In Stephen Greenblatt’s The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, the renowned Shakespearean scholar and Harvard prof tells a fast-paced intellectual detective story about how, in 1417, an Italian Renaissance book-hunting humanist, Poggio Bracciolini, rescued a key work of ancient Roman thought from a remote German monastery and delivered it to a world that was on the verge of becoming “modern.”

The nearly-lost work in question is Lucretius’s 1st century BCE book-length poem, On the Nature of Things (De Rerum Natura), and its ideas pose exactly the sort of challenges about the nature of reality and human fate that we’ve been attempting to respond to ever since the book’s rediscovery. What’s more, in this tale of palimpsests and copies, Lucretius’s book  is itself a paean to the earlier ideas of the 4th century BCE Greek philosopher, Epicurus, a thinker whose own almost completely lost works advocated, at the metaphysical level, atomism, and ethically, a life of reasoned pleasure.

At one point in his story, Greenblatt reflects, “It is possible for a whole culture to turn away from reading and writing.” One of the major themes of The Swerve is that culture and learning can be forgotten for centuries, or even permanently lost; that occasionally it is fortuitously rediscovered; and that it is almost always imperilled. Greenblatt is thinking of the Roman Empire, where “the literacy rate was never high, and after the Sack of Rome in 410 CE. it began to plummet… As the empire crumbled and Christianity became ascendant, as cities decayed… the ancient system of education fell apart. What began as downsizing went on to wholesale abandonment. Schools closed, libraries and academies shut their doors, professional grammarians and teachers of rhetoric found themselves out of work, scribes were no longer given manuscripts to copy.” What remained of books was scattered among isolated medieval monasteries, and preserved in Arabic centres of learning outside the former empire. By the time Poggio began his quest, “Lucretius’s ideas had been out of circulation for centures.”

But perhaps Greenblatt is not only thinking of antiquity. In an upside-down-reverse-mirror sort of way, the threat to learning is still with us today. In Poggio’s day, it was the secret knowledge of the crumbling, about to be lost ancient manuscripts that was in peril. Today, the “secret knowedge” of  books is ubiquitous, but is strangely invisible to people not particularly interested in reading books. The present technological revolution makes more information more quickly available to more people than at any time in history, yet the data we have of Internet usage suggests that for the most part, users are primarily interested in Facebook exchanges, video games, incessant texting, and tidbits from the world of celebrity culture. Although Greenblatt doesn’t directly say so, at least one critic suggests that although “The Swerve presents itself as a work of literary history…  really it is a salvo in the culture wars.” Greenblatt’s portrait of the Middle Ages “bears a strong resemblance to America’s present era of superstitious know-nothing-ism.” (Jim Hinch, “Why Stephen Greenblatt is Wrong… and Why it Matters,” Los Angeles Review of Books, Dec. 1, 2012.) That’s meant as a criticism of Greenblatt’s approach, but I think it’s unintended praise.

Greenblatt, one of the founders of the so-called New Historicist approach to literary criticism, is professionally known for his academic scholarship, but The Swerve, like his previous book about Shakespeare, Will in the World (2004), is written (and in my view, succeeds) as popular cultural history. As such, it became the most-honoured American non-fiction book of 2011, winning both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, as well as making its way to the New York Times bestseller list. Of course, as with much popular history — just to anticipate a critical discussion I’ll get to shortly — it courts the charge of being too popular, i.e., over-simplifying or even distorting history in order to weave its particular tangled web.

Possible criticisms aside, Greenblatt’s narrative is a surprisingly gripping page-turner about what after all is no more than the story of a trip to the library. But in winter 1417, a visit to the nearest book collection could take a man hundreds of kilometres on horseback “through the wooded hills and valleys of southern Germany toward his distant destination, a monastery reputed to have a cache of old manuscripts.” Along the way, we learn quite a bit about rutted hard-packed roads, villages, peasants, knights, skilled tradesmen, merchants, priests, and travellers wandering off the beaten path. Since it’s the second decade of the 15th century and since Poggio is a high-ranking but temporarily out-of-work secretary to the Pope, we get a colourful, detailed report of the 1414-18 Council of Constance (or Konstanz). In that town on the German side of what will become the German-Swiss border, the eminences of the multi-national Roman Catholic Church, and a cast-of-thousands entourage (among them, Poggio), tried to sort out a papacy in disarray. Three contending candidates claimed the holy seat; Poggio’s boss, John XXIII, lost out and was put under castle-arrest, and his apostolic secretary was out of a job. Matters of doctrine were also taken up at the conclave, and two dissidents, John Hus and Jerome of Prague, proto-protestants a century before Luther, were tried, convicted, and burned at the stake.

Once there - and “there” may have been the monastery of Fulda in central Germany, we’re not certain - we learn an equally fascinating amount about monasteries, manuscripts, copy-making, the importance of penmanship in the period before Gutenberg’s press, and the excitement of finding old books and rescuing them for a world becoming interested in new ideas. We also learn something about the fragility of books. In a chapter headed “The Teeth of Time,” Greenblatt asks, “Where did all the books go?”

Of the vast literary output of the distant past, apart from a few charred papyrus fragments, “there are no surviving contemporary manuscripts from the ancient Greek and Roman world. Everything that has reached us is a copy, most often very far removed in time, place and culture from the original. And these copies represent only a small portion of the works even of the most celebrated writers of antiquity.” We have less than 10 per cent of the plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles, barely 20 per cent of Euripides and Aristophanes.

Apart from the editorial decisions of a millennium’s worth of gatekeepers (which left us a considerable amount of Plato and Aristotle, but lost all of Epicurus and dozens of others), “the actual material disappearance of the books,” Greenblatt explains, “was largely the effect of climate and pests.” Though papyrus and parchment were long-lived, “books inevitably deteriorated over the centuries, even if they managed to escape the ravages of fire and flood. The ink was a mixture of soot (from burnt lamp wicks), water and tree gum: that made it cheap and agreeably easy to read, but also water-soluble.” Further, “rolling and unrolling the scrolls or pouring over the codices, touching them, dropping them, coughing on them, allowing them to be scorched by fire from the candles, or simply reading them over and over eventually destroyed them.” As if that wasn’t bad enough, there were the bookworms, not metaphorical avid readers, but literal insect eaters of books.

Beyond that, there was a cultural issue about reading and writing. As far back as the end of the 4th century CE, the historian Ammianus Marcellinus was complaining “that Romans had virtually abandoned serious reading.” As Greenblatt notes, “What he observed, as the empire slowly crumbled, was a loss of cultural moorings, a descent into febrile triviality.”  Or as Ammianus himself put it, “In place of the philosopher, the singer is called in, and in place of the orator the teacher of stagecraft, and while the libraries are shut up forever like tombs, water organs are manufactured and lyres as large as carriages.” Hmm. Sound familiar?

Books and reading retreated into the scriptora of the monasteries during the long period we are today discouraged from simplistically thinking of as “the Dark Ages.” When Petrarch and the other pioneers of the revival of learning in the early 1300s emerged, one of the first places they gently ransacked were those monastic libraries where copies of works from antiquity might be discovered.

At the unnamed monastery in question, our wandering scholar, Poggio, found something unusual. Greenblatt’s book tells the “little known but exemplary Renaissance story” of that particular find, a 9th century copy of Lucretius’s On the Nature of Things. “The recovery,” says Greenblatt, “has the virtue of being true to the term that we use to gesture toward the cultural shift at the origins of modern life and thought: a re-naissance, a rebirth, of antiquity.” Much of The Swerve is a discussion of the remarkable materialist content and implications of the book Poggio rediscovered. The eponymous “swerve” of Greenblatt’s account refers to Lucretius’s theory that the universe is made up of tiny bits of matter, atoms, in constant motion, that from time to time swerve and collide with each other to produce the things of our world, everything from the starry heavens to humans themselves. Greenblatt doesn’t pretend that in focusing on both Poggio’s rediscovery, and the ideas in Lucretius’s poem, he’s in possession of the key that will unlock everything. “One poem by itself was certainly not responsible for an entire intellectual, moral and social transformation - no single work was… but this particular ancient book, suddenly returning to view, made a difference.” How much of a difference is a matter of dispute that we’ll get to in due course.

In Greenblatt’s view, this is not only a story about swerving atoms, but also “of how the world swerved in a new direction.” What’s more, “the agent of change was not a revolution, an implacable army at the gates, or landfall on an unknown continent.” Rather, when this epochal change occurred, nearly 600 years ago, “the key moment was muffled and almost invisible, tucked away behind walls in a remote place. There were no heroic gestures, no observers keenly recording the great event for posterity, no signs in heaven or on earth that everything had changed forever. A short, genial, cannily alert man in his late thirties reached out one day, took a very old manuscript off a library shelf, saw with excitement what he had discovered, and ordered that it be copied. That was all, but it was enough.” The copy was shipped off to Poggio’s friend in Italy, Niccolo Niccoli, himself a famous copyist, and the rest is Renaissance history. Niccoli’s own copy still exists and in the succeeding half-century, some 50 or more reproductions of Lucretius were made before mechanical printing took over.

Finally, there’s the poem itself. About its author, Lucretius, we know next to nothing, other than that he was a follower of the Greek philosopher Epicurus. In Greenblatt’s chapter on the implications of On the Nature of Things, he makes clear why the poem was so subversive of the Christian theology that had succeeded Greek and Roman thought. Epicurus and Lucretius weren’t “pagans” in the sense that they believed in other gods. If gods exist, Lucretius argued, they don’t concern themselves with mortal human affairs and they didn’t create the universe. That universe and everything in it is “made of invisible particles… Immutable, indivisible, invisible, and infinite in number, they are constantly in motion, clashing with one another, coming together to form new shapes,” swerving from a direct course, colliding, and among other things, causing life. In Greenblatt’s reading, Lucretius believes “nature ceaselessly experiments… the universe was not created for or about humans… humans are not unique…” It’s a reading of the natural world that would appeal to Montaigne, Hobbes, Galileo, and even Darwin. In the end, the atoms of which we are formed break free of us, moving on through the void, and individual lives end. Thus, there’s no afterlife, no eternal rewards or perpetual punishments for virtue or vice, and religion is little more than superstition. If this is the way things are, says Lucretius, there’s little reason for humans to fear death, and for our brief lives, there is no end other than pleasure.

Lucretius’s idea of pleasure is not the stereotyped unrestrained orgy he was frequently accused of advocating, but the peace of mind that comes with sensible living, tending one’s garden, and discoursing with friends. Greenblatt has some qualms that Epicureanism is a little too quietist in that it doesn’t leave much room for the public life of social creatures, but he doesn’t dwell on those doubts. So, “How the World Became Modern,” The Swerve’s sub-title, is through a combination of the revival of ancient learning, and the use of some of antiquity’s ideas (especially those undermining the Christian theology of the Middle Ages), along with newly-developed Renaissance notions of science, culture, and social life.

For Greenblatt, “Something happened in the Renaissance, something that surged up against the constraints that centuries had constructed around curiosity, desire, individuality, sustained attention to the material world, the claims of the body. The cultural shift,” he admits, “is notoriously difficult to define, and its significance has been fiercely contested… The key to the shift lies… in the whole vision of a world in motion, a world not rendered insignificant but made more beautiful by its transience, its erotic energy, and its ceaseless change.” On the whole, Greenblatt makes a persuasive case, his claims are tempered by appropriate caveats and cautions,  and his book offers a lively, popular account of a part of intellectual history aimed at a general readership.

2.

In the year and a half since The Swerve’s publication, and its garnering of rave reviews, honours, and commercial success, there’s been more than a ripple of “push-back,” as the media currently likes to term disagreement, about its claims, which is one of the reasons I’m belatedly re-reviewing it. The most passionate of Greenblatt’s negative critics is Jim Hinch, whose “Why Stephen Greenblatt is Wrong — and Why It Matters” turned up in the online Los Angeles Review of Books (citation above) just a couple of months ago. The author’s bio-note provided for Hinch doesn’t explain why he’s a credible expert on the medieval period, but I’m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. He’s furious at the blinkered National Book and Pulitzer prize committees who awarded Greenblatt their laurels. “Simply put, The Swerve did not deserve the awards it received because it is filled with factual innacuracies and founded upon a view of history not shared by serious scholars of the periods Greenblatt studies,” Hinch charges. He allows that the story of Poggio’s quest, “brimming with vivid evocations of Renaissance papal court machinations” as well as “a fascinating exploration of Lucretius’s influence on luminaries ranging from Leonardo Da Vinci to Galileo… is wonderful,” and prizeworthy.

What he doesn’t like is the “second” Swerve, which is little more than “an anti-religious polemic,” riddled with historical errors. Greenblatt is merely using the story of the lucky fate of Lucretius’s poem as a “proxy” for a story “of how modern western secular culture liberated itself from the deadening hand of centuries of medieval religious dogmatism… In other words, The World Became Modern when it learned to stop believing in God and start believing in itself.” Hinch thinks Greenblatt’s got it mostly wrong, especially about the character of intellectual and material life between roughly the 4th and 12th centuries. He objects to Greenblatt’s cartoonish view that “western Europe endured a long, suffocating era dominated by an obscurantist pleasure-hating religious ideology.” Greenblatt’s vision, he insists, “is not true, not even remotely.”

Hinch then proposes to “go through Greenblatt’s portrait of the Middle Ages point by point” to show how wrong-headed it is. He starts with reading and writing. Contrary to Greenblatt’s remark about a whole culture turning away from literate activities, Hinch asserts that “that didn’t happen in medieval Europe,” which was the continent’s “most bookish era.” The most he allows is that there are “declines in written evidence during the centuries following the wane of Rome but that’s not because medieval people suddenly became illiterate or bullied by church culture police.” True, there were a couple or more centuries in which maurauding non-bookish folks “did not pay attention to books while plundering medieval monasteries.” In sum, “it is simply untrue to assert that classical culture was ever lost, ignored or suppressed during the Middle Ages.”

Hinch isn’t especially persuasive in making his corrective counter-claims. Yes, of course, there’s intellectual life in the Middle Ages, but much (or maybe, most) of it is focused on theology and is to be found in those monastery libraries Poggio and others would scour centuries later. Although the works of Plato, Aristotle and the neo-Platonists continue to circulate, they are primarily tailored to be in accordance with Christian theology. When we think of medieval writers, the names that spring to mind are Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. So, while the declne of reading and writing is neither sudden nor absolute after the fall of the Roman Empire, what there is to read in, say Charlemagne’s day (c. 800 CE), doesn’t look much like the best-seller lists of antiquity or anything, starting with Dante, Chaucer, and the troubadors, in the Renaissance and succeeding centuries.

The rest of Hinch’s refutation of Greenblatt is similarly inchoate. His main objection seems to be to Greenblatt’s disdain for religion, and his claim that “a hatred of pleasure-seeking, a vision of God’s providential rage and an obsession with the afterlife” characterized medieval culture. I’m no more than a casual reader of medieval history, but looking recently at Tom Holland’s Millennium: The End of the World and the Forging of Christendom (2011), a popular portrait of the complex church-state power politics of the 11th century, the picture he draws is fascinating but is hardly an account of intellectual flourishing.

Hinch may be right that Greenblatt pays a tad too much attention to the self-flagellation of fearful penitents during the Middle Ages, but his remark that “The Swerve’s primary achievement is to flatter like-minded readers with a tall tale of enlightened modern values triumphing over a benighted pre-modern past” is as much a misreading as  any distortion attributed to Greenblatt. Despite the fervor of the critique posted on LARB, it’s not clear that Greenblatt is dead wrong, as Hinch asserts, or that he can be faulted for offering what is no worse than a contested reading of medieval history in his efforts to understand the modern mind.

A more interesting critcism of The Swerve (which Hinch cites) is State University of New York history professor John Monfasani’s review of Greenblatt’s book in Reviews in History. Monfasani is also critical of Greenblatt’s adherence to the 19th century notion “of the Renaissance as an outburst of light after a long medieval darkness,” a view attributed to historian Jacob Burkhardt, but more to the point he’s dubious about the direct influence of the rediscovered Lucretius. Certainly, it didn’t appear to much affect Poggio or his fellow humanists. (By the way, Poggio, after his rough patch during the Council of Constance, eventually re-secured his posting at the Vatican, and went on to a long and happy life, including a late marriage and honorary offices in his native Tuscany.) I think Monfasani is right to call into question Lucretius’s impact, although Greenblatt hedges some of his bets by presenting the Poggio-Lucretius tale as emblematic rather than immediately causitive of the development of modernism, and certainly much of Lucretius’s materialism is in accord with the ideas of the new science of the 16th and 17th centuries.   

Monfasani points out that it was the triumph of Platonism and Neoplatonism in late antiquity that doomed Epicurianism, and not the opposition of the medieval church, and that Greenblatt fudges that development. More important, Monfasani thinks that Greenblatt is backing the wrong horse. The “startling omission in Greenblatt’s book is any discussion of the Sceptics and scepticism… They and not the Epicureans were the arch subversives.” If Greenblatt “wanted to write about the subversion of medieval verities,” says Monfasani, “he should have written about the recovery of classical sceptical texts and the spread of scepticism,” namely the recovery of the ideas of Pyrrho and his populariser, Sextus Empiricus, which were rediscovered about a century after Poggio’s trip to the library.

Fortunately, notes Monfasani, that story has already been told by historian of philosophy Richard Popkin in his History of Scepticism from Savonarola to Bayle (2003). I won’t attempt to reprise the very complex philosophic debate Popkin traces, but Monfasani is right to fault Greenblatt for not so much as mentioning it, a clear instance of “popular” history oversimplifying the complex development of modernity that Greenblatt is supposedly trying to explain. Greenblatt rightly notes the importance of Lucretius to a thinker like Montaigne, but he ignores Montaigne’s “large hand” in popularizing scepticism in the later 16th and 17th centuries, which leads to the intellectual crisis that Descartes addresses in the mid-17th century, and which is now regarded as the start of modern philosophy.

True, scepticism and Descartes’s engagement with it is focused on epistemology, questions of what and how we know anything, while Lucretius is oriented to metaphysics and ethics, but that’s no excuse for Greenblatt not addressing the issue. Compared to Popkin’s “work of serious historical scholarship… Greenblatt has penned an entertaining but wrong-headed belletristic tale,” Monfasani concludes. Well, I don’t think it’s as bad as all that. Greenblatt could have easily retained his story of Poggio and the rediscovery of Lucretius as emblematic of the rise of modernity, while at the same time deepening the account by pointing to the later developments of epistemological questions. It would have made the point about Lucretius far less intellectually neat, but there’s no reason that the more accurate, more complex account couldn’t have been rendered in popular terms.

Finally, a related cogent criticism (also mentioned by Hinch) is made by Morgan Meis (Morgan Meis, “Swerving,” n+1, July 20, 2012). For Meis, Greenblatt’s book is a shallower and possibly misguided echo of a much deeper, scholarly work also trying to figure out how the world became modern, namely critical theorist Hans Blumenberg’s The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (1966). The focus of this critcism is on Epicurean ethics. Blumenberg considers and ultimately rejects the view that Greenblatt will later popularise: “Hellenism, with its scientific and technical achievements, can appear to be a sort of ‘impeded modern age,’ which in its very onset was thrown back by Christianity’s breaking in and only got going again with the rediscovery of its texts by the Renaissance. The modern age would then be the normalization of a disturbed situation, taking up once again the interrupted continuity of history in its immanent logical sequence. The Middle Ages would again be a senseless and merely annoying intervening period in the historical process.”

Instead, says Meis, “Blumenberg rejects this argument because it fails to recognize what is truly unique about the modern age. ‘If I turn a part of my efforts to the refutation of this thesis,’ he writes, ‘it is not because this reasoning in itself alarms me but because it conceals the singular situation of provocation and self-assertion from which springs the incomparable energy of the rise of the modern age.’”

Meis argues, ”Blumenberg does not want to reduce the modern age to a repetition of Epicureanism because he thinks that misses both what was singular about Epicureanism and what is singular to modern thought. The modern age, Blumenberg posits, was not a simple return to ancient models but rather a radical response to the worldview of the Middle Ages, one that created a new sense of human agency and a drive for world-transforming knowledge the ancients could not have imagined.” I think the point is nicely made by Meis.

He allows that “The Swerve reveals a key tension at the heart of modern life. Our materialism frees us from living in constant terror over the condition of our immortal souls, yet we are not content to withdraw into the life of disengagement and simple joys recommended by Epicurus. Modernity, as Blumenberg reminds us, leads us to confront the world within the context of a scientific attitude that is profoundly active and profoundly engaged, and this attitude comes with its own inherent tensions and regrets.” Again, point taken.

I don’t think the justified criticisms of Greenblatt are necessarily fatal to his project. For all its shortcomings, Greenblatt’s admittedly entertaining (but not merely entertaining) story of Poggio and Lucretius alerts us, in an accessible way, to the relevant question of how we became the modern people we are, to say nothing of how that inheritance of modernity is (always, it seems) in present danger.

Berlin, Feb. 2, 2013 

1.

The first thing Marjorie Garber talks about in The Use and Abuse of Literature is the decline of reading. Or, rather, the first subject that Garber, a Harvard English professor and prolific Shakespearean and cultural studies scholar, seems to address in her book about the current state of “literature” is the general decline in “literary” reading.

That’s a plausible enough topic. After all, if readers of literature are disappearing, then that will surely affect the “use” (and “abuse”) of literature. But it turns out that Garber is not particularly interested in a cultural crisis one of whose symptoms is the decline of reading and, what’s more, right at the outset she commits a sort of scholarly “howler” in the little that she does say about diminished reading habits (I’ll get to the latter in a bit).

Here’s what Garber writes on the first page of her book. At the beginning of the 21st century, she notes, the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts “reported a disturbing drop in the number of Americans who read ‘literary’ works.” She cites the NEA’s 2004 report, Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America, which “showed an alarming decline of reading in all age groups across the country, and especially among 18 to 24-year-olds.” Not only does the NEA report find that less than half of the American population reads literature, and that “reading among persons at every level of education… had declined over the past 20 years,” but that the decline of reading strongly correlates with the diminution of other forms of civic participation, including volunteer work and cultural involvement with the performing arts, and an array of “knowledge deficits” in other fields.

What interests Garber most of all, oddly enough, is not that there’s a big reading problem, but the “idea that fiction/nonfiction should be the determining category” in the findings of the NEA report. She notes that “literature,” for the purposes of the Reading at Risk study, is explicitly defined as including popular genres such as mysteries as well as “literary fiction,” and that “no distinctions were drawn on the quality of literary works.” So, a Harlequin romance or Tolstoy’s War and Peace are equally counted as literature, but not, say, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, because it’s a work of nonfiction. Garber agrees with the NEA’s “democratic decision not to judge works on their putative ‘quality’,” since such judgments are notoriously unstable over time. She also understands the desire to make some sort of distinction between categories, but thinks that “the decision to exclude ‘nonfiction’… does seem to undercut a little the message” that, as the report itself puts it, “anyone who loves literature… will respond to this report with grave concern.” Or, as the NEA chairman Dana Gioia declared, the findings are an indication of a “national crisis” that reflects “a general collapse in advanced literacy,” and a loss that “impoverishes both cultural and civic life.”

Rather than expressing some alarm about this “national crisis,” Garber simply goes on in the next and succeeding sections of her introduction to discuss the ambiguous and historically determined ways in which the term “literature” has been and is used to describe everything from high quality writing to the instructions that come along with your package of pills in the drugstore. The central aim of her book, she declares, is “to argue for… the ‘uses’ of reading and literature, not as an instrument of moral or cultural control, nor yet as an infusion of ‘pleasure,’ but rather as a way of thinking.” This “radical reorientation” of “what it means to read, and to read literature… is the only way to return literature to the center, rather than the periphery, of personal, educational, and professional life.” I’ll come back  to these portentous intentions shortly. For now, I’m simply puzzled about how you put literature back in the centre of life if people are not reading.

Amazingly, Garber’s commentary on the decline of reading in the first pages of her book is also the last time she mentions the subject. There’s not another word in the following 300 pages about whether people are reading or not and whether that means anything. Instead, Garber is primarily interested in the use of the term “literature,” which is separated from nonfiction in that NEA report on reading. This is like witnessing a terrible auto accident and, instead of being concerned about the injured victims, focusing on, I don’t know, whether it was a hybrid or an electric-powered vehicle in the crash. Garber’s perspective seems inexplicably off-kilter.

While reading Garber’s book, I happened to hear a radio interview with her on a program called “Bookworm,” hosted by Michael Silverblatt. The conversation began with Silverblatt attempting to empathise with how tough the current situation in teaching must be. “My impression is,” he said, “that it’s become very difficult to teach literature in college, that people from high schools come unprepared to read, and that English [enrollment] numbers have reached colossal, all-time lows.” Not at all, replied Garber, “I don’t think it is difficult to teach English… the students are uniformly enthusiastic and they actually know a great deal and want to know more.” As for the declining number of humanities students, well, that’s a situation influenced by external social factors not germane to the discussion. So, in Garber’s view, no problem at all. Everything’s just hunky-dory in academia and, she assures us, she’s not just talking about those carefully-filtered $50,000-a-year tuition-paying Harvard students. (Gee, I hope I can wangle a faculty exchange with Garber so she can get a chance to meet my students, who are sometimes slightly less than “uniformly enthusiastic,” and who don’t always give many signs of knowing “a great deal.”) Having heard Garber live-and-unplugged, I was a little less surprised by her myopia about the reading crisis, as evidenced at the opening of her book.

However, I remain astonished by what strikes me as a significant scholarly blooper. Since the point of Garber’s opening riff is that the 2004 NEA report used only “literature” (however skewed the definition) to measure reading habits, you’d think it would be professionally incumbent upon her to let readers know that there’s a subsequent 2007 NEA report, To Read or Not To Read. (You’d also think that the Shakespearean allusion in the report’s title would have caught the eye of the author of Shakespeare After All.) As the NEA press release (Nov. 19, 2007) explains, “To Read or Not To Read expands the investigation of the NEA’s landmark 2004 report, Reading at Risk. While that report focused mainly on literary reading trends, To Read or Not To Read looks at all varieties of reading, including fiction and nonfiction genres in various formats such as books, magazines, and online reading.”

