Category: reviews

America in 1860 was an oligarchy, controlled by a minority of a minority.

Slave Power was unassailable. You couldn’t even discuss it in Congress, which had a standing rule that resolutions dealing with slavery were automatically shelved. The Supreme Court reinforced the power of the peculiar institution by forcing Northerners to cooperate with slave catchers. Enslaved people, despite living in this country for centuries, were not people, according to the Court; they were property.

With the power of the federal government behind them, slave owners talked of expanding slavery across the country and beyond – even to Cuba and Mexico.

To be an abolitionist meant dodging mobs of Democrats who tarred and feathered anti-slavery speakers. Newspapers who criticized slavery, even in the most oblique terms, were destroyed, with their printing presses tossed into the river.

The Wide Awakes stood up to the mobocracy. Founded in March of 1860 by five law clerks, some of them too young to vote, this was a youth movement that confronted Slave Power and elected Abraham Lincoln.

Jon Grinspan tells their story in Wide Awake.

Dressed in black cloaks and carrying whale-oil torches, they marched under their “open eye” banner symbolizing their political awakening to the threat of slavery.

They were a popular sensation that spread across the North, a marching group, as they were called back then, that protected Republican speakers during a violent election year.

The elite class that ruled the country dismissed these Wide Awakes as so much theater; young people play-acting in the streets with their costumes, organized chants and military precision.

Theater matters. I’ve seen it in DC, with pro-Palestinian protesters staging mock scenes from Gaza; the pro-Putin right-left crazy town of Rage Against the War Machine; and even my experience as Red Bike Guy heckling the Patriot Front.

These moments, especially if they go viral, are both communication and inspiration, getting important messages out into the media and motivating others to take up the cause.

That is why the Wide Awakes grew from five to hundreds of thousands in just a few short months in 1860.

Theater matters. Or as, Grinspan puts it:

What the Wide Awakes wanted mattered less than how they tried to show it. Those skinny nineteen-year-olds drilling for war proved to be better forecasters of what was coming than all the august orators or party platforms.

We look back on all of this through a century and a half of mostly viewing political spectacle as hoopla, just a matter of elephants and donkeys and confetti and balloons. People often dismiss performative politics as empty, a collection of stock gestures going nowhere, the work of self-interested politicians or high-priced consultants. But our own era reminds us of the power of spectacle and bluff, costume and prop. They can be intellectually richer, and better indicators of what is to come, than forms of political expression we traditionally consider more substantive. Perhaps one of the central lessons of recent American politics is that, while the chattering classes parse phrases, and conspiracists hunt for hidden meanings, key plotlines take place out in the open. 

In this election year, Republicans are open about their plans to end democracy, take away our rights and make Trump a king. It’s all in Project 2025, their guide to the coming dystopia.

They promise it will be bloodless – as long as we don’t resist.

Democrats talk the issues as if we’re in the soft and gentle world of 1996, with moderates on both sides willing to play by the rules and graciously accept defeat.

But as the recent Supreme Court decision on presidential immunity told us, we’ve entered into a no-compromise era, much like 1860.

The protesters on the streets of DC, with their signs and bullhorns, all that easily-mocked theater, are more clear-eyed about the peril.

They are Wide Awake.

With a fine sense for the perfect, ironic anecdote, We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland by Fintan O’Toole describes how Ireland became modern. I read it as I rode trains around the country my grandparents left.

Early in the book, he describes the visit by President Kennedy to the country in 1963. The ultimate Irish emigrant who did well somewhere else, the Irish were bewitched by his glamor and sex appeal. Mad scenes were reported across the country as Irish nearly trampled the President. And the contrast between the youthful American leader and the elderly Irish leaders is striking.

During his visit, Kennedy says, “Most countries send out oil or iron, steel or gold or some other crop, but Ireland has had only one export and that is its people.”

But what if Ireland didn’t need to export its people? What if young Irish could find economic opportunity in Cork and Dublin rather than New York and London?

