Review- Bagehot, “The English Constitution”

November 28, 2018 Peter BerardLeave a comment

Walter Bagehot, “The English Constitution” (1867) – I read this out of an interest in reactions to democracy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Many would bridle at even getting the word “react,” with its connotations of “reactionary,” so close to Walter Bagehot, such a liberal touchstone the Economist (which Bagehot edited) has a column named after him. I cede the differences between him and your “real” reactionaries but he is part of an early draft of the great western freakout about the masses and power.

I expected this to be more historical, but it is in fact a description of how Bagehot saw the English constitution as working when he was writing, just before the second big Reform Act hit that would grant something resembling universal manhood suffrage to the British people. It was also at or near the peak of British prestige on the world stage. Bagehot placed much of the success of the British government on the cabinet system — which united legislative and executive functions, he has no time for separation of power — and the differing but complementary effective and “dignified” parts of government, the latter including the House of Lords and the monarchy. The effective parts of the state, notionally democratic but really controlled by the best people with a stake in the system, took care of the effective bits, whilst the dignified parts of the state, while explicitly undemocratic, actually brought the masses in to the system by appealing to some supposed universal human penchant for mystery and ritual.

For a great liberal, he goes back to conservative talking points about the nature of the people and governance quite frequently. This is just how people (sometimes the British in specific, sometimes everyone) just are and will always remain. For one thing, it ignored a lot of what was going on with the working classes in Britain, who as E.P. Thompson showed were engaged in a flurry of self-education and had been for most of a century by the time Bagehot was writing. Secondly, like I was lamenting earlier, these figures never make clear what, exactly, about elite education really makes them the only ones who can govern. If anything, much of their education was wildly impractical, which just goes to show nobody is entirely ignorant of their own interest, American voting behavior notwithstanding. But in the end, even if you accept the general premise or take it as a given for this kind of literature, Bagehot — and in my experience, British reactionaries, conservatives, and conservative-liberals (with few honorable exceptions, like Wyndham Lewis) do not bring the same analytical depth or literary imagination to bear on their reactionary visions as their continental counterparts did. I tend to assume this is because the British were so much stronger and more complacent during the nineteenth century, and it seems to me that Bagehot exemplifies this- the sort of attitude the Economist tries to cop. ***

Review- Brontë, “Wuthering Heights”

November 26, 2018 Peter BerardLeave a comment

Emily Brontë, “Wuthering Heights” (1847) – Part of me wants to just link to the video for that Kate Bush song, but that would just be a bid for cheap likes. More than anything, Wuthering Heights was a surprise for me, much like it was for the critics who read it at the time. I wasn’t scandalized by it like they were, but I was surprised by the raw, wild quality of the emotions and the actions impelled by them in this book. It’s a stark contrast from other “respectable” Victorian writers. Everyone continually blackmails each other’s futures by leveraging landed positions and unlikely attractions (like anyone’s attraction to Heathcliff, who I guess gets away with it because of his craggy brow or however she phrases it) to either steal other people’s land or set up some kind of awful marriage. People get stabbed and falsely imprisoned and set upon by dogs. It’s a mess! Along with being more extreme in its action than a lot of Victorian novels, this one also gets to the points it’s making somewhat quicker, without the mannered pace common at the time. I also always enjoy a third-party narrator in a story, though that might enter into the feeling of repetition I had towards the end- but that might just be the nature of the story.

Maybe I’m influenced by other criticism I’ve read, but I do think the historical context — setting the novel at the turn of the nineteenth century when she was writing in the late 1840s — is meant to convey a message about the worth and sustainability of all of these high-romantic feelings and gothic tropes. Cathy and Hareton might not be much, emotionally, next to Heathcliff and Catherine, but at least it’s an actual match and not someone’s lover’s revenge turned into a state-sanctified marriage pact. All in all, a satisfactory read, would wuther these heights again. ****’

Review- Slotkin, “The Fatal Environment”

November 25, 2018 Peter BerardLeave a comment

Richard Slotkin, “The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800-1890” (1985) – This is the second in Richard Slotkin’s trilogy of books on the myth of the frontier in American life. This one covers the nineteenth century, and benefits from Slotkin having gotten most of the theory — especially the Jung and Campbell — out of his system in the first volume. Slotkin reads the literature of nineteenth century America — especially the sort of frontier writing we tend to forget but which was much more popular than the rarified names like Melville and Hawthorne we remember — along the lines of the historical crises of the frontier.

