Author: Marcus Zusak
Publisher: Picador/Pan Macmillan
Marcus Zusak is the author of The Book Thief. The Book Thief was published in 2005, has been translated into thirty languages and was made into a film in 2013. The bandwagon of The Book Thief passed by close to me. Everyone I knew seemed to be reading it at some stage. But, for some reason, I did not hop on. I have never read The Book Thief.
So, when, Brett from the Blokes’ Book Club, chose Bridge of Clay as the next read, I knew nothing of the work of Marcus Zusak. I got round to my reading duties, late. When I started reading, I had heard suggestions that the book was hard to follow in its opening chapters but that it got better. It was, a little, and it did, indeed.
Bridge of Clay was published in October 2018. While it spans events across generations, the time in which Matthew, the oldest son and narrator, is typing the story he narrates on the old Remington TW is very recent. Nonetheless, the book’s atmosphere seems much older. The Sydney of which it speaks could almost be the Sydney of Patrick White’s Tree of Man. Something about the subject matter: the small towns, talk of Remington typewriters, the people of the racing industry, families growing up with siblings struggling to find their respective pathways, combine to make the story seem to belong to an era, much older.
The events must be modern, however, because Kingston Town’s win in the 1982 Cox Plate is spoken of by the characters of the book as ancient history and that happened just a few years ago, in 1982.
Bridge of Clay is the story of five brothers: Matthew, Rory, Henry, Clay and Tommy. The five brothers live without parents in a house at 18 Archer Street in Sydney’s racing district. Archer Street is named for the racehorse who won the first and second Melbourne Cups in 1861 and 1862. The novel is also the life stories of each of their parents. Their father, Michael Dunbar, who grew up in a country town 12 hours from Sydney; loved and knew everything about Michelangelo; wanted to be an artist; and married his primary school sweetheart. Their mother, Penelope Lesciuszko, was raised in Poland by her father who taught her how to play the piano and to love Homer’s classic works. Penelope’s father arranged for her to escape to the west, some years before the fall of communism, by her not returning from a concert performance in Vienna. Penelope chose Australia and she met Michael who, five years before, had been left by his bride from childhood, over her newly purchased piano which had been delivered some distance up the street at Michael’s place as a result of a mistake by the delivery man as to the address.
Penelope’s enthusiasm for The Iliad and The Odyssey was handed down to her five sons. Her enthusiasm for music, not for want of trying on her part, failed to find fertile ground. Because of the former, it is not surprising that the pets at 18 Archer Street, which really belonged to the youngest brother, Tommy, the cat, the fish, the bird, the dog and the mule were all named for Homeric characters (as was, of course, Penelope, herself).
On the first page of Bridge of Clay, Matthew tells the reader that Clay was the one who took it all on his shoulder. The enormity of the truth of this is not revealed to the reader until the very end. But parts of that truth become evident at earlier points in the narrative. Sometimes, a toddler comes out with a statement that no one could have taught them and they make us feel that they must have been here before in some earlier life. Clay is that in spades. He feels the pain and joy of everyone about him and understands what everyone is thinking. He hears the stories. He remembers everything. As the narrator says and the title suggests, Bridge of Clay, more than anything, is the story of Clay.
Clay loves a girl. Her name is Carey Novak. She became an apprentice jockey and rode a famous horse to win a division 1 race. Carey provides the title. When Clay decides he must leave the others and go and help his father, Michael, build a bridge, Carey says that, when you devote yourself to building a bridge, that bridge is partly made of you. The bridge is to be built of stone and is to resemble the design of the Pont Gard, the famous Roman bridge in France. But it is also built of Clay. Bridge of Clay is the story of the bridge but it is also the story of Carey and the story of Carey and Clay.
Because Bridge of Clay is so many people’s stories spanning generations and parts of the world, it is not surprising that 13 years passed between the publication of The Book Thief and Bridge of Clay. Neither is it surprising that Zusak experimented with structure and even the identity of the narrator before he felt able to complete the task he set himself.
Matthew is the narrator but, as the reader finds out, his task is to write down Clay’s story. And Clay is able to tell Matthew so much of the story because he listened and remembered every story that others had to tell, before it was too late.
Zusak starts somewhere near the end with Matthew typing on the old KW that the reader soon finds out belonged to Michael’s mother and which Matthew travelled to unearth from a backyard of the country town 12 hours from Sydney. Chapter by chapter, the narrative moves forward and back in time. For a time, the filling in the past details Michael’s childhood, how he courted Abbey and how their marriage fizzled out. Meanwhile, each other chapter details life at Archer Street of the parentless five brothers. Then the narrative switches with the past focussed on Penelope’s life with her father in Poland. Then the reader hears about life at Archer Street before the children were parentless and before Michael were known by his children as the murderer. It is like a huge colour by numbers drawing being filling in, cell by cell.
Zusak sets himself the task of a complex narrative and the further task of a complex means of advancing that narrative. But he achieves each task with skill and great craft.
Bridge of Clay is a story of love and tragedy. It tells of love between teenagers who mean to spend the rest of their days, together, and of older, more wizened people with the same intention. It tells of love within a family, between parents and children and children and parents and between siblings, despite their many differences in temperament and interest. It is a story of success and failure but they are often difficult to tell one from another. The tragedy comes in different forms and at different times and it challenges the love, also, in many different ways. Zusak is said to have compared the writing of the book to The Odyssey in that the book was the war and the sequel would be the coming home. I think the book may have expanded since Zusak said those things. Bridge of Clay encompasses enough war but, ultimately, it is a story of difficult comings home. Thesimilarities to Homer’s classics are clear. The gods are no less cruel. And, ultimately, the characters are no less heroic.