Get it? The 2007 report is about all reading, not about “literature,” or historical variables in category definitions, or anything else. And then come the report’s dismal findings, which I won’t reprise except to note that they’re more dismal than the findings in the earlier report. (The whole report is available online. Just google “decline of reading” or “NEA.”) The point is: “Americans are reading less”; “Americans are reading less well”; and “the declines in reading” correlate to (but aren’t necessarily the cause of) deficiencies in a range of civic, social, and economic matters. (I should mention, as a matter of scholarly niceties, that there was also a 2009 NEA mini-report that recorded a mysterious uptick in reading, but not such a huge increase as to write home or send a tweet about. Maybe it was the Harry Potter fad that caused it.) The findings in the NEA reports also form the basis of Mark Bauerlein’s book, The Dumbest Generation (2008). Bauerlein is an Emory University English professor who was directly involved in the NEA research. That Garber doesn’t mention (or is unaware of) the subsequent NEA reports or Bauerlein’s book is, to put it mildly, intellectually disturbing.

You would think that someone in the editorial rooms of Garber’s publisher would have said to her something like, “Yo, Marj” (or however they address her), “you’re sweeping the floor with the wrong end of the broom.” Or that someone would have pointed out the glaring absence of relevant materials in her opening pages about the decline of reading (or whatever her opening pages are actually about). But no one did.

Maybe that’s because the people in the editorial rooms were too busy writing jacket copy bumpf for Garber’s book. Although Garber of course isn’t responsible for the puffery, this book jacket copy is so remarkably inflated as to merit notice. Here’s how it begins: “As defining as Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism, Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, and Dinesh D’Souza’s Illiberal Education were to the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, respectively, Marjorie Garber’s The Use and Abuse of Literature is to our times.” I immodestly note that Bloom’s and D’Souza’s reactionary books were not the defining books of my 1980s and 1990s, but let’s not quibble. In a genre (book jacket copy writing) notorious for hyperbole, this is hype beyond the call of advertising. I’m here to assure you that Garber’s book is not, as far as I can tell, “decade-defining,” though some of its observations about the use of “use,” the “canon,” or the quarrel about what is and isn’t literature are perfectly interesting, albeit in a minor key.

We know that the copywriters got as far as the first page of Garber’s book: “Even as the decline of reading… proceeds in our culture, Garber (’One of the most powerful women in the academic world’ - The New York Times) gives us a deep and engaging meditation on… ” etc.  I hope you like the parenthetical endorsement from the NYT of Garber’s commanding powerpoint status in the groves of academe. In any case, “The Use and Abuse of Literature is a tour de force about culture in crisis that…” Can I skip the “brio, panache, and erudition lightly carried”? Thanks.

2.

If you find my mild-mannered comments about Garber’s book too tame for your tastes, then I recommend William Deresiewicz. Writing in Slate about The Use and Abuse of Literature, he begins, “Marjorie Garber’s new book brought me back to my days as an English professor; I thought I was reading a freshman essay.” Ouch! “My marginal comments” says the professor emeritus, “might as well have been written in red: ‘What is the point of this paragraph?’ ‘Where are we in the argument - and what exactly is the argument?’ ‘Sloppy thinking.’”, und so weiter (as they say in German when they don’t want to say, “Etc.”).  Though Garber’s book “purports to be a rallying cry for serious reading,” “once you pick your way through its heap of critical detritus - its mildewed commonplaces and shot-springed arguments, its half-chewed digressions and butt ends of academic cliché - you uncover underneath it all a single dubious and self-serving claim: that the central actor in the literary process is, what do you know, the English professor.” (William Deresiewicz, “The Right Questions To Ask About Literature,” Slate, Apr. 4, 2011.)

Deresiewicz is underwhelmed by Garber’s handling of “the ancient question of pleasure vs. use. Is literature valuable because it feels good or because it’s good for you?” Garber’s answer, at noted above, is neither. Rather literature is valuable as “a way of thinking.” Deresiewicz rolls his eyes. “The argument is both remarkable and banal.” Banal, he says, because the “self-enclosure” of literature “has been a commonplace of theory since the New Criticism of the 1930s” - “close reading,” and all that. The argument is remarkable “because it cuts literature off from the very thing it most obviously wants to connect to: the world.” The answer to the use-pleasure conundrum “is not neither, but both.” Literature is “useful,” says Deresiewicz, “because it wakes us up from the sleepwalk of self-involvement… and shows us the world, shows us ourselves, shows us life and experience and the reality of other people, and forces us to think about them all… Pleasure is use, use pleasure.” Didn’t Keats once say something similar about “beauty” and “truth”?

Garber’s repeated insistence on “the way something means rather than what it means” strikes Deresiewicz as “equally false.” He modestly counters that “form” and “meaning,” the “what” and the “way” are inextricably interrelated. It was ever thus. As for the “old warhorse” question, “What is literature?”, he notes that Garber says it’s not the right question. “A better question,” she says, “might be ‘Is it responsive to literary reading?’ Are these texts… ones of which… a critic can usefully ask literary questions?” Snorts Deresiewicz, “The critic, again, at the center of the enterprise.” He, too, thinks “Is it literature?” is the wrong question, “but the right one is, ‘Is it good?’” Okay, okay, I’ll stop. Like Borges’ Pierre Menard “re-writing” Don Quixote word for word, there’s a tempation to quote the whole of Deresiewicz’s uncompromising critique, or at least to insist you google up the link. Because if there’s any tour de force going on around here, it’s not in Garber’s book, but in Deresiewicz’s review. I cite it at length because it’s so rare these days to find a critical piece that doesn’t indulge in what I think of as thumb-on-the-scale style reviewing; i.e., don’t say anything too harsh, we don’t want to bring down the fragile edifice of (already declining) reading. In any case, if Garber’s Use is one of those books that makes you ask, about 150 pages in, What the heck is this book about?, Deresiewicz leaves us with no doubt about what he’s thinking.

3.

I’ll keep the sermon short: There are books that say important things about reading and writing. There are even some books that face up to the decline of reading and the current forms of cultural impoverishment. Garber’s book is not one of them. Is there anything worth reading that does something interesting with these topics? How about, just to think of the ancient past for a moment, Jean-Paul Sartre’s What Is Literature? (1949), or more immediately, David Shields’ Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (2010)?  These, at least, are books that take seriously both writing and the world. They implicitly understand the poet Charles Olson’s “useful” battlecry, “Art is life’s only twin.”

.

Berlin, June 25, 2011.

The ash cloud was a traveller’s nightmare, of course.  As the British poet laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, who weighed in with a short poem published in The Guardian, put it, “the grounded planes mean ruined plans / Holidays on hold, sore absences at weddings, funerals … wingless commerce.”

Apart from producing the ultimate Holiday From Hell, the cloud was spooky. Over Europe, it was invisible. It was an unseen object poised between intimations of Armageddon (an ominous “what next?” feeling) and the sort of surrealism you might run into in a Rene Magritte painting. Poet laureate Duffy wasn’t the only one inspired to poesy. The headline of a Sunday newspaper I glanced at last weekend while strolling through the marketplace square in the German town of Erfurt, declared, “The sky is free,” meaning free of noisy, polluting airplanes. And one did notice, with a sort of aural double-take, that something was strangely absent. The ambiant, sporadic roar of jet engines that we all simply become inured to in urban life had temporarily fallen silent.

On Iceland itself, the ash cloud was neither invisible nor poetic. The spewing ash from the almost unpronounceable Eyjafjallajokull volcano (its first eruption since 1821) was not only visible as a giant cloud, but the heat melted glacial ice, causing flash floods, visibility was reduced to a few meters as ashes clogged the air, and the sulphuric smell of rotting eggs choked the atmosphere. It was one more mess to add to the island’s already messy collapsed economy.

Back on the European mainland, the ash cloud, poetic or just a pain in the butt for people trapped in airports, was mostly an object of economic contention. Although European Union air traffic officials had grounded planes because the volcanic ash clogs jet engines and endangers flight safety, the airlines themselves were insistent that commerce comes first. The aviation companies claimed that the danger was minimal, that they were losing hundreds of millions of euros a day, and that they might be driven out of business or have to demand government compensation for their mounting losses. As far as the airlines were concerned, they were perfectly happy to flood the ash-clogged skies with their big machines. If a few planes crashed, well, hey, stuff happens. (No, they didn’t actually say that, but you read it between the balance sheet lines.)

The airline pilots association was, understandably, somewhat less enthused about the proposed policy to restore profits. In the end, airplane manufacturers came to a dubious rescue by assuring everyone that maybe the ashes wouldn’t cause the planes to crash. Whatever. The flight ban was lifted.

The lesson (about business and morality) was reasonably clear.  The EU public officials may have been a bit over-cautious, but if the safety decision had been left in the hands of private enterprise, flying travellers would have been putting their lives in the hands of corporate accountants. The other minor lesson, although no one is going to do anything about it, is that there are simply too many airplanes doing too much flying, all in the name of business. The “budget” airlines that fly people short distances within Europe are a completely unnecessary menace and source of pollution. The one thing Europe has is a great train system that efficiently and with minimal ecological disruption gets people from place to place. Filling the sky with giant Sports Utility Vehicles for short hops is solely a commercial proposition. Okay, okay, this is an argument I’m not going to win, even among the iPod-listening, cellphone-chatting, texting-and-travelling public.

One of the things that media coverage of the volcanic ash cloud blotted out almost completely was reflection on the April 10 air crash at Smolensk, Russia that killed Polish President Lech Kaczynski and 95 others, including a large contingent of the country’s military and governmental elite. Kaczynski and his party were on their way to a memorial ceremony marking the 70th anniversary of the Soviet slaughter of 22,000 Polish military officers in the nearby forest of Katyn in 1940, at the outset of World War II.

For years, the Soviets had denied causing the massacre, and only in recent times had Poland and Russia patched up the historical dispute with Russian recognition of responsibility for the atrocity. A couple of days earlier, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and his Polish counterpart, Donald Tusk, had met at Katyn to acknowledge the belated agreement on what had happened. The decision to hold a larger ceremony to memorialize an historic tragedy produced only an additional contemporary tragedy, or as one New York Times headline had it, “Where history’s march is a funeral procession.”

In the immediate aftermath of the catastrophe, it quickly became clear that it was one of the stupidest air crashes imaginable. The weather was foul and foggy; the air traffic controllers had warned off the Polish plane and recommended they land elsewhere. But either somebody decided to risk it, or there was a failure of communication, or… who knows? The plane clipped the tops of trees near the Smolensk landing field and the tragedy of 96 lost lives was added to the ashes at Katyn.

Most media attention to the crash was focused on the late President Kaczynski and the national outpouring of grief that surrounded his controversial burial at Wawel Castle in Cracow, Poland, the burial site of Polish kings and heroes. A lot of people thought that Kaczynski’s accomplishments hardly merited internment among Poland’s major historical figures. Even former Polish president and former Solidarity leader Lech Walesa, 65, acknowledged the burial anomaly, remarking that since it was a decision of the Catholic Church, he would have to accept it.

Although Kaczynski was widely praised in death as “our president,” in life, the rightwing leader had a less than 30 per cent approval rating among Poles and was considered unlikely to win reelection this year (the election has now been moved up to mid-year). Both Kaczynski and his twin brother Jaroslav, a former prime minister of Poland, were known for politics that were economically conservative, strongly nationalistic, and blatantly homophobic. When he was mayor of Warsaw, Lech Kaczynski had attracted notoriety for shutting down gay pride parades.

Most Poles I’ve talked to in the wake of the crash emphasize that their grief is directed to the large number of prominent fellow-and-sister citizens who perished, and not to any particular elected official. As Polish novelist Olga Tokarczuk put it, “From death’s perspective… there are no presidents or flight attendants… There is just the person, always dear.”

As it happened, I knew, however faintly, one of those who died in the Katyn crash. She was 80-year-old Anna Walentynowicz, the heroine, in 1980, of the Solidarity trade union strike at the shipyards in Gdansk, Poland, that presaged the end of communism in Poland a decade later. She, along with Walesa and others, was among the leaders of the most significant workers’ revolt against a “workers’ state” in a half-century. I interviewed the then 50-year-old former welder and crane operator in Gdansk in spring 1981, just months after the trade union strike that would eventually transform Polish society.

“Pani Anna,” as she was known to everyone in the shipyards, was a soft-spoken, small, middle-aged woman in a floral print dress. When I asked her, since I was attempting to construct a journalistic account of the historic events in Gdansk, she gave me a minute-by-minute account of her experiences during the first day of a strike that would flash the famous “Solidarnosc” logo around the world. What one couldn’t discern simply from her appearance was that Walentynowicz was a veteran political activist. She’d begun as a Communist Party member, stormily quit when the communists so obviously failed to live up to their ideals, and became part of the workers’ opposition, one committed to the creation of a genuine workers’ council-type society.

Walentynowicz was unlike many of the people associated with Solidarity. She was not a rightwing anti-communist, a strident nationalist, or a religious activist, all of whom could be found in the divergent Solidarity coalition. One of those conservative figures, by the way, was future president Lech Kaczynski,  then an advisor to strike leader Walesa and eventually a Solidarity member of the Polish parliament as a result of the first free elections in 1989. By contrast, Walentynowicz broke with Walesa as the labour leader who became the first modern Polish president drifted to the right.

For a journalist, meeting her was a brief but memorable brush with history. Certainly, the circumstances of that encounter were headier and more hopeful than Poland’s trudge into post-communist capitalism turned out to be. Yes, you mourn real people when the plane goes down, but you also mourn dreams, and want to be sure that the dreams as well as the people aren’t forgotten.

There was scant time to remember before the volcanic ash cloud arrived. It prevented international leaders, including U.S. President Obama, from attending the Polish burial services. And now that the planes are back up, our distracted attentions will no doubt be directed elsewhere. For a moment, though, a pause to consider the mortal course of ashes to ashes.

Berlin, April 22, 2010.

Stan Persky is the winner of the 2010 B.C. Lieutenant-Governor’s Award for Literary Excellence. His most recent book, co-authored with Brian Fawcett, is Robin Blaser (Vancouver: New Star, 2010).

1.

If you’re a teacher, what your students are wearing tells you something about what’s going on in the culture. In the 1980s and 90s, I noticed that walking into a classroom was like hitting a stretch of highway crowded with advertising billboards. The students were wearing T-shirts, sweatshirts, and other paraphernalia that brazenly bore the names of the corporations that manufactured them. Unlike earlier displays of brand logos, such as the discreet crocodile insignia of a Lacoste shirt or the little horseman and mallet that decorated Ralph Lauren’s Polo shirts, which were meant to subtly but publicly indicate the wearer’s good taste and purchasing power, the new T-shirts were emblazoned with giant corporate names and company colours — Calvin Klein, Tommy Hilfiger, The Gap, and others — that tended to cover most of the surface of the garment being worn.

Puzzled as to why the students wanted to turn themselves into walking advertisements, I’d occasionally ask them what it all meant. Often as not, they would deny it meant anything and blandly declare, “It’s just a fashion thing.” Yes, I’d mildly persist, but how and why does a “fashion thing” become a fashion thing? And does the “thing” mean anything? Mainly, what I wondered was, How did the corporations get the consumers to not only advertise the corporation, but to pay for the privilege of doing so? The students were pretty resistant to my pointy-headed attempts at sociological analysis, and my “lessons from everyday life” tended to fall flat.

Lots of subsequent “fashion statements” have come and gone since the era of big logos. In the first decade of the 21st century, I’ve noticed that students and other “dedicated followers of fashion” (to recall a phrase from an old pop song by The Kinks), tend to express their fashion sense less by haberdashery and bodily decorations (tattoos and other skin piercings), and more by technological accoutrements, such as iPods, cellphones, and all sorts of mobile computer gadgets. It’s fairly de rigueur these days to be armed to the teeth with technology designed to facilitate multi-tasking, although spoilsport teachers often ask the students to turn off all electronic devices while the classroom is in session on the grounds that education is engaged in concentrating on the subject at hand or, what might be called, “mono-tasking.”

All of these passing observations (by myself and others) remained idle speculation until the beginning of the new millennium when a then 29-year-old Canadian journalist, Naomi Klein, in a brilliant stroke of “pattern recognition,” published No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies (1999/2000; 2010). It quickly became an international, multi-lingual, million-copy bestseller, and it told readers a lot about the corporations that plastered their brands on the backs and fronts of their consumers, focusing as much on production and ideology as on the more familiar discussion of consumption. In the introduction to the tenth anniversary edition of No Logo — and it should be noted that a tenth anniversary edition of any work of non-fiction is a pretty rare publishing event these days — Klein points out that from the beginning of her writing career, she’s always been interested in the relationship between power and business, or what was once called “political economy.” (Small disclosure here: although I don’t know Klein, we were both members of the editorial collective of Toronto’s This Magazine at the end of the 1980s; she was the publication’s precocious managing editor; I was its Vancouver-based West Coast correspondent.)

Among the first articles Klein published as a journalist “were [those] about the limited job options available to me and my peers — the rise of short-term contracts and McJobs, as well as the ubiquitous use of sweatshop labour to produce the branded gear sold to us.” What’s more, Klein also picked up on “how an increasingly voracious marketing culture was encroaching on previously protected non-corporate spaces — schools, museums, parks — while ideas that my friends and I had considered radical were absorbed almost instantly into the latest marketing campaigns for Nike, Benetton and Apple.”

The notion about Klein’s ability to connect-the-dots hidden in otherwise disparate phenomena is borrowed from the title of Pattern Recognition (2003), a novel by Vancouver writer William Gibson, who’s best known for his “cyberpunk” speculative fiction. Klein mentions Gibson’s book in her retrospective reflections on the genesis of No Logo, and the kind of aha!-experience to which it refers. It’s something like the sociological acuity found in Douglas Coupland’s Generation X (1991) and other of his novels, but Klein’s recognitions tend to be more pointedly political. As she recalls, “I decided to write No Logo when I realized these seemingly disparate trends were connected by a single idea — that corporations should produce brands, not products.”

This was the era when corporate epiphanies were striking CEOs like lightning bolts from the heavens: Nike isn’t running a shoe company, it is about the idea of transcendence through sports, Starbucks isn’t a coffee shop chain, it’s about the idea of community. Down on earth these epiphanies meant that many companies that had manufactured their products in their own factories, and had maintained large, stable workforces, embraced the now ubiquitous Nike model: close your factories, produce your products through an intricate web of contractors and subcontractors and pour your resources into the design and marketing required to project your big ideas… Some called these restructured companies ‘hollow corporations’ because their goal seemed to be to transcend the corporeal world of things so they could be an utterly unencumbered brand.

In her 2010 No Logo essay, Klein explains that the move from the sociology of marketing to her later works doesn’t at all represent a break in her thinking. “For me,” she says, “the appeal of X-raying brands such as Nike or Starbucks was that pretty soon you were talking about everything except marketing — from how products are made in the deregulated global supply chain to industrial agriculture and commodity prices. Next thing you knew you were also talking about the nexus of politics and money that locked in these wild-west rules through free-trade deals and at the World Trade Organization (WTO), and made following them the precondition of receiving much-needed loans from the International Monetary Fund (IMF). In short, you were talking about how the world works.”

The enormous success of No Logo was rooted not only in Klein’s astute recognition of social patterns and their causes. It was also the result of intrepid on-the-scene reporting. “She ventures into sweatshops in the Philippines, attends classes for anticorporate crusaders and goes ‘culture jamming’ with groups who deface billboards in the middle of the night,” as one enthusiastic reviewer described Klein’s global beat (James Ledbetter, “Brand Names,” The New York Times, April 23, 2000). The reviewer also noted that “the book’s conclusions are largely grim. Klein links the development of multinational branding to the growth of international sweatshops, corporate censorship and the disappearance of the steady job,” but added, “She is careful not to equate her criticisms with a false nostalgia for an ad-free past; instead, Klein takes the fairly unassailable position that our lives ought to have at least some ‘unbranded space’.” Although the classrooms where I was teaching were no longer among those unbranded spaces, Klein’s book helped make sense of how they got to be crammed with displays of brand loyalties.

Klein notes that by the time No Logo came out (a first Canadian edition appeared at the very end of 1999, other editions shortly afterwards, in 2000), a popular political movement had emerged and “was already at the gates of the powerful institutions that were spreading corporatism around the world. Tens and then hundreds of thousands of demonstrators were making their case outside trade summits and G8 meetings from Seattle to New Delhi.” Klein was soon amid the demonstrators and occasionally spotlighted as a spokesperson for what was called the “anti-globalisation movement.” Klein regards the term as a misnomer. The spectrum of the movement, she says, ranged from anti-corporatism at the reformist end to anti-capitalism at the radical end. It was, far from being “anti-global,” insistently internationalist. Klein’s point is that “globalisation” was a bland euphemism for a “ruthless strain” of corporate capitalism.

For the next few years Klein joined protestors before the “gates of the powerful” and huddled in the conference rooms of various “counter-summits,” as an advocacy journalist and political participant. The reportage appeared as Fences and Windows: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Globalisation Debate (2002). As a collection of columns and talks, while it drew far less attention than No Logo, it helped develop the images and metaphors of Klein’s thinking.

“When I first noticed that the image of the fence kept coming up in discussion, debates and in my own writing, it seemed significant to me,” Klein writes. Despite the promise that post-Communist global economic integration would mean barriers coming down, the opposite appeared to be happening. “The economic process that goes by the benign euphemism ‘globalization’ now reaches into every aspect of life, transforming every activity and natural resource into a measured and owned commodity,” Klein observes. An insatiable market continually redefines as ‘”products’ entire sectors that were previously considered part of the ‘the commons’ and not for sale… The invading of the public by the private has reached into categories such as health and education, of course, but also ideas, genes, seeds, now purchased, patented and fenced off, as well as traditional aboriginal remedies, plants, water and even human stem cells.”

What’s more, the fences and gates are increasingly literal. There are now, says Klein, “armies of locked-out people, whose services are no longer needed, whose lifestyles are written off as ‘backward,’ whose basic needs go unmet. These fences of social exclusion can discard an entire industry, and they can also write off an entire country” or even a continent. As for the protestors at global summits, they too find themselves behind actual fences, and “heavy-handed security measures… become metaphors for an economic model that exiles billions to poverty and exclusion.”

But in addition to the fences, there were glimpses through “windows,” occasions where Klein experienced the feeling that “some sort of political portal was opening up — a gateway, a window, ‘a crack in history’” (the phrase is that of the Mexican revolutionary, Subcomandante Marcos), but most of all,  a perspective where “the prospect of a radical change in political course does not seem like an odd and anachronistic idea but the most logical thought in the world.” If you’re of the party that wants to change the world, hope is probably an occupational hazard, as well as a necessity.

2.

Naomi Klein begins her alternate history of the unregulated global free market, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (2007), on the ground, interviewing survivors at a Red Cross shelter in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, shortly after the 2005 Hurricane Katrina that devastated the city of New Orleans. Although the efforts of President George Bush’s federal emergency teams fell woefully short of performing the intended rescue of citizens and reconstruction of their habitations, one of the most curious things to emerge from the catastrophe, Klein reports, was educational reform.

The idea came from Nobel Prize winning economist Milton Friedman. The then 93-year-old doyen of free market economists (he died a year later, in 2006), author of Freedom and Capitalism (1962) and many other books, penned an op-ed piece in The Wall Street Journal (Dec. 5, 2005) lamenting the destruction of New Orleans’ schools, but also seeing the ruins as “an opportunity to radically reform the educational system.”

Friedman’s radical idea, Klein explains, “was that instead of spending a portion of the billions of dollars in reconstruction money on rebuilding and improving New Orleans’ existing public school system, the government should provide families with vouchers, which they could spend at private institutions, many run at a profit, that would be subsidized by the state.” The notion of “charter” or voucher-funded schools was an old hobbyhorse of Friedman’s, who regarded the entire concept of a state-run school system as smacking of socialism. The idea of implementing this “radical reform” in the midst of a disaster is what Naomi Klein’s book is about.

The idea was seized upon by right-wing think tanks, supported by the Bush administration, and “in sharp contrast to the glacial pace with which the levees were repaired and the electricity grid was brought back online, the auctioning off of New Orleans’ school system took place with military speed and precision.” Within 18 months of the hurricane, with most of the city’s poor population still “in exile,” as Klein says, the school board-run 123 public schools had been reduced to 4; the half-dozen existing pre-storm charter schools had burgeoned to over 30. The teachers’ union’s contract had been revoked and the union’s 4700 members had all been fired. Naturally, since a lot of what Klein has to say in this 600-page book is going to hinge on such facts, it’s useful to note that her claims and interpretations are consistently documented, although her interpretations no doubt are subject to debate.

Neither the discussion of the New Orleans catastrophe nor the appearance of economist Friedman are tangential to Klein’s concerns. Noting that The New York Times was soon calling New Orleans “the nation’s preeminent laboratory for the widespread use of charter schools,” Klein defines “these orchestrated raids on the public sphere in the wake of catastrophic events, combined with the treatment of disasters as exciting market opportunities” as the eponymous “disaster capitalism” whose history she is tracking.

Nor is Friedman just a passer-by. For more than three decades, Klein notes, Friedman and his many followers had been perfecting this disaster strategy, “waiting for a major crisis, then selling off pieces of the state to private players.” She cites his Capitalism and Freedom as articulating “capitalism’s core nostrum, what I have come to understand as the shock doctrine.” There, Friedman wrote that “only a crisis — actual or perceived — produces real changes. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.”

Friedman became, unarguably, the most influential post-World War II economist in the world, displacing John Maynard Keynes, who had provided the outlines of the “welfare state” in response to the Great Depression of the 1930s. However, it wasn’t until the ascension, in the 1970s and 80s, of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan to the offices of British Prime Minister and U.S. President, respectively, that Freidman’s theories became official, mainstream, economic policy, emphasising reduction of the size of government, cuts in public spending, and the privatization of as much of the previous functions of the public sector as possible.

Friedman’s ideas, however, had received their try-out a decade earlier in Latin America, and from his academic base at the University of Chicago, he and like-minded colleagues had produced a generation of so-called “Chicago Boys,” economists who soon populated influential governmental posts throughout the region. Klein isn’t making the claim, as she is sometimes accused of doing by critics, that Friedman was personally engaged in or even supportive of every instance of economic shock therapy. For instance, his commitment to more or less unfettered free markets would mean that he disapproved of various moves by the International Money Fund and other institutions as government interference, even when the IMF policies followed his prescriptions and were administered by economists trained at Chicago. Rather, Klein’s point is that Friedman was the inspiration for a variety of free market “disaster” initiatives, irrespective of whether the governments taking them were nominally democratic or authoritarian. What’s more, Friedman was often on hand for advice on just such occasions.

