Why Books? Some New Ones At the Library

 While picking up my next Book Club book at Loussac Library, I went up stairs to peruse the new book section.  In this day of 300 character social media posts, I find books a great place to retreat to a deeper way of knowing about the world.  

So here are, in no real order, some of the books I looked at in the New Books section. 

Hush:  How to Radiate Power and Confidence… by Linda Clemons   (for an audio intro:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FyKL-6OvyE )

I saw Hush first   This is a self-help book to give the reader "power and confidence."  The "without saying a word" more than suggests it's going to be about body language.  There's a link above to an audio intro to the book by the author, who let's you know she can tell all your secrets by the way you hold and move your whole body as well as parts of your body.  

Language is Gesture -  by David McNeill     I saw this second book, ostensibly on an overlapping topic a bit later.  This is more of an academic book outlining this idea that language is based on gesture.

"Abstract:

A new way of viewing language, as a dynamic mode of meaning-making of which gesture is a fundamental part.

When David McNeill began his work on gesture more than forty years ago, language and the action of speaking were regarded as separate realms. But language, says McNeill in Language Is Gesture, is dynamic and gesture is fundamental to speaking. Central to his conception of language, and distinct from linguistic analysis, is what McNeill calls the “growth point,” the starting point of making thought and speech one. He uses the term “gesture–speech unity” to refer to the dynamic dimension of adding gesture to speaking. It is the growth point that achieves this unity, whereby thought is embedded in gesture and speech at the same time.

Gesture is the engine of language. It is foundational to speaking, language acquisition, the origin of language, animal communication, thought, and consciousness. Gesture is global and synthetic and brings energy; speech is linear and segmented and brings cultural standards. The growth point is a snapshot of an utterance at its beginning psychological stage, the starting point of unifying thought and speech. Growth points create gesture–speech unity by synchronizing a bundle of linguistic features with a gesture that carries the same meaning. This gesture–speech unity is a form of thought, a unique form of cognition."  [From Linguist List]

I found the similarity of the covers of these four books interesting.  

The Rolling Stone's review title is 

"OZZY OSBOURNE’S ‘LAST RITES’ MEMOIR  IS HAUNTING, REVELATORY, AND OFTEN DEEPLY SAD"

Rolling Stone offers 14 things they learned that hadn't been in other Osbourne bios.  There was nothing I needed to know, but if you're a big Osbourne fan, maybe , . .

From Kirkus on Sumner:

"A skillful blend of legal history and biography that honors the 19th century’s foremost champion of civil rights..".

Given today's Supreme Court ruling gutting the Voting Rights Act, perhaps we can bring Sumner back to life to help fight again for civil rights.  The decision is 36 pages.  Kagan's dissent is 48 pages.

 

Also from Kirkus on Lionel Richie's book:

"There’s an abundance of love and gratitude in this wildly entertaining, utterly charming memoir."

Roosevelt, also from Kirkus

"Roosevelt’s forceful life is portrayed as the embodiment of America 'as it was meant to be.'

Baier, chief political anchor for Fox News, is a prolific biographer whose volume on Theodore Roosevelt joins his works on George Washington, Ulysses S. Grant, Dwight Eisenhower, and Ronald Reagan. The author’s portrait of the 26th president draws on Roosevelt’s writings, diaries, letters, speeches, and other biographies. Baier sketches Roosevelt’s transformations to politician, president, soldier, writer, and naturalist. .  .

This portrait of an iron-willed president digs only so deep."

I wonder if the author embraces Roosevelt's trust busting and preservation of natural wonders in National Parks.  

When All the Men Wore Hats, Susan Cheever

 The Cheever book looked particularly interesting, though I've only read a few of her father's short stories.  

From Spectrum Culture:

"When All the Men All Wore Hats, the second study by author John Cheever’s daughter Susan, follows Home Before Dark, her longer 1984 memoir, inevitably repeating some of the material. Both accounts blend candor and tact, respect and pain, as she delves into his sense of never quite belonging to the patrician New England-New York smart-set her father limned.

John came from a checkered New England legacy, one that, like the many floundering characters in his short stories, trended downward. Susan archly observes: “The New Yorker was the stern father who would occasionally hand you a dollar and tell you to go and buy yourself a new fifty-dollar shirt.” Cheever’s standout stories mostly had been published before the 1966 success of the adaptation of The Swimmer into a Burt Lancaster film, and John didn’t publish more than a handful of stories at the magazine that had cemented his mid-century reputation after that."

Cloud Warriors, Thomas E. Weber 

 From Princeton Alumni Weekly:

"As his reporting proceeded, Weber began to focus on why more accurate forecasts don’t necessarily translate into better outcomes, in lives and property saved. Weather satellites, radar stations and the specialized scientific knowledge to understand the data they produce are all important, he concluded — but a key, underappreciated factor is how to manage human psychology.

A turning point came with Weber’s interview with a social science expert who traveled to locations that had recently been struck by tornadoes. As her colleagues were focusing on estimating wind speeds and damage patterns, this researcher was asking community members about the warnings they’d heard before the storm and how they decided to take the actions they did.

“I realized then that there was a huge push in the weather world to start better understanding people, as well as the atmosphere,” Weber says. 'The real issue is, how do you get people to make the safest decisions? You have to communicate that to people in a way that gets them to treat it with a gravity that is appropriate to the danger. It’s a complicated chain of events.'”

Empty Vessel:  The Story of the Global Economy in One Barge, by Ian Kumekawa 

From the New York Review: 

Over the past few decades journalists and academics have chronicled the “lawless ocean,” documenting widespread human rights abuses in the shipping and fishing industries and what might be termed “the outlaw sea.” In Empty Vessel, Ian Kumekawa, a historian at MIT and Harvard, finds that the seas are in fact replete with laws—but that many of them are designed to get around other laws, to exploit or create loopholes, or to obtain regulatory and tax advantages, all with the goal of maximizing profits for shipping companies. This parallel offshore universe of laws and contracts was slowly built up by lawyers, corporations, and territories that function as tax havens, enabling them to reap profit without paying their due—and becoming central to what we call globalization.

Empty Vessel tells the story of a single barge, from its construction at a Swedish dockyard nearly half a century ago to its current status as a rusty, “laid up” accommodation barge for oil workers in the port of Onne in Nigeria. (The book also cursorily follows its sister ship, an identical vessel built at the same time, which had a similar course over the years.) By tracking the ship’s many lives—as a floating barrack for British troops during the Falklands War, as a prison ship moored at Pier 36 in Lower Manhattan and then in Portland, England, and as a temporary housing barge for assembly line workers in West Germany—Kumekawa charts the dramatic transformations that the world economy has undergone since the 1980s: globalization, the decline of manufacturing, financialization, neoliberalism. The ship’s trajectory lays bare both the physical infrastructure of the global economy—in the form of ships, ports, and the workers who operate them—and the invisible legal architecture without which it would be impossible. 

