My Final Words on Curt Schilling

On one hand, Curt Schilling doesn't deserve the time of day and there are thousands of more important things to opine on.  On the other hand, the baseball hall of fame is a pet interest of mine and I feel like I have something unique (?) to say about it that cuts to the core of the matter.  So let's make a deal: I will write this brief post and then never talk about Curt Schilling here or anywhere else ever again.

Curt Schilling is one of the thirty or so best pitchers in the history of the game.  He is also an obviously despicable person.  A holistic evaluation of this and everything else that goes into his hall of fame worthiness is best laid out here.  While I appreciate the detail and understand the reasoning behind that evaluation, I come to the opposite conclusion: Schilling should be in the hall of fame. 

The reason for this is mostly that I do not care to make binding character evaluations when evaluating one's greatness at baseball.  Why is this?  Part of this is my non-judgmental streak that I've remarked on before, which can be summed up as "we can't really know anyone so how can we judge?"  But given that I do generally judge Schilling to be a monster, that explanation doesn't quite do it.  There's also my tendency of thinking that the hall of fame should be more focused on history rather than hagiography, and that letting in only those that you deem "worthy" turns the enterprise into the latter.  Still, that's not a concrete enough reason to explain my thinking either.  What I think is the ultimate reason behind my opinion is that, given our context, taking the opposite stance would just be so meaningless.

To explain why I feel this way, let's harken back to a recent inductee we all remember: Mariano Rivera.  The Sandman was the best relief pitcher of all time and an easy call for the hall of fame.  He managed inclusion even though like Schilling, he has a documented history of supporting far-right politics as well as Trump himself.  And yet there was little to no controversy as Rivera was elected to the hall with every single vote for the first time in history.  So what's the difference?  At the risk of being overly-reductive, it's almost certainly that Rivera has avoided the most nominally vulgar expressions of this allegiance while Schilling has not.  From a material perspective, Rivera and Schilling's respective levels of support for Trump and his policies of death and destruction are in the same ballpark (baseball pun) if not exactly the same.  But Rivera's aesthetics are deemed acceptable so he's in and Schilling is not.

This of course isn't to say we should normalize Schilling's antics.  Rather we should question if the growing consensus around what is and isn't acceptable behavior to gain access to the hall of fame implicitly normalizes Rivera's actions.  We should ask if an interpretation of the character clause that limits itself to the most obvious and banal moral standpoints does more harm than good.  If we're really going to try to find the true measure of a man to determine his worthiness of honor, then the results of that process should not just result in the exclusion of the people we can easily justify, or worse, those that we simply don't like.  Either you have to take a full, honest accounting of those you are voting for, or you have to deem such a process fundamentally impossible.  Anything else is a facile and empty gesture.

2021 Book List

I am going to read a lot of books this year.  No real reason other than I want to.  Afterwards I'm going to travel back to 2013 and tell myself that 36-year-old me regularly reads books, runs several miles at a time, and drinks coffee.  I'm also going to write a paragraph or so on each one because a) it will help me remember, and b) why not.

Conflict is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair - Sarah Schulman (link)

You ever have the dream where you're in a classroom and it's the end of the semester but you have no memory of the class or of doing any homework?  For me, this book was the opposite of that dream.  Every page revealed something I felt I've known for all my life.  It's hard to summarize the message of the book (the passage below is pretty good at this), but in short it's about valuing understanding others above shaming them, and avoiding judgment for judgment's sake.  I've touched on my allegiance to this moral principle before in this very blog, but I've never quite seen a philosophy behind this ethic laid out so clearly and steadfastly.  Schulman's ideas of and the various constructs she uses to support them (I'm a fan of the term "bad groups") help to clarify and drive home her message.  And while her reliance on story and anecdote would normally give me pause, her specific background (she is a Jewish lesbian from the generation before mine) is both illuminating in itself and helps someone like me see this mindset play out outside of my own limited experiences.  I would go on, but her conclusion says it better than I can:

"Working on this book has been a profound experience. I had to go very, deep. I had to look honestly inside myself and inside the people around me, especially the ones who refuse to engage. And I think some basics emerged: shunning is wrong. It is unethical. Group shunning is the centerpiece of most social injustice. To bond, or to establish belonging by agreeing to be cruel to the same person, is dehumanizing and socially divisive. It causes terrible pain, and is unjust. If someone asks you to hurt another person, to refuse to speak to them, to cold- shoulder them, to refuse to sit down and hear what they have to say about the consequences of your actions on their lives, then you are being invited into a Supremacy system. The best thing to do when being asked to hurt another person is to ask the scapegoated object herself what she thinks is going on. Just pick up the phone. If you have a conflict with another person, tell them how you feel before implementing punishment. Ask and listen. Talk face to face. Learn from the art of fiction writing: all people are real. Your actions have consequences on other people. 

Intervention is the only moral response to another person being group-bullied, or another group of people being shunned, excluded, incarcerated, or occupied. Especially when someone asks us for help, we must intervene. Usually intervention means confronting the head bully or the central clique, and usually this means risking marginalization ourselves. Most of us—probably all of us—have times in our lives when we risk losing favor by standing up for someone who is the object of everyone else's blame, whether it is people with HIV, the homeless person on the subway, or our friend's ex-girlfriend. Those of us who present ourselves as "progressive," who support others, or help out, or take stands, are the ones most responsible for bucking the trend of cruelty. When we don't refuse cruelty, ultimately we stand for nothing; we are hypocrites, and our public selves are phony. Progressive people do not shun, and in fact they intervene when group shunning is being organized."

What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia - Elizabeth Catte (link)

This book is not "essential" in and of itself because it's primarily a response to another work.  But because that other work (Hillbilly Elegy) has become the simulacrum of a specific political inkling, a formidable counterweight is needed.  In that light, this book is a perfect antidote to the reductive ideals of rugged individualism that Vance and his ilk push on a public perfectly conditioned to eat that message up.  Catte organizes her rebuttal into three sections: A rejection of Vance's monolithic depiction of Appalachia, a refutation of Vance's specific racial argument (I did not know this going in to the book, but apparently he thinks Appalachians have bad Scots-Irish genes?), and a wide-ranging depiction of the righteous actions of various Appalachians throughout history.  This last part is the key I think, as it reclaims the peoples' agency which Vance seeks to deny. 

Licence to be Bad: How Economics Corrupted Us - Jonathan Aldred (link)

If you meet a random person, what is your default assumption of their character?  Why is that your default assumption?  And how do you think this specific assumption relates to your views of society at large?  If your answer to all these questions is something akin to pessimism, you might not be wrong.  But consider that instead, you might be the victim of a decades-long propaganda project staged both wittingly and unwittingly by some of the most famous economists in history.

Enter Licence to be Bad, which is essentially the story of this theory.  It posits that our slow drift from collectivism to individualism, from cooperation to competition, and from trust to rancor was powered at least in part by the leading voices in economics, namely the Chicago School and Mont Pelerin Society.  In critiquing this ideology, Aldred does his best to avoid ideological limitations himself (the book is primarily concerned with the influence of ideas so it's not a Marxist work, and he pointedly eschews the word "neoliberal" in the opening pages).  The book is divided into chapters organized by individual aspects of this ideology (ie. free-riding is implicitly encouraged, so people will always do it) and then efficiently and effectively takes each of those ideas apart.  In doing this a pattern emerges - a good deal of the economic research that has helped to shape our society is thinly-masked ideology masquerading as science.  In other cases the research is more neutral or even antithetical to this ideology, but becomes quickly corrupted by outside forces (ie. the RAND corporation using Tom Schelling's valuation of life for its own nefarious purposes).  Taken as a whole, Aldred's book is a sobering and depressing story that still manages to chart a path out of the dismal part of our dismal science.

I wanted to include a passage or two here but couldn't pick just one, so here's a thread with a few choice sections.

The Idea of Israel: A History of Power and Knowledge - Ilan Pappe (link)

A concise and thorough history on the evolution of mainstream thought on the philosophical, historical, and moral underpinnings of the state of Israel.  The book takes us on a journey from the relative naivety of classical Zionism, to the brief period where these assumptions were questioned (Pappe's milieu, known as "post-Zionism"), to the "harsher and less compromising" version of Zionism promoted by the present-day Israeli establishment.  Each chapter breaks down a specific aspect of this journey, but the essential parts are chapters four (detailing the trailblazers of post-Zionism), seven (the role of Holocaust memorialization in the struggle), and twelve (a sampling of the often revolting nature of modern, Neo-Zionist ideology).

What struck me while reading this was how much of Pappe's sentiments echoed what I had just read.  Sarah Schulman spends much of her book discussing the Israel-Palestine conflict.  Specifically, she says that the Israeli government and its supporters "overstate harm in order to justify acting out with cruelty," "produce unilateral stories based in a profound fear of ever being wrong," and "keep what Palestinians were thinking and feeling out of their realm of consideration."  All of this sounds strikingly similar to Pappe's analysis, albeit filtered through a slightly different lens.  And while Jonathan Aldred doesn't remark directly on the same conflict, his conception of academia as thinly-masked ideology matches Pappe's feelings to a tee.  Hooray for synthesis!

Poisoner In Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control - Stephen Kinzer (link)

After starting the year with a series of polemics, I moved to this straightforward yet captivating history of MK-ULTRA, framed around the life of the man most responsible for it, Sidney Gottlieb.  I knew the broad strokes of the story, but it was still quite useful to have the details revealed in an almost anti-sensationalist manner (colorful stories that would make a compelling television episode or movie are rattled off in a paragraph or two).  Still, the book is most interesting the times when it briefly veers away from straight reporting into some of the relevant implications.  Part of this takes the form of commentary on how a seemingly thoughtful and introspective man could administer such horrors upon his subjects (the epilogue for the paperback containing feedback from readers that knew the characters is particularly enlightening).  But the most valuable part are the sections where Kinzer ties in the actions of the CIA to the larger socio-political climate of the time.  The only answer to "how could a good man do this" is to directly interrogate the dogmatic nature of cold war-era patriotism, which the closing pages state explicitly and succinctly:

"Commitment to a cause provides the ultimate justification for immoral acts. Patriotism is among the most seductive of those causes. It posits the nation as a value so transcendent that anything done in its service is virtuous. This brings into sharp relief what the essayist Jan Kott called the "discrepancy between the moral order and the order of practical behavior." 

"He hears the voice of conscience," Kott wrote about a murderer, "but at the same time realizes that conscience cannot be reconciled with the laws and order of the world he lives in—that it is something superfluous, ridiculous and a nuisance." 

Gottlieb faced a question that cuts to the human heart: Are there limits to the amount of evil that can be done in a righteous cause before the evil outweighs the righteousness? Even if he believed that such limits might exist in theory, or in other cases, he never observed them in his own work. He persuaded himself that he was defending nothing less than the survival of the United States and human freedom on earth. That allowed him to justify grave assaults on human life and dignity. He assumed the role of God, freely destroying the lives of innocents for what he believed were good reasons. That sin was deep. Gottlieb lived with it uncomfortably in his later years.

