Book Review: Jo Walton - The Just City

Plato's Republic is one of the most-debated thought experiments of all time, but I'd always seen the critiques/reflections/responses to Plato's speculations on civic virtue in serious academic writing, so it was very refreshing to see someone think about the Republic in narrative form, and as a fantasy novel no less. What would actually living in the ideal city look like? How would you set it up, keep it running, deal with challenges? Karl Popper spent the whole Volume 1 of The Open Society criticizing the Republic as a totalitarian nightmare state (the classes of citizens, the abhorrence of trade, the idea that as long as the rulers are smart and virtuous enough nothing can go wrong), but in Walton's hands, for many of the characters it's much freer than the societies they came from, a practical lesson in applied ethics and the relativity of idealism that couldn't be obtained any other way. Once Walton has set up the premise - Athena has gathered thousands of people from across time in a recreation of Plato's Republic in part to teach Apollo, fresh off of Daphne's escape from his advances via transformation into a laurel tree, important insights about morality and mortality - the characters, including Socrates, have to work within the structures they've chosen and been chosen for to build the lives they want. Utopian societies have a long and honorable place in fiction, such as Francis Spufford's superb evocation of the Soviet 60s in Red Plenty, but it was very satisfying to see the Just City, the ancestor of them all, treated according to its own premises, and as one character says, "Nobody reads Plato and agrees with everything. But nobody reads any of the dialogues without wanting to be there joining in."

Book Review: Paul Cooper - River of Ink

Here's a great little piece of historical fiction about a time period I didn't know anything about - the invasion and attempted conquest of Sri Lanka by Kalinga Magha in 1215 AD - that manages to be densely researched, well-written, and satisfying on a storytelling level all at once. Cooper fits an impressive amount of research into the details of the Sinhalese-Tamil struggle, the kingdom, the palace, the food, the clothing, etc, in here, and while he drops in maybe a few too many untranslated terms for the prose to be completely smooth reading for a non-Sri Lankan, if you just relax and go with the atmosphere eventually you're so fully immersed you hardly notice it, especially because he's so descriptive and detailed. It's a novel about translation, bother personal and literary, which means it must also necessarily convey something about the difficulty of communication, and the melancholy love story that accompanies the war for control of the kingdom makes the personal political, adding a welcome human element to the mix of literary commentary and political struggle.

The protagonist is Asanka, a nebbishy court poet to King Parakrama and Queen Dayani of Sri Lanka in the Sinhalese royal capital of Polonnaruwa. After the crown prince Kalinga Magha arrives from the mainland and executes the royal family, Asanka is given the task of translating the epic poem Shishupala Vadha from the more academic Sanskrit into vernacular Tamil in order to promote the culture of the invaders as well as to raise the new king's status for posterity as a bringer of literature, since he has a chip on his shoulder about being the bastard youngest son of his royal family. Unfortunately, the Shishupala Vadha is incredibly difficult to translate well, being both dense in complex poetic imagery and heavily reliant on ingenious structural tricks (anagrams, palindromes, double meanings, visual puns, etc), and Asanka's burden of an impossible deadline is additionally complicated by the new king's desire to take Asanka's mistress Sarasi as the new queen. But if Asanka can keep his wits he can keep his head, as he plans an escape with Sarasi and embeds secret messages of defiance into his translation for the commoners to rally around. This subversion of Magha's desire for fame with unflattering comparisons to infamous tyrants is a sort of inverse of Virgil's flattering of Augustus in the Aeneid by linking the imperial dynasty to glorious Homeric myth.

At first I had some complaints about the novel's characters and themes. Even though it's written as a first-person diary/letter to Sarasi, Asanka generally comes off like a rich but uncharismatic dilettante, so it's hard to figure out why the two other main characters put up with him so much. Sarasi is much tougher and self-reliant than he is, to his chagrin, and her affection for him doesn't really seem warranted by his actions, which mostly range from uncaring and distant to cowardly and embarrassing. It seems like she would have dumped him a long time ago, even despite his influence with the new king, and the enduring sincerity of her feelings is out of proportion to anything he does on the page. Magha's continual trust in Asanka until almost the very end of the novel is even odder: a brutal conqueror without a lot of compunctions against killing those who displease him overlooks a long series of incredibly suspicious acts by this holdover poet from the old regime, and Asanka does not seem to have such a high Value Over Replacement Poet that Magha wouldn't have had him executed and replaced several times over. I realize that keeping Asanka alive was necessary to accomplish a few threads of dramatic irony - pay attention to the repeated lament that "poetry makes nothing happen", reader! - yet the sudden appearance of drought-breaking rain at the climax of the novel where the subversive power of literature is exhibited is just too perfect. Even Asanka's fear of elephants gets a callback right before he's reassured that, actually, poets are the real heroes, and the ending revelation of who had been writing Asanka helpful secret messages related to his work is groan-inducing.