The Injustice of Property - Steven Przybylinski

From Project Muse:

"With the rise of homelessness in many U.S. cities, municipal governments are sanctioning organized encampments as an official strategy for sheltering unhoused people. Examining the shortcomings and consequences of these municipal policies, The Injustice of Property explores how unhoused individuals living in self-managed encampments navigate and organize themselves within and against the confines of liberal property systems. Through ethnographic research in Portland, Oregon, a paradigmatic city in advancing this model of homeless shelter, Stephen Przybylinski details the everyday struggles of self-managed encampments to highlight how key contradictions inherent to liberal ideology maintain property as a means of structuring sociopolitical equality. He argues that justice cannot be realized for unhoused communities within the liberal model of private property due to how liberalism and liberal ideology prioritize the rights and values of property over the personal rights of self-governance.

The Injustice of Property is a conceptually robust and empirically rich account of the limits of liberal thinking regarding what “just” property relations look like for unhoused and housed people alike. The book shows that while encampment communities struggle to establish alternative property relationships to the traditional model of private ownership, the injustices that residents of encampments face provoke a necessary reevaluation of how beneficiaries of property systems influence who can become housing stable and on which terms. This insightful book reveals how the injustices surrounding Portland’s encampment communities reflect the limits and injustice of liberal property more broadly."  

The Cost of Being Undocumented, by Alix Dick and Antero Garcia

From interview on UUWorld:

Dick: I would like people to understand that the decisions that immigrants make were never made lightly. Nobody leaves home by choice. When people read this book, I want them to understand that what happened to me could happen to anybody. It’s a privilege to think that tragedy will never hit you.

A black-and-white portrait of Antero Garcia, couthor of "The Cost of Being Undocumented."

Antero Garcia: Taking the “cost” part of the title, I hope readers see that the costs of undocumented life are so much more than just financial numbers. Sure, we offer a financial estimate of what living undocumented has cost Alix at the end of the book. However, more importantly, I want readers to understand the toll of living away from family, of navigating language and social barriers, of losing the opportunities for youthful joy in a new country. The financial costs also go both ways: while existing economic reports point to the fact that undocumented individuals actually provide a net-benefit to the U.S. economy, Alix’s story also highlights the ways wage theft, out-of-pocket medical expenses, and inaccessible university costs actually extract even more income for the most marginalized individuals in this country.

 I pulled out a few more books, but this is a good enough selection.  In this time of social media, influencers whose test for truth is how many viewers they have and how much money those viewers bring, and a president who's truth is measured by his own perceived best interest, taking a mental vacation from all that and reading a few books feels like a luxury.  

And it's a good time to support your local library.  Most have a new book section.  You can even find a comfy chair and just lose yourself in the library.  

Full Blown Police State In Minnesota

 I can't figure out how to simply copy this Bluesky post, so here's a screenshot and a link to the post so you can watch the whole video.   This sort of video is all over social media.  It's appalling that the GOP in Congress have no consciences, not a shred of courage.  But this is the United States at the beginning of the year 2026.  A faltering democracy.  

Some liken this to Jim Crow in the South when thousands were lynched.  Is it different?  I was going to say that now these terrorists are wearing what some call law enforcement uniforms, whereas during Jim Crow they were wearing white cloaks and white hoods.  But some of those in the white hoods were law enforcement.  And law enforcement stopped cars with Black folk in them and treated them like this.

So this isn't new in the US, but it's new that

• it's federal agents
• lighter skinned people are being targeted
• it's in broad daylight in the north with lots of witnesses

Again, here's the link.  It's not pretty, but we have to look and change Congress in November.

https://bsky.app/profile/noturtlesoup17.bsky.social/post/3mcdab3qrvs2g

We have a white nationalist Nazi wannabes acting as immigration prosecutor:

"In February of last year, the Texas Observer reported that t James “Jim” Joseph Rodden—an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) assistant chief counsel who acts as a prosecutor for ICE in immigration court in Dallas—operates a white supremacist X account named GlomarResponder, based on an overwhelming number of biographical details that the Observer matched through publicly available documents, other social media activity, and courtroom observation.

The account has over 17,000 followers and has routinely posted hateful statements, including that “America is a White nation,” that “‘Migrants’ are all criminals,” and that “All blacks are foreign to my people,” in addition to posts with apparent praise of Adolf Hitler." (From Texas Observer)

While this is just one example, the fact that he's back in court after a complaint, reinforces the idea that not only is this reasonable in the eyes of the Trump administration, it's, in my opinion, the dream of Stephen Miller, who is rabidly anti immigrant, especially those whose skin is darker than Scandinavian.  Here's a 2018 article referencing his uncle's condemnation of Miller.  Here's an MSM article saying Miller's target is 3000 arrests per day, and not criminals, but any undocumented immigrant.

From the Libertarian
leaning CATO Institute

3000 per day.  That's 90,000 per month.  That's over a million a year.  The campaign rhetoric about criminals, rapists, murderous gangs, was simply rhetoric.  Somalians eating pets was pure fiction.  But they are Black.  And Miller and others want to protect the "purity" of the white "race."  And they also want to protect Republican candidates who they feel will lose more and more elections if the population gets less pure white.  It's hard to attract people of color to a party that welcomes white nationalists and Nazis.  

So combine Miller's fanatic racism and the GOP's fear of losing future elections, and exporting a million or so darker immigrants makes cruel sense.  

And these arrests, like the one in the Bluesky post above, are violent and intended to intimidate.  These ICE agents have been given a license to be roaming domestic terrorists.  

But the US is nothing but a country of immigrants.  Except for the indigenous peoples who lived here before Europeans came, every one is an immigrant or descendent of one.  

Everyone should be outraged.  Everyone should make a plan to find ways  they are comfortable with, to fight this administration.

For some that may 

• be writing post cards to voters.  
• giving money to candidates who have a record of courage and fighting for people, not corporations. 
• marching in protests.  
• working with refugee and immigration rights groups.  
• joining local groups fighting to save democracy
• volunteering for pro-democracy candidates
• writing letters to you representatives and senators
• pick something from Robert Reich's list of ten things to do

Just feeling helpless will worsen one's anxieties and make one feel hopeless.  Joining a local group of activists will connect you with like minded people and show you ways to fight back.  The recent Democracy Fair in Anchorage showed people a dozen or more such organizations.  This is where internet is you friend.  Just search for "local progressive activist groups in _[your town]_"  I got this FB page, for example, when I put in Boise, Idaho.

found posted multiple times on Spoutible, not sure of the author/creator

While many claim all these current events - kidnapping the president of Venezuela, threatening to invade Greenland,  ICE thugs violently dragging people out of cars and sending them off into a black hole are distractions from the Epstein files.  

Given how much has already come out in the Epstein files, I'm not sure that additional files will change many people's minds.  (But that doesn't mean we shouldn't be continuing to demand their release with pedophiles unreacted.)  

But it's possible that in a perverse way, the Epstein files are a distraction from the authoritarian takeover of the US.  

