A young woman, Alexandra, travels to Sofia, Bulgaria, for a job as an English teacher in part to help her recover from the strange disappearance (and probably death) of her brother. She has barely arrived when she helps an elderly couple and the man with them. By accident she ends up with an urn of ashes in a bag when her luggage and theirs gets a bit mixed up. The ashes are inside an ornately and unusually carved box with the name Stoyan Lazarov engraved on it. She sets out to find them with the help of a young cab driver.
As they set out on this journey, they discover they are being followed but have no idea why. The cab driver whom she calls Bobby has keen observation skills which mystify her at first. They find part of the family and then unfortunate things occur to many they meet who are relatives or are connected to the man whose name is on the box. Without initially realizing it, they become involved in Bulgarian politics and political corruption as they try to unravel the story of the box and the man whose ashes it contains.
As I read this novel, which is both a lesson on the horrible Soviet occupation of Bulgaria and human determination and resilience, I became entranced with the history and culture of Bulgaria. If you want a glimpse into another culture and its history and the beauty of the Bulgarian landscape, I highly recommend this book. It is also a mystery story that keeps the reader going.
The author also wrote an earlier book called “The Historian” which is a novel about the history of Vlad the Impaler who is the real person behind the Dracula stories. I plan to read that novel as well.
As in Part One, I am only going to provide mostly quotes from the book.
The Rise of the New West:
“The demographic shift west continued with the Cold War. In all past wars, the nation had abruptly turned from military production to peacetime economy, but after WWII, the global tension between capitalism and communism continued to bolster the new war industries. Between 1950 and 1959, defense took up 62% of the federal budget as it expanded 246%, up to $228 billion annually, and much of that money moved west…Eisenhower, and after him, John F. Kennedy, expressed concern about the rising power of what Ike called ‘the military-industrial complex.’
“Westerners and southerners agreed that desegregation, which gave Black Americans benefits paid for by tax dollars, offered prime evidence of a communist conspiracy. In 1958, Welch, the chairman of the National Association of Manufacturers…started the John Birch Society, a secret organization with the goal of stopping the creep of communism…Welch attracted supporters by explaining that the civil rights movement roiling the country was really communism.”
“In the mid-1950s, the new television sets in all those new homes were tuned to Gunsmoke, Rawhide, Bonanza to see hard working white men fighting off evil, seemingly without help from the government…The shows all embraced the myth of the American West where cowboys worked hard, stood for what is right, and protected their women from bad men and Indians…the land unpeopled by anyone of color or women, except as they fit into the larger tale of the individualists.”
“Bozell started from the same point as James Henry Hammond had in South Carolina a century earlier, and for much the same reasons…the Constitution strictly limited the functions of government, and that restrictions on property holders were an infringement on liberty.”
“…a key Republican strategist, Kevin Phillips, identified Nixon’s election as the moment that marked the ending of the New Deal era.”
“…in 1967 men determined to stop the church from embracing rights for people of color and women launched a takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention…to turn religion away from the new ways and back to fundamentalism. These fundamentalist purged moderates, insisted on a literal interpretation of the Bible, barred women from positions of authority, and in 1998 oversaw an addition to the Baptist Faith and Message advising wives to ‘submit…graciously’ to their husbands.
“Milton Friedman explained that if the government stopped worrying about protecting workers and consumers and instead cut taxes and permitted money to accumulate at the top, wealthy people would invest in new businesses…This argument, which echoed precisely what the southern slaveholders had claimed, gained traction in the West, where blaming eastern liberals for the nation’s problems became an article of faith…In the 1970s, a secretive Christian organization know as The Family began to sponsor prayer meetings in businesses, colleges, and government. By the mid-1970s, they were effectively mobilizing white evangelicals as a voting bloc.”
Oligarchy Rides Again:
“When Reagan tapped the 35 year old Michigan Congressman David Stockman to be his Budget Director, Stockman, who had grown up on “Conscience of a Conservative’, set to bring Goldwater’s dream to life…The administration turned to tax cuts. When computer simulations at the Office of Management and Budget showed the proposed tax cuts would not increase revenues but instead would explode the deficit, Stockman simply reprogrammed the computers…To protect the tax cuts that lay at the heart of his vision, Reagan and his team supported…the plan to organize business leaders, evangelicals, and social conservatives into a political juggernaut.”
