“You don’t want to be a ditch-digger when you grow up,” my grandfather used to tell me.

Well, I don’t know if he ever said that or not, to be honest, but it somehow sticks in my mind that he did. It’s the kind of thing he would’ve said.

Ditch digging is honorable work—but it’s also a hard way to make a living.

He spoke from the experience that physical labor will give a man. For most of his life, he served as a postman in the small town of Eldred, Pa., sorting and shuffling mail, slipping letters into P.O. boxes, making small-talk with customers from behind the counter. The building smelled of envelopes and stamp adhesive. It was a pretty easy gig.

But in his youth, he worked in the area’s oil fields with his father and his father’s brothers, all hewn of rough Irish stock. They drilled and blasted wells. On their days off, they fished, and some of them drank, and on Sundays, their combined families filled half the church. My grandfather might’ve grown into that same adulthood had the war not come.

Yet the war almost passed him by. He couldn’t pass the physical because of his eyes. Still, he somehow talked his way into a job in the quartermaster’s department. When they shipped him to France, he worked behind the lines, shuffling supplies, moving mail, and flirting with pretty French girls he couldn’t understand.

But His Girl, my grandmother, waited for him stateside, and he couldn’t wait to get back to her. When he did, his job in the army helped get him a job with the postal service. No more oil fields for him.

And no oil fields for his kids, either. He and my grandmother shipped all three of their kids off to college. Their son became a lawyer. Their oldest daughter became a college professor. Their youngest daughter became my mother, and thirteen months later, my brother came along, as well. No more college for mom—but no oil fields, either.

My brother and I became my grandfather’s favorites. Being first and being close had its advantages, after all. He would bundle us up in our buggy and stroll us up and down the streets of Eldred, showing us off to everyone he knew—which was everyone, of course, since he was postman.

“I just want to see those boys make it through school,” he would tell my grandmother.

As we got older, my grandfather’s health got poorer. He had a chronic circulatory problem that sapped the life out of him. It took twenty slow years. He hung on, my grandmother once told me, because he wanted to see my brother and me get through school. If we could just get through school, he knew we’d be okay, that we’d be able to make it in the world.

When I graduated from high school, the tears in my grandfather’s eyes said what his quivering smile and choked voice could not.

He didn’t make it to see my college graduation. He passed away just a couple months before I began my senior year. But he knew I was on my way to a good career, and he knew I wouldn’t have to spend my life digging ditches.

The irony was not lost on me the other day, then, as I leaned against my pick-ax and wiped the sweat from my brow. I was digging a drainage ditch in front of our horse barn when my grandfather’s words came back to me.

I realized how blessed I am to lead the kind of life that lets me dig ditches instead of one that forces me to.

It’s ironic, too, that I’m still in school—albeit as the professor instead of the student. I’ve liked school so much I’ve never wanted to leave, I guess. My brother is a teacher, too.

My grandfather’s other grandchildren, my cousins, have likewise all done well for themselves. We have more lawyers and teachers in the family. We have a flight attendant, a retailer, and a manager of a successful medical practice.

And we all still have my grandmother, the other half of the partnership that made sure we all got our educations.

Last month was my grandfather’s birthday. He would’ve been ninety-two.

It was also my sixteenth wedding anniversary. One reason my wife and I chose the date was because it was my grandfather’s birthday. On the day of the wedding, my uncle gave to me as a wedding gift my grandfather’s ring. “Because you loved him,” my uncle told me. While the ring is too fragile for regular wear, I still slip it on in the evenings and wear it as I write. I have it on now.

For my grandfather’s birthday last week, I went to the cemetery to visit him. I brushed away the few early-fall leaves that covered part of his footstone, and then, from the graveside, I called my grandmother on my cellphone. I wanted to share the moment with both of them. I wanted to tell them thanks.

I sure had a lot of other help along the way, particularly from my folks and my dad’s folks and my brother.

But on this day, my Grandpa Cawley’s birthday, I wanted he and my grandmother to both know how thankful I was.

I’m thankful that I’ve been able to make my way in the world, thankful that everything turned out okay, thankful that I still enjoy school.

I’m thankful I can be a ditch digger, after all—because I can be a ditch digger on my own terms.

One Life, by Johnny Clegg, first released 2006, 16 tracks, ASIN B000I5YROM

We’re on our way home to find our freedom
and I’m on my way home to find you my friend
where we can stand in the light of the people
and breathe life into the land again.

“When the System Has Fallen,” Johnny Clegg

“If you have a patch of ground the size of a door, you can feed a family of four,” rhymes my friend, John Broom. John is well over 80 and has been involved in teaching gardening and feeding schemes in Africa for the Quaker Peace Foundation for decades. I believe him.

Africa itself is a vast and fertile land. The small state of Zimbabwe used to be the breadbasket of the Sub-Saharan region, able to supply wheat and maize to tens of millions of people. South Africa still exports some 3 million tons of cereals a year, 33% of production, while feeding a population of 45 million.

Ethiopia continues to be the poster child for starvation. Five million children a year die in Africa from malnutrition. A third of Africa’s population is malnourished. Yet this continent of 30 million square kilometres produces only 143 million tons of food cereals, less than 10% of the world total of over 2 billion tons. The US, by comparison, produces 450 million tons on less than 10 million square kilometers of land.

Clearly, there is a problem.

Pop stars of the world claim to have a solution.

The Solutions of the Stars

Bono, front-man of Irish super-group, U2, tells African countries that all they need to do is learn from Ireland. “Twenty years ago our economy was down the toilet, the IMF were telling us what to do and the World Bank were down our pants.”

Well, yes, Bono, so what African countries need to do is join the EU, collect hefty subsidies on infrastructure and agriculture, and have tariff-free access to the European market? And on which planet is this going to happen?

In other words, what we learn from an aging, fading pop star is that Africa’s future success depends entirely on what the rest of the world chooses to do. That Africa is an innocent victim of the choices of other countries.

Bono is a twit. As a friend said, “I think the only fair thing, now that Bono has become an economist, is for him to allow all of us economists to join his band.”

To which I respond, “I’m really clear on opportunity cost, comparative advantage, moral hazard and I once saw a guitar … I think I can take over from the Edge.”

Even more foolish is the pie-eyed response from Bob Geldof. Live Aid, in 1984, raised $300 million that allowed Ethiopia’s blood-drenched dictator, Mengistu Haile Mariam, and his Derg army, to butcher and destroy more people before being overthrown. Ethiopia’s new government has, 24 years later, banned journalists from visiting the worst-affected areas of renewed conflict and famine in order to avoid embarrassment. The UN’s World Food Programme estimates that 9.5 million people – 12% of Ethiopia’s population – need emergency food aid in 2008.

So humming along to, “We are the world. We are the children,” made a really big difference. I think Geldof should let me in his band too.

The world of Juluka

In 1993, Johnny Clegg released a deeply moving album, Heat and Dust and Dreams. His first album, Universal Men, was released in 1979. There are few musicians that endure for such a long period of time, and fewer still who reinvent their musical style to continue to say something both original and relevant over that period.

Heat and Dust and Dreams has the energy and originality of a first album; of a new band. Yet it has the depth of meaning and clarity of understanding that is achieved at great personal cost.

South Africa, in 1993, was a dark and terrifying place. The glacial progress towards liberation was giving way to a chaotic stampede: bomb-blasts going off all over the show; horrific violence as “liberators” wrapped “conspirators” in car tyres, covered them with petrol and set them on fire; riots and damage. No one knew if we would come out of this alive as politicians played brinkmanship.

Heat and Dust and Dreams challenged us to remember why we came here and what we were doing it for. It was an homage to those of us active in the “struggle” to keep going. And a remembrance of those who fell along the way.

In 1990, Clegg’s lead dancer – and anyone who has seen a live show will know that the Zulu war dancing is the focal-point of the music’s energy – Dudu Zulu was shot and killed while attempting to mediate in a violent dispute.

Johnny Clegg’s story is a testament to the astonishing charisma and determination of the man. Born of middle-class Jewish parents, he was captivated by the sound of township music; music produced by migrant Zulu workers drawn to Johannesburg to earn a living and work deep underground in the mines. Clegg used to sneak into the townships – where it was illegal for white people to visit – and beg to be allowed to learn how to play. Then he learned Zulu war dancing.

He took Zulu traditional themes and added a rock score and released an album. The “White Zulu” was born.

I was at a concert of Clegg’s in 1994 with kids – most of us who hadn’t even been born when he released his first album – when he lead into a song with this intro: “You know, it’s quite something when you write a song and, 21 years later, people still want to hear it.”

Then he played “Impi” and the kids tried to jump out of their skins with a roar of delight.

And here’s the thing, “Impi” isn’t a ballad or some power rock song about being a teenager. It’s a history lesson.

In 1879 Mageba, General to King Ceteswayo, led his Zulu impi to slaughter the central column of Lord Chelmsford’s army at the Battle of Isandhlwana. The British had deliberately incited the war by setting the Zulus the ultimatum of submitting to the crown and disbanding their army. Five columns of troops were sent, inappropriately dressed in their red coats and black pants, to engage Ceteswayo.

Lord Chelmsford was another of the spectacularly incompetent generals that the British enjoyed appointing to their colonial armies. He couldn’t be bothered to spy out the land, considering the Zulu to be cowardly. Far from it, the Zulu lay in wait and attacked mercilessly and without warning.

After the battle they ritually washed their spears in the blood of the fallen. The blood ran; a river into a river.

“Impi” – so joyously danced to by the descendents of British settlers – is the rebel yell of Zulus defeating a British colonial army. You can’t beat that sort of irony.

The poet within: Heat and Dust and Dreams

If that was the end of Johnny Clegg’s story that would already be the basis of an astonishing Hollywood move, but it isn’t. Clegg went on to get an Honours in Social Anthropology and went on to lecture at the Universities of the Witwatersrand and Natal. In 2007 he even received an honorary doctorate from Wits.

Go through the lyrics of his songs and you are struck by the complexity, depth of feeling and beauty of the words. Clegg’s music is so joyous, so transcendent, so musically astute and so downright danceable, that the lyrics – a mix of Zulu and English – can get overlooked. Sometimes even by the descendants of British colonists.

The opening lines of the opening song, “These Days,” on Heat and Dust and Dreams:

Yashimbawula!
(the watchman’s fire is burning)
What happened to the diamonds in your eyes,
What happened to the hunger for the day’s chase?
What happened to the electric smile
That danced your life across your face
We used to talk about changing the world
Now all you want to do is change your name
Come on baby don’t surrender now
to the empty heart of these days.
We used to talk so deep into the night
You had the heart of a wild horse running
You bared your soul to me
and we both knew these days were coming

“These Days”

A song of the determination need to achieve liberty and resonated particularly during the terrifying days before South Africa’s 1994 universal sufferance. Or how about “The Crossing,” Clegg’s tribute to Dudu and all struggle victims:

Through all the days that eat away
at every breath that I take
through all the nights I’ve lain alone
in someone else’s dream, awake
all the words in truth we have spoken
that the wind has blown away
it’s only you that remains with me
clear as the light of day
Chorus:
O Siyeza, o siyeza , sizofika webaba noma
(we are coming, we are coming, we will arrive soon)
O siyeza, o siyeza, siyagudle lomhlaba
(we are coming, we are coming, we are moving across this earth)
Siyawela lapheshaya lulezontaba ezimnyama
(we are crossing over those dark mountains)
Lapha sobheka phansi konke ukhulupheka
(where we will lay down our troubles)

“The Crossing“

I still weep when I listen to this. And there are others. My anthem in the ’90s was “Tough Enough”:

Picture the end of a cycle
here’s the fire from heaven
There’s a tired planet closing down
no more news at eleven
somewhere the last of a species has died
somewhere a child is born
when I hold you, I tremble inside
can we ride out the storm?
Are you tough enough – can you take the strain?
Are you tough enough – to walk in the burning rain
Are you tough enough – can you take the change?
Are you tough enough – baby just say!
Chorus:
Into the heart of the human dream
into a strange new world
remember me under the Tree of Man
where I first heard your words
gonna make it through, I can feel it

“Tough Enough”

Heat and Dust and Dreams was a political anthem. A declaration of what the world will be and what will be required to get there. In 2008, Clegg released One Life, looking at what all that energy has released and created. And looking forward at hope.

Johnny Clegg and the Tyrants: One Life

Anyone who has seen a Johnny Clegg performance knows that they are high-energy.