ICE-Free Refugee Day Celebration (And More)

RAIS (Refugee Assistance and Immigration Services) is among the groups that help folks under the umbrella of Catholic Social Services in Anchorage,  (I'd also say I've never seen a trace of proselytizing  in any of the RAIS activities.)

Yesterday, Thursday, June 26, was the first day of their summer CSA program pick up.  That's Community Supported Agriculture - a program where consumers pay farmers upfront and then pick up fresh vegetables every week.  In Alaska, that is necessarily limited to summer.  

I first learned and blogged the term CSA in March 2009 when I was a volunteer with an NGO (non-governmental organization, what we call non-profit) in Chiangmai, Thailand.  Here's that post which talks about CSAs in general and what was happening in Chiangmai specifically.  

Because it was the first day of Grow North Farm's 2025 CSA distribution there was also a celebration for World Refugee day. with music, dancing, art activities, and food from around the world. (That sentence was more or less lifted and edited from the email I got from RAIS.

For the rest of the summer, in addition to the subscribers picking up their veggies, there will be booths where other refugee farmers will be selling their crops.  Here's a blog post from 2022 showing you the variety of things for sale. It's always colorful and people are often wearing the clothing they would wear in their original countries.  There are also people selling baked goods.  The one that captured me last summer - the Egyptian Kitchen - won't be here this summer.  They are in Egypt until fall.  Lots of folks will miss their incredible home made cookies.  

Yesterday, I only saw a couple of tents where people were selling veggies and preserved food.  Most of the booths were services available in Anchorage.  The library was there - my mind's going blank - and there were a number of groups with various arts and crafts activities for kids.  

I spent more time at the Choosing Our Roots table, because it was a group I knew nothing about.  This is Adam in the photo.  He's head of the Board of Directors.  Later, the Executive Director Chami joined us.  Basically this groups helps queer youth find housing and get their feet on the ground.  They work with various groups including Alaska Housing, Alaska Children's Trust, Covenant House, and RAIS.

'Youth' means about 15 to 25.  Chami said she herself had been homeless with a baby and worked herself out of that situation and is now a social worker (I'm pretty sure that's what she said) and a licensed therapist (I'm sure she said that).  So she can counsel these youth with first hand experience of what they are going through.  

This was a very colorful (in the literal sense of that word) event and a photographer's buffet.  Except it wasn't.  Many of the people, for cultural reasons, do not want to be photographed.  

And as the title hints, two different people I mentioned this event to responded, "So ICE will be there?"

So no, I don't want to give ICE any assistance in identifying potential targets.  

I took only a few pictures.  Of course I should have taken pictures of the vegetables, but I wasn't thinking.  We got, as our CSA email listed:  

• Radish
• Spinach
• Sorrel
• Bok Choi
• Either Chamsur or Arugula

Don't know what Chamsur is?  Well, the RAIS email tells us not only what it is, but also how to use it.

"Chamsur is the Nepalese word for Garden Cress - a green which is popular in mountainous regions of Nepal and Afghanistan. Nepalese farmers brought seeds to Fresh International Gardens to experiment with growing Chamsur in Alaska - it proved to be well suited to Anchorage and has grown at the farm every year since! 

Include garden cress in any soup, salad, or sandwich for a tangy flavor. The taste is very similar to that of arugula, so it works great in any wraps, sandwiches, or salads! Add this Green Salad with Garden Cress to your list of tasty summer salads! Or use both your spinach and chamsur in this Chamsur Palungo recipe."

Don't know what to do with sorrel?  Another hint from the email:

"Sorrel is another tangy green, bright and lemony and makes a lovely Ukrainian Sorrel Soup - perfect for a rainy summer day."

I did take a few pictures and I've smudged out the faces of kids and people who might not want ICE to know they were there.  

And if ICE was there, they were unmasked and unarmed and just chilling with everyone else.  Here are a couple of pictures.  

I'm trying folks.  I've got pieces of about five posts that haven't been posted.  So many other things are luring me from the blog.  

I'm trying to decide if I really want to duplicate last summer's 1000 miles (1600+ kilometers) of biking.  I'm at 740k so far.  (That's slightly ahead of last summer.  But there were bike-able days in March this year, and last year I was biking hard the second half of the summer.)

I'm doing Duolingo Turkish everyday.  Sometimes I feel like it's hopeless because it's focused on everything but my speaking.  And while I'm gathering vocabulary and a loose understanding of the grammar (and all the fascinating but maddening suffixes which change tense, change who is acting, indicate coming and going, and many other conditions), I don't think I can actually use it to make oral conversation.  Speaking uses other muscles and parts of the brain than reading, writing, and even listening.  But Turkey is the last place on my list of places I promised myself I'd go to another time.  I passed it up while I was a student in Germany and decided more time in Greece for then, and Istanbul later.  Later is going to be never if I don't do it soon.  

And now I'm taking letters every Monday afternoon to my two Senators and my member of Congress.  I'm trying to find different ways to try to break through to them.  But I do believe that numbers matter to legislators, so I encourage others in Anchorage to join the group.  Just go to their offices (510 L Street for the Senators, 6th and 7th floors, and half a block away (1016 W Sixth Ave Suite #406) between 4pm and 5pm on Mondays.  There's no formal gathering, just people coming and going.  And if you miss a week or two, not a problem.  But I am getting to know the staff.  Begich has a second office in Fairbanks.  And Murkowski and Sullivan offices in Fairbanks, Juneau, Ketchikan, Matsu, Soldotna.  So you folks can also make weekly drop-offs.  

Biking gives me a chance to see what's new and changing in Anchorage, so I have pics on some of those things to put up.  I did post about the closing of Lake Otis at 42nd.  Lake Otis is back working, but work on 42nd continues.

There's somebody working on an ordinance to change local Anchorage elections to ranked choice voting (the State has that, though Republicans are trying again to do away with it) and I'm trying to get more info on who is doing this and how it's going.  I know an Assembly committee had it on their agenda this week.  This would be a great improvement.  

Frustration with Democratic establishment and their problems with the bright young, articulate, members of their party, culminating, most recently, with the Islamaphobic responses to Mamdani's apparent primary win in New York.  For example. Christopher Bouzy, the creator of Twitter alternative Spoutible, writes, "Democratic Leadership Told Rep. Jasmine Crockett She's Too Black and Too Loud."

Gardening and regularly visiting the Alaska Botanical Garden as part of one of my bike routes.  

Don't despair.  Find beauty every day.  Get outside and move your body.  (The biking and gardening) Find good folks to be around.  Find ways to resist.  

There are organizations offering lists of ways to fight back daily.  Taking action is the best antidote for hopelessness.  Here are two that send me regular (not daily) emails with list of ways I can resist:

Peoples Action Institute  

The Digital Drumbeat

AIFF2022: Busy Saturday Starts With Kids Program, Ends With Recommended French Film - All at Museum

I started thinking about the Anchorage International Film Festival late this year, so I'm not as organized as I have been in past years.  