Deciding to Stay

O’Toole’s parents were part of the generation that decided to stay, rather than emigrate. This was despite the stultifying hold the Catholic Church had on the country, which ruled in matters large and small, from who could get divorced (no one) to what plays could be performed. Most Irish writers lived abroad, for they could find a freedom in England or Italy that they couldn’t find at home.

And underneath the traditional, thatched roof view of green Ireland hid an a archipelago of Catholic horror, from industrial schools for poor children to Magdalene Laundries for wayward women. This was institutionalized slavery and sexual exploitation. According to the Church, what went on in these prisons was not sinful; telling the truth about them was, for it undercut the faith among the believers. We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland uncover this habit of “compartmentalizing” these unspoken horrors in Irish society.

When I was in Ireland, I visited the Irish Workhouse Centre. Poor people turned themselves into the workhouse when they had no money. Families were separated. Men, women and children worked manual labor (like breaking rocks) for their daily gruel. And this wasn’t just some Dickensian-era cruelty; the workhouse was still operating in the 1920s.

This was around the time my Flood ancestors left the country. In America, we like to think that immigrants are in search of abstract causes like freedom. But, for my family, it was probably emigrate or starve.

What Would Ireland Be?

The Irish leaders of the 1960s – the “conservative revolutionaries” of the Easter Rising and the Catholic Church – realized that the country had to change before the population collapsed.

But if Ireland modernized, what kind of country would it be? West Britain? An American outpost? Part of Europe?

The answer: all of the above.

Ireland has inescapable trade links with the United Kingdom, a constant exchange of people and goods. In the 1980s, American investment arrived, with call centers and manufacturing plants blossoming around the country, during the short-lived Celtic Tiger days. (O’Toole has a very funny chapter on the excesses of the era, like the Riverdance phenomenon, when Irish-Americans shamelessly fused tradition with rock and roll into a global sensation.) And Ireland has worked hard to be accepted into the European Union, despite the skepticism of fiscally-prudent Germany.

We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland ends with a country that is very different from the one that my family fled. The power of the Catholic Church is no more. The veterans of 1916 are just memories. Brexit has flipped old animosities around, with the possibility that Northern Ireland opts out of the UK and returns to the EU through union with Ireland.

The Irish retain their traditional generosity. The country has welcomed more than 50,000 Ukrainian refugees, despite having a housing shortage.

And a power shortage, too. Power cuts are expected this winter, as Europe struggles with the economic turmoil created by Putin’s war.

But it’s a place where you can cross the country in a modern train in three hours. And sit in a Cork bar with the band so close that you can reach out and touch them while you drink a five euro Guinness surrounded by French teens practicing their English.

Ireland doesn’t need to export its people anymore. Instead, the world is coming to Ireland.

I had seen Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walters in my local bookstore in a stack of paperbacks where they kept the popular fiction.

Glancing at the cover, with its sunny shot of the Italian Riviera, and the blurbs from from famous people, I instantly put it in the category of “Live, Laugh, Love” books, dismissing the novel as a piece of feel-good, literary fluff.

I didn’t have to read the back cover. I was sure Beautiful Ruins was some silly nonsense about rich people going to Italy for some spurious reason (a marriage, perhaps) and then rediscovering the joy of life among the simple Italian peasantry.

But seeing it in the Little Free Library, and needing something to read, I took it.

How wrong I was!

Instead of light fare, I got a weighty and complex tale told from multiple viewpoints, spanning from World War II to today. A story that encompassed combat fatigue, post-war poverty in Italy, the making of Cleopatra and even the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Beautiful Ruins was a literary page-turner, full of surprises.

And full of profound questions on the life of an artist. If you write one perfect chapter, is that enough? Will becoming famous really change anything? Is it more important to make money from your art or pursue your own vision?

Jess Walter’s novel left with me a lot to ponder. And it came from a novel that I dismissed as fluff, based solely on the cover. There’s a lesson there somewhere….