Click here to view the embedded video.

When Clegg rejoined his original partner, Sipho Mchunu, for a concert in Grahamstown in 1994 at a school hall in the middle of the local township, they danced on an old carpet.

The dust from that carpet was stomped out into the air causing Clegg to go into a coughing fit. “Haai,” said Mchunu, “the old man is tired.” A typically laconic statement from the man who left Juluka, Clegg’s original band, at the height of its success – when world popularity awaited him – to go back to rural Zululand so that he could raise a big family and watch his cows grow fat.

The concert I saw in 1995 was a one-off, and unique. Could you imagine Bono, or any of the rock legends holding an impromptu concert in a large theatre, sitting on his own with nothing but a guitar and speaking about the stories behind the songs?

Clegg sat and gave us a miraculous, beautiful insight into his life, and the history of the music. He played little musical snatches, showing how the music evolved, where it came from. He talked about Zulu dancing, Zulu music, how to rewire an accordion or a guitar to play Zulu music. Hours hurtled past as he sang and he played and he talked.

I love music. I have a lot of favourite musicians. Many of them are top European or American acts. Sting, U2, Evanescence, Nickelback, Eric Clapton, Peter Grabriel. I’m not especially interested in any of them as people. Bono and Geldof prove to me the vacuousness of most of what they have to say.

Clegg is different. He is genuinely smart, sticks entirely to what he knows and doesn’t claim to have the answers. What he does is humanise, contextualise and emotionalise the questions.

And so, via a lengthy introduction, we come to One Life.

It’s 2008. Johnny Clegg is 55 and has been performing for 29 years. He is not as popular in South Africa as he used to be. People aren’t interested in asking the hard questions anymore. He is still extremely popular in France, where the French have an oddly soft-spot for all things African. I think that Clegg has done well out of his music, but he is never going to be a super-star. That he continues to perform and write is because he loves what he does, and he still has something to say.

This album is a great album. Not just great in comparison to his own work, but a great album. And it just works so well. It has the energy and originality of a first album; of a new band. Yet it has the depth of meaning and clarity of understanding that is achieved at great personal cost. And, yes, I said that before.

This isn’t the first album that Clegg has released since Heat and Dust and Dreams, he stepped into purely traditional sounds in between with albums that weren’t especially memorable. We were all, South Africans, lulled into a pleasurable daze following the success of the 1994 democratic transition. No more.

I am a boy soldier
See my eyes’ empty stare
Each day explodes with pain
And it’s more than I can bare
The ghosts of the slain
Are the shadows in my eyes
And I dream tomorrow will come
And carry me away
Every second in No Man’s Land
I hold my life in these small hands
Every day in a world gone mad
Hard to face who I am
Chorus:
Once we were children
Once we played in the morning light
Once we were dreamers
One morning they came, the soldiers took us away

“Boy Soldier”

“Boy Soldier” opens with a hauntingly beautiful base melody. The lyrics and music evocative of lost childhood, of innocence looking out of a tortured soul. There is no anguish, just sorrow.

Clegg nods to two new languages, apart from his typical English and Zulu, and recognises two audiences that have supported him through the years: Afrikaans and French. I don’t think that Afrikaans works as a musical language. You can swear in it, but you can’t sing in it. Clegg does his best, but he really shines with French which has always blended beautifully into African music.

Can Clegg only talk about politics? No, of course not. Many of his songs are about love and the fragile strength and beauty of human relationships. Writing about one of his ballads, Clegg says, “The sun evaporates water but the sea is not scared of the sun’s flames because it’s infinite. In the same way that the sea is tested everyday by the sun, love is tested by human folly and difficult circumstances. Migrant work separates lovers far from each other over long periods of time and distance. This is the perennial problem of the life of a touring musician. Real love is like the ocean which cannot be evaporated by the burning sun.”

He can even be gently humorous:

I would like to be the sky
You could be my blue
You could be a dancing foot
And I could be your shoe
Oh, it’s hot in here and I need some air
I’ll wait outside for you
Come what may, there will be a day
I will wake up next to you…

“Bull Heart”

Lines I sent to my love, so far away from me across the sea. But Clegg is best when he is roaring defiance:

He’s a leader, talks of freedom
He knows the power of the Big Idea
He’s a dealer, he’s a seeker
Of the power that comes from fear
He gave his life to the party machine
Holding onto a secret dream
He knows better than anyone
Power comes from the barrel of a gun…
And he’s rising up against them now
And he’s rising up in country and town
Rising up against them now, rising up
Chorus:
The revolution has eaten its children
I see the river of dreams run dry
I’m so thankful I got to love you
You are the reason I survive

“The Revolution Will Eat Its Children“

The defining song of the album speaks truth to power. Don’t trust your leaders, they are human, and their motives may be entirely selfish.

“The dry old grass is made young, green and new again only by fire. This means that often hard and difficult experiences in your life make you confront and reinvent yourself giving you a new perspective. We learn some of our deepest lessons through pain,” says Clegg.

Don’t think that this album is only about struggle and survival. It isn’t. It is musically complex, while being a tremendous dance album. The instrumentation is wonderful and you’ll enjoy listening to it repeatedly as the various layers of music and lyric unfold around you.

This is an album that speaks to youth and beginning a life, with all its challenges; those of love and relationships, of loss and horror, but also of dreams and the ambition of changing the world and making it new again.

Oh! this is your time
This is your life
This is your day
Oh! look at the night
These are your stars
They show the way
I feel your heart beat
This is your time
This is your life
This is your day

“Day in the Life”

For Sam, for whom I bought this album and still haven’t actually gotten round to sending it to him. I promise it will be in the mail. Soon.

The World Without Us
by Alan Weisman
Thomas Dunne Books–St. Martin’s Press
324 pp.

What would the world be like if the human race just up and vanished?

“Unlikely, perhaps, but for the sake of argument, not impossible,” writes journalist Alan Weisman. Perhaps a human-specific virus wipes us out or aliens kidnap us or God raptures us away. Poof—we’re gone. Tomorrow.

That’s the hypothetical premise behind Weisman’s newest book, The World Without Us.

But while the premise sounds fanciful, Weisman offers nothing but cold, hard facts and a gnawing gut feeling that something is already dreadfully, dreadfully wrong.

The book starts out with a fascinating look at how houses deteriorate, how cities crumble, how bridges fall. “Back when they told you what your house would cost, nobody mentioned what you’d also be paying so that nature wouldn’t repossess it long before the bank,” Weisman says.

The insidious culprit behind most of it is plain old water, which finds a way “mysteriously, inexorably” into everything given enough time. Water has the power to corrode and erode and wash things clean away.

Throughout the first quarter of the book, the world wears away in such fashion. Weisman talks to scientists, engineers, ecologists, and an assortment of other experts, building his case on well-known, well-documented fact and experience. It’s everything you’d want in a Discovery Channel special.

In those first few chapters, the planet without us sounds peaceful and bucolic, but Weisman is really just lulling readers into a false Eden. The remaining three-quarters of the book shows the terrible impact humanity has already had on the planet and how, if our species were to blink away, the footprint we’ve already left will remain millions of years into the future.

In virtually every instance, that’s not a good thing.

Take plastic, for example. Every particle of plastic ever manufactured still exists somewhere in the environment. In the middle of the Pacific Ocean, a mass of plastic debris the size of Texas clutters the ocean surface—one of six such masses in the world’s oceans. Millions of tons lay buried underground. No one knows how long it will take for any of that plastic to biodegrade.

What makes Weisman’s book so compelling, though, is the solid journalistic foundation it’s built on. Weisman travels the world to do some excellent reporting. For that reason, it’s impossible to dismiss The World Without Us as “a book for tree-huggers.” It’s real journalism that objectively explores serious environmental issues. Weisman never preaches.

Not that he’d need to. The scientific data speaks loudly for itself, leading readers from incredulity to dread to despair. Make no mistake, as vital as this book is—as thoughtful and thought-provoking as it is—The World Without Us is not for the weak of heart. Most readers will hardly be able to believe the precarious condition our planet is really in.

“[W]e don’t get out of this life alive—and neither will the Earth,” Wesiman says.

In a stirring coda, “Our Earth, Our Souls,” Weisman links the post-human world to the post-world human, touching on the religious implications of the world without us. He smartly avoids any long theological discussions by taking a broader approach that examines the ethical implications of what our presence on the planet now will mean once we’re gone.

“Worldwide, every four days human population rises by 1 million,” he says. “Since we can’t really grasp such numbers, they’ll wax out of control until they crash, as happened to every other species that got too big for this box.”

“About the only thing that could change that…is to prove that intelligence really makes us special after all,” Weisman continues. “The intelligent solution would require the courage and the wisdom to put our knowledge to the test.”

In other words, if everyone knew what scientists all around the world already know and what Weisman has written about, and if everyone applied that knowledge, we could save the earth. Such a solution, he says, would be “poignant and distressing…but not fatal.”

On the other hand, by 2050 the earth’s population will balloon to 9 billion people—and there just aren’t enough resources on the planet to support that kind of population. The planet only seems big, and resources only seem endless, but the human race is careening toward a hard, abrupt lesson about sustainability and the finite nature of nature.

The World Without Us will be a startling place, Weisman suggests. What’s even more startling is how—and how soon—it may end up that way.

Chris Mackowski is an associate professor of journalism and mass communication at St. Bonaventure University.

The Case of Abraham Lincoln: A Story of Adultery, Murder, and the Making of a Great President
by Julie M. Fenster

Julie Fenster’s new book is not only a fascinating look at a side of Abraham Lincoln—his daily life as an influential Illinois lawyer in the years before he became president—but an illuminating study about how he and his abolitionist associates succeeded in fusing anti-slavery Democrats and Whigs and to create the Republican party. Lincoln’s role as a wartime president tends to overshadow the fact of his crucial involvement not only in exposing his arch rival Stephen Douglas, author of the infamous Kansas-Nebraska act that opened the western territories of the United States to slavery—but in the nitty-gritty, day-to-day politicking that preceded, and was crucial to the party’s victory at the polls in the 1860 presidential election.

These days there is a lot of hand-wringing about how the internecine struggle in the present election campaign may fracture the Democratic Party and even allow Republicans to salvage victory from what seemed like a sure defeat. I find that highly doubtful considering the rate of the economic meltdown which—along with the Iraq war—should finally and unequivocally establish Bush’s legacy as the worst president in U.S. history and doom his would-be Republican successor; but even if this were not the case, I suggest that the way in which the Republican party came to power offers a hopeful model for a long overdue shakeup in the American political scene.

Fenster has an eye for the telling detail and she has shaped her story on an 1856 murder trial, which captured the attention of the people living in Springfield at the time, and the Illinois legal community. Lincoln took part in the high-powered defense team, although he was offered good money to help the prosecution. According to recollections of a fellow lawyer, Thomas Lewis, “Lincoln accepted. He said he would sooner defend the woman for nothing—she was accused of being an accomplice to the poisoning of her husband—than prosecute her for $200.” The book is enlivened by stories like this, as well as details about his family life culled from gossipy letters of the period such as the recollection by a neighbor that when he was home from his travels on the law circuit, he would happily do the marketing and “put on a large blue apron, and do whatever was needed,” to help with the cooking.

But this is not a book about the homely details of Lincoln’s life nor the more bizarre moments of his highly successful legal practice. For Lincoln and his law partner William Herndon, it was the contentious political issues of the day that were paramount, with the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska law taking first place. Thirty years before the Missouri Compromise had divided the nation between slave and free states. Now with further westward expansion the South had forced a change in the rules, allowing new western states to decide the slavery question for themselves, and border clashes between pro-and anti-slavery forces were becoming a fact of life.

Fenster has accomplished the nearly impossible task of taking a fresh look at Lincoln’s life by juxtaposing his legal practice and his increasing re-involvement in politics following his abortive try for a Senate seat in 1855. At that time his collaborators in the Illinois legislature chose to put forward the anti-slavery Democrat Lyman Trumbull as their candidate, seeing him as more likely to garner votes from fellow Democrats and win the appointment than Lincoln, who still identified with the increasingly defunct Whigs.

While the Democrats remained the largest national political party, it housed Douglas Democrats who espoused direct democracy as exemplified by the Kansas-Nebraska act, southern Slave Democrats, Anti-Nebraska Democrats, Free Soil Democrats—in other words the party was on the verge of shattering. Things were even worse with the Whigs, who were aligning themselves with the various breakaway tendencies in the Democratic Party.