The first instance of the exploitation of a large scale shock or crisis occurred in the mid-1970s, when Friedman acted as an adviser to the Chilean dictator, General Augusto Pinochet, who, in a violent coup, covertly supported by the United States, had overthrown the democratically-elected socialist government of President Salvador Allende. Klein describes Friedman’s proposals for tax cuts, free trade, privatized services, cuts to social spending and deregulation (even Chilean public schools were replaced with voucher-funded private institutions) as “the most extreme capitalist makeover ever attempted anywhere.” Since so many of Pinochet’s economists had studied under Friedman at the University of Chicago, the transformation, which Friedman dubbed “shock treatment,” was known as a “Chicago School” revolution.

The economic shock treatment in Chile was accompanied by more literal versions “performed in the regime’s many torture cells.” If “disaster capitalism” is the primary pattern Klein detects in her book, the use of torture and execution is a secondary, frequently interwoven, pattern that she identifies in a plethora of historical instances. “Many in Latin America,” Klein declares, “saw a direct connection between the economic shocks that impoverished millions and the epidemic of torture that punished hundreds of thousands of people who believed in a different kind of society.” Again and again, throughout Latin America in the 1970s, Klein documents authoritarian, violent takeovers of government, quickly followed by the shock of extreme capitalism implemented by policy makers trained by Friedman’s Chicago School.

Klein, who began writing her book while the U.S. was in the midst of its self-proclaimed “Shock and Awe” attack on Iraq and the subsequent free market “reconstruction” of the country, gives herself a broader investigatory mandate than the gruesome events of Latin America. In New Orleans, Iraq, Sri Lanka in the wake of the 2004 tsunami, Poland and Russia in the post-Berlin Wall period, East Asia during its fiscal crisis of the late 1990s, and even in China and post-apartheid South Africa, she traces similar shocks and reconstructions. The circumstances of disaster she examines are various and “economics was by no means the sole motivator,” she admits, nor were the traumatic episodes always overtly violent, “but in each case a major collective shock was exploited to prepare the ground for economic shock therapy.” In almost all the cases she explores, there is little evidence that the free market policies improved the lives of the inhabitants affected by them.

Klein’s book, finally, is conceived as “a challenge to the central and most cherished claim in the official story — that the triumph of deregulated capitalism has been born of freedom, that unfettered free markets go hand in hand with democracy itself.” In making that challenge, she also offers some sensible cautions: “I am not arguing that all forms of market systems are inherently violent. It is eminently possible to have a market-based economy… [that] coexists with free public health care, with public schools, with a large segment of the economy — like a national oil company — held in state hands.” It’s equally possible, she adds, to require decent wages, workers’ rights, and redistribution of wealth. “Markets need not be fundamentalist.” But in instance after instance, she demonstrates that the imposition of radical free market policies seldom occurs in conditions of enhanced democracy; indeed such policies, whether implemented by authoritarian regimes or the dictates of the International Monetary Fund, tend to be accompanied by a brutal curtailment of freedom.

What follows Klein’s initial overview is an ambitious account that need not be reprised in detail here (but needs to be read in all its devilish detail), a panoramic story that ranges from military coups in Brazil and Chile in the 1960s and 70s to the terrorism, wars, tsunamis and hurricanes of the last decade. Whether or not one entirely agrees with the delineation of the macro-economic “patterns” that Klein claims to recognize, her book offers a bold thesis, substantial research as well as first-hand reporting, and popular readability, all at the right political moment in the decade. For her generation, Klein conveys something of the urgency and astuteness that a previous era of radical readers had found in the work of Noam Chomsky.

The reception of The Shock Doctrine is also noteworthy. Klein had again written a best-seller, one that was widely reviewed, promptly translated into multiple languages, and named to numerous book-of-the-year lists. Succeeding editions carried an impressive roster of endorsements from economists, historians and political journalists, as well as writers and other cultural figures. Novelist Arundhati Roy hailed the book as “nothing less than the secret history of what we call the ‘free market’”; William Kowinski saw it as a possible revelation of “the master narrative of our time”; John Berger praised Klein as “an accusing angel.”

Even discounting for the hyperbole, thoughtful analysts reckoned that Klein had recognized something important. The British social critic John Grey saw Klein’s critique of neo-liberalism as both timely and devastating. “Many of the ideas of the far left,” he writes, “have found new homes on the right.” Once upon a time, it was the communist revolutionary Lenin who believed that conditions of catastrophic upheaval were crucial to social transformation; today, “the devastation of entire societies has been a key part of the neo-liberal cult of the free market,” says Gray.

Throughout the world, Gray argues, “policies of wholesale privatisation and structural adjustment have led to declining economic activity and social dislocation on a massive scale. Anyone who has watched a country lurch from one crisis to another as the bureaucrats of the IMF impose cut after cut in pursuit of the holy grail of stabilisation will recognize the process Naomi Klein describes in her latest and most important book to date.” The Shock Doctrine, he says, is one of those “very few books that really help us understand the present.” Disaster capitalism, Gray foresees, writing exactly one year before the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the beginning of a global Great Recession, “is now creating disasters larger than it can handle.” (John Gray, “The End of the World as We Know It,” The Guardian, Sept. 15, 2007.)

The 2001 Nobel Prize winner for economics, Joseph Stiglitz, a former World Bank and Bill Clinton administration economist, and currently a Columbia University professor, also thought “Klein’s ambitious look at the economic history of the last 50 years and the rise of free-market fundamentalism around the world” a significant accomplishment. “Klein provides a rich description of the political machinations required to force unsavory economic policies on resisting countries, and of the human toll,” Stiglitz writes, adding, “she paints a disturbing portrait of hubris, not only on the part of Milton Friedman but also of those who adopted his doctrines, sometimes to pursue more corporatist objectives. It is striking to be reminded how many of the people involved in the Iraq War were involved earlier in other shameful episodes in United States foreign policy history. She draws a clear line from the torture in Latin America in the 1970s to that at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay,” the two most notorious allegedly anti-terrorist prisons of the last decade.

As for the economics of the book, Stiglitz admits that “Klein is not an academic and cannot be judged as one. There are many places in her book where she oversimplifies. But Friedman and the other shock therapists were also guilty of oversimplification, basing their belief in the perfection of market economies on models that assumed perfect information, perfect competition, perfect risk markets. Indeed, the case against these policies is even stronger than the one Klein  makes.” Some of that case is made in Stiglitz’s own subsequent book, Freefall: America, Free Markets, and the Sinking of the World Economy (2010).

Stiglitz recognizes that Klein isn’t a professional economist but a journalist, and what he likes about her work is that “she travels the world to find out firsthand what really happened on the ground during the privatization of Iraq, the aftermath of the Asian tsunami, the continuing Polish transition to capitalism and the years after the African National Congress took power in South Africa, when it failed to pursue redistributionist policies.” Stiglitz anticipates that Klein will be viewed by opponents as a mere conspiracy theorist. He points out that it’s “not the conspiracies that wreck the world but the series of wrong turns, failed policies, and little and big unfairnesses that add up.” Not conspiracies, but a mind-set: “Market fundamentalists never really appreciated the institutions required to make an economy function well, let alone the broader social fabric that civilizations require to prosper and flourish.” (Joseph Stiglitz, “Bleakonomics,” The New York Times, Sept. 30, 2007.)

Klein’s book also had no shortage of detractors, even among left-liberals who otherwise provided much of the chorus of praise. Perhaps the most dismissive of the criticisms was a lengthy essay in The New Republic (Jonathan Chait, “Dead Left,” July 30, 2008), but Klein was also shrugged off by the Left Business Observer (”Awe, Shocks,” March 2008), and frequently seen as a dupe of conspiracy theories (Tom Redburn, “It’s All a Grand Capitalist Conspiracy,” The New York Times, Sept. 29, 2007).

The most substantial of the critiques, Jonathan Chait’s, is also notable for a tone that mixes ill-disguised resentment (and perhaps some envy) at Klein’s prominence as a social critic, with a dismissal of her intellectual capability that tends to equate her with the nitwit teenagers who featured in the 1989 movie comedy, Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. In that justly forgotten nerdish epic, the boys make use of a fortuitously available time machine in a desperate bid to pass their history exam. “It seems like a very long time — though in truth only a few years have passed — since the most sinister force on the planet that the left could imagine was Nike,” is Chait’s heavy-handed sardonic opener.

There’s a thumbnail sketch of Klein’s progress from “red diaper baby” (she comes from a leftist family, and is married to Avi Lewis, a younger member of a prominent Canadian social democratic lineage) to spokesperson for the “defining causes” of the era (she writes for The Guardian, The Nation and other lefty publications), and “darling of the left.” But under it all, Chait’s point appears to be that Klein is a simply a “classic Marxist-materialist” analyst, with a bit of derivative Frankfurt School cultural critique tossed in. It’s not clear whether Chait’s claim that she “managed to make old notions feel new” is an observation or a complaint, and it’s never said what exactly is wrong with Klein’s rediscovery of the evils of capitalism.

The main charge against Klein is that her book “has a single, uncomplicated explanation for everything that ails us,” namely “the worldwide spread of free-market absolutism as it was formulated by Milton Friedman.” That is, the great flaw of The Shock Doctrine is its over-simplifications, “an extremely crude sort of Marxist economicism” that “leaves little room for the non-economic varieties of conflict, such as ethnic or sectarian strife.” In the end, Chait says, “Klein’s relentless lumping together of all her ideological adversaries in the service of a monocausal theory of the world ultimately renders her analysis perfect nonsense.”

Other critics, such as Tom Redburn, also charge Klein with seeing “everything” as an opportunity “for a particularly ruthless form of capitalism to succeed where it otherwise would never take hold.” He admits that “there’s a measure of truth about the dark side of globalization in all this, but that’s a lot to lay on poor Milton [Friedman].” The unsigned critic of Left Business Observer thinks that there’s little new or “secret” in Klein, and that it’s simplistic to put such varied instances into a single theory. The LBO reviewer is a bit more-leftist-than-thou, chiding Klein for not including more pre-1970 history (particularly the Vietnam War) and for being nostalgic “for the Keynesian welfare state model,” implying that more than Scandinavian-style social democracy is going to be required to solve the deeper crisis.

Since Klein is a literate person, she’s perfectly capable of responding to her critics and has (see www.naomiklein.com; her specific rejoinder is posted on Sept. 11, 2008). Perhaps the most eloquent feature of her reply is the simply the citation of unemployment statistics in countries that have undergone economic shocks and shock treatment, whether it’s the quarter of all Russians who were living in desperate poverty in the mid-90s, or the doubling of unemployment in post-apartheid South Africa, or the extraordinary unemployment and absolute poverty numbers in post-communist Poland and other former Soviet Bloc countries.

Nor is Klein about to disappear. She continues to wade into the daily debate. A Wall Street Journal article declared, in the wake of the 2010 Chilean earthquake, that countless Chilean lives had been saved thanks to the strict building codes instituted by Milton Friedman, whose “spirit was surely hovering protectively over” the country. Klein pointed out that there is “one rather large problem with this theory”: the building codes were instituted in 1972 by the socialist government that was overthrown by Pinochet’s coup the following year. And, in any case, she adds, Friedman was ambivalent about building codes, seeing them as “yet another infringement on capitalist freedom.”  (Naomi Klein, “Milton Friedman did not save Chile,” The Guardian, Mar. 3, 2010.)

It may be that Klein’s “pattern recognition” of “disaster capitalism” is over-extended. Still, I’m disposed to give her the benefit of the doubt in most instances, and I’m not much interested in whether her manner or fame are irritating to some. If anything, the years of the global capitalist crisis since The Shock Doctrine was published tend to bear out Klein’s and others’ arguments about unregulated free-market capitalism. The accuracy of Klein’s “pattern recognition” is important, but it’s outweighed, in my view, by the overall substance of her narrative.

For myself, Klein’s work in the last decade inspires two reflections, perhaps also a bit simplistic, about history and memory. Whether or not Klein has absolutely correctly recognized the patterns of the past half century, her tour of benighted and brutalized places on the globe (as if everywhere, including the “homeland,” are now among Conrad’s “dark places of the earth”) is a historical reminder of the horrors of our time. If overt torture doesn’t occur in every historical episode Klein examines, her insistence on its ubiquity seems appropriate.

One reviewer chides Klein for not explaining why “there is something immoral about using crises to advance the right-wing agenda.” After all, aren’t right-wingers as sincere as anybody else? I suppose Klein could say more about why it’s morally dismaying that the richest country in the world thinks it is acceptable that 50 million of its citizens have no access to health care. On the other hand, the U.S. insistence on the privatization and outsourcing of everything from health care to the interrogation of its war prisoners in Iraq and elsewhere may not require additional moral disapprobation to be understood. By now, you would think, the effects of unfettered capitalism are clear enough to warrant a measure of Beckettian gloom.

As one of the readers of The Shock Doctrine who has lived through all of the historical events adumbrated in its pages, I’m surprised by both how much I’ve forgotten and how much I never understood. Even though I don’t think of myself as someone given to the instant amnesia that characterizes much of contemporary mentality and mindlessness, I’d more or less completely forgotten that Boris Yeltsin had come to power in post-Soviet Russia in a bloody coup. Further, I realized, reading Klein, that I either hadn’t paid sufficient attention to or actually understood the attempted shock therapy program meant to catapult Russia into contemporary capitalism and away from the faded social democratic dreams of the deposed Mikhail Gorbachev.

What’s more, I’d worked as a journalist in Poland a quarter century ago during the Solidarnosc period, and had interviewed the shipyard workers of Gdansk, with their yearnings for a democratic syndicalist future, but I hadn’t really followed the subsequent radical free market policies that crushed those vague yearnings without necessarily enriching the country’s inhabitants. I knew something had gone economically wrong in post-apartheid South Africa, but I wasn’t sure what. Even with respect to recent events such as the Iraq War, it wasn’t until Klein reiterated the numbers, that I fully realized that some 60,000 of the about 200,000 armed U.S. personnel in the field were private security company mercenaries. Much of Klein’s writing works as an aide-memoire to our own times.

In terms of writing in the last decade, the most prominent literary figures among Naomi Klein’s Canadian compatriots are undoubtedly Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro and Michael Ondaatje. But I think a case can be made that Klein is not only her country’s bestselling author of the last ten years, but also its most relevant writer.
Berlin, March 9, 2010.

It’s the sort of winter that leads Germans to turn up the central heating and contemplate the state of the German soul. Rumination about the German Geist has been an Olympic-class intellectual sport here for better than two centuries. Sometimes those ponderings produce a Faust; a Beethoven string quartet; a  Brecht, Thomas Mann, or Gunter Grass; even a Fassbinder film series of Alfred Doblin’s Weimar-era novel, Berlin Alexanderplatz. At other times, that thinking about the authentic German soul or spirit gives us a Herder, Neitzsche, Heidegger, or much darker phenomena — and not just in the form of thoughts.

I think it’s fair to say that Germany is very far removed — more than a half century in time, but the distance is much more than temporal — from its fascist past. Yes, one finds in the press the occasional and almost inevitably exaggerated neo-Nazi story from Germany, but in reality I suspect it’s easier to turn up contemporary fascists in Britain, Italy, France, Austria or Belgium than it is to find them in the former Third Reich of Hitler. Of course, there are neo-Nazis in the country, but the other day when they attempted to march in Dresden to mark the 65th anniversary of the World War II firebombing of the city, some 10,000 counter-protesters showed up in the snow and turned the right-wingers away at the train station. March cancelled. Germany may be one of the few modern nations to have actually learned something from history.

Fascism is gone, but the ghost of fascism remains, at least for a generation old enough to still have some living memory, however faint, of it. For such people, now in their fifties or older, the enigma of how it was possible for Nazism to occur, particularly in Germany, is a permanent question. It’s been a thematic of postwar German writing from Nobel laureate Gunter Grass’s now classic Tin Drum (the 50th anniversary of its publication was marked last year) to such recent works as Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader.

In the winter of German discontent with icy sidewalks, I’ve stumbled upon a lengthy biography of an early-20th century, now mostly-forgotten, German poet and cult leader that tells us more about the troubled stirrings of national souls than most volumes of conventional political analysis and history. The book is Robert Norton’s Secret Germany: Stefan George and His Circle (Cornell, 2002), a work that’s received only limited attention, largely in academic quarters, but that deserves, for a variety of reasons, a wider readership.

Norton’s bio is a first-rate piece of scholarship and an engrossing read, especially on long winter nights, German or otherwise. It’s among the best literary biographies of the past decade. Second, this first full-length account of Stefan George (1868-1933; the surname is pronounced “gay-org-uh”) fills in important gaps in the history of 20th century poetry, as well as in German cultural history. Most important, it examines once widespread notions about “secret Germany,” a dangerously Romantic idea that energized all sorts of phenomena in early 20th century, from nudist and nature movements, to cultlike homoerotic and mystical circles, to national longings for a strong Leader (or Fuhrer). In addition to appreciating the general virtues of Norton’s book, I have an accidental personal interest in it.

When I was a young writer in San Francisco in the 1960s, I frequently heard stories from my teachers Robin Blaser, Jack Spicer, and Robert Duncan about one of their professors at the University of California Berkeley, when they were all students there just after the end of World War II. Their most memorable teacher, Blaser told me, was the medieval historian, Ernst Kantorowicz, author of Frederick II and The King’s Two Bodies, books to which we younger writers were soon introduced.

Kantorowicz, of Jewish descent, had spoken out against the Nazis and fled Germany in the late 1930s. Once in the U.S., he taught at Berkeley, where he resisted the McCarthyite “loyalty oaths” of the 1950s, and later at Princeton. In his youth, however, he’d been a rightwing German nationalist and a member of the fabled George circle. Kantorowicz’s 1928 study of the 13th century Holy Roman Emperor Frederick was one of the books produced by academic members of the George group that celebrated powerful German leaders.

Another San Francisco writer I knew, Lew Ellingham, who was knowledgeable about German culture and the George group, later partially applied the notion to his and Kevin Killian’s biography of Jack Spicer, Poet, Be Like God (1998). Norton’s biography of George provides a sharply focused portrait of what I’d only known, up to then, as a blurry myth of a distant Germanic brew of poetry and perversity.

As Norton recounts it, “George began his career in the early 1890s as a lyric poet in the French Symbolist mode and he was soon regarded as one of the best poets of his time.” Mallarme accepted the young George into his salon as “one of us.” But George’s ambitions would eventually extend beyond the merely literary.

“Over the next four decades,” Norton says, “George attracted a following, first among the small number of his associates and then among ever larger segments of the populace, that sought to put his ideas into practice in the world. For George had devised not just a way of writing poetry but also, as time went on, a way of living. He considered the group of friends he gathered around him, who habitually addressed him as ‘Master,’ to be the embodiment and defenders of the ‘true’ but ’secret’ Germany, as opposed to the ‘false’ and all too manifest reality of contemporary bourgeois society.”

The group was “initially an informal coterie of like-minded poets who congregated to discuss and recite their works.” However, “George and his circle gradually assumed an enormously influential position in the culture at large. During the last 15 years of his life George was the closest thing Germany had to a prophet: a poetic visionary who, through his very remoteness, seemed to personify the vague longings of his countrymen for some form of redemption.”

To give some idea of George’s fame, Norton cites a 1929 newspaper photograph gallery, with the caption, “contemporary figures who have become legends”: the gallery included Woodrow Wilson, France’s Clemenceau, Gandhi, Lenin, and Stefan George. “Just before he died in 1933,” Norton reports, “after the new government had taken over in Germany — a regime many thought he had foreseen and whose coming he had, inadvertently or not, helped to prepare — several of its otherwise cocksure henchmen prostrated themselves before him in the attempt to win his blessing and cooperation…” And, in turn, George wasn’t averse to being regarded as the prophet of The New Reich (the title of his final volume of poems).

It’s hard to tell from Norton’s renditions of George’s poetry if it’s any good or not, though many readers and critics of his era claimed George’s poems to be masterpieces of German writing. Norton doesn’t assume any literary pretensions and simply offers workmanlike translations, to give readers an idea of what George was writing about. Unlike his younger contemporary, Rilke, whose work in English translation is remarkably accessible (if nonetheless difficult in terms of content), George’s verse remains opaque, though the titles of his books, Year of the Soul, The Seventh Ring and The Star of the Covenant among others, give some hint of the secret handshake contents.

What’s clearer is the personality (and persona) of the poet, an austere mixture of purities and autocratic power that could be alternately attractive and terrifying. It was just the sort of combination that gives rise to cult leaders. Still, George had a good eye for both talented writers and beautiful boys. When the 20-something George met and began a demonic pursuit of a talented and attractive 17-year-old Austrian poet, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, in a Vienna café in 1891, the object of the infatuation found it all pretty terrifying. Neither the friendship nor the literary relationship were consummated, though a turn-of-the-century version of telephone tag went on for years.

George was more successful with others. His primary disciple, the photogenic Friedrich Gundolf, turned up as an 18-year-old, and remained devoted to George to his death. Gundolf became a precocious professor at the University of Heidelberg, and published a celebrated study of leadership, The Mantle of Caesar, as well as books about Goethe, Shakespeare and the history of German poetry.  However, when he married, George excommunicated him permanently from the magical circle.

Other prominent followers had similarly stormy emotional and erotic relations with their master. In addition to Gundolf and Kantorowicz, members of George’s circle included such once well-known figures as historian Friedrich Wolter, cultural critic Max Kommerell, and later, the aristocratic brothers Claus and Berthold von Stauffenberg, now remembered for their failed attempt to assassinate Hitler and their summary execution.

Norton is particularly good on tracing George’s  restless parapatetic wanderings between Berlin, Munich, Heidelberg and eventually rural Switzerland. He makes excellent and unprecedented use of the available correspondence and other documents to detail the tangled and obsequious relations that various followers had with the Master. His scene setting brings to life George’s growing influence, beginning with the poet’s first breakthrough salon reading  at the apartment of painter Sabine Lepsius in Berlin in 1897 (the young Rainer Rilke was in the audience; so was the sociologist Georg Simmel, another admirer).

In the pre-World War I decades, a publishing apparatus developed around George. There was a magazine, Pages for Art, a Yearbook of the Spiritual Movement, and a loyal publisher in Berlin who brought out George’s volumes of poetry and the scholarly works of his disciples, a series of so-called Geist-books uniformly marked by the circle’s insignia, a stylized swastika, the symbol that would later become notorious in Nazi hands. The group’s activities ranged from ritualized readings and dress-up parties (George, as many people noted, bore a resemblance to images of Dante, and he occasionally played that role at costumed gatherings) to fairly nutty sub-groups, such as Munich’s Cosmic Circle, which was a stew of apocalyptic prophecy, anti-semitism, and blood-and-soil mysticism.

George’s biographer is sensibly unsqueamish about the poet’s erotic pursuit of teenage boys, one of whom, Max Kronberger, who died at 16, a scant two years after George first met him, was posthumously elevated to the position of a divinity, the object of devotion for George’s sect. Although the organizational propaganda of the circle tended to later suggest that all the boy-chasing was “Platonic,” Norton is fairly convincing that the homoerotic aspects of George’s group amounted to more than simply high-minded pederastic conversation.

The core of the book, finally, is the cultural and political ideology of a once shadowy, and eventually, quite prominent movement. It was, as Norton says, “elitist, hierarchically minded, antidemocratic, and deeply suspicious of all forms of rationalism.” In sum, George and company embodied “the beliefs and values shared by anti-modern intellectuals,” disturbingly striated with violent, apocalpytic calls for absolute destruction of the impure, debased present. It was a view that displayed nothing but contempt for the bumbling but social democratic Weimar experiment of 1920s Germany.

George’s “Secret Germany,” Norton says, “provided a surrogate ideology that looked back to a heroic European past for political and cultural models,” a past that was largely the product of romantic imagination. Norton underscores the point that this “‘Secret Germany’ was not Nazi Germany,” adding, “but the two cannot be separated either.” He provides sufficient evidence that the elderly poet didn’t at all mind being thought of as the prophet of the fascist regime.

I think the real point of understanding George and his times is to understand what was so attractive about fascism. That is, although there’s a temptation to caricature its goose-stepping protocols, there had to be something about the promise of Nazism to explain how enticing it was. Norton’s study of the times also suggests how many of the movements and tendencies of the era were double-edged, both potentially progressive and deeply reactionary.

The images of order and heroics, knights in shining armour, were appealing in the circumstances of turbulent capitalism and political instability that marked post-World War I Germany. The youth, nature and nudity movements of the early 20th century bespoke an interest in environmental preservation against the destruction of technology and the market; the devotion to the body counterposed itself to unfeeling machines. Even the elements of homoerotic romance (and there’s a surprising amount of it attached to fascism) suggested a kind of bonding that rejected the instrumental relationships of bourgeois society. The modes of poetry and mysticism seemed a more authentic route to sublime truth that mere rationality. That all of this has some pertinence to a post-modern present hardly needs to be spelled out.

Norton’s Secret Germany emphasizes the darker consequences of the phenomena it investigates. Those consequences explain why contemporary, pragmatic Germany is less inclined to seek its mystical soul. Norton gives the last word to the German-Jewish cultural critic, Walter Benjamin, who wrote about Stefan George in 1933, the year of Hitler’s ascension to power and the poet’s death, that “if ever God has punished a prophet by fulfilling his prophecy, then that is the case with George.” Norton adds, “Only time would tell how right Benjamin had been.”
Berlin, February 18, 2010.

One recent end-of-the-semester morning, while taking attendance in the “philosophy and literature” course I teach at Capilano University, I checked off the name of a student who had missed the previous class. “Where were you last week?” I asked. Since attendance-taking is a desultory ritual, I try to liven it up with some low-level banter. But this time, instead of the equally desultory dog-ate-my-homework excuse, there was something new.

“Modern warfare was released at midnight,” he said.

It took me a nano-second of mental double-take to realize that he wasn’t announcing an apocalyptic event that had been forecast by Nostradamus or the biblical Book of Revelations. In that same micro-instant I saw that I needed to make an orthographic tweak to his sentence to understand what he was saying. I had to italicize the subject of the remark: it wasn’t “modern warfare,” but instead “Modern Warfare.” Actually, Modern Warfare 2, Call of Duty 6, accompanied by its ubiquitous “TM” trademark logo.

But he didn’t have to say all that because it was common knowledge. As I could tell from the collective chuckle, almost everyone in class got the picture immediately or, like me, an imperceptible nano-second later. Modern Warfare is a popular series of videogames and a new version of it had been recently released. Like Harry Potter novels, vampire movies, or certain musical/video releases, part of the marketing strategy is to begin selling them at midnight, giving early customers a more vivid prestige-enhancing sense of being the first one on their block to own one.