Bridge of Clay is about the way in which people can be brought together. Relationships can be broken. But they can also be mended. Clay is well-named and Bridge of Clay has more than one meaning. He brings people together and overcomes forces as strong and overwhelming as the waters of a creek in flood.
I read the last 25 pages with tears streaming down my face. In my world, that is a mark of a pretty excellent book. Good choice, Brett
Author: Simon Cleary
Publisher: University of Queensland Press
Reviewer: Stephen Keim SC
Simon Cleary conducts a busy practice at the Queensland Bar. He is also a busy family man doing his fair share, with his wife, Alisa, of raising his two active and enthusiastic sons, Dominic and Liam to all three of whom The War Artist is dedicated. Rather, incredibly, Simon has just published The War Artist, his third novel through University of Queensland Press. I stand back and think how is that even possible.
Cleary’s first novel, The Comfort of Figs, published in 2008, weaves a complex narrative joining stories of love and tragedy surrounding the construction of Brisbane’s famous Story Bridge in the late 1930’s and stories of love and activism involving a young man working as a botanist in “change of millennium Brisbane”.
In 1912, Cleary published his second novel, the equally complex Closer to Stone, a story of two brothers, the one who disappeared in north west Africa, and the one who went to search for him. As Comfort links stories across time, Closer links the rigours of north Africa to the fictionalised Helidon and the stone masonry business in which the two young men had grown up.
Seven years of early rising and thousands of unrelenting hours of work later, Cleary has completed The War Artist and it has hit the shelves.
The War Artist displays Cleary’s continuing interest in big narratives tackling big themes. The big themes, however, express themselves most clearly amid the ordinariness of daily life and the challenges of human relationships. So it is in life. So it is in Cleary’s novels. And Cleary’s novels stretch out and embrace the wide world. But his characters find an anchor in those parts of south-east Queensland with which they and Cleary are familiar: Brisbane, where Cleary lives and works and writes and Toowoomba and its environs, where Cleary, the son of one of Toowoomba’s leading solicitors, grew up and went to school.
The War Artist revolves about James Phelan, a brigadier in the Australian army, serving in Afghanistan. Phelan makes one of those decisions about which it is never clear whether the decision was made in one’s own interest or, as one thought at the time, for the benefit of others and the greater good. Phelan decides to go on patrol so that he can understand the impact on soldiers in his command of the decisions he makes and the demands he places upon those soldiers. Tragedy strikes and Phelan sees close up the blood and chaos of war on the ground.
Phelan does all the right things. He accompanies Sapper Beckett’s body home to Australia. He speaks to Beckett’s parents. He tells them how sorry and grateful he and the Australian Army are for their son’s sacrifice.
Phelan does something further, something uncharacteristic. Before leaving Sydney, he decides to get a tattoo, Sapper Beckett’s full name, an indelible reminder, tattooed on his shoulder. He intervenes when Kira, his female tattooist, is attacked by a drug affected friend of one of her friends. And the bond of saving a person from a violent attack leads to a deeper, albeit transitory, bond. Phelan returns to Brisbane to find that his wife, Penny, has undergone a tragedy of her own and faced it without troubling him when he feels that, perhaps, he had a right to be involved.
Phelan is more affected by Beckett’s death, and his ambiguous responsibility for it, than he imagined at first and he never returns to active duty. He is diagnosed and treated for post traumatic stress and his recovery is slow and arduous. Phelan and Penny retreat to, and rent and restore to habitability, the family farm property of Phelan’s childhood located on the lower ridges of the Toowoomba escarpment. Phelan finds some kind of return to health through the hard work of farm maintenance and in writing poetry, a by-product of his treatment for the stress disorder.
Domestic violence at home and the recollection that Phelan had kept her safe, once before, leads Kira, now with a seven year old son, Blake, to abandon her long term partner in Sydney and to seek out Phelan in Queensland. A beautiful young tattooist emerging from a clouded past promises difficulties of explanation, at the very least, and Phelan disappears back into an alcoholic stupor, a phenomenon that has become rare in his new life. This leaves the women to work it out, Blake and Kira are allowed by Penny to stay, for the moment at least, and a new status quo emerges. Phelan even asks Kira to tattoo him again, this time with poppies, and this is the genesis of Kira becoming the war artist of the title.
Cleary has chosen a description of a crying Odysseus for the epigraph of The War Artist. There are references, for example, to the many headed sea monster, Scylla, in the text. It is, perhaps, not coincidence that Penny shares her given name with the Penelope who waited patiently for Odysseus to return. Penny has no Telemachus to help her through her share of the pain of long separation.
It seems clear that The War Artist is also a tale of homecoming. The point seems to be that the things to be feared in a homecoming from war do not cease when one crosses one’s own threshold. The many headed monster comes in many forms and waits within our own soul. There are pathways, nonetheless, which can be followed and Minerva, herself, can turn up in many forms and when least expected.
The War Artist is only 310 pages but there is nothing little about Cleary’s novels. The War Artist fits the mould. The theme of experiencing war and finding peace is grand but the writing is empathetic and the relationships touch the reader’s heart.
