Collected Miscellany

I have long held that certain geographic connects trump more politically correct or emphasized designations.  For example, I hold that being a Midwesterner from a small to medium sized town or suburb compared to someone from an urban center on either coast is a much bigger cultural hrudle than race.

When I lived in the Washington, DC area – Hyattsville, Maryland to be exact – it was an almost overwhelmingly African-American community; the mailman called us “the white couple.”  One of our neighbors was from Wisconsin and we hit it off right away.  Having both grown up in the Midwest or North (Michigan for me and Minnesota for my wife) we could instantly relate to and communicate about her childhood.

In contrast her own husband was from inner city DC and it wasn’t quite as easy to connect.  In fact, she shared with us that there were significant cultural barriers that she had to adjust to in her relationship with him and his family.  We enjoyed his company but there is a divide between inner city or urban folks and rural/suburban Midwesterners.

The reason for all this sociological musing is that Wisconsin is the setting for Jesse Lee Kercheval’s collection of linked stories The Alice Stories (Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction) and it made me think back to these ideas and experiences.

Set largely in Wisconsin, and featuring a central character from Florida who finds herself settling down there, it had a tone or sense that I could relate to.  Not that I don’t enjoy some of it, but it seems much contemporary literary fiction takes place in a setting outside of my day to day life.  Reading stories that hit closer to home makes for interesting reading and a nice change of pace.

A more in-depth discussion follows after the jump.

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I introduced myself to the work of Ralph Peters by reading his latest book Wars of Blood and Faith.  I did not know who Peters was before reading this book – from what I have read about him afterward makes me feel like I have lived in a closet.  From the book’s cover (for those like me who do not know who Peters is), Peters is a retired military officer, a popular media commentator, and the author of 22 books.  An opinion columnist for the New York Post, he is a member of the boards of contributors at USA Today and Armchair General magazine, a columnist for Armed Forces Journal, and a frequent guest on television and radio.< ?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

Wars of Blood and Faith is a compilation of articles by Peters organized in five categories: the Twenty-first Century military, Iraq and its neighbors, the home front, Israel’s struggle, and the world beyond.

My first impression after reading the book is wow.  Peters is very opinionated and seems to be very knowledgeable on military affairs – especially in regards to the Middle East.  He contends that Americans (and Europeans) need to go back to basic human behavior with regard to fundamentalist Islam – basically that in order to win the War on Terror we need to kill more and negotiate less (after all the terrorists are taking that view toward us).  This view is particularly uncomfortable for us to hear because it runs counter to our current view that all peoples are rational and will compromise.

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I am a bad blogger.  This has most likely been clear long before today, but recent events have confirmed this.  I get significant traffic from a couple of links related to the post on Liberal Fascism and what do I do?  Nothing.  No enticing posts to keep all those readers and get them to come back.  Not even a welcome update to the post itself.  This is not how a good blogger would react to increased traffic. Jeff thankfully posted.

The plain fact is that my current job and family life just haven’t allowed me to get into any kind of rhythm or habit of blogging.  And that is really how the process works – you have to get into the habit and make time to post or you simply find time slipping by.

So a belated welcome to those new visitors and a lame promise of content on the horizon.  I have a stack of books I need to review and a couple of bookish subjects I want to tackle.  Perhaps, I can regain that blogging rhythm and earn a little readership in the process.

Charles O’Brien’s third installment in the Anne Cartier Mystery Series entitled Noble Blood is as good as the previous two books.O’Brien has a gift of bringing historical times to life.

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Here is an excerpt from Publishers Weekly about the plot:

Anne Cartier, teacher of the deaf and wife of Col. Paul de Saint-Martin of the Royal Highway Patrol, comes to the defense of Denise de Villers, a housemaid and former pupil at the Institute for the Deaf where Anne works, when Denise is accused of murdering the duchesse de Saumur, a close friend of Marie Antoinette’s.  Paul’s well-connected aunt journeys with Anne and Paul to the royal palace at Versailles, where they soon become involved in a tangled web of treachery, conspiracy and intrigue.  As Paul says, “Pursuing the truth can cause a mess. Old wounds open up, incriminating lies are exposed.”  In their effort to prove the deaf maid’s innocence, they uncover corruption and deception that touch everyone from servants and courtiers to church leaders and the queen herself.