So, my student had dutifully lined up outside the mall emporium, purchased a copy of the game ($59.95 a pop, according to Amazon.ca) in the middle of the night, went home and blasted away until the wee hours, and was of course fast asleep by the time morning classtime rolled around. He wasn’t the only one. In the initial marketing surge (or should that be, these days, “surge”?), 4 million-plus copies were sold, according to the Modern Warfare 2 website, and the company has to date raked in about a half billion dollars in sales. So, this is not merely an anecdote about the latest cute excuse for missing class.

Naturally, I took the opportunity of the occasion to deliver a medium-level rant about the vacuity, shallowness, and dopey nature of the pop culture foisted on young people today, although I soften the blow by pointing out that their consumption of such junk isn’t entirely their fault. Since attendance-taking is generally agreed to be a desultory chore, the students are prepared to put up with these diverting rants as long as I don’t go on too long and turn it into nagging.

Anyway, fulminating about the state of the culture is a legitimate sub-theme of the philosophy and literature class, and such jeremiads can be counted as a form of classroom entertainment. Soon, we were back to our discussion of Italo Calvino’s Mr. Palomar, Diana Athill’s Somewhere Towards the End, Julian Barnes’ Nothing to be Frightened Of, and Jose Saramago’s Death with Interruptions, the four books that make up “Endings,” the last thematic of this semester’s course. But in the back of my mind, I was aware that Calvino et al.’s ideas about death were hardly a patch on the colourful blow’m-up-good version offered by Modern Warfare.

I offer this little story of cultural catastrophe in support of Chris Hedges’ critique of American culture, politics and economics, Empire of Illusion. However, I have to admit that I view such scenes with a bit more wry amusement than Mr. Hedges, who tends to be rather grim-lipped about the whole thing. Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize-winning former foreign correspondent for The New York Times who subsequently turned into a political radical, and is currently a senior fellow of the leftist Nation Institute, a columnist for Truthdig.com, and the author of War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (2002). He begins his account of the “triumph of spectacle” with a protracted description of “entertainment” wrestling (as contrasted to the sport found in schools and Olympic contests).

It’s a ghoulishly fascinating 15-page portrait of the larger-than-life superheroes and lower-than-snakes villains of WWE, the World Wrestling Entertainment tour, one of the spectacles of U.S. cultural life. I’m not one of the 7.7 million monthly visitors to WWE’s website, so I found Hedges’ saga of the soap-opera-like fake wrestling world a bit confusing. Instead of old-fashioned half-nelsons and body slams, WWE is apparently more about bizarre storylines involving provocative taunting, cuckolding, and derogatory genealogies (as in, “Y tu mama tambien“). But Hedges’ main point is that the popular culture in which the masses, as they used to be known, are immersed, willingly or otherwise, is trivial, salacious, distracting, intellectually mind-numbing and, above all, a terrible illusion that signals the decline and fall of the Empire.

Subsequent vignettes in the opening chapter about celebrity culture include a visit to a “celebrity cemetery,” beauty makeover shows, “reality” TV fare like American Idol, Survivor, and Big Brother, and “humiliation” programs of the Jerry Springer type, where sub-proletarians duke it out over paternity DNA and who slept with whom. All of it serves to drive home Hedges’ message about the mindlessness of “mass-cult.”

Eventually, Hedges moves from the ring to Plato’s cave and spells it out. “We are chained,” he says, “to the flickering shadows of celebrity culture, the spectacle of the arena and the airwaves, the lies of advertising, the endless personal dramas, many of them completely fictional, that have become the staple of news, celebrity gossip, New Age mysticism and pop psychology.” This is not exactly news, as Hedges readily admits. Not news then, but apparently more distortions of reality than ever, and perhaps some usefulness in pointing them out. Though shudder-inducing in places, Hedges’ book is strangely unsatisfying, and it’s not immediately clear why. Maybe it’s the tone of what my students would identify as “nagging.” But no, it’s more than tone.

In an opening chapter called “The Illusion of Literacy,” (and in a book partly sub-titled “The End of Literacy”), Hedges has surprisingly little to say about the subject, almost as if he’s not particularly interested in the possibility of literacy as a remedy for cultural mindlessness. There’s a scant couple of paragraphs citing an approximately 40 per cent functional illiteracy rate in North America, but nothing about the decline of book reading, especially among young people, nor anything about other “knowledge deficits” in history, geography, science and civics, and really not much about how the Internet is actually used by its consumers (9 out of 10 of young people’s most visited sites are devoted to “social networking”). For that sort of information you have to go to books like Mark Bauerlein’s The Dumbest Generation, Susan Jacoby’s The Age of American Unreason or Andrew Keen’s Cult of the Amateur.

The paucity of literacy discussion in a book that advertises itself as being about that topic is only part of a larger problem. The “illusion of literacy” chapter is followed by others that explore the “illusions” of love, wisdom, happiness, and America itself. There’s a lot about porn, the pretensions of higher education, pop psychology, and the dismaying condition of a pseudo-democracy. Most of what Hedges says is factually true, yet I found myself periodically surfacing from the account of cultural and political sludge to mumble, “Yes, yes, but this isn’t what all of life is about or how I experience it.” At least in some monastic corners of the world, the kid who’s playing Modern Warfare is also reading Italo Calvino’s Mr. Palomar. That Hedges thinks bleak catastrophe is indeed the whole of contemporary life appears to be Hedges’ own illusion.

It’s never quite clear who Hedges is writing for nor what he wants his readers to do. Certainly, his unrelieved polemical essay is not aimed at the benighted masses watching Ultimate Fighting Challenge and poker on TV, clicking onto YouTube or YouPorn, “friending” strangers on Facebook, or blowing up imaginary worlds on Grand Theft Auto and Modern Warfare videogames. It’s not for them, since they’re not reading at all.

So, it’s a book about rather than for the unwashed but shampooed masses whose minds are inundated by junk culture. Hedges must be writing for the rest of us, the — let’s be generous — 10 or 20 per cent of us who read books, participate in politics and civic culture, and who keep a worried eye on the CO2 counts in the atmosphere. But most progressive middle-class intellectuals already know most of this stuff, and some of them have even read theoreticians like Guy Debord on “situationism” and Jean Baudrillard on “simulacra” (neither of whom is mentioned by Hedges), both of whom early on spotted “the triumph of spectacle.” Moreover, Hedges’ intended intellectual audience, while dimly aware of most of the phenomena Hedges excoriates, live lives that only peripherally partake of mass popular culture. Given that his readers likely pay only corner-of-their-eye attention to the details, maybe Hedges’ intention is to present mass culture to us as a form of at-home exotica.

The chapter on the “illusion of love,” which is entirely devoted to a journalistic visit to a pornmakers convention in Las Vegas, is characteristic of Hedges’ perspective. Beginning with an epigraph that offers a lurid passage from the late Andrea Dworkin’s Pornography: Men Possessing Women, Hedges hews to her particular version of feminism, presenting an Inferno-esque, “graphic” account of heterosexual commercial porn that emphasizes its increasing violence and degradation of women. Interviews with porn performers, peddlars, and recovering porn actors reiterate the sadistic nature of this particular illusion, and in case we’re unfamiliar with its contents, Hedges provides extended snatches of porn video dialogue and detailed descriptions of how tab A is slotted into inserts B, C, etc., in such productions. After a few pages of this, you realize Hedges isn’t planning to go beyond the confines of the commercial sex industry, and you idly wonder why the chapter isn’t billed “the illusion of sex,” since it doesn’t seem to have much to do with love or any similar affectional state.

This cinema verite presentation builds to the climactic message that “porn reflects the endemic cruelty of our society. This is a society that does not blink when the industrial slaughter unleashed by the United States and its allies kills hundreds of civilians in Gaza or hundreds of thousands of innocents in Iraq and Afghanistan.” Mr. Hedges goes on (and on). Porn is soon linked to the plight of  the mentally ill and the unfairly imprisoned, as well as the dangers of gun ownership, obnoxious nationalism and “rapacious corporate capitalism.” Predictably enough, porn is soon equated to the infamous Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and we’re assured that “torture and pornography inevitably converge.”

I’m puzzled by the rhetorical overkill, both here and throughout Hedges’ tract. While it’s reasonable to sharply criticize both the content of hetero porn and the conditions under which it’s made, it’s not immediately clear what the purpose is of a hyperbole that insistently ties porn to all of the world’s assorted ills. It’s as if, in the name of some form of radicalism, Hedges’ intent is to crush all possible discourse about the subject. In this leftist vision of liberation, one can sense the mirthless commissars just over the horizon.

In any case, Hedges’ edicts about the meaning of porn seem designed to render any further discussion of sexual representation either trivial or irresponsible, or both. A question like, “Momentarily leaving aside the egregious conditions and content of contemporary pornography, is there a moral objection to the representation of sex between people and the viewing of such representations by other people?”, becomes irrelevant or even blasphemously incorrect. Why would one want to ask such a question?

Well, for one thing, the question challenges some North American attitudes about sex. While porn may represent commercial views about sex, a dominant religious attitude among Christian fundamentalists (and perhaps the view is held more broadly than merely as a religious tenet) is that sex ought to be strictly regulated — preferably, within heterosexual marriage and utilized primarily for procreational purposes. The debate about attitudes toward, and practices of, sex had a lot to do with both feminist and homosexual political struggles in the last half century. None of that will be found in Hedges’ Empire. Nor, when it comes to cruelty and wanton killing, will readers find anything about porn-deprived jihadis, who manage a good deal of slaughter and torture without the aid of salacious imagery.

Maybe Hedges just isn’t a very good sociological writer. In service to agitprop, Hedges excises anything that complicates his “correct line.” In my experience of gay porn, while it’s true you can find niches for everything from S&M to foot fetishism, mainstream homo porn is overwhelmingly focused on the vanilla sex of “twinks” (18-21-year-old, more or less clean-cut, late-teen beauties). While one can probably criticize the conditions these boys endure while making porn, and can cite the ways in which porn sex distorts ordinary real sex, the behaviour of the boys is generally friendly and non-violent, there’s lots of kissing and gestures of affection, they use condoms in the name of “safer sex,” and the sex, apart from being hot (if you’re inclined to find such sex hot) is pretty inoffensive unless you find the whole thing offensive. I’m not offering a brief intended to mitigate the sexist horrors of heterosexual porn, I’m just suggesting that the world is more various and complicated than Hedges, in the grip of an ideology, allows.

Subsequent chapters on higher education and positive psychology are similarly uneven. Hedges opens his chapter on the “illusion of wisdom” by saying, “The multiple failures that beset the country, from our mismanaged economy to our shredding  of Constitutional rights to our lack of universal health care to our imperial debacles in the Middle East, can be laid at the door of institutions that produce and sustain our educated elite. Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, Oxford,  Cambridge, the University of Toronto and the Paris Institute of Political Studies… do only a mediocre job of teaching students to question and think. They focus instead… on creating hordes of competent systems managers… The elite universities disdain honest intellectual inquiry… They organize learning around specialized disciplines… [they] have banished self-criticism. They refuse to question a self-justifying system. Organization, technology, self-advancement, and information systems are the only things that matter.” Naturally, Hedges doesn’t want to lay at the door of those elite universities such things as the end of slavery, free speech, civil rights, notions of ethnic and gender equality, sexual orientation, or even the attempt to reform health care in the U.S.

But if elite universities are that bad, it makes me almost glad to be teaching in a non-elite, marginal, backwater university where we’re still allowed to read Italo Calvino and modestly rant about the mindless culture foisted on the young by the capitalist Axis of Evil that manufactures those Modern Warfare videogames. Since I’m likely to be accused of frivolity anyway, I might as well confess upfront that at the end-of-the-semester “Goodbye Class” in ethics, where one of the students, Veronika, provided us all with cupcakes that she’d stayed up baking the previous night, we spent a rollicking hour discussing the morality of David Levy’s Love and Sex with Robots (2007), a review of which was the subject of Veronika’s final essay of the semester. Having debated the ethics of everything from abortion to vampires, it was fun to imagine “sexbots” at the end. The class and I found the discussion pretty hilarious, even educational. Mr. Hedges would perhaps think otherwise.

If Hedges can offer sweeping, half-true, generalizations about elite education, he’s also capable of astutely pointing out that in our “deteriorated educational landscape,” it’s the case that “there has been a concerted assault on all forms of learning that are not brutally utilitarian. The Modern Language Association’s end-of-the-year job listings in English, literature and foreign languages dropped 21 per cent for 2008-09 from the previous year, the biggest decline in 34 years. The humanities’ share of college degrees is less than half of what it was during the mid-to-late ’60s… Only 8 per cent of college graduates, about 110,000, now receive degrees in the humanities.” There have been precipitous declines in all fields, from English to mathematics to social sciences. “Bachelor’s degrees in business, which promise to teach students how to accumulate wealth, have skyrocketed. Business majors since 1970-71 have risen from 13.6 per cent of the graduating population to 21.7 per cent. Business has now replaced education, which has fallen from 21 per cent to 8.2 per cent, as the most popular major.” All true, too true, but this isn’t the place for a full-scale dissertation on the plight of the shaping of the educated mind.

Hedges is much better when he gets to the “illusion of happiness.” That’s where he skewers various self-help gurus peddling “positive thinking” and punctures the intellectual pretensions of various psychology departments to put “Positive Psychology” on a scientific footing. Barbara Ehrenreich’s Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America (2009) does a more extensive and thorough job on the topic, but Hedges’ acerbic view of the matter ought to be enough to get you to stash your “Smiley” buttons and shelve your copy of Rhona Byrne’s The Secret.

The worst is saved for last. It’s Hedges’ chapter on the “illusion of America,” and clearly the one he was most itching to write. As is his wont, the screed is unrelieved, but tinged with bitter affection for a land that once was. “The country I live in today uses the same civic, patriotic, and historical language to describe itself… but only the shell remains,” Hedges laments. “The America we celebrate is an illusion. America, the country of my birth, the country that formed and shaped me, the country of my father, my father’s father and his father’s father… is so diminished as to be unrecognizable. I do not know if this America will return, even as I pray and work and strive for its return.”

In place of the recognizable America, “our nation has been hijacked by oligarchs, corporations, and a narrow, selfish, political and economic elite, a small and privileged group that governs, and often steals, on behalf of the moneyed interests… During this plundering we remained passive, mesmerized by the enticing shadows on the wall, assured our tickets to success, prosperity, and happiness were waiting just around the corner.”

Hedges makes it clear that Barack Obama and the “bankrupt Democratic Party” is not the “hope” he “can believe in.” About the only closing-line relief Hedges can offer is “love,” whose power is greater than the power of death. “Love will endure,” Hedges asserts, “even if it appears darkness has swallowed us all, to triumph over the wreckage that remains.” Hmm, bleak stuff.

Somewhere in the  course of Hedges’ final sermon (he was trained, he remarks in passing, as a seminarian), I think I figured out who he’s writing for. The intended readership, I suspect, is left liberals and social democrats, and Hedges’ polemic is designed to persuade moderate progressives that they don’t fully understand the gravity of the situation. In failing to understand the situation, the moderate leftists become, in Hedges’ view, the real enemy, more culpable than the right wing conservatives, because they prop up the shell of the system, even when they should know better. If that’s what’s going on here, it echoes the 1920s Communist Party’s verbal and physical assault on social democrats as “social fascists,” and at least some of us remember where that revolutionary strategy led.

Hedges’ Empire of Illusion is a difficult book to deal with because much of it contains more than a grain of truth. Even if he could persuade left liberals and social democrats to repent and see the light, I’m not sure what he wants them to do. Become cadres in the true Revolutionary Party and set off to free the masses from their illusions? I don’t recall that working the last time it was tried.

It might be more helpful to see the situation as one of a divided polity, a divided culture in the midst of “culture wars,” in which there are left-of-centre Democrats and social democrats, Obama included, and right-wing Republicans and angry anti-government libertarians and self-proclaimed “independents.” That perspective at least makes possible an answer to the question, “What is to be done?” What we should do is continue to teach people to read books and to criticize the gadgets and content of capitalist pop culture. We should continue to try to reform health care, regulate and restrain capitalism, and attempt to save the planet. We should do the little things in our neighbourhoods, and we should join political parties and other organizations and try, as we used to say, to change the world.

This modest program is admittedly less spectacular than Hedges’ despairing vision of spectacle and decline. But what’s the alternative? I saw an ad on TV the other day advertising the latest apocalyptic movies and games, the screen filled edge to edge in high definition exploding objects. The voice-over punchline said, “The end of the world never looked so good.”

Vancouver, Dec. 19, 2009.

The media-ubiquitous philosopher suddenly had an inspiration for a clever op-ed squib that he could dash off and post to the Globe and Mail’s opinion pages. Kingwell’s thinking went something like this: people are always dopily worrying about whether the kids are getting dumber. Rather than argue the question, how about cleverly challenging it instead? Instead of worrying about kids getting dumber, maybe we should be worrying about whether we’ve become too smart for own our good by our over-emphasis on smarts and intelligence.

After all, smartness, whether of the book larnin’ or tech twittering variety, not only ensures human survival, it also produces problems. Problems like “environmental degradation, weapons of mass destruction, hedge funds, sophisticated forms of torture and the justification thereof.” Perhaps the net good effects of intelligence are being outweighed by the bad. What if we’ve made a cultural evolutionary mistake by emphasising smart over dumb, and thus reducing our chances of survival?

Then, still in his inspired state, Kingwell recalled Jonathan Swift’s satiric pamphlet of 1729, “A Modest Proposal,” in which the ironic Dean Swift proposed that a lot of problems could be solved in Ireland by eating Irish children as an upscale food delicacy. Swift was protesting England’s oppression of Ireland, and the empire’s creation of conditions of overpopulation and poverty such that a savage “modest proposal” of eating children might be amusingly but chillingly plausible for a moment. Swift was also sending up the can-do climate of the times in which over-clever bureaucrats and consultants regularly came up with preposterous but perfectly logical schemes.

So, Kingwell amused himself by coming up with a “modest proposal” of his own. Instead of “selecting” for smartness, maybe we could solve our problems by selecting for dumbness, and thus produce a generation of young people who wouldn’t be smart enough to think up “smart” bombs, SUVs, tar sands oil, “American Idol,” and the like. Perhaps, he suggested, tongue in cheek, “we will breed our way out of this mess and back into a simpler age.” Then, when Kingwell’s academic successors are asked if the kids are getting dumber, they can enthusiastically reply, “Yes. It’s working.” We’re making them dumber.

Kingwell’s modest proposal, under the heading, “Too Smart for our Own Good” duly appeared in the op-ed pages and screens of our national newspaper (May 29, 2009). Perfectly harmless, mildly amusing filler for a readership wondering if, in The Who’s legendary phrase, “The Kids Are Alright.” Except for one tiny, little problem.

Before Kingwell can get to his humour-piece punchline, he has to dispose of the questions at the top of his piece: “Are the kids getting dumber? Can they even write?” You notice that Kingwell has put a little blurriness into the question by asking two questions. What’s more, they may not be equivalent.

One way to get rid of the question is to say it’s unanswerable, and probably irrelevant, like arguing about the designated hitter rule in baseball. “The answer says more about you than about the state of play,” says Kingwell. “Answer yes and you brand yourself a bookish curmudgeon, a fogey no matter what your age. Answer no and you align with new cognitive models, social networking websites, early gadget adoption and freewheeling music download. In other words, it’s cool versus uncool.” See? No real question there at all.

In fact, according to Kingwell, “the more you look, the more it becomes clear that the dispute is about apples and oranges. If smart means clear writing, linear thought and sustained self-organization, then yes, those skills are in short supply; if it means quick-witted talent for hyperlinking, multitasking and other compound gerunds of the screen age, then no, there is no evidence of cognitive deficit — on the contrary.” Since the argument is unresolvable, “this is the point where the dispute typically hares off into a hand wringing discussion of what universities are for and whether they’re any good at doing whatever that is. Socialization machine or crucible of citizenship? Job training centre or gateway to wisdom?” Since those hand wringing questions are also hopeless, “let’s ask a different question: What is intelligence for?”

With that, Kingwell is off the hook and also off to a bit of fun with modest proposals.

Alas, it’s all too-clever-by-half, even for a prof with time on his hands while waiting for this year’s grads to adjust their robes, flip the tassels on their mortarboard hats, and get in step for the first strains of “Pomp and Circumstance.” Since he noted in his brush off of the are-the-kids-getting-dumber question that “there are even duelling books on the subject,” he might have spent his time more usefully and less glibly by looking at them once more.

The “duelling books” Kingwell is referring to but doesn’t name are Mark Bauerlein’s The Dumbest Generation (2008), Susan Jacoby’s The Age of American Unreason (2008), Andrew Keen’s The Cult of the Amateur: How blogs, MySpace, YouTube, and the rest of today’s user-generated media are destroying our economy, our culture, and our values (2007) versus business and education consultant Don Tapscott’s Grown Up Digital (2008), an update of his 1999 book, Growing Up Digital. (By the by, Tapscott’s titles, wittingly or not, play on Paul Goodman’s Growing Up Absurd, 1960, an education book about how the conditions of American society then were making it particularly difficult for young people to know anything or to do meaningful work.)

If you read, say, Bauerlein’s account of the present generation, you learn that reading, especially book reading, is in decline, and that there are substantial knowledge deficits when it comes to knowing about history, geography, civics, and just about everything else except the trivia of youth culture and celebrity gossip. Despite the title of the book, Bauerlein doesn’t deal with whether young people are becoming “dumber.” Rather, he shows that they’re not becoming measurably more knowledgeable, despite the available high-tech accoutrements. In fact, the use of the word “dumb” is misleading, both in the title of Bauerlein’s book and in Kingwell’s question. The word that should be used is “ignorant.” Kids (and lots of adults) are ignorant of history, geography, civics, etc., and one of the tools by which they might remedy that ignorance, book reading, is in declining usage.

The question is not do we over- or under-value intelligence but, What should we know? Which leads to the question, What should we know in order to do what? Which leads to the further question, What are universities for? Though Kingwell wants to throw up his hands rather than wring them, I think the question remains, and that it’s not hopeless.

Rather than ragging poor Professor Kingwell, who is after all just trying to get out of the office and onto summer holidays, let me answer the questions. If we want a democratic society in which people are capable of critical thought, are cultured, and are citizens, then we want to dispel young people’s ignorance about history, geography, civics, science, art, literature and book-reading and, yes, we also want them to learn some things that will help them get jobs. These are not unanswerable questions, though there’s no denying that they’re debatable.

But they’re on the net, reply the techno proponents, such as Tapscott, when faced with claims of ignorance. Yes, young people (and older ones, too) are on the net, but the evidence suggests that most of their net time is twittered away on social networking sites, music downloading, YouTubing, porn(ing), and buying and selling, frequently all at once (the famous “multitasking”). The facts, as best we can know them, are in Bauerlein’s, Jacoby’s and Keen’s books. The picture is not all black and white, and some of the claims about knowledge deficits, unreason, and the destruction of society are overblown, and overhyped. But while there may be “duelling books,” we might also remember that not all duels end in a draw. Some of the books are better than others.

As for “smarts,” and “intelligence,” pace Kingwell, it shouldn’t mean merely “clear writing, linear thought and sustained self-organization” (whatever the latter murky phrase means), nor should it mean “quick-witted talent for hyperlinking” and “multitasking.” The problem is not “intelligence”; there’s a sufficient amount of whatever it really is to go around, simply by virtue of the kind of evolutioonary animal we are. The question is development of intelligence, and to discuss that you can’t divorce the content of a developed intelligence from its techniques. The content of a developed intelligence brings up back to the questions of, What do we need to know, for what purposes, and thus, how should we organize our educations?

Professor Kingwell needs some summer beach time. As for the kids, while The Who thought they were alright, their successors, The Offspring, argue in their counter-tune, “The Kids Aren’t Alright,” and they lament, “Chances blown, nothing’s free.” As for the rest of us, whether fearful of being tagged fogeys or not, we had better figure out what to do to dispel ignorance, or else Kingwell’s modest proposal will become more than a tongue-in-cheek quip at graduation time.

.

Berlin, May 31, 2009

The terrorist attacks and plane crashes caused the deaths of more than 3,000 civilians, the largest mass murder in contemporary American history. It also ignited a military response by the United States that included an attack upon Afghanistan’s Islamist Taliban regime, a so-far unsuccessful search for the crime’s ultimate perpetrator, al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, and an ongoing war in Afghanistan that has lasted for all of the decade. As well, it led to a subsequent, controversial invasion and occupation of Iraq in spring 2003, which continues to the present.

As the central political events of the beginning of the new century, 9/11 and the wars that followed it inspired a profusion of books, from popular accounts to academic treatises, many of them sharply critical of the political ideology and actions of former U.S. President George W. Bush and his administration. Both the terrorist attacks and the subsequent wars were of course horrific and the justification for books about them, if any justification is needed, is found in our need to understand the specifics of such events. At the same time, it’s worth recalling that the wars of the previous decade in the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda and other parts of Africa were also horrific, as are all such human slaughters. So, while there is no claim, except a banal one, about the uniqueness of contemporary conflicts, the chilling chronicles that followed in their wake have the virtue of making us more aware of that horror in precise detail, and the reasons that lie behind both the terrorism and the subsequent wars.

In terms of writing, the events of the decade brought to prominence a remarkably competent and talented generation of reporters, feature writers, and essayists, especially journalists working at The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The New Yorker magazine. In this essay, I survey several of the important and, in many cases, prize-winning works that examine some of the major political themes of the period. In some instances, such as Richard Clarke’s Against All Enemies (2004), the book itself became something of a political event. Works like Steve Coll’s Ghost Wars (2004) and Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower (2006) are investigative reconstructions of bodies of background information that were heretofore generally unavailable to the public. George Packer’s The Assassins’ Gate (2005) and Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s Imperial Life in the Emerald City (2006) offer revealing portraits of the American occupation of Iraq, while Ann Jones’s Kabul in Winter (2006) provides an equally sharp eyewitness narrative about the situation in Afghanistan. Alli Allawi’s The Occupation of Iraq (2007) is a scholarly survey of events in that country by a former minister in Iraq’s post-war government, and Dexter Filkins’s The Forever War (2008) is a reporter’s first-hand account of his years on the battlefields. Almost needless to say, these represent only a fraction of the books that have been written about the belligerence of the decade, and many other worthy and similar works have not received their due here. However, this sampling should at least provide an entry point for readers who want to know more.

