Freedom, by Jonathan Franzen

Patty Berglund (nee Emerson)

Walter Berglund Patty's husband
Richard Katz Walter's friend, and at times Patty's lover, but that's complicated.

Joey Berglund
Janice Berglund ... son and daughter of Patty and Walter

From p.200 , on which Richard (a successful musician and songwriter currently broke due to his own behavior) is being "interviewed" by the son of a wealthy customer for whom he is building a rooftop deck in Manhattan:

Q. What do you think of the MP3 revolution?

A. Ah, revolution, wow. It's great to hear the word "revolution" again. It's great that a song now costs exactly the same as a pack of gum and lasts exactly the same amount of time before it loses its flavor and you have to spend another buck. That era which finally ended whenever, yesterday--you know, that era when we pretended rock was the scourge of conformity and consumerism, instead of its anointed handmaid--that era was really irritating to me. I think it's good for the honesty of rock and roll and good for the country in general that we can finally see Bob Dylan and Iggy Pop for what they really were: as manufacturers of wintergreen Chiclets.

Q. So you're saying that rock has lost its subversive edge?

A. I'm saying it never had any subversive edge. It was always wintergreen Chiclets, we just enjoyed pretending otherwise.

Q. What about when Dylan went electric?

A. If you're going to talk about ancient history, let's go back to the French Revolution. Remember when, I forget his name, but that rocker who wrote the "Marseillaise," Jean Jacques Whoever--remember when his song started getting all that airplay in 1792, and suddenly the peasantry rose up and overthrew the aristocracy? There was a song that changed the world. Attitude was what the peasants were missing. They already had everything else--humiliating servitude, grinding poverty, unpayable debts, horrific working conditions. But without a song, man, it added up to nothing. The sansculotte style was what really changed the world. 

I read this book slowly, from about the middle of January to yesterday (5 March 2014). It is, I think, a fairly decent characterization of our time. The characters are a little bit unbelievable, perhaps a little too cardboard-cutout for their own good, but nonetheless they all represent a bit of what makes up America in the early 21st century. The plot is well done, made up of the points of view of the main characters in a way that kept me interested -- because each of these people are quite intense, and they can begin to wear you out.

Should there be anyone here to read it, this book might be a good reference for future inhabitants of Earth.

Books Should Be Free

Lots of free audio books at http://www.booksshouldbefree.com/.

Thanks, Orin.

The End of America, by Naomi Wolf

Chelsea Green Publishing, 2007. 168 pages. ISBN 978-1-933392-79-0.

This is a disturbing little book. It's extremely well-written, relatively dispassionate, and coldly logical. It did not make me feel well.

The full title is The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot. Wolf has written it directly and emphatically, outlining her points clearly and describing nothing less than an emergency to her fellow citizens of all political persuasions.

While her claims may at first seem extreme and alarmist, a reading of her carefully thought-out arguments brings to one some rather unwelcome revelations. Reaching back through the history of the Bush administration to the date of her writing (late 2006) Wolf itemizes instance after instance of power-grabbing initiatives by the Bush Executive Branch.

In her introduction (go to this site and scroll down toward the bottom, there's a link to download a copy of the introduction and some other material from the book) Wolf says

"I began to take a second look at how leaders in the past had cracked down on societies over which they had
gained control..."

End of America compares moves made by the Bush administration to steps taken by leaders such as Mussolini as they established totalitarian control over their countries.

How can we ignore such legislative travesties as the USA PATRIOT act and the Military Commissions Act? This last, which suspends habeas corpus, should make any American of any political persuasion furious. The idea that the President (whoever he or she is, no matter of what political party) would have the ability to imprison any citizen without charge, without the right to representation, and even without disclosing that the imprisonment has been accomplished or where the citizen is -- this is in my mind a definition of the opposite of what the Bill of Rights and Constitution exist to protect.

Wolf's comparisons of strategies, and of language, are chilling. She points out the significance of the term "homeland" as we now use it, and how it was used as the Nazi party came to power in Germany in the 1930s. It is considered "over-the-top" to make comparisons with the Nazis and Hitler:

"I also know that there is a kind of intellectual etiquette, an unwritten rule, that Nazism and Hitler should be treated as stand-alone categories. But I believe this etiquette is actually keeping us from learning what we have to learn right now. I believe we honor the memory of the victims of Nazism with our willingness to face the lessons that history—even the most nightmarish history—can offer us about how to defend freedom."

Wolf points out her own bona fides in this,

"As someone who lost relatives on both sides of my family in the Holocaust..."

There will still be detractors, those who will say that this book is unnecessarily paranoid, that there just isn't any basis for believing that our leaders are headed in this direction.

I found the most chilling aspect of this work to be the idea that we are supposed to know that our government will deal with us if we speak out against it. We are supposed to be aware of the downhill slide from legal interrogation of prisoners with Constitutional rights to the covert torture of helpless "disappeared" captives.

It serves the ends of what Wolf terms the "Fascist shift" for us to have a growing fear of our government. We know that it imprisons our fellow citizens without recourse to traditional legal protections, and we know that it has reached out to foreign nationals and governments and committed crimes. We know that if the magic word "terrorism" is invoked, all bets are off, and all rules are suspended. There is no real effort to conceal these things, there is no need. The more this incipient knowledge is revealed, the less likely we all become to resist any initiative taken by the Executive.

I put this book down about a month ago and put off writing this review. I was just too uncomfortable. As time has gone by, I have found myself brushing off her arguments as too extreme, even obsessive. And then I think back, and I understand that this, too, is probably a predictable reaction. People who live in societies that are becoming more repressive no doubt feel just as I do.

Therefore I say, read this little book, and judge for yourself. If Naomi Wolf is wrong then we have nothing to fear and there is no harm in the reading. If she is right, we may be at an important point in our history, where we will need every intelligent and alert American to be aware of what our government is doing, and to fight to retain the freedoms that have made this country the beacon of light that it once was in the world.