What I'm Listening to...Slate podcasts

... Slate Live at Politics and Prose podcast

Glenn Frankel on his new book 'The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend

Slate podcasts are my lifeline to the world of the mind these days. When you are banned from watching television by the American Association of Pediatrics and every book or magazine you want to read is knocked out of your hand and chewed on or torn, a podcast can be the closest thing you get to intelligent conversation with an adult. Slate podcasts are great because of the diversity of the material they cover and their brilliant way of unearthing random cultural artefacts that I would have no awareness of otherwise.

I'd never heard of Glenn Frankel. I'd only just about heard of 'The Searchers', the John Ford film starring John Wayne and Natalie Wood. I had heard the story of Cynthia Ann Parker, however, via another podcast I often listen to 'Stuff You Missed in History Class'. This podcast talks about the myths and lies surrounding Cynthia Ann Parker's story that Frankel has uncovered in his book about the movie, 'The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend'. One of most interesting aspects of the podcasts for me was the detail that Frankel goes into about Comanche / settler relations in the mid-1800s. The nature of the relationship was fraught of course because of the Texas-Indian Wars at the time but it struck me at the same time how much of a relationship of equals existed between the two populations. The settlers feared the Comanche people as much as the Comanche feared the settlers and raids happened on both sides of the divide. 

This surprised me because the usual story of the settlement of the US and the displacement of Native Americans is one of genocide, oppression and expulsion, starting out with the purchase of Manhattan island for a few beads and ending up with smallpox blankets and the Trail of Tears and reservations.  What has surprised me about the history I'm discovering since coming to the US is just how much the Native Americans fought back. There is not just victimization and sorrow but also fighting and uprisings. Native Americans provided resistance to European settlement where they could and fought hard for their rights and freedom. 

The Sioux Uprising of 1862 in Minnesota is a good example of Native Americans trying to fight back, rather than just pursue the path of deal-making with the settlers. After a number of deals with the Sioux were broken by settlers and they suffered from hunger and overcrowding as a result, a group of young men, fed up of trying to live alongside the settlers, raided a settler's house, killing the owners, triggering a war between the settlers and the Sioux, as years of resentment bubbled to the surface.  The Sioux won some of the battles in the war with the settlers but ultimately were outnumbered and pushed out of their lands. While the Sioux may have lost the war with the settlers, they did win some of the battles and were a force to be reckoned with. 

This is one area of American history I would love to learn more about, the history of Native American resistance. There are so many fascinating characters who emerge in these stories - Little Crow, the leader of the Sioux at the time of the uprising, Sitting Bull, the leader of the Sioux during the later Sioux wars, Quanah Parker, the son of Cynthia Ann Parker and a Comanche chief, who became leader of the Comanche. Dee Brown's 'Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee' was top of my list for American history books to read before I moved here but I was disappointed by the book once I started reading. It has interesting historical material but it is written in a very sentimental style, almost attempting to fake some kind of authentic Native American voice (e.g. 'White Man come, he bring suffering and sorrow' etc) , which got on my nerves after a while, especially since Dee Brown didn't have a drop of Native American blood in him, as far as I know. The book bemoans the fate of the Native Americans and portrays their history as tragedy but it didn't tell me much about Native American life at the time and how the different tribes used different strategies to survive and deal with European settler-colonialism. 

I am going to keep looking for the right kind of history book that covers stories like those of Quanah Parker and Little Crow in a way that does honor to their memory rather than just lamenting their fates as victims of colonialism. 

What I'm Watching... The Invisible War

The Invisible War
(Documentary, 2012)

Military service is something that would never appeal to me. I hate hierarchy and patriarchal structures and dislike being told what to do. Besides that, however, is the more disturbing issue that once you are in the military, you are no longer a part of the civilian world. You are no longer free to choose where you live or what work you do or what opinions you have. On a more sinister level, if any harm comes to you while serving in the military, your case is not subject to civilian criminal laws but comes under court martial so you rely on your military supervisors to have your best interests at heart in a case of bullying, assault or theft - or rape. In US law, this is known as the Feres Doctrine but it applies to the military in any state I'm familiar with. If you burn to death while staying in Army barracks that were shoddily wired: tough. Dying, no matter how, is a hazard of the job. I doubt that many eager recruits to the military are aware of that reality and it's not in the military's interest to make them aware of it.

