Al Franken, Giant of the Senate by Al Franken

Audible Audio, Unabridged, 12 hrs 5 min, Pub May 30th 2017 by Hachette Audio ASIN B06ZZPN9Z7

It had never occurred to me that reading the memoirs of a sitting senator could be an interesting and informative way to spend time. Congress has infuriated me for awhile now. Before I became laser-focused on politics in Washington, listening to the “can’t manage it” complaints from Democrats really burned me up, so the thought of giving a Congressperson more time to blather at me was unappealing.

Since I have been paying attention, however, I can see lots of areas where “can’t manage it” complaints are perfectly in order, leaving me free to be angry with the GOP and their many allied organizations, e.g., far right, libertarians, religious right, etc. Franken points out many ways the best laid plans go awry, and suggests those who are tempted to complain about politics try it themselves. Not a bad idea. It may be time we send our best to Washington to try to make some headway.

So why does sitting-Senator Franken write a book now? He began it in 2015, shortly after he won his Minnesota seat by a comfortable margin for another 6-year term. He points out that Congresspeople do not make a large salary, but he’d better not say that too loudly in this climate where the enormous wage differentials between different types of work are an enduring and growing source of confusion, contention, and anger.

A congressperson doesn’t make as much as a Hollywood celebrity, no. So? He has trouble living on his Senate salary? Anyway, he may have written the book because he can, because it is a something he is good at, and because his books are bestsellers, bringing in real income. I doubt it will allay the need for more fundraising, but it would be nice if it did. It may simply mean campaign funds do not become a temptation.

But I think he also wrote it also to stir the pot and make sure we've heard the message that we need to work hard on our side to become involved and not allow the current administration to go beyond 2018. He's doing what he can to keep our spirits up. As Bernie says, now is not the time to throw our hands up in despair and resignation.

Franken spent most of thirty years trying to be funny and after he became a senator, he had to cap the well so that he’d be taken seriously. After his re-election Franken thought he’d earned the right to be funny again in public, and the truth is, we yearn to find something funny about Washington. We know it is absurd. We want to hear a professional’s take.

It seems effortless for Franken to be funny, so used he is to drilling down to the absurdity in everyday happenings in Washington, to make jokes about the ridiculous posturing and outright lies, to recognize his fellow performers in the Senate as a kind of troupe, some of whom are easier to work with than others. And it is a kind of a relief to look at these politicians as humans, with human foibles.

I admit I was surprised to hear his stories about Orrin Hatch’s credentials writing country songs, or Chuck Grassley’s apparent willingness to work across the isle with a fellow midwesterner. We’d always heard about the startling collegiality among a group who by day fights rancorously in public, though in recent years, with congressional incumbents going back to their districts on Thursdays and returning Monday afternoons, members of Congress have little opportunity to meet casually.

Everywhere I turn I see Franken promoting this book, so I’m sure everyone has some idea what is in the book itself. I was more interested than I thought I would be to hear how it is to campaign every day and every night, to win an election, to suffer through a recount and a challenge, to find co-sponsors for bills, to sit on committees, to fundraise constantly, to answer to constituents, etc. It does sound as though they are pretty busy, and Franken tells us the best way to help, rather than hinder, their efforts to conclude legislation that makes an impact. Calling one’s representatives does help, it appears, useless as it seems at the time.

Anyway, this is not a struggle to listen to—Franken himself reads the audio—and it made me laugh aloud in places. I learned a lot, and find myself interested to look at his earlier work, Lies & the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair & Balanced Look at the Right. Franken is such natural. Let’s hope he doesn’t fall for the really ridiculous claim that Minnesotans are going to gain a lot of long-term well-paying jobs if the Keystone Pipeline from Canada’s tar sands goes through. It would make me happy if he could convince his people that pipeline is not going to save them and it will probably ruin the rest of us.

I know senators represent their states, but those states are in a nation. I’d be happy to carve out a Minnesota-shaped space (or an Idaho-, Florida-, etc. -shaped spaces) if they think their needs more important than those of a nation. There is a balance between needs, and this is another thing getting out of kilter in Washington these days.

