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Geoffrey Dunn: More Palin Lies: The Trooper in 'Troopergate' Breaks His Silence

2009-11-26T00:19:40Z

The Alaska State Trooper at the center of Sarah Palin's so-called "Troopergate Scandal"--which impeded her run for the vice-presidency and stained her record as Alaska governor--has broken his more than year-long silence since his embattled divorce with Palin's sister, Molly, became a cause celebre during last year's presidential campaign.

After reading passages from Palin's memoirs Going Rogue that deal with his marriage and subsequent divorce, a "fed up" Mike Wooten, 37, who still serves as an Alaska State Trooper in Anchorage, called the book "a pack of lies."

According to Wooten, Palin and her father, Chuck Heath Sr., have "interfered with my life--and my children's lives--for at least the last five years. And it is still going on. I'm done with it."

Characterizing his adversaries as "snakes," Wooten said he has kept quiet long enough. "From this point on I'm speaking my mind," he declared. "I'm speaking the truth. Let the chips fall where they may." He acknowledged that he is considering taking legal action against Palin on multiple fronts.

Although Palin would try to claim otherwise during the presidential campaign, an independent investigation ordered by the bipartisan Alaska Legislative Council (composed of ten Republicans and four Democrats) and conducted by former Republican prosecutor Steve Branchflower, resulted in the finding "that Governor Palin abused her power by violating Alaska Statute 39.52.110(a) of the Alaska Executive Branch Ethics Act."

The report issued by Branchflower documented more than thirty occasions in which then Governor Palin, her husband Todd or members of her staff tried to influence Alaska's highly regarded Commissioner of Public Safety, Walt Monegan, to fire Wooten. When Monegan refused, Palin fired him instead.

In addition to the finding that Palin "abused" her office, the Alaska Senate cited Todd Palin and nine other state employees for "contempt" for ignoring legislative subpoenas to testify in the Troopergate investigation.

A native of California whose father immigrated to the United States from Honduras, Wooten served 10 years in the Air Force and three more in the Air National Guard Reserves. He participated in a trio of U.S. military operations in the Persian Gulf War--Desert Storm, Desert Shield and Restore Hope--before returning stateside to Alaska at Elmendorf Air Force Base, about 45 minutes from Wasilla.

Partially disabled from his military service, Wooten pointed out that neither Todd nor Sarah Palin, or Chuck Heath, served in the armed forces. Wooten said he was particularly "disgusted and incensed" by Palin's "insincere" dedication in Going Rogue to "our men and women in uniform."

Wooten further noted with irony that many of those who have been victimized by Palin during her political career--including former Wasilla police chief Irl Stambaugh; Monegan and himself--were all veterans. "Sarah is only about Sarah," Wooten said. "She doesn't care about the 'men and women in uniform.' It's all about advancing Sarah's career."

Public records from Alaska--some of which have been revealed for the first time--chronicle a half-decade long obsession with Wooten by Palin, her father and, later, by Palin's husband Todd.

"They're like poisonous snakes in the grass who spew nothing but venom," Wooten said. "They just lay in wait and they attack you until you're dead."

In Going Rogue, Palin mentions none of Wooten's military record, but cites many charges that were brought against Wooten that were subsequently dismissed. She contends that there were "ten different" citizen complaints field against Wooten--without acknowledging that all of them were filed by members of her family or close friends. "They filed every stinking one of the charges," Wooten contends. "But it's been more like two dozen."

In an interview conducted in Alaska this past summer, John Cyr, the former Alaska Public Safety Employees Association Executive Director, confirmed Wooten's charges:

Not one complaint has ever been made about Mike Wooten's professional performance from any member of the public other than the Palin/Heath family and their closest friends. The troopers that I've talked to that have worked with Mike tell me Mike is the kind of guy they'd go through a door with. That he does his work. He's a professional. You know, just no complaints out there about Mike's work.

"It's the product of an ugly divorce and custody battle," Cyr said of the varied complaints against Wooten. "It's nothing more than that."

Wooten has acknowledged several mistakes he made while "I was younger" and admitted there were several things he "would have done differently," but he chose to remain silent as the McCain-Palin campaign portrayed him as a "rogue" Trooper (note the irony here) who Tased his step-son and went off on violent, drunken binges, to the point of threatening to kill Palin's father.

Wooten calls the version of events rendered in Going Rogue an "outright lie." Either it "didn't happen [the way she alleges]," he says, "or she exaggerated it all beyond recognition. I look forward to telling my side of this story."

Wooten now joins an ever-growing array of figures from John McCain on down who have challenged the veracity of Palin's memoirs. The list also includes McCain senior advisers Steve Schmidt and Nicolle Wallace, Palin's former legislative director John Bitney, her former political ally Andree McLeod, and former Alaska gubernatorial candidate Andrew Halcro. All Republicans. Wooten identifies himself as a "conservative" as well.

Palin contends "the chapter for our family was closed" with the divorce but fails to acknowledge any of the sustained harassment of Wooten, which, he says, continues to this day.

The father of three (two of whom are with Palin's sister), Wooten, still living in Wasilla, is described by his friends as a "very involved father," active as a coach in all of his three children's extracurricular sports activities--hockey, football and soccer. "I've committed my life to these children and being a good dad," he says. "I'm simply not going to allow the Palins or Chuck Heath to interfere in our lives any longer."

Palin recounts a story in Going Rogue that Wooten "asked me to write him a recommendation for the Alaska State Trooper Academy." What she doesn't acknowledge is that she wrote more than one on his behalf. In a letter dated January 1, 2000, written on official City of Wasilla stationery, Palin praises Wooten profusely, though she fails to declare her then-pending familial relationship with him.

It is my pleasure to provide character reference examples for Mr. Mike Wooten. Since I have become acquainted with Mike I continue to be impressed with his integrity, worthwhile community spirit and trustworthiness...

