Perhaps most impressively, Hosseini somehow manages to teach the reader about the complex politics of Afghanistan along the way — all without exposition or blatant asides.  The back-cover quotes the Los Angeles Times saying, “[Hosseini] offers us the sweep of historic upheavals narrated with the intimacy of family and village life.”  If only history focused on the people more often.

Hosseini, more than other authors I can think of, frames his books like songs, with a sort of verse-chorus-verse-chorus mentality.  He repeats certain phrases and mirrors certain events throughout the book, joining disparate sections and reinforcing central themes.  In The Kite Runner, ‘For you, a thousand times over’ took on a refrain-like feeling … and A Thousand Splendid Sunshas similar moments, with events, actions, and phrases taking on a deeper meaning.  Hosseini doesn’t hide these repetitions nor does he push them on the reader; in fact I would bet that a more thorough reading would reveal many more parallels than I initially caught.

The rest of this post is dedicated to quotes that stuck out to me while reading the book.  I’m not going to explain why I’ve chosen them and, further, I warn you that they contain spoilers for those that haven’t read the book yet.

• “Learn this now, and learn it well, my daughter: Like a compass needle that points north, a man’s accusing finger always finds a woman. Always. You remember that, Mariam.” [7]
• “Only one skill. And it’s this: tahamul. Endure.” [17]
• “And I want you to invite my brothers and sisters, too.  I want to meet them.  I want us all to go together.  It’s what I want.” [25]
• And as her heart pounded, her mind wondered what excuse he would use that night to pounce on her. There was always something, some minor thing that would infuriate him, because no matter what she did to please him, no matter how thoroughly she submitted to his wants and demands, it wasn’t enough. [90]
• She said the Soviet Union was the best nation in the world, along with Afghanistan. It was kind to its workers, and its people were all equal.  Everyone in the Soviet Union was happy and friendly, unlike America, where crime made people afraid to leave their homes.  And everyone in Afghanistan would be happy too, she said, once the antiprogressives, the backward bandits, were defeated. [101]
• A society has no chance of success if its women are undereducated. [103]
• Sometimes Laila wondered why Mammy had even bothered having her. People, she believed now, shouldn’t be allowed to have new children if they’d already given away all their love to their old ones. [107]
• She liked how they started each meal with a bowl of fresh yogurt, how they squeezed sour oranges on everything, even their yogurt, and how they made small, harmless jokes at each other’s expense. [117]
• The only enemy an Afghan cannot defeat is himself. [121]
• “We’ll take care of her Laila jan,” one of the women said with an air of self-importance.  Laila had been to funerals before where she had seen women like this, women who relished all things that had to do with death, official consolers who let no one trespass on their self-appointed duties. [124]
• “I listen to that clock ticking in the hallway. Then I think of all the ticks, all the minutes, all the hours and weeks and months and years waiting for me. All of it without them. And I can’t breathe then, like someone’s stepping on my heart, Laila.  I get so weak. So weak I just want to collapse somewhere.” [129]
• Shewould never leave her mark on Mammy’s heart the way her brothers had, because Mammy’s heart was like a pallid beach where Laila’s footprints would forever wash away beneath the waves of sorrow that swelled and crashed, swelled and crashed. [130]
• “Some things I can teach you. Some you learn from books. But there are things that, well, you just have to see and feel. [134]
• For Mammy, he would brush aside this daydream of his the way he flicked specks of flour from his coat when he got home from work. [136]
• Watching the kiss, Laila felt strangely conspicuous all at once.  She became intensely aware of her heart thumping, of the blood thudding in her ears, of the shape of Tariq beside her, tightening up, becoming still. The kiss dragged on.  It seemed of utmost urgency to Laila, suddenly, that she not stir or make a noise. [141]
• “If it isn’t Laili and Majnoon,” referring to the star-crossed lovers of Nezami’s popular twelfth-century romantic poem - a Farsi version of Romeo and Juliet, Babi said, though he added that Nezami had written his tale of ill-fated lovers four centuries before Shakespeare. [148]
• How could he leave her? She slapped him. Then she slapped him again and pulled at his hair, and he had to take her by the wrists, and he was saying something she couldn’t make out, he was saying it softly, reasonably, and, somehow, they ended up brow to brow, nose to nose, and she could feel the heat of his breath on her lips again.  And when, suddenly, he leaned in, she did too. [164]
• One could not count the moons that shimmer on her roofs, Or the thousand splendid suns that hide behind her walls. [172]
• Mariam had never before spoken in this manner, had never stated her will so forcefully.  It ought to have felt exhilirating, but the girl’s eyes had teared up and her face was drooping, and what satisfaction Mariam had found from this outburst felt meager, somehow illicit. [202]
• It wasn’t the fear of bleeding to death that made her drop the spoke, or even the idea that the act was damnable - which she suspected it was.  Laila dropped the spoke because she could not accept what the Mujahideen readily had: that sometimes in war innocent life had to be taken.  her war was against Rasheed. The baby was blameless. And there had been enough killing already.  Laila had seen enough killing of innocents caught in the cross fire of enemies. [253]
• I thought I was immune, you know, safe. as though there was some accountant up there somewhere, a guy with a pencil tucked behind his ear who kept track of these things, who tallied up, and he’d look down and say, ‘Yes, yes, he can have this, we’ll let it go. He’s paid some dues already, this one.’ [300]
• Though there had been moments of beauty in it, Mariam knew that life for the most part had been unkind to her.  But as she walked the final twenty paces, she could not help but wish for more of it. … One last time, Mariam did as she was told. [329]
• In the middle of the night, when Laila woke up thirsty, she found their hands still clamped together, in the white-knuckle, anxious way of children clutching balloon strings. [335]
• “I’m sorry,” Laila says, marveling at how every Afghan story is marked by death and loss and unimaginable grief. And yet, she sees, people find a way to survive, to go on.  Laila thinks of her own life and all that has happened to her, and she is astonished that she too has survived, that she is alive and sitting in this taxi listening to this man’s story. [350]
• In a few years, this little girl will be a woman who will make small demands on her life, who will never burden others, who will never let on that she too has had sorrows, disappointments, dreams that have been ridiculed. A woman who will be like a rock in a riverbed, enduring without complaint, her grace not sullied but shaped by the turbulence that washed over her. [355]
• Laila has moved on. Because in the end she knows that’s all she can do. That and hope. [363]

In its silence, a book is a challenge: it can’t lull you with surging music or deafen you with screeching laugh tracks or fire gunshots in your living room; you have to listen to it in your head.  A book won’t move your eyes for you the way images on a screen do.  It won’t move your mind unless you give it your mind, or your heart unless you put your heart in it.  It won’t do the work for you. To read a story well is to follow it, to act it, to feel it, to become it - everything short of writing it, in fact. Reading is not “interactive” with a set of rules or options, as games are; reading is actual collaboration with the writer’s mind. [37]

Ah.

How did I end up reading a book that establishes “hard and fast rules to help modern women navigate their love lives via technology”?  A book that “offers invaluable tips on how to analyze text, timing, and tone”… on how to “gauge his feelings without seeing his body language or even hearing his voice”? How could I not!?  The Joy of Text promised to be the secret playbook of the other team. 

The content did not, unfortunately, match my lofty expectations.  Surprise, surprise: girls look at grammar and spelling to make sure you’re smart and girls care about how long you take to reply to a message (and it varies from email to IM to txt).  Probably the most useful point in the book was simply that online ‘courtship’ is far different from online ‘relationship management’: that starting a relationship online is different from using technology to communicate with your significant other.

Anyway, here are my favorite quotes/takeaways:

• [Brilliant] He spends an hour crafting genius emails to women he woos - and an additional ten minutes inserting typos: “If the girl’s really busy at work or playing hard-to-get, I want to send the impression that I don’t have time to proofread my work and that I’m not focusing on her so intensely. I want to give the impression that I just zipped it off.” [Note: he transposes letters or repeats the last letter of a word … but he “would never use double negatives or typoe the wrong form of a word, such as ‘too’ instead of ‘two.’”] [36-37]
• [Wierd] Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. [39]
• [On drunk txts, which I would argue as just-as-bad as drunk dialing] There’s no good time to send a drunk text. … Unlike the booty call, in which your conscience has to talk to (and hear the plea of) a desperate partner, booty texts are sent without a spoken word. Your ears can’t cue your conscience about this bad idea, so your judgement is even more impaired. [44]
• [On not appearing desperate on IM] If you’re dyyyyyyying to send him a hello or confirm plans, don’t. Nobody who causes you this much anxiety will keep you happy for the long-term.  … Stare longingly at his avatar, if you must. He can’t see you drool. [48]
• [This is getting complicated] If you must abruptly bold from a group outing to meet a friend in need, a quick apology via text the next day clears up confusion. In this case, immediate text woudl say he was on your mind all night; a call would appear too anxious; and ignoring the situation altogether is disrepectful. Catching on? [51]
• [There should be a one-word term for the following] Personally, I flirt much harder over technology because I enjoy the rush of knowing someone wants me as badly as I profess to want him.  If I amp up my vibe, it’s twice as exciting to anticipate a response. The problem is that when my techno-persona says harlot, and my in-person aura says demure, my date’s virtual blue balls make him frustrated, annoyed, and confused.
• [I never realized this] Avoid “Take care” at all costs. It’s the ultimate kiss-off, best saved for the final ditch. [68]
• [I wonder if this is followed]
  If He: Waits until the day-of to ask you out via email or txt …
  Then You: Accept, but only if he gives good reason … and if you’ve had three successful, planned dates already, which makes this a whim. If he pulls the move before you’ve been on great date #3, tell him you have [specific and enviable] plans with a “friend.” And then make some.
  Why It Works: Techno-relating lends itself to casual, last-minute invites because of its casual, fast talk and delivery. You can be relaxed without being too easy-access.  Set a standard about dating preferences before your fourth date, or he may fall into a lazy routine. [81]
• [Seriously, no guy ever gets his buddy to help him write his love letters for him.  That Kristina brings it up as a possibility makes me worried that women do it…]
  Change in font details … Unusual spacing that indicates a forward … Change in capitalization style … differences in spelling and grammar … change in email length … change in thought exposition … variations in phrasing and word choice … amended punctuation … variations in tone. [91]
• [Clearly had a personal experience…] In brief: socio-pathetic [sic] men hate leaving the house, assume multiple dating personas, and/or lack basic functional social skills.  They entice you to step into their life - despite the fact that they haven’t showered, shaved, or eaten anything by Cheez Whiz sandwiches for a week.  These men will chase you, flatter you, and yet never encourage live interaction because they’re nervous, reclusive trolls. They have trouble discerning between right and wrong, and the only persona a socio-pathetic dater puts out into the world is a false portrayal of himself. [102]
• [More fun comparisons]
  Shy: He’s too bashful to spoon, so his feet snuggle yours.
  Socio-pathetic: He asks you to sleep with your web cam on, so he can sense your presence.

