The Absurd Times: books

Thursday, December 13, 2007

New Books from Tom Dispatch -- Comment by Robert Fisk

Illustration: Tis the Season

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First a listing and discussion of some good current events books, then an article by Robert Fisk.

From Tom-Dispatch:

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From: "TomDispatch" <tomdispatch@nationinstitute.org>
To: stanford_charles@yahoo.com
Subject: Tom's Review of Books, A TomDispatch Special
Date: Wed, 12 Dec 2007 09:09:59 -0800

TomDispatch
a project of the Nation Institute <http://www.nationinstitute.org/>
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Tom's Review of Books

Dear Tomdispatch Reader,

For 30 years, I've been a book editor in -- or at the edge of --
mainstream publishing. I still co-run and co-edit a series I helped
launch back in 2003, The American Empire Project
<http://www.americanempireproject.com/> (out of Henry Holt's
Metropolitan Books). I've often written back to readers who wanted me to
check out their books (or favorite books of theirs) that the saddest
response a long-time book editor is this: I have so desperately little
time to read books these days. And it's true... it really is...

Nonetheless, in those wee hours after I've put Tomdispatch to bed, taken
my bleary eyes off the next still-to-be-edited manuscript page, and
turned off /The Daily Show/ or those interminable late night reruns of
/Scrubs/ and /Seinfeld/, I still pick up a book and paw through a few
pages. These days, I escape into fiction far less often (and miss that
feeling of being swept into another universe); but, when it comes to
nonfiction, I still have that urge to travel the world, peek into other
cultures and universes, plunge into history, and, above all, look for
new ways to frame our own puzzling, unnerving moment. More than
anything, I'm still moved by the generosity of writers willing to travel
where I wouldn't dare go (or couldn't even book passage), who have seen
things I never will, who understand things I haven't grasped -- and want
to take me along.

Anyway, like some old addiction I haven't kicked, it seems that I just
can't keep away from the world of books. Next year, Tomdispatch will be
spinning off books at -- for a tiny website -- a prodigious rate. New
works that first began at the site will include: Nick Turse's The
Complex, How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/0805078967/ref=nosim/?tag=nationbooks08-20>
and a book on America's Iraq by Michael Schwartz, based on his running
commentaries at TD. (Both are due in the spring of 2008.) In May, The
World According to Tomdispatch
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/1844672573/ref=nosim/?tag=nationbooks08-20>,
an imperial reader, will be published by Verso Books!

With all that in mind, I thought I'd try my hand at a little Tomdispatch
extra for subscribers -- a /Tom's Review of Books/ newsletter that won't
be posted at the main screen of the site. So, if I don't hear cries of
pain, horror, or outrage from you, perhaps I'll do two to four of these
little book letters a year, recommending works I've liked, some
connected to Tomdispatch, some not. And, of course, the holidays seem
like a reasonable time to begin -- that classic moment when, if you're
like me, you enter a bookstore stocked with a staggering array of titles
and only a faint idea of what in the world you should be picking up for
gifts.

So here goes -- and please excuse the self-interested beginning. Think
of it as dealer's choice.

In an era when an American culture of triumph returned to our world,
only to crash and burn in Iraq, my own book, The End of Victory Culture
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/155849586X/ref=nosim/?tag=nationbooks08-20>,
might be worth a pit stop. Written in the mid-1990s, it's just been
reissued, updated to the present moment, and offering a perspective not
found elsewhere. Of course, I've written about the book before at the
site (and crib from it regularly for my own pieces). If you want to
learn a little about its more serious side, just click here
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/p/victory>. In the meantime, let me suggest
its charms as a secret cultural history of our times by offering the
following five trivia questions - and answers - drawn from the book.
(You'll be able to answer hundreds more after reading it!):

*1.* What was the great commercial triumph of cowboy hero Hopalong
Cassidy with his "spine-tingling episodes never before shown on TV!"?
(/Answer: Marketing his signature black shirt to one million children
soon after World War II, at a time when black was still associated with
mourning or Italian fascism./)