On a personal note, I have witnessed Mike's gift of calm and kindness towards many young kids here in Wasilla. I have never seen him raise his voice, nor lose patience, nor become agitated, in the presence of any child. Instead, Mike consistently remains a fine role model for my own children and other young people in Wasilla.

I wish America had more people with the grace and sincerity that mirrors the character of Mike Wooten. We would have a much kinder calmer trustworthy nation as a result.

I believe the United States Air Force has been fortunate to have the services of Mike the past 10 years. His work ethic, his American patriotism, his obvious dedication to traditional values, and his strong faith in God and truth is witnessed in Mike's everyday living.

None of which, of course, is mentioned in Going Rogue.

For his part, Wooten recalls a telling conversation with an associate of Palin's campaign team when she was running for Governor in 2006. "You could probably bring the whole campaign down," the aide said. "You probably know things about her that she doesn't want other people to know."

Award-winning writer and filmmaker Geoffrey Dunn's book The Lies of Sarah Palin: The Untold Story Behind Her Relentless Quest for Power will be released by St. Martin's Press in spring 2010.

Bruce Harris: "The First Tycoon": A Good News Publishing Backstory

2009-11-25T22:15:02Z

Why would anyone want to read a 720 page book on the life of Cornelius Vanderbilt?

The object itself is a beautiful piece of bookmaking with a classy jacket and deckled edged paper.

I picked the book up a few moths ago because I'm personally interested in the impulses and people which made America develop into the nation we know today. The mark of Knopf on the spine assured me that this would be a readable and thorough book.

I started reading 20 pages at a time but soon got hooked and couldn't wait to get back and tear off 100 page clumps. The beautiful object now had the dog-eared pages and coffee stained cover that showed I was devouring it.

Most Americans, even New Yorkers, whose lives Vanderbilt still influences would have a hard time telling you who he was or what he did. Sure, there is a Vanderbilt Place for a few short blocks in midtown Manhattan and a rather imposing statue that stands at the confluence of the elevated road which runs around Grand Central, but I bet that Vanderbilt is not even mentioned in high school history books now.

I spoke to my former colleague Jonathan Segal about why he thought he should publish the book and he told me he had worked on Stiles first book on Jesse James which had been a NY Times notable book. Segal was convinced that Stiles "had the goods " and was a "wonderful guy". Jonathan said that he and Sonny Mehta believed that publishing was a "collective relationship" and that they believed in giving their authors "lots of freedom to write what they want". He thought Stiles had a "refreshing point of view" and that since he and Knopf publisher Sonny Mehta "believe in talent" he would not walk away from this project and instead signed Stiles up for what they both knew would be a long period of research, writing and editing.

Mr. Stiles would obviously need to support himself and his family for five years. Even though he lectured at Columbia and taught karate in his spare time, he must have needed a tidy financial commitment from Knopf to undertake this project.

Can you imagine the conversation that would have taken place at most publishing houses when the finance people crunched the numbers and estimated what this project was going to cost? Can you see the sales people's wan smiles when they found out that a 720 page biography was going to have to sell for $37.50? Not a pretty picture.

But Knopf is different. Even the business managers believe that good books will find readers. They believe that it's better to walk away from stuff that isn't right so they can take chances on the the authors and books that will interest and delight the 15% of America that would rather seep themselves in the atmosphere of an earlier America and learn facts about Commodore Vanderbilt than have their prejudices pandered to by Glenn Beck.

Who was Vanderbilt? He was an almost illiterate 23 year old who seized on the opportunity of running one of the first steam ferries from Staten Island to Manhattan in 1817. To quote the jacket copy: "We see Vanderbilt help to launch the transportation revolution, propel the Gold Rush, reshape Manhattan and invent the modern corporation--in fact, as TJ Stiles elegantly argues, Vanderbilt did more than perhaps any other individual to create the economic world we live in today."

"Elegantly argues" is so Knopfian and so true because this books is no dry history but a virile picture of an astoundingly active man who bestrode his world like a colossus but was eminently human with tangled messy relationships with wives, children, friends and enemies.
Yesterday I heard the happy news that "The First Tycoon" has won the Non-Fiction National Book Award. Publisher's Lunch also mentioned that it was the best-selling non-fiction book nominated.

PW quoted Stiles as saying that winning the NBA was an "out of body experience." Stiles said that books "are at the heart of our culture," and went on to thank the vast army of workers--"a complete eco-system" --that make books possible. "The editorial assistants, the copyeditors, the designers, agents, publicists, the guys in the mailroom, librarians--I hope e-books aren't fooling us into thinking these people aren't needed."

I'm happy to join a lot of people congratulating TJ Stiles for writing a terrific book and winning this prestigious award.

I'd also like to congratulate Jonathan Segal, Sonny Mehta and the whole AA Knopf organization for having the guts to back good writers and giving them the means and time to tackle serious subjects and enlighten us all.

Alfred A Knopf is probably looking down from book heaven, stroking his luxuriant mustaches and smiling with delight at yet another Knopf prize winner.

Kevin Morris and Glenn Altschuler: Rest in Peace, Billy Pilgrim

2009-11-25T21:15:24Z

Review of Look at the Birdie. By Kurt Vonnegut. Delacorte Press, 251 pps., $27.00

Posthumous publishing could be called the business of endings. It often involves a confederacy of dunces and rarely yields A Confederacy of Dunces. Especially in the case of prominent authors, who may have chosen to hold back material that did not cut the mustard. Their books often appear because of estate considerations and the desire of the public for a victory lap, a montage of memories. The manuscript becomes the finale of a body of work. It's tricky stuff. How, after all, does a writer say goodbye?

