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books

Create Your Own Economy

This book grabbed me when I read the synopsis, but I can’t remember where I saw it. I usually remember stuff like that. Oh well. This little article from Fast Company sums up some of this guy’s views. It’s interesting to me, this idea of the web actually adding value to our lives and to the economy in some form.

I’m a big fan of the web. I have an above average level of involvement in it, but I don’t feel that it’s an unhealthy level of involvement. Some of my most active involvement with the web is via this book blog and with my Flickr account. This blog really enhances my enjoyment of reading, for sure. And organizing all of my 6,700 photos (and counting) on Flickr enhances and will continue to enhance all of the memories captured by the pictures I’ve taken. What I’m doing, according to Cowen, is organizing all of the stories of my life. This mental ordering is not that weird (I’m comforted).

I’m really just doing it for my own sake. Not many people read this blog and not that many people ever check out my golf pix and such on my Flickr account. It may seem strange to a lot of people, this need to organize things into lists, with tags, and often with commentary on the whats and wherefores of each experience. I’m just compelled to do it. I can’t really give much more of an explanation than that, but Cowen has helped me sort things out.

It’s kind of a rambling book if you ask me. At least that’s how I felt as I read it. And I’ve been putting off writing about it because I’m struggling to piece it all together. Of course, I could just be dumb, but I’m finding it difficult to encapsulate it in a few sentences. Here it goes.

Early on, Cowen says this:

Today culture is not just about buying and selling straightforward commodities such as books or compact discs. Each day more fun, more enjoyment, more social connection, and indeed more contemplation is produced on Facebook, blogs, YouTube, iPods, eBay, Flickr, Wikipedia, and Amazon.com—among other services—than had been imagined twenty or even ten years ago. No matter what the medium, much of the actual value today comes from readers, viewers, students, and consumers, as an “add-on” to what they are sent by corporations. More and more, “production”—that word my fellow economists have been working over for generations—has become interior to the human mind rather than set on a factory floor. Even when a major media corporation produces the pixels, viewers and listeners use their mental ordering to create the meaning and the interpretations, and that is where most of the value lies.

This really speaks to me. I think about my consumption of books. I read fewer books than I could if I didn’t document them in such a detailed manner, but I enjoy them on a much deeper level because I do so. I’ve made reading richer and more fulfilling for me, and more economical in a certain sense (I don’t have to buy as many books). Or as Cowen says:

You have enhanced the meaning and the importance of the small cultural bits at your disposal and thus you want to grab more of them and organize more of them, and you are willing to work hard at that task, even if it means you sometimes feel harried.

Yeah, that’s right. Now some may differ that all of this reading or playing golf (another thing I like to sort, list and categorize) is worthy of being called “cultural bits.” How much culture is there in playing the local muni course or reading “Q” is for Quarry? To you, maybe not much. You may think I should be studying Nighthawks at the Art Institute or spending the day on a Frank Lloyd Wright tour. Well, okay. But, those aren’t for everybody. Can’t simple, everyday pursuits be deemed cultural, even if they don’t line up with your definition? Or as Cowen puts it:

In short, our contemporary culture has become more like marriage in the sense that we are trading in some peak experiences for a better daily state of mind. Culture has in some ways become uglier because that is how the self-assembly of small bits looks to the outside observer. But when it comes to the interior dimension, contemporary culture has become happier and more satisfying. And, ultimately, it has become nobler as well and more appreciative of the big-picture virtues of human life.

Interesting that he compares it to marriage, and I think he’s married. I’m not sure about the analogy, but this idea of being involved daily in simple cultural pursuits versus occasionally pursuing a peak experience may make the world travelers and art historians cringe. But it’s highly relevant in this day and age and represents how many people consume cultural pursuits right now.

Anyway, as the book goes on he develops these ideas by exploring the advanced mental ordering and cognitive skills of people with autism. He lauds their abilities as infovores and highlights how we can learn from them. I found this example interesting:

I have noticed that self-aware autistics are especially likely to be cosmopolitans in their thinking. That is, they tend to attach weaker moral importance to the boundaries of the nation state than do most other people.

Much of this cosmopolitan tendency is rooted in experience rather than cognition. Most autistics have lots of experience with being the “out group” when it comes to “in vs. out” confrontations or social settings. That makes them naturally suspicious of political persecutions, extreme forms of patriotism, and groupthink.

That’s a pretty cool way to look at things, and one of many ideas Cowen has to help us better our lives by borrowing from autistics. Autistics are expert at “ordering knowledge in preferred areas and perceiving small bits of information in perceived areas.” You can see how these skills could be valuable today as we are confronted with a huge amount of information at our fingertips. Figuring out how to situate ourselves so we are comfortable with what and how much we are consuming can be easier if we are game for experimenting with some of Cowen’s ideas.

Overall, for me, Cowen’s most important point is that we should increase our respect for neurodiversity. He says:

In the meantime, awareness of human neurodiversity helps us see the diversity of beauty in modern society, even if we cannot perceive all of those beauties. As cultural production becomes more diverse, more and more art forms will be directed at pleasing people with unusual neurologies. More and more of the aesthetic beauty of the world will be hidden to most observers, or at least those who don’t invest in learning. The aesthetic lushness of the world will be increasingly distributed into baroque nooks and crannies, in a manner that would honor a Borges short story.

I’m continually amazed at the range of human skills, talents, attitudes, etc… I’ll never be able to figure out what makes certain people tick, which is alright. I liked this book so I think I’ll subscribe to a blog he contributes to regularly, Marginal Revolution, just to see what else this dude has to say.

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books

The Hard Way

This is the next installment (for me) of the Jack Reacher series. I’ve had it sitting around for awhile but I was inspired to read it after reading about Lucas Glover’s win at the US Open. If you’re wondering why, read the first few paragraphs of this article and you’ll understand.

So Glover is a huge fan of Child’s stuff. That’s good to see.

Chock this up as just another great thriller by Child. It’s the one where he just happens to be sitting at a sidewalk cafe in New York when, unbeknownst to him, a crime takes place right in front of him. He just happens to be at the same sidewalk cafe the next night when an interested party stops by and asks him about what he saw. He just happens to solve the crime and kill a bunch of highly trained ex-military guys now working as mercenaries who drive big black Toyota Land Cruisers. Who woulda thunk it?

