After the Dance by Edwidge Dandicat

Source of book: Audiobook from the library

 

I actually have had another Dandicat book on my list, but this one came up as available on audiobook when I needed a title. 

 

Edwidge Dandicat is a Haitian-born American author who considers herself both Haitian and American - both places are home. While best known for novels and short stories, this particular book of hers is non-fiction. It is all about Carnival at Jacmel, a world-renowned event that, ironically, the author was not allowed to attend as a child. Her fundamentalist uncle impressed upon her that Carnival gave one demons. Yeah, the whole shebang that I got all too often as a child from my mother, the fear of demons lurking in anything seen as too exuberant, too little straight laced. And, if one is honest, anything rooted in a pagan past involving people with brown skin. (After all, no one ever got demons from a Christmas tree, right?) 

 

The book centers on her return to Jacmel for Carnival as an adult. She talks with the organizers, explores side quests in the area, and discusses literature and history as well as her own experiences. The various masks and character types are analyzed, along with the mythology and roots of the celebration. It’s a pretty fun book. 

 

Dandicat talks about the history of Haiti, from the first successful rebellion of the enslaved, through the various coups and dictatorships. She also mentions authors such as Rene Depestre and his fascinating zombie novel, Hadriana In All My Dreams, which I loved. 

 

Because I listened to it on audiobook over the course of a couple weeks, I don’t have notes. I will say I enjoyed the colorful descriptions of the traditional characters, the history, and the literature. 

 

I wasn’t as thrilled about the audiobook, however. Much of this is due to the fact that the author narrated it. Not all authors should read their books, and I think Dandicat is one of those. 

 

First, her reading was slow and plodding. I almost never increase the speed on audiobooks, but I had to go at +10% just to keep the book from dragging. 

 

Second, I am going to go out on a limb and say that English is not her first spoken language. (French is the official language of Haiti.) It isn’t that Dandicat doesn’t command English well - in print, her writing is fluid and fluent. The problem is that, like homeschoolers like me, she often mispronounces words because she presumably learned them from reading, not speaking. It was enough words to be distracting. 

 

On the plus side, her pronunciation of Haitian names and places is delicious. Her storytelling was good too, but it felt like she was laboring over reading the script at times, which detracted from that feeling of a personal story. Reading aloud isn’t everyone’s strength, and I feel in this case that it would have been better had the author had someone else do the reading. 

 

That said, this is a fascinating book, and definitely worth picking up. World culture is something that all of us, in a globalized world, would do well to learn. Haiti has been all too often denigrated as backwards and dark, and was even blamed (unfairly) for the AIDS epidemic. This glosses over the way the white world punished Haiti for its slave rebellion and self-seized freedom, and the way the United States has propped up brutal dictators in that country while withholding the resources that would have enabled it to become more self-sufficient. It’s a sad story in and of itself - but not really recounted in this book, per se. The book is more about the rich culture and history of a place and people who are underrated. 

 

 

 

Swamplandia! by Karen Russell

Source of book: Borrowed from the library

 

This was our book club selection this month for the Literary Lush Book Club. I didn’t specifically have this one on my list, but it did make the Pulitzer finalist list back in 2011. The book was nominated by my wife. 

 

Swamplandia! is a bit of a difficult book to completely classify. It is kind of Southern Gothic in mood and in the grotesque and malevolent characters. But it isn’t about the Southern aristocracy. Rather the opposite, as it deals with low class white characters, mostly. It is definitely high quality writing, but also feels more accessible than much of modern literary fiction. It is a coming of age story - two of them, really. And it is also about the trauma of the loss of a parent. And it is also seriously funny in many places. 

 

It also does have a scene where a 12 year old girl is raped, so be warned if that will be an issue for you. (It’s not particularly graphic, it isn’t long, it is a key moment in the plot, and the victim is able to assert herself afterward in a positive way.)

 

Swamplandia! is the title, but it is also the name of the fifth-rate amusement park/tourist trap in the Ten Thousand Islands area of the western Florida coast run by the family at the center of the book. The exclamation point is important in both names.

 

The park centers around alligators, with the highlight being the high dive into an alligator pit performed by the mother, Hilola Bigtree. Running this place has been a generational effort, since the patriarch got scammed into buying worthless land back in the day. He created a pretendian back story, complete with a “museum” of family artifacts, and a whole mythology of primordial gator wrestling.  

 

Problems arise, however, when Grandpa Sawtooth gets dementia and has to be placed in a facility. And then Hilola dies of cancer, leaving “The Chief,” the father of the family, and his three children, to manage a park that suddenly has no main event and eventually no customers. 

 

The Chief leaves for the mainland, ostensibly for “business,” leaving the children to fend for themselves amid a mountain of debts and boredom. 

 

First, the oldest, Kiwi, leaves and goes to work for low wages at the competing park, The World of Darkness - a thoroughly tacky Hell-based experience. Then, the middle child, Osceola, has a mental break, decides she is in love with a ghost from a dredge accident back during the Depression, and elopes with him. 

 

This leaves twelve-year-old Ava all alone, until she meets with the mysterious Bird Man, who convinces her to set off with him for the gates of the underworld to look for Osceola. 

 

Thereafter, there are two main threads. Kiwi’s experience working and trying to get his high school diploma is social satire and humor, although with an edge of ambivalence, as Kiwi feels guilt for leaving yet also loves being independent. 

 

The other thread is Ava’s journey through the islands of the mangroves searching for her sister. 

 

Because the writing is excellent, the book draws you into the world completely. Even though things feel a bit exaggerated and over the top, they really aren't, for the most part. The tacky tourist traps of this sort used to be an American phenomenon, particularly along well-traveled routes like the old Route 66 here in the western US. There are ghost parks all over the country, particularly east of the Mississippi, and rotting roadside “attractions” out west. 

 

Really, the only potentially unrealistic element is the supernatural. I mean, are the ghosts real? Does Osceola actually see and talk to them? Is the old laundry witch the ghost of the historical figure? The answers to these questions are unclear - the book leaves a lot of ambiguity, not least because the story is told mostly from Ava and Kiwi’s respective perspectives. Kiwi doesn’t believe in the supernatural. And Ava never does see or hear any ghosts, so she is skeptical. 

 

The ending isn’t exactly tragic - the beginning is really more so - but like any significant transition, it is painful. Life can never just go one the way it has. People die, children grow up, tourist tastes change, society moves on. 

 

There are some excellent lines in the book. In the passage on how the “Indian” heritage was created, The Chief explains why creating the legend was so important:

 

“Tradition is as important, kids, as promotional materials are expensive.”

 

And promotional billboards, with purple prose and puffery are the central promotion for Swamplandia!

 

Although there was not a drop of Seminole or Miccosukee blood in us, the Chief always costumed us in tribal apparel for the photographs he took. He said we were “our own Indians.” 

 

As the kids get older, however, they start to see through all of this, with even Ava, the kid who believes most in the park, realizing that her dad looks pretty silly in his fake regalia. 

 

As someone who works with seniors a lot in my legal practice, as well as nursing home and Medicaid issues, I did have to laugh a little at the description of the care home. 

 

The seniors got issued these pastel pajamas that made them look like Easter eggs in wheelchairs. If you went to visit, that’s what you saw: Easter eggs in these adult cribs, Easter eggs on toilets with guardrails. 

 

Don’t get me wrong here. I advocate for good care, and help people get it when they need it. And I do have a lot of respect for the many good people who care for our elders, often at criminally low wages. This was just a fun visual, and a bit of a gentle dig at the way institutions do things. 

 

The best satire comes in the Kiwi-narrated chapters. He finds himself - a sheltered homeschooled kid from a rather eccentric family - suddenly thrust into a strange world. A guy named Vijay takes him under his wing, not always in the most sensible way, but in ways that are quite funny. 