This is an excerpt from the audio:




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Strangers in Their Own Land by Arlie Russell Hochschild

Hardcover, 288 pages Pub August 16th 2016 by New Press ISBN13: 9781620972250

The concept of this book is exactly what I had been thinking about for the past two years. I am so grateful for Hochschild for structuring a study to investigate the political divide in the United States as evinced by Louisiana, a deeply conservative red state facing environmental degradation and widespread poverty. Hochschild focused on a single issue upon which voting age people might be expected to converge in attitude, environmental pollution, and ended up asking a question which illuminated other attitudes: why do those living in polluted states want less federal oversight from environmental agencies rather than more?

The statistics and studies Hochschild shares at the end of this book are very useful for placing beside the statements, beliefs and attitudes of those she interviewed in Louisiana to judge discrepancies. Hochschild found that many attitudes are not based in economic self-interest so much as emotional self-interest, something with which every person struggles in our lifetimes. Sometimes our emotional response to a problem or issue colors our perceptions, and puts our economic self-interest at odds with what we decide to believe. (There are lots of examples of this in everyday life anywhere: a mother allows an adult child to move back home rent-free while looking for a job, a sister lends money to a drug-addicted sibling promising repayment, etc.)

Hochschild postulates that the individuals she interviewed belonging to the Tea Party in Louisiana were reacting to preserve emotional self-interest rather than economic self-interest with regard to environmental pollution controls (or the lack of them). She concludes these folks experienced a psychological high of belonging to a powerful, like-minded political majority, and as a part of this group felt released from politically-correct rules that usually govern polite society. [It might be worth noting a similar phenomenon is exhibiting in liberal groups with the campus demonstrations refusing permission to conservative speakers, or by destruction and violence during protest marches.]

Looking over the work Hochschild did in Louisiana, we realize that doing sociological research in the field is messy and hard to categorize. In order to determine if there was a shared narrative that connected the attitudes and emotions of the people she interviewed, Hochschild generated something called a “deep story,” which removes the particular facts and judgments that define individuals and just tells us how things feel to those individuals.

The Tea Party supporters she interviewed agreed that the deep story Hochschild generated did resonate with them and could be said to define them: That life is hard, and they must endure; that they felt like they were waiting in line, patiently, for their rewards for working hard but they see federal government-subsidized line-cutters getting benefits before the hard workers, i.e., Negroes, women, immigrants, refugees; the government appears to be helping the line-cutters using taxpayer money and is therefore antithetical to the hard-workers; God teaches how to endure; gay people were not godly; America, especially the America of their youth when fish and fowl were plentiful and air and water were clean, was something to preserve; everything was changing so much they’d begun to feel like strangers in their own land, not getting the benefits citizenship in America promised.

The connection between pollution and jobs gets tangled in the subjects’ emotional self-interest and they can’t seem to extricate themselves from a loop created by what they hear from their former corporate employers, from their state representatives (Bobby Jindal was in office), and from Fox News. It almost seems as though when corporate representatives said they would not clean up the river/lake pollution, that the pollution is not that bad, or they could not afford to clean up, residents felt powerless. In order not to feel powerless, they blamed someone else, like the federal government, or the line-cutters.

The people Hochschild interviewed for this study* were subject to the most egregious environmental pollution I have ever heard of. In some cases their houses were destroyed or blown up by gas leaks, the rivers surrounding their houses were so polluted plants and animals died when in contact with it. The interviewees were retired or near retirement. Their neighbors and spouses were dying of various cancers.

At the end of the study, when she was drawing her conclusions, Hochschild was remarkably restrained. She’d become friends with these folks, and though she might occasionally, gently, point out areas of disagreement with them to see what they might respond, for the most part it did not appear that she interfered with their belief system. Her conclusions were that these people, who struggled their entire lives to make a living, who were often lied to by those with power over them, felt a kind of collective excitement to be part of Donald Trump’s supporters where they felt secure and respected, and were released from the bonds of political correctness, e.g., caring about those further back in the line, the needy around the country, around the world.

Personally, I think it might be the release from political correctness that made everyone so giddy to be part of Trump’s team, because let's face it, the man was not respectful. Though he was rich, he was low class; he made it look as though his level of success was attainable to ordinary folk. There is a certain amount of willful delusion and economic self-interest in these beliefs, it seems to me. I understand compassion fatigue, particularly when one’s own world is so needy, so I am not going to criticize that. There is, however, something we [should] all learn as we grow older that these smart, mature, experienced folks don’t seem to have grasped, and perhaps this is our fundamental disagreement: Happiness and satisfaction in life is not a zero-sum game.