*2.* What did Desi Arnaz tell the studio audience of the top-rated TV
comedy /I Love Lucy/ in 1953, after Lucy was accused of being a
communist by gossip columnist Walter Winchell? (/Answer: "And now I want
you to meet my favorite wife -- my favorite redhead -- in fact, that's
the only thing red about her, and even that's not legitimate."/)

*3.* When did the first interracial kiss make it onto television?
(/Answer: November 22, 1968, in outer space. Star Trek's Captain Kirk
had to turn his back to the camera to simulate placing that kiss on
Lieutenant Uhuru./)

*4.* From what movie did junior officers at the Army Command and General
Staff at Fort Leavenworth, responsible for planning some of the ground
campaign in the first Gulf War, choose a nickname -- and what was it?
(/Answer: Star Wars and it was "Jedi Knights."/)

*5.* When, on May 1, 2003, George W. Bush made his carefully timed, late
afternoon landing on, and strut across, the deck of the /USS Abraham
Lincoln/, to announce that "major combat operations" had ended in Iraq
against the backdrop of that infamous "Mission Accomplished" banner,
what term did his advance men use for the photogenic moment chosen?
(/Answer: "Magic hour light."/)

Now, on to those all those other books.

At the top of my 2007 list is the new paperback of Mike Davis' Planet of
Slums
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/1844671607/ref=nosim/?tag=nationbooks08-20>.
Talk about a single book taking you on a wild ride across a planet you
hardly knew was there! It's not just a matter of wholesale global
urbanization, which is stunning enough in itself. (After all, since the
late 1970s, in China alone, more than 200 million people have moved from
the countryside into cities, with another 250-300 million expected to
follow in the coming decades.) Nor is it just the impoverishment of so
many new city dwellers. It's also the de-linking of the city in whole
regions of the globe from all industrial processes, meaningful jobs, or
well-being of almost any kind. Not the city /with/ slums, in other
words, but the city /as/ slum. And Davis, typically, was there first.
"Instead of cities of light soaring toward heaven," he writes, "much of
the twenty-first century urban world squats in squalor... Indeed, the
one billion city dwellers who inhabit postmodern slums might well look
back with envy at the ruins of the sturdy mud homes of Catal Huyuk in
Anatolia, erected at the very dawn of city life nine thousand years
ago." To wield a phrase from the 1960s, this book is mind-blowing. Davis
is one of a kind. If you haven't met him on the page, start here.

The World Without Us
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/0312347294/ref=nosim/?tag=nationbooks08-20> by
Alan Weisman hardly needs me to recommend it. It was, after all, a
bestseller. But once you accept Weisman's premise -- that, by some
unknown means, in a single historical moment (this one, to be exact),
humans were removed wholesale from the planet, the book is anything but
downbeat. It's a riveting exploration of how the traces of the heavy
hand of humanity would slowly disappear and, everywhere, nature would
return. As a dyed-in-the-wool city boy, I have to admit that there was
something moving about that return of nature -- you can't help rooting
for it -- and gripping about the way Weisman describes the dismantling
of my home town, New York City, starting with those flooded subway
tunnels almost the moment the power -- and so those 753 underground
water pumps goes dead. Imagine! Sooner or later, Second Avenue, on which
I took a bus to school so many mornings as a child, will be a river.
This book is, in fact, an infernally clever way to grapple with climate
change, without claiming to be about it at all.