But on further reflection these criticisms miss why Cooper set those things up that way. The novel is a deliberate echo of the great poetic epic that Asanka is translating, and just as the deliberately florid similes that various characters deploy attempt to connect the frequently-insufficient power of language to the real qualities of the thing they're trying to describe, the often-stylized actions of the characters connect the messiness of reality to the larger-than-life archetypes that populate the Shishupala Vadha. Asanka doesn't seem good enough for Sarasi to the reader; well, he doesn't seem good enough to himself either! Especially not when all he does is scribble words on the page, what a waste of time... until his works turns out to be actually meaningful to people. It's easy to lose count of how often the characters, Asanka included, denigrate literature ("poetry makes nothing happen"), but we're fooling ourselves if we think it doesn't matter, and even if words aren't real, they have real effects through our beliefs. Cooper did a marvelous job bringing this world of smoke, ink, and rain to life. A fantastic debut novel.

Book Review: George MacDonald Fraser - Flashman

Superb historical fiction, all the more notable for having one of the all-time antiheroes as its protagonist. Fast-paced, well-plotted, bitterly cynical, funny, and full of well-researched historical detail, you almost couldn't ask for a better pulp experience. It was written as the memoirs of Harry Flashman, a spoiled rich kid bully with a great talent for getting out of jams and having his character flaws interpreted as virtues, who's reluctantly forced into the army and spends the rest of the book shirking every responsibility he can en route to completely undeserved glory and fame thanks to the public's need for a hero. He's a total scumbag on basically every page (lazy, cowardly, misogynistic, greedy, lecherous, racist, untrustworthy, etc), and half of the time you're actually pulling for the Plot Armor protecting him to let up and give him what he deserves (in addition to his constant good luck at small things, there's more than one "this is the end, there's no possible way Flashman will get out of this one!" cliffhangers resolved neatly by a timely deus ex machina or fade to black), yet he seems to be the only one capable of understanding the sheer folly of the British experience in the First Anglo-Afghan War, and of imperialism/colonialism more generally.

It's a really neat trick: Flashman's interior monologue is unfailingly unpleasant, but his universal cynicism doesn't spare himself or his fellow British as they arrogantly bumble themselves into a hostile occupation of an unwilling country, pointlessly disrupting its politics and eventually getting over 15,000 soldiers and civilians massacred in the the unmitigated disaster of the 1842 retreat from Kabul. Along the way, Flashman's only principle is to look out for #1, as he advises the reader to do as well, and by the end of this sarcastic demolition of the hero myth, where he's given a visit with the Queen and celebration as a hero, universally lauded by a public ignorant of the real truth, you're forced to admit that he has a point: everyone else in this book is awful too. Don't let the vintage jingoism distract you from a surprisingly fun, insightful, and historically rich adventure story. Better yet, it's the first of a dozen.

Book Review: Lauren Groff - Florida

There were lots of aspects of these stories that I liked as I read them, but the collection as a whole didn't cohere into something I enjoyed until almost the very end when I was able to put them all together and get what she was trying to do. At first, each story ran together for me - if Florida Man is perpetually eating bath salts and driving four-wheelers into a swamp, then apparently Florida Woman is continually mired in unhappy relationships and snakes - but even though a notable percentage of these stories hit similar downbeats, each one conveys some bit of weird Florida-ness in a slightly different way. It might feel like the protagonists are mostly interchangeable, and they are, but as vessels for the emotions of disorientation, disillusion, and dislocation they're just fine. "Yport", the last, longest, and best story, doesn't even take place in Florida, but its narrative of a mother in a strange place trying to cope with several different flavors of disenchantment in her life and her work is a perfect example of how Groff is able to explore several things at once when she gives her ideas enough room to develop.