'The Invisible War' is more forthcoming about the realities of military service conditions and would be a good counterpoint to the Army recruitment campaigns targeted at young people. It features a group of women who were raped and often also violently assaulted while serving in the military who take a case against the military to be compensated for the ongoing trauma and physical health problems they are suffering. Their case hinges on challenging the Feres doctrine in the hope that it will make the military realize that they can no longer tolerate rape in their ranks and manage victims out through the court martial system. 

We see in the course of the documentary that their case was dismissed on the grounds that rape is an occupational hazard of military service. I hope they are adding that in to the new recruits' employment contracts this year so everyone knows where they stand. 

This documentary thus brings a very complex moral issue to light. The military exists as a state within a state, effectively, as they seem to be under no obligation to pass information on to the regular civilian police about criminals such as rapists in their ranks. What if a soldier witnessed another soldier committing sexual assaults on children e.g. in a war zone? This would presumably be handled under the court martial system as well, which means that it could result in a pedophile walking away without any conviction if it didn't suit his superiors to pursue the matter. This puts the military on a par with the Catholic Church, another powerful, male-dominated institution in which criminal behavior was covered up in order to save face.

Like the Catholic Church, the issue might be made worse by the fact that serial rapists and criminals will target the military as an employer because they know that they can get away with murder - quite literally, during combat. The documentary does in fact mention that military recruits already are twice as likely to be rapists than the average equivalent civilian population. This confirms the popular idea that a lot of people who join the army, especially the lower ranks, are violent people who want to have a 'safe space' to act out their violence, people who essentially would be criminals if they didn't have the safety valve of military life. The military has always thrived on marketing itself as the dumping ground for unruly youths who need to be knocked into shape. 

It was heartening to see at the end of the documentary that Leon Panetta, Secretary of Defense until recently, did actually change the law so that supervising officers would no longer have the power to adjudicate over rape cases in their ranks so at least some progress is being made. This is not just about rape though. There is the broader moral issue of the military as the 'dumping ground' for misfits and semi-criminals and the incorrigibly violent. This is part of the military's function in a civilized society but by channeling unruly youths into the military the violence doesn't go away, it just becomes concentrated among the ranks of the military and those serving alongside the trouble-makers suffer. There is a fundamental problem in having an organization placed at the heart of a country, defending its values, that normalizes violence and murder. By giving the 'unruly' an outlet for their behavior, we're saying that even at the heart of our civilized society, there is a place for rape or murder or brutal beatings. That is the real moral issue that needs to be reviewed, not just the military's terrible treatment of their own staff. 

What I'm Watching... Russian Oligarchs

Superhomes Russia
(BBC 2, 2003)

This documentary about the new money of Russian oligarchs flowing into a growing Moscow property boom made a deep impression on me when I first saw it back in 2004. I'm not sure why but I remembered it for years afterwards, particularly for the gaudy bling of one oligarch's mansion that had enough gold and crimson in it to make your eyes bleed. I could never find the footage ever again but just recently re-discovered it on YouTube and I don't want to lose it again so am posting it up here on the blog.

When I visited Moscow in 2010, signs of the property boom were still in evidence - signs on buildings  advertising 'English-style apartments!' made us laugh as 'English-style' does not have any cachet to it for us. We joked about a property developer being honest for once, admitting that his apartments have paper-thin walls, tiny rooms and yet still cost a fortune. By 2010, however, the New Russians' money was a little less new. The city seemed to have settled into itself and there was more of a stable, middle-class than in the earlier years of oligarchs and mafia killings. This documentary is from 2003 so it marks the transition for the Wild East era of the 1990s to the more stable Putin era today. 

What I'm Reading...Capital

'Capital' by John Lanchester

This book came out last year and it's been on my radar for a while but my book club have finally pushed me to read it now. It's over eight-hundred pages long so I knew iBook was the way to go rather than some weighty tome that would either give me an aching wrist from holding it up or give me a sore neck from stooping to read it on a table or on my lap. 