The journey home is a theme that continues to merit treatment by novelists and filmmakers alike. For me, Phelan’s predominant experience was not homecoming as such but, rather, the search for atonement for barely detectable wrongs that, nonetheless, without atonement, would continue to haunt despite everything that might have since transpired. The War Artist is, perhaps, not a modern Odyssey. Rather, Conrad’s Lord Jim is its precursor and Phelan’s dilemma is closer to that of the eponymous character of Conrad’s famous novel.
Philosophy and Social Hope
Author: Richard Rorty
Publisher: Penguin (1999)
Reviewed by Stephen Keim
Just over a year ago, my brother, L, gave me a book by a twentieth century, American pragmatist philosopher, Richard Rorty. Taking into account my knowledge of such things, the odds were that this would be a gift that broadened my horizons.
Mr. Rorty was born in 1931. By 1999, he had been studying, teaching and writing philosophy for almost half a century. Philosophy and Social Hope is an anthology of previously published essays, a sort of greatest hits selected with an eye to the needs of the general reader.
Rorty aims to bring that general reader to a sense of pragmatist philosophy by sharing his own journey to becoming a believer and purveyor of that same philosophy. Rorty’s parents were friends of John Dewey , the leading American pragmatic philosopher of his time. Rorty’s father had almost accompanied Dewey to Mexico City for the Dewey Commission which heard evidence and produced a report declaring Leon Trotsky innocent of the scurrilous allegation of crimes levelled against Trotsky by the Soviet Union and its leader, Josef Stalin.
Rorty’s parents were, themselves, followers of Trotsky, opponents of Stalinism and active socialist campaigners who worked on the campaign of Norman Thomas , the Socialist Party’s campaign for President. Rorty imbibed socialism and a sense of social justice, as a twelve year old living with his parents in the Chelsea Hotel and being roped into running errands for his parents and the campaign.
But he also loved rare wild orchids; sought them in their hiding places in the mountains of north-west New Jersey where he and his parents also lived and studied their botany, back in New York at the 42nd Street public library. While he was a one person cheer squad for his wild orchids, Rorty felt touches of shame suspecting that such an esoteric, personal passion might not quite meet the approval of the now murdered Trotsky and his socialist followers.
The social activism of Rorty’s parents is not surprising in that Rorty’s maternal grandfather was Pastor Walter Rauschenbusch , a central figure of the Social Gospel movement which is credited by Earl Shorris as the intellectual forebear of the New Deal.
When Rorty first got to read philosophy, at the ripe age of 15, at the University of Chicago, he was attracted to Aristotelian and Platonic philosophy and the idea that there were absolutes by which the good and the true could be measured. He was equally attracted to Plato’s idea that a chosen few could reach the hallowed state that came with the knowledge of those absolutes. It resonated with his arcane knowledge and love of his wild orchids. It was, essentially, an anti-democratic idea.
This meant that he sneered at the pragmatic philosophy of John Dewey whose principle that growth was the only moral objective was seen as empty and shallow in the post Hitler world in a University philosophy department peopled by brilliant Jewish refugees from the Nazis. This, conveniently, placed Rorty in an intellectual rebellion against the philosophy favoured by his parents and their left wing friends.
But, though for five years, Rorty worked on his love affair with Platonism, he found himself dissatisfied with the idea of absolute values. It was one thing to believe in absolutes. It was impossible to establish what they were or to find a method which would convince others that what you thought might be the criterion for what was good should also be accepted by them as that criterion.
And so twenty-year old Rorty started his journey back to the approaches and the philosophy that that had been favoured by his parents and their friends. He found his way back to the pragmatism of John Dewey and William James .
Rorty spends some time, in the Introduction to Philosophy and Social Hope explaining the difference between philosophers like himself, usually, bad-mouthed by others as “relativists”, and everyone else who may be broadly grouped as followers of Plato and Kant. Relativists do not accept the distinction (made by Plato and other Greek philosophers) between the way things are, in themselves, and the relationships they have with other things, especially, to human needs and interests.
One result of abandoning the underlying nature of things is that “anti-Platonists” like Rorty find no benefit in searching for eternal unchanging values that apply in all situations across time and culture. It is in this sense that Rorty is a disciple of John Dewey.
The area in which pragmatism is most attacked as relativism is in the area of moral philosophy. If there are no absolute values against which actions may be judged, say the critics, there is no reason to seek good rather than evil. Rorty’s reply is that, for pragmatists, the moral struggle is continuous with the struggle for existence. What matters for Rorty is the devising of ways of diminishing human suffering and increasing human equality and increasing the chance of each human child to start life with a real and equal chance of human happiness. Rorty adopts the view that the objective of a better future is the best moral guide.
Happily, for Rorty, he felt that this view also made room for idiosyncratic personal pursuits such as the love of wild orchids along with future creating activities such as social activism.
Rorty says that many of the values which are posited as representing underlying and eternal values are merely habits of past generations, the actions of our ancestors, that we most admire. Thus, if we are attracted to the principle that all human beings are brothers and sisters as representing an eternal value, we are simply reflecting the fact that recent generations held this principle as a religious belief. A different religious culture would produce adherents of radically different eternal values.
Rorty makes two points which might be called concessions. First, he acknowledges that there is no means of rational argument by which a pragmatist and a Platonist can convince the other of the validity of their own point of view so as to settle the difference between them.
Second, he acknowledges that another pragmatist, and German philosopher, Martin Heidegger , is his example, may choose Nazism as the solution to the moral struggle: as the path to a better future. Rorty, himself, regards increasing equality and equality of opportunity as the way to increase human happiness and to strive to make the future better than the past and the present.