  Shy: He dazzles you with quick wit over IM, but struggles in person
  Socio-pathetic: He dazzles you with quick wit over IM, and repeats each joke in person.

Finally, I’ll end with some truly good advice from Kristina: “Real relationships happen between real people - and techno-relating is a supplement to, not a substitute for, a solid bond.  If you want your relationship to thrive, make sure that neither you nor your guy dismisses the crux of what brought you together in the first place: common interests, mutual friends, similar goals, like-minded values, comparable sex drives, and so on. If your opposites attracted, then exploit those differences to their most satisfying ends.”

Actually, I’d rather end with some sillyness: “the five W’s of meet-up: Who’s coming? What should I wear? Where are we going? When do we show? Why didn’t you make a reservation?“

The book is off-put-tingly partisan (anti-Bush/Republican) and is lacking in historical discussion surrounding many of the issues it raises.  Just about all of the anecdotal evidence against current voting practices were pulled from the last few decades; a broader timescale would’ve been far more convincing.

There were some good points — certainly enough to warrant some reflection.  And so I will, step by step:

1. “Secure the Vote”
Translation:Have federal regulations around voting to eliminate fraudulent voting.

Disagree. I agree that the vote should be secured and fraud eliminated as best possible — but I think Hill’s centralizing approach is worse than our current system.  A decentralized state-run voting is less likely to be hijacked then a centralized voting system with centralized regulations. 

If states run their own elections, some will be better and some will be worse (Florida) — but at least there will be some competition and different approaches. Further, Hill calls for “creating a bureaucracy of impartial, non-partisan election officials.”  He follows up that sentence saying “We should have learned this lesson in the 2000 presidential election…” — yet I ask Hill whether he has learned that no one is impartial or non-partisan?  His idea is impossible and would be worse than decentralized systems.

My recommendation to secure the vote?  Let states manage their own elections and let the people in those states demand methods that ensure their vote counted.  If voters don’t care enough about that foundation, their votes won’t matter anyway.

2. Expand Voter Participation
Translation: Implement universal default voter registration, enfranchise Washington DC residents/criminals/expats, have weekend voting…

Generally Agree. I agree that Washington DC residents, criminals, … that every citizen should get a chance to vote.  If criminals aren’t allowed to vote, what would stop an overpowering government from incarcerating rebels and depriving them from democratically changing the government?  (of course if the government jailing dissidents, the government might not hold very democratic elections anyway…)

Where I don’t agree with Hill is universal default voter registration and voting holidays — but mainly in semantics and vision. Hill, as usual, argues for national committees for fairness, national holidays … everything in thick national brush strokes where I would rather have many thin, detailed pencil lines of regulations created on the state-level. 

I agree voting should be a right and should be easy; that right is black-and-white and should be constitutionally protected for every citizen at a national level … but making voting “easy” is a gray area that no one can really agree on.  That issue should be put to states, where citizens could vote to have a voting holiday or not, to auto-register voters or not, etc.So, yes — guarantee and protect the right to vote at a national level for everyone … but don’t try to regulate the ease of voting at a national level.

3. Instant Runoff Voting
Translation: Use instant runoff voting in which voters rank candidates and the tallying takes into account lower choices until one candidate has a clear majority.

Agree. The Constitution does not specify how elections are to be held, so using Instant Runoff Voting is constitutionally fine if voters desire it.  So, is it desirable?  I think so.

Instant runoff voting lets people choose their favorite candidate even if they don’t have a good chance of winning.  It would prevent the “I won’t vote for this candidate because he can’t win” mentality that makes our current elections look like a flash mob.

We’ve got the technology to tally IRV votes quickly.  Let’s make people aware of it and get them demanding their local elections are run that way.

4. Proportional Representation
Translation: Divide single-seats into multiple seats with guaranteed representation after a certain percentage.

Disagree/Don’t Understand.  I really don’t understand this argument.  Hill seems to be saying that a single seat should be divided and then that if candidates reach a certain percentage they get one of those seats, thereby promoting bi-partisanship, which the current ‘winner-take-all’ system doesn’t.

I can sort-of understand the reasoning … but this sort of system seems like it would simply create more parties (no a bad thing-in-itself) to fill the extra slots.  If a seat used to only have one representative and suddenly had three, we’d probably soon have four parties vying for those slots.  That’s not really bad … but it’s also a somewhat arbitrary limit on how many parties could exist.  If we have IRV, we solve part of the two-party system problem and this proportionate stuff wouldn’t be needed.

5. Direct Election of the President
Translation: Have the President elected by the people directly instead of the electoral college system that provides ‘more’ representation to the less populous states.

Disagree. Agree. At first, I felt like a direct election of the President trampled on the founding father’s desire to have the President represent the United States, in which case the Electoral College is a fairer system for state voting rights than direct election.

My biggest gripe with the Electoral College is simply that it’s makeup — the “whole number of Representatives and Senators” in Congress, currently 100 senators and 435 representatives (plus three spots for District of Columbia) for a total of 538 Electoral College representatives — under represents the populous states. California is 55-times more populous (36M) than North Dakota (600K) yet only has 18-times the number of electoral college votes (55 to 3).  That’s not right.  However, to fix it and stay constitutional, you’d have to add a bunch more politicians to the House of Representatives beyond the current 435-cap … do we really want that?  California would need 163 House Representatives (165 electoral votes) to North Dakota’s 1 House Representative (3 electoral votes) to have the proportional representation in the Electoral College.  Yikes!  [And at that point, Cali’s would have 163-times more representation in the House than North Dakota even though the difference is only 55-times.]

[Note: the Constitution originally called for one representative for every 30,000 people … but that didn’t quite work out.  The history of apportionment is pretty interesting/complicated.  A good read.]

My second gripe isn’t so much with the Electoral College but with the state practices of winner-take-all (so that all of the state’s electoral ballots go to the winner).  Maine and Nebraska split proportionately … why don’t more states do it?  Why don’t more voters ask to change their state’s policies?  The winner-take-all is what really breaks the electoral college to me and seemingly disenfranchises voters.

I would prefer to be ‘constitional’ by adding more congressmen for the more populous states and also hope that states would change from the winner-take-all mentality … but maybe it’s just easier to have the President elected directly? 

[Note: One of Hill’s strongest points is that the current system creates ‘battleground’ states like Ohio and Florida where the candidates spend all of their time since they know the decision will come down to those states.  The winner-take-all electoral policies seem to be the biggest culprit behind this … if the difference between winning 70%-30% and 60%-40% actually mattered in electoral votes candidates would need to campaign more broadly to win every critical %-point.]

6. More Proportional Senate
Translation: Change the 2-Senator per state rule to make the senate representative of population.

Disagree. Hill brings up that Alexander Hamilton and James Madison were originally very strong critics of the 2-seat-per-state Senate system and election by the house rather than the people.  The ‘Great Compromise’ was the two-branch legislature that we have now, with proportional representation in the House and equal apportionment in the Senate (and until the 17th Amendment in 1913, Senators were elected by the Representatives rather than the people.)

The 2-per-state Senate system is an important reminder that the United States is a Republic of states, not one borderless nation. [Hill neglects to mention that Madison (and Jefferson) founded the Democratic-Republican party in support of a weaker central government that the 2-seat Senate system helps protect.] 

As the Federal government has grown, the desire to make it more representative of the populace grows … but the solution is not to make the Senate more representative … but to make the Federal government smaller and give power back to the States, where representation is naturally closer-to-the-voter. 

The problem is not proportion of Senators, it is the proportion of power given to the Senators. 

Changing the Senate into a proportional body (or moving to a one-branch system of just the House) pushes more power into a central government than the founders desired.

I am glad the 17th Amendment made senators directly elected since that change removed a fairly silly barrier between the people and their Senators … but changing the equal apportionment composition of the Senate is a step towards one national identity that the Founders rightfully distrusted.

7. “Free the Airwaves”
Translation: Force television/radio/etc groups to provide free airtime for political discussion, debate, advertisements, etc.

Disagree. Hill argues that “a modern democracy requires broad public access to free and fair media.”  Yes, certainly.  But why would we want to the government (run by self-interested politicians) to control media subsidies?  That’s a recipe for disaster.  When did Americans start supporting political propaganda?

Hill’s utopian vision of a open-minded and state-mandated political discussion is a paradox reminiscent of his ‘impartial, non-partisan election officials’.  If the subsidies for political debate are coming from the government, I guarantee they will be affected by political power.  Having citizens believe state-programs are impartial is even worse than having none.

We live in an age of technology that lets anyone voice their opinion on the internet and reach millions.  Way back when Madison and Hamilton managed to distribute the influential Federalist Papers and Thomas Paine changed public sentiment with Common Sense … people get their ideas out.  Yes, TV and Radio dominated communication over the last fifty years without enough skepticism … but that’s changing. 

I don’t disagree with Hill that voters should be better informed.  I don’t disagree it’s disappointing that major television networks dedicate less time to politics than they used to.  But forcing the networks to provide political time isn’t going to make the viewer any more interested or informed (and the networks will find a way to charge normal viewers for their lost opportunity cost).  Having a better educated populace that wants political commentary and analysis is really the only solution to having a better informed populace. If consumers wanted it, networks would provide it. 

My recommendation: Keep the government out of shaping political discussion.  Let private foundations, companies, groups, and individuals act in their own self-interest to promote their own agendas.  People can judge for themselves which to believe.  If people don’t naturally question the motives of their source of information, we’re doomed anyway.  I believe people will question, though.

P.S. I forgot to mention that I disagree with Hill’s recommendation to use anti-trust laws to break up media conglomerates and subsidize daily newspapers, among others.  Again, I believe voters are smart enough to be skeptical in the face of conglomerates.

8. “Minimize Money’s Role”
Translation:Support public financing of campaigns, set ‘appropriate’ donation limits, create spending caps, give airtime to candidates on radio and tv …

Disagree. Hill goes all out on this one to limit the right to free speech.  He’s also extraordinarily hand-wavey with regard to any of the “gray” words like “appropriate” donation or spending limits, or how “free” media time will be allocated between candidates, or which third-party and independent candidates will be allowed in debates. Who will decide?  Another impartial bureaucracy?  Fairyland.