My sense, from reading the online program, was that there are a lot fewer films, turned out to be correct.  Just 75.  But the positive spin is that none are shown in conflict, so you can see them all.  

Friday night's Turkish film The Last Birds of Passage, was a poignant narrative feature on a Turkish minority group that travels 400 kilometers with its goats and camels to the summer grazing grounds and 400 back.  The migration in the film is faced with lots of obstacles - from within the family and from changes in the landscape they have to cross.  The filmmaker was there for a charming Q&A by Zoom after the film and is scheduled to be in Anchorage Wednesday.

I haven't figured out how to find a page on the website that shows all the films for one day AND when they are playing.  So I've tried to  put that altogether here.  

But here's the Saturday lineup - all at the Anchorage Museum Auditorium

Saturday

10am  Shorts - Kids A Bonanza

Birthday Wish • 

Footprints in the Forest • 

Rain • 

Santa Doesn''t Need Your Help • 

Snowflakes • 

SPIRIT: A Martian Story • 

The Social Chameleon

12pm  Big Crow  -  

"Born in 1974 on South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, SuAnne had become one of the state’s best basketball players by age 14. By the time of her tragic death in a car accident at age 17, her wisdom, leadership, and determination had made her a household name across the Great Plains. 27 years later, SuAnne’s legacy has proven legendary - everyone you meet on “the Rez” has a story about how SuAnne’s spirit continues to galvanize the Lakota in their fight to reclaim their language and save their culture, embracing what Su called “a better way”. From AIFF website

2pm  Shorts - Made in Alaska

Kakiñiit •  I talked to the director Patrick Hoffman at the opening.  His film is about traditional Alaska Native tattooing.

Sabor Ártico: Latinos En Alaska (Arctic Flavor: Latinos in Alaska) • 

Safe Enough

4pm  Crows are White - Museum

"For over a thousand years, a secretive Buddhist sect has lived in an isolated monastery in Japan performing acts of extreme physical endurance in their pursuit of enlightenment. In CROWS ARE WHITE, filmmaker Ahsen Nadeem is struggling to reconcile his desires with his faith and sets off to the strict monastery in search of answers. Ahsen is not immediately welcomed and the only monk who will speak with him is an outcast who prefers ice cream and Slayer to meditation. Together they forge an unlikely friendship that leads them to higher truths and occasionally, a little trouble. Shot over five years on three continents, CROWS ARE WHITE is an exploration of truth, faith and love, from the top of a mountain to the bottom of a sundae." From AIFF2022 site.

6pm - SHORTS: Different Kind of Love Stories

Burros • 

Honeymoon at Cold Hollow • 

Jelly Bean • 

Lead/Follow • 

Peanut Factory • 

Star-Crossed • 

The Body is a House of Familiar Rooms • T

oo Rough

8pm  You Resemble Me - Museum - This one got strong reviews from people I spoke to.

"Cultural and intergenerational trauma erupt in this story about two sisters on the outskirts of Paris. After the siblings are torn apart, the eldest, Hasna, struggles to find her identity, leading to a choice that shocks the world. Director Dina Amer takes on one of the darkest issues of our time and deconstructs it in an intimate story about family, love, sisterhood, and belonging."  From AIFF website.

Highly Recommend Watching Stateless On Netflix

Stateless is an Australian TV series about an immigration detention camp, "based on true events".  The key event is an Australian woman who ends up in the camp.    

 

An Afghan family on the run to Australia.  

Two of the guards.  We see how the life of the one on the left deteriorates because of what he has to do in the detention center.  But his life is further complicated because his sister is a fervent immigrants rights activist.  

Tamil refugees who confine themselves to the roof and put razors to their throats when officials try to get them down.  There was no explanation of how they ate or took care of other needs, or why they couldn't be gotten when they were asleep.  But they did like to send these messages to media in helicopters.

The series was released on Australian television in March this year and on Netflix in July.  

Compared to the views we've gotten of kids in cages and refugees packed into much too small areas in the US, this camp looks pretty good.  But these detention centers in Australia were shut down in 2013.  Now refugees are detained offshore.  From Human Rights Watch:

"Since July 2013, Australia has forcibly transferred more than 3,000 asylum seekers who traveled there by boat to camps on Papua New Guinea and Nauru.

This experiment in human suffering as a deterrent has not worked. Seven years on, more than 370 people still choose to endure horrific hardship in Papua New Guinea and Nauru rather than return to conflict and persecution in their home countries. They languish in limbo, separated from families, futures uncertain. The United States has taken more than 700 people in a resettlement arrangement with Australia, and over the years the Australian government reluctantly transferred more than 1,200 asylum seekers and refugees back to Australia for medical treatment. Some of those in Australia live in uncertainty in the community on temporary bridging visas, but more than 200 are detained in centers or hotels."

I'm posting this  because the story is well told from different perspectives and reminds us that there are lots of desperate human beings who have displaced for various reasons who face persecution at home.  And with climate change, more and more people are going to be displaced.  

The US has not just wasted four years, but put tens of thousands of these fragile people under increased stress because we have a president whose longest lasting close advisors include hateful people like Stephen Miller.

This show is a reminder of why immigrants come, that they are intelligent human beings, and that we're contributing to the wretched conditions of their lives.  

Will it help convince anyone if I mention that Cate Blanchett has a supporting role in the series?

Reposting: "The scum of creation has been dumped on us,"

I was looking through old posts trying to find one where I suggested a statue and campaign support for the first 10 Republican Senators to pledge to fight Trump.  I'm still looking for that one, but I also found this very relevant post from July 2016.

I hope you don't think I'm being lazy here.  I know that very few people have the time to read even 50% of what I post and this seems particularly relevant today.

It's my thoughts on reading The Big Burn by Timothy Egan, with more relevance today than when I first posted it.  (Well, it was relevant then and had enough people paid attention it might be less relevant today.)  Let's see what's in it:
√  an account of huge forest fires in Montana in the early 1900's
√  a president attacking government employees' valiant attempts to preserve the environment
√ outrageous treatment of and discrimination against immigrants

Here's the old post:

From Timothy Egan's, The Big Burn:

"What passed for law and constitutional protections in Morenci, [company owned mining town in Arizona, 1910] were thugs hired by Phelps Dodge.  They maintained a three tier wage system:  one for trouble-free whites, one for Mexicans, one for Italians.  Such attitudes are typical in a decade when nine million immigrants came to the United States, and one-third of the population was either foreign-born or a child of someone born abroad.  The Italian surge in particular angered those who felt the nation was no longer recognizable, had lost its sense of identity.  And they hated all these strange languages spoken in shops, schools, and churches.  The Immigration Restriction League, founded by Boston blue bloods with family ties to the old Tories of England, campaigned to keep "undesirable classes" from entering the country.  They meant Italians, Greeks, Jews, and people from eastern Europe. 