By 1856, Lincoln was willing to break with the Whigs and participate in forming the new Republican party (as yet without a name), and he was at the forefront of the political struggle. Militant opponents of the 1854 law were known as the Anti-Nebraskans, but unlike Lincoln and Herndon, they were against the expansion of slavery into the western territories but not necessarily anti-slavery per se.

To complicate things still further, a new secretive anti-immigrant political force that was threatening to replace the populist wing of the two fractured major parties was organizing, with a program reminiscent of today’s anti-immigrant populists. The “Know Nothings”—their name derived from their refusal to answer questions considered to be prying, except to reply “I know nothing”—were gaining power throughout the country. By 1856 they had shown themselves to be a political force, electing nine governors and 43 congressmen on a ticket opposing Catholic immigration. In the northeast they also came out in favor of freedom for slaves.

For Lincoln the challenge was how to create an anti-slavery coalition out of all of these disparate groups that would be strong enough to defeat the pro-slavery expansionists while holding the union together. How he went about this, despite the apparently heavy odds against success, is a gripping story. It has many lessons to teach today—the importance of persevering against the odds and not despairing at setbacks, the need to navigate carefully while remaining uncompromising on fundamental principles.

As someone who has always believed that Lincoln was a principled opponent of slavery, I was particularly interested in Fenster’s documentation establishing that he was associated with the abolitionist section of the movement in 1856, although he did not support radical abolitionists who he felt would abort the possibility of forming a winning coalition.

She quotes from a letter written by Lincoln to his close friend Joshua Speed which shows him to be an uncompromising opponent both of slavery and of the anti-immigrant sentiments being stirred up by the Know Nothings. This from Lincoln:

I am not a Know Nothing. That is certain. How could I be? How can anyone who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favor of degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that “all men are created equal.” We now practically read it “all men are created equal, except negroes.” When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base allow of hypocracy. [Lincoln’s spelling]

In 1856 Lincoln set about trying to organize an anti-Nebraska political force that would include former Whigs and Democrats and anti-Nebraska people who supported the Know Nothing party. These were people who were not necessarily anti-slavery but who were not prepared to accept the extension of slavery in the west. He threw his support to William Bissell, a former Democrat who would was chosen to run for Governor of Illinois, but initially he opposed the choice of the radical abolitionist John C. Fremont as the candidate for president, believing him to be unelectable. On both counts he was proven right. Bissell did win, while Fremont lost. Illinois went for Democrat Buchanan, with a vote of 105,528 (44% of those voting); Fremont (running as a Republican) received 96,278 votes (15.7%) and Fillmore (a Know Nothing) came in third with 37,521 (15.7%).

In one of his 1856 campaign speeches, Lincoln contrasted himself with Senator Stephen Douglas:

Twenty-two years ago Judge Douglas and I first became acquainted. We were both young then; he a trifle younger than I. Even then, we were both ambitious; I, perhaps, quite as much so as he. With me the race of ambition has been a failure—a flat failure, with him it has been one of splendid success. His name fills the nation; and is not unknown, eve, in foreign lands. I affect no contempt for the high eminence he has reached. So reached, that the oppressed of my species, might have shared with me in the elevation, I would rather stand on that eminence, that wear the richest crown that ever pressed a monarch’s brow.

In 1858, Lincoln again tried for a seat in the Senate. This time he ran as a Republican against the incumbent, Democrat Stephen Douglas. Although he did not win that election, in the seven debates between them on the question of the extension of slavery Lincoln established his national reputation and prepared the ground for his election to the presidency two years later.

It’s good now and again to step back from the passions of the moment and take a longer view of how historical processes unfold. I strongly recommend Julie Fenster’s new book.

The worst that a prince may expect from a hostile people is to be abandoned by them; but from hostile nobles he has not only to fear abandonment, but also that they will rise against him;

In 1513, early into the Great Wars of Italy, an Italian politician, ambassador, soldier, and political philosopher was on the losing end of one of the many internal conflicts that followed the Reniassance. After being tortured and eventually released, he moved to his beloved Florence and settled down on a farm to write what is probably one of the most important treatises on politics written – Il Principe, The Prince, by Niccolo Machiavelli.

In The Prince, Machiavelli lays out different kinds of principalities that exist, their various strengths and weaknesses, how to become a prince, and how to most effectively rule a principality. In so doing, Machiavelli gives us an eminently practical and pragmatic book about political leadership as well as a detailed look at the political and military history of his precious Italy.

[T]his country was under the dominion of the Pope, the Venetians, the King of Naples, the Duke of Milan, and the Florentines. These potentates had two principal anxieties: the one, that no foreigner should enter Italy under arms; the other, that none of themselves should seize more territory. Those about whom there was the most anxiety were the Pope and the Venetians.

However, the modern reader shouldn’t just read The Prince for its historical insights, fascinating as they are. Instead, the examples that Machiavelli scatters throughout the book are highly valuable for their parallels to modern politics, especially politics in parliamentary and federal systems a la the United States, the United Kingdom, Israel, Japan, etc. Given that the governance of republics is specifically not addressed in The Prince, that Machiavelli’s insights nonetheless apply should give all of us pause.

If we look at the United States, we find that the country has a long history of political dynasties – the Bushes, the Udalls, the Rockefellers, the Kennedys, the Roosevelts, just to name a few. In many respects (although certainly not all), these families qualify as “hereditary principalities” according to Machiavelli’s definition. And as such, it’s easy to understand how they maintain their influence over a political system that is supposedly a republic.

I say at once there are fewer difficulties in holding hereditary states, and those long accustomed to the family of their prince, than new ones; for it is sufficient only not to transgress the customs of his ancestors, and to deal prudently with circumstances as they arise, for a prince of average powers to maintain himself in his state, unless he be deprived of it by some extraordinary and excessive force; and if he should be so deprived of it, whenever anything sinister happens to the usurper, he will regain it.

In other words, once you’re in with the help of Mommy or Daddy’s money and contacts, unless you suck badly, you’re in for good.

Our system approximates a “civic principality” as Machiavelli defines it, especially the Presidency. Given what Machiavelli says about civic principalities, and civic princes, it’s hardly a surprise that Presidents have sought to expand their power, generally successfully:

He who obtains sovereignty by the assistance of the nobles maintains himself with more difficulty than he who comes to it by the aid of the people, because the former finds himself with many around him who consider themselves his equals, and because of this he can neither rule nor manage them to his liking. But he who reaches sovereignty by popular favour finds himself alone, and has none around him, or few, who are not prepared to obey him.

As the quote that opened this post illustrates, Presidents civic princes who are installed via a public vote are largely insulated against the power of Congress their fellow nobles because the nobles cannot effectively resist the mass of the public. The only problems come when the prince visits upon his subjects (both the people and the nobles) sufficient indignities that he becomes hated and despised.

…I consider that a prince ought to reckon conspiracies of little account when his people hold him in esteem; but when it is hostile to him, and bears hatred towards him, he ought to fear everything and everybody. And well-ordered states and wise princes have taken every care not to drive the nobles to desperation, and to keep the people satisfied and contented, for this is one of the most important objects a prince can have.

Unfortunately for this excellent little book, The Prince has too often been considered a template for personal power. While there is certainly truth to that opinion, there’s a great deal more going on in The Prince than the quest for, and the maintenance of, personal power. In many respects, Machiavelli holds flexibility in the face of setbacks and various forms of opposition to be the single greatest asset any leader could have, and he points out that truly effective leadership essentially boils down to knowing the best approach to dealing with a problem and then implementing that approach. And Machiavelli clearly implies that only a truly effective prince can keep his principality safe from invasion, civil war, and even self-destruction.

Machiavelli has been badly misunderstood to be justifying any actions so long as those actions are effective at keeping the prince in power, when in fact he’s an agitator for princes to temper their basest tendencies in favor of the health of their very subjects and nations.

This is not to say that Machiavelli doesn’t justify cruelty, or lying, or the invasion of other nations – he does. But he points out that princes must limit their cruelty to situations where it’s absolutely necessary, and even then to quick cruelties that affect the fewest people, lest the princes be at risk losing their positions. He points out that lying and going back on your promises is sometimes necessary, but that doing so all the time gives the nobility and public reason to hate and oppose you. He points out that, if invasion is either necessary or desired, then there are ways to do it that will not destroy your own nation via overextension in the process.

The ends may justify the means, but for Machiavelli, the ends being justified are at least as much the security and prosperity of the nation as a whole as they are the personal power of the nation’s prince or princes. The Prince is a book of sufficient subtlety that the differences between personal power and national authority are not necessarily obvious, something that too many readers and reviewers over the centuries have failed to grasp.

Our leaders would do well to study again their Machiavelli and to re-learn what they believe they understand so well.

To read The Prince in its entirety on-line, please visit Project Gutenberg.

Last night saw the premiere of the final season of “The Wire,” HBO’s long-running drama that started out as a gritty look at the cat-and-mouse battle between overworked, underpaid cops and ruthless drug dealers in the decaying metropolis of Baltimore, Maryland, but quickly evolved into a scathing, unforgiving tour of the failure of all the institutions we take for granted. This ambitious vision is married to some of the most honest, raw, and real characters ever to grace a television screen, making “The Wire” not only the best show on television today, but one of the best examples of modern American thought and commentary we have.

Each season of “The Wire” has focused on a different institution or system and demonstrated in gory detail how badly it is failing, wrecked by corruption, indolence, greed,and above all else, apathy. Season One explored the parallels between the drug trade and the police culture, both groups crippled by greedy leaders more interested in protecting themselves than fulfilling their objectives. Corner boy drug dealers like Bodie and Poot were grousing about their distant bosses just as detectives like Jimmy McNulty (the peerless Dominic West) and Bunk Moreland raged at their inability to break cases due to politics.

Season Two explored Baltimore’s ports and the tired workers who man them, as a grisly murder investigation morphed into a look at the decline of unions, collective bargaining, and workers’ fortunes in Corporate America. Union man Frank Sobotka makes a deal with the devil to preserve his people’s dying way of life, and pays for it with a bullet and a padlock on the doors of his local’s headquarters.

Season Three, the most Shakespearean and dramatic yet, focused on the efforts of ambitious drug kingpin Stringer Bell to go legit by working the business world, hampered by his partner Avon Barksdale, just out of prison and looking to reestablish an empire weakened by a dangerous newcomer, Marlo Stanfield. The suave and businesslike Bell chastises the hot-blooded Barksdale for pushing a turf war against Marlo when they can make real money by investing drug profits into real estate and condos, only to be taken for a ride by smarter players in the muck and mire of Baltimore’s political world. Eventually, Bell and Barksdale sell each other out, Bell ends up dead, Barksdale in prison, and Stanfield moves in on their corners as the new king. Meanwhile, idealistic but combative Democratic City Councilman Tommy Carcetti decides to do the unthinkable and make a run for Mayor in an overwhelmingly black city, using soaring crime and decaying schools as his selling points. The resultant inside look at how city politics are defined by self-interest, compromise, and short-term gains is thoroughly depressing, all the more so for its realism.

Season Four, perhaps the most heartbreaking, focuses on four kids getting ready for eighth grade–Michael, the alpha-male group leader, Randy the mischief maker, Namond the wannabe gangsta, and Dukie, the shy, nearly homeless outcast. Their story winds through an educational system marred by massive budget deficits, the heavy hand of No Child Left Behind, teachers who are terrified of getting killed or stabbed, and children who are growing up in a world that has no use for them, left to evolve into wild animals but for the lack of someone to pay attention to their needs. Even as Carcetti wins his run for Mayor, his desire for the Governor’s chair leads him to refuse $5o million in education money for the city from the current (Republican) governor, condemning the school system to even more neglect and disrepair. As for the kids, none of them end up where you expect, but their fates are alternately grim and uplifting.

That’s the great beauty of “The Wire.” The show, created by David Simon, former Baltimore Sun reporter and creator of “Homicide: Life On The Street,” steadfastly avoids cliches, judgment calls on its characters, or pedantry of any kind. People don’t learn life lessons. Cases aren’t wrapped up neatly in a bow at the end of the episode. Nowhere does the narrative stop to lecture us about the evils we’re witnessing. Simon and co-creator Ed Burns (a former Baltimore homicide detective) know better–every vista of hopelessness is tied to the narrative of the lives of cops, dealers, addicts, lawyers, politicos, and all of their attendant desires and ambitions.

