Fall on Your Knees, by Ann-Marie MacDonald

From the PC Library. MacDonald is a Canadian author. This is her first novel.

I must be on an unintentional first-novel gothic kick.

Another fabulous, escapist page-turner, also with a twin theme (I know!). I thoroughly enjoyed this very entertaining book.

Publisher's Weekly review.

The story just goes on and on. If it wasn't obvious by the number of pages remaining, a reader would think the novel had ended several times long before the end. This was not a bad thing, as I was happy to read more of MacDonald's terrific writing.

The Death of the Liberal Class, by Chris Hedges

An electronic book, borrowed from the PC Library.

Inverted totalitarianism.

From The Death of the Liberal Class, by Chris Hedges, Ch. II, “Permanent War.”

There is no national institution left that can accurately be described as democratic.  Citizens, rather than authentically participating in power, are [sic] have only virtual opinions, in what Charlotte Twight calls “participatory fascism.” They are reduced to expressing themselves on issues that are meaningless, voting on American Idol or in polls conducted by the power elite. The citizens of Rome, stripped of political power, are allowed to vote to spare or kill a gladiator in the arean, a similar form of hollow public choice.

“Inverted totalitarianism reverses things,” Wolin writes…

How does this compare to or work with McLuhan’s laws of media, where a medium reverses?

Reversal: Every form, pushed to the limit of its potential, reverses its characteristics.

http://deoxy.org/media/McLuhan/LawsOfMedia

Hedges on Chomsky: 

Chomsky is one fo the few intellectuals who challenges the structure and inequity of corporate capitalism and our state of permanent war...Chomsky is deeply reviled by the liberal class...combines moral autonomy with rigorous scholarship, a remarkable grasp of detail, and a searing intellect. He curtly dismisses our two-party system as a mirage orchestrated by the corporate state...

"It is very similar to late Weimar Germany," Chomsky said when I spoke with him. [footnote to Noam Chomsky, Interview, New York]..."tremendous disillusionment with the parliamentary system..."

"The United States is extremely lucky that no honest, charismatic figure has arisen..."

"...There it was the Jews. Here it will be the illegla immigrants and the blacks...We will be told we have to defend ourselves...And if it happens it will be more dangerous than Germany...the right-wing Republicans...will sweep the [November 2010] election."

Hedges: "[Chomsky] reminds us that genuine intellectual inquiry is always subversive."

Liberal class has supported war, in this way remaining in the "circle of the power elite." Viz: Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq -- all supported by liberals as necessary. The argument against Vietnam was not so much that it was wrong, but that we were losing. Warning about Iran, same BS being peddled.

Michael Moore's speech when he accepted Oscar for "Bowling for Columbine" in which he shamed Bush and characterized both the war and the presidency as "fictitious." "Moore was portrayed as a 'far-left' radical who needed to be escorted off the premises."

"...America's liberal armchair warriors are the 'useful idiots' of the War on Terror." [footnote to Tony Judt, "Bush's Useful Idiots," London Review of Books 28:18 (September 21, 2006), 3-5]

Afghanistan

$345B approved for Afg. war
foreign aid to Afg since 2002 total $17B

WWI: rise of mass propaganda, defeat of populism
Socialist Mayor of Milwaukee & Schenectady before war

Freud: emotions are not subject to reason

"The great muckraking journalists, artists, and progressives, who had used their talents to expose abuses of the working classes joined the [WWI] war effort."

Espionage Act, Sedition Act

Eugene Debs imprisoned after making anti-war speech in 1918.

"Vigilante groups, roused by the enflamed war propaganda and nationalist call to arms, physically attacked and at times lynched war opponents."

"The former socialists and activists were, perhaps, the most susceptible to Wilson's utopian dreams...their combined effort to sell the war corrupted the liberal class."

Propaganda did not stop with the end of the war. Techniques learned and acquired were quickly adopted for other uses by government and business interests.

Edward Bernays, Freud's nephew, 1928. Father of modern PR. "It was only natural, after the war ended, that intelligent persons should ask themselves whether it was not possible to apply a similar technique to the problems of peace." (Quoted by Hedges from Bernay's 1928 book Propaganda)

"The Hun...was supplanted by the Bolshevik...it was corporate advertising, rather than government witch hunts, which would prove the most deadly. News had to do battle with huge, sophisticated and well-funded propaganda campaigns. It would also be denied the tools of emotional persuasion perfected by mass propaganda. News would be restricted to fact, to balance and objectivity. The powerful techniques of appealing to emotion, of creating pseudo-events that a public could confuse with reality, of constantly taking the pulse of the public through surveys and opinion polls to appear to give people what they desired, would be left in the hands of the enemies of truth. The public would be trained, as Bourne wrote, to communicated in a language in which 'simple syllogisms are substituted for analysis, things are known by their labels, [and] our heart's desire dictates what we shall see.'"

"...Civil and political discourse became poisoned by loyalty oaths, spy paranoia, and distrust of dissent. This manufactured fear...[persuaded] the country [to] devote...half of all government spending to defense following World War II, and ... billions more into its intelligence service..."

"...corporate and government propaganda sharply narrowed the parameters of acceptable debate..."

"...nearly everything...disseminated from ...corporations such as Viacom, Disney, General Electric, and Murdoch's News Corporation..."

Dwight Macdonald: "American radicalism was making great strides right up to 1914; the war was the rock on which it shattered."

re-interpretation of reality: propaganda, mass culture

Embrace of simplification: Macdonald warns against slogans, clichés. (Sound bites)

The Dies Committee, root of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC)

Federal Theatre Project (WPA) suppressed

The disappointment of the Beat Generation -- quote from Malcolm Cowley:

Whatever course they followed, almost all the radicals of 1917 were defeated by events. ...talk about revolution gave way to psychoanalysis. 

In truth: I ran out of gas and didn't finish this book. It's quite a sermon, and I suppose I grew weary of that. Nonetheless, a great summary that tells very well the story of how we got to where we are in the First World today.

So Long, See You Tomorrow, by William Maxwell

Elegant, short, unexpected. I hadn't known that William Maxwell, one time editor of The New Yorker, was also a novelist.

The story is a complex boyhood memory, narrated by a man who lost his mother in childhood, and befriended the son of a man who murdered his wife's lover, and killed himself. Although this sounds gory and ghastly, the story is more about the textures and elements of life in Lincoln, Illinois, circa 1918. There is no mention of war, but the Flu epidemic plays a part: it is what claims the life of the protagonist's mother.

Probably the most interesting part, and the focus of this work, is the description and recounting of the relationships of the Smiths and the Wilsons, two tenant farmer families who live near to each other. Lloyd Wilson is a good friend and helper, always willing to lend a hand to Clarence Smith, but through a strange mixture of chemistry and circumstance, Lloyd falls in love with Mrs. Smith. The tragedy that ensues is laid out at the beginning of the novel, most of the rest of it details the movements and thoughts of the principal characters while all these events unfold.

I look forward to reading another of Maxwell's novels.