Rorty explains, in response to charges that pragmatism leads to relativism and on to moral nihilism, that a follower of pragmatism does not believe that all values are equal. Rather, his pragmatism leads to beliefs about the importance of increasing human happiness by increasing equality of opportunity. From Rorty’s perspective, Nazism is not just as good, in terms of values, as a socially progressive form of democracy. But, as with any other source of moral values, pragmatism does not provide a means by which Rorty can persuade Heidegger that his adherence to Nazi values is inherently wrong including in terms of the pragmatic philosophy which they share. Indeed, Rorty denies that any philosophy, necessarily, leads to a particular set of political beliefs.
Ironically, the limited claims made by Rorty’s pragmatism to prove to others that their idea of truth or virtue is wrong makes Rorty’s pragmatism a little like the famous dictum attributed to Socrates in which the philosopher claimed an advantage over others who claimed to be wise through the self-knowledge that he, Socrates, knew that he knew nothing. That is, one of the advantages of pragmatism is that it does not claim to unveil eternal truths. Such claims are at the heart of Platonic philosophy, claims upon which such philosophers cannot and do not deliver.
Rorty explains that pragmatists refuse to distinguish between a justified belief in a proposition and a true belief. William James stated that, when we say that a belief is true, we are saying that it is a belief that has proved itself useful for definite assignable reasons. Rorty goes on to say that, because humans can only operate in their environment, a belief will only endure (and prove useful) if it takes into account the constraints of that environment. A belief that I can engage in unaided flight will cease to be useful the moment I leap from a tall building. In contrast, a belief in the physics of powered flight will prove useful every time I need to travel interstate for work or pleasure. In this context, says Rorty, nothing is to be gained by hypothesising a truth and reality independent of human existence. There is no point in hypothesising a world outside Plato’s world inside the cave .
Some of the chapters of Philosophy and Social Hope, including those from which the above summary has drawn, explain the essential notions of pragmatic philosophy and canvass different aspects of those underlying principles. Other chapters, however, seek to apply the pragmatist approach to different aspects of society.
In discussing legal questions, Rorty suggests that pragmatic philosophy had made its contribution to the law in previous generations and been accepted by most legal practitioners. Most lawyers had rejected legal formalism, the idea that, in any case, the right answer could be achieved by applying previously established principles to the facts of that case.
In discussing statements by Ronald Dworkin and Richard Posner and other contemporary writers, Rorty argues the orthodoxy of the proposition that, subject to the acceptance that coherence of the law is a source of advantage, the law cannot be explained by any overarching legal theory.
Rorty also points out, using some of John Dewey’s more inspired writing, that pragmatism, along with its philosophy, has a visionary tradition that will find expression in those cases where legal principles and the surrounding political environment are shaken to their foundations. Rorty describes such cases as being based on a conviction that the political waters badly “need roiling”.
Rorty uses as his examples, Brown v Board of Education of Topeka ; Roe v Wade and, writing in the nineties, Rorty predicts the case of Laurence v Texas 539 US 558 (2003) which struck down the respondent’s anti-sodomy law. Rorty describes the decisions as deciding, respectively, like it or not, black children are children, too; like it or not, women get to make hard decisions, too; and, like it or not, gays are grown-ups, too. Pragmatic philosophy explains that seismic decisions cannot be explained or justified by a new super-theory of law. Rather, they are the result of, and contributions to, a visionary tradition in which lawyers have happened to enter into an open-ended dispute about the basic terms of social life.
Rorty also turns to discuss education in the light of contrasting views expressed by Allan Bloom and E. D. Hirsch in the late 1980s on the subject of what our schools and universities should teach. Bloom’s contribution to the culture wars still simmers, today, thirty years later. His Straussian values led him to prescribe a heavy dose of classical texts for his leaders of the future and to attack the analysis of society’s structures on race and gender based themes. Rorty’s response reflected both his pragmatic philosophy and his own progressive democratic values. It was the role of secondary schooling, in particular, to inculcate into the adults of tomorrow the products of past learning and thinking. But colleges and universities should not be constrained to a similar task. Tertiary education should help its students find their own values and thinking and individuality by which they can question past orthodoxy and contribute to a new set of orthodoxies for the society in which they will work and live. Only by such questioning and re-formulation can a democratic society enrich and strengthen itself.
Rorty is an interesting writer who challenges and expands the belief structures of his reader. He is well-read and is agile at bringing the results of his learning to each controversy with which he wrestles. On and off, I read Philosophy and Social Hope for most of the year. It was mainly commitments to work that made the read so interrupted. Willingly, however, with smart phone and Wikipedia by my side, I kept coming back to the text and the task.
Richard Rorty, that descendant of the Social Gospellers, has indeed expanded my horizons. My brother must feel pleased with his efforts and the results of his gift.
Author: Jane Mayer
Publisher: Scribe
Reviewer: Stephen Keim SC
In a sign that my allotted time is ebbing away even more quickly than I had imagined, I notice that my review of Ms. Mayer’s previous great work, The Dark Side , was completed on New Year’s Day, 2010. I could have sworn it was last week or, at most, last month. I became an instant and inveterate fan of Mayer’s work from the moment I opened her work on the misdeeds of Dick Cheney during his War on Terror committed while his boss, George Bush, looked on or, more pointedly, averted his eyes.
Indeed, there are more recent signs of the ebbing of days. Scribe published Dark Money during 2016. I purchased my copy in late 2016 with enthusiasm and grand intentions to read it, that night. But work and life and other books got in the way and it took until another Christmas to turn that last page; read the final paragraph; wander through the acknowledgements; and even explore the end notes. Nothing was diminished by the delay. The significance of Dark Money and its implications for our democratic processes won’t go away, any time soon.