The frontier myth — the notion that social conflict can be resolved by people moving to the frontier, wherever it is instead of resolving issues at home — is one of the most powerful ideological solvents we’ve seen in modern history. But it’s considerably more delicate than we appreciate. The frontier can also be seen as a site of degeneration and danger. More pressingly in the nineteenth century, there’s always been the threat of the frontier closing. This was true both in the imagination — how “open” a frontier is is a question of opinion, after all — and in fact. Americans in the mid-nineteenth century were genuinely unsure about their expansive possibilities, between Mexican and British opposition and the sheer size and climatological variance of the trans-Mississippi West.

This led to some interesting ideological fantasies. Some Philadelphian wrote a sort of Philadelphia-apocalypse where, without the safety valve of the west, urban industrial society loses all financial and sexual morality until mobs just roam the street burning everything. Northerners tried to sell the Lowell mills and Southerners tried to pitch the plantations as potential solvents for the sort of social conflict westward expansion was supposed to solve.

Of course, the US wound up stealing half of Mexico and convincing Britain that Oregon wasn’t worth it. But something funny happened- Mexico didn’t quite fit the American frontier fantasy. It was too densely populated- Americans worried that they would wind up like their image of the Spanish, mixing with the Mexicans and ruling them over in a way that degenerated their faculties or whatever the nineteenth century racist jargon would be. Along with that, the Mexican conquest brought in enough territory to set north and south fighting over whose social system would prevail in the spoils, especially California. Both were terrified of a societal collapse if the wrong system prevailed in the west. We know how that wound up.

There’s also a lot of stuff in here about Custer, but truth be told that was less interesting to me. Slotkin is a somewhat “thesis-heavy” writer, and the Custer-as-metaphor thing is something he leans heavy on in the second half of the book. But when he gets away from that, his encyclopedic knowledge of American cultural history returns dividends to the reader. Among other things, I really want to read that Philadelphia apocalypse book and see if it features Gritty. ****’

Review- Levison, “Dog Eats Dog”

November 13, 2018 Peter BerardLeave a comment

Iain Levison, “Dog Eats Dog” (2008) – Bank robbers, FBI agents, and worst of all, humanities professors populate this fast little crime read. Bank robber Dixon winds up in New Hampshire after a botched bank robbery, with a gunshot wound and a quarter million in cash. He stumbles across Professor Elias White — the sort of young academic utterly uninterested in his subject area (history!) but very interested in career climbing many of us have encountered — in the act with an underage girl. Dixon blackmails White into hiding him and helping out. An FBI agent driven to cynicism by her sexism-stalled career comes up to New Hampshire chasing dirty bills and White now has multiple sides to play.

The book is fun, and deeply cynical, a crime novel without the center of a comparatively good character, a detective or whatever. If anything, Dixon comes across the best as he’s least dishonest or sadistic, though he also forces people to do things at gunpoint. White is a well-realized slimeball and if Levison doesn’t get the gritty details of the history profession exactly right, he gets it right enough. Lupo, the fed, has less clear motivations than the others, but the siren song of easy advancement through crooked mean calls to her too. All in all, a good, rotten airplane read. ****

Review- Jama-Everett, “The Entropy of Bones”

November 11, 2018 Peter BerardLeave a comment

Ayize Jama-Everett, “The Entropy of Bones” (2015) – I’ve seen kung fu movies, but I’d never read a kung fu novel before this one. It’s the story of Chabi, a teenage girl growing up on a houseboat in the Bay Area who, after some training from an eccentric old Indian guy, is capable of running fifty miles in a couple of hours every day and breaking every bone in someone’s body in a matter of seconds. The latter feat is accomplished not by strength tuning in to the titular entropy already extant in the bones themselves. All of this is imparted like it’s obvious common sense, which makes it more fun.

