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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
I was reading Newsweek (on my Kindle, for a $1.49/month) and there was an article about this book. It looked cool, so I bought it (also on my Kindle, for $9.99). All this, in a 4 minute span while sharing a cup of coffee at a local coffee shop (Sip) with Gail. Like I said, the Kindle is transformational. It was my aha moment, as Steven Johnson discussed in the WSJ.
At times, I’ve voiced displeasure with the reporting of Jimmy Roberts. So it may come as a surprise that I purchased a book written by him. But hey, it’s about golf, and this topic of the slump really, really interests me. Actually, the whole synchronized interaction of physical, intellectual, and emotional that golf requires is what interests me. Johnny Miller puts it best:
“There’s no game that’s ever been invented that exposes someone’s choke point like golf,” says Miller. “It highlights all your weaknesses, mental and physical, and choking can really be part of a slump. It’s the most interesting thing about the game.”
I agree strongly, especially after watching Kenny Perry break down just a few weeks ago at Augusta. A buddy of mine was discussing this the other day and says (I’m paraphrasing) “any competent professional could go par-par or par-bogey and just win it.” He said it with disdain, as if Kenny Perry was some big loser not worthy of my buddy’s sporting attention, as if golf were not worthy of his sporting attention.
This is a common perception of the casual fan and reflects a fundamental lack of understanding of the game. Here’s the deal: it does not matter how proficient your golf skills are, you are NOT in control of how your body and soul react on the golf course when the pressure is on. You can’t control it, you can only hope to contain it! Kenny couldn’t contain it this year at Augusta, Phil couldn’t contain it a few years ago at Winged Foot; and countless others have had Van de Veldeian breakdowns with apparently no explanation other than “they choked.”
And Jimmy Roberts helped me understand this a little better. For that, I’m grateful. So I’m a fan of Jimmy now. In this book he talks to 18 people about their slumps; each one has a chapter devoted to them. Fifteen are current or former PGA Tour professionals, one is an Olympic figure skater (Dan Jansen), one is a former POTUS (George H.W. Bush), and one is a former LPGA player (Dottie Pepper). Each chapter was enlightening to varying degrees.
The Norman chapter was great. In 1991 he had gone two years without winning after dominating the world stage for most of the 1980’s. He pulled his car to side of the road near his home in Florida and had a long talk with himself:
“And I said to myself, ‘What the f&%# am I going to the course for?’ I said, ‘What are your intentions? What do you want to do? Do you want to get better? Do you want to get out of this thing? What’s your attitude?’” Norman says he sat there for perhaps forty minutes just staring at the clouds and talking to himself. “I swear I could take you to that spot today. It was on Hood Road.” Then he put the seat up, continued on to Old Marsh, and, for the first time in a long time, practiced with “a free mind.” It was an epiphany.
He went to win a bunch more in the mid 1990’s, but it was a cursed career, which Norman has come to terms with:
“I always address my career not on my successes, but on my failures,” he says. “I’ve got this little thing written on my desk, and I can’t remember who the quote came from, but it says, ‘Show me a path with no obstacles, and that path will lead you nowhere.’” This is classic Norman, who has always been Don Quixote—occasionally tilting at windmills—on an endless trek to find answers, and not just about golf. “If I had a different thought than somebody else,” he says, “I always wanted to know why I was right or wrong.”
This tortured career was nothing compared to that of David Duval. By golly, did he drop off the face of the earth or what? It seems like neither Duval or Norman really stood guard over their confidence. Here is what Duval says:
“The thing I feel like I learned the most through anything,” he says, “is that the most precious commodity in golf that needs to be guarded is your confidence. By far, you’ve got to protect it at all costs. Losing friends, losing whatever—you’ve got to protect your confidence.”
You just can’t let negative thoughts creep in. It means the end of your golf career basically.