"The scum of creation has been dumped on us,"  said the native politician Thomas Watson.  "The most dangerous and corrupting hordes of the Old World have invaded us."  It was not just pelicans [auto-correct changed my version of politicians to pelicans] who attacked Mediterranean immigrants as a threat to the American way of life.  Francis A. Walker, president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, called Italian and Greek immigrants "beaten men from beaten towns, representing the worst failures in the struggles for existence."  Another educated expert cautioned Americans against "absorbing the equitable blood from Southern Europe." (pp. 131-2)

I'd note that Fredrick Trump, Donald's grandfather arrived in New York on October 19, 1885  (a year before the Statue of Liberty was unveiled) from Germany at age 16.  Twenty-six years prior to the mining and timber rush described in the book in the summer of 1910 (see below), Trump

"moved to the mining town of Monte Cristo, Washington in Snohomish County.[7] Monte Cristo was expected to produce a fortune of gold and silver because evidence of mineral deposits were discovered in 1889. This led to many prospectors moving to the area in hopes of becoming rich, with the financial investment of billionaire John D. Rockefeller in the entire Everett area creating an exaggerated expectation of the area's potential."

He returned to Germany in 1901, found a wife, and returned with her to the US in 1902.  The Trumps, coming from northern Europe, while part of this huge surge of immigrants, came from a more privileged group of immigrants, they weren't Italians or Greeks or Jews.  Though by 1917 the US was at war with their country of origin.

Mike Pence's grandfather didn't get to the US from Ireland until much later - April 11, 1923.

From what I can tell, Hillary Clinton's paternal grandfather immigrated from England and her paternal grandmother was born in the US to Welsh immigrant parents.

I would also note, that when people claim that their ancestors were legal immigrants, as the passage above suggests, the laws were much, much easier back then for European immigrants.  

Actually, immigration is but a small part of the book.  The main focus is the boom towns of Idaho and Montana as the railroads opened access to the forests just after Teddy Roosevelt, with the guidance of Gifford Pinchot, created millions of acres of national forests and parks in the West.  But they had to fight Eastern corporations that were ravaging the new public land with their rapacious taking of minerals and timber.  This included a huge scandal over Alaska coal.  Roosevelt's second term was up and he chose not to run again.  (He'd come in to office from the vice presidency when president McKinley was shot and had only served seven years.)  While he was off on safari in Africa,  Taft, who had promised Roosevelt to protect the forests and the new concept of conservation, had instead appointed pro-development  Richard Ballinger as secretary of the interior.

"The interior secretary, whose duty was to oversee an empire of public land on behalf of the American people, had once backed a syndicate as it tried to take control of coal in a part of Alaska that was later added to the Chugach National Forest. .  ."  

"Beyond the Alaska coal deal, Ballinger was now showing his true colors - as a traitor to the progressives, Pinchot believed.  "You chaps who are in favor of this conservation program are all wrong,"  Ballinger said in a speech.  "You are hindering the development of the West.  In my opinion, the proper course is to divide it up among the big corporations and let the people who know how to make money out of it get the benefits of the circulation of money."  (pp. 94-5)

That's all backdrop to the story of a band of well-trained and highly motivated new rangers  whose job was to oversee huge tracts of land newly designated as national forests and parks. ("Supervisor Koch . . . felt protective about his five million or so acres . . .")  Land that was being exploited by mining and timber companies and hordes of folks taking the new railroad into the tiny boom towns hoping to get rich.

As the title of the book suggests, the book is about fires, as the rangers struggle on meagre salaries to protect the towns and even more, the newly created national forests from the ravages of fire in the bone dry summer of 1910.  There was no rain, but lots of  thunder and lightening, which started thousands of fires that summer.

I'm not through with the book yet, but I thought the sections on immigration give some historical perspective to today's political debates.  And overall, the book shows that the fights between the corporations looking to exploit natural resources and the government fighting to preserve some of the natural space of the continent, wasn't much different then, though time allows us more facts about what was happening back then.

In a book Pinchot wrote at the time - The Fight for Conservation - 

"He predicted that America might one day, within this century, be a nation of two or three hundred million people.  And what would his generation leave them?  Their duty was to the future.  To ensure that people in 2010 would have a country of clean water, healthy forests, and open land would require battle with certain groups, namely 'the alliance between business and politics.'  It was, he said, 'the snake that we must kill.'"(p. 158)

Given that today corporations once again have great influence over Congress - enough to prevent or pervert what they most oppose - and the importance of money in politics is major issue, I'd say his view of things was pretty prescient. 

If Republicans Don’t Have A Problem With Detention Centers On Human Rights Grounds, Maybe They Will For Wasting Taxpayer Money

CQ reports that the US government is paying contractors over $700 a day to house children in border detention camps.  They cite an NBC report based on information from a Department of Health and Human Services administrator.

“The cost of holding migrant children who have been separated from their parents in newly created "tent cities" is $775 per person per night, according to an official at the Department of Health and Human Services — far higher than the cost of keeping children with their parents in detention centers or holding them in more permanent buildings.”

You can slice and dice the numbers anyway you want, but there are a couple of things that are obvious here:  The government is paying way too much.

This is either because:
A.  They are horribly inefficient
B.  They are making contractors very rich
C.  They have no imagination to figure out better ways to do this
D.  They want the detainees to suffer as much as possible to deter others
E.  They want the detainees to suffer as much as possible because they are sadistic
F.   A combination of some or all of the above

But we could put all these people into decent hotels and feed them well at these prices.  Someone’s getting rich.  Someone who’s probably benefiting from the new tax law.  Someone who probably contributed significantly to the Trump campaign.  (I said probably.  I don’t have the facts.  Let’s consider this a suggestion for a journalist who needs a good story.)

And yes, I agree with anyone who thinks that NBC should have given the name of the person who supplied the numbers.

Notes: Psychopath Childhoods; Flying; Flying TVs; Refugee Day

New York Post article about a Norwegian study:

"Two “extreme” parenting styles have been linked to children becoming criminal psychopaths in later life, a study has revealed.
The Norwegian University of Science and Technology interviewed high-security prisoners and found many have a history of either total parental neglect, or rigidly controlling, authoritarian parents."

OK, so this is a study looking back from someone who ended up in prison.  I've always assumed that prisoners have figured out they'll get more sympathy if they tell people they were abused as kids.  I would imagine the researchers have figured this out too and have methods to avoid being told what they expect to hear.

But how about a study that follows kids to see how they turn out?  What percent of neglected and kids with authoritarian parents end up messed up?  How do you defined messed up?  I was thinking susceptible to Trump like tactics.  But George Layoff already argued that authoritarian parents have kids who want an authoritarian leader.(Scroll down to the Family heading under Conservativism and to the nurturing family under Liberalism.)


New York Times piece, Paying a Price For Eight Days of Flying in America:

"The trip had its share of surreal moments — interrogated by a security agent at one point, I forgot what city I was flying to — and I felt increasingly removed from myself, dehumanized and disaffected. Through a grim twist of fate, every flight seemed to leave from a gate in a distant corner of the terminal. Sitting again and again at the back of the plane, I wondered, am I getting enough oxygen?"