It is in this context that we look at Look at the Birdie, a set of fourteen previously unpublished stories by the late Kurt Vonnegut. Over his long career Vonnegut explored the American landscape with a cartoony style, emblemized by his caricatured persona. It has been said of him, "Like Abe Lincoln and Mark Twain, he is always being funny when he's not being depressed." Long and lanky with bushy hair and eyebrows, he was the laconic and likeable brooder of American letters.

Vonnegut was forever marked by the action he saw in World War II, most notably the firebombing of Dresden. His experience shaped his fiction, and, just as his friend Joseph Heller will be remembered for Catch 22, Vonnegut's legacy will undoubtedly be led by the charming, quirky and heartbreaking, Slaughterhouse-Five. A sort of sadness permeates his writing, and in novels like Slaughterhouse and Breakfast of Champions he returned time and again to the senselessness of war, the corroding effects of technology, and his lack of hope for the human race. These themes are served up in unpredictable and funny story settings, with prose economical and distinctive. He believed "every scene, every dialogue should advance the narrative and then if possible there should be a surprise ending."

Look at the Birdie, for better and worse, is vintage Vonnegut. His skill begins with the beginnings, as even in the weaker stories he introduces a story context faster than you can say Mr. Rosewater. The narratives are simultaneously unique and familiar, like new stories from an old uncle. The book starts wonderfully, as Vonnegut offers up lonely, grievously unhappy characters, like a housewife in "Confido" whose husband invents a mindreading machine, and the company man in "FUBAR," whose whole life is lived in a warehouse.

But, it must be said, the collection also show Vonnegut's flaws. The book's flow is slowed in the overly long night for a small town couple in "Ed Luby's Key Club." And Vonnegut's alchemy goes missing in the stranger tale "Hello, Red." Worst of all, the allegorical story, "The Petrified Ants," in which a pair of Russian scientists discover an amazing colony of insects, falls prey to the author's tendency to be preachy and political. One of the scientists declares: "We're the ones without pincers, Josef. We're done. We aren't made to work and fight in huge hordes, to live by instinct and nothing more, perpetuating a dark, damp anthill without the wits to even wonder why." It's a bit of a wince, this Cold War cold sore, and is an occasion to recall the posthumousness-of-it-all. In fact, each of the down moments reminds you that someone raided the file cabinet.

Still, Vonnegut's touch delights, and even when he is shrill he usually warms the heart, as with "The Honor of a Newsboy," the story of a small town cop, a bully and a paper boy. Asked if he delivered the paper on Wednesday, the boy says, "Of course, it's the rule." The cop is moved to proclaim, "If everybody were ten...maybe rules and common decency and horse sense would have a Chinaman's chance."

Which brings us back to the business of endings. There is something almost old-fashioned about Vonnegut's confidence in finishing stories. Nothing if not the most assured of writers, Kurt Vonnegut is always showing you something to hold up against an abstract future. And though somewhere along the line writers of short fiction have decided not to knit the whole sweater, one of the chief pleasures of Look at the Birdie is being reminded that yarns can, and maybe should, end.

True to his word, the author wraps most of these stories up with a surprise, and some feel a little rushed and not fully earned. But if you are already settled in with Look at the Birdie, it is probably because in your book Kurt Vonnegut deserves the victory lap, the montage of memories, the endings and the ending. There ain't nothing wrong with that.

And so it goes.

Borders, Barnes & Noble Experience Major Losses

2009-11-25T20:46:41Z

Things aren't looking good for big booksellers Borders and Barnes & Noble. The AP reports that both chains have posted major losses for this quarter, their sales made worse by the online price wars between Amazon and Walmart that have driven prices on new bestsellers down so much as to make it nearly impossible for bookstores to compete.

Barnes & Noble hopes for some degree of profit in the future from its new eReader, the Nook, a new competitor for Amazon's Kindle. In launching into the digital book market is at least a step ahead of Borders, as analyst Michael Norris points out.

Stocks for the two companies have also fallen significantly. The Wall Street Journal reports a major fall for Barnes & Noble despite the early success of the Nook, which is currently unavailable until January.

Borders UK seems to be doing even worse than its American sibling. BBC News reports that Borders UK has been looking for a buyer recently, unsure if there will be enough cash to get through the Christmas season. The Guardian also notes that recent visitors to the Borders UK website have been unable to place orders, and that the chain has started to cancel author signings.

The future is looking bleak for these bookselling chains.

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Huckabee Has A Book Tour, Too

2009-11-25T20:00:01Z

Amidst all of the buzz and controversy over Sarah Palin's ongoing book tour, no one seems to have noticed that Mike Huckabee is also on a tour to promote his new book, "A Simple Christmas".

This right-winger's book is also a bestseller, making its way to #3 on next week's New York Times chart, but the timing on the book's release has gotten it lost in a sea of Palin-mania. It's hard not to compare the turn-out on the two tours. Jacksonville newspaper The Florida Times-Union notes that Huckabee's stop in Jacksonville drew far smaller crowds than Palin did one week later, had no lines forming days before the appearance, and found no need for the wristbands that Palin's tour has been employing.

Perhaps it is unfair to compare the two tours, considering the celebrity that surrounds Palin at this point, but there are a number of striking similarities between them. Both conservative politicians are focusing attention on their personal lives; The Times-Union lauds the "good childhood mud" that "A Simple Christmas" features, along with feel-good stories of childhood Christmases.

Both former governors also seem to be using their memoirs as an opportunity to work up political buzz for themselves, treating their book tours like political campaigns. The Los Angeles Times points out that Huckabee stands throughout the entire signing, "as a president would." The LA Times also points out:

The author-politicians can operate in an environment more tightly controlled than an official run for office. They can focus on building personal ties to their most passionate supporters, independent of local party officials. They can sidestep the national media in favor of generally hospitable local coverage. ... After all, they're in town to talk about books, not issues.