This stuff is over the top, but it’s so damn much fun. And at least one member on the PGA Tour agrees with me. Boy, how far the Tour has come; I think I recall David Duval claiming about a decade ago that he was the only guy on the PGA Tour who read books. Well David, now there are two, and the other one just cleaned your clock at Bethpage Black (btw, I still pull for Duval, he’s my favorite PGA player).

Looking forward to the next one, probably on the Kindle.

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books

More Than Just Race

When it was announced that Obama would receive an honorary degree and give the graduation speech at Notre Dame, some heated discourse ensued. I was asked early on by someone, “Why is your university so racist?” I was a little taken aback by this question. The backlash from the Catholic Church did not surprise me and I was ready to defend my university against the accusation that we were no longer a Catholic university. But the accusation that my university was racist made me mad, which was frustrating because I didn’t have any defense readily available besides anecdotal evidence from my experiences there.

I guess I could have rooted around in admission stats and looked at minority representation on the board, but stats may not make any difference to many asking the question. It got me thinking, what would constitute a racist university?

Early on in this book, Wilson describes racism as such:

At its core, racism is an ideology of racial domination with two key features: (1) beliefs that one race is either biologically or culturally inferior to another and (2) the use of such beliefs to rationalize or prescribe the way that the “inferior” race should be treated in this society, as well as to explain its social position as a group and its collective accomplishments.

That’s quite a hurdle put up by Wilson. To be a racist, it’s not enough to just think that one race is inferior to another, but you have to take the next step and act on that belief by either taking some action to exclude that “inferior” race from some aspect of society or use that belief to explain the “inferior” race’s position in society.

I don’t feel that Notre Dame complies with any part of this definition. It’s not a racist university and I hold out as examples Father Hesburgh standing hand-in-hand with Martin Luther King and Father Jenkins defying much negative sentiment to confer an honorary degree on Obama.

I’m not going to drag this out much more because I think it will water down Wilson’s point. Wilson probably would agree that Notre Dame is not a racist university, but I think his bigger point starts out with the point that there are certain “structural forces” that don’t reflect any explicit racial bias but continue to contribute to racial inequality. He says these subtle, structural forces need to be considered, along with explicit racism and certain cultural factors, when explaining racial inequality. Here is how Wilson starts to frame it:

Conservatives tend to emphasize cultural factors, while liberals pay more attention to structural conditions, with most of the attention devoted to racialist structural factors such as discrimination and segregation. I hope in this discussion, however, to encourage the development of a framework for understanding the formation and maintenance of racial inequality and racial group outcomes that integrates cultural factors with two types of structural forces: those that directly reflect explicit racial bias and those that do not.

And a little further on, he expands on this to set the table for his main point, which links structural issues and cultural issues to explain racial inequality today:

If social scientists are to effectively and comprehensively explain the experiences and social outcomes of inner-city residents to the larger public, they must consider not only how explicit racial structural forces directly contribute to inequality and concentrated poverty, but also how political actions and impersonal economic forces indirectly affect life in the inner city. Also important are the effects of national racial beliefs and cultural constraints that have emerged from years of racial isolation and chronic economic subordination.

This gets heavier as Wilson digs into the social science of it, but it never gets too scientific so I never lost focus. At times it reads like a dissertation rather than a book, but this is a good thing because it’s complicated stuff, so Wilson’s structured format, previews, and reviews  are helpful to keep it all straight. I hope I can do Wilson’s views justice; I apologize in advance for errors, omissions, and gross summarizing.

To reiterate, he says that racial inequality and the discussion thereof should focus on three things in varying degrees:

  1. Explicit/direct structural forces (exclusionary laws, racial profiling, segregation, discriminatory practices)
  2. Political/economic/impersonal structural forces (declining federal support for inner cities, globalization, transportation trends, shifts to the service economy, elimination of low-skilled labor in certain industries)
  3. Cultural forces (as Wilson puts it, “shared outlooks and modes of behavior”)

Wilson explores these further by devoting a chapter to three specific areas where the debate about racial inequality is the hottest: “changes in the inner-city ghetto, the predicament of low-skilled black males, and the weakening of the black family.” He looks at each through the lens of all three forces and sites countless studies and papers, all with the goal of giving us a new framework to think about racial inequality.

What did I learn? What was most enlightening?

Well, I have a new appreciation for how racially segregated Chicago was, how it continues today, and how it will probably continue for a long time. Take for instance this item about how something as innocuous as an expressway can have long and lasting effects on racial inequality:

In any case, the freeways had a devastating impact on the neighborhoods of black Americans. These developments not only spurred relocation from the cities to the suburbs among better-off residents, but the freeways themselves “created barriers between the sections of the cities, walling off poor and minority neighborhoods from central business districts.”(4) For instance, a number of studies revealed how Richard J. Daley, the former mayor of Chicago, used the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 to route expressways through impoverished African American neighborhoods, resulting in even greater segregation and isolation. (5) A lasting legacy of that policy is the fourteen-lane Dan Ryan Expressway, which created a barrier between black and white neighborhoods. (6)

Stuff like this can’t be undone. They are undoing “the projects” (high-rise buildings clustered together to house lower income families) here in Chicago, which are another legacy of the first Mayor Daley, but the structural effects of them won’t be rectified for a long time.

Also, I have a new appreciation for Obama’s view on race. Wilson references Obama’s March 18, 2008 race speech with great reverence. Obama is clear in that speech about how important it is to keep addressing structural forces with investment, enforcement, and education. But Wilson especially likes the speech because of Obama’s melding of structural and cultural factors, Wilson says:

… Obama did not restrict his speech to addressing structural inequities; he also focused on problematic cultural and behavioral responses to these inequities, including a cycle of violence among black men and a “legacy of defeat” that has been passed on to future generations. And he urged those in the African American community to take full responsibility for their lives by demanding more from their fathers, and by spending more time with their children “reading to them, and teaching them that while they may face challenges and discrimination in their own lives, they must never succumb to despair or cynicism; they must always believe that they can write their own destiny.”

It’s this all-encompassing frame that Wilson likes. We can’t fix one aspect of the problem and expect everything to be alright. We have to fix it all and we all have to pitch in.

And finally, this book ties in nicely with my recent exploration of politics, of the disparity between the haves and the have-nots in this country, and the political issues wrapped up in this growing disparity. I think I need to take a break from these heavy topics.

My stint  started with The Given Day, was supplemented by Conscience of a Liberal, vetted and tested a little by Liberty and Tyranny, and even put in a different light by Netherland. Now I need to step away from the books and just think because so many problems, solutions, and differing views are running through my head that I can’t get them organized. Many aspects of liberal vs conservative, Democrat vs Republican, construct vs interpretation, and Statist vs Federalist are all wrapped in the issue of income equality. My mostly quantitative, linear brain is having trouble assimilating.