“Now in control of Congress, Gingrich’s Republicans set the terms of the political debate…In April 1995, an internal memo identified tax cuts as the central principle of Republicanism…and explained why: ‘All reductions in federal spending weaken the left in America….Defunding government is defunding the left.'”
“From the beginning in the 1950s, Movement Conservative leaders had recognized that they could not win over voters with policy, for the activist state they opposed was quite popular. So they shaped their message around vignettes that made a compelling story…leaders stayed in power by deliberately crafting a narrative that harked back to western individualism. The hardworking individual–the cowboy–was endangered by the behemoth state…They invoked the corollary to the American paradox, arguing that equality for women and people of color would destroy the freedom that lay at the heart of democracy.”
“Party operatives had talked of cutting down black voting under a ‘ballot integrity’ initiative in 1986, and they bitterly opposed a 1993 Democratic expansion of voting registration…The Florida legislature took the lead passing a voter ID law to ensure that everyone who voted was a US citizen…the Florida law quickly became a purge of black voters, people presumed to vote Democratic… (this was 1997) This purge paid off in the election of 2000, when George W. Bush of Texas ran against Clinton’s vice president, Al Gore…Gore won the popular vote by more than half a million votes but was four votes short of a win in the Electoral College…the 1998 purge would decide the election.”
What Then Is This America:
“In the 2018 midterm elections, female candidates began to articulate a new vision of the country to replace the old American paradox. They emphasized community and fairness over individualism and the race, class, and gender roles that individualism has always implied. Women and voters of color are helping redefine an America for the twenty-first century…In 1612, English colonists were starving in Virginia…One hundred and seventy-five years later, America’s Founders put that idea into practice in what George Washington called a ‘great experiment’: a government based on the idea that human beings had the right to determine their own fate. Could such a government endure? Our country’s peculiar history has kept the question open.”
Rather than summarize or evaluate, I am going to provide some quotes from the book. I will say that if you want to understand the current state of affairs in the United States of America, this book provides excellent insights based on history.
From the Introduction:
“America began with a great paradox: the same men who came up with the radical idea of constructing a nation on the principle of equality also owned slaves, thought Indians were savages, and considered women inferior…it was a key figure of the new democratic republic…the ringing phrase ‘all men are created equal’ did not actually include everyone. In 1776, it seemed self-evident to leaders that not every person living in the British colonies were capable or worthy of self determination. In their mind, women, slaves, Indians, and paupers depended on the guidance of men like themselves…So long as these lesser people played no role in the body politic, everyone within it would be equal. The principle of equality depended on inequality. That central paradox–that freedom depended on racial, gender, and class inequality–shaped American history as the cultural, religious, and social patterns of the new nation grew around it.”
From The Triumph of Equality:
“The accomplishment of white male equality under the law was extraordinary…They argued that their new system made their new nation different from the Old World, which was split between a corrupt aristocracy and the lazy poor.”
“On March 4, 1858, prominent South Carolina slaveholder James Henry Hammond gave a speech in the Senate–to which he had been elected the year before despite the fact that he admitted two years earlier he had sexually assaulted his four young nieces…The greatest strength of the South was not its economy…but rather ‘the harmony of her political and social institutions.’ Every society had ‘a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life’…the people who make up the ‘mudsill of society supporting that other class that leads progress, civilization, and refinement.’ The men in the latter group are wealthy and well connected…In the South whites had made an ‘inferior race into mudsills, dull but loyal people who are content to have their labor directed by their betters.”
“Now a national figure, Lincoln articulated a democratic vision for America, one that refuted the mudsill version of Senator Hammond…he explained that Hammond’s theory divided the world into permanent castes: capitalists driving the economy and workers stuck at the bottom.”