But are they really? USA Today quotes an email from Huckabee in which he talks about his tour:

I have been crisscrossing the country on my book tour meeting with thousands of voters over the last few weeks and when people mention Congress and the Obama administration to me, they are angry about the out of control spending, frustrated that Congress has turned a deaf ear to their concerns about the health care bill and not surprised that our country is lurching perilously left.

Despite his apparent interest in launching into politics on the tour, Huckabee insists that he is not looking forward to the 2012 presidential elections yet, telling the Columbus Dispatch in Ohio that:

[I]t's "absurd" for anyone to be planning now for the 2012 White House campaign.

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Gerald Sindell: Sarah Palin Snags Ziggy Honors

2009-11-25T18:13:37Z

I had abandoned my plans to buy Sarah Palin's autobiography. You know how it is -- you hear about what is likely to be a great book and you get all ready to read it, but you don't quite pay attention to what day it's going to come out, and then all those critics get an early copy and before long everybody is already telling you about all the great stuff that's in the book and if you don't put your fingers in your ears and go la la la it's all spoiled.

Sometimes I wish everyone could just keep it to themselves for a week and give the rest of us a chance to experience something like this without having others make up our minds for us. But then, the author Herself went on tour and suddenly she was everywhere talking about her book and answering questions. So here we are a week or so later, and I just can't imagine anything older than Going Rogue.

So even though I'd taken it off my must have list, I was in a Costco over the weekend and there was a pile of several hundred of her books, all red and exciting on the end of a huge table. I have to admit, Frank Rich's insights notwithstanding, I was still drawn to pick one up. Maybe there was something about Ms. Palin that everyone had missed. Maybe the secret of her attraction would finally, suddenly, become dazzlingly clear to me.

I picked up a copy of the book and fanned it open to read a sample. Surely this was going to be as close as Sarah Palin and I were ever going to get in this life, so no question there was a little frisson in the air. I'm not kidding. Right there in the middle of Costco. Powerful something going on.

I looked at the page. I don't remember now exactly which one, but I was immediately struck by something peculiar. It just didn't look like a normal page in a book. Was it the typography? There were all these little verticals dancing all over the place. What the heck was going on? Was it the weird Costco lighting? Was I becoming dyslexic? Oh dog, please tell me it wasn't happening!

But then I saw what it was. The page was full of a great many freestanding uppercase 'I's. It was the most I have ever seen on a page. Fortunately, my wife has a peculiar genius for pattern recognition. I got her attention by showing her what I was reading. She gave me a look that said, "Are you okay?" But she came over and peered at the page I was pointing to. "See anything strange here?" In less than two seconds she saw it too. "'I's all over the place. I've never seen so many."

We counted them. Twenty-seven 'I's on a single page. Just for a reality check, I searched around for a comparable autobiography, and Ted Kennedy's True Compass fell conveniently to hand. We opened to a random page and counted the 'I's. Four. We tried another page. Twelve. Clearly the man cared too little about his subject. An ego piker, no question.

I felt Palin deserved an award of some kind for her achievement. I'll bet Sigmund Freud's best pals didn't run around Vienna calling him Siggy. Just didn't have the right sound. I'll bet they called him Ziggy. And that's the perfect name for the Best Achievement in Ego for 2009. Sarah Palin, your Ziggy is in the mail. Bigger than an Oscar and much, much brighter.

Fortunately, I turned to another page and found a little morsel from Sarah that was fresh for me, and I'd like to share it. She seems obsessed with killing and eating animals, and she's been oft quoted to the effect that she has a place for all of Alaska's endangered species. That'd be on her plate, right next to the mashed potatoes. Hilarious. But I found an even better quote from her: "If God had not intended for us to eat animals, how come He made them out of meat?" Sounds like something out of Jeffrey Dahmer's playbook, actually. And if you're Sarah's dog or cat or chubby little baby, downright terrifying.

Thanksgiving Poems By Billy Collins

2009-11-25T17:55:42Z

TWO THANKSGIVING POEMS

BY BILLY COLLINS

Reprinted with permission from "The Dreadest Feast: Writers on Enduring the Holidays" published by Stewart, Tabori & Chang edited by Taylor Plimpton and Michele Clarke.

1. Thanksgiving Morning

The crossed multiple blades of the blender
set out to dry on a counter.
The corkscrew unsheathed and ready
to enter whatever cannot resist its twisting.
The carving knife waiting alongside
the sharpener for its abrasive touch,

The blue box of matches, the white candles.
The branch of dry leaves brought in
Along with vines clustered with red and yellow berries,

All of which points to the anonymous turkey,
soon to be trussed with string
but now soaking on the cold porch
in a bucket of salted ice water,
in brine, as they like to say this time of year.

And we must not overlook the oven,
radiating in a corner of the kitchen
set at first at 500 degrees
then lowered almost mercifully to 350,

still hot enough to lift the bird
into the condition of sacrificial edibility,
yet short of what would incinerate a book,
the oven that swallowed the witch and Sylvia Plath
and now the oven of our pleasure,
our forks and glasses blindly raised.

2. The Gathering, a Thanksgiving Poem

Outside, the scene was right for the season,
heavy gray clouds and just enough wind
to blow down the last of the yellow leaves.

But the house was different that day,
so distant from the other houses,
like a planet inhabited by only a dozen people

with the same last name and the same nose
rotating slowly on its invisible axis.
Too bad you couldn't be there

but you were flying through space on your own asteroid
with your arm around an uncle.
You would have unwrapped your scarf

and thrown your coat on top of the pile
then lifted a glass of wine
as a tiny man ran across a screen with a ball.

You would have heard me
saying grace with my elbows on the tablecloth
as one of the twins threw a dinner roll across the room at the other.