 

There are also the usual suspects, the sort of losers who tend to bully anyone who is different. One is described by Kiwi in his own mind. 

 

Oh my God, you are not even an original asshole! You are a plagiarist of assholes.

 

Yep, most assholes are. If they had imagination, they probably wouldn’t be assholes. 

 

Throughout the book, the author fills in the history of the area. The Everglades have long been targeted for draining and exploitation, yet they have resisted human control. From the sale of worthless land, to the dredging that never did open waterways, to the many attempts to create arable land in the swamp. 

 

In one case, trees were imported from Australia, and seeded throughout the swamp. The intent was that the trees would stabilize the soil, and eventually be cut down so crops could be planted. This failed spectacularly, with the new trees becoming an invasive weed, crowding out native plants, and making dense, impassible, unclearable miles of wasteland. 

 

The trees were a species of Melaleuca, which is something that my own family has a history with. There are lots of species, and the ones introduced to Florida were not the same as the “tea tree” ones that are the source of a particular oil claimed to have medicinal properties. Back in the 1990s, my late grandfather, who kind of dabbled in this and that - he was a real estate agent in his 60s and 70s as his most steady form of employment - sold tea tree oil through a MLM. My family went along with it, as it was a fairly harmless hobby, and it also gave the rest of the family a chance to subsidize income for my grandfather, who didn’t have much retirement savings. 

 

As a homeschool kid, I did find the approach to homeschooling in this book to be nuanced. On the one hand, the Bigtree kids lack contact with other kids - the geographical isolation is the main cause of that. However, they seem to get fairly good, if quirky, academic training. As Ava notes, there were gaps, but there were also things they learned that other kids did not. Grandpa Sawtooth taught them about the forgotten history, the black laborers left to die in a hurricane, the indigenous peoples forced off their lands, the marginalized communities that the government never bothered to help or even connect to the mainland. 

 

“Prejudice,” as defined by Sawtooth Bigtree, was a kind of prehistoric arithmetic - a “damn fool math” - in which some people counted and others did not. It meant white names on white headstones in the big cemetery on Cypress Point, and black and brown bodies buried in swamp water. 

 

This is a brilliant insight. The MAGA movement is at its heart a primal scream that “Those People Do Not Count!” As the official position of the State of Florida, as articulated by its attorney, “woke” is the belief that there is systemic injustice and the need to do something about it. For MAGA, this is unacceptable. They are either in denial that injustice exists, or, more typically, they not only do not give a fuck about injustice, they wish there was a lot more of it in their favor. 

 

Much of the book is the story of Ava, and her interior life is described throughout. I thought the author did a good job of making this interesting and relatable without making Ava into a full adult. She feels like a girl on the brink of womanhood, which she is. This line struck me as good:

 

Why was my mind feasting on the worst pictures? 

 

This is a very human tendency, right? Always imagine the most horrible possibility. It is tough to blame Ava, of course, at this point in the story. The worst has already happened. Her coming of age happens when she faces things, lets go of the past (through a somewhat symbolic act of giving up her pet baby alligator to save herself), and takes her own rescue into her own hands. 

 

Kiwi too starts to see things differently with experience. I thought this epiphany was a good one.

 

There was a story that travelled around the islands about a woman named Mama Weeds. A swamp witch. But now Kiwi saw that there were witches everywhere in the world. Witches lining up for free grocery bags of battered tuna cans and half-rotted carrots at the downtown Loomis Army of Mercy. At the bus station, witches telling spells to walls. Only the luckiest ones got to live inside stories. The rest were homeless, pushing carts like this one. They sank out of sight, like the European witches clutching their stones. 

 

I guess that is a good example of this book. It can be very funny, an engrossing story that draws you in, a horror show, a satire, a musing on life and society. And all of it a once. It’s a worthwhile book. 

The Magnificent Ambersons by Booth Tarkington

Source of book: I own this

 

Quick trivia question: who are the four writers to have won the Pulitzer for fiction more than once? 

 

If you answered “William Faulkner,” or “John Updike,” good work. If you answered “Colson Whitehead,” congratulations - you know your modern literature. (And if you didn’t know that, go read some Whitehead already!) 

 

I would imagine, however, that most of us - me included - would have no idea that the fourth author was Newton Booth Tarkington. 

 

Unless you, like me, read Tarkington’s classics of children’s literature, the Penrod books, you may well have never heard of him. My wife, though, has read a whole bunch of his books, because she is unusual. 

 

The fact of the matter is that Tarkington had the opposite career arc of many great artists. During his lifetime, he was considered one of America’s greatest authors. He was celebrated, awarded, and beloved. 

 

And then, after his death, he fell into obscurity, and these days is rarely mentioned at all. 

 

So what happened? It isn’t entirely clear. One factor was probably simply changing tastes. Tarkington wrote more about the past than the present or future. Although he did satirize the upper classes, some modern critics claim that he didn’t really challenge the social structures of his time. It is also probable that two world wars changed the world so much that the American interest in pre-war society faded away, in a way it did not in, say, Great Britain. 

 

In any case, Tarkington had his moment, and then was largely forgotten. 

 

Tarkington lived a fascinating life, though, and I found his writing to be quite good. 

 

Born in 1869, Tarkington came from a wealthy, connected family. He was named after his uncle, Newton Booth, who was at the time the governor of California. He attended Princeton, although he missed graduation by one class. He hobnobbed with Woodrow Wilson and other young luminaries of the time. 

 

His family lost much of its wealth in the Panic of 1873, although they recovered enough to afford education, unlike the Ambersons of this book. Tarkington himself would eventually be elected to the Indiana legislature, act in his own plays, and have a string of best selling novels for both adults and children. 

 

And, as I noted, during his lifetime, he was a celebrated author, much loved and much purchased. 

 

The Magnificent Ambersons is technically the middle book of a trilogy about the family, although it is by far the best known. 

 

I found this book at a used book store during our most recent Utah Shakespeare Festival visit. I was surprised to find it in the edition I did. Back when I was a teen, I started collecting hardbacks from the Readers Digest World’s Best Reading series. Do not confuse these with the condensed books - these are middlebrow unabridged hardbacks that are durable and sit well in the hand, even if they are not the real fancy boxed set quality. I have nearly 100 of these, all purchased used, often from thrift stores, but had not seen a title I didn’t already own in years. This was published in 2005, which is pretty late in the series. 

 

The book deals with the slow, then rapid decline of a prominent Midwestern family. The Ambersons came by their money during the Panic, prospering where others lost money. But, as the generations went on, they squandered and spent their wealth, at the same time that their town (modeled on Indianapolis) grew and changed. 

 

As much as the decline of the Ambersons, the book is about what the author perceived as the decline of the city. From a beautiful small town centered around estates like the Amberson estate, the coming of the automobile led to suburban sprawl, pollution, and perhaps worst of all, lots of new and newly rich people (and immigrants) who all had no idea of taste or history and thus forgot all about the old rich like the Ambersons. 

 

Tarkington loathed the automobile - largely on environmental grounds, and he wasn’t exactly wrong, in retrospect. This is evident not merely in this book, but in his other writings. 

 

The pollution today is actually less than when the book was written, when coal-fired factories blackened houses and lungs throughout the Rust Belt. Tarkington definitely brings out this negative change of early 20th Century urban life. 

 

The central protagonist of the book, young Georgie Amberson Minafer, has to be one of the least likeable in literature. He is kind of an anti-hero, but rather than being actively bad, he is merely an entitled, spoiled, clueless rich fuck. At least until the end, when circumstances finally force him to grow up. 

 

My wife and I had the discussion about whether he is a narcissist, like the Dear Orange Leader, who similarly is who he is because of obscene wealth and privilege as a child. I tend to think that Georgie is not a narcissist, because while he is entitled, he doesn’t really need to be the center of the universe. And, he is able to become self-aware eventually, and can choose to live less selfishly, something narcissists are not really able to do. 