So friends, when I start postulating out loud, just know that I really don’t know what I’m talking about. I’m just trying to figure it all out.

Well, where does this leave me on the question of whether my university is racist or not, whether it’s losing its Catholic identity or not, or whether it even matters? I really don’t care, actually. When religion is introduced into politics, you can’t reach any common ground and probably can’t even sway the opinions of moderates. Some laypeople in the Catholic Church feel that if a one were to prepare a list of issues to be considered when deciding who to vote for, preserving life in the womb should be more important than achieving racial (and income) equality. Others in the church feel differently. I figure that at least half of Catholics rank at least one issue higher than preserving life in the womb (I think around 53% of Catholics voted for Obama).

The argument will go on for friggin’ ever. One thing is for sure, we all need to pay attention.

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books

7 Steps to Midnight

Okay, did you see I Am Legend? I thought it was a cool flick. It was based on a book by an author named Richard Matheson. I only read maybe one or two books a year in sci-fi so I need a strong referral to grab one, effectively this movie was my strong referral. I went out and combed the bookstores for Richard Matheson books a few days after seeing the movie and settled on this one. I’m not an expert by any stretch in this genre, so take this critique with a grain of salt.

It’s the story of a mathematician named Chris Barton who is working for the government on some defense project in a highly secure facility on the Arizona desert. He’s stuck on the project and has been working long hours to try and make a breakthrough. He goes home sleepy one night and finds some impostor in his house who has stolen his identity. The impostor calls the “authorities,” but Chris escapes and ends up playing a global cat-and-mouse game with any number of sinister forces bent on killing him.

** PLOT KILLERS FOLLOW **

As you’re reading it, it feels like a horror/supernatural book with a little spy thriller thrown in. In the end though, it’s a spy thriller. All of the “supernatural” things were orchestrated by dark, government forces in order to break Barton out of his funk so he could figure out the last few niggling problems in the Star Wars defense project.

I was kind of disappointed with this realization. It was just a little bit of letdown because I expected some horror aspect. Matheson’s books are clearly in the horror section of the bookstore, but I’m hesitant to classify this on my annual list as horror. Now that’s not to say I didn’t have a whale of a good time reading it. It was a fast-paced novel and relatively exciting.

I’ve read better common man thrown into international intrigue books, but this one holds up. Not much else to say.

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books

Netherland

Obama suggested I read this book. Not directly of course, I actually saw in Newsweek that he was reading it. Usually, if you hear about a government official reading something, it’s some sort of nonfiction. You know, like Lincoln’s biography. But Obama is admitting to reading a work of fiction, which I find interesting, so I grabbed it. Maybe the White House should start a “One Book, One America” project kind of like we do here in Chicago. I would probably partake.

So here is the snippet from the Jon Meacham interview with Obama in the May 25, 2009 edition of Newsweek:

What are you reading? I’m reading this book called Netherland by Joseph O’Neill … It’s about after 9/11, a guy—his family leaves him and he takes up cricket in New York. And it’s fascinating. It’s a wonderful book, although I know nothing about cricket.

And as you divide up your time, when do you steal the time to do that? I’m a night owl. My usual day [is]: I work out in the morning; I get to the office around 9, 8:30 a.m. to 9 a.m.; work till about 6:30 p.m.; have dinner with the family, hang out with the kids and put them to bed about 8:30 p.m. And then I’ll probably read briefing papers or do paperwork or write stuff until about 11:30 p.m., and then I usually have about a half hour to read before I go to bed … about midnight, 12:30 a.m.—sometimes a little later.

Interesting stuff. I’m Newsweek reader. And I agree with Obama, it’s a fascinating book. There are so many cool moments in this book. I want to talk with someone who has read it.

It’s the story of a Dutch guy named Hans, a hotshot London-based economist for a big investment bank who moves to New York in about 2000 with his wife Rachel and young son Jake. They enjoy New York as a family for a couple of years then 9/11 hits and things start to change. Family problems ensue. His wife and son end up moving back to London but Hans stays in New York for a few more years.

He ends up befriending a guy from Trinidad named Chuck Ramkissoon, whom he met playing cricket. Chuck and Hans are both passionate about cricket and the game forms the bedrock of their friendship. They are completely different people in just about every way – race, religion, profession, upbringing, temperament – but they find common ground in this game; a common ground that transcends the field of play. This is a big theme in the book. Here’s a sampling where Hans is reflecting on the pre-match preparations:

Chutney music was playing, and to its relentlessly tinny and cheerful urgings we’d drive off to New Jersey, Philadelphia, Long Island. We sat mostly silently in the van, absorbed into the moodiness that afflicts competitors as they contemplate, or try to put out of their minds, the drama that awaits. What we talked about, when we did talk, was cricket. There was nothing else to discuss. The rest of our lives—jobs, children, wives, worries—peeled away, leaving only this fateful sporting fruit.

I love that passage. These aren’t professionals, these are just weekend warriors, but they are still passionate about the game. It gets deeper as the book progresses. Deeper in that O’Neill starts delving into the subtleties of how this sporting relationship creeps into other parts of our lives, and Hans’ and Chuck’s lives, but never fully hangs around.

The book is much, much bigger than this though.

It’s about New York, the aftermath of 9/11, and American politics, but it doesn’t make proclamations about right and wrong. It does make observations about what New Yorkers were talking about and how some of them felt. This is some of the frustration that Hans felt:

In this ever-shifting, all-enveloping discussion, my orientation was poor. I could not tell where I stood. If pressed to state my position, I would confess the truth: that I had not succeeded in arriving at a position. I lacked necessary powers of perception and certainty and, above all, foresight. The future retained the impenetrable character I had always attributed to it. Would American security be improved or worsened by taking over Iraq? I did not know, because I had no information about the future purposes and capacities of terrorists or, for that matter, American administrations; and even if I were to have such information, I could still not hope to know how things would turn out. Did I know if the death and pain caused by a war in Iraq would or would not exceed the miseries that might likely flow from leaving Saddam Hussein in power? No. Could I say whether the right to autonomy of the Iraqi people—a problematic national entity, by all accounts—would be enhanced or diminished by an American regime change? I could not. Did Iraq have weapons of mass destruction that posed a real threat? I had no idea; and to be truthful, and to touch on my real difficulty, I had little interest. I didn’t really care.