The title “Homeland Alone” of course plays on that of Home Alone (1990), an American comedy film about an 8-year-old boy, accidentally left behind while his family flies to France for Christmas, who has to defend his home against idiotic burglars. The vaguely patriotic-sounding term “homeland” was adopted by the American government shortly after 9/11, and a cabinet level agency for “homeland security” was created. Whether the American government was as negligent as the parental adults in the comedy film, or America’s antagonists as myopic as the household intruders, is but one of the issues that this discussion attempts to examine.

1. Smoking Guns

Like everyone else, excepting a few Washington, D.C. insiders, I’d never heard of former U.S. counter-terrorism adviser Richard Clarke until he stepped out of the shadows one Sunday evening in spring 2004 on the CBS TV news magazine, 60 Minutes.

The program is an old-fashioned investigative journalism show that seems to have been running ever since God evicted Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden. 60 Minutes specialized in institutional muckraking that locates whistleblowers who embarrass nasty corporations and lying government departments. What’s more, it was one of the few TV public affairs programs at the time that had the budget to gets its facts straight and that, unlike its tabloid news competitors, suffered from neither attention deficit disorder nor faith-fuelled phobias. Whether debunking used-car scams or financial “Masters of the Universe,” 60 Minutes segments invariably ended with the miscreants refusing to appear on camera, and one of the program’s Methuselah-aged reporters standing before the locked Pearly Gates and duly announcing the equivalent of, “God declined 60 Minutes’ request for an interview.” I knew something was up when the program accorded the hitherto obscure Mr. Clarke better than half of its alloted hour.

60 Minutes’ viewers quickly learned that Clarke was a civil servant with 30 years’ tenure who began his Washington career during the Richard Nixon era in the departments of defense and state, and went on to serve in the White House as presidential adviser on counter-terrorism to, successively, Presidents George Bush Sr., Bill Clinton and the then incumbent George W. Bush. In short, his non-partisan credentials were impeccable.

Clarke had only resigned from government service the previous spring, in 2003, just as U.S. troops were launching a punitive expedition into Iraq to overthrow the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein, in the name of combatting the terrorist attacks on America of September 11, 2001. In the wake of his resignation, Clarke wrote Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror (2004), one of the first important works of the decade to critique U.S. foreign policy. It would be followed by many other somewhat comparable books, and a surprising number of them, examining the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as the institutions of U.S. security and their failure on 9/11, would prove to be not only of high journalistic competence, but the readable second draft, after the initial daily dispatches, of American history in the first decade of the 21st century. Their reassessment of conventional pieties about American values and actions provides one of the defining themes for writing in the decade.

Clarke’s book, which was to be released the following day, was the hook for his TV appearance. The point of 60 Minutes’ thumbnail career resume of Clarke was simply to establish that Clarke wasn’t a flake, a liberal in the belly of the neo-conservative beast, or a partisan fundamentalist of any sort. He’s probably best described as a non-party hawk, one of those Washington Jesuits obsessed with their specialty — in this case, counter-terrorism and crisis management. He was a sober Cold Warrior-type who didn’t flinch from recommending political assassinations to presidents or seeking authorization for the military to launch missiles at targets from Afghanistan to Sudan. He had comfortably rubbed shoulders over the years with the likes of Vice-President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and his own most recent former boss, National Security Adviser Condaleezza Rice, as well as with countless CIA and FBI “spooks.” Equally, he’d gotten on with Clinton, Vice-President Al Gore, and Clinton’s security adviser, Sandy Berger — i.e., Clarke traveled well.  From the moment the beefy, mid-50ish, white-haired, blue-suited classic bureaucrat popped up on the tube, and began speaking in sentences — unlike some of his former employers — it was clear that this was a critic not to be brushed off lightly.

All of which made Clarke’s sweeping charges against the Bush administration the more remarkable. Clarke presented his case in a variety of venues — on 60 Minutes, in Against All Enemies, before the government’s 9/11 commission, and on every TV forum available to him. The brief composite version of Clarke’s claims went like this:

First, the George Bush administration, notwithstanding its post 9/11 “War on Terrorism,” had not paid a lot of attention to the threat of terrorism posed by Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda organization from January 2001, when the new president took office, to September 11, 2001, when more than the roof fell in. Furthermore, Clarke argued, Bush, Rumsfeld, Rice et al. didn’t make terrorism a priority despite a series of warnings from the previous Clinton administration, the CIA, and Clarke himself. There was even a prescient e-mail from Clarke to Rice months before the attack, imagining “hundreds of dead in the streets of America,” and asking, “What will you wish then that you had already done?” Within the bowels of the spy business, it was known that there were al-Qaeda agents resident in the U.S., that suspicious guys were at U.S. flight schools learning to maneuver but not land airplanes, and that the eavesdropping on international electronic chatter indicated something “very, very, very big” was about to happen, maybe even in the U.S. itself. Some hints of this near-negligent policy were already known. For instance, Washington Post editor Bob Woodward’s Bush at War (2003) reports in passing Bush’s concession that prior to 9/11 he was not “on point” on the al-Qaeda threat. But it was not until Clarke’s extensive from-the-horse’s-mouth revelations on 60 Minutes and in his book that anything like the behind-closed-doors side of the story of 9/11 and subsequent events was available.

Now, of course, even if all of the available intelligence had made it to the White House, and if the “principals,” as the top cabinet-level and agency people are known, had further “shaken the trees” and had their “hair on fire” (to use a couple of Clarke’s favourite metaphors), there was no claim being made (by Clarke or anyone else) that anything necessarily would have happened any differently. However, the Bush principals didn’t formally discuss terrorism until Sept. 4, 2001. If they had done something earlier and more urgently, maybe, just maybe… is about as far as Clarke allows himself to dream. Despite the administration’s subsequent self-congratulatory tone about its response to terrorism, Clarke makes a persuasive case that prior to 9/11, the Bush regime was negligent. Instead of terrorism, the early focus of Bush and his officials was on “Star Wars” missile defense schemes, and the dangers of China, Russia, North Korea, Iran, and Iraq.

It’s the latter country that’s important to Clarke’s argument. The Bush administration was obsessed with Iraq to the point of distraction, is Clarke’s second major claim in Against All Enemies. He offers unprecedented evidentiary support for his charge that it was determined to find a pretext for war with Saddam Hussein (more about this momentarily).

Finally and more broadly, Clarke argues that the war in Iraq was disastrous for the war on terrorism, diverting military and fiscal resources from the hunt for al-Qaeda to the adventurism of “regime change” in Iraq. Worse, it spawned the growth of terrorist recruitment and organization rather than diminishing it.

Against All Enemies begins in the style of such international thriller fiction writers as Tom Clancy, with an eyewitness account of what happened inside the evacuated White House on September 11. The pop prose notwithstanding, it’s a pretty riveting tale, and Clarke is the guy to tell the story, since he was, for all practical purposes, running the government of the United States from the West Wing of the White House that morning, while the president (or POTUS as he’s acronymically called in government-speak) was in a kindergarten in Florida, and Vice-President Cheney and NSA Rice were stashed in an East Wing emergency bunker.

Once the initial steps to secure the U.S. had been taken, talk immediately turned to the response, which would obviously involve going after al-Qaeda, based in Afghanistan, and the fundamentalist Islamic Taliban government there that harboured the terrorist organization. Yet, that wasn’t the only target on the minds of U.S. leaders in the hours right after 9/11. Clarke was incredulous to discover that Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld “was talking about broadening the objectives of our response and ‘getting Iraq,’” an initiative he and his deputy Paul Wolfowitz had pushed prior to 9/11. An astonished Clarke likened the idea to “invading Mexico after the Japanese attacked us at Pearl Harbor.” But Rumsfeld didn’t drop the notion. Instead, according to Clarke, the defense secretary “complained that there were no decent targets for bombing in Afghanistan and that we should consider bombing Iraq, which, he said, had better targets. At first I thought Rumsfeld was joking. But he was serious and the President did not reject out of hand the idea of attacking Iraq.” This was on Sept. 12, 2001, a year-and-a-half before the Iraq war was launched.

If there is any doubt about this preoccupation, the most dramatic anecdote in Clarke’s book (which he also related on 60 Minutes) was his encounter with Bush on the evening of Sept. 12.  “He grabbed a few of us and closed the door to the conference room. ‘Look,’ he told us… ‘See if Saddam did this. See if he’s linked in any way…’ I was once again taken aback, incredulous, and it showed. ‘But, Mr. President, al-Qaeda did this.’” Bush, however, was not to be put off, and insisted on checking the Saddam connection. Clarke replied: “‘Absolutely, we will look… again… But, you know, we have looked several times for state sponsorship of al-Qaeda and not found any real linkages to Iraq. Iraq plays a little, as does Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia, Yemen.’ ‘Look into Iraq, Saddam,’ the President said testily and left us.”

The exchange is worth repeating not only for its glimpse into the Bush administration’s thinking but also because it had an immediate role in the extraordinary counterattack on Clarke that the White House was to launch in the wake of Clarke’s shocking revelations. The first hint came the night of Clarke’s appearance on 60 Minutes. Since it’s standard practice for such programs to provide a semblance of “balance” by allowing for rebuttals to sensational accusations, 60 Minutes looked for a White House respondent to Clarke’s allegations. The best it could scare up on short notice was one of Condaleezza Rice’s minions. Confronted by the story of Bush’s order to Clarke to find an Iraq connection, Rice’s staffer told 60 Minutes reporter Lesley Stahl, “We have no record of that conversation in the White House.” The implication was unsubtlely obvious: maybe Mr. Clarke is fibbing.

The veteran reporter cast a very cold eye on the messenger, and said words to the effect, Young man, perhaps you’ve never heard of 60 Minutes, but we have a substantial budget to do fact-checking, and we have two sources to substantiate Mr. Clarke’s story of his conversation with the president and one of them is an eyewitness. The sub-text of her thrust was: Do you think we’re so dumb as to let Clarke make a sensational claim like that without checking it? There was a nanosecond of silence in the perpetual white noise of television as the camera watched Rice’s subordinate swallow his tongue before his brain clicked onto the inner digital mechanism that produces the requisite bureaucratic babble. The next day the White House allowed that perhaps such a conversation had taken place. The day after that, it was conceded that the President had asked Clarke to check for an Iraq connection in the interest of canvassing all options.

The connection (or absence of one) between Iraq and 9/11 mattered for two reasons. First, the suggestion that there was a link between the two was one of several pretexts, all of them false as it turned out, concocted by the Bush administration to justify the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Second, the administration succeeded in getting more than half the American public at one point, according to polls, to believe that Saddam Hussein had something to do with the terrorist attacks on America. As long as we’re looking at manufactured gullibility, it should also be noted that more than half the international Muslim population, according to polls, came to believe that the 9/11 attacks were a Jewish plot, which only tells us that inculcating pure ignorance is not limited by national boundaries or cultures.

From the moment I first saw and heard Clarke on 60 Minutes, I had the sense, This is the smoking gun. In all of his subsequent appearances, Clarke was credible, consistent, unflappable. We had become accustomed to getting a lot of “spin” and not much substance from public rhetoric. This was unnervingly different. There might be some argument with the interpretation, but the facts weren’t in dispute. For people who had seen the Watergate hearings in the 1970s, or the Iran-Contra scandal hearings in the mid-80s, Clarke’s story, told over several days, in a variety of oral and printed forms, had much of that weight. But in a country that prides itself on gun ownership, perhaps smoking guns, especially metaphoric ones, are no longer surprising. Clarke’s Against All Enemies was published in spring 2004, in the midst of Bush’s 2004 presidential re-election campaign, and it might be thought that the revelation that the Iraq invasion was more of an ideological concoction than a matter of national security would have some effect on that campaign. As it turned out, it didn’t.

But it was enough of a danger to mobilize the Bush White House. For about four or five days after the publication of Against All Enemies, not very much governing took place in the United States. That’s because practically every major government official in the Bush administration had taken to the media hustings to denounce Dick Clarke. Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, and a legion of White House communications coordinators appeared on every available journalistic outlet to vilify the former counter-terrorism adviser as money-grubbing, disloyal, disgruntled, self-seeking, two-faced, and whatever other epithets they could hurl.

While Clarke’s charges were not foundation-shaking in the long run, they were sufficient to require the White House to retreat and offer up Rice — who would be promoted to Secretary of State during the second George W. Bush administration — for unprecedented, under-oath, public testimony before the 9/11 commission. Rice’s testimony led to the further unprecedented declassification of a Presidential Daily Briefing document, the PDB of Aug. 6, 2001 headed “Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside U.S.,” which had elicited little response from the Bush administration. Although all the president’s men and his warrior princess (as Rice was sometimes known) declared that the PDB didn’t mean anything, not really, they couldn’t repair the crack in Humpty Dumpty’s credibility.

Although Against All Enemies had become a political event in its own right, there’s still the question of whether Clarke’s book is worth reading. Given Clarke’s extensive media exposure, it was possible to ask, as did one slightly overhip review in the New York Observer, “What’s left to say, after all, about Richard Clarke’s book?”

Perhaps not much, but there’s quite a bit more to Clarke’s text than the stuff of media lead stories. After his breathless thriller of an opening chapter, Clarke settles down to review terrorism and counter-terrorism knowledge over four administrations. Some of it is potted history, but since most of the public hadn’t heard of something called al-Qaeda until Sept. 12, 2001 — I remember being rather startled by how quickly the U.S. government was able to post the names and photos of all the hijackers, as if it already knew quite a bit about all of this — the review of everything from the Soviet retreat from Afghanistan at the end of the 1980s to the foiling of a millennium terrorist plot in 2000 is useful.

Clarke also offers some thoughtful assessments of persons and administrations. He’s critical of George W. Bush’s inability to get sufficiently interested in terrorism before the fact, but gives generally high marks to Bill Clinton, “who identified terrorism as the major post-Cold War threat and acted to improve our counter-terrorism capabilities, and who (little known to the public) quelled anti-American terrorism by Iraq and Iran and defeated an al-Qaeda attempt to dominate Bosnia,” despite being bogged down in trailer-park to Oval Office sex shenanigans. About Bush, Clarke is politely measured, saying it was “clear that the critique of him as a dumb, lazy rich kid was somewhat off the mark. When he focused, he asked the kind of questions that revealed a results-oriented mind, but he looked for the simple solution, the bumper sticker description of the problem.”

In the end, the reason to read Clarke, despite the media saturation and even though Against All Enemies is hardly deathless prose, is to get a sustained sense of the story and the issues it raises. About the only ideological disposition required is an acceptance of the notion, Yes, Virginia, there really are terrorists out there. And the story is, as Clarke puts it, “how, even after the attacks, America did not eliminate the al-Qaeda movement, which morphed into a distributed and elusive threat; how instead we launched the counter-productive Iraq fiasco; how the Bush administration politicized counter-terrorism as a way of ensuring electoral victories; how critical homeland security vulnerabilities remain; and how little is being done to address the ideological challenge from terrorists distorting Islam into a new ideology of hate.” Clarke even has the savvy to devote a thought or two to the protection of civil liberties in the midst of excessive “Patriot Act” security measures. Though much of Clarke’s story has in subsequent years simply assumed its place in American political history, many of the issues that he was among the first to address, remain relevant to the present day.

2. Who Were Those Guys?

While Richard Clarke presents much of the inside-the-White-House version of the momentous events at the beginning of the decade, the question of who the 9/11 terrorists and their sponsors were is addressed in two notable books. Steve Coll’s Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (2004), and Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda’s Road to 9/11 (2006) provide complex background stories, unknown to the general public until their publication. What’s remarkable about both books — each won the Pulitzer Prize for its respective year of publication — is that Coll and Wright are able to piece together coherent narratives of the shadowy realm of would-be religious revolutionaries and institutional spies that exists behind the mundane scenery of everyday life. What’s more, they do so while maintaining a high level of page-turning prose, even as they slog through innumerable interviews with secret agents of every political stripe. That they fashion plausible stories out of what must have looked like a scrambled jigsaw puzzle is no small achievement.

Coll focuses on the secret history of CIA involvement in Afghanistan and Pakistan from 1980 to the millennium, while Wright probes the ideological roots of the various Islamist movements and the developments that eventuated in the 9/11 attacks by al-Qaeda. Both books, somewhat overlapping in their content, offer an in-depth survey of Islamic proponents and anti-American antagonists.

The answer to the colloquial question, “Who were those guys?” quickly extends beyond the identification of Mohammed Atta, the Egyptian-born leader of the 19-man terrorist team and the hijacker pilot of American Airlines flight 11 that struck the World Trade Centre on September 11. Both Coll’s and Wright’s books provide an extensive roster of “principal characters.” The dramatis personnae of Coll’s story range from Osama bin Laden, his ideological mentor Ayman al-Zawahiri, and their adjutants in the al-Qaeda organization, to the diverse Afghanistan warlords and mujahedin leaders during that country’s more than twenty-year-long anti-colonial and civil wars, especially the two most prominent mujahedin commanders, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and his chief rival, Ahmed Shah Massoud. Equally important, the principal characters in Coll’s tale of “ghosts” include a wide range of clandestine personnel from the American, Pakistani and Saudi Arabian intelligence agencies and their variably attentive political masters.

Coll’s Ghost Wars begins with a harrowing, little-known tale of the November 1979 riot by 15,000 mostly Islamic students at the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan, that came within a hair’s breadth of causing the deaths of some 150 American personnel. Coll’s gripping minute-by-minute reconstruction of the situation inside a burning embassy during the riot and his account of the failure of Pakistani authorities to intervene establishes the stakes and sets the scene for a complex narrative of war, politics, and religion that will unfold over the succeeding two decades. The incident itself received little attention at the time because it was overshadowed by two contemporaneous upheavals in progress.

The most prominent of the regional transformations taking place at the time was the Islamic revolution in Iran in 1979, which brought an exiled Iranian cleric, the Ayatollah Khomeini, and his religious confreres to power. One of the theological revolution’s immediate side-effects was the seizure of 49 U.S. Embassy employees in Tehran as hostages, and their imprisonment during much of the 1980 presidential transition in the U.S., in which the ultra-conservative government of Ronald Reagan and the Republican Party succeeded that of the more moderate Jimmy Carter, a Democrat.

The other major regional development in the same period was the revolt in Afghanistan by Islamic mujahedin militias, aided by Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the U.S., against the country’s Soviet Union-inspired communist regime, and eventually against Soviet troops themselves. To add to the geo-political complexity of the situation, within a year, Iran’s newly established theocratic state would be at war with its western neighbour, the Saddam Hussein-led dictatorship in Iraq, itself a predominantly Islamic country. All of these events unfolded against an even broader Middle East background that included a near-permanent simmering state of war between Israel and a displaced Palestinian population, as well as internal tensions within countries like Egypt, Sudan, and Saudi Arabia, tensions connected to a widespread Islamist “revival.” Each of the parties involved in the various conflicts brought to battlefields, mosques, countless back-room meetings, and occasional negotiating tables its own often shifting political agendas, and the resulting Gordian knot of cross-purposes, motives and actions yields a story, as one review succintly put it, “with a cast of few heroes, many villains, bags of cash and a tragic ending.”

The perspective of a CIA operative, usually located somewhere on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, is Coll’s characteristic point of departure for each of the succeeding episodes in his chronicle of the mujahedin guerrilla war against Soviet Union troops occupying Afghanistan in the 1980s. The CIA perspective is quickly supplemented by that of Pakistan’s notorious Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency, its army, and its often shaky, and sporadic civilian regimes. As well, the views and actions of the Saudi Arabian intelligence agencies are thoroughly canvassed. Although the Soviet Union is the common target of various militias, spies, and governments, their opponents’ motives and longer-range intentions are bewilderingly diverse and often in conflict. Perhaps the only constants are the international arms traffic and the increasingly large sums of money provided by the Americans, Saudis, international Muslim “charities,” and independent political and religious entrepreneurs like Osama bin Laden.

As the Soviet occupation force slowly crumbled in the decade-long war, Coll punctuates his detailed chronicle with useful sketches of the main players on all sides: figures like Ronald Reagan’s CIA Chief Bill Casey, Saudi Arabia’s Prince Turki, northern warlord Massoud, and Osama bin Laden are but a few of the political principals who come gradually into focus.

By the end of the 1980s, the dying Soviet Union under the reform leadership of Mikhail Gorbachev was prepared to call it quits in Afghanistan and to withdraw its troops. It was expected that the puppet communist regime in Kabul would rapidly fold, and the Pakistanis, Saudis and Americans all jockeyed for position in support of their preferred Afghan warlord.

At which point, there’s the first of a series of small surprises. The indigenous communist regime, led by a former secret police chief named Najibullah, didn’t collapse, in equal parts thanks to its own shrewd maneuverings and to the bungling of its mujahedin opponents, despite the arms and money poured into their ranks. Not until three years later, in 1992, was the regime at last overthrown and Najibullah pulled from a United Nations sanctuary and executed. But instead of the creation of a credible coalition government made up of former militia leaders and available Afghan exiles, as might be expected, the Afghan warlords fell into a brutal civil war, levelling much of the capital of Kabul in the process. It was this failure which gave rise, in the mid-90s, to an even more radical Islamic force, the Taliban, led by a previously obscure warrior-cleric, Mullah Omar, and probably backed by Pakistani intelligence agencies, who soon swept most resistance aside, and installed a theocratic regime as extreme and puritanical as any in the Muslim world. After the Taliban takeover, bin Laden and Al-Zawahiri relocated to Afghanistan in the mid-1990s, joined forces under the banner of al-Qaeda and, as troublesome guests of the Taliban, launched a global jihad against the U.S. that eventuated in 9/11.

Those are the broad strokes that Steve Coll chronicles in his dense, blow-by-blow narrative. It’s unnecessary to reprise all the details here, but readers of Coll can be assured that he demonstrates a sure-handed command of the voluminous body of facts that make up an extraordinary saga of war, politics, and theology. Though Coll doesn’t spend an inordinate amount of time pondering the meaning of the events he narrates, the story of the Afghan wars raises some inescapable questions that will eventually have to be addressed.

Before doing so, it’s worth considering Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower.

Wright’s book begins with a sketch of the mid-20th century Islamic thinker from Egypt, Sayyid Qutb (pronounced “kuh-tub”). It’s a beginning indicative of the direction Wright will take to the 9/11 story, placing more emphasis on al-Qaeda’s ideological roots and, as much as possible, following developments from the perspective of those who will launch the terrorist attack on the “the looming tower.” The eponymous reference is to a verse in the Quran, allegedly cited repeatedly by Osama bin Laden at a wedding shortly before 9/11: “Wherever you are, death will find you, even in the looming tower.”

Wright immerses us in the theological politics of Islam from the outset, as he tells the story of Qutb, a thinker, writer, and official in Egypt’s Ministry of Education who went to the United States to study in 1948. The ideologue who would give birth to modern Islamic fundamentalism arrived in a post-World War II New York that was booming, sexy, affluent, and shocking to the devout, if provincial Muslim. His arrival coincided with the creation of Israel in the Middle East and the inception of a long-term American policy of support for the Jewish state.

Qutb, after a stint at a university in Greeley, Colorado, returned to a chaotic Egypt in 1950, in the wake of the first Arab-Israeli war. He had been radicalized by his sojourn in the sensually tempting West, and was drawn to the doctrines of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, an organization that had been founded in 1928, and whose founder Hasan al-Banna had written, “It is the nature of Islam to dominate… to impose its law on all nations, and to extend its power  to the entire planet.” When an army colonel, Gamal Abdul Nasser, the leader of a group of military plotters, seized control of the country and sent Egypt’s King Farouk packing in a 1952 revolutionary coup, it was expected that Qutb, again working in the Ministry of Education, would ascend to the ruling Revolutionary Council. Instead, Qutb became a critic of the new regime for its failure to impose a sufficiently stringent Islamic dictatorship. When an assassination attempt was made on Nasser’s life in 1954, Qutb was one of hundreds of Muslim Brothers suspected of orchestrating the plot who was jailed.

During the following decade, the imprisoned Qutb produced a multi-volume commentary on the Quran as well as a manifesto, Milestones, whose “ringing apocalyptic tone,” Wright suggests, is the Islamic equivalent of such famous political pamphlets as Rousseau’s Social Contract and Lenin’s What Is to Be Done? Scarcely six months after Qutb left prison, he was again arrested for plotting against Nasser’s regime, convicted, and executed by hanging in 1966, declaring shortly before his death, “Thank God, I performed jihad… until I earned this martyrdom.”

Wright offers a similarly extended portrait of Ayman al-Zawahiri, an Egyptian doctor who assumed Qutb’s ideological mantle. He was jailed in the wake of the 1981 assassination of Anwar al-Sadat, Nasser’s successor, and upon his release, worked as a physician in the Pakistan-Afghanistan border region during the mujahedin revolt against the Soviets. After a lengthy career along the winding road of would-be Islamic revolution, Zawahiri ended up back in Afghanistan in the mid-1990s where he joined forces with the man who would orchestrate the 9/11 terrorist attack. Osama Bin Laden, scion of a wealthy Saudi Arabian family in the construction business, is the subject of an equally compelling biographical portrait, which Wright develops at length in the context of an analysis of Saudi Arabian, Sudanese, and Pakistani political and theological developments.

By the time an exiled bin Laden “flew over the suckling supertankers docked beside the massive refineries lining the ports of the Persian Gulf,” across the desert of southwestern Afghanistan that borders Iran, and into Kandahar, “surrounded by the ruins of its irrigation canals and pomegranate orchards,” for his final relocation in 1996 within the mountainous Afghan outback, Wright has painted a broad canvas of the radical Islamist revival, and set the scene for al-Qaeda’s declaration of war against the United States, posted from a cave in Afghanistan.

Wright’s panorama of Islamic thinkers and warriors is counterbalanced by a remarkable portrait of a driven, demon-haunted American FBI man, John O’Neill, a close friend of counterterrorism adviser Richard Clarke, who was one of handful of U.S. intelligence agents engaged in an ultimately failed hunt for the leaders of al-Qaeda. The flamboyant and gruff O’Neill, with “the flashy suits, the gleaming fingernails” and a harem of girlfriends in addition to a wife and two children in New Jersey, “concealed a man of humble background and modest means” who was drowning in debt to support his extravagent lifestyle. In his way, O’Neill is as bizarre a figure as any of his jihadi opponents. And yet, before his death in the Twin Towers on Sept. 11, where he was head of the World Trade Centre’s security force, O’Neill came cliffhanger-close to tracking down bin Laden in the caves of his mountain fastness. But for the senseless turf wars between American intelligence agencies, O’Neill and like-minded American agents might have prevented 9/11.