Christopher Lydon: The Anthologist: Pining For The Four-Beat Rhythm Poem

2009-11-25T17:20:52Z

Nicholson Baker bursts into our poetry series with a passion for form, a longing for four-beat rhythms a la Kipling and rhymes of the kind that Ira Gershwin and Dr. Seuss learned from Swinburne. For a couple of months now we've been puzzling: what's it like to write serious verse in these times? Who does it, and why? Enter: Nick Baker, the brilliant mischief-making novelist of Vox and Fermata, the compendious historian in Human Smoke of 20th Century weapons of mass destruction, and also the Kindle commentator in The New Yorker. In a day-dreamy fictional monolog titled The Anthologist, Baker's poetic hero Paul Chowder gives one man's complete set of answers to questions we've asked in "whose words these are." Poetry is about dense, juicy words that want to be read slowly, he says. Writing it is slow, too. The poetry game is competitive, anxious and downright scary, not because the words are blocked but because the poet is afraid he's run out of them -- or that he's lost sight of the main goal, to make something memorably beautiful.

In our conversation Nick Baker reveals that he assembled The Anthologist by speaking his own clutter of thoughts (the silly, the sly, the grand) on poetry into a video recorder upstairs and down in his house in Maine -- and some others sitting in a plastic chair next to the badminton court. This is a writer who can talk the afternoon away in the quirky, wise, erudite, fluidly funny high style that we know on the page as Nick Bakeresque.

What is a poem? A poem is something that a person somewhere decided to call a poem. That's the first thing. And what does it ask of us? It asks us to read it slowly. I think that's the key, is that poetry is a bunch of words that's just making a polite request to be read slowly. And there are all sorts of other things that it can do - it can rhyme, it can thump along in a kind of wonderful galumphing way, or not - but it mainly is asking us to slow down. And I like that. I think that I'm not a very fast reader but even though I'm not a fast reader, I read too quickly. And I found that the thing that's most helpful to me as a writer is to slow myself down artificially. And the way I do that is getting a spiral notebook and copying things out, because if you copy something out, you are forced to read at the speed of writing, which is really really slow. So that comma that you've come across? You've had to make that little comma shape. So you're slowing yourself down and I've found that that's very helpful. And one of the things I wanted to do in this book was to put my little hard-won hoard of tips and tricks into book form. Although it's a work of fiction, here are some things that actually helped me learn how to write. And one of them was to read poetry. I as a fiction writer, learned how to write prose by reading poetry, so I have a great debt that I owe to this tradition. I carried around the New Yorker book of poems, and Howard Moss' poems, and Stanley Kunitz's poems with me when I was working in New York on Wall Street, read them on my lunch hour. So I have that, but also there are other tips, and one of them is to: something that you really like - slow yourself down, artificially - it may seem artificial - but slow yourself down by copying it out. If you copy it out, you'll really read it for the first time.

Nicholson Baker with Chris Lydon in Boston, 11.20.09.

Cross-posted from Open Source With Christopher Lydon

Robert D. Stolorow: "Radical Evil"

2009-11-25T17:11:38Z

Richard Bernstein, professor of philosophy at the New School for Social Research, has written an important philosophical inquiry into the phenomenon of evil (Bernstein 2002), an inquiry that will be of great value to psychoanalysts as they confront the problem of evil both in their consulting rooms with their patients and in their personal lives as citizens of planet earth. The
writing of this book was motivated by the need to comprehend the unprecedented atrocities wrought by totalitarianism in the twentieth century, as epitomized by the horrors of Auschwitz. In agreement with Hannah Arendt, Hans Jonas, and Emmanuel Levinas, Bernstein claims that "Auschwitz signifies a rupture and break with tradition, and that 'after Auschwitz' we must rethink both the meaning of evil and human responsibility" (p. 4). To that end Bernstein embarks on a series of "interrogations" or "critical dialogical encounters" (p. 4) with the conceptions of evil developed by Kant, Hegel, Schelling, Nietzsche, Freud, Levinas, Jonas, and Arendt. The inquiry is a hermeneutic rather than a metaphysical one, aiming not at a theory of evil but at a conceptual understanding of what we mean by evil. In the process, Bernstein gives us a wonderful overview of the history and basic concepts of moral philosophy and moral psychology.

Kant's lasting contribution to moral philosophy, according to Bernstein, was his uncompromising insistence that moral responsibility presupposes transcendental freedom--specifically, the absolute freedom to choose between good maxims (those that conform to the moral law) and evil maxims (those that fail to). Further, contrary to any theory of psychic determinism, Kant held that why a human agent makes the choices he or she makes is "inscrutable"--i.e., unknowable and inexplicable. Thus, although he coined the phrase "radical evil" to refer to a universal human propensity to defy the moral law and adopt evil maxims based on self-love, Kant always insisted on the freedom of a human being to choose to resist this propensity.

Kant did not address a problem that has plagued moral philosophy throughout its history--the question of theodicy, of how to reconcile the existence of evil with faith in an omnipotent, omniscient, all-beneficent God. More broadly, theodicy is the effort to justify evil, whether the
form such justification takes is religious or nonreligious. In Hegel's secular theodicy, evil, rooted in egoism and existing in dialectical opposition to the good, is justified as a necessary moment in the evolution of human spirit toward greater unity. Against Hegel and the whole tradition of theodicy, Bernstein argues forcefully throughout his book that "after Auschwitz" any such effort to justify evil must be recognized as "hollow" and "obscene."

Against Hegel's theodicy and in contrast with traditional conceptions of evil as the absence or privation of goodness, Schelling's contribution, in Bernstein's view, was to affirm evil's reality as a principle of darkness manifesting in the grandiose exaltation of "self-will." In so doing, he opened the way to new understandings of evil such as those found in Nietzsche and Freud.