Again, all of these ‘reforms’ rest on the premise that money can win an election rather than ideas.  But I’m not swayed by money.  I actually care about ideas and judge them on their merit.  If America is composed of people that vote based on the fancy jingle on a political commercial, the government can’t save us from ourselves.

My recommendation: Work to make sure the populace is smart enough to be skeptical of commercials, to care about issues.  People that are worried about the populace not voting well should donate money to non-profits that educate voters about how to seek information and care about issues.  Teach uninformed voters how to fish rather than just give them fish.

9. “Reform the Supreme Court”
Translation: Get rid of life-term appointments for Supreme Court Judges, change the appointment process, have age limits.

Agree: I reluctantly agree that the Constitutional life-time appointments of Judges “overachieves” (my term) its goal of keeping Judges free from volatile political trends. 

Although the lifetime appointment ensures Judges are not beholden to appointers every few years, the current system leaves Judges on the bench and away from regular citizenship for too long.  The current Chief Justice, John Roberts, wrote earlier in his career: “A judge insulated from the normal currents of life for 25 or 30 years was a rarity then but is becoming commonplace today.  Setting a term of, say, 15 years would ensure that federal judges would not lose all touch with reality through decades of ivory tower existence.” [159]

Hill reminds readers that the Constitution did not originally have term-limits for the President, so amending it to have, say, 15 year one-time appointments is indeed possible. [note: My home state Massachusetts was one of only two states to reject ratifying the 22nd Amendment of presidential term limits.  Hah.]

What would the founders say?  Why didn’t they impose term limits on the President, Congress, or Judicial system, especially when they so-feared a monarchy and aristocratic ruling class?  Wouldn’t term limits have been a good idea by preventing career politicians?

Yes, term-limits would prevent lifetime politicians … but term-limits also limit the choice of the people.  If people want to elect a politician over-and-over, why not let them?  Further, a politician who is in his last term is not be as effective (’lame duck presidency’).  I do think career politicians often lose touch with reality … but that is a fault of the voters for not voting them out rather than a fault of the system.

And yet, if I don’t support term-limits for Presidents and Congressmen, why would I support it for Judges?  Simply because the Judges are not elected by the people and therefore not enough ‘beholden’ to popular opinion.  (Granted, the mob-mentality of popular opinion is not something to be entirely sought after, either.)  A long-term but not lifetime appointment - as almost every State currently has - would ensure more fluidity in the Court and closer ties to ‘the people.’

Two other points:

1. I do disagree with Hill’s argument to have age limits for Judges.  I think our Judges should be sane (and procedures to remove them from office if they are not) … but an age limit is unnecessary, especially if we have term-limits.
2. I disagree that the appointment process should require 2/3 of the Senate for confirmation rather than the current 1/2, which Hill argues would promote more bi-partisan selection of Judges.  It might, but I’m simply happy with term-limits. 

[And finally: Hill’s recount of the Supreme Court’s 2000 Florida recount (pun intended)  on pages 155-156 was a very nice summary of the decision. Makes me cringe.]

10. “Restore Faith in Government”
Translation: Promote “smart government” rather than “limited” or “big” government; have the government ‘market itself’ like corporations do, with branding and advertising to promote its successes.

Disagree. Yikes.  Hill takes a marketing approach to restoring faith in government rather than actually improving its services. Great.  Isn’t that what Ford/GM/Chrysler keep trying (and failing)?

He takes this approach claiming that people are too critical of the success of government programs.  I simply have to quote this entire paragraph for the full effect:

Americans can point to many public sector achievements.  Whether the service is mail delivery, the care of seniors via Social Security and Medicare, the construction of roads and highways, telecommunications, hospitals, schools, defense, scientific research, national parks, railroads, airways and waterways, environmental protection, the Internet, and much, much more, government has been a leading player, oftentimes partnering with America’s businesses, other times restraining business from doing harm to workers, communities, and the environment.  Government has been the driving force behind regulating the economy, interest rates, and inflation as well as creating policies that grow and maintain the middle class, such as pro-home ownership, worker protections, the 40-hour workweek, and paid vacations and holidays.  And, yes, the federal government has been there many times in the past to shoulder the burden following natural disasters.  The United States is acknowledged by all four corners as the world’s leading superpower, the wealthiest and most powerful nation in human history - how could we have achieved that status is government was such a blunder?  American’s myopia on this point is astounding. [173]

What’s truly astounding is that Hill holds up the same examples I would use … but uses them to support the opposite conclusion I would. 

Hill implies my disagreement with the “success” of government is a “distortion of reality and substantially a result of the relentless right-wing antigovernment propaganda blitz.” [174]  Is the right-wing propaganda the same reason the founders wanted smaller government?

Hill helpfully quotes Madison’s “defense” of government which much more eloquently states my position: “It has been said that all Government is evil.  It would be more proper to say that the necessity of any government is a misfortune.  This necessity however exists; and the problem to be solved is, not what form of government is perfect, but which of the forms is least imperfect.” [172]

I think the answer to how America achieved it’s greatness was to the degree that America was the best government out there - the least imperfect if you will - the government that promoted business and individual economic freedom more than any other nation.  Still, we can do better.

Oh — and the idea of the government launching a marketing campaign to promote it’s success?  As a tax-paying citizen - or customer, if you will - I don’t desire to pay for that service.  Call me crazy, but most people probably don’t want that, either.  And … ugh … services for the people is kind of the basis for government, right?

Conclusion
So  that’s all 10 of Hill’s steps … but one of the concluding quotes is too inciderary to ignore:

They [Republican leaders] argue that “government is the problem” and therefore should be kept as small as possible (at least when it comes to social programs, though not, apparently military budgets).  Government is not supposed to do much for you; instead, it is supposed to get out of the way and let a nation of rugged individualists fend for themselves.  Though many Republicans don’t care much anymore for Charles Darwin’s ideas about evolution, they sure seem to like social Darwinism and an elite society based on the survival of the fittest - they call it “the ownership society.”  Their stated goal is to support democracy around the world, but a truly representative democracy in the United States is the last thing they want because it’s likely that a more robust, representative system would choose to unshackle government to do more for average Americans. [185]

Kudos to Hill for the points about ever-rising military budgets and disbelief in evolution (too expensive and silly, respectively).  As for everything else: I defer to Friedman’s Free to Choose.

Final note: In the spirit of Madison, who notes that the search is always simply for the “least imperfect” form of government, I do expect that technological changes (cough, the Internet) have created opportunities for making government better.  Would’ve liked a discussion of some of those options …

 I bookmark (’dog-ear’) pages of books with interesting passages.  And as the above picture of Joseph J. Ellis’s American Creation shows, I marked almost every other page of this great book.  I simply couldn’t help myself; there was something thought-provoking and worth remembering on nearly every page.  After I finished the book, I ordered Ellis’s other works and the accompanying DVDs. I even opened up my 10th grade history textbook to learn more about some of the events he touched upon.I don’t have time to transpose every bookmarked quote from the book so I intend only to blog the most important takeaways from each chapter (including historical facts or quotes or retrospective opinion).  Since I certainly can’t include all of the content, I heartily recommend you read the book.

If you’re looking for a review, check out the NY Time’s review.  And for a consideration of Ellis’s historical scholarship in light of his lies about his personal past, the Seattle PI has an interesting piece [the verdict is that his work is accurate].

And now on to my takeaways:

Foreward: The Founding
The opening chapter argues that “American Revolution enjoyed two incalculable advantages: time - or perhaps timing - and space”:

• Timing: The political philosophy for the creation of a America was not entirely original: “Over the preceding two centuries, a number of English, Scottish, and French thinkers had generate a veritable treasure trove of political knowledge that undermined and medieval worldview about goernment, society, and even human nature itself.” [4]
• Space: Washington said: “The Citizens of America, placed in the most enviable condition, as the sole Lords and Proprietors of a vast Tract of Continent, comprehending all the various soils and climates of teh World, and abounding with all the necessaries and conveniences of life, are now by the late satisfactory pacification, acknowledged to be possessed of absolute freedom and Independency; They are, from this period, to be considered as the ACtors on a most conspicuous Theatre, which seems to be peculiary designated by Providence for the display of human greatness and felicity.” [4-5] In other words: “the United States began with the largest trust fund of any emerging nation in recorded history.” [5]

The opening chapter also points out that the founding fathers were not Gods but fallible men.  They (generally) did not want to deified or revered by later generations (though it is clear they cared about the legacies).  Of John Adams: “It is only fair to note that John Adams was particulary sensitive about the creation of a mythical American story line with a cast of demigods in part because he feared he would not be given one of the starring roles.  His critical assessments of Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin, and even more of his devastating denunciations of Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Paine, betrayed a throbbing obsession with his own place in the history books.” [7]

Although the book doesn’t explicitly deal with each of the following accomplishments, Ellis makes a five-point summary of what the founders should be credited with:

1. “The revolutionary generation won the first successful war for colonial independence in the modern era”
2. “They established the first nation-sized republic. Until then it was presumed that republican governments based on the principle of popular consent could function only in small areas like Greek city-states or Swiss cantons.”
3. “They created the first wholly secular state.”
4. “They rejected convential wisdom … that political soveriegnty must reside in one agreed-upon location.  The Constitution defied this assumption be creating multiple and overlapping sources of authority in which the blurring of juristidction between federal and state power became an asset rather than a liability.”
5. “They created political parties as institutionalized channels for ongoing debate, which eventually permitted dissent to be regarded not as a treasonable act, but as a legitimate voice in an endless argument.” [8-9]

Finally, one quote that rings true in an election year:

• All of them [the founders] regarded the act of campaigning for office as a formal confession that they were unworthy to servce, a statement that they were not statesmen but demagogues. While popular opinion was hardly irrelevant, it was regarded as flighty, undependable, shortsighted, and easily manipulated.  That ultimate allegiance of the founders was not to “the people” but to “the public,” which was the long-term interest of the citizenry that they, the founders, had been chosen to divine. [15]

Chapter One: The Year
The first chapter makes the interesting point that prudence and patience were the most important parts of the Revolution’s success.  Ellis describes Jefferson’s comments about the time to mean “making an explosion happen in slow motion.” Here is Ellis’s critical paragraph:

In short, the decision to secede from the British Empire was accompanied by a truly revolutionary agenda for the infant American republic.  But the most prominent leaders, John Adams chief among them, insisted on the deferral of the revolutionary agenda and, in some instances, its postponement into the distant future.  Instead of regarding this gradualist approach as a moral and political failure, a conclusion that historians on the left regard as, shall we say, self-evident, the argument offered here is just the opposite.  In my judgement the calculated decision to make the American Revolution happen in slow motion was a creative act of statesmanship that allowed the United States to avoid the bloody and chaotic fate of subsequent revolutionary movements in France, Russia, and China. [21]

The slow-motion approach gave the British the opportunity to resolve the rebellion diplomatically, through shared sovereignty or decreased taxes.  Instead, the British were aggressive, thick-headed, and over-confident: what Ellis says “consistitutes perhaps the greatest blunder in teh history of British statecraft.” [25]

[Sidenote: First, how cool is it that the word ’statecraft’ exists?  Second, anyone that has read Asimov’s The Foundation series should see the similarities between the founding father’s patience and that of the major characters within The Foundation series; both groups rely on letting the world move foreward until the desired change is inevitable.  Ellis says of Adams: “He believed that ideas needed to fester until both his fellow delegates and his fellow Americans came to recognize, at their own speed and in their own way, that what had initially seemed so improbable was in fact inevitable.” [27]  The great psycho-historian Hari Seldon could not have said it better.]