Though both Steve Coll and Wright effectively employ novelistic techniques to tell their respective true stories, Wright’s narrative is the more economical, and benefits from emphasising the background and perspective of its radical Islamist protagonists. Both books leave readers on the cusp of the 9/11 tragedy.

The first observation to be derived from both of these informative narratives is that the U.S. foreign policy establishment was so preoccupied with defeating the Soviet Union during the long Cold War that it more or less completely missed the rise of Islamic fundamentalism and its terrorist strategy. Although Richard Clarke in Against All Enemies gives relatively high marks to President Bill Clinton’s alertness to terrorism in the 1990s, in fact, during the triumphalist post-Soviet decade, the continuing civil war in Afghanistan was put on the American back burner as the administration attended to crises in the Balkans and Africa, and the accession of the Taliban regime was treated with relative indifference.

After 9/11, amid the rush to American military action in Afghanistan, a muted domestic political discussion ensued in the U.S., in which leftists and liberals insisted on appreciating the “root causes” of the terrorist attack, rather than accepting the simplistic account of the Bush administration that al-Qaeda hated American values of freedom and democracy. As The New York Times’ lead critic Michiko Kakutani noted in her review of The Looming Tower, Wright’s account suggests that bin Laden “is not opposed to the United States because of its culture or ideas but because of its political and military actions in the Islamic world.” Similarly, combat reporter Dexter Filkins, also writing in The New York Times about Wright’s book, says, “Wright shows, correctly, that at the root of Islamic militancy — its anger, its antimodernity, its justifications for murder — lies a feeling of intense humiliation. Islam plays a role in this, with its straight-jacketed and all-encompassing worldview. But whether the militant hails from a middle-class family or an impoverished one, is intensely religious or a ‘theological amateur’… he springs almost invariably from an ossified society with an autocratic government.” Worse, those autocratic regimes are often supported by American money and troops.

While the “root causes” argument, as it came to be called, certainly has some traction, the stretch from political criticism of the U.S. to suicide bombings of American civilians in their own country is considerable. Even after one has a grasp of “root causes,” the question remains of whether the terrorists’ program made any sense, in terms of politics, morality or justice. Certainly, the harsh version of Islam they propagated, with its purist theocracy, allegedly based on Islamic or sharia law, and its idiosyncratic declarations of who was and wasn’t a legitimate Muslim, thereby justifying the murder of allegedly apostate members of their own faith, was unintelligible even to those sympathetic to religious claims. For some activists on the left, in North America, Europe and elsewhere, whose political priorities were opposition to American imperialism and Zionism, and who viewed the Bush administration as not merely a period in America history but as a permanent condition of U.S. politics, the “root causes” approach was persuasive. For the rest of us, though we might be critical of neoconservative American politics and administrations, the terrorists seemed as intellectually aberrant as the perpetrators of other, lesser mass murders, such as the teen suicide-killers who murdered their classmates at Columbine (Colorado) High School in 1999.

The American-led coalition war in Afghanistan poses the question, retrospectively, of what should have been done. The options included a) more or less doing nothing and leaving the problem to international institutions, such as the United Nations; b) treating the terrorist attack as simply a criminal act, and attempting to hunt down the perpetrators by “normal” police methods; and c) launching a full-scale assault against the fundamentalist Taliban regime that “harboured” al-Qaeda, and attempting the reconstruction of the country on a democratic basis.

In the event, the last option was chosen as the only one that was feasible and that would satisfy American public opinion. The war in Afghanistan, unlike the subsequent invasion of Iraq, was authorized by the U.N., and an international military coalition was assembled, again in contrast to the subsequent and largely fallacious “coalition of the willing” that was cobbled together for the Iraq expedition. What’s more, and again in contrast to the Iraq occupation, the coalition presence in Afghanistan, according to all reputable polling information, was largely supported by the Afghan public. So, while the question of “intervention,” whether “humanitarian” or military, is arguable (as it was during previous interventions in the 1990s), there was a plausible basis for it in terms of legality, practicality, and democratic ideals. Further, the conditions in Afghanistan, whether those created by Taliban fundamentalism, or the deeper cultural structures of patriarchal tribalism, were such that a case could be made that the attempt to develop a democratic, independent Afghanistan could be seen as being in the liberal and leftist traditions of international “solidarity.”

Still, while a strong theoretical case can be made for the war in Afghanistan, there is the further issue of assessing its actual operation. After a decade of war, with still no end in sight, international supporters of Afghan solidarity can point to the existence of a legally elected, albeit deeply corrupt, government; the end of Taliban restrictions on everyday life; and some improvement of conditions for women and children in the country. On the other hand, a Taliban force not only continues to exist but appears to be burgeoning; the war and destruction continue (including the deaths of large numbers of civilians); the fractures within Afghan society remain deep; and the permeability of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border has meant that the dangers of Islamic fundamentalism have also increased in Pakistan and further endangered that country’s very fragile, quasi-secular institutions. Further, it remains an open question as to who, exactly, the coalition is intervening on behalf of, and whether or not there really is a potentially unifiable state entity that can be called Afghanistan.

Finally, there is what has been awkwardly referred to as a “clash of civilizations” question. Here, the problem concerns democratic secular societies versus theocratic and/or tribal ones. The secular version of civilization is complicated by the fact that, at least in the United States, political institutions have been closely tied to a particular, limited form of capitalist economics (an unregulated, environmentally harmful, globalized economics, sometimes known as “cowboy capitalism”) and a debased commercial culture driven by market priorities, as well as the U.S.’s own fundamentalist Christian “revival.” Other more social democratic models of society on offer (in Europe, say) have received little consideration as roads to substantive reform.

Nonetheless, questions about theocratic and tribal cultures remain. The one thing to say, not only about Islam and its various widely divergent forms, but about Christianity, Judaism and other faiths, is that they are all based on dubious, often fantastical, tenets that ought to be challenged in any rational discussion. In the “west,” there has indeed been a debate about religion, one that has been in progress for at least two centuries, and that, in the last decade, has been conducted under the rubric of “the new atheism.” That debate has not occurred within the Islamic world, and outsiders have remained chary about treading on sensitive multi-cultural toes.

None of the above questions and observations is the subject of books like those of Steve Coll and Lawrence Wright, which are understandably confined to more delimited material. However, their astute historical narratives provide a foundation for any of the necessary discussion that will take place in succeeding decades of the 21st century.

The other American-led military operation of the decade, the war in Iraq, offers a more cautionary and sadder story.

3. Conquest for Dummies

A couple of years before the publication of George Packer’s The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq (2005), one Saturday morning in March 2003, I was marching in the streets of downtown Vancouver, in the company of about 100,000-or-so like-minded people, to protest the impending American invasion of Iraq. Maybe “marching” puts it too strongly: it was more of a duty trudge, since the war was by then inevitable and our protestations were unlikely to have a significant impact. In cities around the world, similar protest marches were taking place that Saturday. Even for those of us who had approved of the war in Afghanistan that began in late 2001, the upcoming Iraq war, a year and a half later, was puzzling.

For one glaring thing, the proposed assault appeared to be out-and-out illegal. Rather than being a response to directs acts of aggression, as could be argued in the case of Afghanistan, the punitive expedition against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was clearly a “pre-emptive” war, in defiance of international law and institutions. If the United States had been part of the International Court of Justice system (which it isn’t), the American architects of the war would be prospective defendents in the dock at the war crimes tribunals in The Hague. (For those interested, the extended case against the illegality of the war is made in Philippe Sands’ Lawless World: Making and Breaking Global Rules, 2006.)

Second, the claim that the anticipated war was justified by the possession of “Weapons of Mass Destruction” that the Iraqi regime intended to use within the forseeable future was without substance, as was soon conclusively demonstrated. Iraq under Saddam was undoubtedly a totalitarian dictatorship, but hardly an imminent danger to its immediate neighbours, the U.S., or “world peace,” such as it is. It was a danger primarily to its own inhabitants, and even that threat had been somewhat curtailed. The regime had, for a decade, ever since its defeat in the Gulf War of 1991, been under United Nations’ economic sanctions, and was effectively hedged in militarily by “no-fly-zones” which covered large portions of Iraq, including the Kurdish north and the Shia Muslim south. Finally, and crucially, there was no evidence whatsoever that Iraq had connections with Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda or with the “9/11″ attack on the U.S., notwithstanding American propaganda to the contrary. What’s more, with the occupation of Afghanistan, al-Qaeda and the Taliban both appeared to be on the run. Why not nail down the situation there rather than embarking on a dubious new venture?

That the venture was dubious soon became clear as the American occupation became hopelessly bogged down in an “insurgency” by Iraqi militants that killed scores of American soldiers monthly and completely derailed American plans for reconstruction of the country. By the time the U.S. was wallowing in the third year of the war in Iraq in 2005, nobody was any longer pooh-poohing the word “quagmire” to describe the situation of the occupiers. The day-to-day focus of the media predictably provided a combination of blood and spin.

But perhaps more germane than the day’s latest, solemnly-reported, and always horrific body count, suicide bombing, or occasional hostage rescue, is a deeper account of what in fact happened in Iraq since March-April 2003 when, in the first flush of military success, President Bush triumphantly declared from the photo-op-selected deck of an American warship, “Mission Accomplished.” Understanding the neoconservative roots and incompetent course of the war is a better guide to judgment than the nightly, standard dispatch by a TV journalist cooped up in the occupation’s fortified “Green Zone,” unable to even directly cover the events in the deadly “Red Zone” streets of Baghdad. That’s where New Yorker magazine writer George Packer comes in.

Packer’s Assassins’ Gate is his loosely-connected, but quite coherent, reportage-based narrative from Iraq and America. It was a Pulitzer Prize finalist, the winner of several lesser awards, and was named as one of ten best books of 2005 by The New York Times. The “gate” of the title is a high sandstone ceremonial arch that provides a “main point of entry into the vast and heavily fortified Green Zone along the west bank of the Tigris River, where the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) governs occupied Iraq.” When Packer first arrived in Baghdad in summer 2003, he mistook the arch for one of the city’s antique gates, built in medieval times to keep out would-be Persian invaders.

Later on, he learned that he’d been wrong about the Assassins’ Gate. Far from being an ancient civic landmark, the gate had been constructed in recent years by Saddam in “grandiose imitation of Baghdad’s classical entrances. It wasn’t even the Assassins’ Gate — not to the Iraqis.” It had only acquired the nickname of  “Assassins’ Gate” from occupying American troops. “It was an American invention for an ersatz Iraqi monument, a misnomer for a mirage.” And the point of Packer’s little introductory anecdote about the Iraqi supplicants he met there, who gathered at the gate each morning seeking admission to the CPA-controlled Green Zone with a variety of requests and petitions for the occupiers, is that so much of the American presence in Iraq was also a misnomer for a mirage.

Packer’s opening chapters offer a thoughtful portrait of the neo-conservative administrators and ideologues who arrived in Washington, thanks to the disputed election of George W. Bush in 2000. The leading neo-conservative figures — vice-president Dick Cheney, defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld and their minions, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, and Douglas Feith, many of them dating back to the Reagan administration of the 1980s — were particularly contemptuous of former president Bill Clinton’s tentative “humanitarian interventions” in Bosnia, Kosovo, and the Middle East in the 1990s, and “saw Iraq as the test case for their ideas about American power and world leadership. Iraq represented the worst failure of the nineties and the first opportunity of the new American century.” A mish-mash of motives, from control of oil to exercise of imperial power to some idealistic if naive musings about democracy, made Iraq a focal point of neo-conservative foreign policy ambitions as early as the mid-1990s, well before the younger Bush’s presidency. As we learned from Richard Clarke’s Against All Enemies, although the Bush administration was ill-prepared for the “9/11″ attack, as soon as it occurred, it was made the fortuitous excuse to roll out plans for the already-contemplated war on Iraq.

The most poignant figure in Assassins’ Gate, who periodically pops up throughout Packer’s chronicle, is an Iraqi exile named Kanan Makiya. Packer first met him in Boston, where Makiya, an architect and an archivist, worked at Brandeis and Harvard universities. In 1989, under a pseudonym, Makiya had published a book about Iraq under Saddam Hussein called Republic of Fear. When the Gulf War of 1991 came along in the wake of Saddam’s ill-judged attempt to annex oil-rich Kuwait, Makiya’s book, which had languished in obscurity, became a minor bestseller among readers who wanted to know something about Iraq. In the aftermath of the war, as it became clear that Saddam’s regime would not be toppled by the Americans, Makiya went public, and became one of a group of exiled spokesmen for forcible regime change in his homeland, writing two more books about the fate of Iraq.

Makiya is that all-too-rare bird, an Iraqi secular humanist. It’s Makiya’s brand of liberalism that leads a writer like Packer to his own initial, if ambivalent, support for the war. It was similar appeals to appreciate the internal horror of the Saddam regime that drew so many strange left-of-centre intellectual bedfellows to this quixotic cause, including such well-known writers as Christopher Hitchens, Paul Berman, the New Republic’s Leon Wieseltier, and Canada’s Michael Ignatieff, among them. While the developing ideas of the 1990s about “humanitarian intervention” go some way to explaining how some liberals became hawkish enough to sign on to a neo-con-inspired war (one that bore some anti-totalitarian promise), it’s still puzzling how they came to accept an override on international legal norms, one of the grounds of liberalism. In each of the previous interventionist cases — Afghanistan, Bosnia, Kosovo — there was a plausible and legal justificatory argument to support the incursion, as well as some form of international imprimatur from the United Nations. Packer, at least, is more conscientious than most in reassessing his position in light of the actual subsequent events on the ground.

When Makiya and Packer meet up again in Iraq in mid-2003, Makiya is engrossed in an effort to establish a sort of “memory foundation” thinktank to ensure that the regime’s horrors will not be forgotten. “Ultimately and in the very long run,” Makiya tells Packer, “it’s about reshaping Iraqis’ perceptions of themselves in such a way as to create the basis for a tolerant civil society that is capable of adjusting to liberal democratic culture.” Although Makiya believes and says all the right words, Packer sees his friend as drifting out of touch. “Makiya was consumed with thoughts about the past and  the future,” Packer explains. “I wanted him to acknowledge that the present was a disaster. Phrases like ‘tolerant civil society’ and ‘liberal democratic culture’ did not inspire me in Baghdad in the summer of 2003. They sounded abstract and glib amid the daily grinding chaos of the city, and they made me angry at him and myself — for I had had my own illusions.”

Indeed, as Packer points out, Makiya and his counterparts pursued their own mirage. “The returned exiles in Baghdad lived in a world apart. They went to one another’s dinner parties, they traveled easily in and out of the Green Zone… they hatched plans and business schemes and visionary ideas for transforming Iraqi society. The event that had crashed like a bomb in the lives of other Iraqis, shattering the state and leaving them stunned in the smoke and debris, was to the exiles the opportunity of a lifetime.” Increasingly, Makiya’s arguments seem unconvincing to Packer, and his schemes sound more “like an excuse for all that he’d gotten wrong. Iraqis, it turned out, were not who he had thought they were” from the perspective of his long exile. “They were not Kanan Makiya.”

Makiya makes later reappearances in Packer’s chronicle. There’s even a charming romance with a woman friend he’d known as a teenager who he re-encounters in Iraq, and with whom he ends up living back in Boston. But the main story line is Makiya’s ultimate irrelevance as a legitimate liberal as events unfold in Iraq. At the end, over a pot of Turkish coffee in Boston, Packer is still trying to sort out his feelings. “He was my friend and I loved him,” Packer declares. “He had devoted his life to an idea of Iraq that I embraced. He had attached that idea to the machinery of war, and a lot of people had gotten killed. No idea remains intact once it’s been bloodied by history, and history had not followed Makiya’s blueprint. At times, his vision of Iraq had been so at odds with what I saw and heard there that dreaming began to seem irresponsible and dangerous.” In the end, Makiya is a man who can be described, echoing the words of Samuel Johnson, as someone who “embodies the triumph of hope over experience.”

Meanwhile, back on the ground, history had not followed the blueprint of the Bush administration, either. The “blueprint,” such as it was, was the product of the fantastical thinking of Donald Rumsfeld and his Defense Department, the dominant secretariat in the American government. Plan A called for the invasion of Iraq with minimal numbers of troops, joyous expressions of liberated gratefulness on the part of the Iraqis, troops out within three months or so, reconstruction of the country by American contractors paid for by Iraqi oil money, followed by democratic elections and a changed world. There was, as it turned out, no Plan B.

Packer’s book focuses on what happened after the swift American “shock and awe” invasion. It is the story of a disastrously misjudged occupation. But it was a political and military catastrophe that could be anticipated. I remember my own first “aw-oh” about the Iraqi invasion, as I followed it on TV. American troops had secured Baghdad, but within a couple of days of the military triumph there was an ominous brief report that the National Museum in Baghdad, which houses one of the world’s great collections of the artifacts of the birth of civilization, had been systematically looted by unidentified Iraqis. The story remains muddy to this day. What became clear, however, was that U.S. troops had made it a priority to guard the Iraqi oil industry and its ministry, but had somehow overlooked the museum and its historic Babylonian treasures, as well as almost every other public institution in the country. It seemed to hint at something about the limited perspective of the occupiers, to say nothing of the ambitious perspective of the Iraqi criminal class.

The central and most important chapters of Assassins’ Gate provide a useful and cautionary account of the bumbling bureaucrats led by the U.S. civilian administrator of the occupation, Paul (”Jerry”) Bremer, and his entourage of youthful, inexperienced subordinates. Many of the young Bremer-crats rapidly became aware of the morass in which they found themselves.

As one investment banker who’d been sent to work on economic development told Packer, “First there was the arrogance phase, and then there was the hubris phase. The arrogance phase was going in undermanned, underplanned, underresourced, skim off the top layer of leadership, take control of a functioning state, and be out by six weeks and get the oil funds to pay for it. We all know for a variety of reasons that didn’t work. So then you switch over to the hubris phase: we’ve been slapped in the face, this is really much more serious than we thought, much more long-term, much more dangerous, much more costly. Therefore we’ll attack it with everything we have, we’ll throw the many billion dollars at it, and to make Iraq safe for the future we have to do a root-and-branch transformation of the country in our own image.” The one thing the two disparate approaches had in common, the investment banker added, is that “they’re very conceptual, very ideological. They’re not pragmatic responses to a detailed understanding of facts on the ground.”

The in-country chief ideologue was Bremer, about whom Packer offers a less than flattering profile. His “provisional authority” was housed in one of Saddam’s main palaces, now safely barricaded within the Green Zone. “On the first floor of the palace, off the rotunda, past the metal detector and the bodyguards, Paul Bremer’s long, high-ceilinged office was lined with bookshelves that were nearly bare when I visited. Rudolph Giuliani’s Leadership stood on one shelf, and a book about the management of financial crises on another, near a box of raisin bran.” As it turned out, Bremer’s reading habits and breakfast food preferences provided suggestive clues to a man who arrived in Iraq in May 2003 knowing little about the country. When he left a year later, not much had improved. The occupation, as Packer says, “was launched with a hodgepodge of improvised moves that reflected no one agency’s strategy, no considered strategy at all other than a belated assertion of American control.” It soon gave way to a virulent insurgency and a descent toward possible civil war.

Though Packer’s chronicle only takes us up to the beginning of 2005, the spectre of civil war was already apparent to observers on the ground in 2004, even though it didn’t become a TV item for home consumption until many months later. As Packer says in a late chapter titled “Civil War?”, “Iraq without the lid of totalitarianism clamped down became a place of roiling and contending ethnic claims… It sometimes felt as if a civil war had already started.” Packer notes that already some analysts had “looked at the mess and decided that only a separation of Iraq into three autonomous regions could prevent civil war.” (The proposal is taken up in more detail in Peter Galbraith’s The End of Iraq, 2007.)

Packer’s notion of a “mirage” is more fully depicted in Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone (2006), a brisk, readable account of the American occupation of Iraq in its initial years. Chandrasekaran, a Washington Post national editor and former Baghdad bureau chief, covers much of the same ground as Packer, focusing on the seven square mile enclave known as the Green Zone, home to the occupation’s Coalition Provisional Authority. Chandrasekaran’s book was nominated for a National Book Award, and won several subsidiary prizes, such as the Samuel Johnson Prize, as well as receiving numerous “books of the year” citations. Its message of misguided mirages is signalled in the book’s title reference to the Land of Oz’s Emerald City. The American “viceroy,” as Chandrasekaran dubs CPA head Paul Bremer, is devastatingly portrayed as a Wizard of Oz type, the fraudulent old con man in L. Frank Baum’s famous series of children’s books.

Much of what Chandrasekaran wants to convey of the American mirage is present from his opening riff, a scene at the Green Zone’s Republican Palace, or “Versailles on the Tigris,” as Chandrasekaran dubs it: “In the back garden of the Republican Palace… bronzed young men with rippling muscles and tattooed forearms plunged into the resort-size swimming pool. Others, clad in baggy trunks and wraparound sunglasses, lay sprawled on chaise lounges in the shadows of towering palms, munching Doritos and sipping iced tea. Off to the side, men in khakis and women in sundresses relaxed under a wooden gazebo. Some read pulp novels, others noshed from an all-you-can-eat buffet. A boom box thumped with hip-hop music. Now and then, a dozen lanky Iraqi men in identical blue shirts and trousers walked by on their way to sweep the deck, prune the shrubbery, or water the plants.” The mirage is not of romantic Middle East deserts, but of an ersatz American holiday spa.

Even at the time of Chandrasekaran’s opening bucolic sketch, June 2004, better than a year into the occupation, one of the countless CPA administrators confesses to the journalist, “I’m a neoconservative who’s been mugged by reality,” reversing the old rightwing boast that “a neoconservative is a liberal mugged by reality.” In any case, reality is beyond the bunkers, blast walls and razor wire of the Green Zone, in the unremitting violence of Baghdad and the rest of the country. Imperial Life in the Emerald City sets out a step-by-step series of vignettes that details the illusions and ideologically-driven fantasies that substituted for a workable post-war plan in Iraq.

Much of Chandrasekaran’s tale would be comic — a sort of Keystone-Cops-Meet-the-Sheik-of-Araby slapstick movie — were it not for the fact that it’s so disheartening sad. The staff of Bremer’s provisional authority was largely made up of rightwing neo-conservative ideologues, often youthful, unqualified and inexperienced. They were hired primarily on the basis of their Republican Party political credentials and, after their brief tour of duty, would return to jobs in President Bush’s 2004 re-election campaign or to conservative think tanks. To make matters worse, in the internecine turf war within the Bush administration, the unabashedly neo-conservative Department of Defense under Secretary Donald Rumsfeld regularly trumped the more moderate Secretary of State, Colin Powell, when it came to personnel, policy and fiscal allocation decisions, as Chandrasekaran persuasively documents.

The various schemes for reconstruction envisaged by Bremer and his superiors mostly came to naught. Notions of privatizing state-owned factories were purely ideologically driven, and found no takers, other than looters. Quixotic plans to revamp the Baghdad Stock Exchange, establish an American-style traffic code, or revamp Iraq’s destroyed and looted university system turned into fools’ errands. Repeatedly, Chandrasekaran details fantasies of reform, both political and material, that collapsed in the face of Iraqi realities, and that leave readers with a don’t-know-whether-to-laugh-or-cry sense of absurdity. The really important reconstruction issues, namely the provision of electricity, water and security to the population, were invariably fiscally shortchanged, and either failed or limped along at less than pre-war levels.

To make matters worse, Bremer, inspired by Vice-President Cheney and Rumsfeld, made a series of political decisions that undercut the very goals he was attempting to achieve. Former government officials were turfed out of office on grounds of political loyalty, and the former military and police structures were disbanded, depriving the dismantled state of the expertise and experience it desperately needed. A local firebrand Shia mullah, Moqtada al-Sadr, leader of Baghdad’s largest Shiite section of Baghdad, Sadr City, which housed some two million people, was needlessly provoked, and by spring 2004 his Mahdi army militia was in open revolt. As if that weren’t enough, at the same time the U.S. military launched an ill-advised full-scale assault on the city of Falluja, a Sunni insurgent stronghold.

Within six months, insurgent rockets were falling on a beseiged, locked-down Green Zone. Though a proto governing council of Iraqi politicians, former exiles, and religious power brokers was cobbled together, it came nowhere close to cohesion or the ability to function. Nonetheless, it was to this body that Bremer handed over formal political authority a year after his arrival, in a contrived “sign of progress” ceremony made largely in the interests of President Bush’s re-election campaign rather than as a reflection of the situation on the Iraqi ground. The ground itself, outside of the Green Zone’s partial sanctuary, was an inferno of insurgency, suicide bombings, ethnic cleansing, and mounting casualties.

There would be, over the remainder of the decade, oscillating levels of violence, elections of various sorts, an American troop “surge” late in the game, and a great deal of muddling through. While American casualties, over 4,000 dead, would be carefully counted, the number of Iraqi dead are unknown. Figures vary wildly, from a hundred thousand to a million, along with as many as two million people driven into exile. By 2009, there was also the promise of a new American president, Barack Obama, to “responsibly” withdraw American troops from combat in Iraq by decade’s end, leaving the country to a still very uncertain fate. Many of these later developments would also be the subject of various books and reportage, but Chandrasekaran’s Imperial Life in the Emerald City and Packer’s Assassins’ Gate stand as early, utterly damning indictments of the American occupation of Iraq.

Meanwhile, Ann Jones’s Kabul in Winter: Life without Peace in Afghanistan (2006) is devoid of Oz-like images or yellow brick roads to democracy. However, Jones strongly suggests that the entire project of constructing a democratic, secular nation out of a patchwork of battling tribes and theological disputes also may be little more than a deeply misguided fantasy. In her report of a three year stint in Afghanistan as a foreign-aid education worker during the same period that U.S. troops were becoming progressively bogged down in Iraq, Kabul could hardly be mistaken for an Emerald City, either of the fictional variety or the contrived virtual version established in the U.S. enclave within Baghdad.

