What I've been readingPaul Theroux, My Secret History"I was thinking: They are living in the world, generating ideas, publishing books, making money, thinking up advertising slogans, working from day to day and solving problems. Nothing they did or said had anything to do with me. I pretended I had a job, I said I was a writer; but really I was simply living in Africa, waiting for something to happen to me." (242) Bill Gilbert, Chulo David Sedaris, Naked Primo Levi, The Reawakening
Ben Bradlee, A Good Life DeWayne Wickham, Woodholme: A Black Man's Story of Growing Up Alone Nathan McCall, Makes Me Wanna Holler Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild Calvin Trillin, Killings Daphne Scholinski, The Last Time I Wore a Dress: A Memoir A Bintel Brief ("a bundle of letters" to the Jewish Daily Forward), edited by Isaac Metzger Philip Roth, American Pastoral Louis de BernièresCorelli's Mandolin Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Love in the Time of Cholera Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
A couple of years ago, guilty consciences of all political stripes got in a scrap over In Retrospect, in which Robert McNamara, the former US Secretary of Defense, tries to explain how the US slipped into the Vietnam "quagmire". The battle lines, as I remember it, were drawn between those who gave McNamara credit for admitting error and those who took the book's release as a new opportunity to lambaste him. At the time I thought, "Gee, there's nothing to gain from coming down on someone who's at least admitting a mistake. It's a step ahead, anyway." No more. With every page my disgust grew until I could stomach no more. I confess I gave up about three quarters of the way through, to return only after about eight months for the rest. Forget about finding out why the US pointlessly poured thousands of young people into a war its people had no understanding of, at a cost of millions of lives. Scale back your expectations, and wonder only about what McNamara had in mind when he wrote this lame attempt at a mea culpa. This old man wants to erase, or at least lighten, a bloody stain on his reputation before he dies. He's already remade himself to some degree with his work on nuclear non-proliferation, but darnit, that old Vietnam stain just won't come clean. It's no more than a dreary, repetitive and numbing rehash of decisions which in every case escalated the war. Every time "Mac" and his band of White House pals decide to crank up the firepower, we see his mind full of misgivings which he never acted upon. McNamara has explained that he only wants to show how these mistakes were made, so that they won't be repeated. But the explanation comes down to, "We looked at Option A, but whoops, we forgot to really consider Option B." Thanks Bob, next time I face a decision I'll try to remember to consider more than the one option. Words from the wise. What's really sinister here is that "A" represented escalation in every case. Surely in it's more than a coincidence. McNamara fills the early chapters with tales of his early academic successes. He must be aware that coins flipped rarely land on the same side every time.Who rigged the coin, Bobby? Obviously there were forces at work pushing consistently for escalation--what were they? McNamara comes off as anything but a regular human. In fact, he seems to be some kind of computer running a human simulation. McNamara's mechanical recounting of the meeting, memos and reports that killed so many regular humans never satisfies. Instead of answers we get phony efforts to humanize the story, extending to the extremely annoying technique of referring to high government officials involved in tremendously fateful by juvenile nicknames, as if they were so many frat boys discussing their party plans. Strain as he might to build his own credibility as a human being, the efforts come off false and shallow. The photo sections are packed with snapshots of him atop various mountains, with his family, and so on, but he always looked posed and stiff. Maybe that's because there's nothing in McNamara's personal life that can compete with the vast human tragedy that he played so large a part in creating. Even the dedication of the book, to McNamara's late, beloved wife, come off as false and calculated. There are two or three million other deaths to mourn, but they don't merit much concern. Those human beings certainly didn't register at the time when it mattered most: before they got murdered by McNamara and his crew. As far as I can tell, Westy, Bobby, Dick--and Mac for that matter--were very bad boys. Perhaps what we really need is a psychological study of why.
PostscriptEight months later I returned to Cambodia, blew the dust off In Retrospect, and read on. Any hope of redemption for McNamara died the death. Even his short treatment of his resignation from the post of Defense Secretary brushes off the enormity of the crimes committed by the regime he served. Why didn't he come out publicly in opposition to the policies that by then he knew were wrong? Because he felt that to do so would be to use a platform against his leader, President Johnson, which owed to his leader.To posit that the needs of honor are better served by decorous behavior than by speaking out in defense of the innocent is the excuse of a man who is either a weakling who is far too up himself to make a real confession, or a scoundrel who is beneath contempt.
I want more. No thanks, just get me out of here During my trip around the world, which took place in between my agitated readings of the first and latter sections of In Retrospect, I stopped in Seattle for several weeks. There my sister gave me a copy of Locked in the Cabinet, Robert Reich's look back at his tenure as Secretary of Labor in President Clinton's first term. Like McNamara, Reich found that he had differences with his president and run-ins with other Cabinet members and Washington players. He found his path frustrated by a president he respected, but whose better instincts were undercut by political needs, especially the need to appease Alan Greenspan, who doubles in Reich's account as Federal Reserve Chairman and as Satan, the Dark Master. That's Reich's metaphor, not mine. Also like McNamara, Reich puzzles over how much he should compromise in order to stay on the inside. But Reich, to his credit, clearly struggled with that question during his tenure, and he struggled with every aspect of it--wondering if he was losing touch with the human beings who felt the results of executive policy on unemployment, the minimum wage, workplace safety and other issues, and then going out to reestablish that contact. This is a concept that as far as I can tell only occurred to McNamara in, well, retrospect, and barely then. Reich, for all that he did compromise, at least comes off as a human being, complete with doubts, frustrations, and thankfully, humor. His humility, despite his brilliance, was a refreshing contrast to McNamara's appalling arrogance. Locked in the Cabinet is an excellent and entertaining look inside a hopelessly compromised Clinton administration. Go and read it. (One complaint: Where's the index?) |
Bookshelves. What better proof can there be of one's devotion to knowledge? Empty, they speak of intellectual ambition. Crowded with tchotchkes, they defy pretension. Groaning with well-thumbed conquests, they speak volumes. I used to keep a copy of just about all the books I had read. Sure, I told myself I might read them again, or perhaps have to look something up. But there were other reasons I kept them.One is that looking over the shelves lets one remember the act of reading, of taking in that information. All the information is still in one's head, buried somewhere in the files. Just seeing the spine of the book on the shelf can unlock the memories and bring them out into the light, to be compared with more recent perceptions and assessed anew.
Another motivation--and a less wholesome one--is that these books stand as trophies to the collector's intellect. There they stand, packed together on shelf after shelf, the massed mounds of learning that the readers has so nobly undertaken to digest. Now I'm traveling light, and have neither the desire nor the ability to amass my intellectual trophies in physical form. But here I plan to keep them, not as trophies--because of course I'm way beyond that!--but to remind myself of the information that's passed through the gates, and to pass along to you a few impressions.
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