In short, I was a political-ethical idiot. Normally, this deficiency might have been inconsequential, but these were abnormal times.

This is typical Hans; highly successful, but somewhat insecure, and really more concerned about getting through his day rather than dwelling on issues like this. I wonder if many New Yorkers felt like this. O’Neill is a New Yorker, so he must be basing this on something.

** PLOT KILLERS FOLLOW **

It’s also about marriage and how it changes with time and circumstances. Hans’ and Rachel’s marriage unravels with 9/11, but not because of 9/11. But they don’t get divorced and it eventually revives. The psychological wrangling that Hans goes through surrounding Rachel is a big part of the book. He perseveres through the arguments, the affairs, and the ocean.

The arguments often center on America and the reaction to 9/11. Rachel spews out acidic tirades against George Bush and Hans doesn’t get why she’s all wound up. Hans, I think, loves New York. Hans and Rachel eventually find some middle ground. There’s a great scene late in the book where Rachel has to weigh her feelings for America against her feelings for Hans. It occurs at a dinner party in London where one of their British friends, Matt, refers to 9/11 as “not a big deal.” Hans disagrees strongly and the others seem to be on his side, but much snickering amongst this small group of Brits makes it clear that they find his views laughable. The following ensues, told in first person by Hans:

For some reason, I’m filled with rage.

I lean over to Rachel. I gesture with my eyes, Let’s go.

Rachel has not followed what has happened. She looks surprised when I stand up and put on my jacket. It’s a surprise for all, since we have not finished our roast chicken.

“Come on, Hans, sit down,” Matt says.“Rachel, talk to him.”

Rachel looks at her old friend and then at me. She stands up. “Oh, piss off, Matt,” she says, and waves good-bye to everyone. It is quite a shocking moment, in the scheme of things, and of course exhilarating. When we step out together into the wet street, holding hands, there is a tang of glory in the air.

Cool stuff. Watching their evolving relationship is a great part of this book.

O’Neill also incorporates some contemporary cultural references that I was surprised by, but maybe I just haven’t read enough contemporary lit to know any better. There is a scene where a gangster, named Abelsky, is roughing up someone and he actually makes a cup of coffee in the home of the guy he’s beating up. This ensues:

“You got NutraSweet?” Abelsky repeated. The man said nothing. Abelsky took a mouthful of coffee then spat it back into the cup. “Without NutraSweet, it tastes like shit,” he said. He put the coffee down on the leather desktop. “That OK there? I don’t wanna make a ring.”

I had to laugh, for various reasons.

And O’Neill incorporates Google Maps into the mix a couple of times. Chuck is a gangster and eventually gets murdered sometime after Hans returns to London to reunite with his wife and son. Hans still remembers his pal and one night Hans pulls up Google Maps to locate the cricket field that he was helping Chuck to build:

I veer away into Brooklyn, over houses, parks, graveyards, and halt at olive-green coastal water. I track the shore. Gravesend and Gerritsen slide by, and there is Floyd Bennett Field’s geometric sprawl of runways. I fall again, as low as I can. There’s Chuck’s field. It is brown—the grass has burned—but it is still there.

I found these methods effective and engaging, they make the book timely and approachable. What makes an author bring this stuff up and throw it into the mix? Is O’Neill just a heavy user of NutraSweet so he thought it might be cool to throw it in? He could have said “the blue stuff” or “Equal.”

I really enjoyed it. It’s a relevant character study and it’s about the world we live in now. It’s a great book and moved me more than anything else so far in 2009.

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Getting Things Done

More self-help, and I certainly need it. This book is not like the usual motivational stuff or the run-of-the-mill pop psychology stuff. It’s a detailed treatise on planning and organizing at the lowest level. It’s about processing all of the “stuff” that crosses your desk each day. Yeah, I feel like a dork, but I’ve lost control of my time completely and I need to work my way out of a backlog. I’m just looking for some ideas.

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Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto

I said after finishing The Conscience of a Liberal, if you recall, that I’m committed to getting the other side of the story. So that brought me to this book by Mark Levin – radio personality, lawyer, and politician. I figured that Levin’s manifesto would be comparable to Krugman’s conscience, just from another standpoint. And it was. To say it was diametrically opposed, as you would guess, is not an overstatement.

But the purpose of this is not to compare and contrast. I’ll do a little, but I think I’ll save most of that for a separate post. This is just to run down what Levin’s book is about, kind of like I did with Krugman. I’m just trying to represent Levin’s views in an unbiased manner, which is what I think I did with Krugman. You tell me, do you detect bias?

Levin thinks that the idea of equality from a Statist’s (that is his term for a Modern Liberal) view is fundamentally wrong; that it imposes tyranny on the individual and is a Utopian myth that can never be achieved. He uses the New Deal as an example of poor federal regulation that “breached the Constitution’s firewalls” and started our society’s decline into a tyrannical state that “rejects the Founders’ idea of the dignity of the individual.” Here’s a snippet from Chapter 1:

In the midst stands the individual, who was a predominate focus of the Founders. When living freely and pursuing his own legitimate interests, the individual displays qualities that are antithetical to the Statist’s—initiative, self-reliance, and independence. As the Statist is building a culture of conformity and dependency, where the ideal citizen takes on dronelike qualities in service to the state, the individual must be drained of uniqueness and self-worth, and deterred from independent thought or behavior. This is achieved through varying methods of economic punishment and political suppression.

In chapters one and two he tears down the New Deal and lays out his case that the Statists, assisted by the international community, academia, and Hollywood, are promoting ideals that are bad for America. He goes into detail in the next eight chapters; devoting each chapter to a broad area of concern. I’ll go through those eight chapters in a little detail.

Faith and Founding

Levin sounds like a religious man, but I’m not sure which religion. He says this:

… It is Natural Law, divined by God and discoverable by reason, that prescribes the inalienability of the most fundamental and eternal human rights—rights that are not conferred on man by man and, therefore, cannot legitimately be denied to man by man.

He feels that the Statist does not hold this same view. That the Statist’s view that we will sink into a theocracy is unfounded. He feels that the Statist’s desire to make laws that prohibit prayer in public shools or eliminate religious displays on municipal buildings are a form of tyranny. He feels that the courts promote this tyranny. He says:

The American courts sit today as supreme secular councils, which, like Islam’s supreme religious councils, dictate all manner of approved behavior respecting religion. …

God-given rights are part of the “founding justification” for this country and Levin, it appears, will resist the Statist’s desire to pull God out of public schools and government.

