Wednesday, July 3, 2019

The Impeachers: Racism Then and Now

I suppose most will pick up The Impeachers out of curiosity about the precedent of presidential impeachment considering all the talk of impeaching President Trump (this being 2019).  Although anyone who reads The Impeachers through will certainly be given a lot to chew on in this regard (especially concerning the similarities of personality of Donald Trump and Andrew Johnson), this book is really about something broader than the post-Civil War Catfight in the Capitol.

The history I was taught in high school in the 1960's, uncontradicted by introductory college history and political science, was that the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson was about whether a president could dismiss a cabinet officer (in this case Edwin Stanton, Secretary of War) who had been confirmed by the Senate.  The Senate failed to convict.  Johnson remained president.  Stanton resigned.  End of story.

O my, what they left out!

It's hard to describe the hate and violence that seized the southern states after the end of the war.  Massacres killed hundreds of black citizens (they were now citizens, although without the vote, yet) in Memphis and New Orleans.  Rivers of what we would now call hate speech flowed from southern politicians, uncowed by defeat on the battlefield.  The Ku Klux Klan intimidated and murdered not only blacks but white Republicans who advocated for them.  In some areas (Texas) Union officers couldn't walk the streets without armed guards.

Congress, dominated by Radical Republicans, passed reconstruction act after reconstruction act, all vetoed by President Johnson, then passed over his veto.  Johnson appointed military commanders and governors in the south who were favorable to the most lenient terms for the readmission of southern states to the Union.  He pardoned any and all of the former Confederates and ratified their state constitutions just as they were before the war.  He told anyone who asked, and quite a few that didn't,  that ours was a "white man's government."  Stanton tried to mitigate the impact of Johnson's actions.  Johnson mightily wanted Stanton out of his way so he could totally bring the south under his control, readmit those states who had rebelled, and bring southern congressmen back to DC to support him and insure that blacks never would have any influence in politics beyond being counted for congressional districting.  The Congress affirmed that Stanton, appointed by the assassinated president Lincoln, could not be fired by Johnson.  Johnson fired Stanton, anyway.  Stanton locked himself in his office, surrounded the War Department building with troops and refused to turn over the keys.  Impeachment ensued.  A long, mostly boring trial took place, with plenty of intrigue on all sides.  Andrew Johnson was acquitted by one vote.

It was hardly over, though.  Johnson spent his remaining months in office insisting he was right, appointing racists, and issuing general amnesties to the former Confederates.  Congress continued trying to reign him in.  When U.S. Grant came to office in 1869 he faced mighty hurdles trying to establish some sort of justice in the reconstruction of the south.  What he and the Republicans managed to accomplish in the 1870's was a weakened version of what might have been done in the 1865-69 period, had not Andrew Johnson, accidental president and full-blooded racist, been president.

It's no coincidence that this book is being published as impeachment talk ramps up.  Sadly, it's no co-incidence that race hatred buried deep in this country's history and heart still dominates the back story.      

Saturday, June 15, 2019

The Moor's Account by Laila Lalami

The 1527 Spanish expedition headed by Panfilo de Navaez was intended to explore and colonize the southeastern portion of North America that now is part of the United States and Mexico.  It did neither, at least not in any way useful to the Spanish empire.  About six hundred people landed in Florida, but only four men, three Spaniards and a black North African slave,  survived an eight year treck across the continent.  One of the Castilians, Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca, wrote an account of the men's ill-fated journey which is the only version of what happened.  It is an account of virtuous Europeans (virtuous with the exception of the incompetent de Navez, who seems, according to de Vaca, to have doomed the whole enterprise by ignoring de Vaca's wise advice) set upon by vicious and inhuman Indians who exploited the white men for their metal implements and their unpaid labor.

De Vaca's self-serving account is a perfect set up for the novelist Lalami to tell the story from a different point of view, that of the Moor slave, whom she calls Mustafa ibn Muhammad ibn Abdussalam al-Zamori.  That the slave can produce a longer moniker than even the proud Spaniards should alert the reader that this version of events will be very different.