Instead, “Kabul in winter is the color of the dust, though the dust is no color at all. It’s a fine particulate lifted by winds from old stone mountains and sifted over the city like flour. It lies in the streets and drifts over the sidewalks… Rain and snowmelt make it mud. Mountain suns bake it. Cart wheels break it down. Winds lift it and leave it on every surface — on the mud houses and the mud walls that surround them, on the dead grass and trees of the park, on shop windows and the broken sign of the cinema, on the brown shawls of men in the streets… Dust fills the air and thickens it, hiding from view the mountains that stand all around. Dust fills the lungs, tightens the chest, lies in the eyes like gravel, so that you look out on this obscure drab landscape always through something like tears.”

High altitude Kabul “stands alone in the thin air, ringed by mountains.” Above the broad deep bowl of the city, “lay a mass of black smog, dense and opaque: a tangle of twisted strands of oily soot and smoke, like a great pot-blackened Brillo pad.” Once the plane bringing Jones to Afghanistan “descended into that soup and the lights dimmed,” she’s in a ruined capital whose main English guidebook promises little more than, “There is a lot to see in the city, even if most of it is wrecked.”

Kabul in Winter is several things at once. As a political travelogue, Jones’s well-written, keenly-observed vignettes give readers a clear sense of the lives of the inhabitants of a blighted landscape, attempting to survive in hovels, supplied only with threadbare blankets and clothes, and less than the bare necessities of life. Jones is there, in the back lanes and crowded dwellings, feeling awkward as her Afghan aid colleagues ask her to take snapshots of the impoverished recipients of the second-hand clothes that the aid workers are delivering, in order to prove the NGO’s legitimacy to the agency’s donors.

Second, Kabul in Winter, is, as New York Times critic William Grimes says, “a work of impassioned reportage, a sympathetic observer’s damage assessment of a country torn apart by warlords, religious fanatics and ill-advised superpower conflicts.” Jones pays particular attention to the condition of Afghan women, visiting them and talking with them in their homes, in schools and in women’s prisons. Not only is this the most powerful aspect of Jones’s work, it is also the first available portrait of the lives of the most oppressed segment of the Afghan population. The story of their oppression makes for grim, but necessary reading. It is a tale of beatings and deprivation of freedom, education, and work. Readers will recoil at the stories of young women, in despair at being married off to a man they fear or loathe, who pour gasoline on themselves and light a match. As Jones documents, the hospitals in Afghanistan are filled with such cases.

Much about the condition of Afghan women is encapsulated in Jones’s sardonic remarks about the history of “veiling.” Given that historians have mostly recorded the doings of men, “it’s difficult to say with certainty just when and why Afghan women came to be clad in pleated polyester body bags.” Some claim that veiling reached Afghanistan as a sign of class. “If such theories are correct — and who knows? — veiling seems originally to have been an affectation of the urban leisure class by which rich men publicly advertised that their wives did not have to work. (Who could work in such a getup?)” A more common explanation of body length burqas is that they’re necessary for “protection.” But, asks Jones, “protection of whom? From what?” Opinions differ, but “many male commentators report that Allah endowed Muslim men with awesome sexual prowess and desire. Any man is likely to be aroused by the mere glimpse of an ankle or a wisp of hair escaping from beneath a scarf. Can he be responsible for what he then feels compelled to do? Of course not. So to protect women from the uncontrollable God-given appetites of men, women must keep themselves under wraps.”

Other commentators on Islamic society, says Jones, “argue that veiling is prescribed to protect men from women. In this view, it’s women, not men, who are thought to be endowed with an insatiable sexuality… Women must be kept under wraps then to safeguard the whole community from the disruptive potency of their whopping erotic capacities.” In any event, Jones’s dripping sarcasm aside, it’s a case of heads-men-win, tails-women-lose. The overarching point of Jones’s excursis is that men not only covered up women, they “covered up women’s history, too… I tell you this long story so you’ll know that the burqa didn’t come from nowhere. That it has a history as hidden and as real as the history of the women who from time to time are forced to wear it.” What’s more, “what a Muslim woman wears is not just a matter of gender. She wears the whole weight of the Islamic world.”

Among the distressing features of Afghan sexism that Jones emphasizes is the degree to which it is “internalized” by its victims. The society’s patriarchal tribal mores are so deeply engraved in the Afghan psyche that even feminist lawyers that Jones worked with were timid in the advocacy of their clients’ rights, and frequently saw little wrong with the lopsided traditional arrangements under which women labour. Occasionally, Jones offers a moment of inadvertent comic relief, as when she’s trying to explain the western concept of a “blind date” to her language students, and one of them says, “Like my wedding.”

As a feminist leftist, Jones’s book is, unsurprisingly, a polemic, one that lashes out at American policymakers, of whom she’s sneeringly contemptuous. She’s also critical of the entrenched Afghan patriarchy and its corrupt political structures. Finally, she directs some of her wrath at many of the foreign non-governmental aid organizations, their wasteful system of allocating funds and the ineffectiveness of their projects. In many cases, she says, their presence in Kabul has done little more than drive up the cost of living for ordinary Afghan residents. The polemic is perhaps the most arguable aspect of the book, and some commentators have faulted Jones for descending into diatribe. If so, it is, understandably, a diatribe of despair. A half-decade after the publication of Kabul in Winter, the limited signs of a springtime of hope that Jones can point to have only marginally increased, if at all.

4. Terrible Swift Swords

Like Chandrasekaran’s Imperial Life in the Emerald City, much of what New York Times reporter Dexter Filkins has to say in his wide-ranging battlefield dispatches, The Forever War (2008), is laid out in a dramatic prologue. It’s titled “Hells Bells,” and provides an “embedded” journalist’s eyewitness account of the second U.S. assault on Falluja, Iraq in November 2004.

At 2 o’clock in the morning, as minarets “were flashing by the light of airstrikes and rockets were sailing on trails of sparks,” a strange “dialogue” begins to unfold. “First came the voices from the mosques, rising above the thundery guns.” A loudspeaker in a minaret howls, “The Holy War, the Holy War! Get up and fight for the city of mosques.” As the “bullets poured without direction” overhead, a new sound can be heard, “violent, menacing and dire. I looked back over my shoulder to where we had come from, into the vacant field at Falluja’s northern edge. A group of marines were standing at the foot of a gigantic loudspeaker, the kind used at rock concerts.”

The sound blasting out of the loudspeaker is from AC/DC, an Australian heavy metal band. “I recognized the song immediately,” Filkins says. “‘Hells Bells,’ the band’s celebration of satanic power, had come to us on the battlefield. Behind the strains of the guitars, a church bell tolled thirteen times.”

In the midst of this surrealistic, but real-life Apocalypse Now moment, “The marines raised the volume on the speakers and the sound of gunfire began to recede. Airstrikes were pulverizing the houses in front of us. In a flash, a building vanished. The voices from the mosques were hysterical in their fury, and they echoed along the city’s northern rim.” Against AC/DC’s ominous verses (”I won’t take no prisoners, won’t spare no lives”), the muezzins from the minarets cry out, “God is Great!”

After that, it’s all bullets, mortars, air-strikes, and house-to-house urban warfare as the American troops attempt to dislodge the jihadi insurgents who for months had controlled Falluja. Filkins’s reporting is a far cry from the exultant tones of the embedded correspondent in the early days of the Iraq invasion who cited Winston Churchill on camera: “There’s nothing more exhilarating than being shot at and missed!”

In Filkins’s more realistic dispatch, the picture looks like this: “The wind from the bullets brushed my neck. Marines were writhing in the street, tangles of blood and legs, while other marines were stooping and helping them and also getting shot. I kept running, pumping, flying toward the other side as fast I could with my seventy pounds of gear when I saw a pair of marines standing in a doorway and waving to me to come on, come on. I ran straight for them and I could see by the looks on their faces they weren’t sure I was going to make it. They were holding their arms out like they wanted to save me, and I reached them and they grabbed me by my pack and threw me through the door. I lay on the floor for a minute as I regained my senses and thought I was nothing so much now as a child. A child in his crib in the care of his parents, they nineteen and me forty-three.” It may be the first time but it won’t be the last that we wonder what in the world Filkins is doing there at all.

Filkins’s book, which ranges from scenes of Taliban executions in soccer stadiums in Afghanistan, to “Ground Zero” in New York on 9/11, to the battlefields and jogging paths of Iraq (Filkins is a dedicated runner), is an intentionally disjointed, jagged-edged assemblage of fog-of-war vignettes. It pointedly eschews analysis (which Filkins, as readers of the New York Times know from his other articles, is perfectly capable of) in favour of the raw feel of war. The Forever War is very much in the writing tradition of the World War I Italian battle scenes in Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, James Jones’s epic of World War II, From Here to Eternity, and Michael Herr’s Dispatches, from the Vietnam War.

The Forever War quickly became one of the most heralded books of 2008. Novelist Robert Stone, in a lead New York Times review, declared that “with the publication of Dexter Filkins’s stunning book… it seems the journals of the brave correspondents assigned to the Middle East will take their place as the pre-eminent record of America’s late-imperial adventures, the heart of these heartless exercises in disaster, maybe some consolation to those maimed and bereaved in them.” Stone argues, “It is not facetious to speak of works like that of Dexter Filkins as defining the ‘culture’ of a war. The contrast of his eloquence and humanity with the shameless snake-oil salesmanship employed by the American government… serves us well.”

Most reviewers, like Toby Clements writing in Britain’s Telegraph, recognized that The Forever War “lacks a coherent narrative or an abiding argument,” but saw that as “an illuminating virtue: from the ground, there is no coherence.” Anthony Swofford, author of the Gulf War memoir, Jarhead (2003), says that the book’s “loose structural footing” at first “feels like narrative sloppiness… but eventually the reader recognizes that these waves of action and inaction, of warfare followed by tea, followed by a run, followed by speeding convoy rides… often without time or date stamps, are a replica of life at war.” Fellow correspondent George Packer hailed Filkins’s book as “already a classic — it has the timeless feel of all great war literature.” The Forever War won the National Book Critics Circle Award for non-fiction, and Time Magazine and The New York Times, among others, named it to their ten best books of 2008 lists.

Among its virtues, Filkins’s book repeatedly captures the self-delusions of the Americans and the double-lives of the Iraqis. “There were always two conversations in Iraq,” Filkins reports, “the one the Iraqis were having with the Americans and the one they were having among themselves. The one the Iraqis were having with us — that was positive and predictable and boring, and it made the Americans happy because it made them think they were winning… The conversation they were having with each other was the one that really mattered of course. That conversation was the chatter of a whole other world, a parallel reality, which sometimes unfolded right next to the Americans, even right in front of them. And we almost never saw it.”

When Filkins was temporarily back in the U.S. to write his book (he later returned to his reporter’s duties in Afghanistan in 2009), and people asked him if Iraq was as bad as people said, Filkins replied, “‘Oh definitely,’ I told them, and then, usually, I stopped. In the beginning I’d go on a little longer, tell them a story or two, and I could see their eyes go after a couple of sentences.” A fellow reporter “told me he couldn’t have a conversation with anyone about Iraq who hadn’t been there. I told him I couldn’t have a conversation with anyone who hadn’t been there about anything at all.”

If there’s something other than the report from the ground on Filkins’s mind, it’s probably contained in the book’s poetic, portentous epigraph from novelist Cormac Mcarthy: “He thought the world’s heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world’s pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower” (Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses, 1992).

Well, “the blood of multitudes” has been exacted, but as Ali Allawi shows in The Occupation of Iraq: Winning the War, Losing the Peace (2007), there have been few visions of so much as a single flower in recompense. Allawi, a former minister in the post-war Iraqi governments has been “there” (for some two-and-a-half years), and he’s also one of those Iraqis who has mostly not been there, as a result of several decades’ enforced exile. Educated in the U.S., he worked most of his career as a successful international banker based in London, and was politically active in the diaspora of Iraqi opposition, until he was called back to his native land in 2003 (he arrived on the fateful date of Sept. 11).

For all the pyrotechnic virtues of Filkins’s prose, one reads Allawi’s sober history of the occupation, fashioned in workman-like style, almost with relief. For one thing, Allawi’s is the first book to let us in on some of that conversation Iraqis were having with each other to which Filkins refers. It is, for the most part, not a happy conversation, or even a hopeful one; mostly it’s a conversation of competing ambitions, squabbles about constitutional documents, and fine-grained dissections of sectarian disputes, both political and religious; and, as a Spanish poet put it in another context, “it ends badly.”

But it is an insider’s account that conveys a clear idea of Iraqi history, politics, and sectarian religion. If Allawi is sharply critical of the American occupiers (and particularly the blunders of Paul Bremer’s Provisional Coalition Authority), he does not spare his Iraqi counterparts. If Allawi’s book lacks the laconic bravura of Filkins’s writing, it is nonetheless, as New York Times Baghdad reporter Edward Wong said, written “in a straightforward, dispassionate manner, painstakingly documenting events from the rise of Iraqi exile politicians in the 1990s to the sectarian cleansing that began sweeping Baghdad in 2006.”

The Occupation of Iraq is as fair-minded and knowledgeable a chronicle of contemporary Iraq as we’re likely to get, and it comes from a courageous participant who “steadfastly refused to move to the relative safety of the Green Zone, not because of any heroics, but because I felt then — and still do — that the Green Zone is the symbol of all that has gone wrong in Iraq since the occupation. A marooned political class living cheek by jowl with the foreign contingent, both cut off from the terrible, daily anguish of Iraqis.” Not living in the mirage of the Emerald City had its costs. “My convoy was ambushed twice; the second time was a near-run thing. The sound of the heavy machine guns of my security detail firing back at the assailants still reverberates in my ears.” Later, while Allawi’s bodyguards were having lunch at a local restaurant, a suicide bomber struck. Three men perished, another half-dozen were wounded.

Writing at the end of 2006, Allawi sadly observes that “the backdrop to the crisis in Iraq began to change” — for the worse. “Death squads and the infiltrated police force began to match — and exceed — the insurgents in the scale and viciousness of their attacks on civilians… The cynicism and anger of the populace were palpable, as public services deteriorated further. Gasoline queues, power shortages, insecurity, lawlessness, car bombs, internal exile — Iraq appeared to be nearing total bedlam.”

In the end, says Allawi, “The Iraqi political class that inherited the mantle of the state… was manifestly culpable in presiding over the deterioration of the conditions of the country. The absence of leadership on a national scale was glaring.” At the time of Allawi’s departure from Iraq, “there was no national vision for anything, just a series of deals to push forward a political process, the end state of which was indeterminate.” By decade’s end, though there had been periodic surges and ebbs in the vortex of violence, the end state was still indeterminate.
***
I suppose there’s bound to be a certain sense of helplessness attendant on having watched the Afghanistan and Iraq wars from a (safe) distance for most of a decade. What one can do is fairly limited. One can, if it’s appropriate, march in protest, though that seemed increasingly futile as events unfolded. What’s more, the insistence of the anti-war march organizers on rolling all engagements — Iraq, Afghanistan, Haiti, Darfur, god-knows-where-else — into one anti-war-everywhere mirage made the prospect of marching less appetizing to those unwilling to endorse such a blanket policy. Alternatively, one could decide to “critically support” the occupation and try to figure out better ways to make it work than the present administrators. However, most of those who have taken that course find themselves as befuddled and lost as those who claimed to possess the roadmaps.

One can, minimally, “keep up” with the situation by reading books like those written by Coll, Wright, Packer, Chandrasekaran, Jones, Allawi and Filkins, which are, I think, among the most informative and poignant of the crop of volumes that have appeared about the failures and minimal successes of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. I guess that’s been my own almost instinctive response, given my predilection for reading and reviewing. And one can, I suppose, hope that history will take another turn, especially in light of the election of Barack Obama in 2008, and his promise of changes in American foreign policy. Looking at the recent past, however, I’m amazed, as are many of the authors I’ve discussed, by the sheer incompetence of those who so confidently, just yesterday it seems, declared how the world would go under their exercise of power. Well, it hasn’t, and I suspect that history will continue to be astonished that an empire invaded hapless nations without even a slightly realistic plan for how to administer their conquest.

So, I find myself with a mild case of political despair, which is not altogether relieved by the many volumes of intelligent reportage and thoughtful analysis that have appeared in the first decade of the century. Like others, I’ve marched, I’ve read, I’ve continued to hope against hope, and I’ve argued with friends of different dispositions over the past years. The arguments have been surprisingly unvituperative. Maybe it’s just that we’ve gotten older and don’t think lost friendships are adequate compensation for the satisfaction of being right or, more likely, we recognize that the enigmas of history are harder to crack than The Da Vinci Code, to cite the title of the decade’s best-selling book.

.

Berlin, May 24, 2009

One of the first poems of Blaser’s to which I paid attention, published in editor Don Allen’s anthology, The New American Poetry, 1945-60 (1960), was an untitled sonnet-like work that begins, “And when I pay death’s duty / a few men will come to mind.”

I was fascinated by the triple-pun-like meaning of the second line. In Blaser’s imagining of his own death, written at age 30 or so, in 1956, he says that as he pays Charon the boatman the standard one-obol fee (that’s one meaning of “death’s duty”) to ferry him across the River Styx to the Underworld, a few of those he knew in his life will appear before his mind. “Death’s duty” also means, more obviously, that we have a duty to pay to death, namely, our lives.

At the same time, “a few men will come to mind” has two more meanings that are to be found in the double sense of the verb “to mind,” as meaning both “to attend” and “to object.” When the poet pays death’s duty, a few of the men and women he knew will come to attend his death. They will be his “minders” at the ceremonies of death, as they were in his life and during the process of his dying. Finally, a few of those he knew will “mind” that he died, that is, they will object to, be troubled by, and will mourn his death.

When he pays death’s duty, “the big question” for Blaser “is what it will feel like with eyes wide open. / It won’t be complete darkness because there / isn’t any…” Until I read the poem (I was 19 then), I hadn’t known there isn’t any “complete darkness.” However, “One thing will stop and that’s this / overweening pride in the peacock flesh.” Having discovered “disgust” “in the wrinkling flesh” of aging, the poet recognizes that death will, if nothing else, put an end to our vanity, our “overweening pride in the peacock flesh.”

At the end of the poem, Blaser says, “And when I pay death’s duty / the love I never conquered / when young will end as such.” I found those last lines puzzling and was never quite sure what they meant. They meant, of course, that just as our vanity ends with death, so will our never-conquered, unrequited love. I only later realized that one of the reasons that I was uncertain of the meaning of those lines is that I made a crucial mis-reading of them: I replaced the word “end” with the word “remain,” so that it read “the love I never conquered / when young will remain as such,” and I imagined those who had been loved remaining, untouched by time and aging, “as such.” Those who had been loved are the immortals of our mortality.

I’m afraid that my mis-reading says more about me than about the poem, but since I’m one of those who have “come to mind,” mis-reading joins the reading of the poem. What’s more, it was a mis-reading that Blaser was inclined to accept on the occasions we talked about it.

In any case, “when I pay death’s duty” is a poem that I not only attended to, but that stayed in mind through the almost 50 years that I knew Blaser as a friend, intimate companion, and master. That last word, “master” also has multiple meanings: Blaser uses it in his poetry as a submissive address to the powers in language greater than ours: “O, master.” But it also means master of the art and craft of poetry, which Blaser was and, in a more conventional sense, it simply identifies Blaser as one of our teachers, as he was to the large number of people who were his students.

A few years ago, I brought Blaser a poem I’d written, titled “Friend,” that begins, “The law of friendship is / one of us must die // before the other / Mourning begins // before death…” It was a poem I wrote upon reading Jacques Derrida’s book, The Work of Mourning, and after Blaser performed the prescribed task of the master or peer of confirming (or not confirming) that it was a poem, we sat in his kitchen, drinking coffee (as we’d done countless times before), and talked about the recently dead philosopher, Derrida, who had inspired the poem, and provided lines for it.

Then I read it aloud again (another custom of the poetry trade), and Blaser looked up afterwards, and slyly asked, “Is that for me?” I was taken aback, startled that he was asking something more than a conventional question about whether the poem was dedicated to him, as in “for Robin.” I hadn’t thought about it before he asked. Am I the “one” who “must die // before the other” in our friendship? Is this the beginning of your mourning for me? “Who else?” I replied, without thinking, then added, “or for whichever of us,” since I too, though it was less likely, could be the one.

Three months before Blaser’s death, on the day before I was leaving Vancouver for Berlin, in early February 2009, I visited Blaser at Vancouver General Hospital once more to say goodbye. We went downstairs so that he could smoke a cigarette, to a parking lot outside one of the hospital’s back entrances. He was in a wheelchair, looking reasonably elegant with his shock of white hair, and wearing a thick dark bathrobe. The tumour had progressed so that present memory dissolved every thirty seconds or so, and he frequently repeated questions he’d asked only a minute before, but his recognition of others and past memory remained.

The moment of departure arrived in the chill February sunshine, while the hospital behind us and the traffic on the street across from the parking lot both continued to hum in their daily rhythm, as if a permanent break between us wasn’t about to happen.

“Well, I guess this is goodbye,” I said.

He suddenly focused. “This really is goodbye,” he said.

“Yes, it is,” I said, once more (as on countless occasions) startled by his sudden coherence.

“Don’t forget me,” he said.

“I won’t forget you, Robin,” I said, almost as if I’d been accused of forgetting.

Then, with some effort, he visibly pulled himself together, looking up at me from his wheelchair, and in a voice both tearful and ferocious, said, “I won’t let you forget me!”

So, let the muses weep; they, after all, have more time on their hands than we do. As for us, the temporarily living, we won’t be allowed to forget Robin Blaser.

.

Berlin, May 8, 2009.

The very first thing that Javier Cercas tells us in his novel, Soldiers of Salamis (2001; translated into English by Anne McLean, 2003), which I re-read recently, is that he initially heard the Spanish Civil War story “about Rafael Sanchez Mazas facing the firing squad” in the summer of 1994, a half dozen years before the writing of the book we’re reading, and more than a half century after the events depicted in that story.

So, this is going to be a story about a story, an investigation into an historical “true tale,” “constantly alert to its own constructs,” as one reviewer, Colm Toibin, put it. But as Cercas is told much later in the novel, “Listen, those stories don’t interest anyone any more, not even those of us who lived through them; there was a time when they did, but not any more. Someone decided they had to be forgotten and, you know what I say? They were probably right…  it would be best… if you forgot about this nonsense and devoted your time to something else.” Thus, the problem is how to interest people in stories that “don’t interest anyone any more.”

Cercas, the real-life narrator of Soldiers of Salamis, presents himself as a 40ish, sad-sack, failing writer, husband, and son. He’s forced to abandon his unrealized literary ambitions and slink back to his old journalist’s job (where they now make him “do everything but get the boss’s coffee from the bar on the corner”) at a newspaper in the northern Catalan city of Gerona. It’s a provincial city in Spain’s Catalonian region, located between the French Pyrenees and the regional capital of Barcelona, a part of the country to which George Orwell famously paid tribute in his memoir of the Spanish Civil War, Homage to Catalonia (1938).

I probably should say “seemingly real-life narrator” in describing Cercas, because although it’s true, as Cercas claims, that he published a couple of apparently less than memorable books a decade or so before this one, he also tells us at the outset that his father recently died, and his wife left him. But in a later interview about his novel, which he insists is a “true tale,” Cercas says that in fact his father is not dead and that “Javier Cercas” is a fictionalized version of Javier Cercas, the novelist and lecturer in Spanish literature at the University of Gerona.

I don’t have any information about the alleged wife who abandoned him as he sat in a blocked-writer’s funk before a blank television screen, but Conchi, the ebullient, irrepressibly vulgar, improbable TV fortune-teller girlfriend who turns up shortly afterwards certainly seems like a work of the imagination (she’s the one who will tell Cercas, “Well, honey, I don’t think imagination is really your strong suit”). Whatever else is going on in the “true tale” of the now-seemingly-ancient Spanish Civil War that Cercas is investigating, the scaffolding around it is designed to be playfully enticing, and may be one of the ways of getting us “interested” in stories “that don’t interest anyone any more.”

Once his journalist colleagues get done razzing him about his apostasy as a reporter and his failed pursuit of the literary chimera, Cercas is soon back to his old chores at the paper, “editing the odd piece, writing articles, doing interviews.” That’s how, in the summer of 1994, he ends up interviewing the well-known Spanish writer, Rafael Sanchez Ferlosio, who happens to be in Gerona, giving some lectures at the university. “I managed to get him to agree to talk to me for a while,” Cercas says, then adds, “Calling that an interview would be going a bit far; if it was an interview, it was the weirdest one I’ve ever done.”

The problem is, when he meets Sanchez Ferlosio at a local bar, the Bistrot, the eminent writer is surrounded by an adoring entourage, and moreover, refuses “to answer a single one of the questions I put to him.” So, if Cercas asks him a literary question about the characters in his books, “he would contrive to answer me with a discourse on, say, the causes of the rout of the Persian fleet in the battle of Salamis”; if Cercas seeks Sanchez Ferlosio’s opinion on the recent five hundredth anniversary of the conquest of the Americas, “he would answer me by describing with a wealth of gesticulation and detail, say, the correct use of a jack plane.”

It’s “an exhausting tug-of-war” which the journalist later attempts to salvage by rendering coherent an inchoate set of answers, occasionally reduced to the desperate device of more or less “making it up.” Then, almost as a throwaway, Cercas remarks that “it wasn’t until the last beer of the evening that Ferlosio told the story of his father facing the firing squad, the story that’s kept me in suspense” ever since.

Sanchez Ferlosio’s father was Rafael Sanchez Mazas, one of the founders of the Spanish Falange, the right-wing group that provided the ideological fodder for the Nationalist forces, led by General Francisco Franco, that overthrew the Spanish Republic and those loyal to it in 1939, after a three-year civil war. At the very end of the war, in January 1939, Sanchez Mazas, then a prisoner of the Republican forces, is taken, along with other prominent Nationalists, to the Collell Sanctuary, a former monastery and boarding school near Banyoles in northern Catalonia, to be executed, even as the defeated remnants of the Republican army and a river of civilian refugees are streaming north to cross the French border.

The story is simple enough. In the mass execution, which took place in the woods near the sanctuary, Sanchez Mazas unexpectedly survived. “The bullets only grazed him,” Ferlosio recounts, “and he took advantage of the confusion to run and hide in the woods.”

From there, sheltering in a ditch, he heard the dogs barking and the shots and the soldiers’ voices as they searched for him knowing they couldn’t waste much time searching because Franco’s troops were on their heels. At some point my father heard branches moving behind him; he turned and saw a militiaman looking at him. Then he heard a shout: “Is he there?” My father told how the soldier stared at him for a few seconds and then, without taking his eyes off him shouted, “There’s nobody over here!”, turned and walked away.