Some quotes from the rest of the chapter:

• Temperamentally, at least on the face of it, Washington was the anti-Adams.  If Adams was excitable, always on the verge of a volcanic eruption that threatened to overwhelm his opponents in a lava flow of words, Washington was preternaturally calm and almost obsessively self-controlled, a man accustomed to dominating any room by his sheer physical presence, to lead by listening while less secure men babbled on. [30]
• “It seemed to be the principle employment of both armies,” wrote one observer [of the Boston Siege], “to look at each other with spyglasses.” [31]
• [about the New England patriots that created the first revolutionary army:] Leaving their posts for a few weeks to return home struct them not as desertion, but instead as a wholly sensible exercise of the very freedom they were defending. [32]
• There was one additional achievement locked into place at the Boston encampment … the routinized acceptance of civilian control over the military. … From the start, Washington deferred to the congress on questions of pay, the allotted size of the army, even final decisions about strategy. “I am not fond of stretching my powers,” he explained, “and if Congress will say thus far & no further you shall go, I will promise not to offend whilst I continue in their Service.” [36]
• Washington’s supreme statement of civilian control, of course, would not occur  until the end of the war, when he surrendered his sword to the president of congress and rode off into retirement as the American Cincinnatus. [37]
• Regarding Thomas Paine: a failed businessman with a “knack for alienating himself from those in power,” but with two talents that made Benjamin Franklin consider him an “ingenious young man.”  His “deep sense of social justice” and “ability to craft prose that expressed his political convictions in language that was simultaneously simple and dazzling.” [Franklin’s ingenious quote, the rest are Ellis on 41]
• [on the first words of the Declaration of Independence] Apparently regarded by all the delegates at the time as a mere rhetorical flourish designed to introduce the more serious business, these fifty-five words would grow in meaning to become the seminal statement of the American creed. [56]

Chapter Two: The Winter
The points that stand out (to me) within Ellis’s take on the famous Valleyforge Winter of 1777-1778  are critical supply chain problems, the new military talent utilized, the American people’s anti-American economic motives, and the new military strategy eventually embraced by Washington.

Some quotes:

• Recent American experience in Iraq, and our earlier experience in Southeast Asia, shoudl help identify the missing variable in the equation by allowing us to grasp the strategic dilemma confronting British policy-makers in Londong and Whitehall more emphatically than was previously possible.  The earliest articulation of this strategic dilemma appeared in the House of Lords in 1775, when the Earl of Camden, attempting to question the wisdom of George III and Lord North in imposing a military solution on the American rebellion, delivered a prescient warning: “To conquer a great continent of 1,800 miles, containing three millions of people, all indissolubly United on the great Whig bottom of liberty and justice, seems an undertaking not to be rashly engaged in … It is obvious, my lords, that you cannot furnish armies, or treasure, competant to the mighty purpose of subdoing America.” [59]
• [requests by Washington…]  first, all officers who signed up for the duration should receive pensions of half pay for life, and, if they are permanently disabled or killed, their wives and children should be compensated; second, mandatory quotas, in effect a draft, should be imposed on each state in order to assure that the fighting strength of the Continental Army reached its full complement of slightly more than forty-thousand troops.  Washington recognized that both requests … violated the very principles the American Revolution purportedly embodied. But it was the only way to wint he war. And defeat rendered all the republican principles irrelevant. [67]
• The Continental Army purchased supplies with certificates whose value was tied to the vastly inflated Continental currency, making the certificates nearly worthless. The British paid in pounds sterling, a much more reliable medium of exchange. And so their [farmers near Valley Forge] decision to sell to British army was not so much a political statement as it was a wholly rational economic calculation based on self-interest. [74]
• Washington was caught between … confiscating the food that prevented the starvation of his soldiers [but] alienated the very people of the American Revolution … or maintaining his revolutionary principles while watching his army dissolve. … Washington preserved his conscience by insisting that all confiscated crops must be paid for in certificates.  While worthless, they provided a moral balm. [76]
• The two armies were primarily pawns in a struggle for the hearts and minds of ordinary citizens in the countryside, the ultimate battlefield where the conflict would be decided. [81]
• In spite of his instinctive urge to defeat the British army, Washington realized that the most crucial battlefield was elsewhere, out there on the psychological terrain where ordinary Americans were calculating their interests and allegiances. [86]

Also noteworthy: Ellis points out that the meriocratic/non-bloodline/non-aristocratic military system allowed several individuals to rise and flourish in military service (including Washington) that might not have had a chance in tradition-bound Britian.

Chapter Three: The Argument
This chapter chronicles the “the most creative moment in all of American political history,” when the system of central government was created and accepted by the states.  Ellis points out that “none of these players believed wholeheartedly in the constitutional settlement proposed in 1787 and ratified in 1788, which was more the product of painful compromise and elegant improvisation than any pure and sustained argument about political theory.” [90]

One of the most interesting about this period was the ~decade delay to erect a central government from the start/end of the revolutionary war.  I usually lump the creation of the central government in with the declaration of independence … but there is a lot of time (and a lot of fighting) between those two events.  So why did Madison and Washington fight so strongly for a stronger central government rather than the loose affiliation of states through the Articles of Confederation?  After all, “the Articles of Confederation accurately reflected both the ideology that justified the American Revolution as well as the mentality and experience of most American citizens, for whom grand visions of a powerful nation-state with imperial pretensions floated far above their daily lives.” [92]

Washington came to be a nationlist after nearly losing the American Revolution because of an ill-equipped and manned army, and sought a stronger central power to ensure the nation’s military defense.  Madison, on the other hand, had witnessed the poor local democratic decisions in his home state of Virginia (fearmongering, interest group legislation, political scheming) that made him yearn for a stronger and more principled central government. Madison’s revolt at a corrupt democratic state-government fueling a desire for a larger democratic central-government seems quite odd.  But Madison reversed the convential wisdom for close-democracy in a very interesting argument:

The conventional assumption, most famously articulated by Montesquieu, held that republics worked best in small geographic areas, where elected representatives remained close to the interests of citizens who elected them.  […] But Madison had just spent many pages in “Vices” demonstrating that proximity to the electoroate had not produced responsible political behavior by state legislators. Quite the opposite: the overwhelming evidence, as Madison read it, revealed a discernible pattern of gross irresponsibility, a cacophony of shrills voices, a veritable kaleidoscope of local interests with no collective cohesion whatsover.

So Madison reversed the convential logic. Small republics, like the states, were actually more vulnerable to factional squablling and sectarian divisions than large republics, because the larger scale of the enterprise vastly increased the number of competing factions, thereby producing “a greater variety of interests, of passions, which check other … So an extensive Republic meliorates the administration of a small Republic.” [105-106]

Madison is arguing that local interests are stronger within smaller democracies than they would be within larger democracies.  Ellis notes this idea may have come from “Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776), where Smith’s analysis of the synergistic balance of the marketplace, surely familiar to Madison, provided an economic version of the idea that Madison might have tranposed to the political arena.” [106]  In some sense, there were economies-of-scale with regard to fairness as democracies grew.

Whether you agree or disagree with that notion, Madison was a talented debater.  “He habitually compensated for his deficiencies as an orator by always being the most fully prepared participant, the kind of frustrating opponent who always had more relevant information at his fingertips and who also somehow understood the logical implications of your argument better than you did.” [101]

Yet despite Madison’s debating prowess, the finished Constitution that was proposed for ratification to the state governments lacked two major qualities that made Madison consider it a failure: “a federal veto [ability] of all state legislation and for proporational representation in both branches of the legislation.” [111]  These two points were, to Madison, crucial, because they allowed the states too much sovereignty. Interestingly, as Madison ventured into the states to muster support for the Constitution, he found these two critical absences, “initially regarded as the fatal weakness of the Constitution gradually grew into its greatest strength.” [113]

Like a politician who must accomodate himself to unwelcomed evidence about public opinion, Madison shifted his ground to become the chief advocate for the very argument he had opposed in Philadelphia: namely, that the Constitution institutionalized a unique form of shared sovereignty. [118]

The June 1788 debate between Patrick Henry and Madison in Virginia, which was critical for ratification as other states followed it, is noted to “lay plausible claim to being the most consequential debate in American history.” [120]  Ellis does an amazing job describing Madison and Henry’s differing styles and specific arguments; those few pages should be required reading for every student of American history.

Chapter Four: The Treaty
This chapter deals with the political struggle surrounding the Native Americans populations that United States citizens were rampantly overrunning at the edges of state borders.  The accepted strategy had been to use gradual demographics to push back the Native Americans. As put by Philip Schuyler: “As our settlements approach their country they must, from the scarcity of game, retire further back, and dispose of their lands, until they dwindle comparatively to nothing, as all savages have done, … when compelled to live within the vicinity of civilized people.” [132]

That approach was generally accepted … except for a few that realized we’d be systematically taking the Native American property, which was something the American Revolution had fought to secure for all.  Henry Knox pestered George Washington that the Constitution gave the President the power to deal with foreign nations (like the Native Americans) and that “It would reflect honor on the new government, were a declarative Law to be passed that hte Indian tribles possess the right of the soil of all lands … and that they are not to be divested thereof but in consequence of fair and bona fide purchases, made under the authority, or with the express approbation of the United States.” [135]  Washington agreed, got Jefferson involved, and began to form a plan.