Simon says in the above-linked interview that he is cynical of institutions to create change, and rightly so, but the individual stories of “The Wire” have the power to wreak great change. The show has never done “Sopranos” numbers, due to the complexity of the narrative and the simple truth that a majority-black cast in an urban setting may scare off white viewers. Season Five may broaden that scope a bit, as Simon turns his critical eye to examining the failures of our modern media to chronicle the important stories of the age. Already we can see the beleaguered reporters and editors under assault from corporate cutbacks, uninvolved superiors, personal ambition, lack of institutional experience, and the same devils that plague every other aspect of “the game.”

I strongly urge you to click every link in this entry and read everything you can about “The Wire.” Then watch it. There’s never been a show like it, and there most likely never will be again.

Recommended:

Christy Hardin Smith’s rave review of the show and its themes.

The Wire 101 for those who need a primer.

His books were like the opening of a window.

Pratchett is the creator of the epic Discworld fantasy series. They started off as a light-hearted send-up of the swords-and-sandals fantasy epics of Beowulf and Tolkien. Then they became an original world.

It is one of my annual joys. This year, when Making Money came out I chortled with joy and phoned one of my best mates to gloat that I’d got it first. Instead he turned the tables on me to say how much he’d already enjoyed it.

Pratchett is a prolific writer, having been first published at age 15, having his first big hit in 1971 with The Carpet People, and creating the first Discworld book – The Colour of Magic – in 1983.

For 21 years I have loved every moment of his books. As I finish my first read of a new saga I turn straight back to page 1 and begin again. Somehow – and books are frightfully expensive in South Africa – I have ensured that I’ve read and bought every one of them.

Today there is no laughter. Today there is tremendous sadness.

Terry Pratchett announced on Tuesday that he has been diagnosed with a rare form of Alzheimer’s Disease. His approach, like his approach to life, is light-hearted. In a release titled An Embuggerance he states his case. “Frankly, I would prefer it if people kept things cheerful, because I think there’s time for at least a few more books yet,” he says. And he’s perfectly correct.

“PS I would just like to draw attention to everyone reading the above that this should be interpreted as ‘I am not dead’. I will, of course, be dead at some future point, as will everybody else. For me, this maybe further off than you think – it’s too soon to tell. I know it’s a very human thing to say “Is there anything I can do”, but in this case I would only entertain offers from very high-end experts in brain chemistry.”

However, I can’t help feeling incredible pain at the unfairness of it. Alzheimer’s is a living death and I can’t see how anyone, least of all such a nimble and inspiring mind as Pratchett’s, can “deserve” such a fate.

Anyone who wants to see the maturing of a writer, the creation of deep and subtle characters, and a person who gets deep inside the skin of his stories should read Pratchett. Because his motif is fantasy he tends to be discounted by the literati yet you will search far before finding someone with as good a sense of plot-pacing.

He is also one of the finest writers of female characters. From his witches, to Monstrous Regiment (a war book about a troop of women), to the more recent series of teen books on the education of a young witch.

He has always been my guide as to how a writer offers a moral judgement without preaching or removing the reader’s free choice.

I have been intending to feature Pratchett in Scroguely Works for some time. Finding a favourite favourite has always been the difficult one.

For the next few years, as long as he is able to keep writing, I will come to each new book with reverence and apprehension. I will treasure each new word and savour each new story.

Perhaps this is the most important gift he can give me, or any of his readers; the knowledge that life is precious and genius is a rare treasure to be recognised and appreciated.

When that day comes that Pratchett’s sands run out, I hope that the Death who cuts the thread of his life is wearing a cowl and does so with a scythe. And that Death embraces him as the caring friend that he is and takes him away into the next life on a white horse called Binky.

The Arrival, by Shaun Tan, first published October 2007, 128 pages, ISBN 978-0439895293

The dividing line between comic books and graphic novels – for many – seems to lie in the question: “Would I show this to a kid?”

Maus, by Art Spiegelman, or When the Wind Blows, by Raymond Briggs, are astonishing reinventions of the art, claiming a space in literature that defies either category. Both opened up the creation of artworks that tell human stories; allowing emotion and empathy with the images to fill the space left by the absence of words.

Taking four years to research and produce, The Arrival stands alone – not just amongst graphic novels – but amongst all art. It is like stumbling across The Kiss by Auguste Renoir placed inconsequentially at the base of the stairs in London’s Tate Modern, or hearing Pachelbel’s Canon played in the midst of a mix of faded pop-songs.

Shaun Tan, at only 33, has taken the the world of picture books further than many, including such luminaries as Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean (and you really must do yourself a favour and read The Wolves in the Walls to see how far the art has come).

Tan describes the book as follows:

“A man leaves his wife and child in an impoverished town, seeking better prospects in an unknown country on the other side of a vast ocean. He eventually finds himself in a bewildering city of foreign customs, peculiar animals, curious floating objects and indecipherable languages. With nothing more than a suitcase and a handful of currency, the immigrant must find a place to live, food to eat and some kind of gainful employment. He is helped along the way by sympathetic strangers, each carrying their own unspoken history: stories of struggle and survival in a world of incomprehensible violence, upheaval and hope.”

And you are totally lost in this as well. Tan has created a surreal landscape, wordless and alien. Yet these are humans and the gestures and nuances are haunting, more so in that you can sense the frustration of being unable to be understood.

Tan has created a book that looks like an old sepia-toned scrap-book, filled with images that each tell their own story.

In one sequence, which is inspired by Ellis Island photographs taken during the period 1892 to 1954, the immigrant is subjected to a confusing and alienating arrivals process. Covered in squares of paper pinned to his clothes and carrying arcane symbols he tries to explain his presence and what he is fleeing.

Tan uses these sequences almost cinematographically, pulling away from his subject and exposing his remoteness and isolation.

Other immigrants offer their advice in the peculiar new land; and their stories. The “photographs” darken as their own tales of horror unfold, and then brighten as you realise that the escape has been worth it.

Each character is – Philip Pullman-like – accompanied by some bizarre creature. Our immigrant is “adopted” by a peculiar-looking cat-like tadpole which guides him through the city.

There are numerous vignettes, too many to mention, that are deeply emotional: his despairing search for work; his meeting with a group of work acquaintances to play a totally unfathomable game; his joy and run through the winter snow when his family finally arrives to join him.

My favourite is his being invited by a young family to dinner. Tan is the first artist I have seen to capture real laughter and human camaraderie. The dinner shared between new friends, the delight and joy in their faces, bodies and hands…

This is important stuff. Everyone, more or less, is an immigrant.

Too many nations have barricaded the doors against immigrants. The optimism with which these new arrivals enter a country are not shared.

Here, in Cape Town, Somali refugees are regularly attacked and murdered. One of my employees, a Zimbabwean – legally in the country – was picked up by police last week. He didn’t have his passport on him and was jailed for two days before his family were able to track him down and have him released. He was relatively lucky. Many “disappear” to a concentration camp near Johannesburg where immigrants are kept in an open cage, exposed and with only limited food and ablution facilities. There are families kept here. They have committed no crimes save that of fleeing despotism.

It is something that America, long the beneficiaries of the migration of the best that the world has to offer, should remember. No new wave of arrivals has ever been treated with much respect by their adoptive lands. Yet they are creative, ambitious and brave.

Tan’s book as a beautiful and poignant reminder of the hope that is within us all. Be sure, as well, to visit Tan’s web site for further images from his published works.

If on a winter’s night a traveler by Italo Calvino, first published 1979, 254 pages, ISBN 978-1857151381

You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade. Best to close the door; the TV is always on in the next room. Tell the others right away, “No, I don’t want to watch TV!”

These are the first lines of Calvino’s entertaining novel. Welcome to the world of post-modern literature.

What is the modern writer to do? Every story, and every variation of every story, has been told. You already know the plot of virtually any movie before it even comes out. Even the final twists have all been taken care of. Umberto Eco, another of the post-modern greats, once asked the question, “How does a post-modern writer say ‘I love you’?” How, when the phrase itself is so cliched it has lost all the meaning which you wish to convey to your beloved? By saying it anyway.

The novel begins in a railway station, a locomotive huffs, steam from a piston covers part of the first paragraph… The pages of the book are clouded like the windows of an old train, the cloud of smoke rests on the sentences.

This is beautiful writing but disconcerting. Calvino tells you in his first paragraphs that you are reading the book that you are holding. The entire book is written in the second person. Except for every second chapter, written in the first. You, the Reader. I the story-teller.

And you, the Reader, are in trouble. You really want to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new book, If on a winter’s night a traveler, but you cannot. Every time – in every second chapter – you begin reading the introduction, just as you get to the most critical moment of the beginning, you lose the plot. Literally.

Books end abruptly. Get ripped from your hands. Get taken by government agents. No matter what you do, there is no way to complete a story. No way to reach redemption.

“But my book…” you complain, extending with an infant’s gesture an unarmed hand toward that authoritative barrier of glistening buttons and weapon muzzles.

“Confiscated, sir. This book cannot enter Ataguitania. It’s a banned book.”

So you, the Reader, begin a quest. To find out why this is happening. You are joined by the Other Reader, another you, but feminine. There is a moment of intimacy that leaves you excited and disoriented. What is the Other Reader’s involvement?

Lovers’ reading of each other’s bodies (of that concentrate of mind and body which lovers use to go to bed together) differs from the reading of written pages in that it is not linear. It starts at any point, skips, repeats itself, goes backward, insists, ramifies in simultaneous and divergent messages, converges again, has moments of irritation, turns the page, finds its place, gets lost. A direction can be recognised in it, a route to an end, since it tends toward a climax, and with this end, since it arranges rhythmic phases, metrical scansions, recurrence of motives. But is the climax really the end? Or is the race toward that end opposed by another drive which works in the opposite direction, swimming against the moments, recovering time?

Yes, there are hints of the Arabian Nights where, to stay alive, Scheherazade, tells stories without endings for 1001 nights to Shahryar, the king who threatens to murder her every day should he tire of her. But there is something else to.

Calvino takes us within the pages. Into the writer’s process of telling and retelling a story. He shows us the pages. He tells us the people are characters. You wouldn’t expect this to be a captivating way to tell a fantasy. Yet it is.

You are wrapped inside your own journey. Each of the new story beginnings are gripping. You want to know the ending. What is it that unites them?

(Don’t believe that the book is losing sight of you, Reader. The you that was shifted to the other Reader can, at any sentence, be addressed to you again. You are always a possible you. Who would dare sentence you to loss of the you, a catastrophe as terrible as the loss of the I. For a second-person discourse to become a novel, at least two you’s are required, distinct and concomitant, which stand out from the crowd of he’s, she’s and they’s.)

Eventually you wind up a library where you collect all the titles from all the various books you have collected in your journey. Here you hope to find the endings to these stories. You tell other readers present about your troubles.

“May I see?” the sixth reader asks, taking the list of titles. He removes his nearsighted glasses, puts them in their case, opens another case, takes out his farsighted glasses, and reads aloud:

“If on a winter’s night a traveler, outside the town of Malbork, leaning from the steep slope without fear of wind or vertigo, looks down in the gathering shadow, in a network of lines that enlace, in a network of lines that intersect, on the carpet of leaves illuminated by the moon around an empty grave – What story down there awaits its end? – he asks, anxious to hear the story.”

The sixth reader misinterprets, runs all the titles together, and you object. But…

There is an answer. And I’m not going to tell it to you.

The truth is that, even though all stories have been told there is still the intangible delight in reading a story, crafted, well-told, sculpted, loved, and released. Enjoy.

Yesterday I found out that Brad Fitzpatrick, the creator of LiveJournal, is also advocating for open social networking, publishing a “minifesto” on the difficulty of managing many different identities across multiple platforms:

Currently if you’re a new site that needs the social graph (e.g. dopplr.com) to provide one fun & useful feature (e.g. where are your friends traveling and when?), then you face a much bigger problem then just implementing your main feature. You also have to have usernames, passwords (or hopefully you use OpenID instead), a way to invite friends, add/remove friends, and the list goes on. So generally you have to ask for email addresses too, requiring you to send out address verification emails, etc. Then lost username/password emails. etc, etc. If I had to declare the problem statement succinctly, it’d be: People are getting sick of registering and re-declaring their friends on every site., but also: Developing “Social Applications” is too much work.