Dark Money’s epigraph is a famous quote from Supreme Court Justice, Louis Brandeis which states that a country may have democracy or wealth concentrated in the hands of a few but that it cannot have both. The thesis of Dark Money is that America is choosing the latter of the two alternatives.
Dark Money starts and ends with Charles and David Koch, the Koch brothers, heirs to an oil fortune and heirs to right wing fringe politics. The lesson of Dark Money is that, by mobilising their fortunes and utilising the same dishonest tactics, and often the same operatives, used by the tobacco industry to deny and obfuscate the science that linked tobacco to cancer, the brothers have pushed their fringe ideas into the mainstream.
Fred Koch, the father of Charles and David, invented an improved process for refining petrol from crude oil. Hounded by the major oil companies using patent enforcement litigation, Fred took his skills, first, to Stalin’s Russia and then used them to assist Hitler’s Germany to rebuild its industrial capacity. He also, eventually, achieved a $1.5 million judgment in the courts against the oil majors.
By 1960, Fred Koch was extremely wealthy and poured money into the John Birch Society . The Society categorised the de-segregation decision in Brown v Board of Education as sufficient to justify the impeachment of Chief Justice, Earl Warren; admired the anti-communist policies of Benito Mussolini; and regarded welfare as a plot to lure rural blacks to the city to foment a vicious race war. The Society marketed their ideas like commercial organisations selling product but also advocated and used the secretive and deceptive methods of the communists they hated and saw under other people’s beds to achieve their objectives.
The brothers took over their father’s money; his penchant for political activism; and many of his right-wing ideas. David ran as a candidate for the Libertarian Party candidate in 1980. His candidacy was a way of getting around campaign financing laws in that, as a candidate, he could donate as much as he liked to his own campaign. Presaging the deceit which was to come, the Party’s slogan was that it had only one source of funds: “You”. Instead, $2 million came from David Koch, more than 60% of what the Party spent in that campaign. The 1980 campaign led Charles Koch to say that politicians are only actors and that he wanted to supply the themes and the scripts. In the thirty-seven years which have passed since then, massive progress has been made on that ambition.
The Koch brothers have been able to leverage their own money by convincing other very rich families to donate to their projects. Dark Money also documents the actions of other right wing warriors who have used their billions to change political orthodoxy in America.
Mayer devotes a chapter to the scion of the Mellon banking, Alcoa aluminium and Gulf Oil family, Andrew Mellon Scaife , who died in 2014. Scaife pioneered the use of funding foundations with neutral names whose purpose was to manufacture, at the behest of the provider of funds, and promote, right wing ideas and to attack long established and non-partisan bodies like the Ford Foundation as hopelessly liberal and biased. One such body founded by Scaife was the Heritage Foundation. By this single stratagem, repeated several times with the endless support of funds, a few very rich people managed to re-define the political realm by defining the centre as left-wing and liberal and, thereby, categorising the previously fringe ideas of the right as just one side of the mainstream spectrum. These were strategies that the Kochs would use to manipulate perceptions in many different policy areas.
Dark Money documents the work of millionaire industrialist, John M Olin, whose Olin Corporation polluted the company town of Saltville, Virginia, by pouring 100 pounds of mercury into its waterways, every day. Olin Corporation became an early target of the EPA after it was legislated into existence in 1970. Olin’s affront at being challenged by government agencies on his company’s record of dangerously polluting the environment in which his workers lived and worked motivated him to destroy the power of any government to challenge the way rich people like him did business. This is a common theme in Dark Money. Almost universally, the policies that the very rich pursue, conveniently, benefit their ability to make and keep even more money without being called to account.
Mayer documents the case of a Koch Industries employee, Donald Carlson, who was employed to do the dirtiest jobs, cleaning up the most toxic chemicals. Carlson died of leukemia in February 1997. Because Carlson worked with benzene, his employer was required to offer annual blood tests. But, for four years, from 1990 to 1994, the company hid from Carlson the information that his blood counts were abnormal. The case also illustrates the legal tactics used by the Koch companies and many of their allies. The cases are defended with no dollars spared; no admissions are made; and, eventually, a mean settlement is offered with confidentiality clauses to hide the truth. Mayer also documents the prosecution and conviction of Koch Industries for false reporting of the their benzene emissions and the public relations campaign they ran against Sally Barnes-Soliz, the environmental technician and whistle blower, who had compiled the truthful returns and observed that falsified versions had been filed, instead.
As part of a grand strategy to change the values of society, Olin used his Olin Foundation to pour huge sums of money into supporting the work of particular academics, whose views and work were known to be right wing and who were already established at major educational institutions, thereby, establishing extreme conservative beachheads in respectable educational institutions. The Olin Foundation gave money to Allan Bloom whose best-selling book on higher education described rock music as commercially pre-packaged masturbation fantasy. It also funded Dinesh D’Souza , a pioneer of the right’s use of the term political correctness to denigrate all political discourse that does not agree with it. As I write, D’Souza is denigrating the survivors of the Parkland School shooting massacre for having the temerity to speak out on gun control. The Foundation also funded whole departments provided the School in question was prepared to create a department that specialised in a right wing version of traditional disciplines. For example, the Foundation spent $68 million underwriting the growth of a previously fringe discipline, law and economics, and, between 1985 and 1989, underwrote 83% of the costs of law and economics programs in American law schools. The project reflected the strategy used to create new orthodoxy by pretending not to upset the old orthodoxies. By using the term, “law and economics”, Olin avoided appearing overtly ideological. Nonetheless, the practitioners of the new discipline understood that their role was to replace existing legal orthodoxy with extreme conservative views about the function of law and its role in society.