At the core of what Nietzsche meant by evil was the concept of ressentiment--a particularly virulent form of resentment born of impotence. In his genealogical account of the ascendancy of Judeo-Christian morality, Nietzsche traced its origin to the seething hatred experienced by a class of slaves in consequence of prolonged deprivation, domination, and powerlessness. Judeo-Christian morality, in this account, exacted "spiritual revenge" through a "revaluation of values" in which the powerful and the noble became evil and the weak and the lowly became good. But evil motives like hatred and a thirst for revenge only beget more evil. Thus a negative morality motivated by poisonous ressentiment could lead only to destructive consequences, such as a self-lacerating asceticism, an aversion to life itself, and, ultimately, a succumbing to what Nietzsche called "suicidal nihilism," the most dangerous malady threatening the existence of modern man.

Nietzsche's account of evil as the violent manifestation of festering ressentiment born of impotence was a contextual and historical one. Freud's, by contrast, in Bernstein's portrayal (which relies substantially on Freud's myth of the "primal horde" and dual instinct theory), located ineradicable evil in a universal psychic ambivalence lying permanently at the core of human instinctual life. Bernstein suggests that Freud thereby gave substance to Kant's conception of "radical evil" as a propensity to evil inherent in human nature. The contrast between Freud's instinctual determinism and Nietzsche's contextualism and historicism parallels contemporary psychoanalytic debates about whether human destructiveness is to be comprehended primarily as a manifestation of an innate aggressive drive (later Freud and Melanie Klein) or primarily as a reaction to frustration (earlier Freud) or narcissistic injury (Kohut). I have recently proposed (Stolorow 2009) that large-scale human destructiveness can often be grasped as being reactive to collective trauma.

The remaining three of Bernstein's philosophical interlocutors--Levinas, Jonas, and Arendt--were directly and decisively impacted by the atrocities of twentieth-century totalitarianism. All three thinkers addressed the fundamental problem faced by moral philosophy "after Auschwitz"--in Bernstein's words, "how to think about evil when we no longer have any confidence in traditional theodicies, when the very idea of seeking to 'justify' evil is obscene, and when there is no possibility of reconciling ourselves to the brute existence of evil" (p. 165).

Bernstein contends that Levinas's entire philosophical project can be understood as an ethical response to the evil and nihilism that erupted in the twentieth century, a response that emphasized the human being's "infinite responsibility" to and for the other. Evil, from this perspective, is an "excess" that constitutes a complete break with such ethical normativity and responsibility. Evil as excess "transcends" and "ruptures" human categories of understanding. The evil symbolized by Auschwitz defied comprehension or integration and, according to Levinas, thereby put an end to theodicy.

Jonas, too, attributed the upsurge of evil in the twentieth century to a nihilism that eradicates ethical normativity, but it was Arendt who fleshed out what such nihilism entails. Bernstein's inquiry essentially begins and ends with his reflections on Arendt, as it was she, more than any other philosopher, who undertook the rethinking of the very meaning of evil demanded by the horrors of totalitarianism and the Nazi period. According to her analysis, totalitarian domination eventuates in an absolute evil that can no longer be deduced from humanly comprehensible motives. Invoking Kant's phrase but giving it a very different meaning, she referred to such absolute evil as radical evil. Radical evil involves much more than acting on the basis of familiar "sinful motives." It involves making human beings as human beings "superfluous" and dispensable--by nullifying what makes human life distinctively human, by liquidating human freedom, spontaneity, individuality, and morality. Using the example of Nazi "desk murderers" like Eichmann, Arendt described how radical evil took on a kind of "banality," whereby monstrous, massive crimes against humanity were committed as if they were "standard behavior"--mundane, normal activities of everyday life. Such was the nature of the total moral collapse that Arendt tried to capture in her elucidations of radical evil and the banality of evil.

In his conclusion, Bernstein emphasizes that "interrogating evil is an ongoing, open-ended process" (p. 225). New, unanticipated, and more horrifying forms of evil continually appear. Closest to home for Americans, no one who witnessed the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001, along with the counter-atrocities that have followed in its wake, can think that radical evil was brought to an end with the defeat of the Nazis. Bernstein's penetrating and accessible contribution to moral philosophy gives us philosophical ideas and tools that can help us and our patients gain our bearings in an era that can rightfully be called an "Age of Trauma"(Stolorow 2009).

REFERENCES:

Bernstein, R. J. (2002). Radical Evil: A Philosophical Interrogation. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.

Stolorow, R.D. (2009). Identity and resurrective ideology in an age of trauma. Psychoanalytic Psychology 26:206-209.

Michael Crichton's "Pirate Latitudes" Has Blockbuster Movie Written All Over It

2009-11-25T16:03:25Z

Hoist the Jolly Roger above the bestseller list, ye mateys, 'cause Michael Crichton has just published a swashbuckling pirate thriller. The popular author of "Jurassic Park" and "The Andromeda Strain" went to Davy Jones's locker last November, but his assistant found a finished draft of "Pirate Latitudes" on his computer, and Harper has plundered this booty like a chest of gold doubloons that washed up on shore. The first print run is a million copies, and Steven Spielberg has already signed on to produce the inevitable movie version, so drop sail and prepare to be boarded.

eMail Will Eat You Alive

2009-11-25T15:55:50Z

In 2009, the average office worker will spend forty-one per cent of her day reading and responding to e-mails. Such grim statistics abound in John Freeman's new book "The Tyranny of E-mail."

Book Review: Gene Dattel's "Cotton And Race"

2009-11-25T15:54:29Z

JACKSON, Miss. — Gene Dattel grew up in the segregated South and was one of the few Mississippians enrolled at Yale University in 1962 when his home state became ensnared in a bloody confrontation over integration.