Brad’s minifesto is very techie and not for the faint of heart, but it’s worth reading–he makes a strong case for cutting down the “walled gardens” that block users of ever-multiplying social networks from being able to easily transmit information back and forth. Brad also references a Wired article that makes the point in stronger fashion–that walled-garden social networks serve the interests of advertisers, company owners, and few others. Pete Cashmore at Mashable also has more on this idea.

But BexHuff offers a counterpoint that is closer to how I feel about it–social networks that try to be all things to all people end up straining themselves beyond their limits, and being able to trade data back and forth across the open Web poses an enormous risk to privacy and security. I’m completely in favor of the idea of open identity integration across multiple platforms (as long as it’s optional and not de facto–sorry, Gavin), but our personal information is already at tremendous risk just from everyday Internet commerce–this has to be addressed concretely if any sort of “walled garden pruning” is to go forward.

As an aside, I find it interesting that Brad is embarking on this crusade now, after he has announced his resignation from Six Apart, the makers of Movable Type and the folks who bought LJ. This is concurrent with–but may or may not be related to–the continuing problems LJ has caused with preemptively censoring content and removing users of late.

In a sense, this actually circles back to what Gavin and I discussed earlier–social networks build “reputations” based on their content. MySpace has a reputation for being gaudy, trashy, and slightly downmarket, while Facebook is now apparently the “clean” social network for fresh-faced collegiates and business networkers–and LiveJournal, one of the oldest blog/journal communities, is now largely viewed as a refuge for writing fan fiction about Severus Snape and Harry Potter polishing each other’s wands. The “walled garden” approach can actually help in this regard, as it will filter out people who can’t find what they want in a particular network. It can also harm, however, as “ghettoizing” these networks will, by extension, implicitly judge the reputations of people who use them. (“Ew! You’re on MySpace?!”)

Food for social networking thought, to be sure.

“What things one does dream,” thought [Pahom]. – “How Much Land Does a Man Need?”

The greatest struggle in the American experience is the one between democracy and capitalism. As de Tocqueville observed, “As one digs deeper into the national character of the Americans, one sees that they have sought the value of everything in this world only in the answer to this single question: how much money will it bring in?” Americans like to think of themselves as the people who brought the world the bellwether concepts of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” But the “pursuit of happiness” for Americans has tended to follow the Coolidge dictum: “The business of America is business.”

Perhaps, then, it only makes sense that when Americans, even well educated Americans, think of a literary artist like Leo Tolstoy, only a couple of images come to mind: the daunting reading length of a copy of War and Peace – and the breathtaking beauty and inscrutability of Greta Garbo as the title character in Tolstoy’s equally daunting Anna Karenina. As Mark Twain observed all too accurately of too many of us, “A person who won’t read has no advantage over one who can’t read.”

So let us ease into our acquaintance with the great Russian master through his short story, “How Much Land Does a Man Need?” The story can be synopsized easily enough:

After slowly accumulating more and more property, a greedy Russian named Pahom hears that the Bashkirs, a minority race in Russia, are practically giving their land away. He decides to visit them and they offer him as much land as he wants, provided he can walk its perimeter in one day. Pahom agrees and goes out on his trek, but when the sun starts to set, he finds he has walked too far. Running back, Pahom collapses at the starting point just as the sun disappears behind the horizon. The Bashkirs try to congratulate him, only to find him dead. In answer to the question posed in the title, the Bashkirs bury him in a hole six feet long by two feet wide.

Tolstoy’s message in the story is clear enough – Pahom destroys himself because he allows the sin of greed to guide his life. For Tolstoy, a Russian nobleman who, after a dissolute youth, reformed his behavior and eventually became a Christian mystic, it seemed clear that the devil had to be the catalyst of Pahom’s destruction. Pahom, who’s been a contented peasant working his own small farm and sharing in the community pastures – and in the community – becomes the devil’s plaything once he expresses this weakness in the devil’s hearing:

Busy as we are from childhood tilling mother earth, we peasants have no time to let any nonsense settle in our heads. Our only trouble is that we haven’t land enough. If I had plenty of land, I shouldn’t fear the Devil himself!

So Pahom schemes and plans and executes – and gradually becomes a large land owner – but with each successive business deal that makes him richer and that gives him more land, he finds himself less and less satisfied. The land is never fertile enough – or he has problems with his neighbors – or, as in the case of the Bashkiri steppes where he meets his fate, greater amounts of land, seemingly too good to be true, are available for the taking:

There is more land there than you could cover if you walked a year, and it all belongs to the Bashkirs. They are as simple as sheep, and land can be got almost for nothing.

Of course Pahom can’t resist such an opportunity. He accompanies the tradesman who told him of this “deal of a lifetime” (actually the devil in disguise) to the land of the Bashkirs and makes a deal with a Bashkir chief that he can, for 1000 rubles, have all the land he can walk around in a day if he starts at sunrise and returns to the spot he began by sundown. But a night of restless sleep brings a dream that it wouldn’t take a Joseph to interpret:

Hardly were his eyes closed when he had a dream. He thought he was lying in that same tent and heard somebody chuckling outside. He wondered who it could be, and rose and went out, and he saw the Bashkir Chief sitting in front of the tent holding his sides and rolling about with laughter. Going nearer to the Chief, Pahom asked: “What are you laughing at?” But he saw that it was no longer the Chief, but the dealer who had recently stopped at his house and had told him about the land. Just as Pahom was going to ask, “Have you been here long?” he saw that it was not the dealer, but the peasant who had come up from the Volga, long ago, to Pahom’s old home. Then he saw that it was not the peasant either, but the Devil himself with hoofs and horns, sitting there and chuckling, and before him lay a man barefoot, prostrate on the ground, with only trousers and a shirt on. And Pahom dreamt that he looked more attentively to see what sort of a man it was that was lying there, and he saw that the man was dead, and that it was himself! He awoke horror-struck.

As the opening quote of this essay notes, Pahom dismisses the dream as foolishness. He sets out the next sunrise and his greed drives him to walk too far before starting back toward his starting point, the cap of the Bashkir chief which sits upon the ground before the leader as he awaits Pahom’s return. Pahom has to run as hard as he can to reach the cap just as the sun disappears below the horizon. But he realizes that his dream was, like that of the second Joseph, a warning – which in his own case he did not heed:

“Ah, that’s a fine fellow!” exclaimed the Chief. “He has gained much land!”

Pahom’s servant came running up and tried to raise him, but he saw that blood was flowing from his mouth. Pahom was dead!

The Bashkirs clicked their tongues to show their pity.

His servant picked up the spade and dug a grave long enough for Pahom to lie in, and buried him in it. Six feet from his head to his heels was all he needed.

The truths in Tolstoy’s story can be rationalized, of course. Pahom makes choices of his own free will – and those choices lead him to destruction. And one can say that Tolstoy’s religiosity (after all, the story bears striking resemblance to one of Christ’s parables) seems quaint and out of tune with our complicated times.

It might be good to remember de Tocqueville again: “The Americans combine the notions of religion and liberty so intimately in their minds, that it is impossible to make them conceive of one without the other.” For what Walker Percy called “…the most religious nation in the world” maybe a writer like Tolstoy speaks to and for us more than we know….

It might also be useful in our complicated times to do some simple substitutions for the word “land” and see if the warning Tolstoy’s simple parable offers has a different ring. How about if one substituted – oil? convenience food? cheap goods? clean water and air? war? power? money? (I’m sure others are occurring to you….)

Tolstoy seems to get complicated enough for us pretty quickly then… and well worth the reading…..

“The modern world looks at war through eyes different from those with which it looked at the problem early in the twentieth century, and if someone were to talk today of the beauty of war as the only form of world hygiene, he would go down not in the annals of literature but in those of psychiatry.”

Umberto Eco is one of the world’s foremost moral philosophers. Many may not know his studies in philosophy and reason but will have heard of The Name of the Rose (1980) or seen the movie of it staring Sean Connery (in 1986). His writing is much more than that.

Eco is Professor of Semiotics at the University of Bologna in Italy. It is a Catholic University and Eco describes himself as an agnostic. Semiotics is the study of symbolism and the nature of the signs by which people govern their lives. Five moral pieces is a brief and profound study of the nature of ethics.

There are five essays. The first “On War” was written in 1991 during the first war in Iraq but before the liberation of Kuwait. Eco poses himself the question: “Is war justifiable under any circumstances?” His further demand on himself is that his answer must stand no matter what the result. He is prescient, clear, and haunting.

“Every war of the past was based on the principle that the citizens, believing it to be a just war, were anxious to destroy the enemy. Now information not only shakes the faith of the citizens, it also leaves them vulnerable when faced with the death of the enemy – no longer a distant and vague event but instead unbearable visual evidence.”

He considers that war, like incest, is becoming a taboo.

“Becoming aware that mating with mothers or sisters hindered exchange between groups took thousands of years – it apparently took humanity ages to grasp the cause-and-effect relation between the sexual act and pregnancy. But it took us only two weeks to realize that airline companies close when war breaks out.”

And war, he concludes cannot be justified: it is worse than a crime, it is a waste.

My favourite – and much thumbed essay – is “When the Other appears on the scene”. It is the last in a public exchange of letters between Eco and the Jesuit Cardinal Carlo Martini organised by Liberal Magazine in Rome in 1996. Eco’s reply here is the last in the exchange and unifies his theory of a lay ethics. Eco believes that morality can be developed entirely without need to call upon a third-party deity to act as arbiter. Here he puts his case in one of the most beautiful essays on morality and ethics. I, without apology, present the lengthy centre of his argument.

“But you say that, without the example and the word of Christ, all lay ethics would lack a basic justification imbued with an ineluctable power of conviction. Why deprive laypersons of the right to avail themselves the example of a forgiving Christ? Try, Carlo Maria Martini, for the good of the discussion and of the dialogue in which you believe, to accept even if only for a moment the idea that there is no God; that man appeared in the world out of a blunder on the part of a maladroit fate, delivered not only unto his mortal condition but also condemned to be aware of this, and for this reason the most imperfect of creatures. This man, in order to find the courage to await death, would necessarily become a religious animal, and would aspire to the construction of narratives capable of providing him with an explanation and a model, an exemplary image. And among the many stories he imagines – some dazzling, some awe-inspiring, some pathetically comforting – in the fullness of time he has at a certain point the religious, moral, and poetic strength to conceive the model of Christ, of universal love, of forgiveness for enemies, of a life sacrificed that others may be saved. If I were a travelers from a distant galaxy and I found myself confronted with a species capable of proposing this model, I would be filled with admiration for such theogonic energy, and I would judge this wretched and vile species, which has committed so many horrors, redeemed were it only for the fact that it has managed to wish and to believe that all this is the truth.”

His essay “On the press” is timely reading for those of us concerned about the future of the news media. “Ur-fascism” relates how Fascism is for all time and that any-time a politician or leader declares that “a does not equal a” you are in the presence of a potential fascist. I consider this essay essential reading for any person concerned about the nature of political and social leadership in the present century and will return to this essay in concluding.

“Migration, Tolerance, and the Intolerable” was written in 1997.

“Is it possible to distinguish immigration from migration when the entire planet is becoming the territory of intersecting movements of people? I think it is possible: as I have said, immigration can be controlled politically, but like natural phenomena, migration cannot be. As long as there is immigration, peoples can hope to keep the immigrants in a ghetto, so that they do not mix with the natives. When migration occurs, there are no more ghettos, and intermarriage is uncontrollable.

What Europe is still trying to tackle as immigration is instead migration. The Third World is knocking at our doors, and it will come in even if we are not in agreement. The problem is no longer to decide (as politicians pretend) whether students at a Paris university can wear the chador or how many mosques should be built in Rome.”

And he considers the intolerance that gives rise to xenophobia.

“Intolerance comes before any doctrine. In this sense intolerance has biological roots, it manifests itself among animals as territoriality, it is based on emotional reactions that are often superficial – we cannot bear those who are different from us, because their skin is a different colour; because they speak a language we do not understand; because they eat frogs, dogs, monkeys, pigs, or garlic; because they tattoo themselves …”

The world is not really a confusing place. “a = a” and we need to have the intellectual humility to admit that our assumptions sometimes undermine our ability to express a really true lay ethic. That even a lay ethic can learn from religious teachings. And that fascist thinking is attractive precisely because it panders to our base-instincts and desires for the world to be other than it is.