So far it's a pretty accurate picture of London in 2007-8, at the peak of the financial and property bubble. It's giving me an aching nostalgia for our life back home because of the familiar stories from the media of that time, the familiar characters and lingo ('realised' - with an 's'! 'Nappy' not 'diaper'! Sigh...) but it's also verging on twee at times. It has a Dickensian feel to it that is putting me off. Everyone is somehow too neatly sketched out as characters, one or two little defining traits that mark out their individuality but nothing too in-depth. It is a very English style of novel, very Dickens. Lots of jolly chaps and awfully nice gals gadding about being frightfully eccentric and funny and darling about everything and oops! look out, Matron! there's a villain about, can't be doing with that now, can we! Most of the characters are a cipher for some social trend or other rather than deeply thought out characters with deep drives and desires - the Rich, Bored Housewife, the Jolly if Misguided Muslim Chap, the Hard-working, Dour Polish Builder, the Tim-Nice-But-Dim Banker. Their actions sometimes don't make sense as a result. 

For example, the character of Arabella is clearly meant to be some hateful personification of rich hedonism and self indulgence, a banker's wife who is too lazy to even take care of her own children despite not working outside the home. She is also a mystery though because she puts her husband to the test by leaving him alone one Christmas to fend for himself without her or their nanny (who has just quit) and as a reader you are left wondering why on earth she would do that. From the women I know who are in her position in life, you basically cut a deal with your husband that he pays bills and creates wealth and you get to be with your children and / or do nothing. There would be nothing that could motivate a woman in that situation to leave her children alone at Christmastime and test her husband's childcare skills. They're not some struggling middle-class couple, both working long hours, both juggling childcare and her resentful, feeling angry that he's not pulling his weight and wanting to prove a point. They're a rich couple and the deal is very clear: he makes the money, she takes care of everything else. I don't see why she would flounce off and then return wordlessly as if nothing had happened. It doesn't make much sense. This is where it becomes clear that the characters in this novel are tools in the hands of the author, not intended to be believable people. That is the Dickensian element to the novel that is putting me off, I think. 

On the other hand, I do get where the author is coming from, wanting to build a tapestry of his city where he lives, a wry portrait of an intense time. He mostly succeeds in that portrait and I did smile with recognition at some of the scenes. In this article, John Lanchester refers to the book as his 'Big Fat London Novel' and mentions an aspiration to paint a Dickensian portrait of the city in a time when Victorian levels of social inequality were returning. He does manage to achieve his aim in the book. The problem lies in the tension between the depth of Lanchester's message about globalization and inequality and social change and the superficiality of the characters demonstrating that message. As a novelist, you either write action that is driven by the desires and drives of the characters or you have an overarching story that you want your characters to tell. I can see with this novel that it was written to deliver a story rather than being organically formed from the characters telling it. It still works as a good read though. Despite the Dickensian element that irritates me, it's ultimately the kind of novel I would be interesting in writing myself, if I had to pick a type of novel to write, as it combines social and economic issues with a diverse range of characters in a portrait of a place. Thinking about it, however, there is no city where I belong wholeheartedly in the way that this author seems to belong to London. 

What I'm Reading... The Feminine Mystique

Betty Friedan's 'The Feminine Mystique' 

It is in the news a lot again because of the 50th anniversary of its publication so I'm devoting some time to reading it. I will post a lengthier piece on it, once I finish it, but for now the biggest impact it has had on me is the realization that Friedan feels that women's rights had gone backwards in her era, that the 1920s and 30s were actually more progressive than the 1950s and 1960s. We tend to look back at the progress of women's rights as a linear thing, with women gaining more and more rights, decade by decade, bit by bit, but reading 'The Feminine Mystique' it becomes clear that women really were pushed back into the home after the war, possibly as a reaction to the all the destruction and instability, and a desire for home and family, but also possibly as part of reactionary politics.

News articles:

WSJ: Why Getting an MBA Isn't Worth It: 
The Wall Street Journal finally saying the unsayable about MBAs: you're better off just getting out there and working and doing business instead of just studying business and reading case studies. Some MBAs are better than others, obviously, and some are good for building a network of professionals that you can tap into over the long term of your career, but many of them are money-making exercises for universities. As an MBA is often a mid-career qualification and often marketed as a qualification that will boost your earnings, universities tend to charge a premium for them. They are exceptionally profitable 'products' for educational institutions as, unlike medical or engineering degrees, they are cheap to provide with no lab costs.

This brings me on to one of my soapbox topics - why universities need to change their business model to survive the changing economy. One for a longer blog post...