The Dan Jansen chapter was the best of them all. He choked horribly in two Olympic Games, but finally won gold in his final race. He did so by convincing himself that he “liked the 1,000 meters.” He had always had all the talent, so he basically talked himself into the confidence he needed for the victory. Now he is a golf junkie and he relates his experiences back to golf. Enlightening and interesting stuff.
The Johnny Miller and Dottie Pepper chapters were solid. And Jimmy Roberts proved himself to be a pretty serious golf junkie. I’m looking forward to NBC’s golf coverage, but we really don’t get Johnny Miller and Jimmy Roberts back until The Players on May 9th and 10th and the US Open on June 20th and 21st. Oh well, I’ll sit tight.
Reading huge, epic novels has always been complicated for me. The best time to read them is on vacation, but hauling a huge book through airports and rental cars, along with other reading, is cumbersome. But not anymore now that I have a Kindle. I was out of town getting some R&R and the cumbersome aspect of carrying around a large work of fiction, a sports book, Newsweek, the WSJ, and the Chicago Tribune is no more. It even makes me think I can justify the Kindle from a cash flow perspective.
This Lehane book is that “large work of fiction” I just mentioned. It’s a mighty piece of historical fiction that takes place at the end of WWI. I started it and finished it in the middle of my vacation, which was perfect. It was great reading material for a vacation; long and involved, but exciting and thought-provoking. I’m going to classify it as popular fiction, but I don’t think it’s quite as “popular” as Lehane’s crime novels like Mystic River or Gone, Baby, Gone.
Like those books, it’s set mostly in Boston. It’s the story of the Coughlins, an Irish-American family of cops and politicians, set during the years of 1917-1919, a tumultuous time in Boston and all over America. Tumultuous because of the rapidly changing landscape in the seats of power in America. The labor movement was in full swing, race relations were heated, women were on the brink of getting the right to vote, and fear of communism coupled with paranoia about radical immigrant groups was especially acute. Lehane brings them all into play.
I term this book epic because it intertwines other families and individual personalities with the Coughlins. So even though it doesn’t span a long time-period like a traditional epic, it switches back and forth between these people and places, giving it an epic feel. For example, the story of Luther Laurence, a black factory worker/domestic servant whom trouble seems to follow around, is just as involved as that of Danny Coughlin, a white cop bucking the establishment. Eventually they become intertwined forming the backbone of the story, highlighting issues of race and class that were so warped back then. Other stories involved an early-career Babe Ruth, a young J. Edgar Hoover, the Massachusetts governor Calvin Coolidge, and the Coughlin’s domestic help. It’s a wild, roaming ride through post WWI America and I was engrossed from the get-go.
I often hold off reading these long stories regardless of the convenience factor, which is why I’ve only read two (labeled as epic) in the last few years. Besides hauling it around, staring down the barrel of 700+ pages is sometimes daunting because it takes a lot of focus and locks me out of reading other fiction at the same time. But the rewards are great, so I’ve purchased another epic that I’ll read this year for sure (World Without End).
Lehane’s tone is kind of gloomy. There’s a lot of evil and heartbreak in this book, along with some solid family carnage. So I had that going for me, which is nice. Lehane’s characters spend a lot of time ruminating about their situation and his narrative style is thoughtful and descriptive. At times I found myself welcoming a section of crackling dialogue because it didn’t seem that common. I don’t have empirical evidence to support this, that’s just the way it felt. I would like to see book stats come out that measure items like this. How about a ratio that compares dialogue to narration? The quant head in me would welcome that.
I’ve said it before, this is why we read. The only time I turned on the TV this vacation was to measure the screen and see how well we could see it from the back of the room. It was on for about four minutes. No need for it when you have a captivating work of fiction, a solid sports book (Breaking the Slump), and a few newspapers and periodicals handy. Gail read three books and mentioned that it was the most relaxing vacation we’ve ever had. I agree.