The great mechanism in which Gottlieb was a cog gave birth to MK-ULTRA and nurtured it through waves of suffering. Something like it would have existed even if Gottlieb, Helms, Dulles, and Eisenhower had never been born. Behind it lies a quintessential moral trap. Most people are able to distinguish right from wrong. Some do things they know are wrong for what they consider good reasons. No one else of Gottlieb's generation, however, had the government-given power to do so many things that were so profoundly and horrifically wrong. No other American—at least, none that we know of—ever wielded such terrifying life-or-death power while remaining so completely invisible. 

Gottlieb saw himself as a spiritual person. By most definitions, though, true spirituality means that a measure of compassion and mindfulness informs every aspect of a person's life. That was not the case with Gottlieb. Neither his scientific curiosity, his sense of patriotism, or his acts of private charity justify his years of heinous assaults on the lives of others."

Class Notes: Posing As Politics and Other Thoughts on the American Scene - Adolph Reed, Jr. (link)

You might think a book of essays about contemporaneous events from the nineties would be dated and irrelevant but you would be wrong.  Sure, the specific details of union meetings and erstwhile political movements and the OJ trial (lol) might be forgettable, but Reed's analysis of the meanings of and takeaways from those events is both sharp and essential.  In fact there were multiple times I specifically wrote the name of something current alongside a critique of the past.  Take this section:

"We often aren't clear enough about distinguishing opposition to the actions of particular governments and regimes from hostility to the actions of government in principle.  As a result, we sometimes over-value anything that looks like an insurgency against concentrated power."

If that doesn't retroactively describe some of the left's brief celebration of the Gamestop saga to a tee, I don't know what does.  This is not to minimize the happenings that Reed writes about, but more to highlight that things are as they ever were, and reading insightful works about the past will always help drive that home.

The more important point is that this book served as both an inspiration and a warning.  Most everything Reed says enriches and expands upon what I already believe to be true about the world (liberal politicians will not save us, blinkered understandings of race cannot lead to meaningful anti-racism).  I realize this is likely because Reed's words have trickled down and influenced all that I have read/heard in the present day, but it's still nice to be affirmed every now and then.  At the same time, his recurring prescription for the cure to our society's ills (a working-class movement based on both class and racial awareness) is still largely absent twenty-plus years later.  So there is work to do.

Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? - Mark Fisher (link)

The way to make philosophy readable for a relative philistine like me is to 1) make it short, 2) make it relevant, and 3) make myriad connections between your work and others'.  This book succeeds on the first two counts (it's an eighty page screed about capitalism's seeming inevitability), but it really makes its mark with the last point.  Not only does Fisher's work cite a number of relevant thinkers (Zizek, Deleuze, Lacan, etc...), but it also draws on familiar pop culture references to drive its point home.  Discussions of Children of Men, Office Space, Nirvana, and TS Eliot's "The Waste Land" serve to illustrate and reinforce Fisher's thoughts in a way that even the finest prose wouldn't be able to accomplish.  Take this section on the implications of Wall-E:

"A film like Wall-E exemplifies...interpassivity: the film performs our anti-capitalism for us, allowing us to continue to consume with impunity.  The role of capitalist ideology is not to make an explicit case for something in the way that propaganda does, but to conceal the fact that the operations of capital do not depend on any sort of subjectively assumed belief."

Add in Fisher's thoughts on bureaucracy (he doesn't like it) and his diagnosis for our society's growing incidence of mental health problems (hint hint it's capitalism) and you have yourself a quick and indispensable summarization of our modern condition.

The Wretched of the Earth - Frantz Fanon (link)

I am not ashamed to say I don't quite know what to think of this book.  In a way this is to be expected, as these are the words of a dying man engaged in anti-colonial struggle half a world/century away.  That said, the more significant barrier to my own understanding is that much of Fanon's analysis of the colonized subject is in the realm of the psycho-affective.  He is as concerned with the internal affects of colonialism on its subjects as he is with the political reality of this situation.  Still it's clear that when he weaves together his knowledge of history, political economy, and his own experiences with his people, he is able to produce many illuminating insights.  I'm just not sure what do with all of it yet!

Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus - Rick Perlstein (link)

I finally decided to dive in to Perlstein and what better subject to start than with the erstwhile 1964 presidential candidate who effectively birthed the modern right-wing movement.  The 500+ pages go by quickly thanks to Perlstein's deft narrative touch and are peppered with enough cutting remarks to make the larger themes clear.  To wit, he consistently remarks on the truly mythic nature of the supposed American consensus, lest you get the impression that the title is not half-ironic.  Take this passage:

" 'Far more united and at pace with itself, except over the issue of Negro rights, than it has been for a long time': future generations might be excused for wondering how many conflagrations need burn...before columnists would break down and concede the point that America was a nation deeply divided against itself.  But the architecture of their thought would not permit it."

Nuggets like this do more than demystify illusions of a harmonious past - they also serve to show that Everything Is The Same As It's Always Been.  Clueless pundits, right-wingers labeling everyone (even Eisenhower!) a commie, incompetent and/or self-interested campaign staff, and of course, the ever-present political money spigot.  Even though this story of eternal recurrence portends an aura of doom (the rise of Reagan is all but spelled out in the final chapters), there's something almost perversely hopeful about reading a blueprint for how to change the political direction of a nation.  If they can do it, so can we?

Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties - Tom O'Neill (link)

Thanks to years of investigative journalism and declassified documents, there's plenty of direct evidence of our government's nefarious activities (see the MK-ULTRA book above or last year's The Jakarta Method for a couple examples).  But even now, there's a good deal of evidence that paints the CIA/FBI/American law enforcement in general as an oppressive force (Google "strategy of tension").  Even with all this evidence, what we still don't have is a definitive answer to the question Why?  Different stories point to or suggest anything from indifference, to incompetence, to a purposefully selective enforcement of rules and laws, to outright malice, and finally, a grand "conspiracy" to uphold capitalism at all costs.  You or I might have theories about the true motivation and reasoning behind all of this, but a) we'll probably never know, and b) it's probably some combination of "all of the above."

In this light, Chaos is a useful read.  It is by its own admission not a definitive answer to anything concerning Charles Manson or the circus surrounding him.  In spite of O'Neill's dogged reporting, there is no silver bullet that ties together all the oddities and inconsistencies he uncovers.  It's still entirely possible that Manson was just a man whose insanity metastasized into violence.  But what the book does accomplish is its implicit (and sometimes explicit) suggestion that each and every one of the explanations from above may have played a role in the killing spree.  From the banal (it's pretty clear that Manson's parole officer was an incompetent amateur and nothing more) to the sinister (the MK-ULTRA ties), it's possible to use the evidence at hand to construct a narrative that fits whatever explanation you desire.  And what better place to start considering these things than one as ubiquitous and batshit crazy as the Manson story.

Debt: The First 5000 Years - David Graeber (link)

Of all the fields of study I could have pursued but did not, anthropology often feels like The One That Got Away.  There are few if any subject matters that fail to pique at least some interest in me, but anthropology has the unique combination of asking larger questions about humanity and the societies we create and being a near diametric opposite of what I did study (business and math).  So Graeber's work scratches a particular itch that nothing else on this list has.  Being that it literally does cover 5000 years, the book is rich with stories and rather brief with its analysis.  But when the stories illustrate his points so clearly (the refutation of the "myth of the barter" is a highlight) and when the analysis consists of cutting remarks woven effortlessly into the fabric of his prose, such a skewed distribution is actually optimal.  And the central thesis - that our conceptions of debt, obligations, and value are cyclical and vary across (and in turn, are defined by) the specifics of our time and place - is as revelatory and mind-expanding as anything else I've read this year.  So that's a strong recommendation from me.

From my perspective, the book was especially useful as a link to some of the previous works in this list (Synthesis: It's Cool).  In Licence to be Bad, Aldred posits that modern misanthropy is the result of bad economic theory that's seeped into our unconscious and not some inherent deficiency of humanity.  Graber reaches deeper into both our history and our psyches to make the same point:

"Cash transactions between strangers were different [...] Here, transactions really do become simply a figuring-out of how many of X will go for how many of Y, of calculating proportions, estimating quality, and trying to get the best deal for oneself. The result, during the Axial Age, was a new way of thinking about human motivation, a radical simplification of motives that made it possible to begin speaking of concepts like "profit" and "advantage"— and imagining that this is what people are really pursuing, in every aspect of existence, as if the violence of war or the impersonality of the marketplace has simply allowed them to drop the pretense that they ever cared about anything else. It was this, in turn, that allowed human life to seem like it could be reduced to a matter of means-to-end calculation, and hence something that could be examined using the same means that one used to study the attraction and repulsion of celestial bodies. If the underlying assumption very much resembles those of contemporary economists, it's no coincidence—but with the difference that, in an age when money, markets, states, and military affairs were all intrinsically connected, money was needed to pay armies to capture slaves to mine gold to produce money; when "cutthroat competition" often did involve the literal cutting of throats, it never occurred to anyone to imagine that selfish ends could be pursued by peaceful means. Certainly, this picture of humanity does begin to appear, with startling consistency, across Eurasia, wherever we also see coinage and philosophy appear."

Likewise, in Capitalist Realism Fisher discusses how capitalism seems to insist on its own inevitability.  Graber's analysis of the modern era seems to reach a similar conclusion:

"In other words, there seems to have been a profound contradiction between the political imperative of establishing capitalism as the only possible way to manage anything, and capitalism's own unacknowledged need to limit its future horizons, lest speculation, predictably, go haywire. Once it did, and the whole machine imploded, we were left in the strange situation of not being able to even imagine any other way that things might be arranged. About the only thing we can imagine is catastrophe."

Still, Graeber's most cutting remarks exist on a different plane than anything else I've read this year.  Once he's considered the full history of the shifting conceptions of human relationships, obligations, and exchange, his recommendations no longer seem radical but logical and obvious:

"I would like, then, to end by putting in a good word for the non-industrious poor. At least they aren't hurting anyone. Insofar as the time they are taking off from work is being spent with friends and family, enjoying and caring for those they love, they're probably improving the world more than we acknowledge. Maybe we should think of them as pioneers of a new economic order that would not share our current one's penchant for self-annihilation."

And the book closes on probably it's most succinct and meaningful invocation:

"What is a debt, anyway? A debt is just the perversion of a promise. It is a promise corrupted by both math and violence. If freedom (real freedom) is the ability to make friends, then it is also, necessarily, the ability to make real promises. What sorts of promises might genuinely free men and women make to one another? At this point, we can't even say. It's more a question of how we can get to a place that will allow us to find out. And the first step in that journey, in turn, is to accept that in the largest scheme of things, just as no one has the right to tell us our true value, no one has the right to tell us what we truly owe."