The Constitution

Levin does not believe that the Constitution is a “living and breathing” document and feels that Roosevelt mangled the Constitution when he created the New Deal. The rights resulting from the New Deal are some of Levin’s favorite targets and he feels that the federal intervention on health care, farm reform, labor laws, unemployment, education, etc… were unconstitutional. Referring to these “rights” he says:

… These are not rights. They are the Statist’s false promises of utopianism, which the Statist uses to justify all trespasses on the individual’s private property.

Federalism

The 10th Amendment says:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

Levin discusses just how important this is for our country and how Statists have subsequently torn it down to the detriment of society. The largest detriment being this massive “administrative state” put in place that he feels is a huge burden to this country.

He uses the rest of the chapter to explain why federalism was NOT responsible for slavery and how the civil rights acts of the 60’s and their reliance on the Fourteenth Amendment are examples of the federal government overstepping their bounds. This quote about what the “modern conservative” feels sums up his point:

For example, he accepts today, as certain Conservatives may not have yesterday, that the civil rights acts of the 1960s, while excessive in their application in some respects (such as imposing overly broad speech and behavior codes on universities, secular goals on religious institutions, and a wide range of employment and housing restrictions, which ultimately embrace an authoritarian approach that threatens civil liberties), were the proper exercise of federal statutory authority under the Fourteenth Amendment to address intransigent state racism against African-Americans.

The Free Market

Levin believes in the free market; it “promotes self-worth, self-sufficiency, shared values, and honest dealings, which enhance the individual, the family, and the community.” He believes that most of our taxes are a form of tyranny, that they destroy the free market, and that government should be allowed to tax only to gain enough revenue to “to fund those activities that the Constitution authorizes and no others.” Anything above this is tyranny, which Levin equates to government stealing from its constituents:

The Statist seeks to impose on individuals a governmental and economic structure that is contrary to human nature. He attempts to control the individual by subverting his spirit and punishing his natural impulses. For example, the parent teaches the child that stealing is wrong. Faith also teaches it is immoral: “Thou shalt not steal.” Laws, in turn, make it a crime to steal. One can only imagine the complete breakdown of the civil society that would result if stealing were an acceptable practice. For the Statist, however, thievery by government is a virtue in that it is said to be compelled for the “public good” or in the “public interest.”

We already knows that he feels that the New Deal was unconstitutional. He also feels that New Deal style of governmental regulation extended the Great Depression and that the current stimulus supplied by our government will delay our recovery from this current economic situation.

The reason stimulus plans of this sort do not work is a fundamental reality of governance: The government does not add value to the economy. It removes value from the economy by imposing taxes on one citizen and providing cash to another. Or it borrows money that would otherwise be used by investors and redistributes it elsewhere. Or it prints more money and threatens the value of the dollar. Nothing is stimulated. Spending power is not increased. Moreover, politicians and bureaucrats are substituting their uninformed, largely political decisions for those of the marketplace. Their past miscalculations demonstrate that they do not and cannot possess the information, knowledge, means, and discipline to manage the economy. Of course, the best way to stimulate the economy would be for the federal government to slash capital gains taxes, corporate income taxes, and individual income tax rates, thereby increasing liquidity available to individuals and businesses to make decisions about their own economic circumstances.

This is a good lead-in to his views on the state of public aid.

The Welfare State

Levin views Social Security as a complete sham and feels almost the same about Medicare and Medicaid. This should about sum it up:

Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are built on a family of frauds—the fraudulent concealment of material facts, the fraudulent representation of material facts, and the fraudulent conversion of one’s money for another’s use. They are a complex mix of taxes, benefits, obligations, and rights from which no individual can make much sense and about which the government sows disinformation and confusion. The “working poor” subsidize “the wealthy,” “the wealthy” subsidize “the working poor,” “the middle class” subsidizes itself as well as “the working poor” and “the wealthy,” and future generations are left paying off the crushing debt created by all of it, since the government spends far more than it raises.

Levin brings up the New Deal again and refers to one of its major components, Social Security, as “one of the earliest and most tangible breaks from American economic and constitutional traditions.” In total, especially after reading Krugman’s book, it appears that one of Levin’s goals is to tear down Krugman’s reverance for the New Deal. But that’s about it for the New Deal. We still have the environment, immigration, and foreign policy to cover.

Enviro-Statism

Levin disagrees that global warming or any sort of environmental crisis is upon us; he debunks much of the science behind it and cites science to the contrary. So if there isn’t a problem, he asserts that the laws addressing the problem are/will be completely unnecessary and represent another attack on liberty:

But the coming invasion of the home and workplace, the restriction on individual liberty, independence, and mobility, and the deconstruction of America’s economic system and impoverishing of the citizenry are justified in the name of a long and growing roster of preposterous assertions that must be listed to be believed.

As you can guess, he goes on to list them.

Immigration

Levin feels that the Statist agenda regarding immigration is not in the best interest of preserving our society; that it is self-serving to keep the Statist in power:

The Statist tolerates the illegal alien’s violations of working, wage, and environmental standards, because the alien’s babies born in America are, under the current interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, treated as United States citizens. And under the Hart-Celler Act, upon turning twenty-one years of age, the child can sponsor additional family members for citizenship. From the Statist’s perspective, the pool of future administrative state constituents and sympathetic voters is potentially bottomless.

A powerful immigrant society in general rubs Levin the wrong way.

For more than two centuries, individuals with diverse backgrounds have come together to form a national “melting pot” and harmonious society sustained by allegiance to the country and its founding principles. But today’s open-ended mass migration, coupled with the destructive influences of biculturalism, multiculturalism, bilingualism, multilingualism, dual citizenship, and affirmative action, have combined to form the building blocks of a different kind of society—where aliens are taught to hold tightly to their former cultures and languages, balkanization grows, antagonism and conflict are aroused, and victimhood is claimed at perceived slights. If a nation does not show and teach respect for its own identity, principles, and institutions, that corrosive attitude is conveyed to the rest of the world, including newly arriving aliens. And if this is unchecked, the nation will ultimately cease to exist.

I guess to say that it rubs him the wrong way may be an understatement.

Foreign Policy

This is the last issue and I’m running out of steam (plus I’m trying to keep this the same length as Consience of a Liberal). Levin promotes that view that foreign policy decisions should be measured using one benchmark:

The Conservative does not seek rigid adherence to any specific course of action: neutrality or alliance, preemptive war or defensive posture, nation building or limited military strike. The benchmark, again, is whether any specific path will serve the nation’s best interests.