Obviously there’s something special about Chabi in terms of her physical capabilities. She’s also mute, but can speak psychically. This didn’t make much sense to me as a character feature until a minor reveal at the end. The book in general has a kind of loose, almost conversational rhythm, like Jama-Everett is telling you these stories over beers. Loose, but well-structured (like a barroom story one has told many times)- the details of Chabi’s powers, and the world she’s a part of, come out naturally. The world of the story is similarly tossed-together in the best way: entropy beings versus “liminals,” super-powered people like Chabi, and a few demigods and time travel thrown in.

Chabi winds up working for some suspiciously pretty hotel magnates once Narayana, her sensei, disappears on her. She knows there’s something wrong with them but can’t work out what. When a friendly demigod of the wind comes from the future and hips her to the whole entropy-being thing, she puts two and two together and realizes maybe Narayana wasn’t on the side of the continued existence after all, which is a bummer. She gets it together enough to fight a bunch of other superpowered fighters in a big final tournament the baddies put on, but of course she can’t fix the whole thing or there wouldn’t be a future conflict for the wind guy to come back from, would there? No, the forces of rhythm and weed (this guy likes weed) will have to continue to battle the forces of entropy. In all, this book was pretty fun and I’m going to look up some of the rest of his work. ****’

Review- Washington, “Up From Slavery”

November 7, 2018November 8, 2018 Peter BerardLeave a comment

Booker T. Washington, “Up From Slavery” (1903) – I picked this up at a library sale because it’s historically important, and Modern Library ranked it #3 on its list of great nonfiction works of the 20th century- the highest black writer, ranked above works by W.E.B. Du Bois, Malcolm X, Richard Wright, and so on. To be fair it is a pretty conservative list, with “The Education of Henry Adams” topping it. But still, a big claim.

It’s not my place to adjudicate political fights within communities not my own. I will say that Washington has not gained in popularity since the 1960s, where the introducer to my copy discusses him as someone worth reading basically out of opposition. I’m told there’s an edition with an introduction by Ishmael Reed, a politically protean and contrarian figure, which I’d like to read. His rival, Du Bois, is name checked with more and more frequency, from where I’m sitting, and Washington primarily exists as a foil to him and the black freedom struggle.

Washington doesn’t do himself many favors in this book. His writing working class black people speaking in minstrel dialect would be enough to cost him legitimacy if he wrote even a few decades later. “Up From Slavery,” which is largely repackaged from his speeches, contains a kernel of an interesting story- Washington was indeed born a slave and wound up a quasi-official spokesman for his community, running a sort of millet system out of his school, the Tuskegee Institute.

But you don’t really learn much about how this happened. As far as Washington is concerned, it happened because he wanted it, he worked for it, and some white people were nice to him. That’s it. It gets more interesting when Washington spitefully depicts — often enough imagines — the dreadful fates of black people who pursue other values, like formal education, political power, and simple human enjoyment. Respectability and work — whatever work the white man deigns to give him — is the black man’s only way forward. Washington believes this to the point of intentionally degrading black political efforts during Reconstruction, bragging about seeing former black politicians reduced to servile work and drunkenness. It’s fucked up. Apparently, he took that attitude to Tuskegee, to the point where he scolded some of his own professors for carrying books around.

It’s possible to spare a little sympathy for the impossible position figures like Washington were in after the failure of Reconstruction. I wasn’t kidding in comparing his situation to the millet system- a minority at the mercy of a capricious and violent ruling majority, he tried, like the Armenian leadership before the Ottomans turned to genocide, to make himself and his community into whatever shape wouldn’t call down heat. Of course, it didn’t work, not for the Armenians or the German Jews or Iraqi Shia or American black people. How to rate something like this? A historical document written in fairly pompous late 19th century oratorical style, about disputes in a community not my own but touching on historical questions which effect us all… well, I base these ratings in the last case off of enjoyment, and this was a grim read. **

Review- Payne, “I’ve Got the Light of Freedom”

November 6, 2018 Peter BerardLeave a comment

Charles Payne, “I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: the Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle” (1995) – You can learn a lot about what some very small groups of twenty-somethings were up to in the 1960s, if you’re so inclined. Students for a Democratic Society and its offshoots and the LSD evangelists in the counterculture have dozens of monographs and memoirs dedicated to them as representative figures of their generation. There’s a growing literature on the conservative movement emerging out of the Goldwater campaign. To me, the most interesting of these small groups that have gotten so much historiographical attention are the civil rights workers in the Deep South in the early to mid 1960s, coalescing around the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC.

