fans.

Dubai

In India we discover that Bombay (Mumbai) is the organized crime capital which has assumed control over Bollywood. The mob bosses used to live in Dubai where they can be protected from the police and rival gangs, but a recent crackdown has sent them to Pakistan where the ISS Pakistani intelligence provides them shelter and training. From Pakistan they are free to launch attacks into India.

In Japan we learn the integral roll of the yakuza in Japanese society. They were centrally involved with the Zaibatsu and the big banks in the 80s real estate bubble but received primarily blamed when the bubble burst. The yakuza’s biggest problem today is aging and the inability to recruit young Japanese men to join them. They are forced to subcontract much of their dirty work to the Chinese tongs or Korean gangsters.
China is feared throughout Asia. Its primary current contribution to global crime is their ability to copy and reproduce virtually anything up to and including ersatz Mercedes automobiles.

Medellin Columbia

South Africa leads organized crime in the continent. In Latin America Columbia is still a big supplier of cocaine to the world, shipping via Mexico into North America, and via Brazil into Europe. Brazil is particularly attractive because of its trained chemists and local access to virtually any chemical needed in production.
The US war on drugs has done more to perpetuate the global market for narcotics than any program in history. The only thing holding back growth of heroin and cocaine whose prices are dropping is the ready availability of synthetic drugs like ecstasy and methamphetamine (the drug of choice in Asia). Instead of regulating and taxing narcotics, governments are spending vast revenue in the hopeless effort to reduce of eliminate it. Any seizure or arrest leads to the immediate filling of the vacuum by new criminals and new shipments of the drug.
The trend toward globalization and domination by multinational corporations has blurred the distinctions between the legal and illegal. Is it any more legal for corporations to move money offshore to avoid taxation than for mobs to launder their money? Does the scramble to protect property rights give the rights to multinational corporations to patent plants and herbal cures that have been known to places like China and India for thousands of years? Does a patent give the right to a corporation to deny medication to those who can’t afford it?

Somehow the author is able to interview many of these underworld leaders and he seldom misses the local brothels.

The Cellist of Sarajevo, Steven Galloway, 2008

Sarajevo

A novel of the time of siege of Sarajevo between 1992 and 1996. The city of Sarajevo was proud host to the winter Olympics of 1984. Within a few years, Yugoslavia was torn apart by multiple wars, one part of which was the terrible siege of Sarajevo. Galloway points out that two Serbian war criminals responsible for much of the human carnage are still at large.

1984 Olympics

The novel is built around a real world tragedy when a shell killed 22 people waiting in line to buy bread. Four characters feature: The cellist was principle cellist at the destroyed Sarajevo Opera House. He resolves to play Albinoni’s Adagio for 22 consecutive days at the site of the killing.

Bread Line Mortar Attack Vedran Smailovic

Arrow is a university sharpshooter recruited by the military commander, a friend of her now dead father, as a sniper. She agrees on condition that she work alone and chooses her own targets. She proves a natural, working purely from instinct. The commander asks her to break her rules and try to protect the Cellist.

Kenan is a family man who ventures out of his apartment every four or five days to get water from the brewery across the river. He risks sniper fire and shells on each trip.

Dragan is 64 and has sent his wife and 19 year old son to Italy to escape the carnage. His apartment has been destroyed and he lives uneasily with his sister and brother-in-law. He works at a bakery and is able to bring bread home from work. We follow the lives of these four characters through the 22 days that the cellist plays his adagio.

The novel is short but very effecting, evoking life and death in this once beautiful city. Another compelling account of this time and role of snipers was the 1998 movie Shot Through the Heart directed by David Attwood. Here two friends and former Olympic competitive sharpshooters, one Serb and one Bosnian discover they must hunt one another down.

By coincidence Radovan Karadzic, one of the two at large war criminals has been arrested today July 22. For 11 years he has been in Serbia, protected by both the the Serbian Orthodox church and the secret police of Serbia. This reminds us of the movie The Statement with Michael Caine and Tilda Swinton where Caine plays a French war criminal protected for years by the Catholic church and powerful politicians in France. Now only Ratko Mladic remains at large.