Even here, by the way, put Mike Davis at the head of the class. In the
final chapter of his 1999 book Dead Cities
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/1565848446/ref=nosim/?tag=nationbooks08-20>,
he began dismantling a great city, London, in what would become the
Weisman-ian manner. Of course, to my mind, the single greatest literary
dismantling of a city (and a civilization) takes place violently in H.
G. Wells' 1898 novel, The War of the Worlds
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/0141441038/ref=nosim/?tag=nationbooks08-20>.
With gusto, Wells turned the task of taking London apart over to his
"Martian" invaders. (I first read that book under the covers, after
curfew by flashlight, at about age 12 or 13, and practically scared
myself to death.). After hearing a heartless discussion about the
British extermination of the Tasmanians, Wells reputedly decided to turn
the tables, fictionally at least, on imperial Britain. In the process,
he invented most of the tropes of the invader-from-outer-space sci-fi
novel. Ever since then, we humans have been imagining scenarios in which
implacable aliens with superweapons arrive to devastate our planet. What
if, as Davis and Weisman might both agree, it turned out that the
implacable aliens were us?

Speaking of that, I noticed that one of my favorite (tiny) "travel"
books -- ostensibly by bus deep into Africa, but in fact by research
deep into European colonial history -- was reissued this year by the New
Press: Sven Lindqvist's "Exterminate All the Brutes."
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/1565843592/ref=nosim/?tag=nationbooks08-20>
(The title, of course, is taken from Kurtz's mad scrawl in Conrad's
/Heart of Darkness/). What a ride through the planetary past Lindqvist
takes you on as "progress" and "extermination" leave Europe hopelessly
intertwined, cut a swath across four continents, and arrive back home as
the god of slaughter, machine gun in hand, in August 1914. In a sense,
you could think of this book as the story of how the Jews of the
Holocaust were essentially the Africans of Europe. Read it and weep, as
they say. (Or check out my old /Nation/ review of it by clicking here
<http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20001023&s=engelhardt>.)

And talking about cutting a swath of destruction across a country, don't
miss Dahr Jamail's first book, Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an
Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/1931859477/ref=nosim/?tag=nationbooks08-20> --
and, while you're reading it, think of us as the invading Martians. I
hardly need to extol Jamail to Tomdispatch readers, but his book offers
a remarkably fresh glimpse at what those "Martians" looked like and felt
like through Iraqi eyes. This book should outlast the war it recorded
(even given Washington's urge to remain in Iraq forever).

On more purely American ground, not to say Ground Zero, stands Susan
Faludi's The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/0805086927/ref=nosim/?tag=nationbooks08-20>,
which explores the full range of bizarre responses to the 9/11 attacks
-- the set of fantasies that Americans, the media, and especially the
right-wing and the Bush administration conjured up in about 30 seconds.
It offers a genuinely original window into the American psyche, for
those brave enough to peek. Where did all those fantasies of manly men
and women-in-need-of-protection come from anyway in a nation that mainly
watched 9/11 on TV? Faludi is convincing when she argues that they
emerged from an American mythology whose origins are as old as the
Puritans and which has been etched, almost like a genetic code, into our
national consciousness. /The Terror Dream/ has largely been reviewed as
a 9/11 book, but, believe me, it's so much more fascinating and deeper
than that.

Oh, not that I haven't recommended it before, but if you're in that
classic, history-can't-repeat-itself-can-it mood, Juan Cole's Napoleon's
Egypt: Invading the Middle East
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/1403964319/ref=nosim/?tag=nationbooks08-20> is
the book to cure you. Yes, Virginia, it all happened before. The
invasion bringing "liberation" and "democracy," behind which were the
grandiose dreams of a "Greater Middle East." The miscalculations, the
unexpected, bitter guerrilla war that followed, the full fiasco. The
difference? Napoleon's disaster took a mercifully short three years to
unfold and he, at least, brought along a corps of scientists, rather
than private security cops and crony corporations, and some of them
found the Rosetta Stone. Cole, who runs the Informed Comment website
<http://www.juancole.com/> (my daily bread) is just a barrel of energy
and so has set up a separate blog <http://napoleonsegypt.blogspot.com/>
for his book, which is fascinating in its own right.