The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America - Khalil Gibran Muhammad (link)

Where Debt was sparing with its direct commentary this book avoids such rhetoric altogether.  Aside from the preface, the author doesn't step outside of his narrative to opine until literally the last paragraph of the book.  This is not a problem, as the narrative (of how blackness came to be associated with crime in the period from 1880 to 1940) is so strong, detailed, and incorporative of contemporary criticism from the works he cites that it would almost be a disservice to the reader to interject.  Plus, many of the arguments put forth at the time are so obviously dumb and have been debunked many times over that it's probably better to let the ignorance speak for itself.  

Condemnation reminds me a good deal of Licence to Be Bad in that it describes how flawed hypotheses and bad research came to be the "common sense" of the land.  The notable difference is that Licence spends significantly more time and effort describing the specific mechanism of how that blinkered research turned into policy.  While Condemnation may keep itself buried in the details of the academic work, it still peeks its head up enough to let you know what's what.  For example, Muhammad talks about how "huge private donors" influence disparate social outcomes by race:

"From local, state, and national politicians to the wealthiest men and women of the industrial age, from beat cops to visiting nurses, from probation officers to real estate developers, white settlement workers had access to power, resources, and spheres of influence impossible for middle-class and elite black reformers to match."

Muhammad, a Harvard professor, also indicts his own institution and their ilk for breeding an inadequate hivemind when it comes to issues of race:

"These northern white race-relations experts reviewed each other's work, vetted and corroborated each other's findings, collaborated on specific projects, worked in the same academic departments, and shared national leadership positions in social scientific and reform communities. [...] The perspectives of W.E.B Du Bois and Fannie B. Williams and Ida B. Wells were subsumed by these writers even as they moved beyond, or devalued, anti-racist critiques."

He also makes clear that sympathetic white liberals who sought out moderate positions on the matter did the cause of black equality no favors:

"...the fragile nature of their argument and their ambivalence cannot be ignored.  Their ambivalence made it easier for more reactionary forces to simply ignore black suffering and to define most that was good in the world as 'white.'"

This is all tied together in the end, with the simple invocation that equality in consideration is necessary to achieve equality in outcomes:

"Progressives rewrote white and immigrant criminality just as early civil rights activists rewrote, for a time, black criminality.  The measure of crime, in both cases, was not racial inferiority but rather compassion towards the least among them.  Sympathy and faith in humanity were chosen over scorn and contempt."

The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017 - Rashid Khalidi (link)

In a very timely fashion the next book on my pile was this one, a concise yet detailed summary of the history of the Palestine-Israel conflict.  Khalidi is as knowledgeable as one can be on the subject from an academic perspective, but he also weaves in his own families' history to give the book a "first person dimension that is usually excluded from scholarly history."  This dual approach gives the book a sense of authority that few other works can muster (to this end, the cover art is of Khalidi's grandfather's house, which is currently an Israeli heritage site).  Ironically, this approach serves to fight off accusations of bias the reader might have, as he spends roughly as much time criticizing the strategic mistakes of the PLO, Fatah, Hamas, and other Palestinian organizations.  At the same time, Khalidi makes it clear that the Palestinian people have faced longer odds in their struggle than any other colonized people:

"After 1917, the Palestinians found themselves in a triple bind, which may have been unique in the history of resistance to colonial-settler movements. Unlike most other peoples who fell under colonial rule, they not only had to contend with the colonial power in the metropole, in this case London, but also with a singular colonial-settler movement that, while beholden to Britain, was independent of it, had its own national mission, a seductive biblical justification, and an established international base and financing. According to the British official responsible for "Migration and Statistics," the British government was not "the colonizing power here; the Jewish people are the colonizing power." Making matters worse was that Britain did not rule Palestine outright; it did so as a mandatory power of the League of Nations. It was therefore bound not just by the Balfour Declaration but also by the international commitment embodied in the 1922 Mandate for Palestine."

In all, Khalidi's work serves as a complete historical context for modern Palestinian struggle, a celebration of the unbreakable spirit of the Palestinian people, and a genuine desire for the movement leaders of today to avoid the mistakes of the past.

The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination - Sarah Schulman (link)

Inspired by my love of the first book on this list, I dug deeper into Schulman's non-fiction work with this brief entry.  The two are similar in nature with overlapping themes and relevant auto-biographical details.  But the difference is that Conflict is Not Abuse is more of a framework for understanding the world supported by personal anecdotes while Gentrification of the Mind is a memoir-like collection of experiences that gives way to a similar framework (she literally calls it a "personally intellectual memoir" which is great turn of phrase).  That said, this mild distinction absolutely does not mean that Schulman's conception of "gentrified thinking" is any less revelatory.  Take this passage, which is the perfect antidote to the post-pandemic thinkpiece trend of culling your group of friends: 

"One of the organizing principles of gentrified thinking is to assess everyone based on what they can do for you, and then treat them accordingly." 

This relevance also applies to weightier matters.  Schulman's personal experiences related in this book primarily concern the AIDS crisis, but it's easy to square her insights with current struggles.  Take this section on the gentrification of literature related to AIDS:

"At one point during the conference, critic Michael Bronski shared a startling insight from the stage. He said that the rubric "AIDS literature" is itself an expression of homophobia, because without denial, oppression, and indifference, these works would be called "American literature." The cultural apparatus was instructing Americans that those works telling the truth about heterosexual cruelty, gay political rebellion, sexual desire, and righteous anger were not to be recognized. It was a living reenactment of Herbert Marcuse's insight into what he called "repressive tolerance," in which communities become distorted and neutered by the dominant culture's containment of their realities through the noose of "tolerance." The dominant culture doesn't change how it views itself or how it operates, and power imbalances are not transformed. What happens instead is that the oppressed person's expression is overwhelmed by the dominant person's inflationary self-congratulation about how generous they are. The subordinate person learns quickly that they must curb their most expressive instincts in order to be worthy of the benevolence of this containment."

And a similar passage on the same phenomenon with respect to women's liberation:

"We're repeatedly told that women are thriving in our society. More women than men are in college, we see women in male professions, as powerful figures on television, and as consumers. Yet same time that women apparently have broken all barriers, a disobedient female is considered antisocial, a drag, and a bitch. Although feminism succeeded in transforming options and ways of thinking, the subsequent changes have remained encased in the capitalist apparatus. At the same time, our propaganda machine, mass entertainment, has erased the history of feminism and how these changes were actually achieved. So only their consequences remain visible."  

Because the book was written a decade ago, there is nothing about specific events that have happened since then.  But I see a direct echo of Schulman's argument in this fantastic summary of BLM and George Floyd:

"It’s that part of the black world—their anger, their comfort, their belated conscription to the harried scramble for the American good life, their uncertain place beneath the fluorescent lights of the corporate office—that’s become a point of panicked fixation in the aftermath of the riots. It was hard not to laugh at the official response to the rebellion, as every brand and elite institution rolled out the same manic public statement, declaring their love for their black employees and allegiance to BLM. But, perhaps inevitably, that daffy piety became the rule. One outcome of the uprising is the expansion of a zealous antiracist discourse that remains silent about the street battles that gave it marvelous topicality.

This is not a new phenomenon. The past six years had seen the passions of Ferguson displaced by efforts to give white professionals moral lessons and a smattering of black people prestigious posts. Black professionals, after all, are the crown jewels of the liberal reformist mission: their presence on the campus or conference call performs a shining symbolic task. This is the only sliver of black America to feel the full effects of integration—so the shivering, conflicted existence of this minority within a minority stands as talismanic promise that the wound of history might be healed. In Obama’s first public statement after the events in Minneapolis—months before he intervened to break a strike by professional basketball players—he began by quoting an email sent to him by an “African American businessman.”"

The summation of this is that according to Schulman, everything worth living for - love, contentment, happiness, justice, and even liberation - is dependent on avoiding this so-called gentrification of the mind.  The only way to do this is to hold ourselves and others accountable, and to consciously avoid the trap of seeking comfort above all else.  The simplicity and clarity of this prescription makes the book a worthy and necessary predecessor to Conflict is Not Abuse.

Conspiracy Theory in America - Lance deHaven-Smith (link)

If I'm going to read books about real-life conspiracies, it might make sense to address the epistemological issues surrounding the related concept of "conspiracy theories."  In our current climate, such a designation often confers that the subject matter at hand is anathema to a sane and reasonable view of history. That some of these conspiracies verifiably happened is largely besides the point - the metaphorical well has been poisoned by the likes of Jade Helm, PizzaGate, QAnon, and other such lunacy.  While these books have been enlightening in their own way, none of them really touch on this modern conception of conspiracy theories writ large (Chaos mentions this, but it's primarily about his personal comfort pursuing a conspiratorial narrative).  Thus, a discussion of what is "reasonable" is something that should be addressed.  To this end, I believe that my first serious consideration of this matter (and thus, my initial framing of this idea) came when I read this passage some time ago:

"Sometime back in the middle of the first decade of the AIDS epidemic, I was picking the brains of a friend of mine, the activist scholar Cindy Patton, about the probable natural history of HIV. This was at a time when speculation was ubiquitous about whether the virus had been deliberately engineered or spread, whether HIV represented a plot or experiment by the U.S. military that had gotten out of control, or perhaps that was behaving exactly as it was meant to. After hearing a lot from her about the geography and economics of the global traffic in blood products, I finally, with some eagerness, asked Patton what she thought of these sinister rumors about the virus's origin. "Any of the early steps in its spread could have been either accidental or deliberate," she said. "But I just have trouble getting interested in that. I mean, even suppose we were sure of every element of a conspiracy: that the lives of Africans and African Americans are worthless in the eyes of the United States; that gay men and drug users are held cheap where they aren't actively hated; that the military deliberately researches ways to kill noncombatants whom it sees as enemies; that people in power look calmly on the likelihood of catastrophic environmental and population changes. Supposing we were ever so sure of all those things — what would we know then that we don't already know?""

This anecdote is from the late queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and it opens a wonderful book chapter titled Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading.  The question posed above is never explicitly answered in the text (the essay is primarily concerned with the literary concepts in its title), but the implications are still provocative and worth reflecting on.  Consider this second passage (emphasis mine):

"Patton's response to me seemed to open a space for moving from the rather fixated question Is a particular piece of knowledge true, and how can we know? to the further questions: What does knowledge do — the pursuit of it, the having and exposing of it, the receiving again of knowledge of what one already knows? How, in short, is knowledge performative, and how best does one move among its causes and effects? 

I suppose this ought to seem quite an unremarkable epiphany: that knowledge does rather than simply is it is by now very routine to discover. Yet it seems that a lot of the real force of such discoveries has been blunted through the habitual practices of the same forms of critical theory that have given such broad currency to the formulae themselves. In particular, it is possible that the very productive critical habits embodied in what Paul Ricoeur memorably called the "hermeneutics of suspicion" — widespread critical habits indeed, perhaps by now nearly synonymous with criticism itself — may have had an unintentionally stultifying side effect: they may have made it less rather than more possible to unpack the local, contingent relations between any given piece of knowledge and its narrative epistemological entailments for the seeker, knower, or teller."