It is, and in a surprising way.  Mustafa is a merchant who becomes improvised by war and famine and sells himself into slavery to feed his widowed mother and his brothers.  He knows what he's letting himself in for because he, too, in his more prosperous days dealt in slaves, rejoicing at their profitability.  He bears up well enough with the indignity and hopelessness of his situation until, with the collapse of the expedition on a storm ridden gulf coast, the survivors find themselves at the mercy of the indigenous peoples who first treat them with some kindness, then make them into virtual slaves.  Now the Castilians and the Moor become comrades, sharing the misfortunes of their situation together.  As the layers of European and Muslim civilization are striped away they discover that indeed they are brothers under the skin. Near the end of their strange journey they again encounter their own kind on the Pacific coast.  Mustafa dares hope that his one time master will, once they are returned to Spain, honor his promise to free him.

Lalami portrays the plasticity of the human character.  Faced with the demands and contradictions of an  alien culture and environment, human beings are capable of surprising adaptations. The proud Spaniards survive only because they can put pride aside and allow themselves to be used as beasts of burden, to be whipped, even killed by their Indian masters.  The Moor is able to combine his knowledge of healing from another continent with the indigenous methods and herbs and become something of a 16th century Park Avenue doctor.  In the end the four survivors are able to put their newfound lives behind them and pick up their old ways and roles with little effort.

What is constant throughout is the will to survive, no matter what privations, indignities, and horrors are forced on them.  And they retain what even slavery cannot take away:  hope.    

Sunday, May 26, 2019

Crash Course

When I came across Julie Whipple's Crash Course in the new book section of my local library it struck me with a double impact.  First, I'm a retired air traffic controller, so this type of book reels me in as surely as a Siren's song.  Second, a headline pictured on one of the first pages under a photo of the torn and crumpled cabin of a jetliner didn't really need boldface to get my attention:  Friday, December 29, 1978;  United DC-8 Crashes at E. Burnside, 157th; 10 Killed, 175 SurviveFor the last eight-and-a-half years I've lived four blocks from that location.  I had no idea.  Conversations with neighbors, many of whom lived in the neighborhood for over forty years had never veered off into reminisces over what must have been an overwhelming and terrifying experience.  (Believe me, as a controller in Vietnam I witnessed large aircraft crashing a few hundred feet from me.  It is terrifying and overwhelming.  You never forget the sound.  You never forget the bodies lined up neatly to the side--it's real.)  

Whipple, a journalist with extensive reportorial experience, is well equipped to write this type of investigative book.  She has the added advantage of being the daughter of Stewart M. Whipple, an attorney who represented Elizabeth Andor, a three year old child who survived the crash with extensive life-changing injuries, and also lost her parents and two sisters.  The elder Whipple provided his daughter with seven boxes of notes from the trials that resulted.

The first four of the standard five W's of reporting, Who, What, When, and Where, are easily presented in this type of book.  The last W, Why, is the hard one.  It turns the book into something that shares features with the True Crime genre.  This is introduced on the cover with the subtitle:  Accidents Don't Just Happen.  Not in the United States anyway.  Federal Law dictates that all aspects of aviation be accident free.  Properly designed, properly maintained and operated, aircraft will not crash.  That's the law passed to reassure commercial aviation passengers that they are perfectly safe.  So, if an airliner crashes, it is because someone didn't do his job right.  In American aviation there are no accidents.

United Flight 173 crashed on a cold winter evening in 1978 because somebody messed up.  The question is: who?  United Airlines, the Federal Aviation Administration, and the National Transportation Safety Board had no doubts.  Captain Malburn McBroom was the pilot in command that night and had total responsibility for the safe operation of the huge airliner.  He crash landed the big jet some 12 airmiles from the airport when the fuel tanks ran dry.  A pilot's first responsibility is to make sure he has enough fuel to land his flight at the intended destination.  McBroom didn't do that and it was his fault.  End of investigation.