The West:
The last stand of the Alamo became the foundational event for western American history, offering a vision of self-sacrifice and heroism. It prompted the formation of the Republic of Texas, and inspired Texans under Sam Houston to defeat Santa Anna’s troops…In the retelling of what happened at the Alamo, what got lost was the reality that the defenders were rebelling against the Mexican government in Mexican territory, and that they were fighting to defend the right to enslave people. The myth also ignored the fact that many of the defenders were Mexican opponents of Santa Ana, and that some of the defenders–including Davy Crockett–surrendered.”
Cowboy Reconstruction:
After Lincoln’s death, Johnson wanted no part of Lincoln’s and the “Union’s democratic vision. To rebuild the South, Johnson turned not to the Army, or to the ex-slaves who had supported the Union, but to former Confederates. He offered pardons to all but 1500 Confederate leaders…states codified the racial violence that swept across the South in the summer of 1865. As employers cheated workers out of wages, gangs beat and raped African Americans into submissive behavior, and whites attacked their black neighbors, southern state legislatures created the Black Codes.”
The West and The South Join Forces:
“The resurgence of the South’s ideology came from the nation’s new bloc: the western states. Easterners had made the mistake of thinking the westerners would join their coalition, only to discover that due to their peculiar history and extractive economy , westerners had more in common with white antebellum southerners than with easterners. By the 1890s a few wealthy men dominated western society. Poor white men had little opportunity. people of color and women even less, and leaders worked to keep it that way. Still, as in the East before the Civil War, the myth of the individualist convinced Americans that the west was the land of opportunity…Theodore Roosevelt’s war record took the western ideal and put it on the national stage. By the end of the century, Americans embraced the cowboy image and vowed to spread it across the globe, putting into law that some people are better than others. Once again freedom was hierarchical.
“In the early part of the twentieth century, southern towns began to erect statues of Confederates, making them into western style heroes and individualists. The rewriting of the past created momentum for women’s suffrage…Rebecca Latimer Felton was a reformer who wanted educational and prison reform as well as women’s suffrage. She was also in favor of lynching her black neighbors who wanted equal rights…The Ku Klux Klan reformed and rebounded in the 1920s…Meanwhile in the West, immigrants and Indians were falling victim to a legal system that established castes. In Texas, officials were hardening a racial system that classified migrants across the Mexican border by race. In Arizona, a state law singled out ‘treason against the state’ as punishable by death aimed at Apache and Navahos who might fight the legal system ensnaring them. In Oklahoma…corrupt legislators arranged affairs to steal valuable land from Indians.
Piketty is Professor of Economics at the Ecole des hautes etudes en sciences sociales and Paris School of Economics. Sandel is a Professor of Government at Harvard University. This small book (119 pages) is the discussion between the two on the value of equality. In this discussion they debate what citizens and governments should do to narrow the economic gaps that separate people. This includes looking at the dangers of political instability and environmental issues. Rather than summarize their discussions, I am going to quote various parts:
“Mainstream politicians…have faith in the market because of a belief that markets deliver rising prosperity and yield Wall Street campaign contributions. A deeper reason…is that markets seem to offer a way of sparing us as democratic citizens from engaging in messy , contentious, and controversial debates about how to value goods and how to value the various contributions that people make to the economy and to the common good.”
“We live in pluralist societies. We disagree about the nature of the good life. We disagree about how to value goods.”
Because of the above, it is just easier to use the market and avoid the discourse as to what is worth more, the work of a teacher or a laborer or a hedge fund manager.
“Those on the left and those on the right may may well disagree about what counts as the dignity of work and how to promote it…many working people and many without university degrees feel that elites look down on them, don’t value the work they do…individual upward mobility is not an adequate answer to inequality.”
They discuss credentialing and note that the government spends billions more on higher education than technical education. They note that this form of credentialism is something that many see as an acceptable form of prejudice. A survey was done of prejudices in both Europe and the US:
“The group most disfavored by the respondents were the poorly educated.”
They discuss corporate tax rates and world wide efforts to have a world tax on multinational corporations:
“So, really, it’s a game between tax administrations in Washington, Paris, and Berlin to split some of the tax revenues that are now in tax havens among them, leaving aside the countries in the South.” –referring to the Southern Hemisphere where most of the poorest countries in the world exist. “Don’t companies have a patriotic duty to pay taxes and contribute to the common good in the country that makes their success possible?”