In Sedgwick's eyes, the "paranoid reading" of the conspiracy mindset can be self-limiting and inherently defeatist.  The consequence of this for literary criticism is blinkered and reductive understandings of the  meaning of a work.  Transposing this to geopolitical matters, an increased level of suspicion or paranoia in a body politic could lead to its downfall.  For our current American landscape, the natural implication of this is that mistrust of others and the atomization of our lives map almost eerily to this predicted outcome.  I would not go so far to argue that this would be Sedgwick's specific opinion on the literal reality of conspiracies, but it's hard to argue that her essay doesn't at least suggest this to be true.

The issue with this line of thinking is that it treats knowledge itself, the very concept the argument is built on, as a sort of abstraction.  Centering her argument on "knowledge does" tacitly ignores that knowledge still "is," and that we cannot "do" anything particularly meaningful until at least some amount of underlying truth is revealed.  This deficiency is not an issue for the theoretical purposes of her essay, but if we're going to try to answer the rhetorical question that begins it, we need a different tool.  Enter Conspiracy Theory in America, which builds its arguments and frameworks on that which we do know.  Part of this knowledge is what I hinted at in the beginning; namely, there have indeed been documented government conspiracies (there's an appendix with a helpful chart) and studying these can help us understand their nature.  Once we comprehend this nature, we then understand that the best way to investigate what are fundamentally criminal acts is to treat them as such.  To this end, deHaven-Smith centers his argument around his self-created term "State Crimes Against Democracy," defined as "the type of wrongdoing about which the conspiracy theory label discourages us from speaking."  This framework helps to center the effects of the crimes rather than their minutia, and takes us to the next logical step of asking who stands to gain as a result.  All of this, plus the "smoking gun" of the book (a 1967 CIA memo written explicitly to propagandize against conspiracy theories in the wake of the Warren Commission), suggests that we can't fully understand our world without a "paranoid reading" of sorts. 

While this all is useful, this still doesn't answer our original question.  What would we know then that we don't already know?  Putting ourselves in deHaven-Smith's mindset certainly confers knowledge, but what does that knowledge do?  It is here, implicitly answering a question that he might be unaware of, that I think the book is most worthwhile.  Take this passage:

"Simply put, there is an element in American society, perhaps a large element, that trusts the government to do what is best for the nation, and that believes state manipulation of domestic politics, at least in relation to foreign affairs, is necessary even though it is usually illegal. 

This group can be called "conspiracy realists," not because they are more realistic than conspiracy believers or deniers, but because they base their political actions and attitudes on what they consider to be the existing realities of power. They speak as if they support the aspirations of the Founders for liberty and popular control of government, but they are quite happy if the government secretly snoops on their neighbors to enhance their own security."

This conception of the way things are speaks to two things.  First, it grounds its analysis in an understanding of power dynamics and how they apply to our situation.  Second, it dispels the common misconceptions that the evil acts we see are primarily the product of incompetence, tactical disagreements, or simply (a misanthropic view of) human nature.  What this knowledge then "does" for someone who is looking to fight back is to correctly frame the conflict such that the battles you choose to fight are the ones that will actually address the root of the problem.  The following drives this home even more explicitly: 

"Nevertheless, most Americans take some solace in their belief that U.S. government manipulation of events and information is relatively rare. The idea is that this is still a free country because for the most part we are left alone to interpret events as they come. On, say, 99 percent of the issues, the U.S. government lets history unfold naturally and provides the most complete and accurate information it possesses. This assumes, however, that all events and information that might be subject to government control are equally important, and therefore that what matters is how much is controlled and not what. But the truth is that events and information vary greatly in their importance, and hence a more or less totalitarian system can be achieved with a bare minimum of government intrigue and propaganda if the political apparatus and specifically the organs of manipulation are focused on society's key levers and choke points. This might be called "smart" or "selective" totalitarianism. In such a system, the government rarely intervenes into domestic or international affairs for domestic effect, but when it does, it orchestrates hugely important events that set the frame for policy and politics for years or even decades to come."

Through this lens, we come to understand the existing power structures as they are: adaptable, capable, and above all else, smart.  Individuals and groups within this structure may be subject to human impulses and faults, but regardless, the sum total of all existing power has not achieved its current level of hegemony by sheer accident.  Armed with this knowledge, we can reject the three prevailing mindsets in modern America (Trumpism, defeatism, and foolish optimism) and carve out a different path to "do" something different, something effective.  After all, you cannot fight your enemy if you don't know who or what it is.

The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War - Stephen Kinzer (link)

If you've read this far, you might get the idea that I like studying post-war America (1945-1964 in particular) with the goal of better understanding of Why Things Are The Way They Are.  A deep dive into the lives of the Dulles brothers seems like my next logical step, so here we are.  As Secretary of State and CIA Director during the Eisenhower administration, the two of them bent the Cold War landscape to their will to such a degree that the reverberations are still felt today.  A complete understanding of America requires a deep familiarity with and understanding of their story.  As Kinzer sums up nicely in his closing words "They are us. We are them."

Like with Poisoner in Chief, Kinzer's gift for storytelling is his strength.  The book is divided into two sections: The first a description of their rise to power, and the second a series of chapters framed around six distinct efforts they undertook to remove foreign leaders from power.  This framework moves things along briskly, groups together his myriad details logically, and serves to repeat the most relevant themes and motives to maximal effect.  

Three themes in particular are worth noting here.  The first is Kinzer's patient, detailed description of the Dulles' all-American upbringing, one that was truly "all-American" in that the brothers were Frankensteins of a sort, combining every American pathology to create a pair of monsters:

"...The forces that shaped them are quintessential strains in the American character. First was missionary Christianity. "I see the destiny of America embodied in the first Puritan who landed on those shores, just as the human race was represented by the first man," Alexis de Tocqueville wrote at the beginning of the nineteenth century. This destiny reached apotheosis in the Dulles brothers. They were raised in a parsonage and taught from childhood that the world is an eternal battleground between righteousness and evil. Their father was a master of apologetics, the discipline of explaining and defending religious belief. They assimilated what the sociologist Max Weber described as two fundamental Calvinist tenets: that Christians are "weapons in the hands of God and executors of His providential will" and that "God's glory demanded that the reprobate be compelled to submit to the law of the Church." 

The second force that shaped the brothers was American history. They could only have been awed by its upward arc. Their grandfather John Watson Foster had helped tame the frontier and campaigned for Abraham Lincoln; they spread American power to every corner of the globe. In their belief that the United States knew what was best for the world, as in their missionary Christianity, they reflected dominant strains in the society that produced them. 

As adults, Foster and Allen were shaped by a third force: Decades of work defending the interests of America's biggest multinational corporations. Although not plutocrats themselves, they spent their lives serving plutocrats. They were among the visionaries who developed the idea of corporate globalism-what they and other founders of the Council on Foreign Relations called "liberal internationalism." Their life's work was turning American money and power into global money and power. They deeply believed, or made themselves believe, that what benefited them and their clients would benefit everyone."

The second is the brothers' devotion to a blinkered understanding of the world.  Specifically, their black-and-white understanding of other nations' relations to the USSR and communism led to a series of hasty decisions that more prudent minds might have avoided.  I do think the Kinzer lets them off the hook a bit in this regard.  While the Dulleses might have lost some battles, they clearly won the war, and America repaed all the hegemony and power the brothers could have dreamed of.  Suggesting that this happened more by accident and not primarily because powerful people used their power rings somewhat hollow.  At the same time, the book does a good job of detailing some particularly obvious blind spots, such that it becomes obvious that they weren't perfect masters of their domain.  Take this section on the brothers' interventions in Vietnam:

"Why was Foster able to see [Josip Broz] Tito this way, but not Ho [Chi Minh]? The best explanation stems from the Eurocentrism that was ingrained in his identity and that of almost every other American foreign policy specialist of his age. He, his brother, and Eisenhower had studied European history, were steeped in European politics; and understood the subtle interplays that for centuries had bound and separated European states. About East Asia, by contrast, they knew little. Blinded by their anger at "losing" China and robbed of expertise by the dismissal of the State Department's "China Hands," they never gave Ho the chance they gave Tito. Instead they drew closer to Diem, their anti-Ho."

In the same vein, the regular references to the Dulles' reactionary anti-communism and simplistic red-baiting are nothing new; several other books I've read have touched on this exact phenomenon with others from their generation.  But I think this takes on extra resonance now that "critical race theory" has become today's preferred shibboleth for right-wingers to invoke All That Is Wrong With Society.  Analysis of how CRT became "CRT" speaks to the same mechanism that launched America into a frenzy of anti-communism that fueled the Cold War.  Understanding the past can help us understand the present, and vice versa.  Take this analysis, which would sound like a description of the Red Scare with a few words swapped out:

"All these charlatans share absurdly abstract and pseudo-genealogical approaches to that are about labeling and boxing and thereby foreclose any dialectical or critical approach to what’s going on. They are selling what Saul Bellow called “the 5 cent synthesis,” the bargain-rate distillation of social ills. These people are also all of roughly the same intellectual class: a sort of managerial or policy consultant that’s very invested in pushing simplified, commoditized “guides” to certain complicated issues. Their goal is "training" as opposed to teaching: they want to inculcate a reflexive response to certain words and phenomena. So if you hear the word “white privilege,” you will hopefully go “alert, alert, CRT, error, error.” Christopher Rufo of the Manhattan Institute basically says as much: “We will eventually turn it toxic, as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category. The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘critical race theory.’”"

The third theme, my personal favorite, is how the brothers both used and abused religious beliefs in their pursuit of American dominance.  Part of this is the stark Calvinist beliefs that have been described in previous passages.  Another part is their frequent reliance on religious leaders in foreign countries to help smear the heads of state they were seeking to undermine (hellfire sermons that helped shift public opinion were a key part of the operations in both Guatemala and Vietnam).  But the most interesting aspect of this was the brothers' willful ignorance of other religions, and though this lens we can see more generally a fundamental failure to grasp good faith worldviews that were not their own.  Their mission to overthrow Sukarno in Indonesia is perhaps the best example of this: 

"Indonesia and its dazzlingly charismatic leader, however, posed a challenge that was not simply strategic but also conceptual, cultural, even spiritual. Never did Foster and Allen set out against an enemy whose worldview was so different from their own. were shaped by missionary Calvinism and America's pioneer tradition, believed that godly and satanic forces were at war on earth, and felt called to crush the satanic ones. Sukarno emerged from an opposite tradition, one that emphasizes harmony and conciliation, finds good and evil mixed everywhere, and abhors confrontation. What Foster and Allen took as Sukarno's abandonment of the West was actually his attempt to make foreign policy according to principles that shape life in Indonesia, and especially on his home island of Java. 

"It is regarded as a Javanese characteristic to avoid formulating a long-term plan of action to control the future and to provide a criterion for the making of immediate choices," one historian has written. "Rather a Javanese will allow the forces around him to work themselves out.""