On the parapet of the bridge
The heads of hanged men
In the water of the fountain
The drool of hanged men

On the cobbles of the market
The fingernails of men shot down
On the dry grass of the meadow
The teeth of men shot down

Bite the air bite the stones
Our flesh is the flesh of men no more
Bite the air bite the stones
Our hearts are the hearts of men no more

But we have read the dead men’s eyes
And the world’s freedom is the gift we bring
While the coming justice is close
Clenched in the hands of the dead.

Franco Fortini

For the song and the sword and the Pipes of Pan
Are birthrights sold to a usurer
But I am the last lone highwayman
And I am the last adventurer

Like so many serialised literary characters – such as James Bond or Sherlock Holmes – Simon Templar has outlived and outshone his creator. Leslie Charteris (originally Leslie Charles Bowyer-Yin), though, has some claim to having lived the life he based his character on.

Simon Templar started life as a particularly effervescent vigilante and … drifted. His adventures have him defrauding drug dealers in ’30s England, stopping a plot to start a second world war in 1930, moving to the US to assist the war effort by spying for the US government, before returning to England to raise hell. The dialogue is witty, the descriptions breathtaking, and the in-your-face banter is a breath of fresh air next to all those all-to-serious meaning-of-life books. The Saint knows who he is and is blithely untroubled by suggestions to the contrary as he biffs the ungodly. He chain smokes, he drives at unsafe speeds, he mocks the police and – against every principle of free-booting buccaneerhood – he has a regular girlfriend (although, he was somewhat modern in his approach).

“Boy, listen – weren’t you going to be good?”

He paused in his stride, and turned. He smiled dreamily upon her. In his ears, the scuffling undertones of the battle were ringing like celestial music. He was lost.

“Why – yes, old dear,” he answered vaguely. “Sure, I’m going to be good. I just want to sort of look things over. See they don’t get too rough.” The idea took firmer shape in his mind. “I – I might argue gently with them, or something like that.”

Charteris believed that life could be significantly more exciting if lived entirely according to your own passions and interests. And Charteris was determined to explore the world. He prospected for gold, fished for pearls, worked in a tin mine and on a rubber plantation, toured England with a carnival, and drove a bus. He visited as many parts of the world as he could. His character could do no less.

And, yes, it is all larger-than-life fantasy. Simon Templar of the books is the character the movie James Bond became (he was a bit of a wet as a book).

He approached the battle thoughtfully and circumspectly, like an entomologist scraping acquaintance with a new species of scorpion. In that murderous jumble it was practically impossible to distinguish one party from another; but Simon reached down a thoughtfully probing hand into the tangle, felt the scruff of a thick neck, and yanked forth a man. For one soul-shaking instant they glared at each other in the dim light; and it became regrettably obvious to the Saint that the face he was regarding must have been without exception the most depraved and villainous specimen of its kind south of Munich. And therefore, with what he would always hold to be the most profound and irrefragably philosophic justification in the world, he hit it, thoughtfully and experimentally, upon the nose.

I started reading Saint stories when I was a young and terribly sickly 8-year-old. I started with Enter the Saint and have collected more than 30 books (Charteris wrote over 100 stories, the last book being published in 1983). They were heaven for a child who never thought he’d live long enough to experience the world. They made the world magic. Who knows, maybe they inspired him to live?

Charteris’ descriptions of the world didn’t glamorise violence. If anything, quite the opposite. The world was a seedy, dirty, dour place (especially with the post-war depredations of Europe) but the Saint – through sheer force of personality – could make everything exciting. Charteris, writing in one of his frequent philosophical asides, declared that a bore would see no adventure in meeting an adventurer and an adventurer would completely fail to relate to a bore. Your enjoyment of sky-diving, mountain climbing and traveling to remote parts are exciting to some and terrifying to others who project their fears onto you when they tell you, “Well that seems terribly dangerous, I wouldn’t recommend it.”

Charteris was not enamoured of laws constraining human activity. In one of his frequent asides his gorge rises: “We live in a wonderful country. Did you read how two policemen and one policewoman practically lived in a night-club in Brighton for about three weeks, drawing their wages from the ratepayers all the time and drinking gallons of champaigne at the ratepayers’ expense, until they finally managed to lure some poor fathead into the place and get him to buy them a drink after time? And that’s what we pay taxes for. Our precious politicians can go to Geneva and swindle the Abyssinians with all the dignity of a gang of bucket-shop promoters, and slap the poor deluded Spaniard on the back and tell him he’s just dreaming about Italians and Germans helping the rebels in his so-called civil war; but the honour of England has been vindicated. A bloke is fined fifty quid for selling a whisky and soda at half-past eleven and another bloke is fined a fiver for drinking it, two policemen and one policewoman have had a wonderful free jag and helped themselves towards promotion, and the world has been shown that England respects the Law. Rule, Britannia.”

Psychologists, from whom no secrets are hidden, tell us that certain stimuli may possesses such ancient and ineradicable associations that the reactions which they arouse are as automatic and inevitable as the yap of a trampled Peke. A bugle sounds, and the old war-horse snorts with yearning. A gramophone record is played, and the septuagenarian burbles wheezily of an old love. A cork pops, and the mouths of the thirsty water. Such is life.

And even so did it happen to the Saint.

He was even a bit of a libertarian economist (at least when it came to beer). “Why can’t they make beer like this in England?” he ponders of German beer, and then answers: “Because of your Aunt Emily. In America they have total prohibition and the beer is lousy. In England they have semi-prohibition, in the shape of your Aunt Emily’s wall-eyed Licensing Laws, and the beer is mostly muck. This is a free country where they take a proper pride in their beer, and if you tried to put any filthy chemicals in it you’d find yourself in the can. The idea of your Aunt Emily is that beer-drinkers are depraved anyway, and therefore any poison is good enough to pump into their stomachs – and the rest is a question of degree.” This was 1932, before Hitler.

The series (at least until the last he wrote himself – The Saint in the Sun) is everything you can hope for in pulp fictional adventuring. Simon Templar is an exciting character irrespective of the age in which he finds himself. And Charteris’ obvious delight in writing the stories carries even hum-drum plots. Yet Charteris had a thorough understanding of the world in which he placed his character.

His descriptions of New York in the years immediately after prohibition and the ways that gangs evolved and adapted to keep their crime syndicates going shows astonishing insight. His tales of Europe in the early 1930s, between the world wars, give a terrible sense of foreboding and impending doom. And the Saint isn’t bullet-proof or untouched by events. He loses, sometimes, is scarred. Close friends die.

After all, he had done nothing desperately exciting in a long time. About twenty-one days. His subconscious was just ripe for the caressing touch of a few seductive stimuli. And then and there, when his resistance was at its lowest ebb, he heard and felt the juicy plonk of his fist sinking home into a nose.

The savour of that fruity squish wormed itself wheedlingly down into the very cockles of his heart. He liked it. It stirred the deepest chords of his being. And it dawned persuasively upon him that at that moment he desired nothing more of life than an immediate repetition of the feeling. And, seeing the nose once more conveniently poised in front of him, he hit it again.

For the quality of the writing. For the delight of the author and of the Saint in life and living. For the penetrating asides and insights into human frailties. For a small sickly boy sitting in bed dreaming that the world is limited only by our imagination and our own outrageous excitement for living.

He had not been mistaken. His subconscious knew its stuff. With the feel of that second biff a pleasant kind of glow centred itself in the pit of his stomach and tingled electrically outwards along his limbs, and the remainder of his doubts melted away before its spreading warmth. He was punching the nose of an ugly main, and he was liking it. Life had no more to offer.

“… who are you then?”
“I am part of that power which eternally wills evil and eternally works good.”

Goethe, Faust

Hands on the table. This is my favourite book. I first read a tattered and badly translated copy in my early 20s. Even there Bulgakov’s language and the sheer inspired delight of this epic shone through. And that was before I even knew the context and history of this work.

“Afterwards, when, frankly speaking, it was already too late, various institutions presented reports describing this man… It must be acknowledged that none of these reports is of any value.

First of all, the man described did not limp on any leg, and was neither short nor enormous, but simply tall. As for his teeth, he had platinum crowns on the left side and gold on the right. He was wearing an expensive grey suit and imported shoes of a matching colour. His grey beret was cocked rakishly over one ear; under his arm he carried a stick with a black knob shaped like a poodle’s head. He looked to be a little over forty. Mouth somehow twisted. Clean-shaven. Dark-haired. Right eye black, left – for some reason – green. Dark eyebrows, but one higher than the other. In short, a foreigner.”

Satan comes to Moscow. More specifically, he arrives at the height of the purges and pogroms exercised by Stalin.

By tradition every spring he throws a ball to which the otherwise doomed denizens of Hell are invited. Mephistopheles, being a bachelor, requires a hostess. Also by tradition her name must be Margarita.

On the stage behind the tulips, where the waltz king’s orchestra had been playing, there now raged an ape jazz band. A huge gorilla with shaggy side-whiskers, a trumpet in his hand, capering heavily, was doing the conducting. Orang-utans sat in a row blowing on shiny trumpets. Perched on their shoulders were merry chimpanzees with concertinas. Two hamadryads with manes like lions played grand pianos, but these grand pianos were not heard amidst the thundering, squeaking and booming of saxophones, fiddles and drums in the paws of gibbons, mandrills and marmosets. On the mirror floor a countless number of couples, as if merged, amazing in the deftness and cleanness of their movements, all turning in the same direction, swept on like a wall threatening to clear away everything in its path. Live satin butterflies bobbed above the heads of the dancing hordes, flowers poured down from the ceiling. In the capitals of the columns, each time the electricity went off, myriads of fireflies lit up, and marsh-lights floated in the air.

In Satan’s retinue are Azazello, his choir master, Koroviev, his interpreter, and Behemoth, a large black cat.

Satan entertains himself in Moscow by taking over the apartment of a man who dies mysteriously by being beheaded by a tram and then delivering a single and outrageous magic show. Koroviev and Behemoth amuse themselves with mischief-making, including a violent shoot-out with a squad of police where – although everyone is firing madly at each other with tommy-guns at point-blank range – no-one gets hurt. Azazello teaches an entire staff at a bank to sing; at which point they burst into song, in complete harmony and unwillingly despite being out of sight or hearing of each other.

“Your king is in check,” said Woland.

“Very well, very well,” responded the cat, and he began studying the chessboard through his opera glasses.

…

Behemoth’s winking took on greater dimensions. The white king finally understood what was wanted of him. He suddenly pulled off his mantle, dropped it on the square, and ran off the board. The bishop covered himself with the abandoned royal garb and took the king’s place.

…

“I repeat, your king is in check!”

“Messire,” the cat responded in a falsely alarmed voice, “you are overtired. My king is not in check.”

If this was the story alone it would be charming, but it is not. Interwoven is the story of Yeshua Ha-Nozri, a minor Jewish prophet who is brought before Pontius Pilate for sentencing. The story is told, first by Satan, then dreamed of by the poet Ivan Homeless, and then completed by the mysterious Master.

The story of that crucifixion in Yershalaim, contextualised within the politics of the day, with Jesus stripped of divinity and presented as a man, is gripping and tragic. Told by Bulgakov, a man who was never allowed to leave the USSR and where religion was banned, it is nothing short of genius.

“I think”, the procurator replied, grinning strangely, “that there is now someone else in the world for whom you ought to feel sorrier than for Judas of Kiriath, and who is going to have it much worse than Judas! … So, then, Mark Ratslayer, a cold and convinced torturer, the people who, as I see,” the procurator pointed to Yeshua’s disfigured face, “beat you for your preaching, the robbers Dysmas and Gestas, who with their confreres killed four soldiers, and finally, the dirty traitor Judas – are all good people?”

“Yes,” said the prisoner.

“And the kingdom of truth will come?”

“It will, Hegemon,” Yeshua answered, with conviction.

But more than that, the story is ultimately Bulgakov’s. For the tale of the Master is Bulgakov’s desperate and tragic attempt to contextualise his own story and his own, self-proclaimed, weakness: “Cowardice is the most terrible of vices.”

Bulgakov was Ukranian by birth and absorbed into the USSR by the communist uprising that also brought Stalin to power. In The White Russians, one of the best anti-war books, he depicted the final days of life in Kiev before the communists won power. Turned into a play it was Stalin’s favourite.

Yet, despite great acclaim, Bulgakov was just too free-spoken, too dangerous in the view of Stalin’s censors. He was banned, denied permission to travel and censured. He wrote a letter to Stalin requesting permission either to go into exile or, at least, to be allowed to work. Stalin replied personally and gave him a job as vice-theatre director of the Moscow Theatre.