I’ve already read enough about SNCC to recognize the basic narrative arc — humble beginnings, perseverance in organizing, bold stands, national profile, splits, disillusionment even as they become a model for much of organizing thereafter — and a lot of the names. Charles Payne’s book situates SNCC and the campaigns it ran within a tradition and a place. SNCC didn’t invent the community organizing model — radical internal democracy, self-education, nonviolence, above all the encouragement of local grassroots leadership — but it did promulgate it throughout the Deep South and from there to sixties “movement” culture. Payne depicts the organizing tradition as bearing the deep stamp of Ella Baker, a massive behind-the-scenes influence on generations of civil rights and labor leaders. She was a transmission point of lessons learned in the earlier twentieth century to the young people who formed the backbone of SNCC.

Focusing specifically on the Mississippi Delta, Payne also embeds the SNCC story in place. It’s not as though SNCC just appeared and made change. Even in the most oppressed parts of the south, black people had organized themselves where they could, often under the NAACP (which was more or less legally purged out of existence in much of the south after the Brown decision). The organizing model SNCC employed melded well with the local organizing traditions of older Mississippi black activists, even if there were always points of conflict.

“I’ve Got the Light of Freedom” is essentially social history of an old school bent, though differing from the classic British social historians in that it deals with material that living people could detail to the historian. You get very granular stories of what happened, when and why, in Greenwood and other Delta towns, tied in to thematic chapters. Payne demurs when it comes to explaining SNCC’s divisions and downfall, except to repudiate the idea that we should be focused on the decision to get white people out of the movement- as he points out, it’s not as though the black people in it were all of accord, before or after that decision. He seems to point to the idea that beyond a certain scope of both time and organizational size, dedication to the slow, patient work this sort of organizing entails is hard to maintain. People want something bigger, both in terms of results and in terms of personal reward. This makes sense, and raises questions for this model, as important and inspirational as it’s been ever since. ****’

Review- Shaw, “The Nazi Hunter”

November 1, 2018November 1, 2018 Peter BerardLeave a comment

Bynum Shaw, “The Nazi Hunter” (1968) – I picked this up off the free pile at the Brookline Public Library based on its cover and title. It was written in the wake of the capture and trial of Adolf Eichmann, along with debates about the scanty denazification of West Germany. Shaw was an American journalist who worked West Germany for a number of years, and it shows. He has opinions about cities (Bonn, Cologne, etc) and writes very “German” Germans, declarative, rules-bound, and still willing to vote for ex-Nazis. The titular character, who goes most of the novel with the name Streik, is a glowering Czech camp survivor who, well, hunts Nazis. He works with a Wiesenthal-style organization but is a little too hardcore for them. It’s hinted he was involved with the Eichmann capture but for the most part he kills Nazis and makes it look like an accident. For the most part, Streik is a standard midcentury super-spy in the Bond/Bourne mold. Closer to Bourne- the beige post-war Europe he works in, his tragic backstory, etc. Moreover, uh, spoilers I guess: he has a tragic end, where his devotion to killing Nazis lets him do massive collateral damage to get the big bad, and some of that collateral damage is his love interest. Was Shaw trying to get across the idea of “antinazism, but too much?” In real life, these Nazi-hunters were pretty scrupulous about getting the right man and only the right man and taking them alive- the Israelis could have killed Eichmann several times over with all the effort they put into getting him out of the country for trial. Probably, this is more about how revenge is bad, the usual thing. This is a fast, reasonably fun read but nothing mind-blowing. ***

Too Much Berard

Month: November 2018