 

Georgie’s grandfather, a Union Major during the Civil War, is the one who established the family fortune, and built a magnificent mansion in the new town. His three children have taken different paths. George never married. Amelia married Sydney, but they are childless and have taken their share of the estate and moved to France. 

 

It was left to the gorgeous and charming Isabell to carry on the family name. 

 

She had the pick of two eligible young men. For a time, it seemed she would choose the ambitious and dashing Eugene Morgan, but after an episode where he drank too much and accidentally broke a string bass at a party, she dumped him and chose the boring but steady Wilber Minafer. 

 

Their child, Georgie, grew up with a largely absent and uninvolved father, and a smothering, spoiling mother. With predictable results. 

 

Later, as an adult, Georgie still hasn’t improved, and many who know the family secretly hope he gets his comeuppance. 

 

At this point, age and ill health start catching up with the older generations. Eugene Morgan’s wife dies, leaving him with the beautiful and sharp witted Lucy, who falls in love with Georgie. 

 

Wilber Minafer dies, leaving his business affairs in shambles. Isabell generously leaves the life insurance to Wilber’s spinster sister Fanny, who otherwise would have nothing. 

 

With the Major in ill health, and the wealth of the Ambersons looking ever more questionable, Georgie and Isabell remain oblivious. 

 

What sparks the central conflict of the story is that Eugene has never stopped loving Isabell, and, a decent time after Wilber’s death, comes courting. 

 

Georgie is furious for reasons he cannot entirely articulate. But what he can speak out loud is that the town gossips are claiming that Isabell was cheating on Wilber with Eugene before she was a widow. This infuriates Georgie, and, of course, he makes everything worse and worse and worse with his foolish actions. 

 

From there, everything slowly, then rapidly goes to hell. I won’t spoil anything further if I can help it. 

 

As I noted, the writing is excellent throughout. The characters are believable, the descriptions evocative, and the story compelling. The satire of both old money and new money is spot on. The class obsessions we Americans claim not to have but in fact spend far too much time reinforcing are pointedly skewered.  It really is a shame that Tarkington fell out of fashion, because this was a quite enjoyable and interesting book. 

 

I wrote down some lines to share, of course. 

 

Shifting fashions of shape replaced aristocracy of texture: dressmakers, shoemakers, hatmakers, and tailors, increasing in cunning and in power, found means of making new clothes old. 

 

That’s gold right there. As one who still wears largely the same style as I did 25 years ago, I am with the author here. And also with this one, the antithesis of the McMansion style. 

 

At the beginning of the Ambersons’ great period most of the houses of the Midland town were of a pleasant architecture. They lacked style, but also lacked pretentiousness, and whatever does not pretend at all has style enough. 

 

One thing I was not at all expecting in this book was to run across what I had thought was a modern term. As with many books of this era, there are offensive racial terms that would have been in common use. For example, most of the book, the black staff are referred to as “darkies.” 

 

But there is one spot, during the first chapter, when the author describes the usual few servants the rich family had, he notes that a female servant was usually Irish or German or Scandinavian - a recently arrived immigrant. But in a few cases, the servant might be “a person of color.” How about that? 

 

Georgie, like all the Ambersons, fails to understand the changes of the times. In particular, he believes that automobiles are a fad that will soon fade away. He even tells Lucy Morgan that her father had better not waste his time making them in his factory. Fortunately for him, Eugene continues making them, and eventually becomes filthy rich as a result. 

 

There are a number of passages that illuminate Georgie’s character, and his inability to see any future different from the present. One of the most poignant is where he explains that he has zero intention of ever working for a living. He assumes he can and will be a gentleman of leisure. As he puts it, he has no intention of “doing anything.” He wants to “be something, not do something.” He sees himself as having family pride to uphold - “what it means to be an Amberson in this town.” 

 

Later, he would expound on this to Lucy. 

 

“I never have been able to see any occasion for a man’s going into trade, or being a lawyer, or any of those things if his position and family were such that he didn’t need to.”

 

I am reminded a lot of a modern version of this, the woman (and her family) who sees no need to have a career, because she will simply be a stay-at-home mom. Like Georgie, I have seen all too many who found out too late that they did not in fact have the position and family to avoid the need to support themselves. 

 

I also found a fun connection with another author of a similar era, Sinclair Lewis.

 

In his bitterness, George uttered a significant monosyllable.

 

Cue Elmer Gantry and the “nine Saxon physiological monosyllables.” 

 

Another one comes from Lucy, who is both in love with Georgie and frustrated at his immaturity. 

 

“He does anything he likes to, without any regard for what people think. Then why should he mind so furiously when the least little thing reflects upon him, or on anything or anybody connected with him?”

 

As her father tells her, “That’s one of the greatest puzzles of human vanity…” 

 

There is a line about Wilber’s lack of involvement in Georgie’s life that I also thought was perceptive and well written. 

 

It needed only the sight of that forever inert semblance of the quiet man who had been always so quiet a part of his son’s life - so quiet a part that George had seldom been consciously aware that his father was indeed a part of his life. 

 

Eugene would later note something else about Georgie, this time to Uncle George. 

 

Eugene laughed. “You need only three things to explain all that’s good and bad about Georgie.” 

“Three?”

“He’s Isabell’s only child. He’s an Amberson. He’s a boy.”

“Well, Mister Bones, of these three things which are the good ones and which are the bad ones.”

“All of them,” said Eugene. 

 

One of the most significant mistakes that Georgie makes is in how he chooses to deal with gossip. In this, he is a lot like the Orange Dear Leader in that he lashes out in an attempt to control and exert power and privilege. Which is, of course, the worst way to deal with gossip. As Uncle George tells him:

 

“Gossip is never fatal, Georgie, until it is denied. Gossip goes on about every human being alive and about all the dead that are alive enough to be remembered, and yet almost never does any harm until some defender makes a controversy. Gossip’s a nasty thing, but it’s sickly, and if people of good intentions will let it entirely alone, it will die, ninety-nine times out of a hundred.”

 

The last one that I noted was a line about psychics and spiritualists, which I think is pretty accurate. 

 

Mrs. Horner spoke of herself as a “psychic”; but otherwise she seemed oddly unpretentious and matter-of-fact; and Eugene had no doubt at all of her sincerity. He was sure that she was not an intentional fraud, and though he departed in a state of annoyance with himself, he came to the conclusion that if any credulity were played upon by Mrs. Horner’s exhibitions, it was her own.

 

As I said, I enjoyed the book, and think it was well written. It is a shame that Tarkington somehow fell into obscurity. One wonders if he had lived a generation earlier if he would still be widely read and discussed today. Maybe sometimes timing and luck make more difference than we think. 

The Mousetrap by Agatha Christie (BCT 2025)

Back when I was in law school, our class took a trip to London (which a few of us extended into a two and a half week trip through parts of Western Europe). As our evenings were our own, a few of us decided to look for cheap last minute tickets for shows. The three we ended up seeing were Les Miserables, Phantom of the Opera, and The Mousetrap. These were the first professional stage productions I had seen since I was a kid. It was pretty cool sitting way up in the nosebleeds, where you could see the orchestra pit (for the musicals), and just generally get the cheap seat experience. 

 

The Mousetrap is the longest running show of all time, and it isn’t even close. It opened on the West End in 1952 - literally before my parents were born - and ran continuously until the Covid-19 pandemic closed all the theaters in 2020. It has since resumed, and is now well over 30,000 total performances. Estimated total attendance in London is more than 10 million. 

 

Which is why it is kind of funny that audiences are still advised to keep the twist ending secret. Surely a lot of people know it already, and attendance is probably not being risked by the spoiler almost 75 years after the play debuted. (Also, you can find the ending on Wikipedia if you really wish.) 