Although we might be able to feel sympathy, empathy, compassion—something other than steaming anger—for individuals in the world Hochschild studied, I don’t think it is so easy to do the same for a group. I found myself steeled against their resistance to coherent argument on commonsense pollution controls. They can react with their emotional self-interest if they wish, but I don’t think it is healthy if I do as well, because then we’re at loggerheads. If I react with my economic self-interest, we are likewise at loggerheads. These people want what I want, e.g., family, community, a measure of security. They must want a clean environment as well. We disagree on how to get there. I don’t see that changing unless perhaps we agree to set standards of accountability and hold each other to those standards.

This was really a spectacular study, enormously important, and deeply skilled in execution. I am in awe of how the author was able to approach the problems she could see in our society, measure them, and explain what she found to us. This book was published in 2016, the result of at least five years of labor and study. It was a 2016 Finalist for the National Book Award for Nonfiction.

*[We never get an explanation why younger people, with presumably more at stake, less history in the area, and more energy for resistance to corporate interests, were not interviewed for the study, except maybe it was necessary to limit the scope of the interviewees so they could all operate from the same deep story.]



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Democracy in Chains by Nancy MacLean

Hardcover, 400 pages Expected publication: June 13th 2017 by Viking ISBN13: 9781101980965

Many publishers claim “explosive new content” for their nonfiction but in this case it is not hyperbole. This political history of the Radical Right is a worthy companion to Jane Mayer’s Dark Money. It reveals what Mayer did not: what on earth were the Radical Rich thinking?

This is the book we’ve been waiting for—a book which explains the philosophical underpinnings of the Radical Right and the scope and direction of their plan for political and economic control. For years I have struggled to understand how they could imagine a small group of people should be more privileged than the majority, but now I get it. The Radical Right has divided human beings into makers and takers, “makers” being those who own the means of production (and pay taxes) and “takers” being those who do not. For some reason I still don’t understand, they have concluded that the superrich fit the first category and the bulk of the economy’s workers fit the second. Which, as we all know, with regard to taxes at least, is a logical fallacy in today’s America.

Though sometimes it may appear the Radical Right are inarticulate because they never seem to explain what they are aiming at, they apparently wanted to keep their philosophy and intent quiet, to work in secrecy. This is because most people in our democracy would oppose their thinking. The Radical Rich freely acknowledge this. The Right believes that the majority in a democracy can coerce individuals to pay for things the minority do not want to pay for, like public schools, health care, welfare programs, jails, infrastructure. The Right believe they should be free to do as they choose, and services should be privatized. The market will take care of any climate change-related environmental controls that the majority might wish businesses to adopt. The Right’s view of an efficient business and political environment might look like the early 20th Century when oligarchs roamed the earth.

It sounds bizarre, I know. The Right knew we would react this way, which is why they have been unable to say what they were thinking straight out, but instead made common cause with the Republican Party, and the Religious Right, cannibalizing both and leading those two groups to their own demise. An important piece of their thinking is that only the national government has enough clout to stop them from dominance, which is why they are so insistent on weakening the central government and passing “power” to individual states, which would of course diffuse power.

Things are so much clearer to me now. When the Black Lives Matter movement said opposition to President Obama was about race, they were right. Opposition to Obama was ginned up by this group, who spread rumors and undermined his attempts to compromise by refusing cooperation. The genesis of the thinking in this far right group has its roots in slavery.

The roots of Radical Rich thinking goes back to John C. Calhoun, slave holder intent upon “preserving liberty” [of the elite], and keeping the demands of the many off his “property.” Up until the 1960’s, the majority of wealth in this country was in the South, leftover generational wealth from slave-holding days now invested in tobacco, cotton, energy products like oil and coal, etc... MacLean calls it “race-based hyper-exploitative regional political economy…one based first on chattel slavery and later on disenfranchised low-wage labor, racial segregation, and a starved public sector.”