I'm not recommending this one, but it's (another?) example of finding what you're looking for.  She was looking for bad experiences and found them.  I mean, the route she took in a week guaranteed she wouldn't have enough sleep and would be grouchy as hell the whole time.
I think about eight hour bus rides I used to take in Thailand to go 200 miles.  Dusty.  Hot.  Chickens.  No toilet. Unpaved roads.  Dare-devil drivers.   Going 2000 miles in five hours in air conditioned seats with arm and head rests?   Luxury.

OK, There's a lot about flying to complain about - the proliferating fees, the shrinking seats, the carbon footprints,  and all the time it takes just to get on the plane.  And we should rightly work to change these things.  Through lobbying for more competition and as consumers who can refuse to fly and let the airlines know why.  And if you do have to fly, minimize the things that cost extra.  I know we can't always do that, but I see a lot of people forking over $8 for a digiplayer every time I fly.

She complains about people who pay more getting treated better.  Hey, that's the American way of life.  It's just on planes the coach passengers have to walk through first class.  The really rich fly on private jets.  And the wealthy get better everything in the United States, it's just done where you can't see it.  The more we see the class system, the more people might start to figure out our system isn't fair.  But I also have to say that a lot of the first class seats on Alaska anyway, are frequent flyers who get bumped up even though they are paying coach fares.

But still, it's pretty remarkable how quickly we can get to distant places in relative comfort.  Since I tend to fly on Alaska Airlines, I may be spoiled compared to other airline passengers, but I also plan for the trip, have something good to read, or to work on the computer, and my own food,  and the time passes quickly.

So, yes, let's do something to fix the ever increasing ways airlines gouge us (outrageous change fees would be on the top of my list), but in the meantime, prep for the flight, be respectful to the people around you, and think how much better this is than doing the same trip by stage coach.


A New Yorker piece called "White House On Lockdown After Television Is Hurled Out Window"

In these times of outrageousnous, I had to read through the writer's bio to confirm this was a joke.  It's hard to do satire when the president does it so much better.


From the Catholic Anchor,  World Refugee Day celebration set for June 11 in Anchorage.

"World Refugee Day is an annual international celebration established by the United Nations to honor, recognize and celebrate the positive contributions of refugees worldwide.

“Catholic Social Services hosts its annual World Refugee Day celebration on Saturday, June 11, 4-6 p.m., at Clark Middle School* in Anchorage.

[UPDATE:  Seems I got last year's announcement and the times wrong.  Sorry about that.]

After facing unimaginable challenges as they were forced to flee their homes, living precariously for years in refugee camps or cities, our clients have been given the opportunity to rebuild their lives,” Catholic Social Services related in a statement about the upcoming celebration. “'They now have access to rights and freedoms they have long been denied: stable housing, education for their children, and opportunities to work and become economically self-sufficient.'”

I've been doing some volunteer work** with RAIS (Refugee Assistance & Immigration Services) and I promise you'll meet some very interesting people from places like Bhutan, South Sudan, Mexico, Congo, Somalia.  People you've been reading about.  And maybe have seen out and about in Anchorage.  But this will a setting where you're encouraged to engage them in conversation and ask about why they've left their homes and what it's like to be here.

*Clark is north of the Glenn on Bragaw - where the old Mt. View library used to be.

*Not a lot.  A few Saturday mornings.  The program is just getting started and they're working out the kinks.  But I've met some impressive people.

The Camp Of The Saints Is a Mean And Racist Diatribe But Given It's A Steve Bannon Favorite, Worth Knowing About

Some time ago I read that one of the books that influenced Steve Bannon, the White House chief strategist,  was The Camp of the Saints by Jean Raspail which came out in French in 1973.  It took me a while to track down a copy - which I got through interlibrary loan.  

It's a disgustingly racist novel about 1000 old ships that leave India for Europe with 'the Ganges horde' of nearly 1 million people, led by the giant 'turd-eater' who carries the monster child on his shoulders.  I did try hard to read this book to see if it would help me understand something about Bannon and others who supported Trump.  I wasn't able to finish it - it's really hard to read this stuff - before it was due back at the library.  But I think I got enough to get the gist.

I'd like to share some of the book with you for a number of reasons.

• The author, twisted as he may be, is insightful in his analysis of how things operated back then in French society.  
• The language and unrelenting disdain for other people (not only the darker people of the world, but also their white stooges who believe in helping the poor and making the world a better place) has to be read to truly get the level of racism and general misanthropy.  Just my saying it is racist  doesn't convey the point here. 
• The insight it gives us to many Trump supporters' way of seeing the world and what his campaign targeted
• The roadmap the book offers as a way to capture the 'gullible masses' which the author despises when  the techniques are used by the left, but sound very similar to what the right has been doing in the US for the last twenty or thirty years.  
• The book that supposedly helps shape Bannon's view of the world clarifies a lot of why Trump is doing some of what he does

I thought I could do this in a series of quotes, but that isn't going to work.  The quotes need some context and some commentary.  I may do a second post, though midway through writing this up I did find the whole book on-line, so you can skim through it yourself.

The Basic Plot

The armada of poor leaves Calcutta for Europe.  The book is mainly about how the French will respond if they land on French shores (which they do.)  Raspail eviscerates various aspects of French society - from the media announcers, academics, government officials, teachers, the clergy, and the French public and their children - as stooges of the poor refuse of the earth.  The French, in Raspail's eyes are no longer men, but rather patsies due to their disgusting humanitarian beliefs in equality and their lack of will to defend their own hard won gains and to defend the white race.  You can read the plot in more detail at Wikipedia.  

It's Not Just The Plot That Matters

But the plot isn't what stands out to me.  It's the language, the hate, the disdain, the world view.  Raspail's world is zero sum - either we get the world's limited resources or they do - and that humans are just brutish members of tribes with no hope for a better society.  

The heroes of this book remind me of the heroes of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, in that caring about anyone but yourself is considered foolish and weak.   This book then adds gallons of racism to Rand's cold libertarianism.  

Why We Need To Read Books Like This

As despicable as I find this book, the world views expressed in it do represent views held by many people in the world;  enough to pass Brexit and elect Trump.   Had these views not been so summarily dismissed as unacceptable and undiscussable, they might have been better debated.  The fears of the invading hordes that this book evokes might have been addressed rather than dismissed.  There are legitimate concerns and liberals left those with concerns to get answers from the likes of Raspail.  

Also reading about the process of social brainwashing that Raspail describes might have better helped us understand and address the Fox News and talk radio propaganda tools that set the stage for Trump.  