Book Review: Chapo Trap House - The Chapo Guide to Revolution

If you've listened to any of the podcast, you know exactly what to expect from the book: jokes, bile, leftism. Not all of it works, but of course you probably wouldn't be voluntarily reading this unless you were actually a fan of their acidic radicalism. But even a Democrat like me who's only listened to a few episodes would agree that much of their criticism of mainstream liberalism is inarguably correct: the Democratic Party sucks, no question. The show punches well above its weight class in terms of the leftist zeitgeist (although to be fair when it comes to podcasts this is not as hard as it seems), and so it's an important window into how our discussion of politics is evolving, in a particular segment of the electorate that is tired of the crimes of mainstream parties and media, sick of endless compromise, but struggling for coherent solutions and suspicious of the same folks who brought us the original problems to begin with. Even though you'll look in vain to find any real prescriptions here - "why are you expecting serious political advice from a group of leftist comedy podcasters?" is the obvious question - this kind of perspective from outside the political system is essential in order to have an honest, moral debate about politics within the system. Plus, the Onion/Something Awful-ripoff jokes are still usually funny.

This book is fine, read it if you like the show. But I want to spend some time talking about the Iraq War, because both the book and the show would be incomprehensible without first understanding the long shadow cast by that moral failure. The Iraq War is why I'll never vote Republican, why I didn't vote for Hillary Clinton in 2008, and why many still couldn't vote for her in 2016. At age 34 I don't think I'm alone in my thinking, and even younger progressives have to grapple with the fallout of many prominent Democrats failing that moral test and giving in to the Republican urge to war. If you're a liberal, what do you do with the inescapable knowledge that many of the politicians and pundits that define your party and your ideology voted to support the completely unnecessary deaths of hundreds of thousands? The cowardice of Clinton, Kerry, and so many others has come to define liberalism for leftists, offering a crystal-clear example of the ethical bankruptcy of compromise-first liberalism, and it presents a real problem for anyone interested in a system of politics that can beat the hate/fear/greed of the right. The contempt that Chapo has for mainstream Democrats is amply deserved, and I won't make excuses for those Democrats who voted for that stupid, senseless, evil war.

But, as I read the many long sections of the book making fun of the Diet Evil tendencies of liberalism, recognizing that the Iraq War vote was the prism through which all of liberalism was being viewed, I realized that it's important to understand the structural reasons that encouraged Clinton etc. to make such an obviously dumb vote, since this sort of thing happens again and again in all sorts of contexts. Exactly why did all of these people, routinely pilloried by their enemies as far-left extremists, supinely acquiesce to these transparent lies and indeed actively defend them, to the bafflement of actual far-leftists? 

The historian Adam Tooze once laid out a fascinating explanation for why the German Social Democratic Party decided to support funding for World War 1 (bear with me here, it's the 100th anniversary of Armistice Day and it's on my mind), and though the phrase "It's time for some game theory" is beyond parody at this point, adapting the 2 x 2 decision matrix in Tooze's lecture 14 of his WW1 series to the Iraq War is surprisingly revealing. On the show Chapo correctly pays a lot of attention to the media because media perception is often reality (indeed, they fulfill the role of the media themselves for their listeners in the same way as the much-reviled Daily Show did), and the credulous, self-important, and hawkish press, deciding that it truly represented "public opinion", played an important role in shaping incentives for the Iraq War:

• If Democrats vote Yes and the Iraq War is a success: Democrats are on the winning side and hopefully seen as strong, righteous, and loyal supporters of victory in the War on Terror; surely Republicans will never attack our patriotism again!
• If Democrats vote Yes and the Iraq War is a failure: This is kind of what Democrats like Kerry were actually saying afterwards in 2004, like "you didn't send enough body armor, or bomb the right targets, or pay enough attention to Afghanistan", in the hopes that voters would prefer slightly more competent warmongers.
• If Democrats vote No and the Iraq War is a success: Democrats would look unpatriotic to the Beltway press, the ultimate horror. Plus, even though winning the Gulf War obviously didn't re-elect George HW Bush, theoretically the American people love winners, and so not being a loser is all that matters.
• If Democrats vote No and the Iraq War is a failure: Hey, don't blame me! Without their fingerprints on it, Democrats look like geniuses, even though according to the popular press only hippies were against the war, and can you really trust someone who isn't willing or even eager to slaughter foreigners?