 

I am going to keep the ending secret, as I do for nearly all the mysteries I talk about on this blog. Call it respect for the most iconic stage mystery of all time. 

 

The Mousetrap is a classic of the “locked room” mystery genre. Due to a snowstorm, once the eight characters are trapped in the guesthouse of Monkswell Manor. When one of them is murdered, the others are the only potential suspects. 

 

We are gradually introduced to the characters after we first hear on the radio that a murder has been committed elsewhere, and the suspect still at large. 

 

There are the young couple running the guest house as a B&B sort of place, Molly and Giles Ralston. Without servants, they are run ragged trying to get everything done. 

 

Next to appear is Christopher Wren, an aspiring young architect, who is socially awkward and, (it is implied) gay, in an era when that was still criminalized. Next up are Major Metcalf, an amiable retired military man, and Mrs. Boyle, a decidedly not amiable older woman, full of complaints. Miss Casewell, a kind of “manish” young woman, who is standoffish, rounds out the registered guest list. 

 

Then, however, two others arrive. Mr. Paravincini arrives claiming his car is in a snowdrift, and wants a place to stay. He affects a foreign accent, but seems to be a bit of a fake. He is certainly an oddball, but the Ralstons have an available room which they let him rent. 

 

The final character is Sergeant Trotter, who skis in and says that he thinks the murderer - still at large - is headed there, because the address was on a piece of paper found at the crime scene. 

 

With the phones down, and the place cut off from the rest of the world, the stage is set. When one of the characters is murdered, who did it?

 

That is as far as I will go with the plot. 

 

Complications abound, because everyone is hiding something. Everyone. The secrets will eventually be unravelled as the play progresses, but there are clues early on. An astute viewer may be able to solve the mystery in advance. 

 

Since I had seen the play, I already knew the plot, so the thrill wasn’t in the surprise, but in how the characters are portrayed. 

 

In this version, I have to say that I think the casting was perfect. While not exactly the same as in the London version of years ago, our local thespians captured the essence of the characters, while bringing personal style to each. 

 

Most of the cast are regulars in local theater, and at BCT. There is one actor who debuted on stage in this production, however, and that is always fun to see. 

 

To start with, Joey Bedard (Giles) is one of the young actors here in town who has been on pretty much every local stage, in a variety of parts from Shakespeare to modern plays. I liked his performance in this one - his beef with Wren (husbandly jealousy) and frustration with the absurd behavior of other characters was quite believable. He is really the straight man in every comedic episode in the play, and kept character well. 

 

Petra Carter, as Molly, was emotionally intense, and incredibly physical. She has been excellent in everything I have seen her in, often in that sort of psychologically fraught role. I’ll also note that her voice could fill a room several times as big, while still sounding vulnerable. She is professional grade, in my opinion, and I am glad to see her regularly on stage. 

 

Jason Dollar (Major Metcalf) is another stage veteran, and brought a chill and relaxed vibe to this particular part, seeming unfazeable throughout. 

 

Beth Clark was perfect as the cantankerous and imperious Mrs. Boyle, nailing the “resting bitch face” vibe of the character. A British “Karen” of a certain age and time, for sure. 

 

Sebastian Richardson as Wren captured the hopeless goofiness of the young man, simultaneously flirting with Molly and mooning over Trotter, with paranoia and nervous tics on display. He too is a young actor who has been around lately, in a variety of roles. 

 

Likewise for Elizabeth Wurster, who played Casewell with a stiff upper lip and a casual strength and confidence. 

 

The new face on stage was Shomario Crawford, taking on the role of the eccentric “foreigner” who can easily become the prime suspect. His take was definitely different from the one I saw in London. Crawford went for the Mr. T vibe, complete with a bit of a ‘hawk, a slightly unhinged laugh, and some campy costumes. My only disappointment in an otherwise delightful performance is that his voice was a bit too soft on occasion to compete with the ludicrously loud air conditioning. (BCT will be moving to new digs, hopefully with a more stage-friendly HVAC system, in the near future.) Nonetheless, he has good stage presence and acting skills, so just a bit more consistent projection, and he’ll be great. 

 

Finally, as Sergeant Trotter, Daniel Lizarraga Ramos brought his trademark intensity and simmering sense of frustration and menace to the part. He really was every abusive cop you can think of, bullying witnesses (and especially poor Molly), getting in everyone’s personal space - much like the Orange Fascist likes to do at debates - and acting as if the way to solve a case is to make everyone hate him as much as possible. 

Joey Bedard (Giles), Petra Carter (Mollie), and Shomario Crawford (Paravicini)

 

Joey Bedard (Giles), Sebastian Richardson (Wren), Jason Dollar (Metcalf), and Daniel Lizarraga Ramos (Trotter)

 

I think this was a great take on the part. One the one hand, it hints at the secret he is hiding (remember, everyone is hiding something), and on the other, it makes him plausible as the junior cop - a sergeant, not a full inspector - frustrated at his lack of promotion, and willing to do anything to make a name for himself. 

 

The set was good, as usual, with lots of quirky furniture and knick-knacks accumulated over decades. 

 

A fun show overall, and worth seeing if you are local. It runs through September 28. Tickets at the door or from bctstage.org

A Basque History of the World by Mark Kurlansky

Source of book: Borrowed from my brother

 

From time to time, my brother and I share books. He has a knack for coming up with unusual books that I would not have discovered, but that turn out to be excellent. A case in point is Noodling for Flatheads. 

When I first came to Kern County in my teens, I was not particularly familiar with the Basques. If you haven’t lived in a place with Basque heritage, you may not know of them either. 

 

Kern County and Reno may not seem that similar, but one thing they do have is a history of Basque immigrants settling there and herding sheep. This is why you can eat Basque food in both places. Bakersfield also has a lot of Basque surnames, including the late judge, Louis Etcheverry, who presided over the longest bench trial I ever did. (See below)

 

I have also eaten Basque food many times, and it is delicious and unique. That was my first taste of pickled tongue. The cuisine has elements of both French and Spanish, but also its own unique flavors. If you can’t come here and try the food yourself, you can at least make the oxtails from Woolgrowers - I cook it pretty often, and it is so good. 

 

The history of nations is often messy, and in the case of Spain and France, this is very much the case. The boundary is drawn at the divide of the Pyrenees mountains, but this choice divided the homeland of the Basques between France and Spain. This homeland is in the mountains and foothills, on the west side. The east side also has unique cultures, with the additional culture of Catalonia - an area which includes Barcelona. Readers of Patrick O’Brian’s novels will recognize Catalonia as the homeland of Stephen Maturin. 

 

The Basques, though, are not merely a different culture from France and Spain. They are a group which is unique in Europe. Their language, Euskara, is not related to any other known language. It is an outlier, a remnant from a time before the root language of everything from Latin to Swedish swept across Europe. Some of the features of the language indicate that it dates back to the stone age. In that sense, the Basques are the most indigenous group in Europe, the most original inhabitants. 

 

Despite this, the Basques have never really had a country of their own. Going back to Roman times, the loosely tribal groups of Europe were mostly conquered by the empire. This included the Basques, but, as in subsequent conquests, they retained their language, culture, and a degree of self-governance. 

 

The book’s title is a bit tongue in cheek. The book is about the history of the Basques, mostly in Spain, but also on the French side. While it mentions the emigration of Basques to the US, the book has nothing about that history. 

 

The period covered is from the Roman era, when written records were kept, through the present. There is a brief mention of the pre-Roman era, but nothing of anthropology of the language or ethnic group before that. Most of the book recounts the era between the formation of Spain as a nation through the present. 

 

So, consider the book a history of the Basque people in their homeland for the last 2100 years or so. 