[sidenote: Ellis notes that Washington created a special commission to negotiate with the Native Americans, which the Constitution required he consent the Senate.  The meetings went badly and, as Ellis puts it: “Washington thanked the Senate, walked out briskly, never returned, and from that moment to the present day “the advice and consent of the Senate” ceased to mean direct presidential consultation.” [141]]

Perhaps the best anecdote of the chatper comes from the actions of Georgia lawmakers:

In January of 1790 the Georgia legislature announched the sale of twenty-four million acres of land to three private companies, collectively called the Yazoo Companies, which claimed control over a vast region now comprising the states of Tennessee, Alabama, and Mississippi - in other words, all of [Native American] Creek County.  The legal rationale for this sale was the original Georgia charter, which placed the western border of the then colony at the Mississippi River. This inflated claim made perfect sense to most members of the Georgia legislature, who owned shares in this speculative bonanza, making it a thoroughly corrupt and breathtakingly brazen scheme from the start. [149]

And what of the eventual Treaty of New York with Creek Nation that promised them their land and treated them as a foreign nation?  The Georgia settlers simply kept coming and the federal government could not control demographics: “The white American population was doubling every twenty to twenty-five yearsat the same time the Indian population was declining at roughly the same rate. By the last decate of the eighteenth century an ongoing demographic explosion was radiating out from the eastern rim of North America, and the Indian population opposing it was simply outnumbered and overwhelmed. No political effort to contain or control this explosion stood much chance of succes.” [162]

Also: “[The Indian Peace Initiative] had been a top-down affair conceived and planned in the executive branch with little if any consolutation with Congress except for the Senate ratification vote, which had itself happened awkwardly, even comically.  … From Washington’s perspective, only a bold assertion of executive power could put American Indian policy on a republican course. But in the minds of many observers in the Congress and out, such a conspicuous projection of executive power itself violated republican principles and conveyed the distinct odor of monarchy.” [163] 

Anyone care to translate this to modern day issues?

Chapter Five: The Conspiracy 
This chapter deals with the creation of the two political party system now standard in America, with the first difference being the power of the states and the power of the central government.  Ellis makes a great point about politics in general:

One of the ultimate implications of the two-party system that was so hard for most of the founders to accept was the realization that different versions of the truth could coexist alongside one another and both claim, with considerable plausibility, to be true.  Unlike mathematics, in politics there was no agreed-upon solution reached by sheer brainpower and logic, but rather an ongoing and never-ending struggle between contested versions of the truth.

I simply can’t cover all of the ground within this chapter to do it any justice.  Jefferson and Madison create the Republican party to fight the Alexander Hamilton’s creation of a Central Bank, arguing both against the bank and the expansion of federal powers used to create it. Ellis deftly narrates how part of the opposition to the bank by Virginians was based partly in response to Virginia’s economic decline, conspiracy theories about bankers, and simply because “the [Virginian] planters had not the dimmest understanding of what Hamilton was talking about.” Ellis also notes: “One of the distinguishing features of most conspiracy theories is the tendency to personalize what are, in truth, impersonal forces of unwelcomed change. Hamilton and his banking cronies thus became the personification of the reasons for Virginia’s economic decline.” [174]

Ellis is unfortunately light on details of Hamilton’s central bank proposal, only noting that it “represented an effort to restore fiscal stability to an American economy burdened by debt and previously incapable of doing much about it.  The enrichment of a few investors was an extraneous by-product of an economic policy rather brilliantly designed to persuade the international market makers that the United States was not, in modern parlance, a banana republic.” [172] 

All of Madison’s arguments against the Central bank are ironic because Hamilton’s central bank was “also the fullest projection of federal sovereignty over the states, the kind of undiluted statement of wholly national ethos that Madison had not so long ago advocated just as strenously.” [175]  And it came back to get Madison:

In the debate over the bank that raged throughout February of 1791, its opponents, to include both Jefferson and Madison, based their opposition on its unconstitutionality, arguing that Congress possessed only certain enumerated powers, that the power to create a corporation (i.e., the bank) was not one of them, so the bank violated the Tenth Amendement, which reserved all powers to the states not specifically delegated to the federal government.  But the winning argument proved to be Hamilton’s which cited the “necessary and proper” clause of the Constitution (Article I, Section 8 ) to sanction congressional authority as one of the implied powers inherent in the Constituion. Hamilton quoted, almost verbatim, the argument made in Federalist 44, which everyone presumed he had written: “No axiom is more clearly established in law, or in reason, than that wherever a general power to do a thing is given, every particular power necessary for doing it, is included.” [176]

 So what all of this? You simply need to read the rest of the chapter because there is too much to go through.  The creation of the two-parties, America’s siding with Britain rather than France … and so muc more.

Chapter Six: The Purchase
Reading how the success of the Louisiana Purchase was entirely dependent on the indirectly-related uprising of slaves on Santo Domingo against Napolean’s army was quite interesting.  Like every other chapter, it was hugely educational/entertaining.  Or how about this anecdote:

There was then [after the sale of Louisiana to America for $12.5M] the famous bath scene, where Napolean lay in his tub, teh water sprinkled with cologne, when his two brothers came in and accused him of impetuosity in deciding to sell all Louisiana. He lacked the authority to make such a huge decision without consulting the elected representatives of the legislature, they insisted, and when the debate in the legislature began, they intended to side with the opposition. “You will hav eno need to lead the opposition,” Napolean replied, “for I repeat there will be no debate, for the reason that the project … conceived by me, negotiated by me, shall be ratified and executed by me, alone. Do you comprehend me?”

I leave you with that. Go read this book.

[zacknote: reminder that you read most of this book traveling from OAK to BOS for Christmas on Dec 24th, opening the book on the Bart ride out and finishing it on Christmas day.]

The subtitle’s implications worried me. If citizens believe that religion “poisons everything,” their response might be to pass laws banning religion, a position I would strongly oppose because it infringes on personal liberty.  People can think and believe whatever they like; any effort to impose on that freedom - especially in personal beliefs - is not only wrong, but futile.

Of course ”personal freedom” is really “liberty,” which, as I defined it in grade school, is “freedom with responsibility.”  That “responsibility” is, by and large, to not infringe on other’s freedoms.  (Effectively the golden rule, but with freedom.  ie: I can’t use my freedom to kill you since that is a violation of your freedom.)  Yet if “Religion poisons everything,” other’s beliefs seemingly cause negative externalities that infringe on my rights.  (That’s how I read it, anyway). Is that really true?

Hitchens doesn’t - to me - provide evidence that religious belief causes such a negative externality.  He does provide plenty of evidence that actions arising from religious beliefs quite often impose on personal freedoms, but those impositions are a failing of government to protect citizens’ rights.  In modern democracies, the government must protect liberty (further, it is a failing of the people if they do not demand such protection).  [and for those in countries without personal rights nor the freedom to leave, the only recourse is to fight.]

So, in the end, I finished god is not Great unconvinced that religious believers are necessarily imposing a negative externality (despite their prayers) and that when religious actions impose on my freedoms, the government should stop that action rather than trying to stop the personal religious belief.  I would assume that is the standard libertarian response.

I must note that the idea of ‘banning religion’ was my theorized line-of-reasoning based on the book’s subtitle. No where does Hitchens explicitly call for banning religion.  In fact, he does the opposite:

“I would not prohibit it [religion] even if I could.  Very generous of me, you may say.  But will the religious grant me the same indulgence?  … I would be quite content to go to their children’s bar mitzvahs, to marvel at their Gothic cathedrals, to “respect” their belief … And as it happens, I will continue to do this without insisting on the polite reciprocal condition - which is that they in turn leave me alone.But this, religion is ultimate incapable of doing. As I write these words, and as you read them, people of fair are in different ways planning your and my destruction, and the destruction of all the hardwon human attainments that I have touched upon. Religion poisons everything.

The rest of the book is a description of some of the atrocities committed because of or in-hand with religion; and while religion is the core of the problem, only the actions can truly be stopped by a proper rights-protecting government. 

[There is some discussion of how religious upbringings can affect obviously naive children - but that is still a personal choice on the parent’s part, and a difficult question  (ala Jesus Camp).]

This is a good time to note that my “faith” in the right of religious freedom is a faith that the best ideas - those that help individual and society prosper - are those that will survive in the long-run.  My knowledge of evolution and my experience that the truth is eventually unavoidable makes me content to let competing ideas stand on their own merits.

Enough with philosophy based on a subtitle; what of the actual book?  Good.  Interesting.  It seemed a bit unfocused and rambled at times, but the underlying content was compelling enough to transcend any structural flaws.

I won’t do a chapter-by-chapter summary (in part because they blended together), but here are the quotes that stood out to me:

• Religious distress is at the same time the expression of a real distress and the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of the heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people.

  The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness.  The demand to give up the illusions about its condition is the demand to give up a condition that needs illusion.  The criticism of religion is therefore in embryo the criticism of the vale of woe, the halo of which is religion.  [Marx on 9]

• Two peoples of roughly equivalent size had a claim to the same land.  The solution was, obviously, to create two states side by side. Surely something so self-evident was within the wit of man to encompass?  And so it would have been, decades ago, if the messianic rabbis and mullahs and priests could have been kept out of it.  But the exclusive claims to god-given authority, made by hysterical clerics on both sides and further stoked by Armageddon-minded Christians who hope to bring on the Apocalypse (preceded by the death or conversion of all Jews), have made the situation insufferable, and put the whole of humanity in the position of hostage to a quarrel that now features the threat of nuclear war. Religion poisons everything. As well as a menace to civilization, it has become a threat to human survival. [24-25]
• “Apostasy,” according to the Koran, is punishable by death.  There is no right to change religion, and all religious states have always insisted on harsh penalties for those who try it. [29]
• The nineteen suicide murders of New York and Washington and Pennsylvania were beyond any doubt the most sincere believers on those planes. [32]
• [John Ashcroft] stated that America had “no king but Jesus” (a claim that was exactly two words too long). [32]
• Anyone citing Madison today would very likely be thought either subversive or insane, yet without him and Thomas Jefferson, coauthors of the Virginia Statute on Religious Freedom, the United States would have gone on as it was - with Jews prohibited from holding office in some states, Catholics in others, and Protestants in Maryland. [34]
• By all means - for all I care - let a priest sworn to celibacy be a promiscuous homosexual. … By all means let anyone who believes in creationism instruct his fellows during lunch breaks.  But the conscription of the unprotected child for these purposes is something that even the most dedicated secularist can safely describe as a sin. …

