F Von Clownstick

I'm not sure whether to feel sorry for Republicans who have embraced, in whatever capacity, large or small, Trump.  In some ways I do, as I think that in particular a lot of the party leaders, McConnell, Ryan and the rest, have been put in a tough spot.  On the other hand, they have all chosen then short term copout;  we have to support our nominee.  In the long run, or just on principle alone, I think that is an awful choice.




Donald Trump has no business being anywhere near a Presidential election.  The past week has shown him at his worst, and that is saying a lot.  His attack on a federal judge in San Diego are abhorrent, showing not only his absolute lack of intelligence, but also his horrid racism.  While it has been encouraging to see a fair amount of Republicans condemning him for it, there absolute unwillingness to call out what it out for the racist ideology it is, is rather shameful in itself.  They have all couched their criticism in vague language such as "I do not agree with what he said" or other such wording.  Hey, its racist.  Ugly, vicious racism in the raw. 


Update 6/7:  A few Republicans have shown some class - Lindsey Graham being one, as he called for Republicans to "un-endorse" Trump after what has transpired the last few days.  I'm not sure Graham actually endorsed Trump in the first place.  He gave some weird kind of statement a few weeks ago that was rather unclear, I think in the vein of "I'm supporting our candidate, but not endorsing him" which is a mindless piece of nonsense.  But he did make the un-endorse call today.  Good for him.  Graham is an odd character anyway - he seems to alternate between weird panicky statements and moments of being incredibly rational. 


Mark Kirk took away(?) his endorsement of Trump as well.  Again, I'm not sure Kirk had endorsed him previously or was just saying he will not endorse Trump due to his constant hate mongering.  Kirk is in a tough spot as the Republican with the biggest X on his forehead due to being in a liberal state and facing a tough opponent (a penchant for making his own ill advised statements every now and then hasn't helped him either.


The other guy who deserves credit is Ben Sasse, who has been a committed anti-Trump guy from the start.  He's getting a lot of flack from some members of his party for it, which I find pretty deplorable.  Ignore Trump's failings as a human being (hard as that is) and you still have a guy that embodies few Republican values (actually any values), and its still not hard to see why a person who values those values might be aghast at him being the candidate of the Party. 

What Trump Would Mean

An interesting analysis of what Trump as president would mean. Bremmer specializes in studies of global risk and is very even-handed here. On the good side, he doesn’t think the chances of Trump involving us in nuclear war are very high (yay for that!), or that he would create some type of conflict with Iran (it’s not clear he actually cares enough about Iran, or perhaps more likely, like his son, he gets his foreign policy lessons from Hollywood movies, and remembers to never get involved in a land war in Asia), or that he would seriously mess things up with China.

On the other hand, he would seriously mess up the world. Trump’s lack of coherent policy or ideas would be a disaster for the US and everyone else. Promoting this as “I want to surprise people” is idiocy as the article points out several times. It would result in a lack of confidence from allies, shred the dollar to pieces, and result in enemies being much more likely to test the US to see what the response is, since there would be no way to tell otherwise. “A clear policy, and predictable outcomes, help shape the behavior of the world’s bad actors.”

On the dollar: “An unpredictable foreign policy, the product of either an administration that likes surprises or a temperamentally erratic commander in chief, will undermine that confidence quickly. Worse, any hint from the president that the U.S. might deliberately default on its debt, for any reason, will inflict damage that can’t be undone, and it will push foreign governments to look more urgently for an alternative….This risk is unprecedented for a credible presidential candidate: No one else has said the things Trump is saying about debt and America’s global relationships.” It’s one thing to shoot your mouth off about things you don’t know, even when you’re a presidential candidate, but it is much different when you are President. Words matter.

And then there’s this: “ Finally, a Trump presidency would make the United States, its citizens and its assets the single most attractive target for Al Qaeda, ISIL, and other Islamic militant groups.” This one is pretty obvious – while we have been comparatively spared in this area compared to much of the rest of the world in this regard, much of that has been due to having level-headed leaders who understand complexities. Trump doesn’t.