The Konkans, Tony D’Souza, 2008

A brilliant exploration of multiculturalism. The narrator is Francisco, the son of a blond American woman who went to India in the Peace Corps in the mid 1960s and an Indian catholic from the Malabar coast on the Arabian sea whose father saw the white woman as a ticket for his sons to move to America the ersatz Britain. The region is a former Portuguese colony taken over later by the British. Under the Portuguese many residents were forced or converted to Catholicism and assumed Portuguese names.

Francisco’s mother grew up in a dysfunctional American Midwestern family and escaped to college at UW Milwaukee. When she graduated, she joined the Peace Corps where she was trained to teach low caste Indian women to build and use smokeless ovens and reduce the risk of early death due to lung disease and cancer. The Peace Corp sends the recruits to a training camp on a Native American reservation. Unlike most Peace Corp volunteers who hated India, would never live in the villages, or simply went mad, Francisco’s mother loved India. When she was assigned to a village as the lone American, she acquired a bicycle and jumped wholeheartedly into Indian life and her work. She never wanted to leave India. When the Konkan patriarch sees the volunteer, he invites her to his home and recalls his first son from his bank job with orders to court the American. They marry and the patriarch orders his wife to torture the American daughter in law so she will want to return home to American with first son in tow. The plan works and soon the family finds itself in Chicago.

Francisco’s father is obsessed with his ambitions and obligations of the first son of a first son going back generations. He gets a job with a good American company and works his way up although much slower than his white colleagues. He moves to ever larger houses in more prosperous neighborhoods which his wife hates. He takes up golf and tennis and applies for membership in local country clubs. He is always turned down and eventually forms a friendship with and American Jewish man who has married an Irish wife. They share ambition and disappointment.

Chicago Country Club House

Francisco’s mother sponsors two brothers in law for immigration to America. A distant cousin must be smuggled through Canada. One uncle is in love with Francisco’s mother and spends a lot a time with Francisco telling him legends of the Konkan (Indian Portuguese Catholics) people and of his family. As Francisco grows up, he studies the actual history of the Portuguese colonial time and of the Jesuit and Franciscan missionaries and of the long Catholic Goa Inquisition which last from the 1500s into the 1800s. He also learns the real history of his father’s family, their wealth accumulated by serving their British masters.

Konkan Wadi

Francisco’s father is eventually promoted to VP but his job is mostly to fire minority workers in his corporation. The company thinks having a minority Indian do the firing will isolate them from charges of discrimination. Ambition wins over conscience and the father fires his own black protégé.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz, 2007

Rutgers University

Novel of a Dominican family living under a multi generation curse. The narrator is a skirt chasing young Dominican who falls in love with Lola the beautiful, smart, athletic popular daughter of the cursed family. Lola worries about her brother Oscar, overweight nerdy guy always falling for girls out of his reach. When the three leave Patterson N.J. for Rutgers University, Lola enlists the narrator to watch out for Oscar and try to teach him about girls and about life. He fails and Oscar tries to kill himself by jumping off the Trenton railroad bridge. He lands on a bush and ends up in the hospital. His mom and Lola decide to take Oscar to the Dominican Republic to try to bring him out of his depression. It works when he falls madly in love with the semi retired prostitute living next door. She is lonely and develops a brother sister relationship with Oscar and they spend a lot of time together. Unfortunately, her part time boy friend is a very jealous police captain whose buddies put Oscar back in the hospital. As soon as he can move, the family returns with Oscar to Patterson.

Rafael Leonidas Trujillo 1930

The novel traces the origin of the family curse to the grandfather, a doctor with two beautiful daughters that catch the eye of dictator Trujillo who ruled the Dominican Republic from 1930 to 1961 when he was assassinated. The father refuses to bring his oldest daughter to a Trujillo party and is arrested. A third, very black, daughter is born after his arrest. She becomes the only surviving member of the cursed family and is the mother of Lola and Oscar. The novel starts out loaded with Spanish and English Dominican community colloquial expressions and the unfamiliar reader misses a lot. The author also provides long footnotes in the beginning giving a condensed history of the Dominican Republic. It then settles down and becomes quite readable and informative.