In 1976, Charles Koch wrote what he called a blueprint for the libertarian movement. Among his prescriptions was the need to use all modern sales and motivational techniques. In 1984, he created a body called Citizens for a Sound Economy. Though bankrolled by wealthy industrialists including the Koch brothers, Citizens for a Sound Economy looked from the outside as a community organisation formed and operated by concerned citizens. Within a few years, Citizens for a Sound Economy had 50 paid operatives across 26 states organising events, buying television time and running campaigns promoting the Koch brothers anti-tax, anti-government agenda. Citizens for a Sound Economy provided the blueprint which was used, over future decades, repeatedly, on many issues dear to the heart of rich conservatives, by which wads of money were used to create the impression of grass roots organisations. “Astroturf” became a particularly apt term to describe this mechanism and these organisations. (In August 2016, Fueling US Forward was launched with Koch money to promote fossil fuel usage. The tactics of the new entity including using gospel music concerts as a bait and switch method of persuading Afro-Americans that their well-being would be ensured by more fossil fuel usage which would keep their energy costs low.)
Citizens for a Sound Economy, itself, was AstroTurf for hire. Mayer quotes public records which show that a procession of companies, including Exxon and Microsoft made donations to Citizens for a Sound Economy which were followed by Citizens for a Sound Economy running a false citizens’ campaign on issues of financial importance to the donor.
By the time, Barack Obama was inaugurated on 20 January 2009, the machine created by the Koch brothers and their wealthy allies had been developing for over two decades. The Introduction to Dark Money describes a meeting held just over a week later in Indian Wells, California. Charles and David Koch had summoned many of the richest and, certainly, the most right wing conservative businessmen in the country, including eighteen billionaires, to a weekend meeting. It was at that meeting that Republican tactics were decided for the next eight years. There would be no compromise; no acceptance that Obama had won; no move to the centre; no attempt to build a bigger tent into which more politicians and supporters would be welcomed. The Party would take a much harder line against any form of regulation and whatever Obama tried to do would be opposed.
In a later chapter, Dark Money traces the origins of the Tea Party Movement, a movement for which the Kochs have always disclaimed responsibility. Many trace the origins of the idea to a rant by a former futures trader, Rick Santelli, on CNBC. Mayer points out that much of the infrastructure for the Tea Party had already been put in place by the Koch movement’s Astroturf organisations and even the idea was expressed earlier than Santelli’s rant by Rush Limbaugh whose show was largely funded by Mellon Scaife’s Heritage Foundation.
By the 2014 mid-term elections, the Kochs had financed their own system of accumulating electoral data that was so good that the Republican Party organisation was forced to do a deal to be able to use it. One Koch operation engaged in recruiting and training candidates while another had paid organisers able to be deployed into any hard fought electoral contest. In this way, the Koch organisation was able to supplant the GOP organisation from outside.
The expenditure of $300 million by the Koch organisation led to the prize of Republican control of the Senate. The new majority leader of the Senate, Mitch McConnell, had spoken at a recent Koch brothers donor summit and had bowed and scraped to Charles and David Koch, saying that he did not know where the party would be without them.
After the mid-terms, McConnell hired a former Koch Industries lobbyist as his chief policy director and launched a war on the Environmental Protection Agency. The evidence would suggest that McConnell has been fighting for Koch causes ever since.
Dark Money closes before the 2016 presidential election. The Koch organisation announced at the beginning of 2015 that it would be spending a staggering $889 million in the campaign almost matching what both major parties would be each spending.
The Kochs never endorsed Trump. But Trump was persuaded to appoint Mike Pence as his running mate. The vice president is a long-time associate and ally of the Kochs, receiving their donations, exchanging staffers and delivering on policy. Pence who was in charge of the transition was the key factor in so many Koch allies heading government departments including Betsy de Vos (the de Voses get a chapter in Dark Money) in education and Scott Pruitt in the EPA.
In 2018, Charles Koch has got to writing the scripts for politicians like Mitch McConnell and Mike Pence. There are many more politicians receiving their lines from the same sources as those two. But the Kochs have achieved much more. They control, through their funding of AstroTurf organisations, much of the background noise against which politicians must do their jobs. They provide the carrots, in the form of electoral funding, and the stick, by way of funding opponents in both primary and general elections. They run many academic faculties and control much of the news media. Their steady stream of self-interested and dishonest propaganda gushes from a myriad of different outlets.
The Kochs appear to fear nothing except that people hear the truth about their attempts and actions to subvert democracy in their own interests and their own ugly image.
Only a few brave journalists, wonderful writers like Ms. Mayer, publishers like Scribe and concerned citizens such as we are stand between the Kochs and the world dominance they crave.
And, if public life in America is polluted by the money of plutocrats, is Australia untouched by such things? The evidence would suggest that similar (if not the same) forces seek to manipulate Australian politics and that some Australian politicians are equally in awe of them.
I strongly recommend Dark Money to a reader in America, Australia, indeed, anywhere in the world. Ms. Mayer speaks with the benefit of exhaustive research but she speaks in a quiet voice. The facts pile up, the excitement and horror build, and the narrative emerges.