The conclusion? “A Trump foreign policy will undermine U.S. exceptionalism, the consensus-based conviction that America will fight for more than its self-interest and is therefore worthy of emulation. That idea has sustained plenty of damage in recent years. It will sustain more. But the biggest risk posed by a Donald Trump foreign policy is that he will destroy this worthy aspiration once and for all.”

And he's a short fingered vulgarian.

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/06/2016-donald-trump-international-foreign-policy-global-risk-security-guide-213936

El Payaso

Exposing Trump as the most awful, embarrassing excuse ever for a presidential candidate is almost easy;  I suppose that’s part of his plan.  You become almost immune to his constant hatred, bigotry and ignorance.  Yesterday’s press conference being a prime example – 40 minutes of a temper tantrum railing at the press for doing their job of asking questions, and showing Trump for the snake oil salesman he is.  The checks just happened to go out last week indeed……

Asked recently about what he looks for in potential Supreme Court nominees, Trump replied, “Well, I’d probably appoint people that would look very seriously at her email disaster because it’s a criminal activity, and I would appoint people that would look very seriously at that to start off with.”  Ignoring the irony of that statement based on yesterday’s press conference, it does make obvious Trump has no idea what the Supreme Court does, how it works, or much else about it.  But that’s par for the course with him – no policy, just a bunch of rambling statements that change day to day. 

Anyway, the article below is about Trump and his blowup at the judge overseeing his Trump University case.  Another ignorant, racist rant, but one that shows the true depth of his awfulness.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2016/05/29/on-donald-trump-and-the-rule-of-law/

The Silent Cry - Kenzaburo Oe

Plot:  Soon after the suicide death of his best friend and the institutionalizing of his child, a young man returns to the village in rural Japan of his youth along with his wife and brother in order to sell a building on the family property to a Korean store owner.  As his brother initiates an uprising among the locals, our hero becomes more depressed and unable to do much of anything. Events long in the past continue to resurface and are subject to competing interpretations.


Why read it?:  An unrelenting work of despair, The Silent Cry is an awesome work.  Its dense, not easy, nor fun, to read.  But it will affect you like few other works.


A few years ago, I read Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids, Kenzaburo Oe's first novel.  I had bought it for one of my daughters sometime before, but I don't believe she ever read it.  It didn't make a great impression on me, truth be told; it was a very Lord of the Flies style story of young boys fending for themselves.  In this case, though, it is a group of reform school boys abandoned in a remote village by the townspeople, who all leave when a plague outbreak occurs.  Unlike Flies, the boys here stay together for the most part; its the villagers who pose the biggest threat.  The boys actually manage ok on their own, but vandalize the village while left to themselves.  The villagers eventually return and are not only mad about the vandalism, but worry about what will happen if everyone finds out they abandoned the boys. Its an unsettling work that ends without much resolution.




Anyway, a few months back, I spotted The Silent Cry on a Goodwill shelf.  It sat at home for awhile before I picked it up.  Life will never be quite the same......




Few books start as full bore as this one does.  Even fewer, perhaps none I have ever read, are able to keep it up for their entirety.  The Silent Cry does.  There's no escape within, even for a moment.  This is not a fun, or even enjoyable, book to read.  But it is brilliance, in the way that There's A Riot Goin' On is as well.  No escape, not even for a second.




The hero, Mitsu, is a mess.  A young Tokyo translator, with a wife and a severely mentally handicapped son, who they have institutionalized, Mitsu is also dealing with the suicide of his best friend (as Oe will remind us over and over, he painted his  entire head red (actually crimson, there is a lot of crimson in this book), stuck a cucumber up his anus and hanged himself). Mitsu's immediate family has a checkered history:  his older brother was killed as a teen under hazy circumstances years earlier, a younger sister, also mentally handicapped, committed suicide, and their father disappeared in China during WWII.  Mitsu himself is blind in one eye, the result of rock being thrown at him by fellow students when he was a boy.  Mitsu soon finds himself, by choice, in the hole being dug for their new septic tank, furiously trying to make the hole cave in on itself.  Oe puts in his characters in holes in the ground a few more times before the end.  Haruki Murakami does the same thing in A Wind Up Bird Chronicle, I'm assuming not by chance. Murakami, who writes about the next generation of Japanese, zeroes in on many of the same ideas of Japanese culture, just a bit more mature - his characters have overcome the guilt, but often feel lost and aimless in a society that favors conformity.  Mitsu, not being a man of action, fails at that, like most everything he seems to do.