We Are Cuba! How a Revolutionary People Have Survived in a Post-Soviet World - Helen Yaffe (link)

On the heels of reading about Palestine during the recent brutal Israeli assault, I happened to be in the middle of this book during our nation's latest attempt to foment an uprising in Cuba.  In the immediate sense, this serendipity helped to reinforce my initial assumption that this movement is clearly astro-turfed, perhaps in its entirety (if you are skeptical of this, chapter 7 has a good summary of our long history of covert action against the Cuban Revolution).  But more generally, I think reading this has expanded my understanding of the Cuban peoples' struggle to the degree that I now have a more complete appreciation of just how much they've accomplished against comically long odds.

Three items stick out in particular.  The first is just how obviously wrong the standard American line on Cuban governance is once you learn anything about how it actually works.  Yaffe sums this up early on: "Observers who accept parliamentary liberalism - the form of political organisation preferred in the advanced capitalist countries - as synonymous with 'democracy' will find it missing in Ciba and conclude that there is no democracy on the island."  More than anything else, the narrative of the book (especially the second chapter on the rapid transformation of the post-Soviet 'Special Period') serves to "bring out an essential element that has been understated in most commentary on Cuba: the level of engagement by the population in evaluating, critiquing, and amending policy changes and proposed reforms, through representative channels, public forums, national consultations, and referenda."

The second item of note is an incisive analysis of Obama's policy of rapprochement.  Yaffe's critique falls somewhere in between the optimistic view that it was "good" and the pessimistic view that it meant nothing.  Instead, the diplomatic effort is summed up as a sort of killing them with kindness (which to be clear is better than the previous strategy of just killing them):

"Instead of isolation and aggression, Obama sought to erode Cuban socialism by persuasion, seduction, and bribery, through 'engagement': foisting the logic of the capitalist market, social relations, and cultural values on the revolutionary people.  This was part of Obama's 'smart diplomacy' approach to foreign relations."

While this justification is a bit cynical and counter-revolutionary, one of Yaffe's interview subjects still concurs that it achieved what Cuba wanted in at least one important way:

"You cannot have normal relations when you have a military base in their country, against their wishes...when you are constantly trying to overthrow that country's government, when you want to impose your way on others.  There can't be normal relations, but there may be a certain relationship of coexistence."

The third item is a bit more far afield but stick with me.  I've heard the mantra "100 companies are responsible for 70% of emissions" so often that it feels like a cliché.  Worse yet, in some circles it's come to be a shorthand for "don't do anything; we're doomed."  The more reasonable takeaway in my eyes is that the current power structure that maintains the status quo is concentrated in these corporations, and that individual obsession over your own consumption will not counterbalance that.  But the real truth about it is, we're still all supposed to try.  And after reading and considering the chapter on Cuba's energy revolution, the most powerful consideration one can take from all this is that aligning yourself with your neighbors to affect mass change is the only answer.  If nothing else, let the story of the Cuban people's struggle inspire you in your life.

The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government - David Talbot (link)

The next entry in my journey through Cold War history builds on the story of the Dulles brothers by focusing on the one who was objectively the more interesting one.  While this does indulge the visceral thrill of stories of spycraft more than the Kinzer book, Talbot is still readily able to reinforce the same themes and ideas that we know to be true.  The ruling class had (and still has) a very specific culture that helped reinforce its glorification of America and capitalism above all human concerns.  This culture produced a worldview so blinkered and devoid of reason that it could justify basically any atrocity (Talbot says "...by defining the Cold War as a ruthless struggle outside the norms of military conduct and human decency, the national security regime shaped by men like Dulles was able to brazenly defy international law," which sounds like it could also describe....well, any time since then).  And perhaps most incisively, Talbot drives home how our corporate media infrastructure is fundamentally unable to hold power accountable.  Not only does he site Dulles' myriad avenues of influence over the media of his time (most notably Henry Luce), but he also cuts to the heart of why, writ large, the media has not been able to accomplish its ostensible mission:

"Those resolute voices in American public life that continue to deny the existence of a conspiracy to kill President Kennedy argue that "someone would have talked." This line of reasoning is often used by journalists who have made no effort themselves to closely inspect the growing body of evidence and have not undertaken any of their own investigative reporting. The argument betrays a touchingly naïve media bias—a belief that the American press establishment itself, that great slumbering watchdog, could be counted on to solve such a monumental crime, one that sprung from the very system of governance of which corporate media is an essential part. The official version of the Kennedy assassination—despite its myriad improbabilities, which have only grown more inconceivable with time—remains firmly embedded in the media consciousness, as unquestioned as the law of gravity. "

There are echoes of Conspiracy Theory in America throughout, which is impressive for a book more focused on narrative than general theorizing.  One such throughline is how Talbot appears to ascribe Straussian political philosophy to the players in his story (deHaven-Smith summarizes the practical effects of this philosophy by saying "the country's leaders decided they knew what was best for America, and that the people were actually a potential obstacle to the nation's survival").  In the prologue, Talbot asserts that "In the view of the Dulles brothers, democracy was an enterprise that had to be carefully managed by the right men, not simply left to elected officials as a public trust."  He adds to this later, saying "Democracy, in their minds, was an impediment to the smooth functioning of the corporate state."  Even more importantly, when addressing JFK's assassination in the book's final section, Talbot seems to follow deHaven-Smith's prescription to question who stands to benefit from the crime rather than getting bogged down in the details.  This fundamental treatment of the assassination as a crime against the American people serves to tell a much more meaningful story.  Indeed, it's one that still resonates today.

This final part also contain my favorite takeaway; a passage that helps answer the "what would we know then that we don't already know" question from the Sedgwick essay.  My original response to the question was essentially a riff on "knowledge is power," but then none other than Charles de Gaulle comes along to one-up me.  de Gaulle had found himself in the crosshairs of the American security apparatus in the time of Dulles, but managed to escape unscathed.  He shared his damning assessment of the situation with his information minister, with the key part copied below.  This analysis goes beyond the simple understanding of power and gets at something more fundamental about the psyche of Dulles and his ilk.  In doing this he describes a sort of learned ignorance inherent to the ruling class that is in my estimation more perverse and terrifying than any overt explanations for our country's misdeeds.  As one begins to inhabit the mindset that such criminality is nothing less than the original sin of modern American governance, coming to terms with the implications of de Gaulle's words is perhaps one of the most "patriotic" things you can do.

"America is in danger of upheavals. But you'll see. All of them together will observe the law of silence. They will close ranks. They'll do everything to stifle any scandal. They will throw Noah's cloak over these shameful deeds. In order to not lose face in front of the whole world. In order to not risk unleashing riots in the United States. In order to preserve the union and to avoid a new civil war. In order to not ask themselves questions. They don't want to know. They don't want to find out. They won't allow themselves to find out"

Mao Zedong and China in the Twentieth-Century World: A Concise History - Rebecca E. Karl (link)

As someone who knew the broad strokes of recent Chinese history but not all the details, I was a prime target for this book.  Its concision (less than 200 pages) was a welcome change from the lengthier tomes on this list, without sacrificing the illuminating details that make the narrative work.  This relatively brief coverage of a long, sprawling history left me with more questions than I originally had, but I would actually argue reflects quite well on what the author was trying to do with this book.  What this means at this moment though, is that I don't have quite as many synthesized and presentable thoughts as I did for previous entries.  Which is fine.

Still, I have a couple quick observations.  It's endlessly fascinating (to me at least) how so many revolutionary minds come from relatively anodyne backgrounds.  Mao's initial state of apoliticism/liberalism reads similar to the stories of Fidel Castro and others like him.  And that the topic of women's liberation served as as a gateway to his radicalization is critical to understanding how interconnected struggles can lead to a revolutionary state.  Further along in Mao's journey, I found the concept of "New Democracy" (later known as "The Fifth Modernization" in the post-Maoist denouement) to echo many of the details and reasonings presented in We Are Cuba, as well as the fundamental hatred of bureaucracy from Capitalist Realism.  Finally, Karl never comes out and says this, but her narrative seems to indicate that Mao's biggest successes were born out of a pragmatic (but still revolutionary) spirit, while the failures stemmed from the more impetuous or stubborn parts of his nature.  Important thing to consider for whatever is to come.

Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community - Robert D. Putnam (link)

I must have done a good job of picking books this year, because it took me until September to find the first semi-dud.  Bowling Alone examines America's very real sense of increasing alienation and attempts to form a meta-narrative to help explain why this is happening.  While I wouldn't say Putnam does a bad or dishonest job of this, his analysis is unmistakably blinkered and incomplete.  The most obvious shortcoming is that at heart, the book is really just a series of cross-tabs, correlations, and regressions, which means it runs up against the correlation/causation dilemma almost constantly.  This is in part a function of the limitations of the underlying data/reality, which he does acknowledge repeatedly.  You can't run controlled experiments on the progression of a society over several decades, so what we're left with is survey and observational data that by its very nature cannot tell the whole story.  But even though Putnam addresses this shortcoming, there's still a palpable sense that he wants to believe in simple cause and effect which leaks into his prose often enough for me to question his rigor.

This doubt is further reinforced by a supplemental section, appropriately titled "The Story Behind This Book," in which it takes all of three paragraphs for him to start thanking organizations like the Carnegie Corporation and the Ford Foundation for their assistance.  More directly, his personal story begins with a clearly true thesis worthy of academic pursuit, but then gives way to a seemingly purposeless journey that is guided by the whims and theories of others.  The number of different people who pull him a number of different ways could serve to highlight Putnam's open mindedness, but it also paints a picture of someone who is seemingly allergic to having a specific point of view worth engaging with.

A less generous reader could interpret this lack of ethos as a sign of an author who subscribes to an "end of history"-style American centrism, a position I hold as much respect for as Walter Sobchak does nihilists.  I wouldn't necessarily say that Putnam's ideology (or lack thereof) poisons the well, but a thorough analysis of the text does him no favors.  Take his thoughts on "polarization."  Throughout the book, he turns to this concept as a stand-in for social degradation.  While I can understand the surface-level reasoning behind this, he rarely if ever considers who is driving the polarization, or if any of the matters at hand are important enough that polarization is perhaps even desirable.  When he describes how decreased consumption of print and TV journalism correlates with decreases in social capital, he gives short shrift to the rather obvious fact that the news itself has changed (which of course leaves no room to discuss who is responsible for this and what it means).  And his final chapter consists largely of suggestions that are as obvious as they are toothless, in that they don't account for the political reality of how a society in decline would actually accomplish any of these things.  To wit, every one of them begins with "let us find ways to..." without really contemplating who the "us" is or the enormity of what the "ways" may be.