They view the success of far right groups and the election of Trump as more due to job losses in manufacturing than due to the inflow of migrants. They note an anti-immigrant view in places where there are even few immigrants and see it as related to the destruction of jobs:
“It’s not about immigration, but it’s about feeling looked down upon. It’s about recognition. It’s about dignity. Throughout this conversation, we’ve discussed three aspects of equality. One is economy, about the distribution of income and wealth. A second is political, about voice and power and participation. Then there is a third category, about ‘dignity,’ ‘status,’ ‘respect,’ ‘recognition,’ ‘honor,’ and ‘esteem.’ My hunch is that the third is the most powerful politically and maybe also morally. Any hope we have of reducing inequality in the first two dimensions, economically and politically, will depend on creating conditions for greater equality of recognition, honor, dignity,. and respect.”
Imagine a society where everyone has shelter and love.
My 15th book of the year was “Imagination, A Manifesto”, Ruha Benjamin. After going over the history of racism, poverty, and misogyny in the US, the author, a professor at Princeton, details various ways individuals and groups can imagine and act toward creating a better world for all. She delineates the endless obstacles to attaining this better world but claims through collectively imagining detailed ways the world can be better, people can work together to attain such a world. She admits individuals rarely have the power to do this alone but working with others, we can make dramatic differences, but first we have to imagine what this better world will look like. We now are prisoners of hierarchies, exploitation, and frequent violence, but it does not have to be this way. The Appendix includes Discussion Prompts, Project Based Prompts, and Speculative Prompts to help readers get started imagining differently. She quotes Toni Morrison–“Dream a little before you think.”
I finished this book on New Year’s Eve, missing my goal of reading a book a week all this past year, but not by much. No excuses except one book I read was nearly 800 pages which took a bit longer.
This last book was full of surprising information. I had no idea that Teddy Roosevelt and Booker T. Washington were friends. This book is very detailed with loads of historical information about the lives of both of these men. Born worlds apart in terms of freedom, economics, and race, they both had a goal to further the status of Black people. In terms of his political future, Roosevelt made a big mistake when he invited Washington to the Whitehouse for a family dinner. Once this event became known, white people in the South were outraged. Jim Crow incidents, e.g. lynching, increased. Roosevelt felt he had to backtrack some to save himself and this included one his worst decisions in terms of racial equality. Meanwhile, they tried to hide their relationship more, did not visit each other as often, and Washington had to go to great lengths to appease some whites in the South to keep Tuskegee growing and flourishing. W.E.B. Du Bois viewed Washington negatively and thought he went too far to appease white people and did not do enough for his own race. Du Bois who had grown up free in the North did not understand Washington’s viewpoints and did not know what he did secretly to help Black people. If you are interested in the actual history of this period and how these three men affect the present, I highly recommend this book. There are 35 pages of references, notes, and documentation at the end of the books for those who want to read further on this topic and time period.
Without doubt this ranks among the most horrifying books I have ever read. Every life story (there are ten) discussed in detail illustrates failures in the US justice system:
–inept police, sheriff departments, and judges
–judicial corruption
-criminals paid to give false testimony in return for lower sentences or pay
-sheriff departments, police, and judges unwilling to admit they made a mistake when evidence clearly indicates they are in error
-racism
In one case ten years ago, an innocent person in Texas was actually put to death. The governor refused to acknowledge the evidence given to him that proved the person was innocent. The majority of the cases discussed in this book occurred in Texas although this sort of thing occurs throughout the country.
Note: One of the authors, Jim McCloskey, founded Centurion Ministries, the first organization in the world focused on freeing those wrongfully convicted. The state with the most exonerated individuals is Texas.
Johnson, a columnist for The Washington Post, notes that the US was founded on a set of ideals but for much of its history agreement on what those are ideals are has not existed. What are these ideals, who are they for? Today there is little agreement on much of this. There seems to be a lack of a common vision on what a democratic system is and should be and for whom. The essays in this book address these questions both today and from the origins of the country when only white men who owned land could vote. This book also discusses how different races in the country and the changing predominance of cultures affects the ideals people hold and the kind of country they envision for themselves.