 

The history in this book is difficult to summarize, so I will not attempt it. The book is worth reading if you wish to learn the history. 

 

I did want to feature a few quotes and tidbits, however. The chapters are headed with quotes either from Basque writers, or about the Basques. The first one, from The Decameron, is ludicrous. 

 

“Nomansland, the territory of the Basques, is in a region called Cornucopia, where the vines are tied up with sausages. And in those parts there was a mountain made entirely of grated Parmesan cheese on whose slopes there were people who spent their whole time making macaroni and ravioli, which they cooked in chicken broth and then cast it to the four winds, and the faster you could pick it up, the more you got of it.” 

 

Throughout the history of the Basques, one of their demands of the various conquering nations was that they keep their traditional laws. These pop up in the book periodically, and they are interesting. Some seem pretty outdated, but there are a few that might be considered progressive. 

 

One of these that is fascinating is that, unlike the rest of Europe, real estate is inherited through the female line, not the male. The reason given for this is that women farm the land, while men went off to war. 

 

Once the laws were put in writing after centuries of being an oral tradition, the first article affirmed that the intent of the laws was to guarantee justice to the poor as well as the rich. 

 

Basque religion retains elements of the pre-Christian beliefs. (Actually, all religion is syncretistic, but we just pretend it isn’t…) One of these is a pre-Christian version of Santa. Or, one might say, Bad Santa. Olentzaro slides down the chimney on Christmas Eve, but is there to harm people. So, always keep the fire burning bright on Christmas Eve. 

 

Another factoid in this book is one that has bothered me since I was a child. We were taught that Magellan was the first to circumnavigate the globe. This is bullshit. Magellan did not make it around the globe. He picked a stupid fight partway around, and got stabbed in the neck. 

 

Guess who did circumnavigate the globe? That would be Juan Sebastian de Elcano, who took over command after Magellan’s death. Elcano was a Basque, who, like many Basques, were the most experienced sailors in Europe. 

 

There is some evidence that the Basques may have visited North America at the same times as the Vikings, by the way. The Basques invented whaling, years before whales were hunted for oil, not food. From Vasco de Gama (“Vasco” is the Spanish word for a Basque man) to, well, every Spanish exploration of that age, you will find Basque sailors everywhere. 

 

Another person who was Basque, but not known for it was Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits. Now you know. 

 

There are fascinating historical asides throughout the book. One of these is about the burning of witches. One forgets that history isn’t a linear progression, but more a cycle. Charlemagne outlawed the execution of witches in 787. But it came back into vogue 800 years later. This comes up because rural Basque women were targeted by Pierre de Lancre, who was Basque himself, but changed his name to hide the fact and seems to have been motivated by a hatred of everything Basque. 

 

On the French side, as often happens with witch hunts, De Lancre’s terror seemed unstoppable until someone had the courage to denounce it, and then it quickly disintegrated. 

 

This is something to keep in mind in our own times, with our current witch hunt targeting transgender people. We need to keep denouncing this for what it is, and stand against witch hunts of all kinds.

 

There is another fun connection drawn in this book. Adam Smith, in The Wealth of Nations, mentions Spain as a negative example. By seeing the wealth of a nation as consisting of gold, Spain was actually impoverishing itself. What Smith failed to notice, however, was that at the same time, the Basques were gaining wealth through their trade to and from Latin America. This is a lesson that Trump has yet to learn. 

 

Later in the book, the author notes that “without the Basque and Catalan provinces, the two most productive regions, Spain would become an impoverished third-world nation.” 

 

The Basques suffered a good deal under Franco, who tried to outlaw the Basque language and culture. The story of Basque Nationalist leader Jose Antonio Aguirre is interesting, and offers some parallels to our own time. 

 

Aguirre didn’t live to see the end of Franco’s reign, and spent the last 20 plus years of his life in exile in France. Franco’s fascist regime sold itself as being pro-Catholic. That is, pro-Christian. This is the same argument MAGA fascism uses to sell itself to gullible religious people today. 

 

In contrast, Aguirre was a devout Catholic who rejected the premise of fascism. 

 

“I dream with all the nostalgia of a Christian,” he wrote years later in exile after having endured the assaults of Franco and Hitler, “in the evangelical precepts of the Sermon on the Mount, a return to primitive Christianity which would have nothing in common with the opportunistic and spectacular affiliations with which we Christians rush to disfigure the most august of doctrines.”

 

Damn. I couldn’t have put it better myself. 

 

During the Franco regime, the resistance included a more violent group, the ETA. The group assassinated one of Franco’s deputies, Carrero Blanco, who was intended to be Franco’s successor. While I am not in favor of violence, including political violence, I did find the response of many Spaniards to the incident to be fascinating. 

 

The method of killing was a bomb hidden under the pavement where Blanco parked. It blew him and the car several stories high. The joke that immediately began circulating was that Blanco had become the first Spanish astronaut. 

 

The other line, which is pretty darn good, translates to “One more pothole, one less asshole.” 

 

Not all of the resistance was violent, however. Most was peaceful. Not that that stopped Franco from arresting dissidents over and over. In one case, Telesforo de Monzon, this reached a ridiculous pinnacle. 

 

He managed to be arrested one last time, when his funeral procession from St. Jean de Luz was briefly stopped by Spanish police on its way to the family home in Vergara. 

 

Another ETA member who is still around, living in Cuba, is Joseba Sarrionaindia, a novelist who writes in Euskara. One of his quotes starts a chapter, and I thought it was good. 

 

“In people’s lives and in social history there is always a first mistake, a little mistake, which happens almost imperceptibly, a momentary slip-up, but this first mistake creates others, and these mistakes follow each other; accumulating little by little, one on top of another. Eventually, this creates a growing and fateful error.” 

 

It is easy to think of examples in our society. One little mistake was failing to prosecute and convict Richard Nixon. In a very real way, Trump is the result of the compounding mistakes since. One could think of many others. 

 

I wonder as well what the first little mistake was for my parents, the little slip-up that snowballed into an increasing embrace of authoritarian parenting, leading to Gothard’s cult, and eventually the destruction of our family relationships. What was that first step? 

 

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention a few of the well-known things which are Basque, but that people do not always realize are Basque. 

 

Picasso’s famous anti-war painting, Guernica, is a memorial to the bombing massacre inflicted on the Basque city of Guernica (Spelled Gernika in Euskara) by German and Italian fascist troops in 1937. This incident of the wanton slaughter of civilians in what was officially peacetime is not as well known as it should be.  

 

Bilbao is the largest city in Basque country, and it is the site of one of the most iconic buildings ever created: the Guggenheim. Frank Gehry’s bold and swooping design is like nothing else. Or at least it was until Gehry used much of the same design language to create Disney Hall in Los Angeles. 

 

I’ll end with one of the final observations by the author. Basque country transcends national borders. For the Basques, culture and language are more important than arbitrary lines. This is one way that the European Union has improved things for many border-straddling groups. With movement largely free, Basque Country can be reunited in a very real sense. 

 

The author notes that this arbitrary border drawing is a problem around the world. (Jonathan Kwitny made the same point in a very different book.) 

 

When Europeans decolonized Africa, they left it with unnatural borders, lines that did not take into account cultures. This is often stated as the central problem of modern Africa. But they did the same in Europe. The Pyrenees may look like a natural border, but the same people live on both sides. 

 

The author notes that the trend in Europe today is away from seeing nations as entirely separate. Europe is bound together economically, with free movement of citizens. Instead, people are seeing nationhood more as culture and identity within larger structures. 

 

Ironically, this is what the Basques have sought this arrangement for themselves for the past 1800 years. Maybe they were on to something. 

 

This book is definitely an interesting one, filled with unfamiliar history (to an American at least), colorful people, and the spirit of a people who are just a bit different. 