From 1929 till his death in 1940 (at the age of 49) he struggled with The Master and Margarita. The story evolved, grew, changed, moved. He wrestled with his demons. Woven through the tale is his own story. Of betrayal by the literary establishment. Of his own fear that, by not standing up, he was being a coward.

“You’re a writer?” the poet asked with interest.

The guest’s face darkened and he threatened Ivan with his fist, then said:

“I am a master.” He grew stern and took from the pocket of his dressing-gown a completely greasy black cap with the letter “M” embroidered on it in yellow silk. He put this cap on and showed himself to Ivan both in profile and full face, to prove that he was a master. “She sewed it for me with her own hands,” he added mysteriously.

Terrified that the book would be discovered, he tried burning it. But it wouldn’t stay burned. The mantra “manuscripts don’t burn” became a clarion call for Russian writers suffering under oppression. Bulgakov wasn’t imagining things. The mere existence of the text would have been enough to cause his permanent “disappearance”.

Almost 30 years after his death, during an improbable lapse by the Soviet state, the book was serialised by Moskva. All 150 000 copies of the November 1966 edition in which Part 1 appeared were sold within hours. Group readings were held. The language and structure of the novel was a joy; a complete contradiction of everything contrived, rigid and authoritarian. And it’s bloody funny too.

Richard Pevear, writing in the introduction to his seminal translation, declares: “Then there were the qualities of the novel itself – its formal originality, its devastating satire of Soviet life, and of Soviet literary life in particular, its ‘theatrical’ rendering of the Great Terror of the thirties, the audacity of its portrayal of Jesus Christ and Pontius Pilate, not to mention Satan. But, above all, the novel breathed an air of freedom, artistic and spiritual, which had become rare indeed, not only in Soviet Russia. We sense it in the special tone of Bulgakov’s writing, a combination of laughter (satire, caricature, buffoonery) and the most unguarded vulnerability.”

Bulgakov let his own sentence be read by Margarita, his love:

“Listen to the stillness,” Margarita said to the master, and the sand rustled under her bare feet, “listen and enjoy what you were not given in life – peace. Look, there ahead is your eternal home, which you have been given as a reward. I can already see the Venetian window and the twisting vine, it climbs right up to the roof. Here is your home, your eternal home. I know that in the evenings you will be visited by those you love, those who interest you, they will sing for you, you will see what light is in the room when the candles are burning. You will fall asleep, having put on your greasy and eternal nightcap, you will fall asleep with a smile on your lips. Sleep will strengthen you, you will reason wisely. And you will no longer be able to drive me away. I will watch over you in your sleep.”

America inspires both awe and loathing. The scale of the place; its open spaces, wealth, ambition and ability to turn ideas into global phenomena.

The Iranian youths rioting against “The Great Satan” are wearing blue jeans and iPods. The stone-throwing anti-globalisation protestors listen to American music. The most fervent supporters of American-style capitalism are the survivors of pure communist states; like Poland and Lithuania.

American-leftie self-loathing and declarations that George W Bush is turning the US into a fascist dictatorship are vastly amusing to those of us who have survived brutal autocracies.

Some outsiders are drawn to the US, to explain her. Not just to others, but to Americans themselves.

Neil Gaiman is a transplanted Englishman, now living in Minnesota. His oeuvre is vast. From The Sandman graphic novel series, to co-writing Good Omens with Terry Pratchett, to his astonishing collaborations with artist Dave McKeen that has resulted in several groundbreaking books and one film. Gaiman’s work covers the full generation-gap: Wolves in the Walls for young children, Coraline for young adults and his novels. The man is seriously talented.

And, once he moved to America, he wondered:

One question that has always intrigued me is what happens to demonic beings when immigrants move from their homelands. Irish-Americans remember the fairies, Norwegian-Americans the nisser, Greek-Americans the vrykolakas, but only in relation to events remembered in the Old Country. When I once asked why such demons are not seen in America, my informants giggled confusedly and said, “They’re scared to pass the ocean, it’s too far,” pointing out that Christ and the apostles never came to America. – Richard Dorson, “A theory for American Folklore”

And he wrote American Gods.

“I know,” said Shadow. “But you know, the only thing I’ve really learned about dealing with gods is that if you make a deal, you keep it. They get to break all the rules they want. We don’t.”

Gaiman’s talent has always been to take the fantastic and to place it in a contemporary setting. In Neverwhere, set in London, he imagines a world where the beggars and street performers, so ubiquitous yet invisible from city to city, are part of a terrifying parallel world that intersects only briefly with our own through the stations of the London underground. American Gods is a vaster novel.

“This isn’t about what is,” said Mr Nancy. “It’s about what people think is. It’s all imaginary anyway. That’s why it’s important. People only fight over imaginary things.”

The gods are real. Every culture that arrives in America brings its culture and traditions with it. And their gods come too, to watch over their people and provide context and meaning in a foreign land. But America is poor soil for foreign gods. Gradually, unique cultures blur and blend. And the borders between cultures become no more than green beer on St Patrick’s Day or tossing salt over your shoulder to ward off evil. Instinctive, forgotten, misplaced.

“Soon,” said the crackling voice of the flame, coming from behind him, “they will fall. Soon they will fall and the star people will meet the earth people. There will be heroes among them, and men who will slay monsters and bring knowledge, but none of them will be gods. This is a poor place for gods.”

Without belief, the gods’ power weakens. And so they fight amongst themselves for the scraps that are available.

We find the title character, a man, in jail. Shadow is both the name and designation of our guide. Within pages of our meeting him his wife dies in a car accident and Shadow is left adrift, released early to go to the funeral. On the way home he is hired by the mysterious Mr Wednesday who we discover is the Norse god Odin. Mr Wednesday is preparing the gods for war; the old gods of legend against the new gods of technology. And Shadow is both observer and critical to the story’s unfolding. The gods are tired, weary, nervous. They are weak and bitter. It has been a long winter.

We do not always remember the things that do no credit to us. We justify them, cover them in bright lies or with the thick dust of forgetfulness. All of the things that Shadow had done in his life of which he was not proud, all the things he wished he had done otherwise or left undone, came at him then in a swirling storm of guilt and regret and shame, and he had nowhere to hide from them. He was as naked and as open as a corpse on a table, and dark Anubis the jackal god was his prosector and his prosecutor and his persecutor.

Gaiman delights in the vast variety that created the tapestry of cultures of the US. We visit the theme park at the dead centre of the US, the House on the Rock in Madison, strange small towns. All filled with their own communities and gods. It has become a fringe activity to try and figure out who all the gods are.

“I,” she told him, “can believe anything. You have no idea what I can believe.”

“Really?”

“I can believe things that are true and I can believe things that aren’t true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they’re true or not. I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and Marilyn Monroe and the Beatles and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen – I believe that people are perfectible, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run be secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones that look like wrinkledy lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women. I believe that the future sucks and I believe that the future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo woman is going to come back and kick everyone’s ass. I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline in good sex in America is coincident with the decline in Drive-In Movie theatres from state to state. I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that they are better than the alternative. I believe that California is going to sink in to the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve in madness and alligators and toxic waste. I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we’ll all be wiped out by the common cold like the Martians in War of the Worlds. I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed Siberian Shaman. I believe that Mankind’s destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it’s aerodynamically impossible for a bumble-bee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there’s a cat in a box somewhere who’s alive and dead at the same time (although if they don’t ever open the box to feed it it’ll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself. I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn’t even know that I’m alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of causal chaos, background noise and sheer blind luck. I believe that anyone who says that sex is overrated just hasn’t done it properly. I believe that anyone who claims to know what’s going on will lie about the little things too. I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman’s right to choose, a baby’s right to live, that while all human life is sacred there’s nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no-one but a moron would ever trust the legal system. I believe that life is a game, life is a cruel joke and that life is what happens when you’re alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it.” She stopped, out of breath.

Shadow almost took his hands off the wheel to applaud.

And amongst the gods and the strangeness we find America. That it is a world where pragmatism trumps superstition and the gods can only commit petty mischief in revenge.

“For twelve years, you have been asking: Who is John Galt? This is John Galt speaking. I am the man who loves his life. I am the man who does not sacrifice his love or his values. I am the man who has deprived you of victims and thus has destroyed your world, and if you wish to know why you are perishing – you who dread knowledge – I am the man who will now tell you.”

Published 50 years ago in 1957, Atlas Shrugged is Ayn Rand’s magnum opus. The story is simply told.

At some point in human history people have turned against themselves. They no longer aspire to do anything more than enslave the most able and catch a free ride. John Galt, the most talented man of his age, recognises where it must end and decides to rebel. Over a twelve year period he accelerates the decline of society by convincing the most ambitious and able industrialists and thinkers in America to abandon their work and go on strike. They do and society collapses leaving a world free for the endeavours of Galt and his allies.

The characters are cardboard and the voice throughout is that of Rand. But what a voice.

“Man’s mind is his basic tool of survival. Life is given to him, survival is not. His body is given to him, its sustenance is not. His mind is given to him, its content is not. To remain alive, he must act, and before he can act he must know the nature and purpose of his action. He cannot obtain his food without a knowledge of food and of the way to obtain it. He cannot dig a ditch – or build a cyclotron – without a knowledge of his aim and of the means to achieve it. To remain alive, he must think.”

Character’s are given to launching into lengthy speeches. At almost 650 000 words it is a heavy read. Despite this is remains a best-seller. Many businessmen, after the fall of Enron, turned to it to remind themselves of who they are and why they do it, as society turned the name “businessman” into a curse.

The book was a product of its times. Communism was raging through Europe, South America and Asia and Africa. People’s Republics were all the rage and the most productive people became the slaves of the majority. Did Rand stop the slide? Or did she merely point out, 50 years before the collapse of the Soviet Union, that any society that kills production has a finite bank account that will eventually be overdrawn?

The world of Zimbabwe resonates with John Galt

Yet what Rand had to say resonates today. Her antagonism towards “need” trumping “ability” is well founded. Any student of contemporary Zimbabwe history would see a world that lacks everything but John Galt.

“I, who do not accept the unearned, neither in values nor in guilt, am here to ask the questions you evaded. Why is it moral to serve the happiness of others, but not your own? If enjoyment is a value, why is it moral when experienced by others, but immoral when experienced by you? If the sensation of eating a cake is a value, why is it an immoral indulgence in your stomach, but a moral goal for you to achieve in the stomach of others? Why is it immoral for you to desire, but moral for others to do so? Why is it immoral to produce a value and keep it, but moral to give it away? And if it is not moral for you to keep a value, why is it moral for others to accept it? If you are selfless and virtuous when you give it, are they not selfish and vicious when they take it? Does virtue consist of serving vice? Is the moral purpose of those who are good, self-immolation for the sake of those who are evil?”

Consider a préci: In 2001 Zimbabwe’s president, Robert Mugabe, started taking the most productive farms away from their owners and passing them on to his ministers. The reason given was that these farms had been illegally stolen by white settlers and were now being redistributed to the people. As with the appropriations performed in Atlas Shrugged the assumption was that farms would continue producing since the minds that ran them were unimportant. Agriculture collapsed and, what had once been the breadbasket of Africa, is now its basket-case.

It didn’t end there. Mugabe debased his currency, causing hyperinflation (around 11 000% at present) and is currently nationalising more businesses. In words that could have been said by Wesley Mouch, Atlas Shrug’s Economic Dictator, Zimbabwe’s Trade Minister Obert Mpofu has stated, “Once we take over a company, we retain all the staff and bring in a manager. All we do is get rid of the owner.”

Zimbabwe’s empty economy is a worthy demonstration of the world left behind once all the John Galt’s leave.

“Wealth is the product of man’s capacity to think. Then is money made by the man who invents a motor at the expense of those who did not invent it? Is money made by the intelligent at the expense of the fools? By the able at the expense of the incompetent? By the ambitious at the expense of the lazy? Money is made – before it can be looted or mooched – made by the effort of every honest man, each to the extent of his ability. An honest man is one who knows that he can’t consume more than he has produced.”

South Africa too is experimenting with redistribution. Minerals and energy minister Buyelwa Sonjica has threatened De Beers, a South African diamond-mining conglomerate, with extortionate export duties unless they set up local diamond polishing capacity. There is no rational reason for De Beers to do this. According to Jonathan Oppenheimer, one of De Beer’s directors, the cost of polishing locally is $ 70 to $ 100 per carat, while it is $ 6 to $ 8 in India.