More than 1,200 miles and a cultural universe away from the land of cotton, the white freshman found himself answering questions about the violent resistance to James Meredith's court-ordered admission as the first black student at the University of Mississippi.

"I was really put on the defensive," Dattel, now 65 and living in New York City, recalled recently.

He said his struggle to answer questions, and to understand what led to events of the day, prompted him to begin an intense course of study. He earned a bachelor's degree in history from Yale in 1966 and a law degree from Vanderbilt University in 1969.

Now, after decades of working in international finance and lecturing occasionally at universities, Dattel has written a book titled "Cotton and Race in the Making of America: The Human Costs of Economic Power." The publisher, Ivan R. Dee of Chicago, gave the book an initial print run of 7,500 copies.

"Cotton and Race" is a compelling story of how the cash crop shaped the 19th-century global economy and magnified the United States' racial problems. His narrative begins during the framing of the U.S. Constitution in the 1780s, decades before the cotton boom. It ends in about 1930, when, Dattel says, subsidies made cotton "a permanent ward of the federal government."

While Dattel's work condemns slavery as "a tragedy of racial epic proportions," the book focuses more on money than morality.

"Without cotton, slavery would most probably have been headed for extinction," Dattel writes.

The book outlines changes in society, including Europeans' demand for clothing made from cotton rather than wool, that made the crop the top U.S. export from 1803 to 1937. It also notes that the cotton trade helped propel New York to commercial prominence.

Charles Reagan Wilson, chairman of the history department at the University of Mississippi, said Dattel researched primary sources to create a "very sweeping" narrative about how the rapid expansion of the cotton market in the early 19th century shaped history and reinforced slavery in the United States.

"It's a global story," said Wilson, who has known Dattel for years. "It's extremely well crafted."

The book also makes clear that racial oppression was not limited to the South. Although there was significant anti-slavery sentiment in the North and the West, there were also strong anti-black attitudes in those areas. Dattel notes, for example, that Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan and Wisconsin were among the states with laws excluding blacks from full civic participation.

"Someone who was anti-slavery could also be anti-black – the same person," Dattel said in an interview.

Dattel writes that "the blatant racial bigotry of the North played a vital role in consigning blacks to a life in the cotton fields by impeding and even curtailing their physical and economic mobility, thus furthering the entrapment of most blacks in the South after the Civil War."

Lee A. Daniels, communications director for the New York-based NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Inc., praised Dattel's book as an "epic." He said it meticulously outlines how – by law and by social pressure – the U.S. carried out a policy of containment that kept blacks in the South during and after slavery and in Northern ghettos later.

Daniels said Dattel challenges a broadly held belief that racial oppression was limited by geography or carried out only by certain groups of people – an assumption Daniels said is "one of the ways America takes comfort from its slave past."

"In fact, all of America condoned, really, the oppression of all black people," said Daniels, who read Dattel's book upon the recommendation of a friend.

Dattel worked in investment banking from 1969 to 1992 and his career took him to Tokyo, Hong Kong and London. Since 1998, he has been a financial-institutions adviser to the Pentagon.

He spent three years writing "Cotton and Race" – his second book after 1994's "The Sun That Never Rose," an analysis of Japan's failed financial institutions during the 1980s. He had been researching the race and cotton since he was at Yale in 1963.

Dattel was raised in what he called a "very assimilated" Jewish community in Ruleville. The Mississippi Delta town now has a population of 3,234, of whom 81 percent are black and 19 percent are white. At the time he lived there, Dattel said, the population was more evenly split between black and white.

From 1997 to 2004, he traveled to several states with Clifton Taulbert, author of the 1990 memoir, "Once Upon a Time When We Were Colored." In a presentation they called "Parallel Lives," they discussed what it was like for Dattel to grow up Jewish and white, and for Taulbert to grow up black in the Mississippi Delta in the 1950s.

Dattel was recently in Jackson to discuss "Cotton and Race," and about 60 people attended his presentation at the state archives. Meredith sat quietly near the back of the room, wearing an Ole Miss baseball cap. Dattel said later he was intrigued to see, in person, the man whose integration of Ole Miss helped propel his own first efforts at explaining race and history.

"The symmetry," Dattel said, "was unbelievable."

10 Non-Dysfunctional Family Books

2009-11-25T15:36:00Z

Last week, we looked ahead to Thanksgiving with the family by showing you that yours is not the only crazy family out there. Sooner or later, we had to become a little more earnest, so today, as we're on the eve of turkey dinners, we asked for suggestions that give us, well, a little more love for the holidays. With a few exceptions, most of the books with a happy family theme are aimed at children. Life just gets more complicated as we get older.

We'd love to hear the titles you come up with as well. Send them in using the Participate button below!

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Kimberly Marteau Emerson: San Francisco D.A. Kamala Harris Talks To Kimberly Marteau About Her New Book Smart On Crime

2009-11-24T21:07:05Z

Q: You dedicated Smart on Crime to your mother, Shyamala G. Harris, calling her "the toughest, smartest and most loving person I have ever known." She died this year. Tell me about your relationship and why she inspired you.

My mother was and will always remain my greatest hero. She was a woman who gave herself to my sister and me unconditionally, and was the most inspiring and courageous person in my life. She was active in the Civil Rights Movement, where she met my father. My mother was also the consummate professional, a world-renowned breast cancer researcher and teacher whose work took her to universities all around the world. Despite her 5-foot stature, she had a commanding presence and a sharp wit, a keen sense of humor and endless depth of knowledge.

Q: What does it mean to be "smart on crime?" Are we not being smart now? Why and how does your book address this idea?