 

***

 

My trial: 

 

This was a conservatorship case that required medical testimony. I ended up subpoenaing two doctors. One was great, and very helpful. The other one, not so much. After starting off bragging about his memory, he couldn’t remember jack shit. 

 

After the testimony concluded, Judge Etcheverry called for a brief sidebar in his office. He told me and opposing counsel, “If I thought he had a sense of humor, I would have said, ‘I find the witness’ memory to be merely average.’” 

 

Endless Enemies by Jonathan Kwitny

Source of book: Borrowed from the Library

 

Where to start with this post? I suppose I could start by saying that this book is a good companion to two books I read previously, covering some of the same ground, but with its own additional information. Both A Peace to End All Peace by David Fromkin and Overthrow by Stephen Kinzer are about the problems created by intervention in foreign governments by the United States (and the United Kingdom in the first.) 

 

While both of those books were well researched, thoroughly supported by evidence, and well written; Endless Enemies adds an additional layer of knowledge. Jonathan Kwitny was one of the most badass investigative journalists of the 20th Century, and this book is a clinic in how to do journalism. 

 

Throughout the book, as Kwitny recounts events and documents and conversations, he explains exactly how he got the information. In a typical explanation, he will name the reporter who first published the information, then he will contact the actual people involved, and either get confirmation of the fact, or a refusal to answer questions. In an impressive number of cases, Kwitny himself was on the ground in the foreign country and has personal knowledge of things. There are also a lot of documents involved - and this was before email, so stuff on paper. 

 

The pattern is clear: get the information, verify the information. 

 

Also important is that Kwitny, unlike so much media these days, wasn’t content to just publish what officials told him. He is clear in this book that officials lie. It is what they are paid to do. You cannot take their word, but have to actually investigate and then report the truth. (Kwitny notes that even in his time, this was a problem for most of the mainstream media, all too willing to parrot the talking points from the US government.) 

 

Another thing to understand about Kwitny is that he did a lot of his work for the Wall Street Journal, which he considered the most honest of the major media during the 1970s and 80s. He states in the book that he was not pressured to conform to a narrative in his reporting. I’m doubtful that is still the case. 

 

As of the time this book was published, Kwitny would likely have been considered a right-leaning writer. He was definitely not in favor of Communism, or indeed in any planned economy. The book is unashamedly in favor of free enterprise, and indeed capitalism itself. Although with caveats. Kwitny, unlike today’s right wingers, understood that unregulated capitalism is just monopoly by another name. Much of this book describes the way that big business co-opts government (especially our own) to gain monopoly power over markets, thus suppressing free markets. 

 

The free market is demonstrably the most bountiful economic system on earth. And it has become the odd role of the United States of America to deny that system to hundreds of millions of people the world wide. 

 

These days, of course, because Kwitny was pro-democracy, believed capitalists needed regulation, opposed foreign meddling, and refuses in the book to blame poverty on brown skinned people, he would be considered a commie pinko by today’s American right wing. How times have changed. 

 

The book’s subtitle gives a good indication of what the book is about. 

 

How America’s worldwide interventions destroy democracy and free enterprise and defeat our own best interests.

 

Such a radical idea, right? The thing is, he makes a strong - indeed incontrovertible - case that our interventions have in fact been against democracy in the third world, have suppressed rather than encouraged free enterprise, and have ultimately gone against the best interests of our nation and its tax payers. 

 

By installing and supporting dictators, forcing countries to accept dominance by our giant corporations, and doing this at incredible expense to taxpayers, our government has served the capitalist class at the expense of everyone else, here and abroad. 

 

The book focuses on four specific parts of the world where we have meddled in different ways. In this, the book is a bit different than Overthrow, which specifically looks at instances where the US overthrew existing governments. There is overlap, of course, but we have also intervened in other ways, and those are also subjects of this book. 

 

The book begins its tour with Africa, looks at the Middle East, Latin America, and South Asia. 

 

It starts, however, with a look at the common thread: the way loans to the third world intentionally keep countries impoverished while ensuring that Western corporations have access to natural resources. 

 

I want to quote this bit about Lebanon, which the US has pretty well fucked since the 1950s. 

 

The newspapers said the marines were put there to put an end to twenty-five years of bloody civil war, so that Lebanon could “get back on its feet” and start a democracy. Nobody seemed to remember that Lebanon’s twenty-five years of civil war began when the CIA sabotaged a democracy that was already in place. 

 

Kwitny points out that the US has a lot of good things about it - freedom of speech, economic freedoms, a willingness to stand up to Hitler. But unfortunately, our government has failed us in foreign policy since the end of World War Two.

 

Americans have an interest in foreign affairs. They want and deserve security, peace, and prosperous trade. But these goals elude them. Their government’s foreign policy has left them in constant peril of war with a seemingly endless list of enemies. 

 

We have fought a seemingly endless series of wars against countries that never wanted to fight us, all in the name of an ideological war against “Communism,” which, as Kwitny points out, isn’t even the right category for an undeveloped economy. In most of these cases, “communism” became the name for any opposition party to US corporate interests, even if the term wouldn’t actually apply. 

 

This has led to negative consequences for the US, which we keep experiencing because we refuse to change our actions. 

 

But a refusal to see such events [hostages and political murders] in their context leaves the United States perpetually unprepared for crises abroad, when these crises are the natural consequence not only of events long visible, but often, in part, of the U.S.’s own actions.

 

I think Kwitny’s analysis of the mistakes we keep making in Africa is spot on. It also happens to match what African writers themselves have said. By clinging to our Cold War binary of “capitalism versus communism,” we fail to actually understand the real issues abroad. In speaking of the Congo (many of the names were different in the 1980s), he has this to say: 

 

The first is provincialism. Accustomed to the context of big-power diplomacy, no one in the foreign policy-making chain of command could see the Congo for what it really was: a couple of hundred mini-nations, whose people were consumed with the daily chore of warding off hunger. These nations had long been occupied against their will by white people and occasionally forced to do slave labor for whites. Suddenly, under rules laid down by whites, they were proclaimed to be one “country,” with common leadership. 

 

When governments changed, most of the country didn’t even know it, because it had no effect on their lives. 

 

Back in the hinterland, where Americans didn’t go because the roads were too bad, millions of farmers hoed on, little concerned. Chaos in government is recognizable only to those who are used to getting some benefit from government. Very few Congolese fit that description. 

 

The colonial powers had divided up Africa for their own convenience, drawing lines across ethnic lines, in ways that made sense for their exploitation of resources, but would never have become borders naturally. It should be no surprise that new countries that have no common language, religion, or ethnicity might be…unstable. Just saying. 

 

In fact, the issue of “communism” has rarely ever even been a driving force in these conflicts. Economic ideology is just not the biggest factor in conflict, despite the claims by the US government.

 

But even more important historically was the shock to those who survived - the realization that tribal hatred was stronger than anyone’s philosophy. The real problems of Africa were being written in blood over the platitudes and ideological cant that people had come to believe. 

 

The US made this worse, not better, by propping up brutal dictators, overthrowing governments, and fighting against democracy. 

 

It is on the whole a pretty sorry record, though not exactly unpredictable, considering that native and colonial monarchies dominated previous African history. The democratic experiment had no example in Africa, and badly needed one. So perhaps the sorriest, and the most unnecessary, blight on the record of this new era, is that the precedent for it all, the very first coup in postcolonial African history, the very first political assassination, and the very first junking of a legally constituted democratic system, all took place in a major country, and were all instigated by the United States of America. It’s a sad situation when people are left to learn their “democracy” from the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. 

 

The CIA doesn’t come off well at all in this book, and it deserves all the censure it receives. 