Mitsu's younger brother Taka, arrives from the US, where he is a student at Columbia.  Taka had been a leader of student protests (against the Japan-US Security treaty in 1960) and is in many ways the opposite of Mitsu; Taka lives a life of grand external actions.  Both brothers, however, are driven by their family's long history back in the home village.  Along with Mitsu's wife, who has started drinking whisky by the barrelful, and a couple of Taka's acolytes(who also manage to pin the nickname Rat on Mitsu, who actually agrees with it), the two brothers head off to their ancestral home, where they plan to sell the family storehouse (as the intro to the book explains, its much more than that, but hard to describe;  its big, its old and its neat) to a local Korean who owns a chain of supermarkets and wants to move their storehouse to Tokyo and make it into a restaurant.


We get a lot of the interplay between Mitsu and Taka - each has their own version of the family history - two important events are a peasant uprising in 1860 involving their great  grandfather and his brother - the grandfather representing the existing social order and his brother the fight against it, yet still maintaining their blood loyalty; and the death of their older brother at the hands of the Korean slaves years ago.  The differing interpretations of these events drives much of what happens in the novel, as Taka undertakes his own revolt, while Mitsu festers in his own pool of shame and guilt and despair.  Of course, Taka does too, setting things up for a nasty climax.




A truly difficult read, because of the overwhelming sense of despair in all the characters, none of whom can seem to find redemption in anything they do.  While I am not familiar with Japanese history and culture to be cognizant of all that is going on, the themes are universal. There is some small hope at the end, but that is only brought about by great sacrifices.


A brilliant novel.

These Dreams of You – Steve Erickson

"It's a country that does things in lurches.  Born in radicalism, then reluctant for years, decades, the better part of centuries, to do anything crazy, until it does the craziest thing of all.  But it's also a country - inherent in its genes - capable of imagining what cannot be imagined and then, once it's imagined, doing it.
Six years before, another president, a white privileged Texan, swaggered across the deck of an aircraft carrier in a pilot's jacket, a banner unfurled behind him proclaiming the end of a war that, in fact, was only beginning.  It was an image that the country embraced almost as much as it believed it.  Now a black Hawaiian with a Swahili name?  It's science fiction, Zan thinks.  Or at least the sort of history that puts novelists out of business." 

Plot:  A Los Angeles family reeling under the weight of the recession seek temporary respite.  A trip to find the mother of their young adopted daughter results in the family physically split apart and their attempts to get back together take them all over Europe.  And a lot more too hard to explain.

Why read it?: While more conventionally plotted than a lot of Erickson's work, it still retains some fantastical elements.  Time travel, Ulysses, Robert Kennedy in a state of doubt, Bowie and Iggy in Berlin, there's a lot to like here.

This book affected me personally as few other books have, particularly in the first few pages.  For a book taking its title from a Van Morrison song (at least tangentially about Ray Charles, if a Van Morrison song can actually be about something), includes a lengthy section with a conscience stricken Robert Kennedy on his way from opportunistic son a American royalty to the political soul of late 60's America, another lengthy bit involving David Bowie and Iggy Pop in Berlin, a bit of a time travel problem involving a copy of Ulysses, and even stops for a short time in a hotel in Ethiopia, it’s a very intimate novel that begins the night of the 2008 election.  Despite his family’s life being in financial disarray as a casualty of the financial meltdown of the time, Zan is brought to tears via TV as he watches what is happening in Grant Park.  For me, it had been a few months earlier, August 28, watching what had seemed impossible not too much earlier in my life.  The idea of possibility seemed infinite at that moment, and an America that could deliver on it’s promises was real.