After that, Sanchez Mazas spent several days hiding in the woods, until he encountered some young men, former Republican soldiers, from a nearby village, who fed and protected him until the Nationalists arrived. They did so partly as an act of decency, but also because they shrewdly saw in Sanchez Mazas a sort of “insurance policy” against the fortunes of war once the regime change was accomplished. “I don’t think he ever saw them again,” Ferlosio concludes, “but he talked to me about them more than once. I remember he always called them by the name they’d given themselves: ‘the forest friends’.”

In salvaging his “interview” with Sanchez Ferlosio, both the battle of Salamis and the instructions on the use of a jack-plane are dropped in favour of the prominent writer’s views, inchoate or made up, on characters in novels and the recent anniversary celebrations of the discovery of America, and the story about Sanchez Mazas facing the firing squad isn’t mentioned. “At the time I’d not read a single line of Sanchez Mazas,” confesses Cercas, “and to me he was no more than a mist-shrouded name, just one more of the many Falangist politicians and writers that the last years of Spanish history had hastily buried, as if the gravediggers feared they weren’t entirely dead.”

Perhaps they weren’t. The story sufficiently intrigues Cercas that he becomes curious about Sanchez Mazas and “about the Civil War, of which till then I’d known not much more than I did about the battle of Salamis… and about the horrific stories that war produced, which till then I’d considered excuses for old men’s nostalgia and fuel for the imagination of unimaginative novelists.” For a while, Cercas takes an interest in Sanchez Mazas, one of the Falangist writers who “had won the war but lost literature,” as the scholar Andres Trapiello put it in a book about writing and the Spanish Civil War. It doesn’t take long for Cercas “to conclude that Sanchez Mazas was a good writer, but not a great writer.” In any case, “Time passed. I began to forget the story.”

It’s not until five years later, in February 1999, the year of the sixtieth anniversary of the end of the Civil War, that Cercas is assigned to write a commemorative article about the tragic last days of the famous left-wing Spanish poet Antonio Machado, who “in January 1939 (together with his mother, his brother Jose and some hundreds of thousands of their utterly terrified compatriots), driven by the advance of Franco’s troops, fled from Barcelona to Collioure, on the other side of the French border, where he died a short time later.” It was a well-known episode that “not a single Catalan (or non-Catalan) journalist would manage to avoid recalling.” Cercas resigns himself to doing “the standard time-honoured” hack job. That’s when he remembers Sanchez Mazas and his botched execution, which had occurred at more or less the same time as Machado’s death.

The sad-sack journalist has a tiny inspiration. “I then imagined that the symmetry and contrast between these two terrible events — a kind of chiasmus of history — was perhaps not coincidental and that, if I could manage to get across the substance of each within the same article, the strange parallel might perhaps endow them with new meaning.”

What follows is the text of the article, which is presented as a document called “The Essential Secret” (I haven’t checked to see if it was indeed published in a Gerona newspaper in 1999, but Cercas presents it at such). And, as promised, the journalist weaves together the two stories, of the poet’s death and the Falangist writer’s escape, adding, “We’ll never know who that militiaman was who spared Sanchez Mazas’s life, nor what passed through his mind when he looked him in the eye,” just as we’ll never know what was said by Machado’s surviving family members as they stood before the grave of the poet. “I don’t know why, but sometimes I think, if we managed to unveil one of these parallel secrets, we might perhaps also touch on a much more essential secret,” the article concludes, suggesting that perhaps the secret is contained in the well known lines of another poet, Jaime Gil, who wrote, “Of all the stories in History / the saddest is no doubt Spain’s / because it ends badly.”

The reason for reprising all of this in some detail is because the self-reflexive sub-theme of Cercas’s novel is about how we become not only interested, but obsessed, with a story, a small story that opens the door to the historical memory of an entire country. After publishing his article, to Cercas’s mild surprise, he receives some letters about his piece in the paper.

One of them is from a young local historian in nearby Banjoles, Miquel Aguirre, who writes to Cercas to tell him that someone else besides Sanchez Mazas had escaped from the execution at Collell and wrote a now forgotten book about it, a copy of which Aguirre offers to provide. The two men meet at Cercas’s favourite watering hole, the Bistrot bar, for dinner and drinks, where Aguirre delivers the obscure book about the firing squad, and fills Cercas in on the background of the story. But there’s something more. At the end of their conversation, Aguirre, polishing off his chocolate cake desert, drops the crumb that changes everything.

“Did Ferlosio tell you about the ‘forest friends’?” Aguirre asks.

“Do you know about them?” Cercas asks, surprised, since he had cited Ferlosio as the source of the story about the firing squad, but hadn’t mentioned the “forest friends” in his piece.

“I know the son of one of them,” Aguirre tells him.

“You’re kidding,” says Cercas.

“I’m not kidding.”

Suddenly, like Cercas, we perk up. What had been a casual, meandering, shaggy-dog war story is now a recoverable mystery, given a little persistence and luck. One thing will lead to another. There will be dead-ends, misunderstood clues, unexpected revelations. The trail of crumbs through the forest is a time machine. We stop worrying about whether we’re interested in the distant Spanish Civil War, or how Spaniards in the 21st century see it retrospectively, or whether we can keep track of the welter of names, characters and documents that the investigation will turn up. Cercas stops worrying, too. We simply follow the story to see where it takes us.

First, it takes us on holiday to a Cancun, Mexico resort with Conchi and Javier. That’s where Cercas realizes “that the character and his story had over time turned into one of those obsessions that constitute the indispensable fuel for writing… I decided that, after almost ten years without writing a book, the moment to try again had arrived, and I also decided that the book I’d write would not be a novel, but simply a true tale, a tale cut from the cloth of reality.”

Once back in Spain, the story takes us everywhere a story has to go: to dusty provincial archives; to obscure phone conversations with civil war literary scholars in Madrid; to minute comparisons of versions of the story, which in its many re-tellings has practically become a folktale; to Sanchez Mazas’s own notebook (a page of which is reproduced in the text); to former sanctuaries and killing grounds; and most of all, to people, like the son of one of the “forest friends.” He’s the one who says to Cercas, “Anyway, if you do plan to write about Sanchez Mazas and my father, you should really talk to my uncle. He definitely knows all the details.”

“What uncle?” Cercas asks.

“My uncle Joaquim… My father’s brother. Another one of the forest friends.”

And, “incredulous, as if he’s just announced the resurrection of one of the soldiers of Salamis,” Cercas asks, “He’s alive?” Not only him, it turns out, but others, old Catalans in their 80s, who are perfectly happy to chat with the young writer up from Gerona. (In the film of Cercas’s book, made by director David Trueba in 2003, the elderly Catalan-speaking “forest friends” are there in person, their words sub-titled in Spanish.)

When Cercas formally announces to Conchi at a restaurant where they’re having dinner that he’s writing a book, she’s happy that it’s not a novel (since, as noted previously, she says, “Well, honey, I don’t think imagination is really your strong suit”), but is distressed to learn what it’s about. “How can you want to write about a fascist with the number of really good lefty writers there must be around! Garcia Lorca, for example. He was a red, wasn’t he?”

Later, one of the elderly forest friends says to Cercas that Sanchez Mazas told them he was going to write a book about his brush with death. “He was going to call it Soldiers of Salamis; strange title, don’t you think? He also said he’d send it to us, but he didn’t… Do you know if he wrote the book?”

Part two of Cercas’s novel, also titled “Soldiers of Salamis,” is an account of the life of the right-wing, “good but not great” writer, Falangist politician, and melancholic aristocrat, Rafael Sanchez Mazas.

2.

There’s a translation problem with Soldiers of Salamis. I’m not referring to Anne McLean’s translation of it into English, which is eminently readable, but to a problem of cultural translation. The most extreme example of this that I encountered happened when I tried to teach Cercas’s novel to first-year university students in a Philosophy and Literature class a couple of years ago. I figured we’d have some philosophic fun with “true tales” and “fiction,” with “unreliable narrators,” the ironies of history, characters invented out of necessity and that sort of thing. It would be a lesson about the ambiguities of “reality.”

But as soon as I started talking about Cercas’s book, I felt one of those holes in the classroom that teachers are trained to notice. I looked up, and half-realized what it was. “Have you heard of the Spanish Civil War?” I asked in my most non-accusatory possible voice.

They hadn’t. And since I could hardly expect them to sit down and read the two standard, thick texts on the subject, Hugh Thomas’s The Spanish Civil War (1961; revised, 2001) or Antony Beevor’s The Battle for Spain (1982; revised 2006), neither of which, oddly enough, mentions Rafael Sanchez Mazas, I brightly chirped, “Oh, I’ll tell you about the Spanish Civil War then, and try to explain why it was so important.” They looked up, like flightless fledglings in the nest, and opened their beaks in preparation to receive a tasty historical worm.

I quoted Albert Camus’s eloquent remark about what the experience of the Spanish Civil War meant: “It was in Spain that men learned that one can be right and yet be beaten, that force can vanquish spirit, that there are times when courage is not its own recompense. It is this, doubtless, which explains why so many men, the world over, regard the Spanish drama as a personal tragedy.” I paused to ask them if they knew who Albert Camus was. They didn’t. When I mentioned in passing George Orwell’s famous memoir about the Spanish Civil War, Homage to Catalonia, there was a similar problem. They hadn’t heard of it. Nor did most of them know who George Orwell was, or, well, maybe one or two of them did, because Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four had been on the high school reading list.

Later, we stumbled over the cultural problem again. I noted that one of the characters in the book is a Chilean novelist who had been in Chile in 1973 at the time of the overthrow of Salvador Allende by General Augusto Pinochet and the American CIA. Again, I felt the chilling abyss-like vacuum in the room. They hadn’t heard of Salvador Allende or Chile in the 1970s, much less the Chilean novelist character in Cercas’s book. “Um, I’ll tell you about it,” I said, my bird-chirpy feathers slightly drooping.

I didn’t ask them whether they’d ever heard of the Soviet Union, which had expired in 1991, or thereabouts, a year or two after their births. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know the answer. And I just straight-out told them that the battle of Salamis, between the Greeks and the Persians, happened in 480 BCE, and that the story, if they were interested, is told in Herodotus’s Histories. No doubt I’m exaggerating the extent of their ignorance but, I mean, how do you discuss a novel about the nature of historical memory with people who have no historical memory?

The problem isn’t exclusive to ill-educated North American university students. The problem of how to address the historical memory of the Spanish Civil War was one that Cercas faced in Spain, and his elegant solution to the problem is one of the reasons that Soldiers of Salamis became a prize-winning bestseller in his native land.

As the Irish-born novelist Colm Toibin, who lived in Barcelona for a time and wrote a book about it, Homage to Barcelona (1990), explains in his review of Cercas, “The transition from dictatorship to democracy in Spain after the death of Franco in 1975 was a model of decorum, choreographed with skill. There were to be no recriminations against the old regime, which was to be consigned to the dustbin of history through silence rather than show trials… The silence worked wonders; it allowed for a new constitution, great autonomy for the regions, and a strong sense of democracy… But strangely, in those years of easy and friendly freedoms, the silence exerted its sinister power and influence in the private realm more than in the public, and there, in families and villages, it did a great deal of harm.” Toibin adds, “History resided then in locked memories, half-told stories, unread archives. In some families the silence was complete; the children, as they grew up in the bright new democracy, simply did not know what their parents had done in the war.”

For a new generation, that of Cercas (he was born in 1962), the time had come to unlock some of those memories, to re-tell those half-told tales, to read the unread archives. “The civil war as a battle between good and evil,” Toibin notes, “no longer works in Spain. Just as on the right, no one wants to be reminded of the cruelties in the name of fascism, on the left, no one is proud of what happened either.” Instead, as Toibin says, “Forgetting and reconciliation have made their way into the core of Spanish political life.” Today, a story merely telling of the bravery of the Republican left and the evil of the fascist right “would seem to some too simple, too old-fashioned; and to others too obvious to be of any interest.” What Cercas has managed to do is enact in the pages of Soldiers of Salamis “the same process of reconciliation which Spain has been striving for, while reminding readers, with considerable tact and some wryness, that the shadow of the civil war is a shadow they live with, and that what creates this shadow continues, whether they like it or not, to obscure the light.”

It is that achievement, of allowing the past “beauty and the possibility of redemption,” of telling a tale that “is not a story of tragedy, although there is tragedy all around it, but of the irony of history,” that accounts for Cercas’s book not only winning most of his country’s major literary prizes, but achieving a national popular success, selling more than half a million copies in Spain alone.

Those factors, astutely delineated by Toibin, don’t fully account for its enthusiastic reception by critics outside Spanish-speaking lands, or its winning the British newspaper Independent’s Foreign Fiction Prize for 2004. For readers not directly engaged by the delicate issues that engross Spanish readers, the reason that Soldiers of Salamis is one of the notable books of the decade must have something to do with its more generally applicable investigation of the questions of historical memory and of storytelling itself.

I’m partial, I notice, to writing that moves back and forth across the always permeable boundary between true tales and made-up stories. The interesting thing about this kind of genre-bending is that the writer can approach the borders of truth and fiction from either side of the divide.

In contemporary non-fiction, the use of novelistic techniques to tell a true story became widespread in North America with the appearance of what was called “the new journalism” in the 1960s and 70s. Books like Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1966), about two murderers in the American Midwest, which was labelled a “non-fiction novel”; Michael Herr’s hallucinogenic Dispatches (1977), about the Vietnam War; and the “gonzo” writings of J. Hunter Thompson and Tom Wolfe are exemplars of the method. The masterpiece of the genre is Norman Mailer’s Armies of the Night (1968), an account of an anti-Vietnam War demonstration in Washington, D.C. in which the novelist Mailer appears as a picaresque third-person character that the author (Mailer) treats with no more solemnity or piety than he bestows on the rest of the cast he assembles on the steps of the American Pentagon.

The tangled boundaries of truth and fiction can equally be reached from the fictional side. The roman a clef, in which a true story is only lightly fictionalized, such as Saul Bellow’s Ravelstein (2000), a portrait of his friend, the social critic and scholar Allan Bloom, is one way of doing it. Philip Roth’s novel Operation Shylock (1993), in which Roth appears as “Philip Roth” and other actual historical figures make substantial appearances, is another and more elaborate way of blending fiction and truth. Tomas Eloy Martinez’s elegant Santa Evita (1995), the story of the eerily peripatetic corpse of Eva Peron, is one more strategy for getting at certain strange realities.

I should mention, just to dispell any possible misunderstandings, that I’m not talking about purportedly true stories that are exposed as false. The scandal of the decade in this category was James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces (2003), a so-called “misery memoir” about the author’s recovery from various addictions that two years and a million copies later was revealed to contain significant elements that were false. That’s not the mixture of truth and fiction under consideration here.

While I’m at it, it’s also appropriate to note that self-reflexiveness in fiction, in which the author talks about himself and about the book we’re reading, as Cercas does, is not, as is often suggested, a recent “postmodern” invention of the late 20th century. Novelists have been doing this sort of thing every since Cervantes, Sterne, Defoe, and Denis Diderot put quill to paper in the 17th and 18th centuries.

Of all the contemporary novels prior to Cercas’s Soldiers of Salamis that play with real and fictional persons, while challenging the conventions of the novel, the masterpiece of the form is the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Storyteller (1990). It’s the account of a young anthropology student who literally goes native, joining a tribe in the Amazonian jungle whose central and binding figure, because of the tribe’s ecologically scattered state, is a “storyteller.” In fact, Vargas Llosa’s novel is the story of two storytellers. It’s not only about the man who becomes a tribal storyteller, but also about the unnamed narrator, who is obviously Vargas Llosa himself. Apart from the uncertain identity of the storyteller whom Vargas Llosa claims was a friend and university classmate of his, all other aspects of the book, from references to various Peruvian professors to an account of Vargas Llosa’s own adventures as a storyteller on Peruvian TV, appear to be purely factual.

Vargas Llosa’s challenge in writing The Storyteller was the problem of creating the tribal storyteller’s perspective, as he confesses in the pages of his novel. “Why, in the course of all those years, had I been unable to write my story about storytellers?” Vargas Llosa asks. “The answer I used to offer myself, each time I threw the half-finished manuscript of that elusive story into the wastebasket, was the difficulty of inventing, in Spanish and within a logically consistent intellectual framework, a literary form that would suggest, with any reasonable degree of credibility, how a primitive man with a magico-religious mentality would go about telling a story.” In the end, Vargas Llosa “makes it up,” writing a series of credible chapters in the voice of the tribal storyteller.

In a sense, Vargas Llosa, in writing a “true tale,” is forced to “make it up” in order for the story to become real. That is, there are some “true” stories in which fiction is imperative. It’s the necessity of fiction that turns Javier Cercas’s Soldiers from simply an ingenious book into one of the memorable novels of the decade.

3.

Cercas’s monograph on the life of Sanchez Mazas is, as Cercas might say, “good but not great.” It provides an account of an upper middle-class gentleman, born at the end of the 19th century whose literary ambitions lead him both to poetry and a journalistic stint in Italy in the 1920s, where he becomes an admirer of the Italian fascist Mussolini. On his return to Spain, he helps to found the Falange, Spain’s version of fascist ideology, and though personally mild-mannered, his violent rhetoric in numerous articles and speeches, ultimately contributes to the deaths of thousands of his countrymen in a civil war, even though he personally makes good on his promise to protect his “forest friends” from recrimination and jailing after the war. Making use of the testimonies of the “forest friends” and other surviving documentation, Cercas reconstructs in some detail the central episode in Sanchez Mazas’s life, his near execution and the inexplicable act of mercy by a Republican soldier who doesn’t shoot him. After Franco’s triumph, Sanchez Mazas serves briefly as a minister in the Nationalist government, but soon retires, on inherited wealth, to a fading and rather melancholy literary life as an obscure minor writer that ends only with his peaceful death in 1966.

At first, Cercas reads the manuscript he’s written in a white heat euphorically. “At the second rereading my euphoria gave way to disappointment: the book wasn’t bad, but insufficient… it was missing a part. The worse of it was I didn’t know what part it was.” He confesses his failure to Conchi. “Shit!” Conchi replies, “Didn’t I tell you not to write about a fascist? …What you have to do is forget all about that book and start another one. How about one on Garcia Lorca?” Cercas slumps into writerly despair, plopping himself down in “an armchair in front of the television without turning it on.”

The depressed author cuts his book-writing leave short and returns to the newspaper, where his editor takes pity on him and suggests that he get out of the office and conduct a series of interviews with various transplanted intellectuals, businessmen and athletes who have settled in Catalonia.  One of the first persons Cercas interviews is the Chilean-born novelist Roberto Bolano, a man in his late 40s with “the unmistakable air of a hippy peddler that afflicted so many Latin Americans of his generation exiled in Europe.” Although Cercas mentions that Bolano, after years of penury, had recently won a major literary prize, most English speaking readers wouldn’t have recognized Bolano’s name at the time that Cercas was writing. (Though Cercas doesn’t say so, the prize was for Bolano’s novel, The Savage Detectives, published in Spanish in 1998, but only posthumously translated into English in 2007.)

Cercas gives us a thumbnail sketch of Bolano’s life, which includes, in addition to his Chilean birth and an adolescence in Mexico, a short stint as a would-be revolutionary in Salvador Allende’s Chile in the early 1970s, brief imprisonment in General Augusto Pinochet’s subsequently authoritarian Chile, followed by exile in Mexico, and then a wandering resettlement in Europe, some complicated medical problems concerning his liver (which will ultimately foreshorten Bolano’s life; he died in 2003), and finally a rather ascetic literary life with his wife and children in a small Catalonian coastal town. We’re filled in on this background as Cercas and Bolano are having a drink at a bar down by the harbour and talking about Pinochet. “Naturally, I asked him what it’d been like to live through Pinochet’s coup and the fall of Allende. Naturally, he regarded me with an expression of utter boredom,” Cercas reports.

Then Bolano replies, “Like a Marx Brothers’ movie, but with corpses. Unimaginable pandemonium… Look, I’ll tell you the truth. For years I spat on Allende’s name every chance I got. I thought it was all his fault, for not giving us weapons. Now I kick myself for having said that about Allende… [He] thought about us as if we were his kids, you know? He didn’t want them to kill us. And if he’d let us have those guns we would have died like flies. So… I think Allende was a hero.”

“And what’s a hero?” Cercas asks.

Bolano pauses, then says, “I don’t know. Someone who considers himself a hero and gets it right. Or someone who has courage and an instinct for virtue, and therefore never makes a mistake, or at least doesn’t make a mistake the one time when it matters, and therefore can’t not be a hero. Or someone, like Allende, who understands that a hero isn’t the one who kills, but the one who doesn’t kill or who lets himself get killed. I don’t know. What’s a hero to you?”

The answer to that question, it will turn out, is the epic subject matter of Cercas’s book. A week later, when the interview is published, Bolano phones to tell Cercas he’d liked the piece. “Are you sure I said all that about heroes?” Bolano asks.

‘Word for word,’ I answered, suddenly suspicious, thinking the initial praise was just a preamble to the reproaches, and that Bolano was one of those loquacious interviewees who attribute all their verbal indiscretions to journalists’ spite, negligence or frivolity. ‘I’ve got it on tape.’

“No shit! Well, it sounded pretty good!” Bolano reassures him, and suggests they meet for lunch the next day since Bolano has to be in Gerona to update his residence permit. So, they spend a rambling day together, talking about the vicissitudes of writing, life, and all the rest. At the end of the day, in a hotel bar near the train station, between cups of tea for the liver-damaged Bolano and gin and tonics for the depressed Cercas, Bolano tells him, almost as accidentally as Ferlosio told Cercas about his father, the heroic story of Miralles. He’s an old battle-scarred warrior who’d fought in Spain to the very end, then crossed into France, joined the Foreign Legion, got shipped to North Africa where he fought the Italian fascists, then back to Europe to fight the Nazis in World War II. A quarter-century after the wars, in the late 1970s, Bolano had gotten to know the ancient veteran, then a French resident living in Dijon, at a Catalan summer caravan camp where Bolano was working as a watchman.

It’s a good story, as Cercas reprises Bolano’s version of it, of a warrior for whom the war never ends, and for whom the dead, although dead, never go away. As they’re walking to the train, Cercas asks Bolano if in all the subsequent years he’d ever heard anything more about Miralles.

‘Nothing,’ he answered. ‘I lost track of him, like so many people. Who knows where he is now. Maybe he still goes to the campsite; but I don’t think so. He’d be over eighty… Maybe he still lives in Dijon. Or maybe he’s dead, really. I guess that’s the most likely, no? Why do you ask?’

‘No reason,” I said.

But it wasn’t true.

Sometime in the middle of the night, something clicks. “And at that moment, with the deceptive but overwhelming clarity of insomnia, like someone who finds, by unbelievable chance, having already given up the search (because a person never finds what he’s searching for, only what reality delivers), the missing part… I heard myself murmur, in the pitch-black silence of the bedroom: ‘It’s him.’”

After checking with Bolano to make sure that the Chilean isn’t already writing the story of Miralles, he tells Bolano what’s on his mind. “You’ve got a hell of a novel there,” Bolano enthusiastically replies. “I knew you were writing something.”

“I’m not writing,” Cercas insists. “And it’s not a novel. It’s a story with real events and characters.”

“Same difference,” Bolano replies. “All good tales are true tales, at least for those who read them, which is all that counts.”

There is, of course, a Miralles at the end of the always circuitous search, after the almost-giving-up, the dead-ends, the clues that fade away. In fact, during one of the impasses, Bolano says to Cercas, “You’ll have to make it up.”

“Make what up?” Cercas asks.

“The interview with Miralles. It’s the only way you can finish the novel,” Bolano tells him.

Either way, made-up or not, there’s an old man at the end of the road, or sitting in the TV room of an old people’s home in Dijon, and he hasn’t forgotten anything. Yes, he was at the sanctuary of Collell in the last days of the Spanish Civil War; yes, he knew Sanchez Mazas (”How could I not know? He was the biggest of the big shots”); and yes or no, was he the gun-toting soldier in the woods who looked Sanchez Mazas in the eye before saying, “There’s no one here,” and turning away?

Readers of this story that mixes real people, whether historical figures like Sanchez Mazas, or contemporary ones like the Catalan “forest friends” and Bolano, with “fictionalized” real people, like Cercas himself, as well as imaginary characters, such as Conchi, will no doubt wonder about the status of Miralles. Does he exist? Did Bolano really know such a person? Did Cercas actually find and interview him? One way of looking at Cercas’s book is to see it as a demonstration of what a really good writer does when he or she runs out of facts. In the end, we simply don’t know what the factual truth is, and we don’t care because the tension between it and invention, if the writer is good enough, more than compensates. If Miralles is fictional, the fiction is imperative.

For Cercas, he gets closer, perhaps only in imagination, to one of the “essential secrets”: the meaning of the look in the hero’s eyes. If there’s no yes or no answer to any of this, there is this:

Beneath the sodden hair and wide forehead and eyebrows covered in raindrops, the soldier’s look doesn’t express compassion or hatred, or even disdain, but a kind of secret or unfathomable joy, something verging on cruelty, something that resists reason, but nor is it instinct, something that remains there with the same blind stubbornness with which blood persists in its course and the earth in its immovable orbit and all beings in their obstinate condition of being…

But that’s not what’s on the mind of Miralles. It’s not his act of heroism that he returns to, but the dead.

Sometimes I dream of them and then I feel guilty. I see them all: intact and greeting me with jokes, just as young as they were then, because time doesn’t pass for them… and they ask me why I’m not with them  as if I’d betrayed them, because my place was there…

“At some point Miralles had started to cry,” Cercas says, “his face and his voice hadn’t changed, but inconsolable tears streamed down the smooth channel of his scar, rolling more slowly down his unshaven cheeks.”

Nobody remembers them, you know? Nobody. Nobody even remembers why they died, why they didn’t have a wife and children and a sunny room; nobody remembers, least of all, those they fought for. There’s no lousy street in any lousy town in any fucking country named after them, nor will there ever be. Understand? You understand, don’t you? Oh, but I remember, I do remember, I remember them all, Lela and Joan and Gabi and Odena and Pipo and Brugada and Gudayol, I don’t know why I do but I do, not a single day goes by that I don’t think of them.

Old heroes don’t think about their heroic deeds, but about the innocence of those who were once alive.

.

Berlin, Apr. 18, 2009.