The World When The Book Was Published

The book came out in France in 1973, about five years after French students shut down universities with demands for sexual and other liberties and workers demanded higher pay and shorter work weeks.  During WW II, France was unable to rule its colonies adequately and their independence movements strengthened. By 1954 France was out of Indochina  By 1960 France was out of most of their other colonies, most notably those in Africa, and most painfully, Algeria, leaving many in France angry at this loss of economic and political dominance.   There was a tug between the old traditionalists and those clamoring for a modern world.  France’s cultural superiority in the world was  also being challenged by American culture as English became the new lingua franca.  The French did not look kindly on this American usurpation.  

“Georges Clemenceau, who had led France through the first world war, once said that 'America was the only country that had gone from barbarism to decadence without passing though civilization’” (from Americans in Paris) 

I'm guessing that some of Raspail's vituperation against the media stems from what this Wikipedia entry describes.

“De Gaulle's government was criticized within France, particularly for its heavy-handed style. While the written press and elections were free, the state had a monopoly on television and radio broadcasts (though there were private stations broadcasting from abroad; see ORTF) and the executive occasionally told public broadcasters the bias that they desired on news. In many respects, society was traditionalist and repressive.”

But 'traditionalist' didn’t mean in France what it might mean in the US.  From the same Wikipedia post:

“In the context of a population boom unseen in France since the 18th century, the government under prime minister Georges Pompidou oversaw a rapid transformation and expansion of the French economy. With dirigisme — a combination of capitalism and state-directed economy — the government intervened heavily in the economy, using indicative five-year plans as its main tool.”  

 In short, there was plenty for the French to be upset about.  And Raspail seems to have taken his insight, twisted with a virulent racism, and created a fantasy apocalyptic novel.  And the boat people and other refugees coming to Europe lends some prescience to Raspail.  Though his tales are fantastical misrepresentations and omit key factors such as:  labor short Northern Europe, particularly Germany, had begun importing workers and many of the immigrants were from former European colonies.

OK, Let's Look At Some Of The Book

The chapters jump back and forth from views of the west and views of the armada of Indians.  It starts in the present with the arrival of the ships at Côte d' Azur.  We bounce around a bit and then we're at the Belgian consulate in Calcutta which had been cherry-picking Indian babies for adoption back home.  Until the masses of mothers bringing their babies in for adoption got too much and a huge mob is outside the consulate.  This is where we are first introduced to the leaders of the armada as it prepares to leave India.

The Turd-Eater and the Monster

"Way back, behind the backmost women in the crowd, a giant of a man stood stripped to the waist, holding something over his head and waving it like a flag. Untouchable pariah, this dealer in droppings, dung roller by trade, molder of manure briquettes, turd eater in time of famine, and holding high in his stinking hands a mass of human flesh. At the bottom, two stumps; then an enormous trunk, all hunched and twisted and bent out of shape; no neck, but a kind of extra stump, a third one in place of a head, and a bald little skull, with two holes for eyes and a hole for a mouth, but a mouth that was no mouth at all—no throat, no teeth—just a flap of skin over his gullet. The monster’s eyes were alive, and they stared straight ahead, high over the crowd, frozen forward in a relentless gaze—except, that is, when his pariah father would wave him bodily back and forth." (p. 9)

"Can a man spend his whole life grubbing for turds in all the slop pots along the Ganges, shaping them, rolling them between his fingers, day after day, and not know something about the true nature of man? He knew all there was to know. He just never knew that he knew, that’s all." (p. 10) 

These are the characters Raspail has created to lead the armada.  And Turd-Eater and Monster is what they are always called.  Reminds me a bit of Limbaugh's love for disdainful moniker's such as femi-Nazi as well as Trump's nicknames for his opponents.  Though Trump's 'crooked Hillary' and 'Lyin' Ted' were tame in comparison to Raspail.

The Western Media And Its Consumers

"To appreciate the West’s opinion of the refugee fleet—or, for that matter, of anything new and unfamiliar—one essential fact must be borne in mind: it really couldn’t give less of a damn. Incredible but true. The more it discovers about such things, the more fathomless its ignorance, feeble its interest, and vulgar its own self-concern. The more crass and tasteless, too, its sporadic outbursts, fewer and farther between. Oh yes, to be sure, it indulges in flights of sentiment now and again, but cinema style, like watching a film, or sitting in front of the TV screen, poised for the serial’s weekly installment. Always those spur-of-the-moment emotions or secondhand feelings, pandered by middlemen. Real-world drama, served in the comfort of home by that whore called Mass Media, only stirs up the void where Western opinion has long been submerged. Someone drools at a current event, and mistakes his drivel for meaningful thought. Still, let’s not be too quick to spit our scorn its way. Empty drivel indeed, but it shows nonetheless how reading the papers or watching the news can provoke at least the appearance of thinking. Like Pavlov’s dog, whose slobber revealed the mechanics of instinct. Opinion shakes up its sloth, nothing more. Does anyone really believe that the average Western man, coming home from his ofiice or factory job, and faced with the world’s great upheavals, can eke out much more than a moment’s pause in the monumental boredom of his daily routine?" (p. 20  - emphasis added)

There are many on both sides of the political divide who might characterize parts of the media this way - though probably in less scornful tones.  But this is clearly the message about the media that Trump fed his voters, though calling the media the 'enemy of the people' seems tame by comparison.   Liberals certainly believe the basic message when it's applied to Fox News and its audience.

Let's look at the media's consumers as Raspail sees them, beginning here with the intermediaries - the priests and the teachers.  First the clergy:

"Three thousand two hundred sixty-seven priests started frantically scribbling with an eye toward the following Sunday—ready-made sermon, delivered to the door, nothing to do with the gospel for the day, but who worries anymore about such minor details? (Among the cast of thousands we should note the presence of a certain married priest, Catholic and cuckold, wearing a pair of Christian horns, and aware of the fact—a situation so utterly new to the poor man, and muddling his mind into such disarray, that for over a month his Sunday sermons seemed to leave him at a loss. Durfort’s strong dose saved him from total silence. The therapy worked so well, in fact, that the antlered, oil- fingered gent forgot all about his sanctified horns and recovered that gift of thunderous fire and brimstone that made him the shepherd of the largest flock of masochists in the diocese. Perhaps we’ll see him again bye and bye ...)" (p. 27) 

And the teachers:

"At the very same moment thirty-two thousand seven hundred forty-two schoolteachers hit on the subject for the next day’s theme: “Describe the life of the poor, suffering souls on board the ships, and express your feelings toward their plight in detail, by imagining, for example, that one of the desperate families comes to your home and asks you to take them in.” Irresistible, really!"  (p. 27)

And the kids:

"And the dear little angel—all simple, childish soul and tender heart—will spread four pages’ worth of infantile pathos, enough to melt a concierge to tears, and his paper will be the best, the teacher will read it in class, and all his little friends will kick themselves for having been much too stingy with their whines and whimpers. That’s how we mold our men nowadays. Because even the tough, hardhearted little brat, the one with all he needs to succeed in this life, is forced to take part, since children abhor standing out from the crowd. So he’ll have to play along too, and work himself into a hypocritical sweat over the same philanthropic rubbish. And he’ll probably write just as brilliant a theme, clever child that he is, and he may even wind up believing what he writes, because youngsters like this are never really bad, just different, that’s all, just untapped potential. Then he’ll go home, like his classmate, both of them proud of their fine compositions."