This book is predicated on one main premise, which is that all Americans have the right to live in safe communities. Having spent nearly two decades as a courtroom prosecutor, I know that it simply is not enough to just talk tough about crime. I want us to be what I call "smart on crime." That means in order to make our communities safer, we have to take a strategic approach to changing the status quo -- because our current system is failing all of us.
In the book, I first address some of the myths and outdated approaches that I believe are failing. In the second half of the book, I outline the ways in which I believe we can chart a new course for tackling these long-standing problems. My hope is that this book helps to elevate the discussion of how we as a state and nation approach the criminal justice system. I believe it is absolutely possible for us to create a future with safer streets, lower re-offense rates, and a better-educated workforce.

Q: In the book, you talk about how important it is to look at the criminal justice system through economic eyes. In a time of extremely limited public resources, how do we justify allocating those resources to anything other than investigating crimes and prosecuting criminals, especially violent crimes?

Getting smart on crime does not mean reducing sentences or punishments for crimes. It does mean using the time and resources we now spend on offenders more productively to reduce their odds of re-offending. Remember, for decades we have spent billions of dollars on ineffective solutions that have not improved public safety. I believe that especially in these tough economic times, it is critical that we evaluate the cost of action versus the cost of inaction. I strongly believe that for serious and violent criminals, we must absolutely hold them accountable for their crimes and send them to prison. But as I discuss in the book, we must take a smarter approach when it comes to combating nonviolent crime. And it is also essential that when we look at investing in innovative ways to fight crime before it occurs, we must weigh the short-term costs of action versus the long-term costs of inaction.

Q: Can you please explain the "crime pyramid" and what it reveals about the weaknesses in crime prevention? Why are our harsh sentences not deterring some kinds of crimes?

I have found that the "crime pyramid" is an effective way to visualize the totality of crimes committed in our society, and an effective way to communicate about how we can best fight crime -- because as you know "crime" is not monolithic. Visualizing this pyramid, at the top are the very worst crimes: murder, rape, violent assaults, crimes that so rightly command our attention. While these crimes are so horrific and threatening, they form the very top of the pyramid because they constitute the minority of crimes. Did you know that only one fourth of all offenders sentenced to prison are violent offenders?

One of the main reasons we haven't been able to effectively prevent nonviolent crime is that we have been using only the tools best suited to combating the offenders at the top of the pyramid. For several decades, the passage of tough laws and long sentences has created an illusion in the public's mind that public safety is best served when we treat all offenders pretty much the same way: arrest, convict, imprison, parole, and hope they learn their lesson. But the numbers paint the true story, which is that most nonviolent offenders are learning the wrong lesson, and in many cases, they are becoming more hardened criminals during their imprisonment.

Q: In Smart on Crime, you take aim at several myths about crime, including that the only thing the criminal justice system and education have in common is that they both need reform. Why do you believe that fighting truancy might be the most significant step we can take in crime prevention?

I believe that a child going without an education is a crime. As San Francisco District Attorney, I have seen firsthand what too frequently happens to habitually and chronically truant school kids: young lives are lost to street violence or prison at an appalling rate, our state loses more resources and our communities are less safe. A recent report from UC Santa Barbara concluded that high school dropouts account for a disproportionate amount of juvenile crime, crimes that cost the state of California $1.1 billion every year. Add in social and medical costs, lost income taxes, and associated economic losses, and the report estimates that dropouts cost the state more than $24 billion per year.

The warning bells keep on ringing. In California, two-thirds of prison inmates are high school dropouts. I believe that this is one of those critical issues where we can either pay attention now, or pay the price later.

Q: You are very proud of "Back on Track," a re-entry program that you started out of the San Francisco DA's office in 2005. How does it fit into your Smart on Crime ideas?

The old approach to fighting crime is well-known. Police and prosecutors are deluged with low-level drug cases, and the public spends billions on prisons to house these offenders. And, every year, prisons release hundreds of thousands of these offenders back into our communities. They have no plan, no skills, nowhere to go, and they pick up right where they left off. Within three years of release, 70 percent of California prisoners will re-offend and return to prison.

That is why in 2005, I created an initiative called Back On Track. Back on Track is a reentry program designed for nonviolent, first-time drug offenders. These are young people who are mostly in their early 20's, have no prior criminal records and were caught for low-level drug offenses. None of their cases involves gangs, guns, or weapons.

We give them a choice: they can go through a tough, year-long program that will require them to get educated, stay employed, be responsible parents, drug test, and transition to a crime-free life, or they can go to jail. Those who choose Back On Track plead guilty to their crime, and their sentence is deferred while they appear before a judge every two weeks for about a year. They must obtain a high-school-equivalency diploma and hold down a steady job. Fathers need to remain in good standing on their child-support payments, and everyone has to take parenting classes. For people who hit all of these milestones, the felony charge is going to be cleared from their records.

The results speak for the wisdom of investing in reentry programs. For this population, the recidivism (or re-offense rate) is typically 50 percent or higher. Four years into this initiative, recidivism has been less than 10 percent among Back On Track participants. And the program costs only $5,000 per person, compared to over $35,000 a year for county jail. That saves our city roughly $1 million per year in jail costs alone. When you add in the total expense of criminal prosecutions to taxpayers, including court costs, public defenders, state prison, and probation, the savings are closer to $2 million. And we cannot even begin to quantify the value of these individuals' future productivity, taxes and child support payments, or the brightened prospects for their families.

That is why both Governor Schwarzenegger and the US Department of Justice have recognized Back on Track as a model for both our state and nation.

Kindle: Amazon Improves Battery Life, Adds PDF Reader

2009-11-24T20:42:15Z

Just in time to remind holiday shoppers, Amazon has announced an 85% battery life increase as well as a native PDF reader application for the Kindle digital book reader. Whereas the previous battery life topped out at about four days with wireless access turned on, the updated Kindle will run for seven days without needing to be charged.