Others, including the family of little Elizabeth Andor, weren't so sure.  McBroom had aborted his approach to Portland International that night when he put down his main gear and, instead of the reassuring "thunk" of the gear locking in place, was jolted by two shocks from the right main gear, intense enough to throw the massive plane from side to side.  He had good reason to believe the first shock was caused by a part failing in the piston that extended and retracted the heavy gear assembly.  But what was the second?  He suspected that the gear, unrestrained by the normal resistance of the hydraulic system, had free-fallen past the structural stops that kept it aligned properly for landing.  That might mean that the gear on the right side could be splayed, which would cause the aircraft to spin uncontrollably to the right on landing.  McBroom had opted to enter a holding pattern south of the airport while he and the flight crew "worked" the problem with the assistance of United Airline maintenance personnel on radiotelephone from San Francisco.  While working the problem the crew became distracted from monitoring the fuel situation and by the time their attention was brought back the plane lacked fuel to make it to PDX.  

Site of United Flight 173 crash today.  Two unoccupied
 homes were flattened.  One in the still vacant lot in the
foreground and one across Burnside street in the area now
occupied by apartments.  No one died on the ground.   

To United and the regulatory authorities that was the whole story.  But, wait a minute.  What if the part hadn't failed in the first place?  Then the approach would have continued normally and all 185 on board would have landed on time in Portland and proceeded with their plans for celebrating the new year.  And what if the part failure was not a unique event, but something well know to be a problem with the DC-8?  And what if that specific DC-8 was known to have a defective part and United had knowingly chosen to defer replacing that part, not once, but twice?  What then?  

Whipple's well written book journals the story of those what-ifs.  It presents a landmark lawsuit and the human lives forever changed by an avoidable accident.   

Wednesday, May 8, 2019

A Writer's Blog Is Back

It has been nearly five years since I've composed a post for A Writer's Blog.  It's not that I've lost interest in either my writing or the books I wrote my little reviews about.  I have continued to write and I've continued to read.  So, why stop blogging?  (It makes me smile that the spelling checker doesn't underline "blogging."  My trusty Webster's New World College Dictionary doesn't even have an entry for blogging, yet it claimed, when published in 1999, that it was "defining the English Language for the 21st Century").

Part of the reason was that I was indeed writing a new novel, my third.  Much of the time and energy I would have given to blogging was directed to what turned out to be a long and complex project.  Longer and more complex than I'd imagined.  That's finished now and query letters for A Dangerous Heritage, my Civil War novel, are being emailed to agents in three countries.  (The whole process of seeking an agent has changed a lot in the fifteen years since I had one.  I'm sure this will be the subject of future posts.)   Partly, the social media landscape has changed so rapidly with the advent of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and a host of other ways to communicate, that blogging seems a relic of another time.  A Gentler, slower, and more generous time.

Blogging didn't disappear, however.  And, more importantly, interest in blogs didn't disappear, either.  When, after years of never having checked my Blogger Dashboard, I finally checked in, I was surprised to find that from August 2012 to today, 11,958 pageviews of my blog were recorded.  Unsurprisingly, the most popular posts where the ones Google Searches for "Amelia Earhart" led to (635).  The runner up, surprising until you think of our time's obsession with racial politics, was my review of A Black Prisoner Of War, by James A. Daly and Lee Bergman.  The fact that 3 people viewed my blog yesterday and 169 people last month, tells me that my work (and don't kid yourself, it is work) isn't entirely for naught.

So, my blog is back.  To celebrate that I'll post this and reduce the price of my two eBooks shown for sale to the right to 99 cents each.