In Soldier's Heart, Reading Literature Through Peace and War at West
Point
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/0374180636/ref=nosim/?tag=nationbooks08-20>,
Elizabeth Samet takes us into an otherwise no-admission world -- that of
the officer-corps-in-the-making for our all-volunteer Army. As that
force has become ever less a citizen's army, and so ever less connected
to all of American society, it becomes ever more important for the rest
of us to understand it. Samet offers what, on the face of it, might seem
an unlikely vantage point for illuminating military culture. She teaches
literature and poetry to West Point cadets, but she's canny and
eagle-eyed -- and the ways the young almost-officers she deals with
every day grapple with literature (especially war poetry) turn out to be
telling. "Like their teacher," she points out -- like most of us, in
fact -- "most of my students first encountered war and military life
through the stories of their fathers and from the movies... The signal
difference is that they have actually agreed to turn make-believe into
real life." Not surprisingly, "owning war" -- wresting the right to
write about and interpret it from civilians -- "is one of the things for
which they will fight hardest." The book is peppered with insights into
these young men (and women) and what drives (and confuses) them, while
introducing the civilian reader to a culture that is the best and worst
of small town life. Samet even takes time to consider that almost
all-purpose military exclamation -- nobody really knows where it came
from or exactly what it means -- "hooah" (which she finally bans from
her classroom).

Near the top of the must-read stack of books by my bedside, along with
Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/0805079831/ref=nosim/?tag=nationbooks08-20>
(my next stop actually) and an account of the great Arab conquests in
the century after Mohammed's death, is Studs Terkel's new autobiography,
Touch and Go
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/1595580433/ref=nosim/?tag=nationbooks08-20>.
Our premier oral historian -- and all-around amazing character -- he is
now 95 years old, but don't you dare say that this is his last book! He
continues to defy the odds. Until I read this one, let me recommend two
slightly older Terkel gems, both perfect paperback purchases: Hope Dies
Last, Keeping the Faith in Difficult Times
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/156584937X/ref=nosim/?tag=nationbooks08-20> is
his oral history of activists, from the 1930s into the twenty-first
century. It's filled with stirring testimony and a reminder that, in bad
times, to dispel the gloom, hoping is not enough. Only acting -- even
taking the smallest step toward change -- engenders actual hope and a
sense of optimism. I'd like to urge on you as well Will the Circle Be
Unbroken? Reflections on Death, Rebirth, and Hunger for a Faith
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/0345451201/ref=nosim/?tag=nationbooks08-20>,
Stud's oral history of death. For those of us of a certain age, it is, I
guarantee you, a strangely upbeat, genuinely uplifting book. I edited it
once upon a time and I have to admit that some of the interviews moved
me so that I found myself tearing up even as I marked the pages. I'm
unlikely ever to forget the mother who forgave her son's killer (to his
face) or the touching fantasy of the Chicago sanitation worker who
donated part of his liver to a man he didn't know.

Okay, consider the book "review" part of this letter officially over.
Whatever minimal authority or expertise I may have has now fled the
premises. But that won't stop me -- not before I wax enthusiastic about
two plays I've seen recently. If you're not already in New York or not
coming soon, you can stop here and holiday good speed to you. If you
are, or you will be, then rush for the phone (212-352-3101) or onto the
Internet
<http://www.cultureproject.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=61>
and order tickets to Howard Zinn's /Rebel Voices/ at the Culture
Project, which has just added shows through December 18th (and will soon
be adding more for January). In it, six young actresses and actors (and
the odd guest reader) work energetic magic with passages from the
Zinn/Anthony Arnove book Voices of a People's History of the United
States
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/1583226281/ref=nosim/?tag=nationbooks08-20> as
well as stirring songs. I have to say that it's a distinctly feel-good
event.

And, if that isn't enough for you, pick up that phone again
(212-967-7555), you mad fool, or grab that credit card one last time for
David Henry Hwang's fabulous new play, /Yellow Face/, at the Public
Theater <http://www.publictheater.org/> only until December 23rd (unless
extended). It's a very personal, inventive, and superbly acted farce of
mistaken racial casting and identity, of father, sons, and American
dreams (as well as nightmares -- sometimes the two can't be told apart),
of anti-Chinese hysterias and other strange phenomena of our American
world.