  I think we are entitled to three provisional conclusions.  The first is that religion and the churches are manufactured, and that this salient fact is too obvious to ignore. The second is that ethics and morality are quite independent of faith, and cannot be derived from it.  The third is that religion is - because it claims a special divine exemption for its practices and beliefs - not just amoral but immoral.  The ignorant psychopath or brute who mistreats his children must be punished but can be understood.  Those who claim a heavenly warrant for the cruelty have been tainted by evil, and also constitute far more of a danger. [52]

• One must state it plainly.  Religion comes from the period of human prehistory where nobody - not even the might Democritus who concluded that all matter was made from atoms - had the smallest idea of what was going on. It comes from the bawling and fearful infancy of our species, and is a babyish attempt to meet our inescapable demand for knowledge (as well as for comfort, reassurance, and other infantile needs). [64]
• … the three monotheisms claim to share a descent at least from the Pentateuch of Moses, and the Koran certifies Jews as “people of the book,” Jesus as a prophet, and a virgin as his mother. (Interestingly, the Koran does not blame the Jews for the murder of Jesus, as one book of the Christian New Testament does, but this is only because it makes the bizarre claim that someone else was crucified by the Jews in his place.) [98]
• The simple fact is that the New Testament, as we know it, is a helter-skelter accumulation of more or less discordant documents, some of them probably of respectable origin but others palpably apocryphal, and that most of them, the good along with the bad, show unmistakable signs of having been tampered with. [H. L. Mencken on 110]
• In 2004, a soap-opera film about the death of Jesus was produced by an Australian fascist and ham actor named Mel Gibson. [110]
• (It was not until two decades after the second World War that the Vatican formally withdrew the charge of “deicide” against the Jewish people as a whole.) And the truth is that the Jews used to claim credit for the Crucifixion. Maimonides described the punishment of the detestable Nazarene heretic as one of the greatest achievements of the Jewish elders, insisted that the name Jesus never be mentioned except when accompanied by a curse, and announced that his punishment was to be boiled in excrement for all eternity. What a good Catholic Maimonides would have made! [111]
• The impressive fact remains that all religions have staunchly resisted any attempt to translate their sacred texts into languages “understanded of the people,” as the Cranmer prayer book phrases it.  There would have been no Protestant Reformation if it were not for the long struggle to have the Bible rendered into “the Vulgate” and the priestly monopoly therefore broken.  Devout men like Wycliffe, Coverdale, and Tyndale were burned alive for even attempting early translations.  The Catholic Church has never recovered from its abandonment of the mystifying Latin ritual, and the Protestant mainstream has suffered hugly from rendering its own Bibles into more everyday speech.  … among most Jews, too, the supposedly unchangeable rituals of antiquity have been abandoned. The spell of the clerical class has been broken. Only in Islam has there been no reformation, and to this day any vernacular version of the Koran must still be printed with an Arabic parallel text. This ought to arouse suspicion even in the slowest mind. [125]
• Islam when examined is not much more than a rather obvious and ill-arranged set of plagiarisms, helping itself from earlier books and traditions as occasion appeared to require. [129]
• Each hadith [saying of Muhammad], in order to be considered authentic, must be supported in turn by an isnad, or chain, of supposedly reliable witnesses. … (”A told B, who had it from C, who learned it from D”) …. One of the most famous of the six compilers, Bukhari, died 238 years after the death of Muhammad.  Bukhari is deemed unusually reliable and honest by Muslims, and seems to have deserved his reputation in that, of the three hundred thousand attestations he accumulated in a lifetime devoted to the project, he ruled that two hundred thousand of them were entirely valueless and unsupported.  Further exclusion of dubious traditions and questionable isnads reduced his grand total to ten thousand hadith.  You are free to believe, if you so choose, that out of this formless mass of illiterate and half-remembered witnessing the pious Bukhari, more than two centuries later, managed to select only the pure and undefiled ones that would bear examination. [133]
• The idea of being “tolerated” by a Muslim is as repulsive to me as the other condescensions whereby Catholic and Protestant Christians agreed to “tolerate” one another, or extend “toleration” to Jews. The Christian world was so awful in this respect, and for so long, that many Jews preferred to live under Ottoman rule and submit to special taxes and other such distinctions. [133]
• Thus, dear reader, if you have come this far and found your own faith undermined - as I hope - I am willing to say that to some extent I know what you are going through. There are days when I miss my old convictions as if they were an amputated limb. But in general I feel better, and no less radical, and you will feel better too, I guarantee, once you leave hold of the doctrinaire and allow your chainless mind to do its own thinking. [153]
• But was there a moment when he [Joseph Smith] also believed that he did have a destiny, and was ready to die to prove it? In other words, was he a huckster all the time, or was there a pulse inside him somewhere?  The study of religion suggests to me that, while it cannot possibly get along without great fraud and also minor fraud, this remains a fascinating and somewhat open question. [166]
• Every week, at special ceremonies in Mormon temples, the congregations meet and are given a certain quota of names of the departed to “pray in” to their church.  This retrospective baptism of the dead seems harmless enough to me, but the American Jewish Committee became incensed when it was discovered that the Mormons had acquired the records of the Nazi “final solution,” and were industriously baptizing what for once could truly be called a “lost tribe”: the murdered Jews of Europe.  For all its touching inefficacy, this exercise seemed in poor taste. [168]
• … a watched at the gates, whose job it was to alert the others if the Messiah arrived unexpectedly. (”It’s steady work, as one of these watchmen is supposed, rather defensively, to have said.) [172]
• This is exactly what gave Dr. King his moral leverage, because he could outpreach the rednecks.  But the heavy burden would never have been laid upon him if religiousity had not been so deeply entrenched to begin with.  [179]
• I was a guarded admirer of the late Pope John Paul II, who by any human standards was a brave and serious person capable of displaying both moral and physical courage. He helped the anti-Nazi resistance in his native country as a young man, and in later life did much to assist its emancipation from Soviet rule. His papacy was in some ways shockingly conservative and authoritarian, but showed itself open to science and inquiry … Pope John Paul was praised among other things for the number of apologies he had made.  These did not include, as they should have done, an atonement for the million or so put to the sword in Rwanda.  However, they did include an apology to the Jews for the centuries of anti-Semitism, an apology to the Muslim world for the Crusades, an apology to Eastern Orthodox Christians for the many persecutions that Rome had inflicted upon them, too, and some general contrition about the Inquisition as well.  This seemed to say that the church had mainly been wrong and often criminal in the past, but was now purged of its sin by confession and quite ready to be infallible all over again. [193]
• In order to establish eternal peace in East Asia, arousing the great benevolence and compassion of Buddhism, we are sometimes accepting and sometimes forceful.  We now have no choice but to exercise the benevolent forcefulness of “killing one in order that many may live.” This is something which Mahayana Buddhism approves of only with the greatest of seriousness. [- Japanese Buddhist leadership on joining Nazi/Fascist Axis 203]
• The Dalai Lama tells us that you can visit a prostitute as long as someone else pays her.  Shia Muslims offer “temporary marriage,” selling men the permission to take a wife for an hour or two with the usual vows and then divorce her when they are done. Half of the splendid buildings in Rome would never have been raised if the sale of indulgences had not been so profitable: St. Peter’s itself was financed by a special one-time offer of that kind.  The newest pope, the former Joseph Ratzinger, recently attracted Catholic youths to a festival by offering a certain “remission of sin” to those who attended. … This pathetic moral spectacle would not be necessary if the original rules were ones that would be possible to obey.  … The essential principle of totalitarianism is to make laws that are impossible to obey. [212]
• At the very extreme edge can be found the primevil puritanism of the Taliban, which devoted itself to discovering new things to forbid (everything from music to recycled paper, which might contain a tiny fleck of pulp from a discard Koran) and new methods of punishment (the burial alive of homosexuals).  The alternative to these grotesque phenomena is not the chimera of secular dictatorship, but the defense of secular pluralism and of the right not to believe or be compelled to believe.  This defense has now become an urgent and inescapable responsibility: a matter of survival. [252]
• All he really “knew,” he said, was the extent of his own ignorance. (This to me is still the definition of an educated person.) [256]
• This derided heretic [Baruch Spinoza] is now credited with the most original philosophical work ever done on the mind/body distinction, and his meditations on the human condition have provided more real consolation to thoughtful people than has any religion. [262]
• I do not believe in the immortality of the individual, and I consider ethics to be an exclusively human concern with no super-human authority behind it. [Einstein, 271]
• The true value of a man is not determined by his possession, supposed or real, of Truth, but rather by his sincere exertion to get to the Truth.  It is not possession of the Truth, but rather the pursuit of Truth by which he extends his powers and in which his ever-growing perfectibility is to be found.  Possession makes one passive, indolent, and proud. If God were to hold all Truth concealed in his right hand, and in his left only the steady and diligent drive for Truth, albeit with the proviso that I would always and forever err in the process, and to offer me the choice, I would will all humility take the left hand. [Gotthold Lessing, 277]
• [Religions] are philosophy with the questions left out. [Simon Blackburn, 278]
• Thanks to the telescope and the microscope, it [religion] no longer offers an explanation of anything important.  Where once it used to be able, by its total command of a worldview, to prevent the emergence of rivals, it can now only impede and retard - or try to turn back - the measurable advances that we have made. [282]

Hitchens concludes the book saying, “it has become necessary to know the enemy, and to prepare to fight it.”  While the rhetoric is powerful, I would’ve preferred he made clearer that the coming “fight” is one of preferably ideas and not of actual violence.  God knows we’ve got plenty of that already.

Since I am not Jewish, nor do I hate Jews or myself, the topic choice may seem odd.  However, I loved Mamet’s dialogue in Glengarry Glen Rossand figured he might provide an interesting take on anti-semitism (as well as ’self-hatred’, which I hadn’t heard of before).  Plus, I’ve been to plenty of bar-mitzahs and wanted to learn a bit more about Judaism in America.

While Mamet’s agile writing is certainly present, compelling underlying content isn’t.  The Publisher’s Weekly Review aptly says: “[Mamet’s] tone is that of the condescending expert: alternately Talmudic scholar, academic, psychoanalyst and anthropologist. But nowhere is Mamet’s expertise proven; he provides no source materials to back up his pronouncements on everything from Santa Claus to gun control to religious observance. The implication of this bombastic text seems to be that anyone who disagrees is a coward, an anti-Semite or a self-hating Jew.”