He punches a lot of holes in Obama’s foreign policy. Like this:

How is banning waterboarding—which Barack Obama did among his first acts as president—morally defensible when a few minutes of simulated drowning applied against the operational leader of 9/11 reportedly saved an untold number of innocent American lives?

Read the book to get his support for this assertion. In general, Levin feels that global citizenry should not be our goal because the powerful countries who aren’t global citizens will end up with the upper hand.

America’s adversaries and enemies do not consider themselves global citizens. Nor are they constrained by international sensibilities and arrangements. A resurgent Russia, an aggressive China, communist movements growing in Latin America, rogue regimes in North Korea and Iran, Islamic terrorism, to name a few, all reject the Statist’s Utopia as a weakness to be exploited. They are not motivated by world opinion but by their own desires. They seek strategic—economic and military—advantage.

So that gets us through the major issues that Levin vets. These appear to be the major issues that any American needs to vet as they decide on where they stand. I’ve just spent a big chunk of May and June sorting through both ends of the spectrum so I should be able to lay out a decent strategy for the next election. When I say ends, I mean extremes. Both Levin and Krugman espouse extremes. Certainly the answer for me is somewhere in between. I will lay out that strategy in a separate post (some day).

Categories
books

The Secret Adversary

Pure nostalgia baby! I read this book for leisure when I was in high school (or maybe even before). It was the first Agatha Christie for me and remains the only one I’ve ever completed. Which I don’t understand because I loved it and I love the mystery/thriller genre. Why I haven’t read more of Christie’s books is somewhat of a mystery itself. Upon the second reading, it did not disappoint.

I should note another item; this is the first free, public domain electronic book I’ve read on my Kindle. I just went to Feedbooks and did some searching and eventually arrived at the Agatha Christie page. As soon as I saw this I grabbed it because this book has been stuck in the back of my mind for a few years now. It has always remained a memorable book for me for some reason, but I can’t recall why. I’ve entertained thoughts of purchasing it for years but just never pulled the trigger. Now that burden is lifted.

Most people think of detective Hercule Poirot when they hear Agatha Christie. But he’s not in this novel. This book features Tommy (Beresford) and Tuppence (Prudence Cowley), two “young adventurers” who meet up one day in London after not seeing each other for awhile. In no time, they get up to date on each other and decide to start their own little detective agency. This leads to all sorts of intrigue and danger.

It feels a little like young adult literature. Or maybe it’s just kind of old-fashioned (written in 1922). Or maybe I just don’t have any idea what Christie’s writing style is like. It’s very upbeat and although there is danger and death, I never really got to the edge of my seat. But then again, I’ve read it before, albeit about 30 years ago. Here’s a passage that I found kind of humorous, it occurs when Tommy is captured; he’s trying to figure out what to do if he’s able to lure his captor into his cell:

Therefore, why not wait in ambush for Conrad behind the door, and when he entered bring down a chair, or one of the decrepit pictures, smartly on to his head. One would, of course, be careful not to hit too hard. And then—and then, simply walk out! If he met anyone on the way down, well—Tommy brightened at the thought of an encounter with his fists. Such an affair was infinitely more in his line than the verbal encounter of this afternoon.

The detective novel certainly has changed over the last 90 years huh?

Another technique Christie uses in this book is the big reveal. You know, when the smart detective goes through the deductive process they used to arrive at the solution. I’m not used to this because I don’t read that many classic mysteries. I read a lot of crime fiction, which I think is how I would classify Grafton or Burke. I don’t feel like Grafton ever uses the big reveal.

I will read The Mysterious Affair at Styles, Christie’s other public domain book in the US. Maybe I’ll do that this year or next, so I’ll get a better feel for her writing.

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books

The Conscience of a Liberal

How opportune that I’m reading this book right on the heels of The Given Day. Early on Krugman mentions the Palmer Raids, which were an integral part of the The Given Day. Lehane used them to highlight a point in America’s history where tensions between the political establishment and those disenfranchised in society reached a fever pitch. Krugman uses them to highlight a similar point, which we’ll get to.

The timeliness of reading these two books back-to-back was dumb luck. I had just finished The Given Day (and Breaking the Slump) about a day earlier so I was between books. I had my Kindle in my hands  and I heard my phone vibrate. Ah, a text message from a friend. He says something like “just finished Conscience of a Liberal by Paul Krugman, great book.” So I ordered it up on the spot. Sweetness.

You may not care a bit about how I came about this book, and I don’t blame you. Hey, I’m sorry. This is stuff I want to record though for my own sake, so thanks for listening. I also want it to be known that to get both sides of the story, I will read Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto, which as of today is the top seller in the Kindle Store’s category entitled “Politics & Current Events.” It just feels like something I should do. Reading two sides of the story back-to-back should put me in the best frame of mind to compare and contrast.

Okay, enough of the intro stuff. Let’s get down to what Krugman is talking about. He builds a case that this country is in a bad place, just about as bad as it was in the period leading up to the Great Depression, because of the high level of income inequality that exists. This, he says, is not unrelated to the high level of partisanship that also exists in our country. They feed off each other and to rectify the situation, a return to liberal ideals, like those embodied by the New Deal, is imperative.

In the first chapter he sets the table with this statement:

There have, then, been two great arcs in modern American history—an economic arc from high inequality to relative equality and back again, and a political arc from extreme polarization to bipartisanship and back again. These two arcs move in parallel: The golden age of economic equality roughly corresponded to the golden age of political bipartisanship.

This golden age he talks about is the period after the Great Depression until about the late 1960s; a period that had great economic growth, a thriving middle class, and relative agreement on most economic and political issues across both parties. But then the 70s came along:

Over the course of the 1970s, radicals of the right determined to roll back the achievements of the New Deal took over the Republican Party, opening a partisan gap with the Democrats, who became the true conservatives, defenders of the long-standing institutions of equality. The empowerment of the hard right emboldened business to launch an all-out attack on the union movement, drastically reducing workers’ bargaining power; freed business executives from the political and social constraints that had previously placed limits on runaway executive paychecks; sharply reduced tax rates on high incomes; and in a variety of other ways promoted rising inequality.

So now that this rising inequality has finally met it’s backlash in the form a near-sweep by the Democrats in the 2006 mid-term elections, what is the new liberal majority to do? Krugman tells the reader that answers are forthcoming, but we have to have a quick history refresher on modern America. Thus ends a rather rich chapter 1. It’s important to note that Krugman wrote this book in 2007 and correctly predicted that we would have a Democratic president and a Democratic Congress in 2009.