What happened after was not surprising in hindsight.  Erickson’s novel wanders through the wasteland of 2008-09.  Zan and Viv have adopted Sheba, now 4, from an Ethiopian orphanage.  Sheba is precocious, with a vocabulary of words and sayings beyond her years, and transmitting music through her body. While Zan and Viv are not your typical white middle aged couple (Viv has turquoise colored hair and is an out of work artist) they are at times baffled by their daughter.  Much is made of the perplexities in even beginning to understand the meaning of race.  Yet this is, along with their 12 year old son Parker, a family.  It isn’t long before they are leaving Los Angeles and their increasingly creaky existence there, for London (Zan, Parker and Sheba) and Addis Ababa (Viv, in search of Sheba’s mother).  The novel will eventually also reach Paris and Berlin, people appear and disappear, and the novel redirects for awhile to a sublplot involving Robert Kennedy who may possibly envision a 2008 America 40 years earlier.  There’s also a 2^nd subplot imagining Ulysses suddenly showing up in history before it’s actually written (not surprisingly a Molly shows up in the 08 story).  And what you might do about that, if you were so lucky to find it.  Also, which seems to be pretty much a ritual for Erickson, there's a brief entry of a character from his previous novel Arc d'X. And then there’s Berlin Bowie and Iggy.  They somehow become integral to the plot in a roundabout way.

Ercikson can write some indecipherable sentences, but I’m fine with a few misses sprinkled in with many more hits.  His novel Zeroville is a brilliant piece of movie fandom built around a story of 1970’s Hollywood).  Again, history is important here.  Erickson doesn’t see it as fixed as most of us do; as some of the other writers I have read, he sees the importance of point of view, but more than that he seems to see it as something we can mold and use today to better ourselves.  We are a country of assembled parts that have had to be repaired again and again to make something more unique and better.  What happened in 2008 was a culmination of events going back more than 2 centuries.  A belief in the magic of America doesn't have to be blind faith in exceptionalism - we can also see it as a long experiment that has succeeded more often than not, sometimes in spite of itself.

The Orphan Masters Son - Adam Johnson

“When the dogs returned, the Senator gave them treats from his pocket, and Jun Do understood that in communism, you'd threaten a dog into compliance, while in capitalism, obedience is obtained through bribes.”


Plot:  Jun Do, a North Korean, learns early in life how to survive in a difficult place to live.  Through perseverance, smarts, and luck, he rises up through the spy ranks, only to be thrown into a hellish prison under murky circumstances.  Miraculously he emerges from the prison a new man and manages to befriend and become a rival to, Kim Jong-Il.


Why read it?:  Fiction about North Korea is rare, especially good fiction.  You can spend hours reading between the lines, as there will be many instances in which you find yourself scratching your head about what just transpired in a world of doublespeak.  Also, the love story between Jun Do and Ga makes the book worth reading on its own.

 

I certainly have no idea what life is actually like in North Korea, but Adam Johnson presents it here in a way that at least seems possible, while running his protagonist, Jun Do, through a series of incredible adventures(?) nightmares(?).  The idea of identity runs throughout this book, which makes sense when it is set in a country where all individual identity has been essentially used by its leader Kim Jon Il.  It’s a place where in order to do anything beyond merely survive, one must prove themselves indispensable, but by becoming indispensable, one then becomes a target, because only the leader is truly indispensable.  Identity is more a matter of who you want or need to be, as opposed to who you may really be.  Jun Do manages to figure this out, and thus becomes Kim’s rival.

Jun Do, unlike most North Koreans, actually gets to travel a bit, but it’s not your everyday travel.  Early on, he participates in kidnapping raids to Japan, later finds work as a spy on a rickety North Korean fishing/spy ship that has an odd encounter with a US Navy vessel, and then gets to be a part of a quixotic diplomatic trip to Texas.  As a reward, he ends up in a prison that one assumes people rarely come out of.  But Jun Do does, but that entails assuming the identity of someone else; he still has his most audacious adventure ahead of him, including face time with Kim.

Adventure, romance, humor, political satire, it’s all here in an absolutely compelling story.  Part of the novel is narrated by a state interrogator, who provides insight in how North Koreans may think, or at least justify why they live like they do. He’s an eminently sad character, but in his own odd way, has the ability to be a humanitarian in a system where there are none.

The story moves pretty quick – it’s easy at times to get lost in some of the conversations, as often the characters are speaking in coded language of one form or another, as few things in the North Korea portrayed here are as they seem, and even a simple conversation can prove deadly.  Even the conversations with Americans and Japanese Jun meets are never quite what they seem on the surface.