It is fascinating to hear how Nancy MacLean, investigating a tangential issue to those she explores in this book, came upon the personal papers and writings of Nobel Prize winner James M. Buchanan (October 3, 1919 – January 9, 2013) at George Mason University in Virginia, which included private letters between Buchanan and Charles Koch. The letters illuminated the train of thought of both men, including their insistence that their thinking be kept secret lest people object to their belief that democracy would ruin capitalism and their right to rule. Eventually the two men diverged in thought and Koch sidelined Buchanan decisively.

At last I can understand why the Republicans would put forth a health care plan that actually harmed people. It bothered me that I didn’t understand, but I do now. I struggled to understand why this group of individuals, which include Mike 
Pence, Paul Ryan, Scott Walker, Mitch McConnell, and a host of others, oppose government-subsidized affordable college education, corporate and personal taxes, environmental protections, and state-subsidized drug rehab programs. They actually believe the majority of the American people are stealing their wealth.

Of course there is room in the world for people with fundamentally different ideas about what man is. But there may not be enough room for these thoughts together in one nation. They can go off to live by themselves if they wish, on an island somewhere outside a country founded on the principle of “by the people for the people.” But, you know, without our willing slavery, they are just old men stashing meaningless bits of paper. They can’t even eat without our labor. They can’t live in all the houses they own. They can’t get where they are going without us. They can’t dress themselves without us. No, in order for them to win we must agree to be ruled by them, and we don’t.

You will want to preorder this book and read it immediately. I understand now why there was no buzz about this. Remember when Jane Mayer was asked in an interview¹ if she was afraid to criticize the secretive Koch brothers because they were so powerful? MacLean, I am quite sure, had to be extremely careful until this became public. The audio is excellent, read by Bernadette Dunn, produced by Penguin Audio. The audio file is about 11 hours, and it is completely enthralling. Now I can tell a conservative from someone indoctrinated by Koch. I can see the strategy.


¹Pamela Paul’s January 24, 2016 podcast for NYTimes Book Review



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Woolly by Ben Mezrich

Hardcover, 304 pages Expected publication: July 4th 2017 by Atria Books ISBN13: 9781501135552

Mezrich picks interesting topics, I will concede that. Readers may already have heard some years ago that a Harvard lab was working on de-extinction of the Woolly Mammoth. Mezrich brings us up to date on this project; indeed, the first and last chapters in this nonfiction are set in the future.

If you are familiar with Mezrich’s writing, the author weights the concept of narrative nonfiction heavily on the narrative and fiction sides, ostensibly to stoke momentum and get folks interested. The only problem is that his very good instincts about what is intrinsically an interesting story fights with his method. Sometimes the reader has to thrash through pages of invented dialogue to reach a critical conclusion, a real buzz killer if there ever was one.

But this story works on many levels, and while we are following his careful step-by-step thrust with one eye, our mind is busy on the operations of a lab and the implications of the study for medicine, for wildlife, for every aspect of our visible and invisible world. Mezrich eventually addresses many of these key issues in the text, usually making the science sound responsible and considered.

I started to grow more uncomfortable towards the end of the book, when we are reminded that the science has progressed so far so fast that genomic modifications have escaped the lab environment and can be undertaken in a made-over garage for relatively small costs, and that billionaires of every stripe are lining up to make their money count for something big.

The real excitement of this story is in our imaginations, and what the skills and knowledge of present-day scientists can allow us to imagine. Mezrich places us in fund-raising meetings with billionaires, allowing the most humble among us to enjoy the same stories and sense of excitement that fuels movers and shakers. If the glamour of the whole thing begins to seem suspect at some point, I think you’ve caught my sense of unease.

Mezrich shares the history of the project, including the work by Nikita Zimov in Northern Siberia, determining that woolly mammoths seemed to have played a role in preserving the permafrost levels of the tundra, by upturning the soil and exposing lower layers to the freezing temperatures. His father, Sergey Zimov, apparently theorized that reestablishing animal herds that roamed Siberia earlier in human history might play a role in keeping escaping carbon and methane, now sequestered in permafrost, from accelerating the speed at which the earth warms.

The fact that woolly mammoth remains are discovered regularly now in thawing and melting ice and snow of the north is something I had not known. The ancient ivory from the tusks is not protected and is therefore an important source of income for hunters, sold in lieu of protected elephant tusks, for the same reasons, to the same buyers.