As I try to write a criticism of the book I find myself trying to think of something that Mamet might understand, that we could discuss rationally - but it seems impossible.  I am sure he would consider me an at-best subsconsciously anti-semite and coward. Perhaps the problem is somewhat fundamental in our views?

At the core of my disagreement is the unnerving ‘wicked son’ parable, about sons being told about a ritual during the Passover Seder:

The wise child asks for information [and] he receives information, humor, which is to say, welcome to his tradition. His desire to learn and participate is rewarded with love… 

The wicked child, asks “What does this ritual mean to you? He is wicked in that his question is rhetorical - it is not even a request for information; it is an assualt. The wicked Jewesh child removes himself from his tradition, and sets up as a rationalist and judge of those who would study, learn and belong. [Foreward x]

I read the Wikipedia entry on the four sonsto try and better appreciate the traditional understanding of this story … but I still don’t agree with the assessment of the ‘wicked child’ as ‘wicked.’  The Wicked Child sounds more like an anthroplogist, a skeptic, a scientist; yes, he is seperating himself by his question, but he is asking an important question nonetheless.  I find it unsettling that the “wise child” has a “desire to learn and participate,” and is “rewarded with love,” but the child that needs further information before participating is berated as Wicked. [Foreward x]

The core of Mamet and my disagreements probably relates to our opinions of the sentence ”faith is a virtue.”  The wicked son does not have faith to participate, he does not ‘honor thy parents’ in the Christian sense; he questions.  In my book, there are many times when questioning your leaders is a good and virtous thing.

Oddly, I’ve always thought as Judaism as one of the most ‘questioning’ religions out there, and credited their open-mindedness and adaptability with their culture’s continued prosperity. I found it surprising to read Mamet’s fairly fundamentalist style approach towards accepting tradition.

Much of Mamet’s The Wicked Son berates apostate [lapsed] Jews that have, like the Wicked Son, seperated themselves from Judaism.  He also spends some time on Anti-Semitism, beginning quite strongly with:

As you have taken the time to read and I to write this book, I believe we should be frank: The world hates the Jews. The world has always and will continue to do so. [4]

I was immediately soured by that provacative sentence, since it seems to assume I hate the Jews and always will.  Well, if the future is written, what’s the point in reading your book?

Of course the sentence is just a hook, since it doesn’t hold up at all.  Mamet attributes the worldwide hatred of Jews to a”psychotic prejudice,” like that against Blacks or gays, though he doesn’t point out that hatred and prejudice against those cultures has disappated, and could potentially for Jews as well.

The next chapter starts with a letter from a Christian women visiting Israel in the 50s and praising “her love for the Jew, of our national courage, humor, solidarity, invention, and hardiness.” Where is the hatred that started the last chapter?  Somehow, Mamet uses that to launch into a diatribe against implicit hatred of Jews through such terrible words like “charming” - “an application of the epithet of savagery to that group by which one does not currently feel threatened.”  He makes some valid points about media using different words like “reprisals” rather than “defense” … but I simply found myself underwhelmed by his facts and overwhelmed by his conspirary theory of hatred.  For example:

Imagine the anti-Israeli propaganda currently engaged in on college campuses and other institutions of englightenment - directed against Canada - not that Canadians are misguided, wrong, but that they are “bad” - devoid of the capacity for goodwill, duplicitous, inspired by some nefarious and implacable power to wrong those around them; possessed of a power so diabolical it induces their neighbors to strap bombs on their young and send them into the marketplace to slaughter women and their babies.

What is this power? It must be the Devil; indeed, it is the Devil, and the Jews will not stop until they have ruined the world. [12]

The book was published in 2006 and I graduated from college in 2004 … and I don’t remember any such propaganda on my campus.  Granted, I’ve always gone to school with Jewish kids, so I suppose I may not be experiencing the xenophobic hatred at colleges where there are fewer Jews … but I still read the above passage feeling like Mamet was drumming up a greater hatred for Jews than there actually is.  Of course I am probably underestimating since I only use my experience … but I am part of the “World” that Mamet claims hates the Jews universally, so my exception may be a trend.  [Unknowing hatred seems like such a wasteful emotion that I can barely believe it exists at all … but of course my individual sample size of 1 probably doesn’t represent the world very well. ]

The rest of the book is sometimes thoughtful, more often scarily dogmatic.  Mamet has an impressive grasp of language but (and I am thankful for this) it could not rescue his ideas.

I’m going to have to withhold comment on most of the quotes I’ve dog-eared because I’ll never finish this post if I respond to each.  Here we go…

• The Jewish State has offered the Arab world peace since 1948; it has received war, and slaughter, and the rhetoric of annihilation. After fifty-six years of war this tiny fingernail of a country, the size of Vermont, continues to exist and to practice democracy in spite of the proclaimed implacable hatred of an Arab world rich, vast, and populous. [13]
• The “crimes” of Israel, as those of the African-American man, are imaginary, existing in the mind of the accuser and engendered both by his guilt at his oppressive behavior and by his attempt to license his own criminal passions. [15]
• The illness, racism, cannot be perceived by the sufferer. Racism and love make such perfect sense to those affected that the entire world is redefined in their light. [22]
• “Jewish Guilt” and “Jewish anxiety” are not Jewish at all but universal - a universal desire to revert to paganism. It is not the Christians the Jews try to ape with their Chanukah bush but the pagans.  The cure for the Jew is neither assimilation nor conversion, but religion. [29]
• Religion came into being to supplant the anomie and excess of paganism.  Humans individually, and all religions they create, are always in a dynamic struggle between the desire to revert to, and the desire to supersede, the pagan. [29]
• What if, then, the Jews were a secret society, similar in the public imagination to the Rosicrucians, the Knights Templar, the Masons and so on? What if admission to this secret society depended upon a profession a of faith - not that that faith here must be, to a certain extent, blind - for the true benefits of membership in a secret society must be apparent only to the initiated members. … The next step would be, as with any secret society, a study toward master of its rituals and language. …The first language and practice would be that of the prayer service.  The language would be prayer-book Hebrew, the language of the Torah.  A mastery of the same might reveal, to the novice, further avenues of study. …Having mastered sufficient biblical Hebrew, the devotee of this secret world might be inspired to pursue those advanced texts and those systems that devolved from it. He might study Aramaic in order to read the Talmud; these studies might lead toward the Kabbalah the mystical tradition …

  His zeal for further progress … might lead to the study of Yiddish and the sociology of one thousand years of European diaspora civilization. … [and] confirm in the student an awe of the civilization that gave him life, and a deep longing for further knowledge.

  Most secret society have, at their core, the final mystery of “the secret knowledge,” which is that there is no secret knowledge.  Judaism, as a spiritual, ethical, or social practice, has at its core a mystery so deep that not only is its existence hidden from the uninitiated but its very practitioners are hated and scorned, reviled and murdered as necromancers.  What is the fear the Jew engenders and that manifests itself as hatred?  Perhaps it is caused by his historical, absolute, terrifying certainty that there is a God. [58-60]

• [The primitive man] perceived the work of the gods all around him, and in every thing.  Sociologists may have called this superstition, but it was religion.  It was a direct and constant connection to the Divine, and it is understood by every human being who has ever lived in extended, direct contact with the elements. [68]
• The shul, then, like the rabbi, has two choices: grow and die, or resist growth and die. Only in the latter, however, may be found the possibility of a continuation of the inspired rabbi’s teaching. [79]
• Anti-Semitism is a profoundly sexual fantasy - a sadomasochism founded on religious or pseudoreligious views…
  The Jew is not a victim but merely a human being, the sadomasochistic fantasy of murder- and (self-) forgiveness cannot be played out and the obscene pornographic drama of anti-Semitism is stifled before the final, ejaculatory moment.  The unwillingness of real Jews to die in cooperation with this sick, masturbatory fantasy of anti-Semitism further inflames the psychotic bigot as it brings his fantasy into relief. [84…86]
• Don’t let an instance of an anti-Semitism pass. Stand up for yourself, and stand up for your people.  It is possible to support the Palestinian cause without being an anti-Semite, and there are people of goodwill who do so.  But much of the pro-Palestinian feeling in the West is a protected example of anti-Semitism, and, when and as it is such, it should be opposed. [100]
• The [’half naked fans shivering in the subzero weather of the football stadium] perform a hieratic display of suffering that might not only sway the gods, but banish from the performers the terrible notion of their own worthlessness vis-a-vis the actual combatants. [103]
• Most cosmetic surgery, similarly, while presenting itself as the individual’s attempt to gain or retain membership in a group from which he or she is physically debarred (the young, the beautiful) is, actually, a proclamation of ordeal.  The patient, here, undergoes a physical alteration not in an attempt to “remain young” but in an attempt to conquer the shame of his or her exclusion.  “See,” the facelift testifies, “though I am no longer young, this painful procedure proves that I have not lost my devotion to the group. I am indeed, willing to be disfigured in respect for what, to me, are its now unobtainable ends.” [104]
• The conversos of Spain escaped the Inquisition by pretending to embrace Catholicism.  They acted, in all outward forms, as Catholics but secretly practiced Judaism in their homes.  The new converso, the assimilated Western Jew, in a curious inversion, practices no religion whatever, retaining only his self-identification as a Jew.  … The apostate Jew confesses what to him, as to the Inquisition, is a sin. [113]
• “I am Jewish but not too Jewish” can be understood as a statement of secularity and ingratitude, to wit: because my ancestors suffered persecution and prevailed, I will renounce their struggle and call my ingratitude enlightenment; my ignorant scorn of the Israelis and their struggle will be called championship of the oppressed, my ignorance of religion common sense; and my supercilious superiority to its practices a licensed diversion. [118]
• In a democracy, however, the electorate is unaware of the process, and the residual illusion of rational choice blinds the voter not only to his wish for monarchy but also to its essential nature, which is the acknowledgement that the role of the monarchy’s leader is symbolic.In the actual, contemporary monarchy, that is evident which in its supposedly democratic imitators is hidden: that the individual, and that a society must govern itself, as the monarch is a figurehead.

  Acknowledgement of the nonpotent nature of this figurehead diffuses the unconscious, unavowable, infantalizing wish to be ruled; after which the individual now-aware voter can get down to the business at hand: the unromantic, mundance and most necessary day-to-day government of and by fallible human beings - the schools, the sewars, the crumbling bridges, and the price of corn.