The government can offer nothing to De Beers except to withdraw their offer of violence towards the company if they comply. De Beers has made a counter-offer: if the government is serious about this then they must provide them with subsidies to make up the difference.

The recipients of subsidies are complicit in extending the range of government’s violence to other businesses as well. Government does not sell any services that business wishes to buy. If they did then no threats would be necessary; they would be trades of mutual benefit.

In order to raise the capital necessary to support De Beers, government will have to raise additional taxes from other businesses.

Government’s “need” to create jobs will see millions of rands taken from people who have the best ability to turn it to productive use and transferred to people who have nothing to offer in return but their “need” for jobs.

With examples like these the need for a book like Atlas Shrugged has never been more important.

The delusion of wealth

“Money will not purchase happiness for the man who has no concept of what he wants; money will not give him a code of values, if he’s evaded the knowledge of what to value, and it will not provide him with a purpose, if he’s evaded the choice of what to seek. Money will not buy intelligence for the fool, or admiration for the coward, or respect for the incompetent. The man who attempts to purchase the brains of his superiors to serve him, with his money replacing his judgment, ends up by becoming the victim of his inferiors. The men of intelligence desert him, but the cheats and the frauds come flocking to him, drawn by a law which he has not discovered: that no man may be smaller than his money. Is this the reason why you call it evil?”

What Rand raises is the complicity in the decay of a moral system by those who are most able. Instead of refusing to trade “need” for their ability – instead of recognising their own value – the greatest producers and thinkers voluntarily carry everyone else. They choose to be enslaved by the least capable. On a large scale this is equivalent to the United States being responsible for 60% of the budget of Mozambique because Mozambique is needy. On a micro scale it is when the youth of today are subjected to astonishing taxes to pay for the profligacy of the elderly.

“The answer you evade, the monstrous answer is: No, the takers are not evil, provided they did not earn the value you gave them. It is not immoral for them to accept it, provided they are unable to produce it, unable to deserve it, unable to give you any value in return. It is not immoral for them to enjoy it, provided they do not obtain it by right.”

Faced with this type of logic, even in today’s world, the most able vote with their feet. Europe battles to stimulate new business growth since youngsters travel to countries with lower tax-rates and settle there. The most able Zimbabweans, 3.5 million of them, have emigrated to the UK and South Africa.

The idea that the benefits experienced by the most able are “unfair” is delusional when compared to how little the average worker has contributed towards the wealth of society.

“When you work in a modern factory, you are paid, not only for your labour, but for all the productive genius which has made that factory possible: for the work of the industrialist who built it, for the work of the investor who saved the money to risk on the untried and the new, for the work of the engineer who designed the machines of which you are pushing the levers, for the work of the inventor who created the product which you spend your time on making, for the work of the scientist who discovered the laws that went into the making of that product, for the work of the philosopher who taught men how to think and whom your spend your time denouncing.”

The point that Rand made, repeatedly and explicitly, is that the most able are actually the least benefited by the extent of their innovations.

“In proportion to the mental energy he spent, the man who creates a new invention receives but a small percentage of his value in terms of material payment, no matter what fortune he makes, no matter what millions he earns. But the man who works as a janitor in the factory producing that invention, receives an enormous payment in proportion to the mental effort that his job requires of him. And the same is true of all men between, on all levels of ambition and ability. The man at the top of the intellectual pyramid contributes the most to all those below him, but gets nothing except his material payment, receiving no intellectual bonus from others to add to the value of his time. The man at the bottom who, left to himself, would starve in his hopeless ineptitude, contributes nothing to those above him, but receives the bonus of all of their brains. Such is the nature of the ‘competition’ between the strong and the weak of the intellect. Such is the pattern of ‘exploitation’ for which you have damned the strong.”

So what about Enron?

Since we are not honest about what constitutes ability and how that relates to reward it is not surprising that this contradiction frequently throws up horror stories like Enron or Parmalat in which the executives rob the investors who placed their faith in them. But the truth is that it effects the investors more than the employees. Investors should be more careful about who they invest in.

One of Rand’s characters, Francisco d’Anconia, is trashing his own company. No-one notices since now people take their investments on faith rather than actually studying the balance-sheet. You believe that it is a good deal and then are surprised when it falls to pieces. Consider the ultimate perversion of the US sub-prime mortgage market: ninja bonds. You don’t need a job, assets and any qualities to get a loan to purchase a home; just the need for one.

“Then you will see the rise of the double standard – the men who live by force, yet count on those who live by trade to create the value of their looted money – the men who are the hitchhikers of virtue. In a moral society, these are the criminals, and the statutes are written to protect you against them. But when a society establishes criminals-by-right and looters-by-law – men who use force to seize the wealth of disarmed victims – then money becomes its creators’ avenger. Such looters believe it safe to rob defenseless men, once they’ve passed a law to disarm them. But their loot becomes the magnet for other looters, who get it from them as they got it. Then the race goes, not to the ablest at production, but to those most ruthless at brutality. When force is the standard, the murderer wins over the pickpocket. And then that society vanishes, in a spread of ruins and slaughter.”

And then people are outraged when it all falls apart? Why? It is the ultimate realisation of the dream that a person’s need for a home is sufficient. Why shouldn’t the investors lose their money if they are that foolish?

“Do you wish to know whether that day is coming? Watch money. Money is the barometer of a society’s virtue. When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion – when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing – when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favours – when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don’t protect you against them, but protect them against you – when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice – you may know that your society is doomed. Money is so noble a medium that it does not compete with guns and it does not make terms with brutality. It will not permit a country to survive as half-property, half-loot.”

Ask Zimbabwe what happens when a government entrenches looting as the sole means of production.

The best within us

Rand’s message is stark. More so for those who have tail-gated their way through life. Many people are terrified of all the unearned benefits they may lose if the most able shrug that burden. And Rand’s message is astonishingly easy to understand.

“… business and earning a living and that in man which makes it possible – that is the best within us …”

And the best way to express it is to do nothing else. Part with no aspect of your intellect or ability until you are paid in equal value. Force is no substitute for value.

“Whatever may be open to disagreement, there is one act of evil that may not, the act that no man may commit against others and no man may sanction or forgive. So long as men desire to live together, no man may initiate – do you hear me? no man may start – the use of physical force against others. To interpose the threat of physical destruction between a man and his perception of reality, is to negate and paralyze his means of survival; to force-him to act against his own judgment, is like forcing him to act against his own sight. Whoever, to whatever purpose or extent, initiates the use of force, is a killer acting on the premise of death in a manner wider than murder: the premise of destroying man’s capacity to live.”

If you feel that force is being used to extract your abilities and virtues against your will then refuse to yield. It is possible to enslave your body but not your mind. A government or society can vote that you run your company at a loss, that you yield up your profits to them, but they cannot make you put your imagination and ability to their use. That takes your capitulation. You can be physically present but you can demand that they tell you how to deliver. If they are so certain that they are right then let them tell you what to do. Take no part in your own slavery. Do not design a better lock for your jailor.

“Only a brute, a fool or an evader can agree to exist on such terms or agree to give his fellow men a blank check on his life and his mind, to accept the belief that others have the right to dispose of his person at their whim, that the will of the majority is Omnipotent, that the physical force of muscles and numbers is a substitute for justice, reality and truth. We, the men of the mind, we who are traders, not masters or slaves, do not deal in blank checks or grant them. We do not live or work with any form of the non-objective.”

It is a simple enough strategy. Whenever others demand of me that I make available the products of my mind and receive their need in payment I simply say, “No.” There is no law they can pass and no torture that they can imagine that would make it possible to force my mind to be their tool. And I state John Galt’s oath, here and now, to my own purpose and for my own ends:

“I swear – by my life and my love of it – that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.”

“There is a lovely road that runs from Ixopo into the hills. These hills are grass-covered and rolling, and they are lovely beyond any singing of it. The road climbs seven miles into them, to Carisbrooke; and from there, if there is no mist, you look down on one of the fairest valleys of Africa. About you there is grass and bracken and you may hear the forlorn crying of the titihoya, one of the birds of the veld. Below you is the valley of the Umzimkulu, on its journey from the Drakensberg to the sea; and beyond and behind the river, great hill after great hill; and beyond and behind them, the mountains of Ingeli and East Griqualand.

The grass is rich and matted, you cannot see the soil. It holds the rain and the mist, and they seep into the ground, feeding the streams in every kloof. It is well-tended, and not too many cattle feed upon it; not too many fires burn it, laying bare the soil. Stand unshod upon it, for the ground is holy, being even as it came from the Creator. Keep it, guard it, care for it, for it keeps men, guards men, cares for men. Destroy it and man is destroyed.”

Alan Paton wrote these words in 1948.

1948.

Before Apartheid. Before legalised hate. Before it was too late. It is the most beautiful book ever written. And the people who needed to read it most never did.

“Cry the beloved country” tells the story of an Anglican Minister, Stephen Kumalo, who travels from rural Kwazulu Natal to Johannesburg, the capital of the South African republic. He goes in search of his son, Absolom, who left home to find work in the mines. The rural areas no longer support people. The land is overgrazed. The people starve.

The work is biblical in form, poetic, a psalm. It is loved. There is no evil in these pages. Not in any of the characters you meet. The evil is in the system that constrains the way that people interact. This was before Apartheid, before laws cemented the racism in peoples’ hearts.

“Cry, the beloved country, for the unborn child that is the inheritor of our fear. Let him not love the earth too deeply. Let him not laugh too gladly when the water runs through his fingers, nor stand too silent when the setting sun makes red the veld with fire. Let him not be too moved when the birds of his land are singing, nor give too much of his heart to a mountain or a valley. For fear will rob him of all if he gives too much.”

You may compare it to “To kill a mockingbird”, by Harper Lee, but it is by far the greater work. “Cuckoo” is a cop-out and the weaker for it. Tom Robinson, the black man accused of rape, didn’t do it and the Ewells, the white family who attempt to railroad him, are despicable. The reader never needs to confront their own racism, merely gloat that they are “liberal”, their morals untouched.

“Cry” offers no such solace. For Absolom murders Arthur Jarvis during a botched robbery. Jarvis is not a villain. He is the epitome of all that is bold and courageous and wonderful in the human spirit. He is a young attorney, in love with his wife and his two young children, and he is the most vocal critic of government racial policy. He is a crusader for justice.

And his murder will bring about a state of emergency; his death becoming the cause of the oppressor he fought against and hurting the very people he represented.

But it is the language of Paton that is so haunting.

“I have one great fear in my heart, that one day when they are turned to loving, they will find we are turned to hating.”

There is so much compassion and redemption in this book. An understanding of the fear of difference, of living, of dying. Absolom is tried. The case is clear. Everyone involved recognises the horror. That Absolom had a life ahead of him, that he never intended for this to happen. But he did do it. He is found guilty and we follow him to his execution where he cries out for his father and the land he will never see again.

From 1935 to 1948 Paton ran the Diepsloot Reform School where he introduced progressive reforms aimed at rehabilitation of the young, black, offenders. It was during this period that he formulated writing “Cry”. In 1948 the National Party came into power on a groundswell of popular (white) sentiment against black liberty. Paton formed the South African Liberal Party in 1953 to fight Apartheid. The National Party struggled to find a way to ban the Liberals and, eventually, did so in the 1960s. Paton himself had his passport seized and became a “listed” person with all the scrutiny that a brutal dictatorship could focus on an internationally famous humanist.

“But the one thing that has power completely is love, because when a man loves, he seeks no power, and therefore he has power.”

Paton became a full-time writer after this. His final novel “Ah, but your land is beautiful” was published in 1981. He died in 1988 without seeing the first democratic election that took place in 1994. Sadly, even in 1988, it was not obvious that change was coming.

“Cry” is a great work. Not for what it says, but for the intimacy of the interactions between the characters. Jarvis’ father is a large land-owner near Stephen’s decaying church. The murder brings him closer to the black community living on the fringes of his estate. The murder does not speak to our horror but to our compassion.

Paton recognised the fear. He knew that simply berating the racists without addressing their concerns was short-sighted and risked triggering defensiveness. His books, in their humanity and honesty, achieve so much more. In the last line of “Cry” he acknowledges the immensity of his task.

“But when the dawn will come, of our emancipation, from the fear of bondage and the bondage of fear, why, that is a secret.”