The clearest sign of this lack of imagination though, is what is not discussed; that is, that the underlying cause of all this social decay is a political economy whose purposeful end state is the very alienation and social collapse that book describes in detail.  To this end, there is one (1) section that mentions capitalism by name and as you might guess, it is very silly:

"If big government is not the primary cause of declining civic engagement in contemporary America, how about big business, capitalism, and the market? Thoughtful social critics have long feared that capitalism would undermine the preconditions for its own success by eroding interpersonal ties and social trust. Many of the grand masters of nineteenth-century social theory, from Georg Simmel to Karl Marx, argued that market capitalism had created a "cold society," lacking the interpersonal warmth necessary for friendship and devaluing human ties to the status of mere commodities. The problem with this generic theory of social disconnectedness is that it explains too much: America has epitomized market capitalism for several centuries, during which our stocks of social capital and civic engagement have been through great swings. A constant can't explain a variable. 

One version of economic determinism, however, may have more validity—the gradual but accelerating nationalization and globalization of our economic structures. The replacement of local banks, shops, and other locally based firms by far-flung multinational empires often means a decline in civic commitment on the part of business leaders."

In case it's not clear, what he's describing in the second paragraph is the latest iteration of...capitalism.  It's almost as if the dominant political economy of the last couple hundred years isn't just a simple on/off switch that never changes its strategy or tactics based on contemporary material and political conditions.

In spite of these flaws, Bowling Alone is fine.  Critiques of the meta-narrative aside, there are enough great details and thoughts sprinkled throughout the book to make it a worthwhile read.  The insights gleaned from the data are often quite interesting, and most meaningful caveats are addressed adequately.  The book's absolute pinnacle is its exploration of the historical and material reasons why levels of social capital were higher in the past (in an alternate universe, Putnam might apply a Marxist framework to this argument and base the whole narrative of the book on it).  In the section on generational change, Putnam puts forth a strong argument that the unifying forces of WW2 created a generation that was durably committed to building and maintaining the marrow of our society.  And in the penultimate chapter (the best of the book), Putnam describes how the turn of the twentieth century was in many ways a time and circumstance similar to our current day, which may bode well for our future:

"It was, in short, a time very like our own, brimming with promise of technological advance and unparalleled prosperity, but nostalgic for a more integrated sense of connectedness. Then, as now, new modes of communication seemed to promise new forms of community, but thoughtful men and women wondered whether those new forms would be fool's gold. Then, as now, optimism nurtured by recent economic advances battled pessimism grounded in the hard realities of seemingly intractable social ills. 

Then, as now, new concentrations of wealth and corporate power raised questions about the real meaning of democracy. Then, as now, massive urban concentrations of impoverished ethnic minorities posed basic questions of social justice and social stability. Then, as now, the comfortable middle class was torn between the seductive attractions of escape and the deeper demands of redemptive social solidarity. 

Then, as now, new forms of commerce, a restructured workplace, and a new spatial organization of human settlement threatened older forms of solidarity. Then, as now, waves of immigration changed the complexion of America and seemed to imperil the unum in our pluribus. Then, as now, materialism, political cynicism, and a penchant for spectatorship rather than action seemed to thwart idealistic reformism. 

Above all, then, as now, older strands of social connection were being abraded — even destroyed — by technological and economic and social change. Serious observers understood that the path from the past could not be retraced, but few saw clearly the path to a better future."

Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump - Spencer Ackerman (link)

The Jakarta Method was the hot book of 2020 in lefty circles for good reason.  The simultaneous breadth and depth of its analysis of America's Cold War dominance of Third World nations served to re-frame the narrative of that time for the modern era.  Given the relative recency of the subject matter of Reign of Terror - the equivalent 2021 must-read - it seems odd to say this book accomplishes fundamentally the same thing for its time.  Trump, the security state, and most other players in this book are still a going concern; how can one craft the definitive narrative for an era before its completion?  Smartly, Ackerman addresses this directly in the opening line of his acknowledgments when he says "Yes, I know this book is incomplete."  A few paragraphs later, he directly answers my rhetorical question.  "This is an attempt at doing something a bit different: surveying the entirety of the War on Terror and its impact on America.  Ironically, that makes it difficult to go into everything I would have liked.  That's probably also a function of the difficulty of writing about the previous twenty years, a period that's too old for journalism and too young for history."  On these terms, Ackerman has crafted a telling of a sort of fever dream of imperialism, which I would argue is perhaps the most appropriate way to address the relentlessness, the naked furor, and the utter moral nullity of the time at hand.

The actual argument present here - that everything from the Oklahoma City bombing to January 6th can be viewed through the prism of the War on Terror - is the biggest lift the book asks of the reader.  So it's to its credit that Ackerman spends the whole book synthesizing and re-framing events to this end.  The result is an overwhelming procession of ever-more-maddening facts that enrages you to a point where it would seem foolish not to agree with his conclusions.  The tales of old-fashioned war and suspensions of liberties from the Bush era might be enough to accomplish this on its own, but it's the transition into the subsequent administrations that really drives this home.  Obama's policies of deportation, drones, and surveillance are described acutely as "making the War on Terror sustainable through making it sufficiently inconspicuous to split the difference with abolition."  And Trump's proclivity to bring the war home is summarized effectively as well: "Trump may have promoted the Wall, but it was never truly built, nor did he deport the multitudes Obama had.  The real nativist innovation of Trump was to lock up the migrants who were already in America."  But Ackerman makes his argument most effectively when he describes how these competing strains of imperialist thought come together to create an ouroboros of absolute shit.  No passage illustrates this better than this one about the early days of covid:

"A lack of concern for the health of those on the front lines was as conspicuous for coronavirus health-care workers as it had been for troops in Iraq. The sloth of the Trump administration in equipping health-care workers rivaled the Rumsfeld Pentagon's laxity in equipping soldiers properly in Iraq. Both turned to "hillbilly armor." Just as the soldiers had dug through scrap piles to uparmor their Humvees, nurses wrapped themselves in garbage bags to fashion personal protective equipment.

Service in the wars turned into a preexisting condition for those veterans who had been exposed to the open-air burn pits of Iraq and Afghanistan. There, everything from furniture to human shit was disposed of in the flames, and the military insisted no one who breathed in the acrid smoke would suffer lasting harm. In reality, an army study never intended for public release found that exposure to the burn pits would likely lead to "reduced lung function or exacerbated chronic bronchitis, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), asthma, atherosclerosis, or other cardio-pulmonary diseases." When Elana Duffy, an Iraq and Afghanistan veteran in New York, began developing shortness of breath and a high fever on March 18, she suspected she knew why. A Veterans Affairs hospital turned her away without so much as administering a coronavirus test, "largely because the VA is slammed," Duffy explained. None of the two hundred thousand veterans who had signed up for the VA's burn-pit registry, created precisely for situations like this, received any guidance about what special precautions to take."

Aside from Ackerman's primary argument, the book makes some interesting points about the varying levels of effectiveness of different strains of resistance to the War on Terror.  Chapter Six in particular details the number of ways in which various leftist factions opposed the war.  What's provocative about this analysis is how it contrasts the large protest movements in advance of the Iraq War to the periodic leaks of atrocities and other violations of liberties that followed.  While the former effort was larger and placed specific demands on the government, in reality it accomplished nothing.  On the other hand, the leaks from generally less-ideologically driven actors like Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, and others appear to have done a great deal more to move general public sentiment in a positive direction.  Unless I missed it, the book does not offer a specific prescription on why this dichotomy exists.  Still, that it presents the contrast as something for the reader to consider is enough to run with (my personal theory is that it's hard to get the general public to engage with a cause unless there is a specific atrocity to rally around, ie. George Floyd).

Even though Ackerman acknowledges the practical shortcomings of the past two decades of anti-war efforts, he is not specifically critical of people or groups who at least tried to stem the tide.  Rather, he saves his venom for those who were actually in a position of power but failed to resist the War in Terror in any material way.  I already mentioned his description of Obama's shortcomings above, but this summary of the current state of the Democratic establishment is fantastic: "Lacking firm ideological commitments after generations of loosening its ties to labor, increasingly divorced from the material conditions of the vast majority of Americans, and terrified of being on the wrong side of security issues, Democrats compensated with technocracy and institutionalism."  More to the point, Ackerman correctly diagnoses that the problem is not just one of inaction, but rather one of actively enabling our country's worst impulses.  His diatribe below against Democratic leaders under Trump is perhaps the most salient takeaway for left-leaning people trying to understand how all this could happen in spite of strong opposition.

"The outraged liberal #Resistance, as it came to be known in the increasingly online political environment, blurred, as ever, the distinction between resistance and complicity. The very Democrats who called Trump a unique threat to the republic were willing to grant him the same extensive surveillance powers they had allowed Bush and Obama. They saw themselves granting these authorities to the Security State, as if Trump himself were irrelevant. They voted for his astronomical military budgets and denounced his deviations from the national security norm that had mired the United States in unwinnable, agonizing conflicts, which bred frustrations that Trump harnessed. Six Senate Democrats followed the lead of Brennan and Clapper in approving the CIA torturer Gina Haspel to become Trump's second CIA director. The #Resistance was the next phase of liberal complicity in the War on Terror. It was determined not to miss an opportunity to align with the Security State now that Trump and the Security State clashed."

The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters - Frances Stonor Saunders (link)

"There are ... those who lie consciously, coldly falsifying reality itself, but more numerous are those who weigh anchor, move off, momentarily or forever, from genuine memories, and fabricate for themselves a convenient reality.... The silent transition from falsehood to sly deception is useful: anyone who lies in good faith is better off, he recites his part better, he is more easily believed." 

-Primo Levi

If you've read this far you may have the impression that I have a particular interest in the Cold War.  Perhaps I enjoy unpacking the assumptions that 37 years of living in America has implanted into my brain, perhaps The Jakarta Method was extremely influential on me, or perhaps I'm just a sucker for some good spy stories.  Regardless of the reasoning, yes I am obsessed with the Cold War and as a newfound "expert" on the matter I can say that this book is the most Cold War-y of them all.  The narrative is centered around the CIA's funding of exploits in the cultural realm, most notably the terrifyingly-named Congress for Cultural Freedom, and in the same fashion as Devil's Chessboard takes the form of a series of interlocking vignettes that's optimal to conveying its preponderance of debauchery (it's just as funny, too...search the index for the story of Robert Lowell declaring himself the "Caesar of Argentina" for one example).  The notable departure from Chessboard (and most of the other Cold War books detailed here) is that not a drop of blood is shed here.  Instead, The Cultural Cold War is the story of how the US manufactured an ideal of America that it used to sell the world (mostly Europe) on its way of life, substituted the illusion of freedom for actual freedom, and simultaneously gave cover for atrocities too numerous to count.  In this light, the deceptions detailed in The Cultural Cold War could be viewed as the United States at its most nonchalantly evil.