While the novel Dune by Frank Herbert has its science fiction elements, it’s really a book about politics and manipulation.

I’ve read it three times, having just finished it again in anticipation of the upcoming film by Denis Villeneuve. At first glance, the novel appears to be the classic Hero’s Journey in which a young man loses his father, gains new skills and allies, and then defeats his enemies to restore the world.

Herbert presents and subverts this familiar tale. As he says in the book, “No more terrible disaster could befall your people than for them to fall into the hands of a Hero.”

The novel is a warning about charismatic leaders, though that’s easy to miss in this exotic story of Fremen, sandworms and spice. Herbert is telling readers to think for themselves, and to ponder the way that leaders manipulate their people.

Masses Manipulated by Rulers

The Dune universe is one in which the masses are manipulated by their rulers. Even the good Duke Leto brags that he has the best propaganda corps in the business.

We see this most notably in the way that Paul and Jessica Atreides adopt the myth of a redeemer to cement their hold on the Fremen people and restore the House Atreides to power. The Fremen were seeded with this myth by the Missionaria Protectiva, an arm of the Bene Gesserit that plants superstitions among primitive peoples for later exploitation. Jessica knows the myth and rituals and is able to use them to make Paul the divine leader of the Fremen.

Yet, chaos is the rule of the universe. The Kwisatz Haderach comes too soon for the Bene Gesserit and is beyond their control. And even this omniscient being cannot control the jihad that the Fremen will wreak upon the universe.

Stagnation is the greatest enemy, according to Herbert, and humankind must be periodically refreshed by the kind of wild mingling of genes that occurs only during wartime.

Butlerian Jihad

This jihad is an echo of an earlier one: The Butlerian Jihad. While this is often characterized as a revolt against machines, it was a rebellion against the rulers who controlled the machines. As Herbert states early in Dune:

Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.

The jihad began when the people discovered that their choices were being manipulated. Free will was an illusion. The course of their lives were being altered by men with computers.

Sound familiar?

Men with Machines

Frank Herbert had his own kind of prescience.

Writing in 1965, he could see our future, in which our decisions are manipulated by social media algorithms through the reinforcement and discouragement of certain behaviors.

What path are men like Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos subtly sending us down? It’s not the golden path of the Bene Gesserit, seeking to better humanity. Instead, it’s all about the likes. Hate likes, love likes, fear likes – all that engagement adds up to greater wealth and power for the social media titans.

In the Dune universe, people rebelled against this kind of manipulation, though it plunged thousands of worlds into chaos. Shorn of their computing devices, humankind was forced to develop its innate potential, producing human computers like mentats, Guild navigators for safe space travel, and the Bene Gesserit with their exquisite mind-body control and limited prescience.

Butlerian Jihad 2.0

Back in the 1990s, I believed that the Internet was a democratizing force. Anyone could create their own web site – even me. This exciting new medium was a way to get around the traditional gatekeepers and let human creativity bloom.

Yet, the diverse and funky Internet that I was a part of is no more. Instead, the network has been taken over by global social media conglomerates with very different agendas from connecting the world’s people.

Why would you connect the world’s people unless you wanted to control them? Even the noblest soul would be tempted to manipulate users during a crisis (for example: now). You might think you’re doing something good, by raising some voices and silencing others, but it’s still manipulation.

A situation that Frank Herbert would instantly recognize. The machines themselves are not bad; it’s the men who control them that we should suspect. We’ve all been impacted by social media – consider your attention span – and we should ask how these men with machines are controlling our lives.

The Butlerian Jihad did away with thinking machines. There was a new commandment, with the penalty of death for anyone who violated it:

Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.

Frank Herbert had a healthy skepticism for leaders of all types. His view was that we are too ready to surrender our will to others, whether they be a charismatic hero or a powerful man with a machine.

Maybe it’s time for our own Butlerian Jihad.