Despite the importance of the message, Ms. Mayer writes in human terms. Her characters stand out on the page. Above all else, Ms. Mayer is a wonderful writer. Dark Money is a wonderful story, beautifully and endearingly told.
Author: Barbara Kingsolver
Publisher: Griffin Press (Australian edition)
Reviewed by Stephen Keim
Barbara Kingsolver is, of course, a very accomplished writer of fiction and non-fiction. The Poisonwood Bible had been very popular in, and received encouraging reviews from, Ladies Literary Societies close to me without ever quite piquing enough of my interest to make me invest the time to read it. It awaits.
I had in fact given a copy of The Lacuna to D. for Christmas in 2009.
As it turned out, I read a completely different copy, years later. It was urged upon me by our daughter, L. I was busily reading as much of Mexican literature, travel writing and history as I could in the gaps of an otherwise demanding life.[1] This was a book about Mexico and I would love it, she said.
So, with a respectable semblance of hesitation, I took L.’s advice.
The Lacuna is about Mexico. And a lot more. Some authors, without ever having met me, know how to pander to all my prejudices. Ms. Kingsolver is one of them.
She is still doing it.
Her wonderful article written in the wake of Trump’s election victory is an example of that excellent pandering.
The Lacuna commences in 1929 on a fictional Mexican island called Isla Pixol. It is possibly in the Gulf of Mexico, possibly, off the coast of the State of Tabasco.
The novel’s main protagonist, Harrison Shepherd, is 13 years of age. He lives with his mother, Salome, an enthusiastic but not particularly successful gold digger on her boyfriend, Enrique’s hereditary hacienda which takes up most of the island. Salome left Virginia, bringing Harrison with her, in the hope and belief that Enrique would marry her and keep her in the agreeable lifestyle of the wife of a rich man. The reality had turned out to be less fulsomely romantic.
Left largely to himself, Harrison learns to make tortillas and pan dulce, the soft bread from which you make sweet buns, from Leandro, the Indios cook at the hacienda. Harrison learns more than just cooking while helping Leandro in the kitchen. He learns to use goggles and becomes obsessed with the underwater world. He discovers the lacuna, perhaps, a lava cave or cenote, emerging at the shoreline above the lowest low tide but below many other tides. A cave filled with water for much of its length but connecting back to the surface, a long underwater swim inland. Risking his life to drowning, many times, Harrison eventually has sufficient breath and strength to find the lacuna’s other end. He finds the human bones of an ancient mausoleum or sacrificial site.
His discovery was complete just a day before Salome resolved to make their escape to Mexico City. Enrique was away and would be enraged. Salome had a new target for her charms, a man that Harrison christened Mr. Produce the Cash.
The Lacuna is complex in its structure and its narrative methodology. The early chapters are told by an omniscient narrator who refers in the third person to the boy and his mother. The reader learns, however, from an archivist’s note at the end of that first chapter, that Harrison Shepherd is the author of the piece, albeit, talking about himself in the third person. It was written nearly twenty years later by an older Harrison who was, by then, an accomplished author.
But, for reasons which the archivist does not disclose at that point, the autobiographical project stalled. The following chapters do not come from the accomplished author but are the contents of Harrison’s diary, written, at first, by the fourteen year old but developing in age and maturity with the diarist.
The archivist points out that the diarist, like the autobiographer whose work we have already read, eschews the first person perspective. The author of the diary is almost invisible, never talking about himself but, continually, describing those matters and events that fall within his point of view.
As the book proceeds, the archivist shows more of herself and her concerns in life. Eventually, the reader comes to know how important her role has been in Harrison’s life and how much Harrison meant to her.
Ms. Kingsolver’s method works. It lends immediacy to events which span a long period of time. In the latter chapters, it produces poignancy, as the diarist and the archivist give their respective points of view revealing that they seldom spoke to each other about what they really felt or thought.
In Harrison Shepherd, Ms. Kingsolver has created her eye witness to history.
It starts with Mexico City in 1930. Harrison finds out about the politics of the time and the history of a nation. He shops in Coyoacan, then, on the outskirts of Mexico City. At the Melchor market, Harrison sees a woman with a startling face with ferocious black eyes who reminds him of an Aztec queen. He is told that the queen is married to a much talked about painter.
Not by coincidence, Harrison travels to the National Palace on the Zocalo in the centre of the city where the much talked about painter is painting his latest famous mural. A crisis occurs in that the specialist plaster mixer has not turned up to work. Harrison steps up to the mark and, using his pan dulce skills, mixes perfect plaster; makes himself indispensable; and earns the nickname “Sweet Buns”. The double entendre makes every man who hears it laugh.
Through this stratagem, Ms. Kingsolver inserts her witness into the lives of the famous couple, Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. The work is interrupted when Rivera goes to San Francisco to make murals for the gringos but the connection has been made.
The Lacuna is not just a novel about 1930s Mexico through the experiences of its most famous artistic couple. The author has a much broader vision than that. Harrison has an American father who works as a public servant in Washington. Having an ever present son has never been convenient to Salome and it becomes less convenient in Mexico City.
Conveniently for the novel, his mother decides to send Harrison, by the long train journey,[2] off to his father’s care in Washington where he goes to the Potomac Academy, an American boarding school. Again, he gets to do chores for a cook and this lets him walk the streets of Washington with Bull’s Eye, an equally poor but much more street savvy student at the Academy. Harrison gets to witness the poverty and politics of Hoover’s America close up and, through Bull’s Eye’s family connections, gets to go inside the Bonus Army encampment at Anacostia Flats composed of protesting veterans and their families and meet one particular family, husband and wife and new born babe, there.