And the parents, whom he identifies as Marcel and Josiane, which I take as a generic French worker husband and wife, sort of like Mr. and Mrs Joe Six Pack.  Remember, this all came out in 1973.

"And father, who knows what life is all about, will read the A-plus masterpiece, terrified (if he has the slightest imagination) at the notion of that foreign family of eight coming to live in his three rooms and kitchen, but he’ll sit back and keep his big mouth shut. Mustn’t frustrate the little angels, mustn’t shock them, mustn’t sully their innocent thoughts and risk turning them later into hopeless prigs. No, he’ll wallow, ensnared, in his gutless affection, and chuck his little angel on a cheek flushed with pleasure, telling himself that he’s really a dear, and besides, “out of the mouths of babes,” isn’t that what they say? ..."

Raspail describes Marcel further, a man who actually questions why the announcer is talking about helping the far away poor.  Marcel himself is living in a pretty basic apartment.  Shouldn't some of the help go to his family?

"Let’s give ear, in passing, to this discordant note. Good, canny common sense, a little uncouth and harsh—in other words, healthy— draws itself up to its dignified height and kicks up a fuss. Just a bit more effort and it could save the day. Marcel is no fugitive from the Ganges. He works, he wears shoes. He’s a hundred percent man, and make no mistake! With some prodding you could get him to admit that he’s part of a civilized country, that he’s proud of it too, and why not? Peekaboo, it’s our little white friend again, our foot-slogging soldier of the Western World, hero and victim of all its battles, whose sweat and flesh seep through all the joys of Western life. But he’s hardly the man he used to be. He only goes through the motions now. This volley won’t hit the mark. And there won’t be another. When the time comes, he’ll sit back and watch, as if none of it makes any difference to him. When he suddenly finds that it does, it will be too late. They’ll have made him believe it’s no skin off his nose, and that only the others—all the ones with money—will cough up and pay, in the name of equality, and brotherhood, and justice, or some such nonsense that no one dares question. And of course, in the name of the beast. But that’s something they won’t tell Marcel. Would he know what they meant?" (p. 27)

Sounds exactly like the voter that Trump targeted.  




Raspail's descriptions of people - politicians, newscasters - are so detailed  that I can't help but think he had real people in mind.  For example:

"Albert Durfort was full of the milk of human kindness. (Machefer would have used a rather more vulgar expression. He always said the professional do-gooders turned his stomach. A little too harsh, perhaps, for Durfort, not a bad sort, really.) Constant crusader, he would gallop through radioland to the rescue, looking for supposedly desperate causes, barely taking the time to change horses between two campaigns, always panting for breath as he came on the scene just in time to deliver the downtrodden victim, expose a scandal, and lash out at injustice. A Zorro of the airwaves. And the public adored it. So much so, in fact, that some—the most obtuse—saw each nightly editorial as a serial installment: Durfort on skid row, Durfort and the Arabs, Durfort vs. the racists, Durfort and the police, Durfort against brutality, Durfort for prison reform, Durfort and capital punishment, etc., etc. But no one, not even Durfort himself, could see that our Zorro was flogging dead horses, flying off to the rescue ‘of issues long since won. Something else, strange but true: he was looked on as the model of the free, objective thinker. He would have been shocked and surprised to learn that he was, in fact, a captive of fashion, bound by all the new taboos, conditioned by thirty years of intellectual terrorism; and that, if the owner and general manager of the station that employed him entrusted ten million good Frenchmen to his care each night, it certainly wasn’t to use his talents to tell them the opposite of what they supposed they believed in." (p. 26) (emphasis added) 

That's for a white French guy.  Note how the news model seems to fit Fox News and one could probably make a good argument that it fits well for some of the more centrist and liberal news outlets.  He also points out the contradiction between the professed concerns for the poor and the rich salaries the newsmen get.

 Now let's look at an immigrant news man:

"The speaker was one Ben Suad, alias Clément Dio, one of the monster’s most faithful minions, concoctor in chief of the poisonous slops poured piping hot each Monday into the feeble, comatose brains of the six hundred thousand readers of his weekly rag, served up in its fancy sauces. Citizen of France, North African by blood, with an elegant crop of kinky hair and swarthy skin—doubtless passed down from a certain black harem slavegirl, sold to a brothel for French officers in Rabat (as he learned from the bill of sale in his family papers)—married to a Eurasian woman officially declared Chinese and author of several best-selling novels, Dio possessed a belligerent intellect that thrived on springs of racial hatred barely below the surface, and far more intense than anyone imagined. Like a spider deep in the midst of French public opinion, he had webbed it over so thick with fine gossamer strands that it scarcely clung to life. A cordial type all the same, given to great informative bursts if he chose, though always one-way, sincere enough to put his convictions on the line and draw the occasional fire of intelligent colleagues—of whom there were fewer and fewer, alas!, and whom people had all long since stopped reading. In those topsy-turvy days the Left sprawled out in abundance, while the rightist press, in a hopeless muddle, languished alone in its trenches, deserted. The home front, meanwhile, true to form, fraternized high and low, unabashed and unrestrained. Politically, Dio’s columns were something of a hash, whipped up with a proper dose of utopian pap. But most dangerous of all was his very special talent—unrivaled, in fact—for planting his mines through the waters of current French life, far and wide, just surface-deep, always finding those areas still intact, and larding them through with the deadly devices, spewed mass-produced from his prolific brain."

One last quote from early in the book - the mayor of New York talks to a consultant for the city after they hear the news of the armada.

"As consulting sociologist to the city of New York, he had seen it coming, predicted it to the letter. The proof was there, in his lucid reports, ignored one and all. There was really no solution. Black would be black, and white would be white. There was no changing either, except by a total mix, a blend into tan. They were enemies on sight, and their hatred and scorn only grew as they came to know each other better. Now they both felt the same utter loathing. ... And so the consulting sociologist would give his opinion and pocket his money. The city had paid him a handsome price for his monumental study of social upheaval, with its forecast of ultimate doom. “No hope, Doctor Hailer?” “No hope, Mr. Mayor. Unless you kill them all, that is, because you’ll never change them. How about that?” “Good God, man, hardly! Let’s just wait and see what happens, and try to do the best we can ..."  (p. 7)

The 'scientific' proof that is supposedly buried in the report is, of course, fake news created by the novelist.   The 'realistic' sociologist is Raspail's good guy in this scene, and the mayor who won't hear of killing off the blacks in New York is the fool.  But there is lots one could write about overpriced consultants whose expertise often supports what a government wants to do, or is ignored.




This is supposedly and influential book for Steve Bannon, still running loose in the Oval Office and helping Trump figure out what to do on things like the Paris Climate Agreement.