 

The obvious question raised by all of this is what the best interest of the United States really is: to perpetually try to corrupt as many overseas governments as we can so that when a military crisis arises we may have some crook on the scene in our pocket? Or to try to encourage, by example and reward, a world of clean governments that are strong through their own popularity - governments that allow their peoples’ free-market impulses to interact productively with our own peoples’ free-market impulses, and which for all these reasons are unlikely to become involved in a military crisis at all? 

 

But corrupt governments allow giant corporations to extract profits. And also, everything is about the Cold War, and that war was built on lies. 

 

There is also a dangerous hypocrisy at work. Unlike the great imperial powers of the past, today’s great powers mostly shun nationalistic rhetoric. They baldly deny that they are building empire. One hears little talk of the ethnic superiority claimed by other conquering peoples, like Rome’s, or Germany’s, or England’s. Usually, the U.S. and U.S.S.R. even deny that they are acting to protect themselves from each other. Almost in unison, they proclaim an ideological motivation - and justification - for what they do. They argue that by enabling the rule abroad of those who proclaim an ideology similar to theirs, they are performing a selfless favor for other countries. 

 

But it really has always been about Empire. 

 

In our handling of Zaire, great effort was made to suppress both democracy and free enterprise - in fact, to suppress almost everything we say we believe in. 

 

And we haven’t even benefitted anyone economically. Even the corporations find their access to be in jeopardy due to political unrest. 

 

So tenuous is our indirect line, through Mobutu Sese Seko, to Zaire’s mineral wealth that it could snap at any time. Similar situations confront us around the globe. We have sought to accomplish so much that is beyond our ability to accomplish, that we have threatened our ability to accomplish the one thing we need to accomplish. Peaceful commerce is so natural, so universally beneficial, that real effort is required to sabotage it. Inadvertently, we have applied that effort.

 

We also have ended up undermining ourselves in the Cold War. Interestingly, the U.S.S.R. also did so - both powers pretty well screwed themselves. 

 

The excuse for intervention, of course, is the notion that if we don’t fight, Moscow will win by default. Yet as one travels the globe, from Indochina to Cuba to Angola, one finds that the Third World countries where the Soviets are alleged to hold the strongest influence are precisely those countries where we have fought. Meanwhile, in countries that weren’t militarily threatened by the United States, where Soviet influence had a chance to flunk on its own merits, it has. 

 

One of the most depressing things in this book was the well-documented interconnection of business and government. It was (and probably still is, even more so in the Trump Era) an incestuous circle jerk of lawyers, diplomats, and politicians. Two of the big players were Allen and John Foster Dulles, who worked for the big oil companies through their law firm, then went into politics, where, predictably, they used their influence to have the CIA and the military do the work of Big Oil. 

 

In other words, the CIA director and the secretary of state at the time of the Mossadegh coup were, in private life, well-paid lawyers for the major oil companies.

 

Yes, it was that bad. And that is why we ended democracy in Iran.

 

We are left with no explanation for the coup except for one that might at first glance be rejected as a piece of Socialist Workers’ party campaign rhetoric: a retrieval of the rights of two Rockefeller-controlled oil companies, whose lawyers were running the CIA and the State Department, to monopolize Iranian oil in U.S. markets and thereby fix gasoline prices for the American consumer. Can it be? If so, adding insult to injury, the same consumer was also being dunned for tax money to hire and outfit the U.S. agents who were carrying out the coup.

 

These wars - culminating in Vietnam, another war based on lies and morally indefensible - have led us to the distrust of the American government we see today. 

 

The loss of a U.S. citizen’s ability to believe his own government officials on such matters is one of the saddest results of the whole anti-communist crusade. In some ways, it is sadder than the loss of life the crusade has cost, because officials who constantly lie for what they see as the greater good create more loss of life, through every war and covert action the country is sucked into. 

 

There are multiple chapters on Cuba, which has to be one of America’s greatest own goals of all time. And we still refuse to change policy, even though Castro is long dead. 

 

Starting with our United Fruit wars, we made it clear that we didn’t give a rat’s ass about the people of Latin America - we just wanted to exploit their land for profit. The rise of Castro was enabled by this. 

 

The U.S. had delivered Castro a power he never could have bought - a legitimacy he could have won no other way. 

 

For that matter, why haven’t we normalized diplomacy with Cuba? Why do we not trade with them? We do with China, after all. And brutal places like Saudi Arabia as well. 

 

The answer is something I discovered over a decade ago. The people and companies who were rich in pre-revolutionary Cuba expect to be reimbursed for their losses. This expectation is fuelled by companies like United Fruit, who dream of returning to the good old days, when they owned most of Cuba’s land. 

 

To this day, United Brands is part of a business lobby opposing improved relations with Cuba until Cuba pays the claims of 979 U.S. companies whose property was seized by the Cuban government. 

 

Kwitny spent a good bit of time in Cuba, and not in the tourist areas. He recounts the interviews he did there (and a number are in the book) and his observations of the country. 

 

The fact is that Cuba is among the most functional countries in Latin America. Its infant mortality rate is like the first world - and better than it is in the US. Ditto for life expectancy, education, medical care, and so on. Cubans live better than other third world citizens - Kwitny describes this through his interviews with a wide range of people, from those in menial jobs to students to business owners.  

 

And all this despite the US embargo. 

 

One of the interesting questions raised by this chapter is what constitutes happiness? By some measures, Cubans are happier than Americans. They have less money, but they have more security - guaranteed jobs, food, healthcare, and education. Even the issue of money is tricky - many wealthy nations, the US included, concentrate that wealth at the top, and the poorest of the poor here are left to live on the streets. Perhaps overall well-being is, as one Cuban interviewed said, “more important than money.”

 

While Kwitny is no fan of communism, and does note the authoritarian aspects, he also notes that this is actually far less invasive than the thugs of the dictators running many countries - dictators the US put there and maintains. He also notes that the Soviets subsidized the Cuban economy, but the amount in play very likely was less than tourism and trade would have brought in. 

 

The sad thing is, Cuba’s most natural trade partner would be the US, and yet we refuse to take the action that would lead to closer relations (and a reduction in the Soviet/Russian threat.) Why will we not do this?

 

For the past quarter century, the United States has fretted and fumed, and applied great resources trying to change conditions in Latin America. Yet the condition the US has concentrated on changing has not been bloodshed, poverty, illiteracy, or disease. The US effort has been directed toward changing the government of Cuba, where all these evils exist less than almost anywhere else in Latin America. And the US has punished any nation that tried, even slightly, to emulate Cuba. 

 

In discussing countries like Nicaragua, Kwitny notes that their long-term interests don’t lie on the other side of the world. The problem is that America continues to stifle popular government, democracy, and free markets in these countries, driving them to seek help elsewhere.

 

Kwitny talks a lot about the central mistake of the Cold War: deciding that Communism was somehow something new and uniquely evil, totally different from other dictatorships. Thus, a civil war wasn’t just a civil war, it was an invasion of this new evil. Rather than having faith that the US system was superior and that people would therefore choose it, we decided to devote our resources to stamping out this idea, as if one could even do that. (And also, isn’t stamping out ideas the sort of thing authoritarian systems like…Communism are known for? Just saying. 

 

When communism became a scapegoat, however, it was no longer an evil among evils. It was a unique evil - so insidious that it could override all cross-cultural barriers and all known norms of human behavior. Thus the Chinese revolution could never be seen as an ordinary civil war, the coming of yet another dynasty to China. One side called itself communist. That side must, by our perception, consist of brainwashed hordes, manipulated by a handful of satanic agents. It was inconceivable that they were rational human beings pursuing what looked to them, rightly or wrongly, to be the most advantageous course. 

 

Related to this is the fact that the colonial powers didn’t actually export free markets. They exported a system where they got to exploit the native peoples and their resources. This next passage is from a discussion of Indonesia. 