Sunday, December 21, 2014

Lost Memory Of Skin

I read too many books to buy them, so I'm dependent on the offerings of my public library.  With my move to Portland, Oregon in 2010, I've come to use Multnomah County's online eBook service through Library-to-go more than the physical library branch.  There's nothing wrong with Portland's public libraries, but age and disease have taken their toll on me.  It's easier to prowl the stacks from home.  I've got to say, too, that I find the eBook format attractive.  It's always been about content for me, not packaging, so I embrace my Kindle and Nook without hesitation.

But, that's changed my book selection habits considerably. Browsing Library-to-go is different from visiting the library's new book section (where new is always months behind the bookstores).  It's different, even, from roaming the stacks of the brick-and-mortar collection.  The online library offers several different ways to access their titles other than the mere fiction/non-fiction divide.  On-line, books may be presented by acquisition date, which reaches further back than just "new;" or, possibly by something called "relevancy," a term I've yet to see defined.  Search filters allow me to browse books that style themselves "literature," or focus on historical fiction.  The Library-to-go search engine always presents me with possible alternative titles I might like at the bottom of a selection's description page. This allows the possibility of surfing the library like you do the Internet.  Visits to Library-to-go sometimes take longer than visits to the physical library.  Russell Banks 2011 Lost Memory Of Skin was a recent acquisition of the eBook library, so it popped up when I asked for literary fiction listed by order of acquisition date. 

It has been quite a while since I've read a Russell Banks book. Lost Memory Of Skin has a lot of familiar Banksonian elements.  He has given a gritty realistic feel to its dialogue.  It examines the inner lives and thought habits of young men, and, is inspired by actual events in the real world.  As usual, through a particular fictional story he has helped us examine social problems in new ways. Those problems are distinct, yet intertwined: internet pornography, our criminal justice system, the collusion of big government and academia, and the tension between privacy, secrecy, and individual responsibility.

Banks signals his intention that the story be read as more than what the surface plot gives us when he fails to give any of the major characters names.  We have the "Kid," the "Professor," and a "Writer." They interact with characters named, "Shyster," "Rabbit," and "Paco."  The characters with real names are minor and two dimensional.  Those with street names fill out and seem real.  What we expect is turned on its head.  There is a lot of that going on here.

In a rare moment of candor, one of the characters (it would be telling to give the name, so I won't), sums up what seems to be the major dilemma faced by those in the book.  "...I don't feel guilty for all those years of deceit and betrayal, secrecy and lies.  That was the nature of the world then and now, and those are the rules of the game that runs the world.  And once you know that, you either play the game or it plays you.  I only regret that I stopped playing the game.  Now it's playing me."  Will we allow the character his self-absolution?  Will we allow it for ourselves?  Should we?  

All Banks questioning allows him to have a bit of writerly fun, too.
     "Is this what writers do all the time,"  the Kid asks the Writer, "sit around asking themselves questions that can't be answered?"
     "Yeah.  And when they can't answer them they write about them."
     "To give somebody else a chance to answer them."
     "Does it work?"

Banks must have crossed his fingers at this point in the story (page 372 of 419), because the Writer is about to fulfill his purpose in the novel.  Banks has deliberately created such a cloud of lies, secrets, and mystery that without the introduction of the Writer the poor Kid (not to mention the poor reader) might never figure out what's just happened.  So, this freelance writer of travel articles is parachuted in by Banks as an dues ex machina device to allow us to make sense of the novel and get on with our lives without feeling cheated by Mr. Banks.  This is always a tricky ploy for an author, but Banks brings it off.

Lost Memory Of Skin, HarperCollins e-books, 2011, is written in a way that marks it as a familiar Russell Banks book.  It also has some innovations that indicate a writer that continues to learn and grow.  That's what both the reader and the writer want in each new work  This one does, anyway.