Krugman spends the next eight chapters talking about the economic and political climate from Reconstruction to George W. Bush’s second term. He has terms for them:

The Long Gilded Age (1870 to 1829)

The run-up to the Great Depression looks a fair amount like the last few years before this current economic crisis. There were divisive economic and political differences even worse than today’s. Krugman says in Chapter 2:

In short, during the Long Gilded Age—as in today’s America—cultural and racial divisions among those with shared common economic interests prevented the emergence of an effective political challenge to extreme economic inequality. The difference between then and now was that the divisions of the Long Gilded Age were significantly more extreme than they are today. At the same time there were fewer people, even among political leaders, with the vision to see beyond them. This, in turn, brings us to another feature of the Long Gilded Age: the intellectual dominance of conservative, antigovernment ideology.

There was not a foothold to be gained by unions and the post WWI red scare “had the incidental effect of discrediting or intimidating ordinary liberals.” This is where the Palmer Raids mentioned in the first paragraph are brought up by Krugman. He (like Lehane) paints a picture of society where the few in power make decisions detrimental to the economic health of the country.

The Great Depression (1929 to around 1940-some debate)

You know the story. Bad, really bad.

The Great Compression (after the Great Depression to roughly 1973-the end of the postwar boom)

Krugman calls it such because the gap between rich and poor shrunk to unheard of lows. And not coincidentally, the difference in beliefs between Democrats and Republicans was virtually indiscernible. It was a happy time of growth, but characterized by the blight of racism, which Krugman thinks proved to be part of the undoing. Here are Krugman’s exact words:

America in the 1950s was a middle-class society, to a far greater extent than it had been in the 1920s—or than it is today. Social injustice remained pervasive: Segregation still ruled in the South, and both overt racism and overt discrimination against women were the norm throughout the country. Yet ordinary workers and their families had good reason to feel that they were sharing in the nation’s prosperity as never before. And, on the other side, the rich were a lot less rich than they had been a generation earlier.

Wow, sounds alright huh. Taxes were through the roof on the rich, listen to this:

But with the coming of the New Deal, the rich started to face taxes that were not only vastly higher than those of the twenties, but high by today’s standards. The top income tax rate (currently only 35 percent) rose to 63 percent during the first Roosevelt administration, and 79 percent in the second. By the mid-fifties, as the United States faced the expenses of the Cold War, it had risen to 91 percent.

But people were still happy. Union participation skyrocketed, government spending was massive, and the South was voting democrat. Can you believe that? And government corruption was virtually nonexistent:

In retrospect it’s startling just how clean the New Deal’s record was. FDR presided over a huge expansion of federal spending, including highly discretionary spending by the Works Progress Administration. Yet the popular image of public relief, widely regarded as corrupt before the New Deal, actually improved markedly.

The New Deal’s probity wasn’t an accident. New Deal officials made almost a fetish out of policing their programs against potential corruption. In particular FDR created a powerful “division of progress investigation” to investigate complaints of malfeasance in the WPA.

As things go however, it came to an end. The undoing being the 1960’s. Despite continued economic growth through 1973, the political views of the country began to diverge in the early 60’s.

The Great Divergence (1973 to about 2006, the Dems victory in the mid-term elections)

This period is described by Krugman as basically the undoing of the New Deal. Unions shrunk and tax rates plummeted, and in turn the gap between the haves and have-nots increased markedly. He brings up the interesting analogy of “Bill Gates walking into a bar”:

As it turns out, Bill Gates walking into a bar is a pretty good metaphor for what has actually happened in the United States over the past generation: Average income has risen substantially, but that’s mainly because a few people have gotten much, much richer. Median income, depending on which definition you use, has either risen modestly or actually declined.

The middle class has stagnated. He goes on:

A rough estimate is that about half of the wage income of this superelite comes from the earnings of top executives—not just CEOs but those a few ranks below—at major companies. Much of the rest of the wage income of the top 0.01 percent appears to represent the incomes of sports and entertainment celebrities. So a large part of the overall increase in inequality is, in a direct sense, the result of a change in the way society pays its allegedly best and brightest. They were always paid well, but now they’re paid incredibly well.

So the rich got richer because the barriers to it happening in society were torn down. Ronald Reagan came along and put the nail in the income equality coffin by beating unions to a pulp and decreasing taxes, among other things. Additionally, technological change allowed the best and brightest to separate themselves from the rest of society. Krugman summarizes:

As I explained in chapter 1, I began working on this book with that view, which goes something like this: Money buys influence, and as the richest few percent of Americans have grown richer thanks to unequalizing forces like technical change, they have become rich enough to buy themselves a party. In this view, the rise of movement conservatism is a by-product of rising inequality.

He implicates movement conservatism even more than what I’ve quoted thus far. He includes racism as one of the many forces driving movement conservatism and he also seems to say that Republicans have lied and cheated their way to the top. And the American people have let it happen, for various reasons, until they made the stand in the 2006 mid-term elections.

What’s next?

So here we are, a Democrat in the White House, a Democratic Congress, and, according to Krugman, an economy in ruin brought about by the same forces that resulted in the Great Depression. What does Krugman think they should do?

Liberals need to “seize the opportunity” and basically roll back the roll-back, as I understand it. Remember, he referred to the Great Divergence as a reversal of the New Deal. Well, he wants to reverse that reversal and institute measures akin to the New Deal. The most important of which, he says, is universal health care. He spends a detailed chapter on this issue and starts it out with this:

So how does the U.S. health care system, with its unique reliance on private insurance, stack up against the systems of other advanced countries? Table 7 tells the story. It shows how much different countries spend per person on health care, and compares that spending with average life expectancy, the simplest measure of how well the health care system is functioning. The United States spends almost twice as much on health care per person as Canada, France, and Germany, almost two and a half times as much as Britain—yet our life expectancy is at the bottom of the pack.

He refutes the traditional Republican view that we have the best health care in the world, tears down Bill Clinton’s attempt to institute universal health care, and provides data on the why’s and how’s it would work, including a plan that comes at zero incremental cost. I don’t understand all of it, but it comes through savings in administrative costs and a realignment of incentives by converting to a single payer system. He rounds it out with this:

The principal reason to reform American health care is simply that it would improve the quality of life for most Americans. Under our current system tens of millions lack adequate health care, millions more have had their lives destroyed by the financial burden of medical costs, and many more who haven’t yet gone without insurance or been bankrupted by health costs live in fear that they may be next. And it’s all unnecessary: Every other wealthy country has universal coverage. Reducing the risks Americans face would be worth it even if it had a substantial cost—but in this case there would be no cost at all. Universal health care would be cheaper and better than our current fragmented system.