 

But, like so many postcolonial leaders, Sukarno had fallen into the trap of judging the capitalist economic system by the way the system worked in the colonies. Just as the U.S. today defends monopolistic, non-free market economies, the European colonial countries generally did not export a free market system as an example to their foreign wards. Rather, they sent abroad a form of feudalism. 

Thus, to Sukarno, capitalism was an economic system under which the Dutch owned everything. This system worked fine in Holland, where everybody was Dutch, but in Indonesia it seemed grossly unfair. So Sukarno adopted socialism. 

 

The chapter on China is fascinating. It is very out of date - a LOT has changed there in 40 years to put it mildly. What is interesting is that some of what Kwitny expected did in fact happen. 

 

In many ways, China’s history is a cycle of openings and closings to the outside. There is always the lure of material advances, followed by the threat of internal disruption, and then the clampdown. How do you let in things and keep out thoughts? The emperors never learned. The current government is searching for a way to admit technological ideas while filtering out other ideas.

 

With the opening of China to trade, a lot of Western ideas did in fact enter. China hasn’t embraced an open society, though - it remains authoritarian. But, interestingly, it has become far more capitalist than it was. 

 

In fact, the best description of China’s economy these days is “authoritarian capitalism.” There is still government involvement, and single party rule. But there is sure a lot of free enterprise taking place - and China is experiencing many of the nasty side effects of capitalism: billionaires, soaring inequality, unaffordable housing, urbanization. 

 

As China becomes the world’s premier power, a process being accelerated by the Trump administration’s dismantling of American power, it will be interesting to see if it follows the US and USSR in blundering in foreign policy. 

 

Kwitny is no fan of the international arms trade. He assigns equal responsibility to the US and USSR for making the world a more unsafe place through the selling of weapons, usually with little if any accountability for how they are used. (See: Israel right now. But there are a myriad of examples past and present.) This trade is a significant factor in keeping brutal dictators in power, and spreading suffering across the globe. 

 

The book also describes the sordid history of using mobsters at home and abroad in foreign policy. Like that time “Lucky” Luciano was freed from prison as a reward for using the mob to invade Sicily during World War Two. This hasn’t been a good long term strategy for the US, as it has associated us with the worst sorts of people and organizations. 

 

I also want to note another line, where Kwitny really nails it. 

 

Considering the low wages that Gulf & Western gets by with, the food aid could be seen as a U.S. taxpayer subsidy to the company, not to the people of the Dominican Republic. 

 

This applies at home as well. All those social programs right wingers keep winging about - Medicaid, food stamps, other subsidies - aren’t really about subsidizing the poor. They are about subsidizing the corporations that refuse to pay a living wage. We can have the discussion about whether those subsidies are beneficial to society, but we need to stop blaming the working poor for them. 

 

The last chapter is Kwitny’s argument that the US is, through its foreign policy, not only betraying the values we claim to hold, but also denying the benefits of a good society to the third world. In his view, history itself since World War Two has amply demonstrated which ideas lead to good results. 

 

In the decades since then, the Third World itself has offered many equally stunning examples of similar countries that chose different roads. In every case, the more market-oriented and the more pluralistic the road chosen, the more successful the country has been in meeting the needs of its people. 

 

Kwitny isn’t wrong. Free markets outperform planned economies. Pluralism brings opportunities to everyone and attracts the best from everywhere. 

 

This doesn’t mean that Kwitny was a libertarian, though. Free markets, like any public good, need to be protected from those who would prey on them. 

 

The issue is not simply public versus private. The productive economies of Malaysia, Taiwan, and Singapore have benefitted from considerable government participation. On Taiwan, especially, the government intervened to make sure that much of the economy’s profit was spread to the poorest parts of the countryside via large public works - hydroelectric projects and good schools, for example. This intervention helped keep production high, by maintaining morale among farmers who might not otherwise have participated in the industrial boom. 

 

If that sounds a lot like the New Deal, or what President Biden was attempting to do during his term, you would be right. Kwitny goes on:

 

Government under Marxist socialism is obviously very different. The problem with these radical governments is that instead of attacking poverty, they invariably end up attacking only wealth. Some government intervention is generally necessary in order to attack poverty, especially after decades or centuries of feudal accumulations of wealth. Monopolies must be restrained and competition encouraged. Industrious individuals need access to land or other means of production to show what they can turn out. Marxism, though, has almost invariably brought about the vengeful destruction of productive power, not the thoughtful redistribution of it. 

 

I thoroughly agree with Kwitny here. The goal has to be giving everyone access to the resources - the means of production - rather than letting it accumulate with a few wealthy individuals or families. But simply destroying in vengeance impoverishes everyone. Thoughtful redistribution. 

 

Of course, these days, Kwitny would be considered a flaming pinko for saying so. Which is ironic considering how strongly anti-Marxist he was. 

 

There is only one reason why a country would want to adopt Marxist-socialism today. Unfortunately, it is often a valid reason. Marxism-socialism is often the only way a country can avoid American imperialism. Joining the Soviet arms network is often the only way to have a national government that is independent from CIA manipulation, and that stands a chance of bargaining at arm’s length with multinational corporations. 

 

And therein lies so many of our problems. Ditto for the Middle East, where radical Islam is perceived as the only option to push back against CIA manipulation and corporate plundering. 

 

I also loved Kwitny’s analysis of what really made America great. (Which are the very things Trump and his goons and ghouls are working to destroy.)

 

We misunderstand our own message to the world. We misunderstand the source of our strength, our prosperity, and our freedom. The distinction between private and state enterprises is not what is fundamental to American achievement. Our achievement is based on a division of power. 

We divide power throughout our society. The powers of government are divided among federal, state, and local units. At each level, power is divided among the executive, the legislature, and courts. Even so, government doesn’t play nearly so great a role in the U.S. as we encourage it to play overseas. Most decisions are barred to government. Many decisions are reserved to each individual to make for himself. Others are relegated to professionally competent authorities: within broad social guidelines that are politically ordained, doctors guide the day-to-day functioning of their own profession, as do accountants, plumbers, English literature professors, and (there’s a hair in every pudding) lawyers. 

 

I’ll forgive the slur against my profession due to the general truth of the claim about professionals.

 

In the business field, what has distinguished American society has been not only its Rockefellers, but its ability to restrain its Rockefellers, and to preserve open competition. What has distinguished us is not only our Standard Oils, but our ability to break up our Standard Oils. Monopolistic controls have been allowed to persist mostly in foreign dealings, through influence over the State Department, not the Justice Department.

The open chance for small businesses to grow, for the eccentric with a gift to become an entrepreneur, for the individual farmer to figure out a better way of planting or marketing, has been a lifeblood of our system. Equally so has been the power of consumers, individually or banded voluntarily together, to contain the excesses of large and small businesses. 

 

I might recommend a couple of excellent books for more in this line: American Amnesia by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson for the role government has played in creating American greatness; and American Capitalism by John Kenneth Galbraith for the concept of "countervailing power” as a restraint on capitalist exploitation.  

 

I’ll end with what I think is a great summary of how Cold War thinking has poisoned our foreign policy and even far too much of our domestic politics. 

 

By viewing the world as a chessboard, on which all the pieces are either black or white, either our friend or the Soviets’, our leaders are ignoring the principles of which genuine friendships, and partnerships, are made. Only out of such principles can come true national security. 

 

I must admit that this book did make me a bit nostalgic for the days of my youth, when the American right, for all its flaws, still contained thoughtful and nuanced ideas and thinkers. As I noted at the beginning, Kwitny wasn’t considered a leftist when this book was written. His central commitment was to the truth, however, not partisan politics. His commitment was to human thriving and human decency, not political loyalty. And these days, that makes one a leftist. 

 

This book was not “enjoyable” - it was depressing and infuriating in so many ways. But it also stands as a monument to true investigative journalism, and an inspiration to those of us who truly believe in a better world.