Some interesting book reviews out there....
First, a solid
review by historical fiction author Kevin Baker, one of the good guys, of Tim Weiner's fairly solid book about the FBI. Baker neatly summarizes how the FBI is used far more effectively to aggrandize government police power against unarmed citizens who dare to have views outside the corporate media mainstream than it does in stopping real terrorism. Still, I wonder how often the FBI gets most criminals it undertakes to arrest, and I bet the answer is that it is actually very good.
Weiner's book is salutary, however, because there is a need to update previous histories of the FBI, in all its abuses and glories. See
here for a good compendium, which includes some famous books, such as Max Lowenthal's magesterial investigative history of the FBI, Sandy Ungar's book and Athan Theodaris' work, among others. Missing, however, is William Turner's tell-most-if-not-all about his years as the number three person with the FBI, as well as Anthony Summers' salacious biography of Hoover--though Curt Gentry's biography of Hoover is listed.
I think
Summers' book is unfairly maligned, and Tim Weiner maligns Summers, consciously refusing to mention Summers' name when I searched through Weiner's book. He said the charge that Hoover was a closet homosexual was likely false, quoting Hoover publicist, Cartha De Loach, that Hover was not a homosexual at all. Weiner says next that anything to the contrary is "third hand" and therefore not believable. Summers' book is not third hand any more than De Loach's denial. Summers names names, including Joseph Shimon, who was a top inspector at the FBI DC office for years; Ethel Merman, a mid-century actress and singer who was a close friend of Hoover's and who openly stated after his death that she knew he was gay, and so what?; and a few others. Yes, there was the woman actress who said she once saw Hoover in a dress, but one can discount that one without losing the rest. Hoover and his top aide, and likely lover, Clyde Tolson, traveled at least once a year to the Del Mar Fairgrounds to watch dog races, staying at what were known as gay bungalows, which were ironically controlled by the Mob. Then, when we connect the dots as to Hoover's soft stance as to the Mob compared to say...Helen Keller and Martin Luther King, Jr. (true that), one sees how Weiner engaged in that time honored tradition befitting his history as a NY Times reporter denying something salacious when it comes to the power elite, unlike an "usurper" such as Bill Clinton. Nonetheless, with that caveat, Weiner has again performed a public service in dealing with the FBI's bungles and abuses that are systemic in a secret police organization, as opposed to just blaming one man, Hoover, and talking about mere "mistakes."
Second, a tightly argued
review of Peter H. Diamandis' and Steven Kotler's book "Abundance," which rightly shows how technology will continue to lead us to greater convenience and humane results--if we have the political will to ensure the mass of humanity will have access to that technological abundance. The reviewer, Jon Gertner, knows he must stay tight by talking about his economic pessimism to counter the authors' optimism, and not give voice to a political version of the authors' optimism.
If the writer was not reviewing the book in the NY Times, he might have been free to speak about the democratic socialism of Michael Harrington: You know, where an open government uses technology to actually help us humans and other creatures on the planet instead of killing us. Can we imagine if we had the political will to have the doctor robots available alongside doctors throughout the nation? Can we imagine that we could immediately use solar energy to limit our fossil fuel abuse? One can go on, and simply say, the reason for pessimism is not because the authors' are wrong to be optimistic about technologies' advances. The reason for pessimism is that our nation, which should be the leading light in promoting technology, is undermining itself because it is systematically destroying the middle class and creating feudalistic structures where we rely upon the super rich to save us, as they pull up their drawbridges and fill their moats with water and crocodiles. And if people are impoverished, and have to rely on the largess of the super rich, there will be little improvement in the lives of millions and perhaps billions of people on this planet.
(Heck, even the gap between the information haves and have nots is becoming significant with the continued undermining of public education)
Harrington told us that democratic socialism is our language of political optimism, and twenty three years after his death, his insight remains compelling because it says, "Why not work together to build a garden, and why not fund the development of that garden through taxes so people are supported in that effort?" Remember,
Marx openly derided Malthus as a tool of the rising capitalist class when Malthus said there was not enough food to go around. Marx said, There is more than enough food to distribute, and the beauty of capitalism is that it is pushing that
supply ever upward. For Marx, the issue was whether there is a political will to use governments, unions and revolutionary councils (Take your pick or picks) to ensure that the gains are more evenly distributed. Not exactly equal, as any careful reading of Marx's overall writings would tell us (a major exception is the little pamphlet he and Engels wrote in a revolutionary moment in Europe in 1848), but something where people can decide in our legislatures to draw reasonable lines.