Sunday, August 10, 2014

A Life Taken Prisoner: Black Prisoner of War--A Conscientious Objector's Vietnam Memoir

Book Cover Image
James A Daly's griping memoir, Black Prisoner of War rests in the unenviable position of  #2,519,472 in the Amazon ranking of books.  Its an unenviable and undeserved position.  What I read struck me as a straightforward, well written account of Daly's experience in the army. What made his experience different from most others, of course, was his being captured and held as a prisoner of war for five years in a series of camps in Vietnam.  Add into the mix his claim to have been a conscientious objector all along, and the fact that, as one of the few blacks held by the Vietnamese, he was the object of continuous and sophisticated indoctrination by his captors, and you have a unique story worth telling.  Originally published in 1975 by a now defunct company, Black Prisoner of War, was republished by the University Press of Kansas after Daly's death in 1998.  It didn't do well either time despite the efforts of co-author Bergman, a publicist.  When the book hit the stores the first time, the war was over, South Vietnam had passed into history, and America was obsessed with other issues.  Even an interview with Walter Cronkite and an appearance on the Today Show didn't get the necessary attention to make the memoir pay out.

What killed the book then, and still haunts it, was hostility against a man who was perceived as a collaborator with the enemy.  A couple of high ranking POW returnees, who strangely enough never met him during their prison camp time, preferred charges against him.  The Army quickly dismissed the charges, but the damage was done.  Certainly, the controversy around him itself justified his putting forward his story.  Daly's memoir is an important contribution to the literature of the Vietnam War. I'm a Vietnam Vet who doesn't believe that my experience was universal, so I won't judge Daly, question his motives, or his honesty. The reader should understand that Daly is giving his very personal experience, and his inner reaction to it, and not trying to write a history.

I was only the fourth reader to review the book on Amazon.  The other three reviewers all made judgments about James Daly's character, honesty, and motives.  They were negative judgments and that was reflected in the low number of stars they gave the story.  It's the nature of history to deal in objective fact, and of memoir to relay subjective and personal truth.  The two rarely coincide.  Both are valid.  I hope my favorable review and ranking do a little to redress the balance between history and memoir in Daly's case.

No review would be complete without mentioning the contribution of co-author Lee Bergman to this volume.  I found that Black Prisoner of War was, despite one reviewers claim, written in a quite readable, simple style. Few people know how difficult it is to produce this type of writing.  It takes a trained writer.  Lee Bergman spent his professional life as a publicist and I have to assume that it was he, rather than Daly, that actually wrote this story.  Jim Daly was an intelligent, but relatively uneducated and unsophisticated man.  His career aspiration after he left the army was to be a professional cook.  Not chef, cook.  He ended up being a mail carrier and a failed laundromat owner.  He may have been a nice enough guy, but he wasn't a writer.  Bergman was. That he is able to present the unusual life this simple man lived in language that reflects the complexity of the issues faced, and the earnestness of Daly's response, is a tribute to his skill as a writer.  I don't know if Bergman is still alive.  I can't find him with a Google search.  If he is out there, I'd welcome his comments on this blog post.

I came across Black Prisoner of War while researching the battle in which Daly was captured for another project.  His account of that battle was helpful to me.  Anyone with more than an idle interest in the Vietnam War will find this book worthwhile and valuable.  It presents the experience of one man in a strikingly different way than most such works.  Daly's saga is one of race, politics, religion, philosophy and individual choice.  Like him or not, agree with his choices or not, his sincerity and essential truthfulness are evident. You get the sense of what it was like to be Jim Daly in those years.  Few memoirs can leave you with the feeling you've glimpsed the core of someone else.  This one does.

Those Veterans who suffer from the effects of Agent Orange will be interested to read Daly's account of being sprayed by US aircraft as they defoliated the rice fields around his POW camp in South Vietnam. He could smell, and actually taste the stuff. It will come as no surprise to them that he died in his 50's from complications of his resultant severe diabetes. Daly, of course, didn't know the toxic effects of Agent Orange when he wrote the book.  Nor did he know he would develop a disease the government now accepts as caused by the defoliant. That we unwittingly kill our own should give us all reason to question the wisdom of war. Any war.