The foremost strength of the book is its myriad explanations of the inner workings and motivations of the CIA/CCF/etc. and their use of covert propaganda and soft power.  Upon review, it's almost too much to absorb all at once! But I think that by focusing on two specific aspects, you can start to comprehend the gist of it.  The first aspect is how the CCF's goal was to promote their subjective worldview as truth, which in Saunders' words "produced a kind of ur-freedom, where people think they are acting freely when in fact they are bound to forces over which they have no control."  To this end, the book quotes Eisenhower (one of the main progenitors of this line of thinking) himself: "We are trying to get the world, by peaceful means, to believe the truth. That truth is that Americans want a world at peace, a world in which all people shall have opportunity for maximum individual development."  Note the tautological use of "peace" and the emphasis on the "individual" indicate a specifically American "truth."  This implicit understanding of America as truth led to an understanding of the CCF's mission that was as devious as it was banal.  A case officer described it thusly: "We didn't tell them what to do, that would've been inconsistent with the American tradition. That doesn't mean there weren't themes we wanted to see discussed, but...we did not feed the line to anyone."  This sort of double-speak, which Saunders dismisses derisively as an "altruistic myth," is best countered with the following criticism of the CCF's crown jewel, the literary magazine Encounter:

"It has been said that "a magazine article says what it says, and anyone can examine its arguments and disagree with it—it cannot be a covert performance." Encounter's strange silences, its deliberate concealment of what lay below the bottom line, and its exclusion of material inconvenient to its secret backers suggest that the contrary is true. As one historian put it, "The pertinent question about Encounter's independence was not whether there were instructions cabled to the editors from Washington, but who chose the editors in the first place, and who established the clear bounds of 'responsible' opinion within which differences were uninhibitedly explored." Supporting this argument, Jason Epstein explained, "It was not a matter of buying off and subverting individual writers and scholars, but of setting up an arbitrary and factitious system of values by which academic personnel were advanced, magazine editors appointed, and scholars subsidized and published, not necessarily on their merits—though these were sometimes considerable—but because of their allegiance.""

The second notable aspect of this influence is how the CIA specifically targeted leftist groups not with the goal of eliminating them, but using, controlling, and neutralizing them.  The somewhat ironic outcome of this was that these actions effectively narrowed the range of acceptable opinions such that American "truth" based on the concept of "freedom" became an effectively real, hegemonic truth through sheer process of attrition.  Still, I struggle to describe this as "ironic" as the US very much intended for this to happen.  Specifically, the CIA hoped that the method of control (money) would itself corrupt.  In Saunders' words "the political clamor of the artist might be drowned out by the clink of the patron's coin."  But the real brilliance (and evil) of their plan lies in how both of these aspects were used to create a purposeful smokescreen to launder their ideology:

"The purpose of supporting leftist groups was not to destroy or even dominate but rather to maintain a discreet proximity to and monitor the thinking of such groups; to provide them with a mouthpiece so they could blow off steam; and, in extremis, to exercise a final veto on their publicity and possibly their actions if they ever got too "radical." (Tom) Braden issued clear instructions to his newly established IOD posts in Europe: "Limit the money to amounts private organizations can credibly spend; disguise the extent of American interest; protect the integrity of the organization by not requiring it to support every aspect of official American policy.""

I've written about the pitfalls of dogmatic thinking before, and every time I read about America's role in the Cold War, I am treated to myriad examples of how narrow minds necessarily corrupt their occupants.  Saunders notes, like everyone else before her, that the American Cold Warriors' dogma came from a specific place: "They were all Christians, in a nonsectarian, TS Eliot kind of way. They believed in a higher authority, a higher truth which sanctioned their anti-Communist, anti-atheist crusade."  Furthermore, "by invoking the ultimate moral authority, America acquired an unanswerable sanction for her "manifest destiny.""  Saunders also notes the tender irony of how this dogmatic influence neuters the very art the CCF was supposed to support with inclusion of a quote from Orwell: "Monomania and the fear of uttering heresies are not friendly to the creative faculties."  A quote from Senator William Fulbright is probably the best summarization of this phenomenon, as it touches on the tricky dance with "truth" I touched on earlier:

"The effect of the anti-Communist ideology was to spare us the task of taking cognizance of the specific facts of specific situations. Our 'faith' liberated us, like the believers of old, from the requirements of empirical thinking...Like medieval theologians, we had a philosophy that explained everything to us in advance, and everything that did not fit could be readily identified as a fraud or a lie or an illusion.... The perniciousness of [anti-Communist orthodoxy] arises not from any patent falsehood but from its distortion and simplification of reality, from its universalization and its elevation to the status of a revealed truth."

Lest one think that all of this is in the past, it's impossible to ignore the constant echo of the present in Saunders' story (the book is 20 years old, but if you haven't noticed by now all this stuff exists on a continuum, with a few details changed here and there).  The strain of anti-Stalinism described in the book (an all-encompassing "professional stance") somehow echoes both anti-Trumpism and whatever you might call modern anti-communism.  The self-stated goal of the CCF to "create platforms from which culture could be expressed without regard to politics and without confusion with propaganda" reads as sort of end-of-history-type centrist's wet dream that doubles as a veritable mission statement for the anti-politics of modern "cancel culture" patricians.  And the most stark warning comes from a quote that Saunders pulls from the Church Committee's final report, which is more than a nod and a wink that maybe, just maybe, all of this is still happening:

"Many of the restrictions developed by the CIA in response to the events of 1967 appear to be security measures aimed at preventing further public disclosures which could jeopardize sensitive CIA operations. They did not represent significant rethinking of where boundaries ought to be drawn in a free society."

Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America - Rick Perlstein (link)

"Whatever the issue, to allow the government policy to be made in the streets would destroy the democratic process."

-Richard M. Nixon

Much like the previous Perlstein book, Nixonland is a compelling series of vignettes about a specific political project complete with all the context necessary to truly understand What It Means.  It suffers a bit when compared to Before the Storm because the "context" of its time period is harder to reduce to something easily digestible.  But it is still an invaluable resource for understanding both How We Got Here and how Everything Is The Same As It's Always Been.  Even though this was written 15 years ago, it lends itself to numerous meaningful if superficial comparisons to our modern era.  Like Trump, Nixon was famously paranoid about the press even though the net effect of their work was to validate him.  Like Trump, Nixon painted himself as a martyr and oppressed even though he was an entrenched member of the political class serving the needs of the powerful.  The story of Nixon's preferential treatment of Vietnam war criminals like Lieutenant Calley echoes Trump's streak of audacious pardons.  And Nixon even complained about the paltry crowd size at his inauguration!  But where the parallels become more resonant is how the narrative around fundamental struggles like racism still sound the same.  Take this excerpt from the supposedly liberal Chicago Tribune on the day of MLK's funeral:

"If you are white, you are wrong. Feel guilty about it. Assume the collective guilt of all your progenitors, even if neither you nor anyone you know is a descendant of slave owners. Yield the sidewalk to the migrants from the South who have descended on your cities. Honor their every want, because the 'liberals' tell you that it is your fault they have not educated themselves; developed responsibility, trained themselves to hold jobs, or are shiftless and dependent on your taxes." 

Lest I give them impression that the book is merely 750 pages of funhouse mirror-type revelations, Perlstein does attempt to synthesize his thoughts into something weightier.  This aspiration takes two forms.  The first is the literary flourish present in his ability to combine seemingly unrelated thoughts into a coherent narrative.  He's good for roughly one shining example of this per chapter, with my favorite being this passage describing the final days of the 1972 election:

"It would end like a Henry Fonda movie—something like Twelve Angry Men, where only the jury's prejudices had blinded them from seeing that they were about to condemn an innocent man, and where the liberal's gentle, persistent force of reason had compelled the brutish conservative, by the last reel, to realize the error of his ways. 

But America wasn't described by such liberal narcissism. It was a place where the real Henry Fonda, in 1970, turned over to the FBI office in Los Angeles a death threat that arrived at his home— "YOUR DUAGHTER [sic] HAS BEEN TRIED FOR TREASON FOR BEING A TRAITOR. HER DATE OF EXECUTION WILL BE DEC 1970 TO PROTET [sic] HER & SAVE HER PAY 50,000 CASH" — but where FBI files reveal nothing was done to find the identity of the sender. The father had submitted the ransom note to the same FBI office that was running a harassment campaign against his daughter.  

It was also the America where the real Henry Fonda, when his daughter told him she opposed firing Angela Davis because she was a Communist, said, "If I ever find out you're a Communist, Jane, I'll be the first person to turn you in.""

The other form of synthesis consists of Perlstein's efforts to define "Nixonland" as some sort of new, liminal political reality that both created Nixon while simultaneously being created by Nixon.  Part of this is painted as a natural transition away from the height of the Cold War towards a "novel vision of international order, one defined not by Cold War categories of good versus evil, but by metaphors of control: balance of power, equilibrium, structure of peace."  But Nixon's political ethos goes beyond this towards something of a self-serving anti-political tautology (indicated best by the quote I led with).  Perlstein paints Nixon as using the supposed legitimacy of his office as a means to its own end, which entails Nixon (in at least partial bad faith) justifying governing to keep things the way they are largely because they are already that way.  Some of this comes off as pandering ("The Bible teaches us to obey authority") and some comes off as outright lies (he describes the Vietnam War as being fought "only for the right of a people far away to choose the kind of government they want").  And you might notice that the appeal of the lie (self-determination) directly contradicts the pandering (God knows what's good for you).  This comes to a head in the closing chapters, as Nixon largely forgoes campaigning in favor of just continuing to be the president, a strategy that could be seen as "honest" and even "good" if the person doing it were either of those things.  Yes, Nixonland may indeed be the existential heightening of tension present during his administration.  Ultimately though, any good that might have come from that tension was captured and used to suppress dissent by the first president of the current Nixonland order.  Perlstein concludes his book with this exact sentiment: "How did Nixonland end?  It has not ended yet."  Indeed, it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of Nixonland.

Finally, a bit of a side note.  I was in the middle of reading this tome when I saw this goofy take from the author himself:

Setting aside the obvious counterarguments (the opinion of two billionaires is not representative of the whole, or maybe billionaires can be stupid, or maybe they were lying!), this sort of understanding of the world is refuted directly by the story he tells in the last section of Nixonland!  That section describes in detail the 1972 Democratic primary, which effectively pitted the anti-establishment McGovern vs the field.  Admittedly, that conflict does not map perfectly to the 2020 Democratic race no matter how much centrist pundits obsessed with "electability" try to convince you.  But in the ways it does serve as an honest analogy, the details of the story as Perlstein presents them support Sanders, not Warren, as the McGovern-like insurgent.  A billionaire gave money to keep Hubert Humphrey alive as a spoiler candidate, echoing the lifeline Warren received.  On the other side, Nixon did everything up to and including committing crimes in order to bend the Democratic nomination towards McGovern, the candidate he considered unelectable.  I can't prove Trump's campaign made the same effort for Bernie, but I am well aware he didn't hold back from attacking Warren.  And much like McGovern used the lessons of 1968 to modify the nomination process in 1972, Sanders' camp used its leverage to make similar reforms between 2016 and 2020.  I guess the version of "never meet your heroes" that applies in this situation is "pre-emptively block any authors you might read on Twitter so you don't encounter anything that would undermine their work."  Oh well, I still think the book is good and that you should read it.