There was once a
Brazilian priest who said, "When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist."
Third, an older review from early February I missed:
Here is a nice review of Tracie McMillan's book on who is providing us with the food we eat and how the system of distributing food gives us false choices while exploiting the food workers. Indirectly, McMillan provides an example of the socialist-optimist sensibility that we need to restore in our political discourse. The reviewer does not deal with the last part, of course, because...that is again a systemic blind spot at the NY Times. For the Times, capital is king, and labor is well...the less said, the better, and it's always just so messy and outdated in each new "new economy" decade--which is rarely new at all (as Anthony Trollope's great 1850s book reminds us
here).
What's interesting about McMillan's book is how she has had to endure personal attacks from putzim like
this from the San Francisco Chronicle. The libertarian minded fellow at the Chronicle thought McMillan was just slumming with the poor agricultural workers and servers at Applebee's and had no sense of how the "real" people live and how they think (He even cited a film I loved, "Sullivan's Travels"). When one reads
McMillan's autobiography on her website, one realizes why the cook at Applebee's recognized how well she worked in her manual labor position--and that's because McMillan performed precisely those sorts of jobs as a teenager after her mother's tragic death when McMillan was just 16. She had five jobs at one point while attending NYU on a partial scholarship. But my response to the putz reviewer from the Chronicle is, Why does it matter whether she is "slumming"? What makes people planting a garden in a blighted area so ominous that it should lead to a snarky comparison with the Soviet Union's gulags? As usual with too many (but not all) libertarians, the putz is more fearful of community gardens than gulags. He'd ultimately rather see the gulags built by private enterprise, or through a government that otherwise supports private enterprise.
We so need the language and sensibility of democratic socialism to balance and enrich our political discourse. Only then will we regain some optimism in our discourse, and promote a more humane alternative to the Slate.com contrarianism, libertarian claptrap about gold standards or devolving the few areas of our nation's government that do help people, as well as the general dystopian fulminations into which even I descend as I survey the choice for president we are likely to face this year.
This review of book reviews has turned into a theme, hasn't it? Interesting that...So let's complete this theme, shall we?
For those who would like to understand more about Harrington, one should read his works directly, starting with "Socialism" (1972), "The Twilight of Capitalism" (1975) and "Socialism: Past and Future" (1989). See also
this beautiful essay from a Christian professor from over 20 years ago in the Christian conservative magazine, First Things, which reviews that last book. The essay is one of the best explications of Harrington's vision I have read on the Internet. Of course, one may disagree with Max L. Stackhouse' attack on scientific methods that Marx championed, but that is really not important at the point one is reading this again beautiful essay. And
here is another "conservative" writing very respectfully about Harrington.
Stackhouse and George Shadroui help us understand why Bill Buckley, in his last years, said that if he was entering Yale in the 2000s, he'd not be a "conservative," but a devotee of Michael Harrington. And that is, again, because Harrington speaks to a political, economic and social optimism that is long gone from the "conservative" movement, and only exists in non-media pockets of leftist activism, which then gets bashed and derided by the Slate.com set. "What's so funny 'bout
peace, love and understanding?" indeed.
Socialism is a the political sensibility through which we should guide our humanity, Harrington last wrote as he saw the dictatorial edifices collapse in Eastern Europe while he lay dying of cancer in 1989. It is not the answer to the present, it is a goal. It is not the answer to all public policy problems, as public policy problems will require compromises, balance of public and private spheres, and ensuring openness in government and corporations to protect the public that often pays little attention to anything beyond what is personal to each individual. Socialism is, however, like scientific inquiry, the default philosophy we need to embrace for our future if we are to have some hope for humanity as a species. It's what E.O. Wilson is
backing into as he recognizes altruism is an important part of a species' survival. It is obviously not negating the existence or virtues of selfishness, but we don't have to decide that only selfishness is the natural way of things. Wilson is definitely coalescing and harmonizing his world view--and most ironically with Stephen Jay Gould's worldview, though Wilson remains more optimistic about scientific and cultural consilience than Gould did (I find myself more in tune with Wilson these days on that...).
And if all that sounds religious, it isn't. Democratic socialism is not a religion. It is instead a political ideology. As with Wilson's consilience, democratic socialism is the political consequence of that harmonizing of our culture and science, and it will likely be the most effective world view we'll need to have to save us from a dystopic application of science and technology to our lives.
(Edited)