This is the 4th Edition, published in 2007, so it’s pretty up to date. It’s a treatise on marketing for small businesses and individuals, the breadth of which is kind of astonishing. It’s been around for a long time and Levinson has since built a whole infrastructure of co-authored books on more specialized marketing topics. But this is the one that started it all, the one that forms the basis for all of those other ones, and, I’m betting, the one that mentions his other books the most. It’s clear that he has applied most of what he espouses to a high degree of success.
I needed this book. I’m at a point in my business where I need to have my marketing strategy in the front of my mind at every moment. It needs to roll off my tongue like a downhill putt at Augusta, if you know what I mean. Levinson gets the business owner pretty far down the road on this pursuit, but he doesn’t stop there. He spends a little more time on saving money and doing market research, then launches into a detailed discussion of all of the different types of marketing and advertising know to humankind. He groups them as (1) Minimedia (like business cards), (2) Maximedia (like TV), and (3) New Media (like e-mail and blogs).
It’s pretty comprehensive and he goes into a fair amount of minutia on each. He had an interesting digression on classified advertising and talked fondly about the $500/month he earned for about a dozen years selling his self-published book Secrets of Successful Free-Lancing (pg 137). He sold it only via classified ads and uses it to illustrate how lethal and simple classified advertising can be if you monitor your response rates.
He spends a fair amount of time on direct mail (that’s maximedia), going into detail on the style of the envelope, the color of the paper used, and the content of the mailer. He goes through it all man, I’m telling you.
I got a lot out of these three segments, but I also blew through a lot of it very quickly. Radio and TV advertising are not in the cards for me so I couldn’t stay focused on topics like these.
He finishes up the book with three chapters on the “nature of the guerrilla.” In this section he goes into the attributes and attitudes of the marketing guerrilla. It is motivating and some good stuff, but I think the Gitomer books cover a lot of this stuff and I like reading them a lot better. I’ve slapped together some notes on Guerilla Marketing that I’ll use them a lot as I hammer through my marketing strategy over the next 60 days, but I have a feeling that I’m going to be spending more of my time in the Gitomer books than in Guerilla Marketing.
This was a good read and brought a lot of stuff to mind, it’s going in the stack of books at my office that I’m going to be referring to in the near future.
I’m starting to get it. I didn’t get it at first when I read The Neon Rain about two years ago. I said, “It’s quite dramatic and over the top. A little too much so, that’s why I say the jury is still out on this series.” But now I’m hooked on Burke and the jury is in; I will continue to hammer through Burke’s crime series and I’m becoming a big fan of the main character, Dave Robicheaux.
I wonder where Burke gets all the character traits for the dark and tormented Robicheaux. According to his bio, Burke lives in Missoula, MT and New Iberia, LA, which are the very locations that this novel takes place. So I’m guessing that he has melded together some local characters and himself. Grafton does this I think, but her style and main character are a lot different (but there are similarities). I like reading the the author biographies and sorting through these things. I just found out that Burke has a daughter named Alafair, which is the name of the child Robicheaux adopted in his second book. This, coupled with the setting, means that there’s a lot of Burke in Robicheaux.
That’s cool. Things like that bring me closer to the characters, the books, and the authors, making it an extended reading experience, so to speak. It just makes the pursuit more fun.
Burke’s novels throw some variety into my crime reading. So many crime novels have a single, childless, independent, often smart-alecky protagonist (at least the ones I read do). Robicheaux kind of conforms to this caricature. He’s a widower now and his daughter is adopted. But he’s not a smart alec. And he’s not very independent; leaning mostly on his therapist, AA group, housekeeper, bait shop employee, and adopted daughter for support. But in return, he helps these people out a lot and shows them much kindness. They are often the reason why he has to unleash some brutal attacks on the bad guys of the world.
This good and evil in the extreme is very interesting. It’s almost unnerving because the people he loves are often in harm’s way. Especially his daughter. In this book she needs constant protection because he hauls her along while he is tracking the bad guys. But he needs to do so because she’s a target. The tension is always there.