The Crying of Lot 49 - Thomas Pynchon (link)

"She could, at this stage of things, recognize signals like that, as the epileptic is said to—an odor, color, pure piercing grace note announcing his seizure. Afterward it is only this signal, really dross, this secular announcement, and never what is revealed during the attack, that he remembers. Oedipa wondered whether, at the end of this (if it were supposed to end), she too might not be left with only compiled memories of clues, announcements, intimations, but never the central truth itself, which must somehow each time be too bright for her memory to hold; which must always blaze out, destroying its own message irreversibly, leaving an overexposed blank when the ordinary world came back. In the space of a sip of dandelion wine it came to her that she would never know how many times such a seizure may already have visited, or how to grasp it should it visit again. Perhaps even in this last second—but there was no way to tell. She glanced down the corridor of Cohen's rooms in the rain and saw, for the very first time, how far it might be possible to get lost in this."

Inspired by asides in Devil's Chessboard, Cultural Cold War, and this episode of the Trillbillies podcast, I decided to dip my toes back into the world of written fiction.  After all, one cannot fully grok the mindset of Cold War America through nonfiction alone.  Indeed, to truly understand the simultaneous effects of unprecedented levels of material surplus, covert actions, and alienation driven in equal parts by modernization and a burgeoning propaganda machine, I need to also submit myself to the world of allusion and metaphor.  And I could not ask for a better place to start than one of the most approachable works (aka it's the shortest one) by one of leading American authors of the past 100 years.

The Crying of Lot 49 tells the story of Oedipa Maas, who is quickly thrown into a world of intrigue and suspicion after being named executor of her ex-lover's estate.  Of all the strange and peculiar things she encounters, many of them point to a mysterious "Tristero," the meaning of which she spends the rest of the book trying to discern.  This leads to a lot of "dead ends" which I put in scare quotes because every weirdo Oedipa meets is illustrative of some fundamentally American pathology (above all others, I am partial to the fully anonymized broken hearts club).  This gives the book a richness beyond its central meaning, which is good because the central meaning is elusive.  So elusive that the book basically refuses to show its hand and ends abruptly.  This reminds me in both form and function of the motif of Japanese literature put forth in possibly the most famous article from Grantland (RIP):

"The first time you read a story like this, maybe, you feel cheated, because you read stories to find out what happens, not to be dismissed at the cusp of finding out. Later, however, you might find that the silence itself comes to mean something. You realize, perhaps, that you had placed your emphasis on the wrong set of expectations. That the real ending lies in the manner of the story’s turning away from itself. That this can be a kind of metamorphosis, something rich and terrifying and strange. That the seeming evasion is in fact a finality, a sudden reordering of things."

In this light, Oedipa's arrival at the titular auction is less a proper denouement and more the commencement of the reader's journey back out into the world, one in which everything now feels ever-so-slightly more suspicious.  Returning once again to the Sedgwick essay, Crying can be read as a treatise on the "knowledge does rather than simply is" revelation.  What Oedipa now knows is less important than how that knowledge has shaped her and what she has become as a result.  Her self-reflection in the closing pages sums it up best:

"At Vesperhaven House either an accommodation reached, in some kind of dignity, with the Angel of Death, or only death and the daily, tedious preparation for it.  Another mode of meaning behind the obvious, or none.  Either Oedipa in the orbiting ecstasy of a true paranoia, or a real Tristero.  For there either was some Tristero beyond the appearance of the legacy America, or there was just America and if there was just America then it seemed the only way she could continue, and manage to be at all relevant to it, was as an alien, unfurrowed, assumed full circle into some paranoia."

Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression - Robin D.G. Kelley (link)

"When I asked Mr. Johnson how the union succeeded in winning some of their demands, without the slightest hesitation he reached into the drawer of his nightstand and pulled out a dog-eared copy of V.I. Lenin's What Is to Be Done and a box of shotgun shells, set both firmly on the bed next to me, and said "Right thar, theory and practice.  That's how we did it, theory and practice.""

"...young activists who often felt that divisions of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality were insurmountable, or assumed that identities determine political choices and alliances, learned that solidarity is a dynamic, often unpredictable process shaped inexorably by actual struggles in real time.  Black working-class Alabamians did not join the Communist Party out of some economic calculation or because they were driven by narrow interest-group politics.  They were not fighting for themselves; they were fighting for each other, and for a fairer, less-oppressive world for all."

It feels silly to write a blurb for this book when the author's own 25th anniversary preface (the source of both of the above quotes) does that better than I ever could.  So if you're curious I recommend you just read that, which our capitalist overlords have made available to us free of charge.

Still, I have a couple thoughts about how this excellent work ties into my own "journey" of knowledge and discovery, so bear with me.  Much of the contemporary media that Kelley quotes reflects not only the understanding of race at the time (a la The Condemnation of Blackness) but also the very modern chatter surrounding Ferguson/George Floyd/etc.  Passages like "It is the ignorance of the negro which makes him prey to...incendiary literature" convey the patronizing sentiment towards black activists that was born in post-Reconstruction America, while other arguments leaned on the "outside agitators" trope that reared its head again in 2020.  What was even more insidious was how the specter of communism was used as a literal red herring to beat down efforts to unionize industries and desegregate the South.  Kelley summarizes this best in the conclusion to his section on the Popular Front:

"Although the South had made tremendous progress toward reducing outright antilabor and antiradical repression, the power of anti-Communism in its uniquely Southern form—and the residual racism accompanying it—created an invisible barrier between many like-minded individuals."

The main takeaway is that all the struggles present in 1930s Alabama—against capitalism, racism, sexism, and every other manner of oppression—were inexorably linked.  You cannot tell the story of one without the others.  And much like other struggles depicted in the other books I've read, a mix of patient dedication and situational pragmatism is what tends to move the needle.  The most productive outcomes that Alabama communists saw in the 1930s (ie. voting rights, union drives) were more practical than "pure."  By tying the goals of Southern communism to the goals of labor, activists were able to achieve so much more than they would have had they followed the instructions of Northern communists and/or Comintern to the letter.  I'll close with Kelley's own musings on this sentiment:

"Alabama's black cadre interpreted Communism through the lenses of their own cultural world and the international movement of which they were now a part. Far from being a slumbering mass waiting for Communist direction, black working people entered the movement with a rich culture of opposition that sometimes contradicted, sometimes reinforced the Left's vision of class struggle. The Party offered more than a vehicle for social contestation; it offered a framework for understanding the roots of poverty and racism, linked local struggles to world politics, challenged not only the hegemonic ideology of white supremacy but the petit bourgeois racial politics of the black middle class, and created an atmosphere in which ordinary people could analyze, discuss, and criticize the society in which they lived. "

A Brief History of Neoliberalism - David Harvey (link)

"For any way of thought to become dominant, a conceptual apparatus has to be advanced that appeals to our intuitions and instincts, to our values and our desires, as well as to the possibilities inherent in the social world we inhabit. If successful, this conceptual apparatus becomes so embedded in common sense as to be taken for granted and not open to question. The founding figures of neoliberal thought took political ideals of human dignity and individual freedom as fundamental as 'the central values of civilization'. In so doing they chose wisely, for these are indeed compelling and seductive ideals. These values, they held, were threatened not only by fascism, dictatorships, and communism, but by all forms of state intervention that substituted collective judgements for those of individuals free to choose."

The word neoliberalism invokes a lot of ire.  It's often described as overly simplistic and without definition, and its ostensible adherents claim that the phenomenon that it describes can't possibly explain our modern world.  This book makes quick work of demolishing these foolish arguments and more.  Neoliberalism (best thought of as the belief that reliance on free markets and private property best serve to advance human flourishing) is indeed real; so real in fact that it is our all-encompassing and thus inescapable hegemonic organization of society.  The corporal form this ideology has taken is that of a unified capital class that performs its brand of imperialism through financial might rather than by direct force.  Harvey speaks in great detail about what this is, how it came to be, and what is required to defeat it, but what's most useful about this book is what is described in the passage above.  Neoliberalism didn't come to power solely by force; rather, its forebears took great pain to launder the success of their project through the ideal of "freedom," at least as they imagine it.  In doing so, the tenets of neoliberalism have become the "common sense" of the land, serving as a "benevolent mask" for what is truly an odious ideology.  The result for the common man is the "fierce repression of all solidarities" which has led to our current state of anomie and alienation.

While the book is admittedly somewhat of a broken record about this central thesis, Harvey is able to expand his narrative just enough to make it sufficiently holistic.  Perhaps the best connection he draws is how neoliberalism has co-opted and thus neutered women's liberation and more generally, feminism itself.  Harvey wrote this book 8 years before "Lean In" was a thing, but he seems to understand how disadvantaged groups are made to bear the brunt of neoliberalism's toll, while receiving only hollow representation as a reward.  He then links this phenomenon back to consumerism by saying "women be shoppin" only in a much smarter way:

"For those who successfully negotiate the labour market there are seemingly abundant rewards in the world of a capitalist consumer culture. Unfortunately, that culture, however spectacular, glamorous, and beguiling, perpetually plays with desires without ever conferring satisfactions beyond the limited identity of the shopping mall and the anxieties of status by way of good looks (in the case of women) or of material possessions. 'I shop therefore I am' and possessive individualism together construct a world of pseudo-satisfactions that is superficially exciting but hollow at its core."

Finally, apropos of absolutely nothing, I liked this section on how seemingly dumb culture war items should not be inherently dismissed as a vehicle for liberation:

"The so-called 'culture wars'—however misguided some of them may have been—cannot be sloughed off as some unwelcome distraction (as some on the traditional left argue) from class politics. Indeed, the rise of moral argument among the neoconservatives attests not only to the fear of social dissolution under an individualizing neoliberalism but also to the broad swaths of moral repugnance already in motion against the alienations, anomie, exclusions, marginalizations, and environmental degradations produced through the practices of neoliberalization. The transformation of that moral repugnance towards a pure market ethic into cultural and then political resistance is one of the signs of our times that needs to be read correctly rather than shunted aside."

 

In Conclusion,

My great experiment ended with me finishing 26 books in 2021, which is my personal best since...high school?  I could conclude with some very banal takes (it's nice to put down the phone for once, etc.) but instead I will offer one slightly less banal take: Things accepted as mainstream truth are anything but true, and the only way to learn this is to do the reading.  My year started with three directly provocative titles and ended with a book that refutes the hegemonic idea of American "freedom."  Much of what I read directly discussed how these false truths were weaved through faulty economics research, Zionist propaganda, and thinly-concealed race science.  Still other books detailed the mechanisms, power structures, and clandestine operations that created a reality that fostered the dismal worldview born of those false truths.  If you've read this far and take one thing from any of this, know that we live in the wake of the most effective propaganda machine in human history.  Eradicating that from your brain is humbling and takes a lot of work, but for me thus far, it has been worth it.