With each of O’Brien’s novels, I appreciate his depth of historical knowledge more.  He portrays pre-Revolutionary France perfectly – especially the upper classes.  With this novel, O’Brien describes the rampant corruption in the French government and the king’s lack of leadership.  He also begins to interweave the social tensions in France into the plot – some of the characters begin to openly show their disdain for the French nobility (primarily Anne and Georges Charpentier, Paul’s assistant).  I think this open disdain by the characters is setting the stage for the fate of the characters during the French Revolution – we shall see.

The list of characters is wonderful.  Everyone from Queen Marie Antoinette’s lover (not the king) to the most humble of public servants is brought to life.  It is interesting to see how O’Brien brings light to all members of French society through the investigations of Paul, Anne, and Georges.  The number of suspects keeps you guessing until the end of the book.

Noble Blood will keep you enthralled throughout.

Few books by conservative author’s have received as much vitriol and mockery before release as Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism. Its title -and the changing subtitle in particular- and premise have been attacked and decried from one end of the liberal blogoshere to the other. Many have assumed it is a banal, if outrageous, attempt to follow in the footsteps of Ann Coulter. Quite a few have even asserted that Jonah couldn’t finish the book and maybe never would. The book’s amazon page was even hacked.

I have long been of the opinion that critics should read the book before attacking it. And after reading an early version I offered the opinion that it was “a serious argument with important points to make” and that while readers may not agree with all of his arguments that he “draws out some fascinating aspects of history and makes some pretty compelling arguments about the faulty nature of the conventional wisdom surrounding fascism past and present.”

Well, it seems that Publishers Weekly agrees with me. No one would accuse PW of being some sort of right wing propaganda machine and yet they offer this mostly positive review:

In this provocative and well-researched book, Goldberg probes modern liberalism’s spooky origins in early 20th-century fascist politics. With chapter titles such as “Adolf Hitler: Man of the Left” and “Brave New Village: Hillary Clinton and the Meaning of Liberal Fascism”–Goldberg argues that fascism “has always” been “a phenomenon of the left.” This is Goldberg’s first book, and he wisely curbs his wry National Review style. Goldberg’s study of the conceptual overlap between fascism and ideas emanating from the environmental movement, Hollywood, the Democratic Party and what he calls other left-wing organs is shocking and hilarious. He lays low such lights of liberal history as Margaret Sanger, apparently a radical eugenicist, and JFK, whose cult of personality, according to Goldberg, reeks of fascist political theater. Much of this will be music to conservatives’ ears, but other readers may be stopped cold by the parallels Goldberg draws between Nazi Germany and the New Deal. The book’s tone suffers as it oscillates between revisionist historical analyses and the application of fascist themes to American popular culture; nonetheless, the controversial arc Goldberg draws from Mussolini to The Matrix is well-researched, seriously argued–and funny.

So here is my challenge to all of the bloggers and writers who have mocked and chided Jonah through the delays and subtitle changes and everything else: when the book is released, read it, and offer criticisms based on substance rather than emotional reactions and ignorant gossip.

I have a feeling that most will simply ignore it rather than wrestle intelligently with its claims.

The human ego hates a genuinely new experience.  It hates to change and is preoccupied with control.  We prefer ideas.  We can do anything we want with a new idea, including agreeing with it too quickly.  But a genuinely new experience does something with you!  It leaves you out of control for a while and forces you to re-access your terrain, find new emotions, and realign your life coordinates.  It is often a bit of a humiliation, because it upsets your old coordinates.  We prefer to stay inside our small comfort zones and actually avoid any genuinely new experiences.  The ego almost does not allow them to happen.

– Fr. Richard Rohr, from the introduction to How Big is Your God?