** SPOILER ALERT **
Luckily his daughter doesn’t get killed like his wife did in the last book (she was a one-book wife). This is only book three so I’m really anxious to watch the development of these two. It just seems that he has a lot of crimes to solve with kid in tow. It would be overly formulaic if she was threatened in book after book. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. I have the next one in paperback queued up, but I probably won’t get to it until later this year.
I’m not sure how I came about this book. I think my wife, Gail, picked it up at a library book sale knowing that I had already enjoyed Train. She may have remembered that Dexter was famous for his book Paris Trout. Or maybe she just knows me. I don’t think she’s read any books by Pete Dexter and I don’t think I’ll be able to convince her to do so.
Why? Well, I just don’t think Gail has the same fascination that I do with family carnage. I use the term carnage loosely. I don’t mean that I enjoy stories about killing families. I use the term to describe stories about breakdowns in familial relationships that are often more painful than death because they are so insidious.
For some reason, in my estimation, this makes for a good story. I can’t explain it. What’s enjoyable about a family breaking down? I don’t know. Maybe it isn’t enjoyable. This could be the wrong word to use. Maybe engrossing is a better word to describe my involvement with books like this. Or maybe I should say I’m engaged; that may better describe it.
I remember it starting in college when I read Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf in a lit class. I was amazed by it. Then I saw the play about a decade ago and I was blown away. The acidity and enmity of these two people towards each other was mesmerizing. So now, a few times a year, I engage in some carnage. The Paperboy was certainly along these same lines, although a little less so and therefore much more readable then the other books I’ve labeled as such.
The word paperboy in this book, I think, could refer either collectively to the four male protagonists or individually to the narrator, Jack James. Jack is the youngest son of a local newspaper scion in a rural Florida town. Jack is kind of a screw-up, but a good kid; he drives one of the delivery trucks for his dad. Contrast this to Jack’s brother Ward, who is one half of a famous investigative reporting duo for the Miami Times, the other half being a gentlemen named Yardley Acheman.
Bothers Jack and Ward are brought together when Ward and Yardley make a visit to the small town where Jack lives with his dad. They are there to investigate the murder of the local sheriff and the subsequent conviction of the perpetrator. Jack is hired as their driver and errand boy. The dysfunction occurs within the Ward family, between the distant dad and the two son’s. Therein lies the soul of this story, but there’s a lot more that makes this story great.
** SPOILER ALERT **
As the relationship with their father grows more distant and the complications in the investigation become greater, the brother’s relationship solidifies and grows. It’s a beautiful thing to see and provides a hopeful backdrop.
If this family relationship is the soul of the story, then the heart of the story is the daily recounting of the paperboy’s search for the facts in the murder of the local sheriff. To me, it’s even more timely and interesting because it’s a discussion of the morality, ethics, and value of investigative journalism, a pursuit that is under fire now more than ever as the newspaper industry continues its decline. I come across articles daily, asking where we, as a society, are going to get this style of reporting if all of the newspapers go bankrupt.
Dexter takes this topic to its endgame. The paperboy’s investigation leads to a story, the story leads to a Pulitzer for Ward and Yardley, then the Pulitzer leads to an investigation of the original story by a rival Miami paper. Ironic, because the investigative reporter for the rival paper once worked for the Miami Times. In fact, she idolized Yardley before he made a mockery of her by pushing her into a pool in front of all the bigwigs at the newspaper’s celebration of the Pulitzer. It’s a great twist.
And I don’t use the word twist loosely. Dexter’s writing contains a host of twisted characters who do some twisted things in some damn twisted scenes, usually involving violence and sex. It’s dark, so you have to like a little darkness to embrace Dexter. But it’s that darkness that makes the relationship between the brothers that much brighter.
Great book, which I’m classifying as lit because I want to. I don’t think it fits into popular fiction.