And with that, to all a good night and -- let's hope -- a happier New
Year of reading and everything else. /Tom/

*Note:* /If you want your friends to read *Tom's Review of Books* and
don't want to forward the letter, you can always send them to the
Tomdispatch site, where it's posted on a separate page. The url is:
http://www.tomdispatch.com/p/book_review_12_11_2007 or just click here.
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/p/book_review_12_11_2007> /

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Independent.co.uk Online Edition: Home <http://www.independent.co.uk/>

+ > Robert Fisk <http://news.independent.co.uk/fisk/>

Robert Fisk: A different venue, but the pious claims and promises are
the same

Published: 29 November 2007

Haven't we been here before? Isn't Annapolis just a repeat of the White
House lawn and the Oslo agreement, a series of pious claims and promises
in which two weak men, Messrs Abbas and Olmert, even use the same words
of Oslo.

"It is time for the cycle of blood, violence and occupation to end," the
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said on Tuesday. But don't I
remember Yitzhak Rabin saying on the White House lawn that, "it is time
for the cycle of blood... to end"?

Jerusalem and its place as a Palestinian and Israeli capital isn't
there. And if Israel receives acknowledgement that it is indeed an
Israeli state ? and in reality, of course, it is ? there can be no
"right of return" for hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who fled (or
whose families fled) what became Israel in 1948.

And what am I to make of the following quotation from the full text of
the joint document: "The steering committee will develop a joint work
plan and establish and oversee the work of negotiations (/sic/) teams to
address all issues, to be headed by one lead representative from each
party." Come again?

We went through all these steering committees before ? and they never
worked. True we've got a date of 12 December for the first session of
this so-called "steering committee" and we have the faint hope from Mr
Bush, embroidered, of course, with all the usual self-confidence, that
we're going to have an agreement by 2008. But how can the Palestinians
have a state without a capital in Jerusalem? How can they have a state
when their entire territory has been chopped up and divided by Jewish
settlements and the settler roads and, in parts, by a massive war?

Yes of course, we all want an end to bloodshed in the Middle East but
the Americans are going to need Syria and Iran to support this ? or at
least Syrian support to control Hamas ? and what do we get? Bush
continues to threaten Iran and Bush tells Syria in Annapolis that it
must keep clear of Lebanese elections, or else...

Yes, Hizbollah is a surrogate of Iran and is playing a leading role in
the opposition to the government of Lebanon. Do Bush and Condoleezza
Rice (or Abbas or Olmert for that matter) really think they're going to
have a free ride for a year without the full involvement of every party
in the region? More than half of the Palestinians under occupation are
under the control of Hamas.

Reading the speeches ? especially the joint document ? it seems like an
exercise in self-delusion. The Middle East is currently a hell disaster
and the President of the United States thinks he is going to produce the
crown jewels from a cabinet and forget Afghanistan and Iraq and Iran ?
and Pakistan, for that matter. The worst element of the whole Annapolis
shindig is that once again millions of people across the Middle East ?
Muslims, Jews and Christians ? will believe all this and will then turn
? after its failure ? with fury on their antagonists for breaking these
agreements.

For more than two years, the Saudis have been offering Israel security
and recognition by Arab states in return for a total withdrawal of
Israeli forces from the occupied territories. What was wrong with that?
Mr Olmert promised that "negotiations will address all the issues which
thus far has been evaded". Yet the phrase "withdrawal of Israeli forces
from occupied territories" simply doesn't exist in the text.

Like most people who live in the Middle East, I would like to enjoy
these dreams and believe they are true. But they are not. Wait for the
end of 2008.

Interesting? Click here to explore further

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* Robert Fisk: Holocaust denial in the White House
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* Former Nato military chief appointed Middle East envoy
<http://news.independent.co.uk/world/politics/article3204053.ece>
* Abbas loyalists open fire at funeral march, injuring 26
<http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article3204052.ece>
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<http://comment.independent.co.uk/commentators/adrian_hamilton/article3204028.ece>

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