Dominican Republic Beach

The Ginseng Hunter, Jeff Talarigo, 2008

Old Ginseng Root

Austere tale of a third generation Korean living just across the border in China near Yanji. The grandfather was moved to China by the Japanese for labor. The father and uncle become Ginseng hunters and teach the son their secrets. The first part of the novel is a compact but detailed look at the art of hunter for wild Ginseng plants in the mountains. Once found, the Ginseng plant must be very carefully dug up without damaging the often crooked and complex root. The value of the plant depends on its age but any damage will leave the root worthless. It may require hours to dig a single root.

Written in the first person by the son, we are taken into an austere self sufficient life. The hunter lives alone and enjoys his solitude. He tried living with a woman once but it didn’t work out. He visits a brothel during his monthly trips to Yanji in the warm seasons to sell his ginseng and buy supplies.

During one one trip he meets a Korean prostitute and for the first time can’t get her out of his mind. They start meeting in parks during his visits and we learn her tragic story and the start of the novel’s preoccupation with the story of the Korean people under the incompetent rule of Kim Jong-il, son of North Korea’s founding dictator. We learn of the constant reeducation and intimidation as the country falls apart and the people starve. The Korean prostitute had a husband who worked in the mines and a daughter who attended school. The mine closed and her husband was detained and never returns. The daughter dropped out of school to help her mother scrounge for food. They spot the daughter’s former teacher scrounging for food and realize the school is closed. The daughter is killed by government authorities and the woman runs away to China where she is taken to the brothel by a trucker. She realizes she will be fed and sheltered so stays in the brothel.

As things deteriorate in Korea, more and more cross the shallow river to China looking for food, jobs, or trade. The Chinese government offers rewards to return illegal Koreans to the border and pressure businesses to get rid of their Korean workers. A young Korean girl visits the ginseng hunter’s garden to steal corn and the hunter decides to try to take care of her. He realizes he will need help to raise a young girl and goes to the brothel to try to buy the prostitute but she is no longer working there. He travels downriver looking for her as winter sets in. He realizes that the industrial plants built on the river on the Korean side are all shut down.

The hunter is loaned a hand gun by his neighbor to help protect himself from encroaching Koreans including armed and starving soldiers, who are starting to cross the river looking for food. He can’t bring himself to use the gun, but he does assist in turning over some Koreans to be returned to the border for which he receives money. For penance he buys all the seaweed from a Korean woman using his bounty money so she can take the money back home.

Bridge to North Korea

The author spent considerable time in Yanji and the surrounding region learning about ginseng hunting and hearing the takes of terrible happenings in North Korea. He assembles some of these stories into a compact, compelling, story. It is not a story of hope but a testimony to the strength and endurance of people under harsh and trying circumstances.

The Pearl Diver, Jeff Talarigo, 2004

Aerial View of Nagashima Leprosarium

The author’s first novel follows the life of a Japanese pearl diver who contracts Hansen’s disease (Leprosy) as a young woman in 1948. As was the practice then, she was sent to an isolated Leper’s colony on a small island at Nagashima. The first drugs that stabilize the disease have just been discovered and she is able to live a full life without the disfigurement of the disease. This being Japan, the disease comes with a shame and stigma that attaches to her whole family and prevents her older sister from marrying. The family abandons her. We follow conditions and treatment in the colony where the patients are treated more as prisoners than as sufferers of a horrible disease. As time passes more drugs are discovered and doctors learn to differentiate contagious from non contagious carriers. It eventually becomes possible for individual patients to reintegrate into society if they wish, but as with prisoners, it takes our heroin some years and several experiments before she tries to return - but never to her home island. Will she remain in society or return to the colony to live out her life? Very readable and a reminder of what it was like to contract an ancient disease that is all but eradicated in much of the world today.

Nagashima Paper Money