The scientists involved in the story at one of the Church labs at Harvard are fascinating individuals in their own right, each with a backstory that only fuels our interest. The project has been going on long enough now that the twenty-something personnel involved at the beginning of the project are turning it over to others, younger ones still, to ensure continuity of skills on such a forward-looking project. The whole concept and execution of the mammoth idea is sufficiently…mammoth…and complex enough to make readers feel as though they have been subtly changed by the experience.

The real life story ends with woolly mammoth DNA implanted in an elephant cell. Dr. Frank Church, the originator of this project, to his credit, decides not to use elephants to gestate the beast that might develop, but to construct a synthetic uterus. That is currently underway. Stay tuned.

Due out July 4th.



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Two Paths: America Divided or United by John Kasich

Hardcover Pub April 25th 2017 by St. Martin's Press ISBN13: 9781250138460

John Kasich began writing this book as soon as he became the last man standing in the 2016 Republican primary contest between sixteen candidates and Donald Trump. We know Trump won by deriding and dismissing his opponents, but Kasich seemed to run under Trump’s radar. Neither Trump nor Kasich were beholden to Far Right money being shoveled to the other candidates by the Koch brothers’ organizations, and the Republican Party kept some distance from the two of them as well. But other than that, Trump and Kasich have practically nothing in common.

This book is not a difficult read. It’s as though we had an opportunity to sit around listening to Kasich tell stories about the campaign, what it’s like to run for president, what the candidates are like behind closed doors, how to begin to think about a national campaign, etc. It’s intrinsically interesting stuff, but not especially critical to know.

Although I am not Republican, I sought out information about Kasich to see what was different about his thinking from my own. Frankly, he was the only one I could stand to listen to. He is not a jerk, and often acts like a mature adult, which I find appealing. He has the common man touch in that he doesn’t seem particularly philosophy-, ideology-, or theory-based. He comes across as someone who puts one foot in front of the other, and while he has guiding principles, for the most part he is relying on material tested in a big swing state with enormous social strains and stresses.

That a governor can take so much time to campaign and then promote his book on the way to beginning a new campaign means either that he is really good at finding people who can do his job for him while he is away or he has a reservoir of goodwill from voters that he is gradually spending. One’s career is often derailed after a failed bid for president, but it almost looks as though Kasich could carry on as a perennial candidate until he decides to retire, not winning national office but managing his state coffers admirably.

Kasich makes no bones about the fact that he is a religious man. In my mind it is appropriate for him to bring up God because Kasich is actually a nice guy who appears to think about others. It’s in his daily conversation and in the way he treats others. Placed side-by-side with other candidates who also claim to be religious, Kasich comes off as looking pretty authentic in contrast.

In this book there is a chapter that makes enormous sense to me, and none of the other candidates anywhere has talked about it, Democrats either. In that chapter Kasich discusses the how the electorate often worries about a crisis of leadership when we perhaps face a crisis of followship. In other words, a leader is as good as his staff and the people on his team. (We all know this, we’re just not used to purported leaders telling us this. We can’t just pick someone and expect them to fix everything while we go back to our own concerns.) We should be the change we want to see. We need to find candidates that speak for us and deliver on our priorities, and we need to work to make him/her viable in the leadership job.

This book is named after a speech Kasich gave April 12, 2016 to the Women’s National Republican Club in New York City. Kasich had come in second in the NH Republican primary in February after 100 town hall events in the state. In April, the remaining candidates were down to three: Trump, Kasich, and Cruz, just as in that NH primary vote. This is the speech in which he said he would not “take the low road to the highest office in the land” and that “American is still great.” Of the two paths he spoke of, one is that of fear and division, the other is a sometimes steep path to overcoming issues which need resolution. The view on that second path is great, Kasich says, and we’ll be working with great folks (instead of the loud, greedy, insensitive boors on the other path).

I have no idea why more conservatives are not interested in the Kasich message. He seems perfectly rational, thoughtful, and effective, just what you’d think we’d want in a lawmaker, judge, or executive. He may not be the brightest bulb in the bushel, but like he says, he shouldn’t have to be. He has us. And besides, I think he knows a whole lot more than he communicates. Wisely.