Then, once this is done, they can move on to addressing other areas of inequality, by increasing taxes and revitalizing unions. Sounds liberal to me.

He spends the last few moments talking about being a progressive. I’m not sure I completely understand this. He seems to feel that the progressive route is the only route to getting the liberal agenda passed. That most liberals look back and progressives look forward. That, I need to look into. It’s an interesting book and I’m ready to jump on the bandwagon, but I’m going to get the other side first.

Categories
books

Once a Runner: A Novel

Are you passionate about your sporting endeavors? Are you a weekend warrior? I’m NOT talking about a rabid fan who always watches their favorite team on TV or studies real hard for their fantasy draft. I’m talking about a deeper level of involvement. I’m talking about something that goes beyond knowing all the statistics and reading all of the articles. I’m talking about feeling the pain; the pain of running a 5k on a bad day, the pain of missing a four-footer on the 18th hole that lost you the match, or the pain of being in the stadium when your team got laughed out of the park. If you’ve felt this pain, and have even grown to embrace it, you need to stop everything you’re doing at this moment and find this book.

This is a book for people who like to step on to the field of play. For people who love sports and games because of the emotion and the theatre, because of how they feel when they are involved. This book will stir your emotions, make you laugh, and make you want to train for a distance event. I can’t remember a piece of sports fiction this great, period! The only thing comparable is the movie One on One. You know, the Robby Benson classic. This book may be the stepping stone needed to get me pumped up to start running more…or maybe not.

Have I mentioned that I loved this book. It’s the story of Quentin Cassidy (Cass), a miler on the track team of a fictional college in the Florida panhandle called Southeastern University. He has a girlfriend, hangs out with some cool running buddies, and is quite the team jokester. But he’s deathly serious about cracking the four minute mile barrier, and even more serious about beating New Zealand great John Walton at the same distance (fictional character modeled after John Walker, the first guy to break 3:50 in the mile). And he’ll get his chance to race Walton because Walton has agreed to come to Southeastern for the “big invitational.” So Cass just needs to train like a madman. However, life throws him some curveballs.

Before I spoil it, let me digress from the plot a little. The coolest part of this book are the running-specific digressions by the narrator and the track-centric rants by Cass. Let me give you a long example of a Cass conversation with his girlfriend and buddy (Mizner) that I loved:

“Everyone likes to think they have their own little corner; it can be anything: needlepoint, lawn bowling, whatever. Some guy may gratify himself by thinking he’s the best goddamn fruit and vegetable manager the A & P ever had. Which is fine. It gives people a sense of worth in a crowded world where everyone feels like part of the scenery. But then mostly they are spared any harrowing glimpses into their own mediocrity. Pillsbury Bake-Off notwithstanding, we’ll never really know who makes the best artichoke souffle in the world, will we?”

“Gotcha. Don’t filibuster, tell me Demons,” she said.

“Right. The thing is that in track we are painfully and constantly aware of how we stack up, not just with our contemporaries but with our historical counterparts as well. In that regard it’s different even from other sports. A basketball player can go out and have a great day and tell himself he’s the greatest rebounding forward to ever hit the hardwood, but he’ll never really be troubled by the actual truth, will he? Maybe he’s just in a weak league. Maybe Jumping Joe Faulks would have eaten him alive thirty years ago. But he’ll never know. He’ll just have to leave such judgments in the sorry hands of the sportswriters, many of whom it has been pointed out can be bought with a steak.” Mizner nodded vigorously from behind a pile of popcorn.

“In track it’s all there in black-and-white. Lot of people can’t take that kind of pressure; the ego withers in the face of the evidence. We all carry our little credentials around with us; that’s why the numbers are so important to us, why we’re always talking about them. I am, for instance, four flat point three. The numerals might as well be etched on my forehead. This gentleman here, perhaps you’d like to meet him, is 27:42, also known as 13:21, I believe.”

I love that passage. I love that type of conversation about sports. Especially conversations that compare sports, like he compares basketball to track. Some people view it as testosterone-riddled drivel. I call it keen insight into why sports are so beautiful, why they are so important for understanding what makes us, as humans, tick.

I also like metaphysical discussions in one’s own mind, like this one that Cass has in Chapter 17 (titled Breaking Down), as he’s thinking about his training schedule:

Cassidy sought no euphoric interludes. They came, when they did, quite naturally and he was content to enjoy them privately. He ran not for crypto-religious reasons, but to win races, to cover ground fast. Not only to be better than his fellows, but better than himself. To be faster by a tenth of a second, by an inch, by two feet or two yards, than he had been the week or year before. He sought to conquer the physical limitations placed upon him by a three-dimensional world (and if Time is the fourth dimension, that too was his province). If he could conquer the weakness, the cowardice in himself, he would not worry about the rest; it would come. Training was a rite of purification; from it came speed, strength. Racing was a rite of death; from it came knowledge. Such rites demand, if they are to be meaningful at all, a certain amount of time spent precisely on the Red Line, where you can lean over the manicured putting green at the edge of the precipice and see exactly nothing.

Man, that’s cool huh? Taking it to the edge where you have nothing left, that’s a glimpse into the meaning of life; finding that point where you have exhausted all efforts and you have nothing left. It doesn’t matter how fast or how strong or how smart at that point, you’ve done all you can. The rest will take care of itself.

** SPOILER ALERT **

So back to the plot. Everything is clipping along fine for Cass until he gets involved in a little protest that the athletes at Southeastern University undertake, and Cass takes the fall for it. He gets booted out of school and therefore can’t race against Walton in the invitational.

However, that does not deter him from his training. Cass’s running mentor , Denton, loans Cass his house in the woods and Cass sets about training there. He becomes a bearded hermit and trains for the sake of training, unsure if he can get reinstated in time to race Walton. Kind of reminiscent of when Rocky trains in the Russian countryside by snowshoeing and carrying logs.

At the same time, Denton tries to pull some strings with the administration to get Cass back in school, but to no avail. In the end, Denton hatches a scheme that results in Cass having to impersonate a Finnish runner named Seppo from a fake university in Ohio. This is great stuff I tell you.

The book culminates in a detailed retelling of Cass’s race against Walton. I was riveted and teary-eyed at the end of it all.