  Aware of the longing for monarchy, the conscious member of modern democracy is free to dispute, to embrace or reject, pronouncements of government without feelings either of self-aggrandizement or treason. …

  …This person, in the shame of his own self-knowledge, in the shame of his knowledge of his own self-sufficiency, must and will create false gods, as does the electorate.  Only the recognition of the actual sovereignty of Another will set him free to reason. [120-121]

• For Jews feel most comfortable in the community of Jews.  Who can deny it? Freed from either the scorn or the “understanding” of the non-Jewish world, the Jew can be himself. Are six thousand years of cultural and genetic and religious affinities to be abrogated by the brave individual embrace of secularity? Demonstrably not.  Examine the elective affinities of the apostate Jew - the communities, the clubs, the professions, the resorts - all the inhabitants of Jews. … But such affinity stops at the temple door [128]
• To me, real life consists in belonging.I’ve spent most of my life in show business, and I never have walked through the stage door or onto a movie set without the thrill of belonging.  On the stage or set, one is surrounding by like-minded people speaking a common language, having a common goal.  This group is not opposed to the world but a world-within-a-world - small, contained, cohesive, mutually responsable.

  … On the shoot, everything is taken away or is about to be taken away: sleep, health, family, comfort - everything except a sense of shared purpose. …

  … Show business people share a soft pity for those who would like to join but cannot or have not.  For we have, in the dream of a ten-year old, run away to the circus, and the poor wistful reasonable souls on the outside stayed home.

  …  Many seek in this or that confected enterprise: sports bar, sports rooting, paintball, “bonding” expeditions. The opposite of this tribal life is a life of anxiety, loneliness, and loss.

  … Gun collectors, stamp collectors, aviation enthusiasts, gardeners, golfers, these know the meaning of zeal.

  …This love of community, this love of knowledge, this joy of immersion in history, this thirst for group approval, for moral perfection, this endless variety of vertical and horizontal connections, these are all open to the Jew, both his right and his responsability, and Judaism goes begging. [134-137]

• Various Muslim countries, including Syria and the Palestinians have, as a matter of both religious and political doctrine, repeatedly expressed their intention to destroy the Israeli Jews.  This intent is not an adjunct of a territorial dispute but an essential component of their polity - this hatred cannot be mitigated by concession, by negotiation, even by capitulation; it can only be assuaged through blood.

  Israel is a free society.  The rights of minority, of the oppressed, indeed, of the criminally foolish are protected.  Mr. Chomsky would be as free in Israel to pronounce this nonsense as he is in the United States.  Were he to find himself in the Arab World, he would be persecuted as a Jew (as, indeed, he might in France).  And were he, God forbid, persecuted, Israel would offer him a home, under the Right of Return.

  That is what Israel means to me.[142-144]

• This person, in ignorance, has chosen his own wisdom over that of millennia, has chosen to turn his back on the people who will, in times of trouble, accept and protect him, has renounced the beautiful observances of his ancestors. He is the gay Republican, an African-American secessionist - his delusion freezes his development, which now must coalesce around apology and denial. [160]
• The ancient joke has the Jewish castaway found, on a desert island he’s inhabited for thirty years.  “What are those three bamboo structures?” asks the sea captain.  “That over there is my house,” says the castway, “and that over there is my shul.” “And what’s that third one?” the captain asks.  “That,” says the Jew, “is the shul I wouldn’t be caught dead in.” [161]
• For it is written that just as it is forbidden to partake of the forbidden, it is forbidden not to partake of the permitted. … The Jew is not only made and instructed but also commanded to live in the world and to enjoy those things God has permitted him - among the chiefest joys: that of belonging. [169]
• Many recall, and many can still, sadly, witness the couple who write their own wedding ceremony, an essential feature of Epicureanism. 

  What, one may ask, is the problem with this?

  Here is the answer: traditionally, a couple getting married were, wisely, compelled to vow to do not only those things they wished to do but also those things the tribe, in its wisdom, had concluded, over time, best augured well for the health and continuation of marriage.

  It is all very well and faux poetic for the young to swear to “respect each other’s space” and so forth, but these vows were and are soon abrogated …

  … These epicurean vows carried neither the weight of tradition and reason, nor the compulsive power of poetry.

  “Consecrated to me according to the laws of Moses and the Traditions of the Jewish People,” a thousands-year-old formula, a beautiful formula, must awaken more awe in the pretender to the marriage state than writers-group, journal-keeping gibberish. [170-171]

• Speech awakens emotion in the actor. The mere uttering of the written words will involve the actor in the scene.

  The actor, involved in the scene, does not have the self-consciousness to differentiate between a dislike for the written words because they are inept and a dislike for them because they awaken in him feelings he would rather keep hidden.

  The only way to maintain the feeling of this self-control is by a self-removal from the scene, by the adoption of a role as a judge rather than participant. It is literally impossible for the actor to alter lines to suit and to be involved in the progress of the written scene. One may maintain the illusian of superiority to the scene but only at the cost of woodeness.

  The observant actor reasons thusly: since I cannot differentiate between a dislike of the line as written and a dislike of the emotions it creates, I will say the line as written and let the chips fall where they may.

  This is the beginning of wisdom in an actor.  He comes to realize that the well-written play does not need his help, and the badly written play cannot profit greater from his help than to enjoy his unjudgemental dedication to the text.

  Note that the actor was not forced to do the play; he accepted the commission of his own free will and was free to decline.  The congregant, the worshipper, similarly, has not been forced to accept the rite (marriage, Communion, brit milah, holiday observance), but, having done so, would be wise, which is to say rewarded, to devote himself to the rite per se.

  In doing so, he or she will be surprised, as is the actor, finding worth and beauty where none could be suspected.  He will be surprised to find himself blessed by the removal of that worthless burden he has, once wishfully, named to himself as “my free will.” [174-175]

That last allegory is a good embodiment of the entire book.

Call It Quits

If you’re not a movie mogul, rock star, or President
if you’re not a CEO sitting on a billion in the bank,
no on will answer your e-mails, phone calls or letters.
You’ll be helpless, hopeless, too old, too young,
in too much pain, the wrong color, some unacceptable
sex, a non-believer in some religion people kill for.
You could be struggling to see through everyone’s
skin to their slick, writhing guts, including your own.

Or, you could call it quits, and slip into the unknown,
inexhaustible, frothing teeth of the sea that turns us
all to brine, sweet salt of the universe.

“Call It Quits” by Freya Manfred, from Swimming With A Hundred Year Old Snapping Turtle. © Red Dragonfly Press, 2008. (buy now) [ed note: with apologies to the author, I just had to add the line break before “Or”.]

This is a pleasant-but-impossible fantasy.  Salt is not sweet.  Keep working.

Below is how the front-flap describes the book.  I’ll take issue with a few descriptive phrases after…

In this stunning, emotionally charged memoir, Ken Dornstein interweaves the moving story of his own coming-of-age with the promise of greatness his brother never lived to fulfill. [It] is a heartbreaking but profoundly hopeful book about finding beauty in the midst of tragedy and making sense of it.

David Dornstein was 25 years old, a handsome, charismatic young man on the verge of becoming an extraordinary writer, when he [died in a plane crash in 1988]. …David’s brother, Ken, was nineteen, a college sophomore on winter break when the call came.  All his life Ken had looked up to David, confided in him, followed where he led.  David’s death left Ken with a void that both crushed and consumed him.  … Ken Dorstein needed to learn the truth about his brother’s life and death. In this harrowing and affecting memoir, he records what he found out.

The memoir was certainly interesting … but it never felt “stunning, emotionally charged” or “harrowing and affecting”.  While the book was “hopeful,” I would not say it was a “hopeful book about finding beauty in the midst of tragedy and making sense of it.”  Ken never finds beauty and he only ‘makes sense of it’ by letting it go.

But of course ‘letting it go’ is Life, and Life can’t always resolve tradgedies into beauty.  Much like Dave Egger’s Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genuis, the story is real; there isn’t a perfect story arc, there isn’t a central theme, there isn’t a happy ending.  I am annoyed that the front-flap misconstrues the book but can’t find fault with the book itself for being real.

My one real frustration with The Boy Who Fell was that there were too few Big Emotional Moments.  Despite reading 300-pages about a real-life tragedy and experiences of those closest to it, I never once really felt moved.  It was sad at times, certainly, but none of the scenes ever packed the punch they could have; they were somehow muted, contracted … and told in such a tone that I just never felt the proper emotional impact.  The “show don’t tell” motto ran through my head whenever the author mentions how his brother cried, or how he cried … I felt pity for them, but couldn’t seem to empathize with their sadness.  The memoir/reporting style of the book could have had something to do with the emotional distance I felt to the main characters, but I think most of the blame for the gap lies with the author.

One glaring reason why the book perhaps wasn’t written as perfectly as it could have been is that the author is still clearly trying to make sense of the story himself.  As the reader learns more about Ken (the author), it’s painfully apparent that writing this book about his brother’s death has taken an immense toll on his career, his family, and his life in general.  By the 16th long year from the 1988 death to the book’s 2004 publishing, it is clear that Ken simply wants to get the book written and try to make sense later.  Tuning the stories for the highest emotional impact didn’t seem like a high priority.

There is a deeply - and I believe knowingly - ironic quote within the book regarding one’s ability to reflect on their own life.  David received the following comment from an English professor at Brown on an memoir-esque diary/collage type project:

[you are] ‘on to something,’ but that you have here the germ for one good story … one perhaps you’re not quite ready to write.

Although that comment was written towards David’s project, I can’t express how accurately that describes my feeling towards Ken’s own attempt at writing David’s life.  Or, perhaps what I should say is that The Boy Who Fell is an good portrayal of David’s life but the book is also about Ken’s life, and that life story is one Ken is ‘not quite ready to write.’  I think Ken (the author) realizes the book is incomplete and imperfect, but I think he realizes (and the reader realizes along with him) that his own life has to move on from the book and, further, that the imperfections are irreconcilable anyway.

One final thing: The writing style is heavily influenced (or at least similar) as Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius: self-aware author occasionally talking to the reader, occasionally using odd writing styles (lists, bullet points), occasionally going out of chronological order, etc.  Although the style is undoubtedly useful, I sometimes found it merely lazy.  The book felt more like a personal email or a private blog post. Maybe that’s simply how my generation writes memoirs.

and now for a Personal Perspective on a Personal Perspective
Reading The Boy Who Fell was personally interesting on several major fronts:

1. I have an older brother.  Ken’s recounting of how much David influenced him struck a chord w