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Hostage by Guy Delisle

Hardcover, 436 pages Pub April 25th 2017 by Drawn & Quarterly (first published September 16th 2016) Orig Title S'enfuir. Récit d'un otage. ISBN13: 9781770462793

With this new book released in the U.S. in the spring of this year, French Canadian graphic artist and animator Guy Delisle takes a departure from his more usual graphic novels about his life as the spouse of a Médecins Sans Frontières physician to tell the story of a real innocent abroad, Christophe André, on his first assignment for MSF in Ingushetia, in the North Caucasus in 1997.

Christophe was taken hostage, driven across the border into Chechnya, and outside of Grozny he was held for ransom for three months. He had been in his post for three months when they came for him. He spent the bulk of his captivity chained to a radiator in a small room with a mattress stuffed with straw. He was fed watery soup and allowed bathroom breaks, but otherwise had no opportunity to speak, see the sky, move freely.

Ransom negotiations were slow: when he escaped, finally, the translator assigned to his office in Ingushetia told him other foreigners had been kidnapped in the time he was being held. The 400+ pages of this book are not a struggle; readers spend the time thinking about what they might do in similar circumstances, and interrogate themselves about the scene and their own strengths. André himself passed the more terrible stretches by recalling in great detail the military commanders, battles, and outcomes he had studied when he was younger, including Russian, French, and American battles.

The escape at the end is harrowing, and stomach-dropping. André simply did not know whom to trust. Eventually he made it back to his home in Paris, and six months after that went back to MSF and asked for a new assignment. He worked twenty years for MSF after that experience.

Here is a Public Radio International The World radio interview with the artist Delisle about this new book, Hostage, the kind of story that lingers in one's memory:




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Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward

Hardcover, 304 pages Expected publication: September 5th 2017 by Scribner ISBN13: 9781501126062

This brilliant novel reads like a thriller yet teases out and lays bare a disturbing family history of violent, unresolved death resulting from a culture of race relations profoundly at odds with national ideals.

Jesmyn Ward is a Southern writer in the gothic tradition, a worthy successor to Faulkner, O’Connor, Welty, and McCullers. She shows the cruelties not just within families but between families and races. Her characters have so much at stake. What Ward writes is what we have inherited. We can change it, but first we have to acknowledge it.

The bulk of this novel takes place over the course of one day, the day Jojo and his sister Kayla accompany his mother Leonie to Parchman’s, a prison, to pick up his father Michael. Everything is revealed in that one day. Resolution takes a little longer.

Ward’s willingness to “go there,” her vision uncut and her language clear and exact, gives her work the aspect of witness. And yet she inhabits the young man Jojo so completely that he became our eyes and our judgment. It feels like a gift, to be able to see how families bend and break under the weight of all they carry…the weight of all those killed violently and not yet laid to rest.

“Last night, Richie crawled under the house and sang.”

Richie is the ghost of a poor murdered boy, and he is not the only ghost in this family’s present. Jojo’s uncle Given is also a spirit, albeit one that gives comfort, advice, and warning. It proves difficult for family members to deal with the spiritual needs of the ghosts as well as the temporal needs of those around them. It is confusing, demanding, intrusive. Add to that, not everyone has “the sight.” Jojo has it.

Ward opens her story with the butchering of a goat, giving us a taste of the education Jojo has on the farm, under the tutelage of his grandfather. The violence of the experience jolts us awake, nerve endings jangling. We need whatever instincts this incident has aroused in us to get through the day trip to Parchman’s, which becomes a descent into the dark heart of delusion and destruction.

Ward manages to instill the work with the impetus of a thriller: a reader becomes completely trapped by the closeness in the old car, the desultory conversation, the turn onto unfamiliar roads, the unexpected stop. The blood scent has put the wind up: we’re not sure who will come out alive at the end of the trip. Ward exquisitely calibrates her descriptions to resonate with us: we recognize these people, these motivations, these zones of danger.

Making an exciting work of fiction is an art, but Ward elevates the stakes by making an exciting work of fiction socially relevant and critical to the conversation going on in our nation. Just last summer a book of essays edited by Jesmyn Ward and written by important American writers and thinkers, The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks about Race, was released to great acclaim. The essays address the ongoing race issues our country has never resolved and struggles with yet.

Ward is among the finest and most important writers we have. Make sure you catch everything she puts out.



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