As a Black man who is a retired Navy Commander, he also discusses his own experience, extensive research, and personal views. This short book is an excellent primer on how different races and cultures experience living in this country and their varying visions of the meaning of democracy.
Starting with ancient Egypt and later with the ancient Greeks and Romans and ending in current times, this highly researched book (there are 15 pages of Bibliography) details millennia of lies told about and attacks against women in power. Ridiculous things have been attributed to women, powers that no human has, in order to control them. Here is an example: Pliny the Elder (23-79 CE) wrote that menstruating women caused hailstorms, lightning, and whirlwinds. And worse yet, demons come from this blood (various medieval medical authorities) and it can shrivel the penis.
Then there is the whole thing about raging hormones. The word hysteria, which supposedly is an ailment of women, comes from the Greek word for uterus. During the 2020 presidential campaign, Marco Rubio, currently a possible candidate for vice president, tweeted a photo of ten missiles exploding and asked if you want a woman a heartbeat away from the presidency.
During the Middle Ages millions of women were put to death in various horrible manners after being accused of witchcraft. Even in current times various male political candidates and media announcers (a Newsmax journalist, Zinke of Montana, Ben Carson, Chris Matthews–list is almost endless) have called powerful political women witches. The victims of these pejorative rantings even include Margaret Thatcher when she held office.
Marie Antoinette never said, “Let them eat cake”. Various forms of this phrase had been around for over one hundred years. Ann Boleyn originally wanted to marry the love of her life who also wanted to marry her but the powers at the time, including Henry VIII, forbade this. Many of the ridiculous stories about Cleopatra can be easily disproven, e.g her being so rich she dissolved a giant pearl in vinegar to prove her wealth. Unless powered, pearls do not dissolve in vinegar. Catherine de Medici was attacked as some sort of sex pervert when she was 42, obese, and anything but a sexy seductress.
The documented lives of many powerful women for the last three thousand years contains endless abuse of all sorts. How is this possible? Because there is an informal Misogynist Handbook that has been used for millennia to control women. The above is only a smattering of what you will learn about this Handbook if you read this book. In the last chapter, the author does provide recommendations for overcoming this abuse of women. However, she also notes currently there is a “furious backlash against this long-delayed crawl toward justice, resulting in the increasing viciousness of sexist tweets and memes, more violent threats, more savage abuse.”
Want to know how the top 1 percent, the super wealthy live and control nearly everything in the US? Read this book. In a mere 117 pages, McDonell explains his own life and that of fellow 1 percenters. He details his early life, the private school he attended, the family connections, summers taking sailing lessons in the Hamptons, and vacations using private jets to places like the Galapagos Islands. At 18, he was able to get his first novel published in part because of his family connections to a famous publisher. Eventually, he left this life behind to become a foreign correspondent in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In this book he details how the super wealthy hoard wealth, pass it from one generation to another, and how outsiders, the poor and those not white, are kept out. Here are a few quotes from the book:
“I began to see how, in the United States of America and elsewhere, success almost always, and predominantly, depends upon wealth–and frequently comes at the expense of the less wealthy.”
“We in the one percent like to believe in meritocracy, even fairness.” At this point he lists several of famous people who rose to wealth and power from poorer circumstance and explains how this is used to make the “one percenters feel good, they distract from the possibility of a more humane distribution of wealth.”
Why do the one percenters behave as they often do? He interviews several whom he knows through his private school connections. “The fear they share was loss of wealth. Without ever saying so, they were very much afraid of losing their country houses, the barn converted for their kids sleepovers, the space for the grand piano, the green houses, pied-a-terre where their mother-in-law stayed without interfering in everyone’s business, the airport lounge that allowed them to enjoy pleasures among their own, in quiet. They were afraid of supermarket processed cheese, preferred organic stuff which they believed would keep them alive longer….they were afraid of losing their Prada bags…the cashmere….They feared losing wealth not for its own sake but because it was justified, in their own minds, by intelligence, hard work, determination—that is by character.” They truly seem to believe they are smarter and harder working than other people.
writingontherim 