Only weeks later, he is again close to the action as the protesting veterans and their families are attacked by police and soldiers; and driven from their encampment; which is then set on fire. At least two protestors die with over a thousand injured. Harrison gets to witness America at its most cold-hearted.
A volume of the diary is lost at this point. The record is interrupted. The archivist is unable to provide an explanation. The reader never gets to hear what happened to the passion that Harrison had been developing for his fellow traveller of the Washington streets. Was it unreturned and unrequited, as Harrison was fearing in the last pages of the previous volume, or did love blossom only to be quelled by family intervention or terrible tragedy? We can only guess.
The record resumes nearly three and a half years later, in late 1935. Harrison is back in Mexico City and again in the employ of Mr. Rivera. The scene has moved to the Twin Houses in San Angel, also then on the edges of Mexico City and across the road from the San Angel Inn, the old Carmelite monastery (that became a hacienda) where Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata met to divide Mexico between them in 1914 when each of their stars were, for the moment at least, in the ascendant. Leandro’s lessons are still serving Harrison well. He is now in charge of the cooking, using the tiny kitchen to produce the culinary delights that allow Frida and Diego to do the entertaining for which they are also famous.
More important even for the writer of an historical novel than the ins and outs and comings and goings of the relationship between the two painters, the diarist is very well placed to observe the forced itinerant and famous revolutionary, Leon Trotsky, when he arrives with his wife in early 1937.
Trotsky lives in Coyoacan in the Kahlo family house, the Casa Azul. Harrison is sent to work at the Blue House and provides a close up view of the man known for his fiery writing and for giving rise to a movement that has specialised in factionalism.[3] Harrison is there to witness and record with some delicacy the affair between Frida and Leon. When the Trotskys move a few blocks away to Avenida Viena, still in Coyoacan, Harrison goes with them and witnesses the hearings of the Dewey Commission; survives the unsuccessful machine gun attack by Mexican Stalinists led by painter, David Siqueiros; and is nearby when Ramon Mercader launches his fatal attack with an icepick. The fictional version of Mercader is a talentless devotee of Trotsky who manages to get close to the great man by asking Trotsky to look over a manuscript that he has written.
And, if that is not enough history for a novel to retell in personal and intimate terms, Harrrison, in the aftermath of Trotsky’s death, washes up in Asheville, North Carolina[4] and becomes a successful writer. The years of keeping a careful diary had serves him well. He lives a solitary live with only a house and bookkeeper/stenographer, Violet Brown, to keep him company, on occasion.
But history, in post war America, did not give a quiet life to writers who had once worked with a famous revolutionary and it was not long before the writer is testifying before the House Un-American Activities Committee and not much longer before criminal charges are likely to be on their way.
At a time like this, when in a difficult situation, a person needs some kind of loophole, some kind of lacuna.
The historical novelist plays an important role. They get to re-tell history, selectively, and to personalise it for the reader. They are less constrained than the historian to subject headings and chosen themes.
History is so immense, however, that every historian must, herself, be selective. With every passing minute history is occurring on every square metre on the Earth and beyond. Most history is unrecorded and precious little that is recorded is retold by historians. Even the history we live through is subject to choices. As I write, I may have to choose between attacks in London and attacks in Kabul to read or care about. And, if I choose both, I must ignore other tragedies and other happenings, both comic and bizarre, which are occurring at the same time. Nonetheless, the historical novelist’s ability to choose is less constrained and can be more easily fitted to an artistic or normative agenda.
In the end, then, Ms. Kingsolver’s choice of historic events: progressive artistic Mexico; working class America desperate, down but not out and with the spirit to protest; and the oppressive, obsessive madness of McCarthyism (which changes in degree but never goes away, completely), though not necessarily more selective than the choices that historians make, every day, in their work, is more adapted to her artistic intentions.
Ms. Kingsolver has brought together events of which the reader may never have heard; events of which the reader may have been aware but never thought about; and events that the reader may have pondered but never in terms of real people experiencing hope and feeling joy and suffering pain and disappointment.
Ms. Kingsolver makes history a personal experience. Her characters live on the page such that the reader feels that she can reach out and touch. Harrison Shepherd tries to make himself invisible but we grow to know him through his experiences and his veiled reactions. As the archivist, Mrs. Brown, reveals herself, the reader feels the irony that perfuses her relationship with Mr. Shepherd. Not only do they not tell but they never guess at what the other feels.
L. was right to urge the book upon me. I had walked the streets of both Coyoacan and San Angel and was delighted to read more about them. But The Lacuna offers and delivers to the reader much more than a road trip to Mexico. It spans but thirty years and two countries. Yet it provides an understanding of events and of people that still resonate. It offers also an understanding of values and actions that are important in our time.
Ms. Kingsolver has that knack of filling the lacunae that permeate our understanding of ourselves and our world.
[1] See, for example,
https://old.hearsay.lancedev.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1929&Itemid=35; https://old.hearsay.lancedev.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1969&Itemid=35; https://old.hearsay.lancedev.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1998&Itemid=35;
and
https://old.hearsay.lancedev.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1761&Itemid=35.
[2] For the train journey in reverse, read Ms. Bedford’s A Visit to Don Otavio.
[3] The old saw is that, if you have two Trotskyists in a room, you will have at least three factions.
[4] The place where Zelda Fitzgerald met her tragic death in a fire.