Tuesday, May 27, 2014

Everett Ruess: His Short Life, Mysterious Death and Astonishing Afterlife

One of the sad truths I learned when writing about Amelia Earhart was that most people are more interested in her disappearance than her life.  The allure of vanishing without a trace attracts folks.  Especially when the disappearee is young, talented, and good looking.

Everett Ruess is one of those pretty, artistically gifted missing whose story pulls us to him.  The twenty year old rode alone into the Utah desert in 1934 accompanied by two donkeys packing his drawing supplies, food, and an ambition to find something in the wilderness that would sustain him throughout a lifetime of creating art.  His donkeys were found a couple months later, as well as various items he was known to be carrying  (though not all).  Also found were a couple of his signatures on desert rocks:  "NEMO 1934".  The allusion to Jules Vern's Captain Nemo captured Ruess's attraction to high culture and craving for isolation from a society that seemed to puzzle him.

Phillip Fradkin's Everett Ruess: His Short Life, Mysterious Death, and Astonishing Afterlife documents Ruess's "short life" and "mysterious death" well and in an engrossing manner, often through Everett Ruess's own words.  However, Fradkin's account of Ruess's "astonishing Afterlife" leaves me unsatisfied.  Something about this boy still draws us to him, but it's hard to put a finger on just what.

A University of Utah art curator has classified him as a "gifted amateur." A little Googling led me to the conclusion that prints by this "gifted amateur" go for about a thousand, when they can be found. I have some work by other similarly gifted artists that might bring five bucks on a good day.  For some reason, Ruess is different.  The Ruess family were prolific writers.  Everertt produced a high volume of writing while sitting around the campfire, and his mother and father kept the letters, later publishing some of them.  Everett was sometimes a powerful writer, and was clearly working to develop his writing further.  He was, in my opinion, more talented as a writer than painter.  His writing is, however, limited to describing a desert he preferred to paint.  No one argues his writing stands alone.  Studio photos by the then well known photographer Dorothea Lange were widely published during the searches for Ruess, and they show what most would call a very good looking young man, even if one suspects his beauty is primarily his youth.  All things being equal though, do we care more about the fate of the beautiful than the ugly?  Maybe.  But, for eighty years?

Twenty year olds-pretty and plain-drop out of sight everyday.  They run away, get killed, change their names, get lost in the desert, are swallowed by bodies of water, and sometimes just vanish.  What is it about Everett Ruess that makes anyone pay any more attention to him then anybody else?  And, they do pay attention.  In 2009 a journalist and two university scientists published what turned out to be an erroneous DNA identification of bones found in the dessert as those of Ruess.  When the ID proved wrong they ran into a blizzard of criticism.  A project that one of the experts thought would be "interesting and fun," but not of much consequence, came close to ending careers. 

Perhaps it is Ruess's fascination with the beauty he discovered in the desert that keeps us interested in him.  In fact beauty was something of an obsession for him.  An obsession taught him by a mother who seemed more interested in art than family.  Stella Ruess seems to have been a very attentive mother, but she was attentive in the manner of a sculptor molding bronze.  Art was all in the Ruess household.  Since father Christopher was absent for many of the formative years of his children's lives, Stella's view was not to be tempered by his more practical bent. 

Most of what we know about Ruess comes from the promotion and publishing efforts of his mother after his disappearance.  She kept his name and work alive for decades after she must have known he was dead.  At some point Everett became an art project, not a missing boy.  The same held true for Amelia Earhart.  Her husband George had no problem with publishing her unfinished book and his own biography after her death.  I've no problem with that.  She left a stack of unpaid bills.  But, he then backed a movie that suggested her last flight was connected to a US intelligence mission against the Japanese, a scenario many today believe true simply because of that movie.  I'm sure had she popped up again after the movie release she would have been furious at the lie. 

Unfortunately, this is the way we make money in the age of celebrity.