Gould's Book of Fish - Richard Flanagan

“And when I had finished painting & looked at that poor leatherjacket which now lay dead on the table I began to wonder whether, as each fish died, the world was reduced in the amount of love that you might know for such a creature. Whether there was that much less wonder & beauty left to go round as each fish was hauled up in the net. And if we kept on taking & plundering & killing, if the world kept on becoming ever more impoverished of love & wonder & beauty in consequence, what, in the end, would be left?”  


Plot:  The story of William Buelow Gould, from his point of view, which is not what the history books tell.  Petty thief, liar, painter, he ends up on a Tasmanian penal colony where things getter stranger than fiction.  Despite his many flaws, Gould is able to ascertain the beauty of life, and how we squander it without a second thought.


Why read it?:  Flanagan is a brilliant writer, and basically invents a shaggy dog story out of a relic of history.  Gould's forays into the heart of darkness is at times tremendously humorous, while simultaneously being sad and angry, as we witness, much like in English Passengers, the destruction of an entire culture, for no reason other than greed and thoughtlessness,


This would fall into the category of speculative, or maybe better, reimagined historical fiction.  There was a William Buelow Gould, who was banished to Van Diemen's Land in the nineteenth century and did make a name for himself as an artist, including his book of fish.  Tasmanian Richard Flanagan's novel uses that as a starting point in creating a weird, funny, and engrossing story of identity, racial relations, and the sad extermination of an entire group of people.


Flanagan uses a framing story to introduce to Gould - an aimless con artist comes across Gould's unknown diary, written on scraps of paper, or any other available flat material, using a variety of liquids, including blood, as ink.  No one believes the diary to be real - it just doesn't agree with history.  This is one of the main ideas of the book - what we know of as history depends on who gets to write it, and its not always the most reliable sources that get to do so.


The Gould we get to know is not a noble character; he is a criminal and a lackluster one at that.  He picks up some artistic skills as a young man, but painting is mainly a way of survival for him, not a passion.  He eventually ends up on Sarah Island, the worst of the worst penal colonies.  By Gould's account, the man in charge of the island is in fact an escaped convict, who by being the lone survivor of a shipwreck, is able to pass himself off a British naval officer.  Through more luck, he ends up in charge of the penal colony.  Unfortunately, the trauma of the shipwreck and his survival have robbed him of his sanity.  He soon takes to wearing a gold mask and a coat made of bird feathers.  And creating the world's strangest penal colony.  Starved for funds from the British, he soon establishes a shipbuilding enterprise using prison labor, a timber business that deforests much of the island, and a variety of trade deals with the Japanese and others.  Through a series of letters with his supposed sister (he is impersonating a real officer after all) he hears of all that is happening in Europe.  When trains become the newest thing, he wants his own and buys the equipment.  Soon Sarah Island has its own railway, but due to the small size of the island, it only goes around in a small loop (the hope that it will magically link to the great railways of Europe, alas, never come to fruition). 




Gould, due to his painting abilities, is spared from hard labor, and gets a job as a gofer for the chief doctor and science officer, Lempriere,  a large, strange man who seems to be straight out of a Dicken's novel.  Hoping to achieve membership into the Royal Society, he tasks Gould with making drawing of the fish of Macquarie Harbour.  Gould's resulting fish provide the motif's for each of the book's chapters.  The story becomes darker;  Lempriere, having lost out on the fish project, turns to a study of the aborigine's brain size, which of course requires samples that can be sent back to England.  Lempriere ends up himself as a meal (of a large hungry pig).  Gould is convicted of his murder and awaits execution in a prison cell that floods twice daily with the tide. It is here that Gould creates his diary, often writing with his own blood, or the ink from captured sea urchins.


The novel is full of blood and other bodily fluids, death and mindless destruction.  Gould though, learns to see the beauty in the world, both natural and that created by man.  The juxtaposition of the two paths is what Gould can not reconcile. 


Flanagan is a wonderful writer; this book always has a sense of humor throughout what is a horribly tragic story.  Much like The English Passengers, another book that details the demise of the aborigines of Tasmania by white men, the senselessness of the wholesale destruction of a people, repeated so often, and which affects all of our lives to this day, is brought into great focus