So from the perspective of prominent Democrats like Clinton or Kerry, petrified of being accused of being insufficiently willing to bomb foreigners, voting No offered only political downside, while voting Yes would, at the very least, claim you would have bombed foreigners better in some hopefully unspecified way, thus allowing you to be dubbed Serious by the people who mattered (i.e., not the foreigners in question). Setting aside the genuinely enthusiastic Democrats, who are thankfully now almost entirely gone, pure political self-preservation was the rule for the remainder. 

This calculus of cowardice applies to many situations throughout our history, but the poor SPD does look somewhat better in the historical rear-view mirror: Germany was not actually the bad guy in WW1; defeat in that war would have been, and actually was, far worse for Germany than the US just wasting trillions in Iraq; and by participation in the "patriotic truce" of Burgfriedenspolitik the SPD hoped to gain some much-needed political reforms as opposed to the nothing that Democrats got in exchange for their votes. I completely sympathize with anyone who won't forgive Democrats. Sometimes politicians fuck up, and people die, and no rebrands or glitzy ad campaigns can erase those dead people, and the knowledge that elected politicians are actually afraid of what some circle-jerking idiot news dispensers decide is consensus should give you incandescent rage.

I think that's a worthwhile exercise to go through, because, for all Chapo's completely valid criticisms of mainstream liberalism, like many leftists their response to these hard truths about American politics head-on is essentially limited to jokes. Yeah, a huge percentage of the population is simply awful, the press is not anyone's friend, the system is rigged, the support of elites is usually all that really matters, we're surrounded by freaks and mutants. 

All of that is true, and yet a turn to irony socialism and podcast radicalism would not actually avoid any of those obstacles or address any of those problems. Take the press, for example, and how bizarre it is that so many idiots are paid to pontificate on politics at all while wielding enormous power to destroy careers, gatekeep out new voices, and set the agenda. Gary Hart's 1988 Presidential bid was destroyed in a media frenzy over a picture that is laughably tame by today's standards. Howard Dean yelled funny in 2004 and that was it; Kucinich couldn't even get off the ground. Hillary's emails. Donald Trump can barely complete a sentence and he's shown rambling and openly lying for hours at a time, the press eagerly rolling over for it, countless gigantic scandals immediately forgotten, but simultaneously there's no such thing as too much sneering at liberals, and leftists might as well be in a different galaxy. The Cillizzas of the world make doing the right thing very hard, and as satisfying as it is to imagine all of those people in gulags, it's just not going to happen, so how do you work within that awful system? It's like Keynes' famously brilliant "Trotsky On England" book review, and what makes Robert Caro's works so fascinating.

I'm writing this just after the 2018 midterms, which gives both liberals and leftists ambiguous takeaways. Some left-wing candidates did better than centrists, but others did worse. Many states voted for very progressive policies, while simultaneously electing awful reactionaries in landslides. Important media outlets continued to be worthless, because for them it's all a game, and it doesn't really matter who won. What should non-Republicans learn from this election? This is a book of jokes ("Sir, this is an Arby's drive-thru"), but Chapo can't provide a satisfying answer of how they or DSA or anyone else who wants to work around the shambling hulk of the Democratic Party and our rotten electoral system would be able to do better systematically, to avoid the incredibly powerful incentives for good people to do bad things, to have 2018 look like 2006 in another 12 years (remember when the prospect of Speaker Pelosi portended unspeakable Jacobin horrors to come?). 

It's immensely frustrating that socialism, of all possible ideologies, seems to have all the moral energy behind it, given what a dead end that is, but perhaps encouraging socialists to participate in the Democratic Party is the only way to keep it grounded. Compromise is not a principle, as they so ably point out, and Robert Frost's line about how "A liberal is a man who won't stand up for his own side of the argument" means that sometimes a party drunk on appeasement needs a sober friend to take the keys away. It would be truly depressing if this was the best political system we could possibly hope for, but since we're stuck with it for now, we might as well laugh along the way.